How come no one has been as forward thinking as Francis Schaeffer in the last couple decades... This guy's amazing. Below is a video from "How Should We Then Live?
Pastor Tim Interviews Lecrae from Mars Hill Church on Vimeo.
It's cool to see people reaching their culture for Jesus in whatever way they can. You can tell that Lacrae is passionate about seeing Jesus worshiped and lives changed. When I went to see him perform live, I felt slightly uncomfortable jumping up and down with the rest of the crowd, but, when I looked around me and saw hundreds of people praising Jesus and they were preaching the Gospel in a way the whole crowd grasped—I was amazed.
Who are the people around you that need Jesus?
What does it look like to be a comic book geek for Jesus? A Nascar Dad for Jesus? A YMCA volunteer for Jesus?
Speaker: Mark Driscoll
Venue: Together on a Mission 2008 Conference
Location: Brighton, England
Topic: Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Luke and Acts
In 1967 sociologist Peter Berger, published The Sacred Canopy. He argued that a culture is held together by a number of shared religious notions that form an unquestioned (often unconscious) "sacred" covering that includes common ideas of goodness, beauty and justice. For centuries Western Civilization has lived under the canopy of Christendom. But that canopy now lies in rags on the cultural floor. A new covering floats over our heads.
International travel has helped me see this. I just returned from a trip to Colombia, France and Holland. In Holland we discussed "The New Europe," which is no longer Christian. My lecture, "Neo-Paganism: Step-child of Secular Humanism," suggested that the new Europe will be either Moslem or Pagan. There I met a South African theologian who noticed how much the "native" regime in the "New South Africa" fosters ancestor worship. In France, the students agreed that Cartesian French secular humanism was breathing its last.
I received an astute email recently. "Dear Dr. Jones," it began, "you make a big distinction between monism and theism, between understanding God as the divine force within the world over against God as the transcendent Creator above it. But it seems to me," continued the note, "that Jesus was a monist, because he says quite clearly in Luke 17:21, 'the kingdom is inside of you.'"
An interview with Lee Strobel
Please enjoy this quick interview that Resurgence had with Lee Strobel, a New York Times best selling author and believer in Jesus. Apologies in advance for the interview being so short due to my lingering side effects of being a jock. Lee Strobel has just came out with a very helpful resource The Case for the Real Jesus and he does an excellent job again at investigating to the core the six major challenges today brought up against Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. You will want this book in your library.
On Thursday, May 31st, 2007, at Mars Hill Church's West Seattle campus, Pastor James Harleman gave the fifth of a five-part lecture series called "Christianity and..." James' topic was Christianity and Culture.
What is Culture?
"By the word culture, we have to understand the sum total ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation. Central to culture is language. The language of a people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and of coping with them. Around that center one would have to group their visual and musical arts, their technologies, their law, and their social and political organization."
"And one must also include in culture, and as fundamental to any culture, a set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty. I am speaking, obviously, about religion. Religion—including the Christian religion--is thus part of culture."
Lesslie Newbigin
Why do we create culture?
God is our Creator and He made us creative to create culture (Genesis 1:28). The cultural mandate remains in effect even though sin has entered the world (Genesis 9:7). People create culture simply because they bear the image of God the Creative Creator.
On Thursday, May 3rd, 2007, at Mars Hill Church's West Seattle campus, Pastor Gary Shavey gave the first of a five-part lecture series called "Christianity and..." Pastor Gary's topic was Christianity and Liberalism. Listen as he lays out a little bit of history on just what Liberalism is, and what it's role in today's culture is, as well as what our Biblical response to Liberalism should be.
A Discovery Channel movie claims that the limestone boxes with the names of two Mary's, Joseph, Jesus and the "Judah, son of Jesus" discovered in 1982 in Jerusalem actually contain the DNA of Jesus, his parents and his "wife" Mary and his child.
The cosmic characteristic most extensively described in the Bible is the ongoing expansion of the universe.1 No other holy book of the world's religions describes this feature, nor was it anticipated by secular scholars before the development of Einstein's theory of general relativity.2 Therefore, evidences for a continuously expanding universe provide an impressive tool for demonstrating the divine inspiration of the Bible. Such evidences just received a huge boost.
Many lines of proof exist for demonstrating that the universe is expanding. The velocities with which galaxies are moving away from each other, the verifications of general relativity, the relative age and crowding of galaxies seen at greater distances (thus farther back in time), the measurable cooling of the cosmic background radiation—these four offer a sampling.3 Richard Tolman of the California Institute of Technology proposed one of the best tests as early as 1930, a test involving measurement of galaxies' surface brightnesses.4
The Resurgence is a movement that resources multiple generations to live for Jesus so that they can effectively reach their cities with the Gospel by staying culturally accessible and Biblically faithful.