On Sunday Kristin and Andrew came to church with us in his ridiculously loud Volkswagen, and Joel Main spoke about giving.

Can I go off an a tangent here? Okay.[1] First off, I hate sermons about giving. They generally come off as thinly-veiled muggings, the preacher suddenly morphing into a salesman who is desperately trying to flog the money out of your pockets. That said, Laura and I have just migrated to Freshwater Church in Mississauga after a short stint at The Bridge Church in Burlington. I say short stint because we moved too far away to be a part of the church, but also because the church folded, citing amongst several reasons a lack of money. This came as a shock to me and Laura, as no-one had really actually said anything about money; maybe we missed those weeks, but there was a lack of transparency about it that bothered me afterwards.

This is why, even though I don’t particularly like them, I think sermons about money and frank discussions about money are good for a church. Actually, good for most organisations. Just be clear that the money isn’t going to the pastor’s slush fund. Be honest. Show what you’ve done with the cash. And be sure that you remind people that God doesn’t just want your cash and coin, but he wants those things you just can’t give him: your time, for instance. Or your talents. Or your ridiculously oversized SUV.

[1] Yes, I’m taking the piss out of Joel. Hope he doesn’t mind.

• Today’s my mom’s birthday. Happy Birthday mom! I hope you read this blog every once and while… because I tried calling you and you were out getting milk.
• On the elevator up to our apartment yesterday, I realised I have a thing for churches whose names involve water somehow. I used to attend Living Water, then I attended The Bridge (is dead, long live The Bridge!), and now Laura and I are tenatively attending Freshwater in Mississauga. It’s a small church, quite similar in character to The Bridge, and from what I’ve heard thus far, the preaching has been absolutely spot on.
• That sort of brings to mind how blessed I’ve been with the sort of preaching I’ve been priviledged to hear over the last few years.
  • At Living Water, Pastor Vogel has the sort of passion for preaching you don’t get to hear much anymore, and a soft spot for alliterative bullet points (who doesn’t!). His sermons always provoked me to thought; sometimes I would fill entire sheets with observations about what I’d heard. I still have quite a few of those sheets at home, I think.
  • At The Bridge, Robb Powell, who also married me and Laura, had a sort of calm rationality about his preaching. He’d throw out so much stuff in one sermon that I’d almost get brain overload. I’d have to chew on it for hours later.
  • I haven’t heard much of Joel Main at Freshwater yet, but from what I have heard he has a remarkable capability for historical analysis and context, and a passion to bring Jesus to life (yes, I know the Holy Ghost already did that) and make him seem real in all his Godhead and humanity.
• This morning I poured hot water all over my hand. The throbbing has subsided, thankfully. I topped that off with spilling my tea all over the floor at work about two hours later. Frankly, I feel like an idiot. Or, like Chandler, I’m a dropper. It’s true.
• I’m currently gathering information about tasers. If you have a link or something, please do post it in the comments! I’ll be ever so grateful.

I constantly marvel at the unbroken stream of offal emanating from Christian bookstores. Constantly. Now, I don’t like to be sexist, but it seems, from my experience at least, so take this with a grain of salt, that most of these books are bought by well-meaning but gullible women.

In church this Sunday I saw one of these woman with a book by Bruce Wilkinson, something to do with unlocking the secrets of abundance of some such. If sounding curiously like prosperity gospel isn’t bad enough, the cover of the book had three — THREE — trademark symbols on it, as if they meant to be remarkably clear that the secrets of abundance somehow involve having your own brand name and an enterprise whose mission is essentially to hoodwink people who have stopped using whatever critical skills they may have ever possessed.

All this is a preface to a little passage I read this morning, when I picked up a book called “Getting Anger Under Control”. Which, I might add, is a pretty noble sentiment and a good idea, etc etc. The only problem being I never actually got to read the book because the dedication in the front — the first few sentences — actually blew my mind. I mean, I’ve got a gasket loose in here now. I’m dazed and confused.

So, I’ve reproduced the passage verbatim, as is my fair use right:

The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, occurred as we were doing the final editing of this book … Americans responded in disbelief and wondered how this could happen to us, a peace-loving nation. But what was intended to dishearten and destroy us took a different turn. It brought out a heroic spirit of brotherhood and revealed that the church is still the soul of America … These deplorable acts of violence brought about a righteous indignation that caused our country to unite against godless terrorism.

There’s so much wrong with that little paragraph that I won’t even address the things I bolded up there (yes, that was me), except to ask this: Is that really what Americans think of themselves? Really?

I assure you not a single other nation on the face of the earth, including their beloved allies to the north, and their “special relationship” allies over the pond, thinks of America a peace-loving nation. Nor do they think that the church is the nation’s soul, or if they do, it scares the living daylights out of them.

And, in the last analysis, it would be hard to explain why America declaring war on “godless” terrorism is anything more than rank hypocrisy.

Funny story. In church on Sunday someone said, “Yadda yadda yadda is in your mail slots.” I can’t remember what it was, except that it made me curious. So I go over to my mail slot–they put lots of literature and stuff in there–and am confused.

You see, each mail slot is part of a shelf, and each shelf is labelled with a name, except for the top and bottom (which are, of course, the enclosure that forms the shelf), so you can see the problem. There is an extra slot in there that’s not labelled, making finding your slot somewhat ambiguous. Is it the slot above or below the label? You never really know. I choose to believe that it’s the slot below the label, because people keep putting stuff in there.

But this Sunday, there was stuff in all the slots, meaning someone is confused. At that point it was me. Because there, on the shelf below my name, is my Bible, and on the shelf above my name is a bunch of tapes. So I say to Mr Hamstra, who is standing there also grabbing stuff from his slot, “Which of these slots is mine? And why would anybody give me tapes?”

Mr Hamstra says, “Well, maybe somebody thinks you need them!”

So I pull the first couple of tapes out, and lo and behold they are titled, “Grumbling” and for the pièce de résistance, “Church Discipline”.

As a post-script, I don’t actually think they were meant for me, and if they were, I don’t own anything capable of playing a cassette, so I guess we’re SOL on that one.

Now, I will end this post by complaining and grumbling about the people who ambiguously labelled those shelves. I mean, come on. Gah! It’s terrible! I AM GOING TO FORM A NEW DENOMINATION NOW.

• It’s an 80 magnum. It shoots through schools.
• On Saturday me and some friends decided–in view of the forecast–to go to a local church instead of Living Water. The sermon was about sex, definitely an interesting choice of topics, and highly reminiscent of Mars Hill’s “Good Sex/Bad Sex” series. Not only that, it was just a plain good sermon. The weather on the other hand was clear and sunny, leading me to believe that Brian Hill of 680 News is in fact “Lyin’ Hill”, which is what I shall call him from now on. But plans had been set, and it was good to see Mike (the nonchristian) visiting a church (any church).
• Oy, it’s hard to get up these mornings. Knowing that the only thing to greet me on the way out is going to be my own breath frozen in my mouth: it’s a difficult thing to muster up enough willpower to throw the blankets aside.
• Wikis quickly become disorganised
• Do you find Robusta makes for much worse coffee breath than Arabica?
• Philip Glass’ “Heroes” Symphony is bothering me this morning. I mean, I know he’s rooted in minimalism, but this seems neither minimalist or contemporary classical, both of which I enjoy very much. “Heroes” seems to take its cues from minimalism and try to apply that ethos to pop music and score it all as a big symphony. Yet it still very much ends up sounding like a very long, very boring version of itself repeating the same rhythm twenty-two-hundred times. Compare this to, say, his “Low” symphony, or “Anima Mundi”, both of which I enjoy greatly.
• The work, it does pile up. I must go now.

I just lost the longest theologically-related post ever, and I want to shoot myself in the head. Let me summarise:

1. Why does the church, described by scripture as nomadic, put so much stock in buildings and the like?
2. Why do we do church the way we do? We don’t kneel, for instance, or lift our hands in prayer.
3. How do we do church in such a way as to reach this current generation? If not worship services, what then?
4. What philosophical bent does your worship service portray?
5. People who want to be in a church are the most happy, the best members. If they want to come, let them in; if they want to leave, let them go.

Gah. These question brought to you by The Bridge, where I was this morning to see Laura and play the djembe. It was good. New theatre to meet in. But seriously, I’m PISSED that I lost that post.

So this morning I wake up to the beautiful sight of sunlight streaming down on my face from my open door, only to realise that my alarm clock has clearly malfunctioned (why are these things so hard to operate, I ask you?) and it’s 10:30am, too late to drive across the country to Living Water. Left with a veritable smorgasboard of sucky churches in Mississauga to attend, I decided to hit up Oakville’s wonder church: The Meeting Place.

I don’t know quite what I was expecting; I knew it was a large church (several thousand members, a hundred or so staff and volunteers, four or five satellite churches, three services) but I wasn’t prepared for exactly how large. The church is contained in a renovated theatre, you know, where they show movies, and does not look very much like a church at all. This is in contrast to where I am now a member, which meets in a renovated warehouse, you know, where they keep stuff piled on other stuff, and does not look very much like a church at all. Hmmm.

I have to be honest, the megachurch model is something I’ve had to reconcile myself to over the years. It’s something I’ve been raised to think is a bit stupid, and I’ll be on the frontlines of telling those with Starbucks in their lobbies to re-arrange their priorities, but with small groups and other ways of making the church “smaller”, a megachurch can be be cellular in nature, an excellent place for spiritual growth. In any case, The Meeting Place is not a McChurch in any sense of the term.

The service was well-done. Not over the top. It didn’t rock my face off, thank God. The songs were a nice selection of worship songs I knew, worship songs I didn’t, and a very tasteful version of “Take My Life and Let It Be”.

But I’ll be honest with you, the sermon was what gave me pause. I haven’t really had a sermon give me that much to chew on for a while. Although Bruxy or whatever his name is needs to get rid of his horrible Chad Kreuger hair. Minor point, but ew ew ew ew ew ew ew. I spent the rest of the day interfacing with several of the things he said; I found the rest of the sermon quite resonant, and the 45 minutes or so that it took up just flew by like no one’s business.

Apparently the pastor likes Gandhi. Huh. What about that. I’m definitely going back sometime.