The Vegas Missional Outpost

Christian Blogging

Here is a must read article my buddy Ryan Kearns has written on Christian blogging.

"Good grief. I am glad I don't read the web very much. I would sin with anger too much. "Roaring debate" !-- these people have too much time on their hands."
                                                                             John Piper

It has been some time since I have thrown a post up. Honestly I have just been bombarded in life over the last few weeks. Usually when this happens my natural instinct is just to go into survival mode and just try to keep my head above water each day. My semester has turned out to be quite back loaded and I am really paying the price for that right now. I have a few more weeks in which I really need to run hard and finish strong and then I can begin to catch my breath. In the midst of all this I have been trying to keep first things first and consistently hang out with Jesus. I have been praying a lot recently and just wanting God to stir my affections for him. My heart is easily hardened and when it is the rest of me suffers because I have stopped battling sin, replenishing grace, and finding rest in Jesus.

Along that note one of the most harmful things I think we can do at times is blog. This could be writing on one's own blog, as you try to think of something creative and funny to say. This could be reading blogs that you like/dislike/why the hell am I reading this? as doing so can take your focus away from the good works that God has prepared for you to do. And last you can even post comments on blogs, this is hardly ever goes well. I imagine it is a lot like what frat guys think when they have a one night stand with the crazy needy girl who they know they should stay away from. That night with the cheap beer flowing and the beer goggles in full effect you throw caution into the wind and say "ah this won't end so bad, in fact I think this will turn out well." This is foolish thinking. The frat guy wakes up in the morning with a raging headache wondering what the hell he just did, and a crazy girl who is making his life miserable. This can be like commenting on blogs especially if it is on something controversial. Then you are just asking for it. You may as well just schedule your STD test down at the free clinic right then.

Anyway, I am re-thinking blogging in many ways because of experiences like this. I have a few conclusions that I have come to. No matter what the form of communication that blogging is, automatically gives to people distorting and manipulating another person's words in order to make their point. Yeah yeah I know this should not happen on Christian blogs, but it does there more than anywhere else probably. On secular blogs you can just say "Hey F@#k you!" when you do not like what someone says. In the Christian blog world you have to be much more sly then that. You have to be passive aggressive make the other person out to be an idiot pull quotes out of their comment and then find ways to deconstruct them. Oh yes this is Christian blogging when it comes to controversial matters. In many ways I think I would just perfer the "F@%K you!" on a secular blog. These threads will then begin to just spiral out of control and fall way off course of what they were intended to discuss. One more thing unless you are bald guy in your fifties, and have a docile personality do not speak of being "generous" either. Giving people grace, and trying to really use our brains to understand what they are saying is too much to ask for.

So I conclude what should Christians who want to love Jesus and advance the Kingdom do? Well I think it to be unwise to just retreat from blogdom this is what the Amish and quakers do when they do not like how culture and its communication forms evolve, they just say, "Hey F&$k it, we are just going to make butter and wear overalls." Sometimes I think I can understand this mentality and wonder if it would be so bad to just be Amish. Then I remember that we can not run from the world and times that God has placed us in. Blogging is here to stay, it is a reality that we as pastors will have to interact and deal with for the rest of our lives and ministry. Yet I think since it is so hostile to good honest dialouge we should be slow to participate in the mayhem (I am mainly speaking to myself here.) Becasue blogging has this tendency to bring out the worst in a lot of Christians. There is no way half of us would say to another person face to face what we say on a blog. I think this should be a rule we try to abide by as we blog, "Would I say this to their face?" If we can answer yes then I think we are doing pretty good. There is much more to throw out there about this subject but this is just some stuff of the top of my head. I threw the Piper quote at the top because it made me realize that Piper does not even blog but still knows more about it than most of us who do, and because I could just imagine him dropping F bombs as he furiously rebutted stupid people all across Christian blogdom."

Amen Ryan, Amen.

Blessings,
Matt

Praying With Mamie

I post this as a continuance to the discussion of schools, but also because it is freaking awesome. Here's what my co-worker Mamie at the latchkey program has to say about how kids act.

"What is that there calling it? A...D...ADD? I'll tell you what that kid really needs. He needs and old fashioned ass whuppin', and to be laid on the prayer alter. Pills? That boy needs prayer. It's like Jesus did to that man in the grave, cast the demons out."

To really understand how cool Mamie is, you must know that she is in African American, in her sixties, and a grandmother. I sure am glad Mamie's praying.

Matt

Schools in Vegas

Often times when growing up I would tell people that I lived in Las Vegas, and would often hear responses such as, "People actually live in Vegas?" or, "They have schools in Vegas?" Part of this is understandable. But mostly they are stupid questions. That's like me asking if people drink anything other than coffee in Seattle, or being amazed that a heterosexual Christian couple lives in San Fransisco. Actually, this year over 300,000 students will attend public schools in the Clark County Area. As one who has attended every level of public education in the Las Vegas area (kindergarten through college), the state of our schools is very important to me. Really, I am writing this so that you would pray.

This year Las Vegas has had eight recorded instances of handguns being brought to schools. These were only the ones who have been caught. For me this is nothing new. In second grade, one of my classmates was caught in the playground with a gun and ammo. A student was shot at my high school the year after I left. And if I knew better, I would suspect that I was a lot closer to guns than I realized during my time in High School. A girl two weeks ago found out how close she was when her boyfriend "accidentally" shot her in the leg while brandishing his gun to her and his friends. This occurred two blocks from where I live. (On a side note, the commentary of one of her teachers my wife knows was incredibly telling of the school situation. The teacher, who is African-American, was saddened because this girl came from a "two-parent" home, and had a chance to make it. The teacher was upset seemingly because she rarely sees this potential. Wow.)

Should this scare parents? Of course. Should this scare students? Of course. We are at the point now where we are not surprised by school shootings. I am not surprised that guns are being brought to school so often. My fear is that we have been inoculated to school violence. By this I mean, that is has become so normative, that instead of scaring us into change, it lulls us into sullen acceptance. Because it is normative, it doesn't surprise us. Because it doesn't surprise us, it doesn't cause us to fear. Because it doesn't cause us to fear, it leaves us vulnerable. (note: there is an obvious teaching point here about God. Since we are inoculated just enough with Christianity, we don't fear God. Because we don't fear God, we are vulnerable to living lives without him here and eternally in hell. Perhaps I will expand this, although Tim Keller did a great job at the DG Nat'l Conference talking about the inoculation of America to Christianity). Being vulnerable is no place we want our children to be.

As my fellow pastors and I talk and pray about how to find a common point of interest with the community of Las Vegas we keep coming back to children (our only other options are alcohol or sex, and well, those need some serious redemption first). Yet here too we are stuck in a bit of a quandary because it seems that are parents are all too willing to let themselves, their kids, and their community be vulnerable to violence at school. I am no sociologist, but I have spent over 5 years working with school children in various programs in the Vegas valley and one thing constantly amazes me: the amount of split homes children come from. Whether there is a correlation to parents lack of caring here, I cannot prove. And while my life is only one case study, my parents still comment on how my sixth grade teacher was so saddened that only 3 parents showed up on parent teacher conference day, that he quit. Vegas is a work hard, play hard town, where the individual is catered to at every opportunity. From my perspective, it seems that the kids are suffering immensely from this.

Would you join me in praying for the children and the schools of Las Vegas. That God would call fathers to lead, protect, and provide for all the needs of their families. That we, as a community, would not become inoculated to school violence, but would have a healthy fear for the safety of our kids. That God would send his Holy Spirit to convict the parents for their lack of protection and provision for their children, and that He would lead them to Jesus. That the Christian families would seek to restore the Shalom of the city by being an example of what godly parenting looks like. Pray also that the Lord would bless Vicky and I with children, we so would love God to grant us with that wonderful blessing.

Matt