{"id":447,"date":"2008-02-25T10:37:37","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T10:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/tidbits.html"},"modified":"2008-02-25T10:37:37","modified_gmt":"2008-02-25T10:37:37","slug":"tidbits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/tidbits.html","title":{"rendered":"Tidbits"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of things that caught my eye:
\nGashwin has a post on a baptism he attended in India. You must go and read about the very unique tradition that follows the baptism itself. Lovely. <\/a>
\nAnthony Sacramone has an interesting interview with Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church <\/a>in New York, and author of a new book written in response to the New Atheists, The Reason for God.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>There’s lots of good stuff in the interview about the purpose and limits of apologetics, but much more about church, denominational issues, outreach, evangelization and mission. I was particularly interested in what he has to say about the whole “megachurch” thing, and believe what he says could give Catholics\u00a0hashing out these issues for ourselves\u00a0a lot to chew on:<\/p>\n

OK: I\u2019ve heard you refer to Redeemer as a seeker church. Do you see Redeemer as part of the emerging church phenomenon, and what does that mean? <\/strong>
\nNo, no, no, no. The words \u201cseeker church\u201d now I think mean Willow Creek to most people, which is a service that is strictly\u2014Willow Creek branded that term, so I probably can\u2019t use it anymore.
\nSeriously? <\/b>
\nYeah, well the seeker church is a church in which you have sort of low participation, there\u2019s a talk, there\u2019s good music\u2014but it\u2019s not really a worship service. You\u2019re not trying to get people engaged. You are targeting nonbelieving, skeptical people as the audience. That\u2019s considered a seeker church. And I would have always said that Redeemer is the kind of church in which we\u2019re trying to speak\u2014it\u2019s a worship service, but we\u2019re trying to speak in the vernacular. We\u2019re trying to speak in a way that doesn\u2019t confuse or turn off nonbelievers. We want nonbelievers to be there. I think that a lot of ministers would never say, \u201cWe expect nonbelievers to be constantly there, lots of them there, incubating in the services.\u201d And we<\/i> do. We do expect that. In that sense we\u2019d be a seeker church. But now I\u2019m afraid I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good word to use, because when people hear \u201cseeker church\u201d they\u2019re thinking something else.
\nI found that if you define megachurch as anything over two thousand people, then yes, then we are. But here\u2019s four ways in which we\u2019re not a megachurch, or we don\u2019t do things people associate with megachurches<\/strong>. One is, we do no advertising or publicity of any sort, except I\u2019m trying to get the book out there so people read it and have their lives changed by it, but Redeemer\u2019s never advertised or publicized. And the reason is, if a person walks in off the street just because they\u2019ve heard about Redeemer through advertising, and they have questions or they want to get involved, there\u2019s almost no way to do it unless you have all kinds of complicated programs, places where they can go. But if they come with a friend who already goes there, their questions are answered naturally, the next steps happen organically, the connections they want to make happen naturally . . . We do not want a crowd of spectators. We want a community.
\nSecondly, we do almost no technology. We don\u2019t have laser-light shows, we don\u2019t have Jumbotrons, we don\u2019t have overheard projectors, we don\u2019t have screens. We don\u2019t have anything like that. Thirdly, we have a lot of classical music, chamber music\u2014we are not hip at all. We don\u2019t go out of our way to be hip.
\nThere\u2019s praise music in the evening services. <\/b>
\nYeah, but it\u2019s jazz. It\u2019s toned down. It\u2019s much more New York. It\u2019s certainly not your typical evangelical contemporary music. We actually pound into people that we\u2019re not here to meet your needs but to serve the city.<\/strong> So we pound that into them, that we\u2019re not a consumer place, that we\u2019re not here to meet your needs but to serve the city.
\nSo no publicity, not at all hip, almost no use of technology, definitely consider it a worship service, do not do much in the way of pat answers and how-tos in the sermons but really have people wrestle with the issues\u2014but<\/i> we do it in such a way that the interests and aspirations and hopes and doubts of non-Christians are constantly addressed. When a person who doesn\u2019t believe comes they\u2019re often surprised at how interesting, intelligible, nonoffensive the thing is. So it\u2019s relatively subtle at this point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis mine)
\nRomeblogging:<\/u>
\nThe Cranky Professor\u00a0features the world’s ugliest pulpit.<\/a> Which, contrary to this subtitle, isn’t in Rome, but Pisa. Oh well. As for me, I am just not grasping the\u00a0concept of it – I can’t see how you’re supposed to stand in it or what direction you’re supposed to face.
\nTwo great Stational Churches Blogs – great photos, interesting and witty entries:
\nPeregrinus<\/a>
\nHilariter<\/a>
\nvia Hermeneutic of Continuity<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of things that caught my eye: Gashwin has a post on a baptism he attended in India. You must go and read about the very unique tradition that follows the baptism itself. Lovely. Anthony Sacramone has an interesting interview with Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, and author of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTidbits - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/tidbits.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tidbits - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A couple of things that caught my eye: Gashwin has a post on a baptism he attended in India. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}