I can’t remember now whether presidential candidate Ross Perot ever actually uttered those words, or whether mimic Dana Carvey just said them so convincingly “in-character” that we all thought he did.

You know what’s just sad to me?

When people have to close the comments of their blog – or even restrict their readership to those who have signed up and signed in each time – because of the unChristian acts and words and motives of a few.

Some of my casual blog reads have “disappeared” into Privacy World as a result of such selfishness on the part of visitors.

I have been the recipient of a great deal of grace in being able to keep this blog open, and though I have seen flashes of conflict and occasional ungraciousness in the comments on it, for the most part I have seen an extraordinary amount of lovingkindness shown to the different opinion and the one who holds it.

I guess I just wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of you who read and comment here; for the grace you show me and each other and for a generally loving and accepting spirit displayed in your words.

I am grateful to God for each and every one of you.

It’s one of those things preachers say.

Without thinking.

“If you’re here today, and you haven’t obeyed the gospel ….”
“If you’re here today, and need the prayers of the church ….”
“If you’re here today, and you wish you weren’t ….”

Okay, I’ve never actually heard a preacher say the last one – but I’ve heard a hundred or more variations of the first two, even from preachers who are really good and who ought to know what they’re doing.

“If you’re here today”? In the days before recording sermons on cassette and then CD and then MP3 for podcasting, who was a preacher talking to when saying that? The folks who were there, of course. They already knew they were there. And if they weren’t there, they weren’t listening. So why say it?

And it’s always a hanging “if,” even today. If you’re not here today, what do you do? Forget it? Sit there and feel suicidal? Shake it off and try to do better next time?

Well, that’s my advice for preachers: ditch the phrase “If you’re here today.” Trust me. We are.

And if we aren’t, and we’re still listening, it’s because we wanted to be there that day and ordered the cassette or the CD, or downloaded the MP3.

It’s not world-class advice like the stuff at Milton Stanley’s outstanding Transforming Sermons, but maybe it’ll make a couple of you out there re-think the standard closer phrasing a bit.

That is, if you’re here today ….

I wanted y’all to know I just read in an e-mail church bulletin from my church family in Abilene (Highland Church of Christ) a prayer request for:

“Kinney Mabry – son of Gary Mabry, chemistry teacher at AHS – in Kerrville hospital with double pneumonia, as well as being anemic”

… and I’m guessing it’s our favorite preacherman. So I ask you to pray for our brother while he’s ill and away from the keyboard.

I do not like it when people use labels for other people. I understand the usefulness of them in describing a set of characteristics, beliefs, points of view, or praxis. I also understand the abuse of them when people use them against other people.

I’m okay with calling myself a centrist, and am about to explain why and what that means to me.

But, as a general rule, labels divide. Labels allow one to classify a group of individual people and assign to them a set of characteristics or beliefs or practices to which perhaps only some of them adhere.

Labels allow one to be crass and insulting toward a whole group of people and therefore avoid the stigma of being crass and insulting toward just one person.

Labels aren’t always accurate by common definition. What may constitute “conservative” and “liberal” to one person may be wholly different from the way another person defines the terms.

These things are true whether you’re discussing esoteric theories or politics or religion or Christianity.

I suspect I would be described as “liberal” by many of the people in the fellowship of Christianity where I identify myself. I suspect I would be described as “conservative” by a lot of other people who think of themselves as Christians.

So what am I?

I’ve decided I am a centrist.

I seek to be centered on Jesus Christ.

Everything else is peripheral. That’s not to say that everything else is unimportant. But if any facet of “everything else” does not have its roots in Christ, its trunk in Christ, its lifesap and its branches and twigs and leaves and fruit in Christ – it’s fit for nothing more than to be cut down and thrown into the fire (Matthew 3:10).

If any instruction of Christ is being neglected and withering on the vine, it needs to be tended and watered and nurtured and grown.

If your view of a certain doctrine or mine, whether considered liberal or conservative, does not bear good fruit, it cannot be of Christ and it needs to be pruned out.

There were plenty of doctrines in century one that were not of God through Christ and His Spirit, but of man. Of one of them – circumcision required in order to become a Christian – Paul wrote:

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.~ Galatians 5:6

Responding to the teachings that Jesus was either man or God but not both, John wrote:

Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also. ~ 1 John 2:22-23

This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. ~ 1 John 4:2-3

On the subject of taking up labels – even self-applied ones – Paul said:

I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into[b] the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized into my name. (Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.) For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ~ 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

Notice what’s important in these citations: Who Jesus is. What He teaches. What He does.

Notice what’s not important: What man teaches about how man sees things.

Notice what’s even less important than Christ: baptism. Yes, even baptism takes a back seat to the gospel. Because if the gospel is preached – if the Story of Jesus is told – then it becomes obvious that baptism is one of the important ways God wants for us to have a new life and become a part of His kingdom. Baptism is rooted, trunked, branched, twigged, leafed and fruited in Christ.

So it cannot be the center of the gospel.

Neither can any of the other essentials of faith. Neither can any of the peripherals of faith. And certainly, neither can any of the matters which are of a faith that is not centered in Christ.

If I teach anything, say anything, write anything, do anything that is not centered in Christ, I beg you to call me on the carpet. It’s not just important to me. It is the single most important aspect of the way I live my life.

I hope to take your correction humbly, positively and penitently if found true and valid. I hope you will permit me the same grace if I feel compelled to challenge the way you view or practice your life in Christ. I believe there is divine wisdom in the fact that God puts us, the lonely, in His family in order to encourage and edify each other.

That is part of faith expressing itself in love. That is the very nature of Jesus, the Christ.

And nothing else counts.

The Bible tells me so.

My interview with David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group and author of unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity … and Why It Matters, is live on the New Wineskins e-zine site at ‘Not Enough to be Transformed.’

The title is taken from the next-to-the-last paragraph in the interview. There is more to the interview that you can hear on the MP3 recording of it, but it seemed like a powerful observation and a good closing line.

In the course of the interview, I mentioned some other books which might seem to be in the same vein: Jim and Casper go to Church; They Like Jesus But Not the Church – but I would have to say that unChristian has the more valuable approach to the subject, with statistical as well as anecdotal research to offer.

In addition, it includes short essays by well-known Christian leaders from a variety of evangelical backgrounds (such as Dan Kimball, Brian McLaren, Rick Warren, John Stott, Chis Seay, Jim Wallis and Chuck Colson), responding to the information presented in the previous chapters.

But I’ll hold my other thoughts on the book. I’m working on a review of it for New Wineskins‘ next issue (July – October) and I don’t want to preview all of them here!

In two words, I believe I can make a better case for intelligent design as responsible for creation than for it being behind, say, network television programming … the Internal Revenue Service tax code … or Microsoft Vista®:

Creation works.

People who always think they know better should know better than to always think they do.

Or not.

I’ve been a bit too busy to tend to it as it deserves, so I’ve taken a bit of a sabbatical while furiously trying to transfer the information from my church’ family’s current site to its new site. The current site may or may not be transferred to new servers, and our contract with the current provider officially expires tomorrow, June 1.

I have tried to keep up with a post each morning at the Daily Life of Worship blog.

And I’m holding things together at home with duct tape while our upstairs air conditioning is out, and Angi is teaching out of town for a week, and Matt and I are taking Laura and her friend to Camp Tahkodah tomorrow for the week.

So blogging, and a lot of other things have gone un-done.

As the actors who portrayed the fictional Bartles and Jaymes in wine-cooler commercials twenty-some years ago used to say: “Thank you for your support.”

Someday, they will.

And we will, too.

In the meantime, we mourn them. We miss them. We yearn for the day when we will be with them again, and even more, with the One for whom His armies ride and march and engage the enemy.

In the meantime, we let their mortality remind us of our own – and of the fact that ultimately, death is swallowed up in victory.

In the meantime, we wait … and put our armor on.

While traveling through tornado-devastated swaths of the Arkansas cities Clinton and Damascus this weekend, my family and I were mind-boggled to see the effects of cyclonic wind on land and property and people: a gargantuan steel construct – possibly a grain elevator – brought to its I-beam knees amidst a sea of rubble … a house which had once hosted a unique art gallery while shaded by great trees, sitting relatively undamaged on a bare knoll with only one denuded tree left standing beside it … and a sign, hand-painted on a plank and planted by Highway 65 in Damascus that simply said:

2 Corin. 4:7-11

Since my son was driving, I could pull out my PDA and key the scripture into its NIV Bible Reader and read:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.

Not long ago, Wade Hodges posted about good readings and right readings of scripture. The scripture that this sign cites is almost certainly taken out of context. It’s not the right reading.

But it is a good one.