You know, some of our great old hymns just don’t connect with the children of this century. Or the past century. The “thee’s” and “thou’s” and “shalt’s” and especially the “shalt not’s” just aren’t easy to identify with for the new generation.

But even more off-putting than the outdated language are those insistent themes of dedication, self-sacrifice, and so forth.

So I’ve thought about updating some of those grand classic hymns – if not with more contemporary language – at least with a more realistic outlook. You know, titles like:

• Living By Fate
• Take My Life and Let it Alone
• I Need Thee Every Week
• It is Well With My Bankroll
• Joyful, Joyful We Ignore Thee
• Lord, I Want to Like You More
• O Master, Let Me Balk With Thee
• ‘Tis The Blessed Minute of Prayer
• We’ll Wait ‘Til Jesus Comes
• Let Jesus Bear The Cross Alone

and

• Come Let Us Worship and Sit Down

I just think we’d all be more comfortable with some hymns like these.

I woke up with this phrase in my head this morning.

I Googled it this evening and found only one use of the phrase on the ‘Net, on a Baptist discussion board among the other five answers to the question “What does ‘ecumenical’ mean?” That answer was: “It seems the Ecumenical movement does in fact seek to merge all under one banner of agreement. But this is often done at the cost of watering down the true Gospel so that it is “acceptable” to all…I think of it as Reader’s Digest Christianity…” – from a poster signed “Keith M.”

But before I Googled it, the phrase rattled around in the head of this Keith all day, who came to a similar conclusion, pretty much unrelated to ecumenicism.

I realized that during a large portion of my life, I was satisfied with Reader’s Digest Christianity. Someone else had already read and studied all the hard stuff for me and boiled it down to a length and language that I could quickly and easily absorb without spending too much time or too many brain cells on it. I missed the nuances of the original work, but I didn’t know or care.

I went to church. I listened. I absorbed. I read a verse or two along with someone reciting it.

And that was all.

And I thought it was enough.

I didn’t try to dive more deeply into the Word. I didn’t try to comprehend the fulness of Christ. I didn’t try to draw closer to God through His Son.

I sat. I swallowed the pre-chewed, pre-digested pablum that some mothering birdly teacher or preacher had prepared for me and all the other flightless hatchlings in the nest with me.

it’s not a bad way to begin your new life after being freshly born again. But we’re talking twenty- thirty-sometimes-more years into my spiritual life, and I was still finding myself at times just squatting in the nest.

It sorta calls to mind how the writer to the Hebrews upbraided their immaturity:

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

And what “this” is that the writer had much to say about was how Christ prayed and was heard because of His reverent submission; how He learned obedience through suffering.

I still have a lot to learn about that “this.”

I won’t learn it by just hearing the Reader’s Digest version; by sitting in the pew; by waiting passively for mothering birdly teacher or preacher to drop it into my craw.

It’s time to fly.

Wait for it!

Wait for it!

It’s a little more – okay, a lot more – about prayer. For one’s self. For others. For what God wants.

I’ve got a good start on it, but I need some time to do it right, and I don’t have a lot of time right now. I need to finish re-naming and posting new pictures to my church’s online database, post a couple or three New Wineskins articles, and I’ve got a full weekend of getting my son to an out-of-town chess tournament and back, plus two back-to-back reception events for friends Saturday night.

So, visit some other blogs and speculate about what I might turn up in my post.

Since I’m still doing the research, I have no idea myself.

Sometime during the next 24-48 hours it looks like my little counter will tick off my 50,000th unique visitor.

That’s kind of a misnomer. It really means that the same handful of people have logged in to the internet 50,000 times and have visited my site in the last 22 months. And while each of them is unique, there aren’t 50,000 of them.

I’m not much into stats and origins of visitors, numbers of lurkers, etc. – so I don’t have a fancy package to tell me all those things.

I’m just glad to have been ticking off people since 2005.

I don’t really have in mind any kind of prize or celebration.

Does that tick you off?

I think it is both intellectually and spiritually dishonest to level the charge against anyone who disagrees with your interpretation of scripture, “Then you must not believe that doctrine is important.”

“Doctrine” means “teachings, beliefs.” Doctrine is vital. Scripture could not be clearer on the matter. What we may disagree upon is whether your interpretation of scripture – or mine or anyone else’s – is doctrine, or not.

I find these items to be doctrinal:

• “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” – John 3:16
• “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” – John 14:6
• “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” – Mark 16:16
• Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God: “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.” – John 2:22
• Jesus came from God incarnationally: “Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.” – 2 John 1:7
• “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.” – John 1:21
• “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
• “As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean.” – Romans 14:14

These are in no particular order; nor are they intended to be comprehensive. There are, for instance, a good number of imperatives Jesus shared, most of which are applicable to His followers today. But I believe the items cited above represent foundational principles of the apostles’ doctrine – and the points of departure for the heresies of the first few centuries of Christendom.

You will not find most of those items in current debate among followers of Christ today, except perhaps the last one – which is terribly inconvenient to the mindset which preaches that everything is an issue; everything one can do is either intrinsically right or wrong; pleasing or displeasing to God; commendable by heaven or condemnable to hell.

There are simply some things we can do – choices we make and actions we take – about which God says nothing.

They are matters of conscience.

We get into trouble when we elevate matters of conscience to something else; try to superimpose scripture upon them and make them look like God’s law. That’s what Jesus took the Pharisees and teachers of the law to task for, over and over again. Matters of conscience are opinions, not doctrine.

So you can believe what you want to about a good number of items which simply are not doctrinal. And the context of the Romans passage above indicates that it is wrong for you to judge your sibling in Christ regarding an item of conscience as surely as it is wrong for that sibling to flaunt his or her freedom from conscience in the matter in order to make you violate yours.

We can disagree about matters of conscience – even teach what we disagree about – but there are limits.

One limit is calling them “doctrine.”

There are matters about which we are to be “of one mind.” There are others which are not.

Honestly, I think that if God had taught that we must worship while standing on one foot, Satan would find a way to split us into right-footers and left-footers, leaners and non-leaners, hoppers and non-hoppers, plus those who would disfellowship all the people who have had to have their feet amputated.

And a few who would cut off one foot to prove how “right” they are.

In a few short words, matters of conscience are never to become a game of “I’m right; you’re wrong.”

That’s doctrine, as I see it, folks. And it is important.

So I close with the most dangerous challenge of all: Think for yourself. Study scripture for yourself. Don’t accept what I say – what anyone says – as automatically right or wrong. Go to the Source. Prove all things. Hold fast what’s good.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. – 2 Timothy 3:16-17

No, I don’t know what’s happened to his blog … or to him!

His Grace Awakening site is still live.

As is the old Abductive Columns archive blog on Blogspot.

I’ve e-mailed him. I’m hoping he’ll let me know.

Because there are very few free-thinkers who can challenge and irritate and annoy and needle me like Fred does.

And I need that.

Go read Brian Mashburn’s post I asked the questions.

Then see if you can screw up the courage to ask them, too.

My hair could get really long again before I get this one right ….

I finally put some items on eBay … to finance some giving that I did last month.

I know that’s probably a really backwards way to approach Luke 12:33, but the need was urgent last month even though I couldn’t afford to help. So I did anyway. I stepped out on faith a bit.

If you haven’t heard my diatribe “What the Rich Man Lacked”, you may not know that I started letting my hair grow in April after running across notes from a chapel address two years before about the rich young ruler. I let my hair grow from that moment to remind myself that I needed to at least try to do what Jesus recommends in that passage – and insists on, to the extreme, before the rich young guy can follow Him.

Having long hair is a constant annoyance to me, so it was an effective reminder.

As it happened, a friend I used to work with had to be off from his minimum-wage job for hernia surgery for about three weeks last month. He and his wife are Hurricane Katrina refugees, land-locked in Little Rock with no transportation or way to support her kids back home. They needed to eat, to pay for her medications, to keep their electricity on during the hottest part of Arkansas summer.

So now I’m trying to sell some of my possessions to finance helping out back then.

I’ve bought plenty of stuff there, but have never sold anything on eBay before. (Well, okay, I sold a video game my son couldn’t use on his computer. He lost money on it.)

I tried several times over the last month, only to have the picture gallery part of the selling software lock up my Safari browser and then my Mac repeatedly. I finally decided to go with just one free picture.

The first item I listed sold within an hour. It felt really good.

Was that a nudge from above?

But I really am against churches trying to be distinctive from each other to the point that they will not share in the fellowship of Christ with each other, or make arbitrary matters of distinction a test for that fellowship.

A commenter recently wondered why I do not leave the churches in the heritage we share because I don’t believe they should strive to be “distinctive.” I think it’s a legitimate question, and it deserves an answer.

This commenter felt I was rejecting 2000 years of church history. The fact is, the last 200 years of church history in our fellowship – churches of Christ – began with the re-founders’ desire (expressed in The Last Will and Testament of Springfield Presbytery)

“We will that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large: for there is but one body and one spirit, even as we are called in one hope of our calling.”

I do not at all reject the fact that for a couple thousand years before that, and after, churches of all hues, colors, faiths, beliefs and practices have divvied up the “Body of Christ at large” in order to be distinctive from each other, but I do not believe those instances to be examples that should be imitated.

Churches sometimes look for distinctiveness in all the wrong places … for instance, in arcane practices and beliefs that have no real basis in scripture.

And for some reason incomprehensible to me, the members of those churches feel that God wants that.

“Come out from them, says the Lord” is an encouragement to not associate with idolators, not believers.

And I think it’s worth noting that a word translated “distinctive” is not found in any of the major translations of the Bible.

As a general rule, I find that churches and fellowships who insist on being distinctive do so because of a mindset that believes that they are doing all the right things in all the right ways according to scripture.

A cursory examination of Romans 3 will put the lie to that perception.

As a general rule, I also find that an insistence on being distinctive results in an exclusionary mindset that can become judgmental, accusatory, condemnatory, and divisive.

A quick perusal of John 17 will prove that is not at all what Jesus prayed for His followers.

So how can Christians be distinctive?

By imitating Christ, to begin with. By proclaiming good news to the poor. By living simply and giving sacrificially. By accepting others as He has accepted us.

That will be sufficiently distinctive from the rest of the world as to cause people to take notice.

And, hopefully, for them to be drawn closer to God through His Son.

A commenter with a tender heart and a positive mindset was offended, I think, by the tone of one of my recent posts – specifically, its sarcasm.

Is sarcasm an offensive way to communicate a concept?

Obviously, for this fellow, it was.

Is it effective? For him, it wasn’t.

Is it scriptural?

At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” – 1 Kings 18:27

“Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ – Jesus, Matthew 23:16

As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves! – Paul, Galatians 5:12

That’s three small examples out of one big, big book.

I agree that it’s best for my conversation be “.. always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

Point taken, Ted.

Still, on a rare occasion, I reserve the right sharpen my quill, ink it with as much grace as I can find, and dry the ink with the salt of good taste.

And if the salt gets in a small wound – well, at least it might serve as antiseptic.