Invitational 'n' transformational

In addition to my recent article on Amy resp. her YouTube videos on "emo" I wondered how an authentic life with Jesus could be made known to people like the emos, in a way that would make them take Jesus seriously. Invitations to any Christian events are useless if there is not already a personal connection. So what? Here's a radically different approach to try out. It is an idea that's enabled by the rise of the Internet, esp. web 2.0 social platforms like YouTube.

The basic idea is: come into individual people's life without any invitation. Help them where they need help, and call them to Christ.

The practical approach would be kind of the following, and I am currently inclinded to try that out once my expedition mobile is ready:

1. Get a community of ~4 authentic Christians who are able to deal with conflicts quite well, have good social skills and have sympathy for every other kind of freaky people.
2. Get a community truck, e.g. the expedtion mobile I mentioned. This will be the permanent living place of the community.
   
3. Search and select interesting, freaky people on web 2.0 platforms like YouTube. They should be selected if the community judged that they might accept Jesus if they just get to know him really and experience that he's truly God and saviour.
4. Contact these people and await their invitation to meet in person. For example, send links to video clips to them with a stylish self introduction of this freaky, nomadic community. This steps might also be left out ... .
5. Meet in person. Therefore, visit them with the community truck. Stay some days with them, placing the truck near the place where they live.
6. Invite them to travel with the community for some time. This will give good opportunity to introduce Jesus to them in a way that they are able to take seriously.
7. If they finally want to know Jesus personally as their saviour and stay with the community, that's fine. Perhaps they stay for 3 years, which is a fine time for character education and transformation (also called sanctification). Then they start perhaps their own invitational transformational community, and the network grows ;-)
   

Does anybody note the similarity to the way Jesus called his disciples? They were called and had the chance to come at that very point of time in their life - that's different from the "permanent but shy invitation to Jesus" nowadays, that does nothing but get on people's nerves. Also note that Jesus started his worldwide kingdom with 12 (well, 11) well-educated disciples, not with a multitude of non-transformed churchgoers who had nothing but heard about Jesus.

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Start date: 2008-05-25
Post date: 2008-05-25
Version date: 2008-05-25 (for last meaningful change)

10359 comments on what do emos want ...

If you are, by chance, not too familiar with today's subcultures, I'm going to confuse you now the same way I confused me yesterday. By looking at Amy's Video clip "Was ist Emo?" ("What is emo?") on YouTube. She had this video online before (quoted in first version of this post), and it reached 250,000 views and approx. 3000 comments, but then she removed it and re-entered it with comments disabled. Doesn't matter, you may look up the comments of another of her videos, namely "Was wollen Emos?" ("What do emos want?"). She posted it in response of the comments on the "Was ist Emo?" video, but the comments there did not get any better (at the point of writing this, there are 558,925 views and 10,359 comments). Here's the mentioned clip:

After watching, you can go more into depth by looking up Emo in Wikipedia. Until yesterday, I didn't know the word, nor that this qualifies as "life content" for some people ... . And then, if you wanna get deeply frustrated about the state of current society, remember to read at least 500 comments on "Was wollen Emos?". There are qualified, good comments, but this applies to maybe 5%. Ignore them. For the 95%, the choice of words alone is so outragingly disgusting ... . If words could kill by themselves, you'd find some hundred cadaver on that web page. I'm simply bare of words ... and all this started by just going to YouTube and choosing a random promoted video clip. What adds to this are the insanely positive comments that can also be found there, mostly from other emos ... . It's not that I've any bias regarding individual "emos". And regarding Amy, she combines authenticity and coolness (see here) so that I think, yea, she has great potential (not just on YouTube as DiamondOfTears).

But, guys 'n' gals: emo ain't no way of responsible life, from the perspective of society. To me, emo and all the other style-based subcultures seem to deal only with aesthetics, music, fashion, fun and hatred. You cannot live on that. You cannot build a society on that. It's all nothing.

If the quality of comments is representative for the quality of youth in this country, we're lost. The 5% clear-minded people cannot save us from the mad once the old people died ... .

By the way, a small technical note: if you want to archive YouTube videos on your hard disk, e.g. to keep them from disappearing as Amy's first "Was ist Emo?" video did, you can use the Linux program youtube-dl. It's in the Ubuntu archives, probably in multiverse. Issue this command:

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV9nghiNnBU -o YouTube.WhatIsEmo.flv

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Start date: 2008-05-16
Post date: 2008-05-17
Version date: 2008-05-29 (for last meaningful change)

Deistic Christology

I presume this will get quite a mournful article. It's not that I'm happy with what I'm going to note here, I'd really like it to be the other way round. So disprove me if you can, I'd be grateful for that.

The problem starts with the sad fact that we as Christians in the Christian Western world don't experience God for real. There are some believable reports, but not enough and not obvious enough to serve as a contemporary justification for ones faith. Most are not believable, though: they're too close to the entropy lowerings that happen by chance in a life full of dynamics and interaction. It's a point of selective perception: we select the favourable chances out and call them "acts of God", and ignore the unfavourable chances as "that's just life". This would not be possible with obvious works of God.

The first thing to note is that is is no exceptional case. We've got other cases like that reported in the Bible. For example this:

“Now the young man Samuel was ministering to the LORD under Eli. And the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” [The Bible, I Samuel 3:2, ESV]

So I won't suggest general cessationism as the "doctrinal solution" here. Instead, it "just happens" (for some reasons yet unknown to me) that God does not acts or speaks in some areas at some times. I will call it "geo-cessationism" or "living in a cessationist area". It seems as if God would let people alone at times with just the historic fact that Jesus dies for them and that they can get saved by believing that. Of course Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to be always with us, and this might be the case, but then, the effects of the Spirit are untraceable, neither in our own nor in other people's life in cessationist areas, so that it is impossible to use the effects to justify ones faith in the Holy Spirit and Jesus.

For us, this means that we need to be able to cope with such a situation. Here's my suggestion for the various aspects of a coping strategy:

• You have to justify your faith from other sources. From history, and / or by moving to or visiting an area where God acts today. This is more difficult and less reliable than experiencing God himself, but it is just that way.
• You've gotta live your life pretty much on your own. You may spread your life 'n sorrows before God in prayer and you can expect him to listen. But don't expect him to help practically. (There will be some rare cases where he does, rejoice in them. But don't expect this to happen for any single case you pray for, as it won't happen in the average case and “hope deferred makes the heart sick” [The Bible, Proverbs 13:12, ESV].) From God's side, all that is there to help you is the general truth in the Bible (you need to read, understand and apply it yourself), the community with your brothers and sisters and their loving help. That's pretty much compared to not believing in God, but it lacks His concrete help, like, by prophecies for you and stuff.
  

So while it seems possible to cope with living in a cessationist area, it's no box of chocolates. So may I be surprised with experiencing God's acts, here or otherwhere, not too far from now ... .

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Start date: 2008-05-10
Post date: 2008-05-10
Version date: 2008-05-10 (for last meaningful change)

Can humans solve spiritual problems?

Lately, I read Bob DeWaay's article "How pietism deceives Christians". He argues against what he calls "pietism", namely, "a practice designed to lead to an experience that purports to give one an elite or special status compared to ordinary Christians." [Bob DeWaay: How pietism deceives Christians]. He strongly argues that sanctification is the work of God:

If the “secret” to a higher order Christianity is based on something we discover and implement (the secret to the deeper life), then it makes sense that some Christians could achieve a higher status than others. But if salvation AND sanctification are God’s work through His grace, then we are all in the same boat, and there’s no higher order. [Bob DeWaay: How pietism deceives Christians]

This could lead to the conclusion that human activity has no place at all in sanctification, as there's no improvement that humans can reach. This is an error. There's no improvement just because we already are in Christ what we become through sanctification.

Also look to the many exhortations in the NT. God integrates people into their sanctifiction process. DeWaay knows this, as he mentions: "If a teaching is called pietism but teaches no more than what God has always used to sanctify Christians, then it is not really pietism."[Bob DeWaay: How pietism deceives Christians]. And sanctification never introduces higher-order Christianity, as it only makes us what we already became in Christ:

For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. [The Bible, ISV, Heb 10:14]

Intermediate result: man's activity is integrated into the process of his sanctification.

So, to desire change towards holiness should not be termed "pietism". It's a work of faith. Also, to do something in that direction shouldn't be called "pietism": generating ideas, trying something. But note, these ideas are just to practically help those with a desire to change. They're not meant to generate a desire for change, because those without any desire for holiness need an initian conversion to Jesus instead.

And again, the result of thinking and trying is not important, but the existence of this desire to change (= work of faith, taking God seriously). Ideas for revival need not be pietism, but they're about practicing the basics of ones faith (continuous repentance, desire for holiness). Now, repentance means "thinking differently", and this starts with recognizing and analyzing a problem (e.g. as done in the article "Oh we of decadent faith!"). Repent, think differently: the Laodicaeans were admonished to go into a different direction, so it is good to try this / something. Also, repentance implied "trying differently", so it's a good idea to generate some ideas how to try differently.

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Start date: 2008-03-20
Post date: 2008-05-03
Version date: 2008-05-03 (for last meaningful change)

Tech-Blog launched

Since the beginning of April, two of my brothers and me invested some work to start up a technology blog. It's now in a relatively mature state, so that I want to announce it here: my blog posts on IT and computing are now published on doit.juii.net. We're currently in the process of adding content that lurked on our hard disks unpublished, so that the blog will start with 1000+ posts of initial content when all the stuff is entered! Basically, the tech blog will contain all the computing knowledge that I acquired in the last 10 years and that seemed worth to remember to me. There is really a load of interesting original Linux stuff in there!

I admit that this announcement is partially for SEO / search-engine optimization purposes ... . But the good thing for my permanent blog readers is that I won't bother you here in the future with any boring posts about computer details. Each blog needs a coherent topic to deserve permanent readers, and mine is, from now on, pure n'everyday life. Computer don't belong to not-everyday life. This does not say that all technical posts are now gone ... some do belong to n'everyday life (like posts on equipment, travelling and so on).

Also, note that this blog has now some fewer posts ... I removed the posts on computing that I wrote on the past here. They will be more useful on doit.juii.net, as we'll have some advertisements over there to gain some revenue. But I won't dare to use advertisements here! These topics here are too precious, while computing is "just a topic".

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Start date: 2008-05-01
Post date: 2008-05-01
Version date: 2008-05-01 (for last meaningful change)