BIG NEWS FOR THE MABRYS!

We have some BIG NEWS to share with all you "interwebs" out there!

As you may or may not know, Hope and I have felt called by God for a long time to plant a church. Hope and I were recently assessed and trained to plant churches. For almost a year now, we’ve been dealing with a call from God to plant a new church. Planting new churches is what we’ve done here in Edinburgh, and now he’s calling us to STEP OUT IN FAITH and follow his call to another place to plant another church. As we’ve prayed, we very distinctly heard GOD CALLING US TO PLANT A NEW CHURCH IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS!

I know what you’re thinking. “Why Boston? What about Scotland?” Well, we always assumed we’d plant in Europe because WE ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT SEEING unCHRISTIAN, ATHEISTIC/AGNOSTIC PEOPLE MEET JESUS. These people abound in Europe (which is part of the reason we like it here As we prayed, we realized that those people don’t just live in Europe, but in certain parts of the USA. Over time, God began to BURN IN OUR HEARTS a desire to reach the people of New England.

What is striking is how similar Boston and Edinburgh actually are. Both cities have amazing spiritual heritages, both cities boast great universities, and both cities are full of people who don’t know Jesus and DESPERATELY NEED A TRANSFORMATIONAL ENCOUNTER WITH HIS GOSPEL.

Of course, WE’RE NOT DONE IN EDINBURGH JUST YET! We’re committed to being here as long as we can to see these churches succeed. This is, of course, being made difficult by our current visa situation. At this point, Hope and I are unsure of how long the UK government will allow us to remain here. The good news is, however, that these churches are doing well and are healthy. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN OUR GOAL TO DO SUCH A GOOD JOB REACHING LOCALS THAT WE WORKED OURSELVES OUT OF A JOB. Now, that is happening.

Obviously, we’re excited that God is pleased to use us in this way to advance His Kingdom. You are welcome to CHECK OUT OUR CHURCH PLANT by visiting the website I built for it. We’re very early days yet, but we’d appreciate your prayers for us and our future. This will be the biggest faith step we’ve ever taken, and we’re going to need a lot of prayer.

Book Review: What's So Great about Christianity

I like this book, I’m not going to lie.

Dinesh D’souza achieves something rather applaudable in this book. He manages to mingle a great, intellectual response to the recent onslaught of "new atheist" literature, humor, and acerbic wit which ends up being very helpful and very interesting. What’s So Great about Christianity seeks to answer some key questions that are being asked by a lot of people today.

Namely:

• Is Christianity true? I mean, can a university-educated person really believe its claims?
• Have the "new athiests" nailed the case for atheism?
• Does Christianity even matter?

He answers these questions in a very helpful, story-type way that makes this book which has very challenging intellectual content, approachable and enjoyable by anyone. So, without further adieu, here’s my list of likes and dislikes:

• I loved that he skipped the debate over evolution and took atheists to task for their complete inability to answer the much more interesting question, "how did anything get here in the first place?" To which the stock athiest response is, as he points out, "I don’t know, it just happened." Yeah. Good answer.
• I loved how he points out that, contrary to popular belief, religion (and Christianity in particular) are on the rise in the world. He writes the greater effect of modernization is that it causes people to strive for "something more." Great point.
• I loved his reasoned and thorough deconstruction of the tatty atheistic arguements that beset so many Christians. He systematically undermines their strongest points with reasoned assessment of the arguements they present. Unlike readind Dawkins or Hitchens, there’s actually some discernable arguments in this book, and they are pretty hard to refute.
• If I have any bone to pick, I do think that his gospel presentation is somewhat lacking in the last chapter. He speaks of Christianity improving life and as a cure for death, but little about real sin.

Overall, this was a fantastic book. I would suggest giving this book to your agnostic friends who are engaging in an honest questioning of faith. I think they may find what they’re looking for within its pages. I know I’ll be giving some copies away.

Airport Bookstore Angst

I’m on my way home back to Edinburgh from D.C.

I decide to walk into the bookstore to check out the titles.

Anger. Lots of anger.

Here’s what’s on offer in the religion section: serious titles that challenge the Christian faith at its core. Bart Ehrman, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and their disciples.

What do we have in our defense? Your Best Life Now. The Shack. Left Behind.

Fan-stinkin’-tastic.

We have work to do.

A Preacher's Personal Prayer

I’m sitting down about to do some intense preparation for preaching Sunday, and the weight of the task before me has just hit me in a new way. I want to share this prayer with you.

Lord, you wrote this word. You know what it means. You spoke and everything happened. I believe you want to speak on Sunday.

I place myself under the authority of your word. Your words are true food, and we are hungry. Your words are true drink and we are thirsty. Your words are life and we want to live.  Your words are holy and we want to be like you.  Your words show us Jesus and want most to see Jesus.

As I prepare, illuminate your word to my heart and my mind. As I read, speak.  As I think, speak. As I am silent, speak. As I study, speak.  As I speak, speak.

When I open my mouth, Jesus, be central in all I say; be the hero of the story, be the theme of the day, be the life-giver, the sin-taker, the means to life and life itself.

Speak, Lord. Use this foolish man to do something great so that all may know on that day that it was not I but you in me.

Radio Silence

This past week I’ve purposely unplugged from blogging, or in military terms, I’ve been maintaining radio silence.

People like me (that is, people who have opinions, like to preach, talk, and generally let everyone know what is on their minds) need to do this every now and again. It’s a good thing sometimes to be silent and listen sometimes. You’d be surprised at what God might say to you.

Try this: be silent. Hold your list and just ask God to speak to you sometime.

He might just talk back to you. I know he did to me.

For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.

Justification by Social Justice

There is a new religion.

Tim Keller has noted that every act of the human will, be it obedience or disobedience is to fill the need to feel accepted by others, and in a deeper way, by God. So, if we are very religious, its so we can say, “look how good I am, God must love me.” And if we are very irreligious, its so we can say, “I’m my own person, and I’m accepted to myself.” Both are religious, and both seek acceptance… what the Bible calls Justification.

Today there is a new religion. Worship services have been replaced with charity appeals. Hymn singing replaced with “live aid, band aid, earth aid” and other such events. WWJD bracelets replaced by the Fair Trade mark, and traditional religion replaced with a new one: social justice.

Think about it. To feel loved and accepted in days gone by, we used to go to church, lead clean moral lives, and make our kids attend sunday school, etc. To feel loved and accepted today, we go to Fairtrade cafes, we buy locally, we drive a Prius, and we recycle. So, you’re asking, what’s wrong with that? Nothing wrong with Fairtrade, recycling, stewarding the environment well, and supporting local farmers, is there?

No.

And yes.

Religion like this does one of two things: it gives you the ability to feel self-righteous, looking down on everyone else because you are following all the rules that they aren’t, or you feel deeply depressed because you can’t follow the rules and it seems like everyone else does. This sort of religious work never ends in free, happy, accepted people. Its ends with two groups: obnoxious, self-righteous jerks and hand-wringing, insecure, depressed wimps. 

So, now the conservative, bible-toating, religious man who looks down on sinners has everything in common with the hippy, liberal, vegan. They are both religious, and they are both wrong. Both mutually excommunicating each other from their respective form of religious acceptance. 

So what’s right? Perhaps the next blog’s for that one…

Awesome Calvin Quote…

Salvation is by grace alone, but grace is never alone.

Book Review: Simple Church

So, I meant to do this a while ago, but here we are with a review of Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger’s Simple Church.

To put it simply (pun totally intended) the book was very good.

This book is a research-based plea for simplicity. It takes into its sights every church with that bulletin, you know THAT bulletin. The one that looks like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory. So many freaking announcements that you’d have to be a member of MENSA just to keep track of all that’s going on.  That church, with that bulletin. It’s a clarion call for the mission of Jesus to be our mission – making disciples.

So, here’s the breakdown of what I liked and what I didn’t. 

• I loved the four words – clarity, movement, alignment, focus.  Make the goal and method clear. Move people along the clear, simple process. Align the church around the clear, simple process. Focus entirely on the clear, simple process.  See, its so simple I summed it up in a sentence!
• I loved what the book made me think about: how, as a church-planter, to simplify the mission of my church, say it clearly, make it a mantra. Loved that.
• I loved the heart behind the book, making disciples for Jesus.
• I didn’t really like the one-dimensional nature of all the examples.  Most of the churches who were “simple” churches followed a three-phrase mission (like, “love God, love people, love the world,” or some permutation thereof).  I thought we could have had some more variety of examples.

All-in-all, I will be recommending this book to my entire team.  Good job Thom and Eric.

Christians, Freak ye Out Not!

I can see it now. Darwinists are cheering the newly discovered “ida” while Christians are shaking in their boots. Well Christian, before you become a premillennialist, start reading left-behind books, buying canned goods, cleaning your gun, and generally freaking out… take a breath.

About 200 years ago, a man named William Paley posed that if we find a watch lying on the street, and we pick it up to examine its intricacy, is it more probable to think it just “evolved,” or that it was intentionally designed?  This was a good argument, until Richard Dawkins came along and refuted it by saying that nature and Darwinian natural selection were the “blind watchmaker.”  We’ll come back to that brilliantly bad argument in a minute…

Evolution is a very helpful biological theory that seeks to explain how organisms changed once they got here. That’s just it though, it says nothing to how they got here. Like it or hate it, evolution is here to stay since pretty much every biologist in the world (including most of the Christian ones) believes it to be true. The question is not, “is evolution true or not?”  Most the good science seems to say it is. The real question we should be asking is, “what does evolution explain?”

Here you have a few options, if you’re Daniel Dennet or Richard Dawkins type, you think it explains abso-freekin-lutely everything, from biology to morality to the superbowl… everything. The only problem with that position is that it’s about as asinine as saying that evolution never happened in any way, shape, or form. In this way Dawkins and Dennet find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being in the same box as a religious fundamentalist who thinks science is “of the devil.”

Here’s what evolution cannot, by its very nature, ever, ever explain:

• The beginning of life or the universe – Evolution explains how stuff changed over time, but has nothing to say about where said “stuff” came from. Renowned biologist Franklin Harold this is one of the “unsolved mysteries of science.” Nothing comes from nothing, but the Dawkins camp wants us to believe that something comes from nothing, life from non-life, order from chaos, etc.  That’s just stupid.
• Consciousness – Evolution cannot tell us why we are self-aware.  It certainly can tell us why our brains are large, but not why we are the only beings who are aware they exist.  Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker admits there is no explanation.  He writes in How the Mind Works, “Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitry of the brain…  The existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science.”
• Rationality and Morality – Rationality is the power to see something as true.  Evolution can’t explain why we perceive truth and communicate through language.  Evolution explains how we got traits necessary for survival, but Pinker again states, “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not truth.” Michael Ruse (a nonChristian philosopher) says that “no one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have an answer to this.”  Morality is the same.  Morality has altruistic qualities that make us act against self-interest. Many Darwinists have tried, but no one has offered any coherent solution to this problem from that perspective.

The Christian’s problem is not evolution, and we make a mistake when we try to say it is. The Christian’s problem is the Darwinian macro-theory, that seeks to explain everything through this very narrow theory about biology.  Allow me to close with a quote from a man far smarter than you and me, Physicist Dr. Stephen Barr.

When examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness.  On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding of an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way.  When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously “arranging themselves” into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeard to be haphazard actually had a great deal of order built into it…  What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley’s watches.  Paley finds a “watch” and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance.  Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point.  But that is absurd.  How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of an explanation than the watches themselves?  Its one thing to say that the finch’s beak and the moth’s hue and the human eye all evolved by chance. But the universe that lawfully produces finches, moths, and humans is quite clearly the product of intention and “creative” design. So Dawkins’ refutation of Paley fails gloriously and completely. Paley was right all along.

Can we please stop arguing about evolution and start exposing the major hole in the systematic theology of the Darwinian… namely that he cannot explain how we’re here to have the argument in the first place!

Genesis 25 Sermon and Commentary

Today I’m preaching on Genesis 25, and the notion of inheritance.

As promised in my sermon today, I’m posting the extended commentary on this passage that I’ve put together for further study.  You can listen to the sermon by going here, and you can download the notes here.

Enjoy, and I’d love your feedback.