Keller: surface & deep idols

There are "deep idols" within the heart beneath the more concrete and visible "surface idols" that we serve.

Sin in our hearts affects our basic motivational drives so they become idolatrous, "deep idols."  Some people are strongly motivated by a desire for influence and power, while others are more excited by approval and appreciation  [or comfort or security]....people with the deep idol of power do not mind being unpopular in order to gain influence.  People who are most motivated by approval are the opposite - they will gladly lose power and control as long as everyone thinks well of them.  Each deep idol...generates a different set of fears and a different set of hopes.

Counterfeit Gods p64&65

He goes onto show, as an example, how money can be an idol but expresses differently depending on the underlying deep idol - money used to control others or to attain social standing or to buy security etc.

Postman: tools of conversation

As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.

...the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

Postman, p8&9

The power of individuals

from the same article as the previous post:

Bread for the World got two women in Birmingham, Alabama, involved. These women happen to be in the constituency of the congressman who was the gatekeeper for the debt relief legislation. They invite him to an event at their church, and he shows up. God works in mysterious ways. They thought, We'll invite all these members of Congress. Well, here comes this guy, and he turns out to be the gatekeeper for the legislation. They connected him to David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, and talked to him about the Bible and hunger around the world.

He starts using this language in the committee hearings, and the Clinton staffers are there. They hear this and go back and tell the White House: This conservative Republican is talking about starving kids in Africa in the finance committee meetings. As a result, the debt relief legislation passed.

Hunger and the Green Revolution

What did the Green Revolution achieve?

Agriculture scientists led by Norman Borlaug developed a new kind of breeding method that resulted in a wheat strain that was more adaptable. It turned out to be just what India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—which were the world's famine zones in the 1960s—needed. That seed goes over there and boom, brings a lot of people out of hunger. It wasn't long after that a country like India has surpluses of wheat and rice. The Green Revolution then moves on to other places in Asia. This formed the basis for the great economic growth seen in India and China over the past couple of decades. People were freed from the task of growing food to be able to do other things.

But Green Revolution techniques weren't applied in Africa. Agriculture development spending in the developing world fell off a cliff. In Haiti, the peasant farmers were told they should be working in factories making underwear. If you export the underwear, then you buy food. Maybe that works in theory, but what happens when the price of rice skyrockets? Suddenly, export earnings aren't buying enough rice. We have rice shortages. There are riots in the streets.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/february/27.40.html?start=2

John Venn on preaching

When I come into the pulpit, it is after study, prayers, and cries for the people. I speak as plainly and enter into all the cares of the congregation as minutely as I am able.

'Evangelist'

From CT

Q: You write that "Evangelism is one of those emotionally charged words that sends shivers of guilt running up and down our spine." Should we retire the word evangelism?

No, I think we need to think about it differently. These days the word evangelist is being used by lots of other people. There are car salesmen that call themselves "BMW evangelists" or "Chevrolet evangelists." They think, eat, drink, and sleep their product. Because of this marketing usage, it's actually become a positive word again.

When I'm on a plane now and a churched person asks what I do and I say, "I'm an evangelist," my response is a turnoff. But if it's a non-Christian in sales, or in any kind of business, they immediately know what I'm talking about. There's no negativity at all. They hear it as a synonym for enthusiast. But in the minds of long-term church people, it can be a negative. But I think we need to get over it. Its biblical roots are too important. When the angels announce the birth of Jesus, we see the Greek word from which we get evangelism—euangelion. So we are partners with the angels when we do evangelism. We are doing what the angels do. That's powerful.

deGroat: limping

Our wilderness leads to dependence.  It humbles us.  It doesn’t make us super-saints.  It doesn’t make us spiritual giants.  Emerging from the wilderness, we’re not marked by halos.  We’re marked by a thorn in our side, a limp, a weakness that is a testimony to Christ’s strength.

http://drchuckdegroat.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/we-continue-to-crawl-along-ever-reaching/

Mr Postman

I've been reading "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, a book that is repeatedly quoted in many other books I have read.  Halfway through at the moment, and it really is a fascinating and well written examination of TV culture.   The only problem with the book is that it predates the internet, or even the possibility of the internet, and I just hope that somewhere he set down his thoughts on how it might affect the conclusions he forms in this book.

Anyway, it's tempting to quote most of the book, which I won't be doing, but here's a start.  His main thesis is:

...an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence  on the ideas that we can conveniently express.  And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important ideas of a culture.  

Which is terrifying in a way:  what TV is able to communicate becomes, because TV is dominant, the content of our culture.  What TV as a medium struggle to communicate, vanishes from a culture.

...I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians [but] I can safely guess it did not include philosophical argument.  Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex...You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content....

...on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say TV gives us a conversation in images not words...you cannot do [political] philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. (p6&7)

Which is why politicians have image management not thinkers at the forefront.

Despair

The disciples went to sleep when they should have kept awake, and when they realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense of the irreparable is apt to make us despair, and we say - "It is all up now, it is no use trying any more." If we imagine that this kind of despair is exceptional, we are mistaken, it is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize that we have not done that which we had a magnificent opportunity of doing, then we are apt to sink into despair; and Jesus Christ comes and says - "Sleep on now, that opportunity is lost for ever, you cannot alter it, but arise and go to the next thing." Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ, and go out into the irresistible future with Him.
There are experiences like this in each of our lives. We are in despair, the despair that comes from actualities, and we cannot lift ourselves out of it. The disciples in this instance had done a downright unforgivable thing; they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus, but He came with a spiritual initiative against their despair and said - "Arise and do the next thing." If we are inspired of God, what is the next thing? To trust Him absolutely and to pray on the ground of His Redemption.
Never let the sense of failure corrupt your new action. 

Oswald Chamers, My Utmost for His Highest, February 18th

Right...here we go: #15

Well...the problem with my first choice is that it’s incredibly long and involved, and is unfair to spring on someone for a week’s review.  But I have chosen it because, for me, it marked the turning point in music.  Now, you might think I should have turned somewhere else, but this was the album that changed everything.  Prior to this I had a tape of Russian classical music, stuff recorded off the radio, a Bill Hailey and the Comets compilation, two Shakin’ Stevens albums (honest)...and recently had branched out into Survivor (Eye of the Tiger had been a hit a few years before, and their album had been released on that £2.99 Woolworths label...those were the days).

Then, somewhere in 1984/85 The Complete Mike Oldfield came out – and, although it never appeared on an album, Pictures in the Dark was released as a single.  I saw the video on Saturday morning TV:  Oldfield had bought all his own video and computer gear and produced one of the early CGI videos, and I was really interested in that.

A friend said his dad had an Oldfield album and lent it to me.  I still have the incredibly long cassette!  And I had a bit of a shock:  not realising that 4minute singles were a recent imposition by Virgin records on him, I hadn’t suspected over an hour of mainly instrumental and live material.   It was noise!   Later I gave it another go, and another...and realised it was buzzing round my head.   I played the tape to distraction. 

In later years I recognised that the multi-layered sound-scapes were setting off  what turned out to be audio-visual synesthesia.  But more than that, these were vast audio landscapes, and as a morose and troubled teenager, I was lost in them, it was another world.  It was Lord of the Rings through my eyes, and Oldfield through my ears.

Anyway, here it is:  Exposed by Mike Oldfield.  It’s the first tour he undertook:  after the phenomenal success of Tubular Bells, the shy and mentally fragile Oldfield took to the hills (literally) and hid;  a one off incident with drugs to try to ease the anguish produced what we’re warned about these days with regards to cannabis: an instant psychotic episode that left him further damaged.  But In ‘77 he underwent a bizarre self-assertiveness course, and then put together his first tour – thus he was finally ‘exposed’.  With up to 50 people on stage, in an attempt to reproduce the complexities of Tubular Bells and Incantations, the tour nearly bankrupted him.   But Oh I wish I had been there!  Never before and never again would it be tried, by anyone.  I mean, Longfellow’s Hiawatha set to music?  And tens of thousands of people listening enthusiastically?  As they said in the 6^th form:  I’m a hippy born out of time...

It’s not on Spotify, but I found it on LastFM:

Introversion

Some interesting quotes from a CT book review on Introverts in the Church by McHugh:

McHugh identifies three primary characteristics of introverts. First, he says, introverts are energized by solitude and drained by social interaction. (Extroverts, on the other hand, derive energy from external sources and find both inactivity and too much solitude draining.) Second, introverts tend to filter information and experiences internally; thinking generally precedes speaking. Third, introverts prefer depth over breadth in both relationships and interests. They may look calm on the surface, but their brains are "bubbling with activity"; thus, they require less external stimulation than their extroverted neighbors.

...

The challenge for those who tend to focus inward lies in "distinguishing between the healthy components of personalities … and the coping mechanisms that are the symptoms of our wounds." Because introverts tend to be good listeners, we can get enmeshed in one-sided relationships and masquerade as extroverts in order to be accepted. Both tendencies drain us of vitality.

...

He wisely adds that "understanding our introversion is not the end of our self-discovery and growth; it is a beginning point for learning how to love God and others as ourselves," and concludes that "the introverted trajectory of growth is toward relationships with others and relationship with the outside world."

The reviewer is not 100% in agreement with the book, but these comments I found helpful.

One comment the reviewer makes struck me as needing investigation:  "Depression is an illness, not a function of temperament".  Any thoughts on this gratefully received.....