WANG CHUNG Everybody have fun tonight

On the edge of oblivion
All the world is Babylon
And all the love and everyone
A ship of fools sailing on
—Wang Chung, 1986

They were a New Wave group. As usual, Christianity is twenty years behind philosophy, the arts and popular culture, because we need a "new wave" now.

How do I know? We fail at praxis.

Praxis is the act of translating an idea into action. It is theory put into practice. It is the mojo in your Sensei's dojo. Wait. You missed that. It is translating the kata (formal exercises) into kime (an explosive attack). For the Christian, it is turning orthodoxy (right belief) into orthopraxy (practical service). I detest the word "suck,” but we suck at that.

So let me give you something you can pray about. A week from today a group of twenty people will be in Philadelphia. We will meet at the church pastored by Herbert Lusk II.

Talk about praxis! Rev. Lusk played for the Eagles and was known as "The Praying Tailback." He gave up pro football, left the NFL for the ministry, and took a struggling inner city church in 1982. They have gone from 17 members to ministering to over 2,000 people every Sunday.

Anyway, pray. Because next weekend we will do a discipleship conference for his leaders. First he said 70. Now it's over 200.

This is a big deal. Our discipleship conferences are not about imparting information. They are about transferring life. That's praxis.

I can see you don't get this, so let me break it down. When Jesus met with his homeboys for three and a half years, he took them through seven stages.(1) But discipleship is not about a program. Remember: praxis. So what we did was to boil those seven stages down into four biblical goals. Then we connected those goals to sixteen basic lessons about the faith. But it's not about a curriculum. Remember: praxis. So what we do in a conference is teach interested believers at other churches how we use those lessons to accomplish the four goals of discipleship in the life of someone else. That's praxis, because it means that every believer becomes a minister.

Whoa! That's not your daddy's Oldsmopile. They don't have to go to seminary. They don't even have to wear a tie or walk in front of a pulpit. And yet they fuse the only two eternal elements in this planet’s periodic table: the word of God and the souls of people. They put one into the other with the goal of causing kime. And when you get down to it, this is the key element in fulfilling the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20).

How'd we miss that, all these years? Okay, four biblical goals that will take you from belief to behavior, doctrine to duty, orthodoxy to orthopraxy.
The Biblical Philosophy of Discipleship
Get established in
1. The Word of God
2. The fellowship of believers
3. The structure of the church
4. Ministry with us

I'm going to stop there with the instruction, because you've already lost your compassion.

Pastor Herb Lusk does not measure the success of his ministry by how many members he has under his ministry, but by how many people his ministry serves. He founded People for People Inc. (PFP) in 1989 as the community development arm of Greater Exodus Baptist Church. In 2000 they developed a credit union. In 2001 they started a Charter School. Today they operate one of the most successful job skills training programs in the city. Pray for this church.
www.gebch.com/
Pray for our team and the weekend discipleship conference. Pray for me as I preach there on Sunday.

Let's start New Wave Christianity. It's not just talk; it's truth. So don't just talk about it—be about it!


1. Wilson, Carl. With Christ in the School of Disciple Building. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978).

Your Rabbi's Dust

My junior year of high school Ron Howard starred in the movie Eat My Dust. It was definitely a B movie (meaning they did not bring their A game). It didn't go straight to video, but became drive-in fodder for the masses. Its only redeeming value was one of the wildest car chases ever filmed. You can probably still find a copy in Betamax.

Rob Bell is the king of the wild evangelical ride. His Nooma videos present that quirkiness in an ingenious way. He criticizes anyone who wants to paint the ultimate picture of Elvis. He says they end up "freezing the faith."(1) And the only place for a frozen faith is the same spot his velvet painting of a pre-doughnut Elvis now occupies: the basement.

Bell says the only thing that is absolute is God (not Elvis, and not the faith—which is his shorthand way of referring to your interpretation of the Bible). That is why doctrines of the Christian faith "aren't the point"(2) (or at least not RB's point).

Now, lest you think I am just grinding my axe (pull that spark out of your hair), there is a lot to admire in Bell's brief book, Velvet Elvis. Not least is his desire to reverse the curse of cynicism and stagnation in much of evangelical Christianity. Robbie would never put it this way but, after all, we are living in the "Laodicean age."

Worthy of equal praise is any attempt to strip away the varnish of traditional interpretations and get back to the true meaning of Jesus' words for disciples today. For this attempt we give kudos to N.T. Wright as well. Both of them have taken the fruits of the "third quest" for Jesus (don't worry, I didn't know Jesus was lost, either) and extracted their relevance for mainstream believers.(3) But in striving to be insightful Bell focuses on the novel.

I think I said something; you better read it again. In the effort to be profound he resorts to novel interpretations. Like, quirky. "Private interpretation" I think Peter calls it.

Is that a fair criticism? Let me start with one example for this post.

The fifth "movement" in Bell's book is entitled "Dust." This is his reference to disciples attaching themselves to rabbinic learning by saying that they wanted to be covered in the dust of the rabbi’s feet. Since the idea of Biblical open-endedness is a key assumption in Bell’s thesis, what RB is really getting at is the concept that the disciples' job was to follow their rabbi, who was constantly repainting their faith so it would not brickify. I'm not sure that was ever the case in Judaism (although they certainly do have a lot of inherently self-contradictory positions inherited from the sages and the oral tradition), but let's play along with the fantasy.

Bell quotes exactly one rabbi to give us an experiential exegesis of this idea. There is just one thing wrong with his extrapolation. Well, two things, actually. First, that's not what the rabbi said. Second, that is not what he meant.

Okay, don't get mad and stop reading; just stop reading. Or, even though I have touched your idol, read on and evaluate for yourself.

On page 130 Bell states, "One of the earliest sages of the Mishnah, Yose ben Yoezer, said to his disciples, 'Cover yourself with the dust of [your rabbi's] feet.’" Now that Rob has grabbed the palette of your imagination in his engaging, fluid style, he goes on to paint a picture of the disciple being covered with dust from "a day of walking in the dirt directly behind" the rabbi.

Let me give you the actual quotation. Rabbi and Sanhedrin leader Yose ben Yoezer, in the first tractate (we would say chapter) of the Mishnah named Perkei Avos (Ethics of the Fathers), discusses the validity of the oral Torah by saying,

"Let thy house be a meeting-place for the wise [or sages], powder thyself in [or sit in, wallow amid] the [very] dust of their feet, and drink their words with eagerness [or thirst, or gusto]."(4)

So this does not mean (as Bell says) to “cover yourself” with their dust as they walk around, binding and loosing doctrine and casting their particular theological spell, excuse me, "yoke" on people. It means to sit in the dust at their feet humbly and attentively. Just like Mary did in Luke 10:39.

Oh. I guess some things are better illustrated by Scripture. As a matter of fact, the Bible will usually keep us from getting wrong ideas from misapplied quotations.

Okay, I know you're tired, but here's my point. Instead of anchoring his images in Scripture, Robbie approvingly quotes Sean Penn (did you know he was also a theologian? At Ridgemont High, I think) that, “When everything gets answered it’s fake. The mystery is the truth.”(5) Hmmm. Glad my physician doesn't think so. Wish my theologians didn't either, because the whole point of biblical revelation is to answer essential questions with certainty (Prov. 22:20-21—and don't take that just as a "proof text,” actually read it and meditate on the meaning).

Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis is kind of like Ron Howard's Eat My Dust. It doesn't get a lot of traction, but the ride is wild enough. What it has in common is quirkiness. Some people thrive on that, but like the movie, I think it is designed to instill maximum vertigo.


1. Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 13.

2. p. 22-23.

3. As might be gleaned in N.T. Wright’s, The New Testament and the People of God, or his dialogue with liberal theologian and Jesus Seminar member Marcus Borg in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.

4. m. Avot 1:4, Neusner. The entire tractate can be viewed online at http://www.anshe.org/avos.htm.

5. p. 33.

Momma Don't Blog and Daddy Don't Rock 'n' Roll

My parents listened to shellac 78s. They were "records" that turned at 78-rpm and were played by a needle runing through the groove. That was old school.

The incarnation of Elvis coincided with the advent of records made out of vinyl (not brittle shellac) spinning at 33-rpm for LP (long play, five songs and 30 minutes to a side) and 45-rpm for "singles." It was way kewl how the "changer" would drop them onto the turntable one by one.

Something else was more important. The advent of the 45 was that day's iPod. With lightweight durable records came portable players that teenagers could afford. You're still not feeling me like I need you to. That means they could take music to their basement or bedroom and listen loud and proud without being tied down to a piece of the family furniture (like with phonos that played the 78s).

The rest is history. A Cleveland DJ called his radio show "Moondog's Rock 'n' Roll Party." He just minted a new term. It's why Huey Lewis gave us the News that "The Heart of Rock 'n' Roll is...Cleveland" (Sports, 1983). The newly coined phrase went national when Bill Haley's Comets "Rock[ed] Around the Clock" (like on TV's "Happy Days"). That was in 1955. Two years later Buddy Holly hailed from Texas with guitar-driven rock (like, oh, ZZ Top and David Crowder). Chuck Berry scored the teen anthem "Rock & Roll." Little Richard put three hits in the Top 40 and then renounced rock for religion (this was before he went on to make the best commercial ever filmed).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em-b0wQzQ-0
O Lawdy, yes.

Fifty years ago this year Elvis had four No. 1 hits. He would die twenty years later, but not before being immortalized in a velvet painting stored in Rob Bell's basement. And then being used as Robbie's metaphor for repainting Scripture and the Christian faith itself. In Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005) RB is not simply arguing for a repainting of Christianity into postmodern norms, like you might slap a fresh coat of color on the outside of the steeple on church work day. He demands an evaluation of the Bible that is prepared to be in process of continually and unendingly reinterpreted.

This blog is my place to use the purple ink. Here is where I emend people's ideas because they are wack. If you want to see books I mostly agree with, go here
www.kcbt.org/media/ashelbybook.htm
I do not review them so much as present a synopsis. But Bell, he rates the purple pen. He can label me part of "brickworld" if he wants to, but I have issues with RB. And his ideas. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that where Robbie claims his conclusions are at the heart of the matter and an accurate summary of Scripture, I can legitimately critique whether his views are complete and free of innovative presuppositions.

This is not Brickianity. It is repainting Velvet Bellvis. And while we are at it we might as well correct some wrongs of N.T. Wright.

WELCOME TO MY PurpelInk

If you enjoy pens check out the new Pentel EnerGel. It's a smooth, vibrant, quick-drying ("great for lefties") liquid gel pen that actually writes clear without muddying things up.

Get it in violet ink. It's beautiful. Why? Because Spurgeon used a characteristic purple ink to emend and correct his sermons for publication. And C.H. Spurgeon was the most magnificent and majestic preacher since the apostle Paul. I can see you don't believe me, so look at www.spurgeon.org and www.spurgeon.us

This is the perfect purple pen. Every Sunday as he preached to between 7,000 and 25,000 people in London, a stenographer would take that sermon down in shorthand. Spurgeon corrected the manuscript copy on Monday and sent it to his printers. I have one of those pages.



Each Thursday a new sermon was printed. Each year they were bound into volumes. I have all 62 (publishing continued 25 years after his death). Today, there are even more volumes—modern emendations of his Victorian-English sermons.


I can tell you're still not a fan, so let me help you out. Get (for example) The Suffering of Man and the Sovereignty of God. Published by Fox River Press, it is 25 of Spurgeon's finest sermons just on the book of Job. Read it and you won't need psychoanalysis and you can stop wasting that money on Prozac (this is not a medical opinion; do not stop taking your medication if you are crazy—not until your physician confirms that Spurgeon has kicked in).