The Enyarts

In the mid-1980s a missionary family serving overseas came home on furlough, needing a little R&R. Through the graciousness of friends, they’d been provided with the use of a summer home on a beautiful lake. For these tired, front-line warriors, it was like a piece of Eden.

One bright summer morning, Mom was in the kitchen fussing with the baby and preparing a lunch for the family. Dad was in the boathouse puttering with something that needed some puttering. And the three children present were out on the lawn between the home and the edge of the lake. Three-year-old “little Billy” was under the care of a five-year-old sister and a twelve-year-old cousin.

When Sister and Cousin became distracted with some mutual interest, little Billy decided it would be an opportune time to wander down to the water and check out that shiny little aluminum boat that had been bobbing so temptingly beside the dock. The trouble is, three-year-olds have limited experience in getting from a stable dock to a bobbing boat. With one foot on the dock and the other stretching toward the boat, Little Billy lost his balance and fell into five or six feet of water beside the dock.

The splash alerted the twelve-year-old, who let loose a piercing scream. That brought Dad on the run. After scoping out the situation for a second or two, he dove into the murky water and began a desperate search for his little boy. But the water was murky, and Dad couldn’t see a thing. With lungs desperate for air, he resurfaced, grabbed another ragged gasp, and plunged back under. Sick with panic, the only thing he could think to do was to extend his arms and legs as far as he could and try to feel little Billy’s whereabouts. Having nearly exhausted his oxygen supply a second time, he began to ascend once again for another breath.

On his way up, he felt little Billy, arms locked in a death grip to a pier post some four feet under the water. Prying the boy’s fingers loose, they burst through the surface to fill their lungs with life-giving air.

Adrenaline continued to surge. Conversation would not return to normal for a long time. Dad just carried little Billy around, holding him close, unable to put him down for some time. Finally, when heart rates had returned to normal and nerves had calmed a bit, this missionary dad turned to his little boy with a question.

“Billy, what on earth were you doing down there, hanging onto that post so far under water?”

Little Billy’s reply, laced with all the wisdom of a tot, reaches out and grabs us by the throat.

“Just waitin’ for you, Dad. Just waitin’ for you!”

Weber, Stu. (1997). Four Pillars of a Man's Heart. Sisters: Multnomah.

Posted by jared at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[lit-er-jee]
-noun, plural -gies
1. a form of public worship; ritual.
2. a collection of formularies for public worship.
3. a particular arrangement of services.

The word liturgy means something like the work of the saints. Every church is liturgical. Even if it is totally free flowing. Every church has its own kind of customs and traditions.

Here is an example of a liturgy:

1. Remember who God is and what he has done for our lives.
Do this with two songs at the beginning of the service. The focus of these songs is to remember. The songs should be about who God is and what we are here to do.

2. Release
A prayer of release. Every service.

3. Renew our minds through the teaching of God’s word

4. Recognize

5. Respond
We believe that the Spirit really does stuff when we let it go. Call people to respond personally. It’s prayer, communion, and financial worship

6. Blessing
Call people to receive

Where is the sermon in this liturgy? Where in the order? It’s toward the front. Why do you suppose it would be toward the front? For most churches, at least the churches I’ve seen you’ve got worship, call to worship, announcements, some sort of fellowship time, then the sermon, then maybe half a song and you’re out. Correct? Why would we do it differently? The idea Biblically is that worship always is a response to revelation. It’s a response to truth. You don’t just come in and conjure up feelings of worship. Right? At least I can’t. In terms of just walking in–we’ve had a crazy week; we’ve got the kids adjusted, they’re finally in their classes, they’re in their rooms; we’re just going crazy and all of the sudden it’s like time to worship. How great does that work normally? Not great. We believe Biblically in the Psalms, in Romans 12:1

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

Notice, what do we worship in view of? His mercy. And Paul has just spent eleven painstaking, concrete, thick chapters elucidating God’s mercy. Eleven chapters! And then he says, in view of that, worship. And what’s worship? Offer your bodies. And the word “bodies” there is your life. That is your act of worship. In the Psalms, you’ll often see the Psalmist talk about God is everlasting, God is grand, and he’s awesome, and he’s this and he’s that. And then they’ll say, “Come let us worship and bow down.” We don’t believe worship is an atmosphere setter. We don’t believe worship gets the people calmed down. Right? Worship isn’t a filler. Biblically worship is the end zone. Worship is obedience. Now that obedience and the heart for obedience can be expressed in song, and that’s what we do. But you notice we have little signs out in the parking lot that say, “Now you begin to worship.” That’s the idea. Do you see how this changes how we preach? If you put the sermon in the front of the thing, what’s the goal of my preaching? To lead people to worshipful obedience. It’s not just, here’s half a song and we’re out. Nothing wrong with half a song and we’re out. This isn’t, better – worse. I’m convinced that Scripture teaches this idea. But it doesn’t teach that it’s the only way to do it. But we need to realize that the temptation is that what we are preaching is the most important part of the service. And it’s not. The most important part of the service is what comes afterwards.
- Do people obey?
- Do they respond?
- Do they worship?
One of the defining marks of teaching is not ending by giving a bunch of information, end with a call to response. This is a huge change. We come from the school of thought that says the teaching is the end zone. And the Bible needs to beat that out of us a little bit.
____________________

The contrast of preaching and communicating between the modern church and the emerging church

If you are wondering what the emerging church is, many people are wondering the same thing. The emerging church is kind of a loosely affiliated movement, typically of younger churches who are reexamining some of the things that we have held to be sacred, that really turn out to be traditions rather than insights from Scripture. Are we an emerging church? The answer is, of course, it depends what you mean. If by emerging church you mean we think the Bible is up for grabs and we don’t think that truth is absolute and we are all for playing culturally relevant over Biblically faithful, then no, we are not emerging at all. If by emerging church you mean, are we willing to try on culturally relevant forms of communicating eternal truth? Absolutely. We always want to be emerging that way. If emerging is, we are putting all of the tradition and faith and doctrine that has been handed down to us on the table, then no, we are not emerging. Not at all. We want to be faithful stewards of what we have been handed. But each generation must translate the truth of the Gospel to the next.

The modern church: the sermon is the focal point of the worship service.
The emerging church: the sermon is one part of the total experience of the worship experience.

The modern church: the preacher serves as the dispenser of Biblical truths to help solve personal problems in modern life, i.e.: Three steps to financial security; Seven steps to God’s will; Eight Biblical principles for raising children. Is there any problem to any of that? No, as long it is understood that the Gospel is way more than principles for living. Right? It’s a radical turning upside down of everything. So you’ll hear from a lot of “modern churches” that kind of teaching. Here’re needs, and here’s how the Bible addresses them. Nothing wrong with that. But if that’s the sole diet, it’s like eating nothing but asparagus.
The emerging church: the goal isn’t to solve problems, or to answer every question. The goal is to lead people to worship.

The modern church: there is an emphasis on explaining what is truth.
The emerging church: there is an emphasis on explaining, and experiencing, who is truth.

The modern church: the starting point is the Judeo-Christian worldview.
The emerging church: the starting point is the Garden of Eden and the retelling of creation and the origin of man and sin – it’s a fancy way of saying we don’t want to assume anything.
As teachers, we can’t assume that words like “atonement,” “edification,” and “reconciliation” are understood.

The modern church: Biblical terms like “the Gospel” and “Armageddon” don’t need much definition since they are basically understood.
The emerging church: Biblical terms like “the Gospel” and “Armageddon” need to be explained.

The modern church: the message is primarily communicated in words.
The emerging church: the message is communicated through a whole lot more than that.

This is what teaching is, it’s more than communicating information, it’s calling people to response. It’s calling them to worship.

This excerpt was taken from the CD series, "Preach It" given by Mike Erre at Rock Harbor, disk 3, Week 2a

Posted by jared at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament...the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin...or Martin Mull or Fred Willard—or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human. Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

We truly take a lot for granted. Forget the Hollywood "stars" and the sports "heroes"...

It is clear that Stein's last column sings like a call-to-arms song, though he is not necessarily calling upon any one of us, or maybe he is calling on all of us. In any case, Monday Nights At Morton's will miss the famous writer it once celebrated, but to shed more than a single tear would be superfluous, for he has heard his calling and is answering to it. Any and everything that Mr. Stein does from here on out should be seen as a means to establish himself for what it is exactly that his maker has called upon him to do, and we should all be so lucky to be humbly called upon as he has been.

Goodbye Mr. Stein, and welcome!!

Posted by jared at 08:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)