Theological Fragments

What is a Blue Christmas Service? Blue Christmas services are a growing trend in the Church. Also known as "Longest-Night," these services are intended for people who are not feeling particularly jolly as the Christmas Season approaches. Some services are targeted specifically at those who are mourning a death. The service I put together (from various sources across the internet, and some of my own ideas) is intended to be open to anyone who is mourning, whether it's a death or a broken relationship, lost job, etc. This can be an incredibly powerful service, with tons of opportunity to minister to people.  What you need for this service The leader book This service is mostly read, so use this document in a binder to lead. The booklet Rather than using a projector, we used a booklet with all of the words in it. This allowed people to follow along without being forced to look up if they are not comfortable doing so. A pianist This service requires backgrou...

Hey everyone! I haven't posted in a while, and boy has a lot happened in the last 10 months! I am now the Senior Minister at Turner Christian Church in the Willamette Valley, and, more importantly, I'm the dad of an adorable 7-month-old boy named James!  Needless to say, I haven't had much time to write posts. However, over the past year I have had the opportunity to write some services for use at our church--for Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and baptisms. Some of them might even be worth sharing!  I'm aware that there is a growing interest in liturgy among churches that are part of the "free-church" tradition--that is, churches that don't use prayer books or set liturgies like Catholic, Episcopalian, and some other churches do. If you're in that boat, it can be really difficult to find liturgies for those kids of services. So, since these services are just taking up room on my hard drive, I thought I would pos...

The Bible is, first and foremost, a story. Books of stories make up about 35% of the Bible’s table of contents. However, if you break it down by the actual length of each book, you find that story-books make up about 65% of the Bible. If that surprises you, it might be because you were taught to treat the Bible as a reference book, full of facts, figures, doctrines and commands for you to obey. Of course, it is true that the Bible contains many facts, figures, doctrines and commands—but most of those are actually part of the story —and overall scripture seems much more interested in teaching us a story than in teaching us facts and doctrines. This is very foreign to our modern way of thinking. We prefer to have everything laid out in formulas. We want to put things under the microscope. We like to classify everything the way our scientists classify living things—kingdom, phylum, class, order, anatomy, etc. etc. And we do this in our theology, as well. Think of how we talk about God...

My goal this month is to convince you of one thing: there is a whole world of meaning hidden in the original words of Scripture. By “original words,” I mean the words in the original language—whether it be Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. Very often these meanings get lost in translation because translators don’t always translate the word the same way, or there just isn’t a good English version of the word. This is why we have study bibles, commentaries, and Sunday School classes! But I know that all of that may seem daunting if you didn’t take classes on the Bible, or if you don’t have a head for languages. So today, to help motivate you to start looking a little deeper into the Bible, I want to show you one of my favorite language gems—hidden in the book of Ruth. Ruth is an interesting book. I’m not sure that most Christians are clear on why Ruth is in the Bible. When I was a teenager, I often saw it used as a divine dating guide (which it definitely is not!). I’ve seen it used as a Ch...

This month I’ve decided to focus on something very practical: how to choose a Bible translation. For 1600 years, you couldn’t read the Bible unless you knew Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and/or Latin. For about 300 years, there was only one English translation that was readily available: the King James Translation. Nowadays, with changes in language, the discovery of more ancient Biblical manuscripts, and advances in technology, I carry around at least 50 different English translations on my phone all the time. How are we supposed to choose? There are two basic approaches to translating the Bible. First, there is the “Literal” approach—also known as “word for word.” In this approach, the translators take each work in the original text and translate it into an English word, so that they can get the most precise translation possible. This is the approach used by the King James translators, as well as the ESV, NRSV, and NASB. The benefit of this approach is that it gives you a highly accur...

 One of the challenges of reading the Bible is the fact that it’s an anthology—a collection of shorter works, shorter stories, that don’t always seem to fit together all that easily. It’s not always obvious to us what this story in Genesis has to do with that story in Judges, or why this prophet has to do with that prophet. Sometimes it can seem like the Bible is a bit of a jumble, without a greater design. If you look deeper, however, you will find that this couldn’t be farther from the truth. The Bible is an intricately woven masterpiece, a single work of dazzling complexity and elegant simplicity. See, every Biblical author was also a Bible-reader, and was inspired by the ultimate Biblical author, so that when they wrote they made all kinds of connections with other books and stories to help you fit the Bible into one great story.  True, some of the strands that connect scripture together can be harder to see once it’s been translated into English, but they are still there...

This month in Powerhouse we’re going to start a new series in our “year of the Bible,” called “Bible-ese.” This series focuses on the words we use that get their meaning from the Bible, such as soul, spirit, sin, salvation, atonement, mercy, grace, and messiah. If you’ve been in the Church long enough, you probably think that you know what all of these words mean. The problem, however, is that all of these concepts are rooted in ancient languages and cultures, and they have had thousands of years to develop and change (for better or worse) since they were written down. What we assume these words mean may not be exactly what the Biblical authors had in mind. Let’s look at an example: atonement . The dictionary defines atonement as “reparation for a wrong or injury.” When you atone for something, you are paying for a crime or offense you caused in order to make things right. This is probably how most of us use the word, and this is what we think of when we talk about Jesus atoning f...