If you could open my brain, peer inside, and see what has been happening there the past month or so, it would be a loop of this video.
The entire video is fantastic, but here are a couple of money quotes:
"[Pastors] are saying, 'Theology doesn't preach. And I only seem to connect with my congregation when when I do psychology, contemporary affairs, aesthetics, novels, comparative religion, lectures on this and that topic.' So the starting point is just to let folks do theology today."
"If we then can say every one of us who picks up a Bible, or, for that matter a newspaper, and tries to wrestle with the relevance of the Bible for the contemporary world, or a Christian response to the events on the front page of today's newspaper -- that person is already doing theology."
"Theology is when Christian folks engage the contemporary world in a vital way; when they ask the hardest questions and then they sit down and try to get some answers."
I think this is what was getting at when he named a chapter "It's the theology, stupid." in his book .
Theology alone will not save the church, but if it can be wrestled away from the ivory towers of academia, it will undoubtedly have massive transformative power. And my contention is that the starting point for theological thinking is precisely where it has been avoided -- youth ministry.
Highlight of the week: I have had a blast at the the last several days. My presentation went really well, but the highlight has surely been meeting new people (like Bethany from , Assistant to the Bishop , and ) and getting to know people in even better.
Book(s) I'm reading: On the flights to New Orleans, I finished 's and got about a third of the way through by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier.
Music I'm digging: (link opens in iTunes) by Wideawake and the by The Daylights.
Something(s) that blew my mind: During 's workshop on pop culture, he played by Green Day and U2 and encourage us to use the time as a . After watching, myself and the people around me were literally speechless.
Oh, and last Wednesday's episode of LOST was insane.
Ministry update: Brandon Mick has at St. Mark. Although we have completely different job descriptions, we have hit the ground running on a couple of really exciting projects. A new audio/visual era has begun. Nerds unite!
Seminary/ordination update: After being denied acceptance into Luther Seminary this past fall, I was pitched on the very program for which I applied upwards of five times at the Extravaganza this week. Oh, the irony.
Looking forward to: Retrieving my guitar from the guitar shop (again), LOST, and beginning Saturday evening worship at St. Mark.
JakeBouma.com is a weblog maintained since 2005 by Jake Bouma, an ecclesial junkie and (imprudently) aspiring polymath who was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma.
