Kaleo’s very own Bezalel has released their first cd. They’ve gotten a great response. Check out the cd at www.cdbaby.com/bezalel. Vote for them at www.musolist.com/bezalel/, they currently are in the Top 5. They even got picked up by Tower Records.

Mixing eclectic influences from Bach to the Beatles, Dylan to Death Cab, and a little Rolling Stones and Radiohead thrown in for good measure, Bezalel is creating beautiful ambient indie-folk-pop songs filled with tension and truth. Brian, Chris, Dustin, and Mike met at Kaleo Church in San Diego, CA where they just sortta organically formed a band to lead the congregation in song. One thing led to another and they recorded “Fidelity on High” in Brian’s studio, which will be released in April. This album could be defined as one of the most adventurous worship albums ever recorded. Not your typical CCM Nashville crap, if you know what we mean. That’s about all we have to say about that.

We are really proud of this new cd as a reflection on the community we are creating here in San Diego.

Have you seen a large church that does a good job of not segregating the family into compartments based on age, gender and sin groups? What does that look like? How can a large church still be a place that is united as a Family of God?

It seems as I visit ‘mega-churches’ they all are program-run and divide the people of God into small groups based on these classifications. I would love to hear if people have seen a large church do this well.

Added new sessions for people download at reformission.com.

A good article and converstation at Next Wave, Just who is emergent, anyway? by Bob Hyatt. I’ve always considered emergent the methods of expressions (worship, style, tastes, mission, etc.) while postmodern churches are changing the principals (theology, truth, interpretation). As a correlation many in the emergent movement also are postmodern.

Interesting conversation on our church forum on this issue: How should we as Christians react to the Terri Schiavo case?

“I do not know when it will come, but, like all else, this moment too I place into the hands of the Mother of My Master: Totus Tuus. In the same maternal hands I place All those with whom my life and vocation are bound. Into these Hands I leave above all the Church, and also my Nation and all humanity. I thank everyone.”

(Totus Tuus means totally yours)

Further reflections on my visit to Mass. The Mass I attended was the Divine Mercy Mass where congregants can receive Plenary Indulgence for sins already forgiven. (Definition: By an Indulgence is meant the remission of the temporal punishment due to us on accont of our sins.) I asked a congregant, if these sins are already forgiven why do people need an indulgence? He didn’t have an answer. Here is what must be done:

This list is a convenient compilation of all the ways to obtain a plenary indulgence. Note that in addition to the described work, obtaining a plenary indulgence also has the following conditions (see Norms which are summarized below):

* Sacramental confession. A single sacramental confession suffices for gaining several plenary indulgences; but Communion must be received and prayer for the intention of the Sovereign Pontiff must be recited for the gaining of each plenary indulgence.
* Eucharistic Communion.
* Prayer for the intention of the Sovereign Pontiff. The condition of praying for the intention of the Sovereign Pontiff is fully satisfied by reciting one Our Father and one Hail Mary; nevertheless, each one is free to recite any other prayer according to his piety and devotion.
* It is further required that all attachment to sin, even venial sin, be absent. If the latter disposition is in any way less than perfect or if the prescribed three conditions are not fulfilled, the indulgence will be partial only, saving the provisions given in Norms 34 and 35.
Source

I’ve got to admit this is pretty crazy to me.

This week I attended a Catholic Mass. Outside of the Mass, a man, named Tom Elwood, held a sign that read, God Kills, Repent on one side and Jesus Caused 9/11 on the other. As people drove to Mass, he yelled at them telling most of them they were going to burn in hell. After the service, I walked over to hear his shtick. “This Church has departed from truth and now are an apostasy. The entire denomination from the Pope to the youngest member, if they stay Catholic will die and go to hell. The Catholic Church has completely departed from the Christian faith and is a wicked tradition,” said Elwood. “If you are Catholic you are going to burn in hell.”

While I was there, two guys walked over to confront Elwood. As they requested he leave, Elwood shouted louder. “You are going to burn in the lake of fire if you don’t leave the Catholic Church.” One of the men became very angry and told him he wasn’t wanted there and told him to leave. After they walked away, Elwood said, “See how he got irate, it is because he hates God and God hates him.”

A black woman walked by and tried to grab the sign from Elwood. Elwood told the woman she was a sinner who was going to burn in hell. The woman yelled, “I’ll break you.” She picked up an item on the ground to throw it at Elwood. A person in a car told the woman it was not worth it to do this, so she put down the item and walked away.

After the commotion, Elwood handed me a pamphlet put out by a true church (www.atruechurch.info). On the back of the pamphlet, a list of false teachers were listed, such as Charles Spurgeon, Chuck Smith, Miles McPherson, Billy Graham, John MacArthur and dozens more.

I asked Elwood, if all these people were false teachers of the Christian faith, how can we know what is the true way to practice faith. “We can know, because the Bible is true. In 1st Corinthians chapter 2 verse 16, we are told (Christians will) have the mind of Christ.” I asked Elwood did he believe Jesus Christ was omniscient. Elwood said yes. I asked, if Christ mind was omniscient are you omniscient? Elwood said no. How can you have the literal mind of Christ then? Elwood got angry at me and told me I was going to burn in hell, he took his sign apart and walked to his car to leave.

I guess the body of God has to have an asshole to function…

Our church is prayerfully considering relocating to San Diego State University. There is a room available to launch that seats 200. Our community are many in their early-to-late twenties and we have a passion for training people up in a holistic worldview. It seems like a college campus is the modern areopagus to do this.

We met with an Intervarsity staff member who said that a Comparative Religions class, one of the selected requirements for students, is taught by a Christian-basher. I guess she has taken a particular liking to presenting (questionable/theory) as objective facts to present why Christianity is nothing but myth and hocus-pocus. It’s amazing how they will not tolerate a Christian professor from saying anything but an anti-theist has an open license to say whatever.

I just ask you keep these decisions in prayer, as of yet we haven’t made the decision.

Our view of Easter is often clouded behind traditions of men and religious terms. The message of the risen King who came to defeat sin, Satan, and death is lost in the cultural tide of our day. As a gathering of worshippers who seek to understand and embody this history changing and life altering news, our greatest desire is to come together with our family and friends to celebrate and hear this incredible story. We also realize that none of us have all the answers, but we can come to the ancient Scriptures and learn from them the truth about Jesus and the Easter message. Come and listen as we sift through the historical facts and myths surrounding this controversial event.

Easter Sunday in San Diego | March 27th @ 11:30am Directions

Michael Horton was featured on a Dateline NBC expose´of the lavish lifestyle of televangelist Benny Hinn. As a result, they received some very interesting emails. Go ahead amuse yourself with Christian nuttiness.

The Kaleo Institute for Cultural Studies (where I serve as editor) has released this months articles. This month we have a review of the award winning album, American Idiot by Greenday. The review is written by Mike Gunn and he warns readers “if you are Christian and don’t like to have your feathers ruffled, then go buy Toby Mac’s new album”. Tom Moller continues his monthly articles with a Celebration of Death exposing the duplicity of a view of death without a belief in God. Brian Thomas presents a few ideas on the cult classic Napoleon Dynamite illustrating through Rico how many in American Christianity operate. Finally, Duane Smets reviews Rick McKinley (From our sister church, Imago Dei’s in Portland) new book, Jesus in the Margins: Finding God in the Places We Ignore.

Enjoy the articles as we are busy working on our next months selection for you!!! (Sign-up for our monthly newsletter here.)

Growing up, Church had always been a sanitized place. It was the one day a week that I dressed up in my ‘Sunday best’ and shook the hands of adults like we were all congratulating ourselves on being Christians. I learned the game early on in my life. I was the kid who could rattle off the right answer in Sunday school and who knew how to smile and say the right things. Church was a clean and tidy world to act a charade, but it was void of reality and meaning.

Sunday became a ritualistic façade for me to play ‘Christian’. Outside of Church there was no room for my religion. Faith was what you did once a week. It continued to the point where I was a student leader of the High School group my senior year, but afterwards I would either go drinking or smoke a bowl.

As I grew up and left for college, I left my faith in God but mostly I left my belief that the Church would ever have a place of value in my life. There was an enormous divide between Church and reality. It was only through a series of life-changing events that regardless of my rejection of religion, I knew that I needed God.

It was through this journey that I got involved in the emerging church-planting movement. It was the first time that I was called to something much more holistic at church. The crowd wasn’t dressing up out of tradition but a group who knew they were once lost and now they were found. Ex-drug addicts, the lost and other people returning to church gathered together each week but more than that, they lived life together. No one felt they had to pretend that they had a perfect-plastic life with no problems. We all knew we were messed up people trying to figure out what the church was but we believed it could not be compartmentalized to a single day of the week.

I think church-planters often plant churches in a reaction against something more than anything else. And I believe from talking with numerous pastors in the emerging movement, that this holistic Christian living is a huge piece of the puzzle. They have a desire for the church to become a local body void of modernistic 12-step programs to live together in the beautiful mess of the church.

This vision was clearly demonstrated for me at Imago Dei Community a five-year-old church plant in Portland. This inner-city church purposefully loved the unlovely and created a church that no modern-suburbanite church could seek out. Through ministering to heroin addicts, homeless teens, people dying from aids, they began to see these people come to Christ and come to church. Their Pastor, Rick McKinley, just wrote a book called Jesus in the Margins - Finding God in the Places We Ignore (pick this book up for some great stories), his first in a series discussing the marginalized and the vision of what the Kingdom of God looks like. This book and my time speaking with Rick and others at Imago has been a rich source of inspiration for what we hope to do here in San Diego at Kaleo Church. Imago Dei desires to serve more people outside of their church walls than attend on Sundays. The percentage of their community that serves in local missions is extremely high and this is in a church that is about 1,000 people now.

I spoke to another church-planter, Ryan Sharp, who I wrote an article on for the San Diego Reader. Sharp and his wife Holly, recently were asked to be god-parents to a homeless couple, Michael and Heather. Heather and Michael were a young homeless couple camping out on the beach in front of their place. Their neighbor, Martin, offered the couple to come into his studio apartment and stay while they got their feet back underneath them. A couple weeks later, Heather turns out to be pregnant. That was about 8-9 months ago. Michael is in jail because he broke his parole. Sharp and his community are helping raise money for baby supplies and to support this new family. Anchor Point is a small community of a dozen people or so trying to live this mess out.

These are just some of the stories of the Beautiful Mess that I pray the emerging church seeks to become. It’s easy to say that we want to do these things but it is so much harder to live it. Personally, I like things that are fixed, sanitized and ordered. It’s part of my nature. When broken people (based on my selfish standards) come into our church family it takes a lot of time and sacrifice to walk with them in life. But this is where we are calling our community to. We’ve started a number of ministries to our local community and are looking for ways to go beyond traditional social justice ministries. We want to go out and become the beautiful mess of the Kingdom of God.

Russell Moore is the Dean of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.  He also serves as executive director of The Henry Institute which is described as "a think-tank devoted to equipping churches and church leaders to engage the culture from a biblical worldview perspective."

In his March 11th commentary he takes on the emergent movement in an article titled, "Bugs Bunny Meets Brian McLaren: Christianity, Pop Culture, and the Quest for Hip. Here are some quotes:

It seems to me that the “Loonatics” phenomenon is not all that far removed from the “emergent church” fad sweeping American Christianity at the moment. Many good critiques of the “generous orthodoxy” of Brian McLaren have been offered—noting everything from the movement’s embrace of a faulty view of truth to its flirtation with understandings of salvation that reject the necessity of explicit faith in Christ. But even beyond the specific doctrinal crises in the emergent movement, there is the sad fact that this really isn’t all that new.

That’s because the problem is not simply with the postmodern fuzziness of Brian McLaren and his devotees. The problem instead is that American evangelicalism long ago sold out to cultural accommodation to the consumerist, therapeutic ethos of contemporary American society. Now that side of evangelicalism is as “lame” in the eyes of the culture as a Looney Tunes cartoon from the 1960s. And so, evangelicalism “reinvents” itself—in the image of a brooding, angst-ridden twenty-something coffeehouse culture.

Thanks to Reformissionary www.stevekmccoy.com for finding the article. Read the full article here >

Ladd’s book is a must read for most American/Western Christians who look at their individual faith as the benchmark for what God is doing in the world today. As believers we need to wrestle with the Kingdom idea of God calling us into His reign that is already here on earth, but at the same time is not yet fully realized as it will be when Christ returns. We need more people writing and thinking through these issues. As a minor note, there are some theological differences I have with the author, but this book is a must read.

Buy it at Amazon: The Gospel of the Kingdom