steve-o
Introduction To The House of Carr
Introduction To The House of Carr

Huge

The implications of this admission should be huge to the majority of evangelical churches. In short, Willow Creek has admitted that they way they did discipleship, in which they invested millions and which they encouraged other churches to emulate, was flawed. And yet large numbers of megachurches and wanna-be-megachurches subscribe to this theory. This deserves a much more thorough treatment on my part but I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on this.

,

People In My Life

,

It seems I'm always catching people up about the life activities of people I know. So I figured I'd take a little time to drop some pertinent information about people in my life.

My older brother Chris and his wife Heather are expecting their fourth child any day now.

Childhood friend Steve Levering, and his wife Beth, just had their first child, a boy named Tyler.

College roommate Aaron Levering [Steve's cousin] and his lovely wife Tia are expecting their fourth child. Additionally college roommate [and Best Man in our wedding] Jason Badami and his lovely wife Dalea [Maid of Honor in our wedding] are expecting their fourth child. All those kids wouldn't fit in the old college dorm room.

Somewhere, right now, someone else we know is most likely getting pregnant. And that's icky.

Our friends, the Burgesses, have some new employment. Aaron is now teaching at Cincinnati Christian University and his wife Dorota started a new accounting job in Northern Kentucky.

Our friends, the Duebbers, finally moved into their rehabbed Price Hill home. It . . . looks . . . awesome.

Friend and Echo leadership team member Tim Tucker is now holding down two jobs and still has time to do stuff for the church.

Friend and Echo-ite Tim Sampson recently lost his father. Please keep him and his family in prayer.

Echo attendees Dan and Angie [soon to be Bielecki] are getting married this weekend and I'm now doing the wedding ceremony. Follow that up with Nate and Julie [soon to be Keyes] and we're in the midst of a season of church weddings.

Echo's first official member, Emily Hill, is now back in the United States, on "holiday" from London. Hopefully she left the accent in Wimbledon. In a related note, her sister in Melissa is ready to be named 2007 MVP at Echo.

Kelly's brother Scott and my future sister-in-law Jessica will be getting married in just a few weeks . . . on Halloween . . . and I have no costume.

League of Justice pastor Russell Smith is excited about his church's homecoming this weekend. Plus he knows all the best downtown restaurants.

College classmate Matt Mehaffey is planting a church in Miami, Florida. Very cool.

College classmate Jake Follis is blogging. Odds are he'll fail at it.

College classmate, and former co-worker, Kelly Butler and her husband Charlie have a beautiful little girl named Brooklyn. You should be reading about her.

College classmate Mike Morehart is a Cleveland fan, but I still like him.

I'm sure there's much more, but I wanted to get some of them down. Feel free to add your own updates. Maybe I should do this more often.

All Things Osteen

I haven't really done an extensive post on Joel Osteen, though I did talk about health/wellness gospel here. Since his new book is out [which I refuse to hyperlink because I love you] there's a lot of J.O. talk going on. Many well intentioned people get excited because his ministry is going so well and his messages sound so pragmatic. It is my belief that every American Christian should familiarize themselves with the fallacies of his teachings because they are not Biblical, nor are they the message of Jesus. So here's some places to get more info:

  1. The 60 Minutes video from Sunday.
  2. A reaction to this piece.
  3. More from the guy who criticized Osteen in the 60 Minutes piece.
  4. A review of his new book.
  5. Why Christian bookstores should refuse to sell his book.

That should be enough to get you started.

Still Holding Strong

It was almost a year ago that I first predicted a Barack Obama presidency. I'm still going with that pick, even though the polls seem to contradict this prediction. Honestly, these early polls don't mean as much as people think. Iowa and New Hampshire can totally alter the face of the election [see Howard Dean]. And you never know what will surface in the middle of the campaign [see Gary Hart].

Although a Clinton/Giuliani match-up seems more inevitable than ever, I sincerely doubt we will see one or both of them come out of the conventions with their party's nominations.

Understand that I'm not supporting Barack, but merely suggesting he'll win this thing.

Comparative Chaos

Today I joined Professor Aaron Burgess [someone actually called him "Dr. Burgess" today] as he participated in a panel discussion on religion at the UC Raymond Walters campus. He was the Protestant representative, as there were a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Catholic priest, and a Reform Jewish rabbi present. The audience was a group of senior citizens who were participating in a community education program. The subject was, "Can science and religion coexist?" Aaron is a dedicated student of theology and philosophy and is incredibly articulate. He did an excellent job of presenting instances where both religion and science are fanatical and suggested a balanced approach between the two is necessary. As for all the other participants, I'm still not sure what they were saying. I'm not even sure they knew where their faiths stood on the issue. How anyone could've gleaned anything useful from this dialogue is beyond me. But at least Aaron and I had some good laughs about it.

Among the things I observed:

  • The elderly and cell phones: a scary combination. More phones rang there than would ever go off in a normal setting. Additionally, one of the older gentlemen on the panel even answered his phone in the middle of someone else's speech.
  • The elderly and the worldwide web: an even scarier combination. A person repeatedly made the following statement: "You can find all this information on my email." He meant the internet.
  • This dialogue confirmed to me that the mere presence of the Creation Museum hinders the conservative Christian position in our region. People assume that if you actually believe events in the Bible actually happened you agree with the AIG position.
  • A Jewish rabbi nodding in approval of a statement from a Muslim imam. Wish I had a camera phone.

But perhaps the most impressive statement was made by the priest who said, "honestly, I don't think there's such a thing as a fundamentalist Catholic."

Classic.

Inked

"Almost half of all Americans under 30 have one, and 40 percent of adults 26 to 40 have a tattoo." That and more in this article [and no, I'm not a regular CBN reader].

I swear I got mine just as it started getting cool [spring of 1995]. I thought I would be different. Now I'm normal. I still want another one, just not sure what I'd get.

True story: I hid it from my mother the entire summer. When she saw it for the first time, she got a washcloth and tried to rub it off.

Endorsed By Beit Carr

As you continue to nail down your fall television viewing schedule, do yourself a favor and catch the pilot of Pushing Daisies over at ABC's website; you can watch the entire first episode free with limited commercial interruption. This is one of the more creative shows I've seen come out in years. I'd explain the premise but you'd do better to watch it to find out.

Catch it now before all the cool kids are doing it.

About Global Warming

Is global warming real? Yes. Is it the most important problem our world faces? Not by a long-shot. If you're looking for an informative article about finding some middle ground on this issue, here it is.

Interesting tidbits from the article:

  • Environmentalists lament the rising temperatures in Greenland when, in reality, the temps in 1941 were warmer there than it is today.
  • As a result of global warming oceanic water levels could rise between 6 inches and two feet in the next century. It actually rose a foot in the past 150 years. Ironically, relatively no land was lost to the ocean as people figured out how to construct barriers to prevent land loss.
  • While rising temperatures will cause 400,000 more heat-related deaths each year, the lack of extreme cold spells will save 1.8 million lives.
  • One of the battle cries of the environmental lobby is "save the polar bears." Enacting suggested environment changes would save one additional polar bear every year at a cost of billions, while hunters kill 300-500 bears every year. Wouldn't it be easier to outlaw polar bear hunting?

Earth worship has been around since the beginning of time. I am just continually amazed that we now twist use scientific data to perpetuate it.

The Changing Face of Cincinnati

Kelly told me about a huge open house this weekend throughout the city center called The Ultimate Urban Tour of Living. Yeah, lame title, but they're showcasing the newest construction, from places you could afford to places that . . . well, you wouldn't see them if there wasn't a tour. Best news: it's free. I'd suggest carving out a little time in  your schedule this weekend to check it out.

,

What To Think About This:

,

In light of my series on urban Cincinnati, I found this blog post interesting. This guy lives in near Washington Park in OTR, a place where many church groups come to pass out food. It's become so popular that the city actually banned groups from giving out freebies in the park, as 1) they usually leave a huge mess behind and 2) there are plenty of organizations/churches with whom they could partner to do this ministry. Of course, the groups chose instead to work around the letter of the law and now give out stuff on the sidewalks.

Makes you wonder (or at least me):

1. What kind of message does it send to people like Joe who live in the community everyday?

2. What kind of message does it send to the organizations/churches in the community who minister there everyday?

3. Who do these acts of "kindness" benefit more: the local community or the volunteers?

4. Am I being objective and accurate or a heartless SOB?

Or, maybe it's just me.

Wanna Bet?

We have two loans out on our house. One is only for about 10% of the value of our home, but splitting the load helped us to avoid some unnecessary mortgage insurance. The smaller loan is a variable rate mortgage, meaning that rising interest rates cost us a little more each month. Really it's not much at all, but it can make you a little angry when any extra money leaves your pocket. I got a call a few months ago from the bank making me an offer to fix the rate. They noted the rising rates and wanted a fee plus a higher rate than we were then paying to lock it in. Basically, they wanted me to gamble that rates would continue to rise and feel that locking it in would save me money over the long haul. It just wasn't worth it, no matter how you looked at it, especially with the small amount of the loan. The loan officer kept forcasting doom and gloom to me but I still said thanks but no thanks.

I hadn't thought of it that much until the loan officer called again on Thursday. She was checking to see if I was still happy with my loan (which is interesting because I've never equated loans with happiness). I remarked, "well, since the interest rates dropped and I'm paying less on my loan, I've been doing pretty good." And that was that.

You see, I would've at least owned up to trying to screw me over. If I had taken her advice I would've watched a lot of money walk out the door.

Hope she stays away from Vegas.

Urban Cincinnati [Part Four]

I'll admit upfront that this final contribution to my Urban Cincinnati series is more devoted to drawing conclusions from all these facts we've accumulated. Some call it urban renaissance. Others call it gentrification. Regardless of how you view it, people are moving back into the city.

Take a drive through Cincinnati's urban areas and you will see this firsthand. From downtown to Over-The-Rhine, Mount Auburn to Walnut Hills, new construction is everywhere. Extend to the south side of the Ohio River and the northern Kentucky shoreline is soon to be lined with high rise condominiums.

With an emerging generation who is no longer afraid of urban living, revitalized arts/culture scenes, workers growing weary of lengthening commutes, people are choosing to settle in downtown areas. While there will always be a dichotomy between "the haves" and "the have-nots" in the city, there will be fewer and fewer areas that are strictly ghetto. What we will begin to see is pockets of poverty in the midst of affluence (and vice versa) that will no longer be limited to urban areas. People, for the most part, are no longer limited by transportation as a decider of where they live and, let's face it, someone has to work at all those stores/restaurants in the 'burbs. This means encountering the impoverished will eventually be unavoidable, no matter where you live in relation to the city center.

This presents an incredible opportunity for churches that minister in the city. With rich and poor living next door to each other, there are few things that they have in common. It is our opinion that the message of Jesus levels the playing field between races and classes. The gospel does not discriminate. But more than anything else, our cities needs incarnational ministry.

Some urban churches have survived the changing landscape based upon their past. They became "family churches,"  congregations that 2nd and 3rd generation Christians would continue to attend based upon their heritage. These attenders  may have migrated to the suburbs but still continue to trek every week back into the city in order to go to church (actually, this was my family's experience as we lived 20+minutes from our Price Hill church). While this keeps the church alive, it does not necessarily lead to impacting the neighborhood.

We need Christians to live in the city. We need believers to take ownership of these communities. In Cincinnati, neighborhood identity is huge; you can completely change contexts from Avondale to Walnut Hills (to East Walnut Hills) to Columbia Tusculum to Over-The-Rhine, so living thirty minutes away from your church in this city makes it difficult to truly understand the community in which you minister. The only way communities are going to be revitalized spiritually is if the people of God live there and dwell there.

And that's what we're about at Echo. We're in the city. We're striving hard to understand Cincinnati, where it's been and where it's going. And the better we know our mission field, the better we'll understand our mission.