The Best Encouragement A Worship Minister Can Have

In my opinion, of course.

It was announced this past Sunday that I'm leaving the church I'm at, for a few good reasons and I've had a lot of encouraging comments from people who are sad to see me leave but understand that the situation I and the church are in makes for tough decisions.

However, the most encouraging comment to me came from someone who just happened to be in that middle ground where they were applying for the worship team, and I wanted to let them know that I wasn't going to be around, yet I couldn't because it wasn't announced yet. That's always a tough issue, to know what to say, how to say it, and when.

Anyway, I received their application in the mail along with a letter. In the letter, this was written:

"You are so talented and I always appreciated that you led worship rather than turning Sunday morning into a performance or concert."

It's encouraging to me because that is exactly what I have strived to do in the now three worship ministries I have led. To me, worship isn't about who's up on stage. It isn't about polish or perfection (although we strive for excellence). It isn't about instrument solos or vocal solos or cool lights or nifty props or appealing stage decorations. It's about God. It's about our response to His workings in our lives. It's about our sacrifices to Him through song or time or money or talents. It's about giving up our lives to the One who gave up His life for us.

My hope is that the church I'm leaving will keep wanting to worship, not a performance.

Re:Light Campaign Blog

It's here!

My other blog has started up, you can find it by clicking here or by going to http://relightcampaign.blogspot.com/.

A New Chapter...And A New Blog.

Well, some of you may know what's going on in my life, but for those who don't, here is an update:

I am moving back to Ohio. We were never able to sell our house, and the church plant I'm employed by is struggling financially, so the best thing to do is to move back. I have mixed feelings about moving back. On one hand, at least we're not moving back to somewhere that we don't like. Where we are at in Ohio is beautiful, we have family there, and a lot of friends. On the other hand, I had kind of dreamed for several years that someday I would return to my home state of Colorado, and I did I guess, but for a much shorter time than I had thought.

I do not have a job in Ohio. I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get there. However, I am still just as passionate about fighting human trafficking as ever, so I'm hoping I can find something there - whether it be my job, or just a side project. I have some ideas, I have some dreams, I have some hopes as to what can be done in my life with fighting human trafficking, but I don't want to push my agenda. I want to be led, not lead.

On that note, I'm about ready to unveil a new blog. This blog will continue to be my personal blog, with stories of my life, things I read online, links to funny videos, and more. I am starting another blog, which will be dedicated to my passion of fighting trafficking and slavery. I think I'm going to transfer some of what's in this blog over to that blog so it can be a resource for those who want to join in the battle as well.

Anyway, I'll let everyone know as soon as the blog comes out. I would ask that you continue to be in prayer for direction for my life as I make the transition back to Ohio.

Paul Hewson Speaks at California Women's Conference

If you go here, you can see Paul Hewson, or as we know him, Bono, give a talk at the California Women's Conference that took place recently. Good stuff.

Call + Response

Last night, I took nine students and other adults from Life Church to see Call + Response, a movie that came out in select cities, Denver thankfully being one of them. We saw it at the Landmark Mayan theater, which is just as pricey as the Landmark theater that I went and saw Religulous, but in this case, the popcorn and drinks weren't free. Grr.

Anyway, if you have the opportunity to see this movie, either in theater or on DVD, I urge you to do so. It is a documentary movie about human trafficking done in a visually and musically stunning way. There were interviews with movie stars (Julia Ormond, Ashley Judd), politicians, journalists, and leaders of anti-slavery organizations (Gary Haugen of IJM being one of them), interspersed with incredible music performances by Switchfoot, Cold War Kids, Imogen Heap, Justin Dillon (also the producer, writer, and documentarian in the film), Matisyahu, and others. It was a cool way to bring the issue of human trafficking to the forefront.

You can go to the movie's website to find out more information about the movie itself, as well as ways to get involved with the anti-slavery movement.

I am also going on Saturday to a conference called HTAC - Human Trafficking Awareness Conference and will get to meet some of the people who are my heroes in this movement. I will blog about my experience after the conference.

Religulous

I went and saw the Bill Maher documentary movie "Religulous" today at the Landmark Theater in Greenwood Village, CO.

First off, let me talk about the theater. It is extremely awesome - the cost of a movie is 9 bucks which is around the usual price. However, they have a complimentary popcorn and soft drinks area where you can get as much popcorn and drink as you want! How awesome is that!

Now, for the movie.

Maybe I'm at a certain place in my life where I am no longer defensive when it comes to someone attacking Christianity or religion. Maybe I'm at a certain place in my life where I can see a lot of what's wrong with religion in our world. But I seriously liked this movie. I've read a lot of Christian reviews, and all the complaints about Bill Maher making fun of religion and being mean or whatever. But from my point of view, he was asking good questions, and then poking holes in the answers he was given. I don't think it was in a mean-spirited way, it was more of in a "You gotta be kidding me, you actually believe that?" kind of way.

As for favorite scenes, I loved two of the Catholic priests/bishops/whatever he interviewed - one guy was a Vatican astronomer or something, and he talked about creation vs. evolution, the other guy was interviewed outside the Vatican, and was just a funny character. When Maher asked him if he felt that Jesus would live in a palace like the one the pope lives in the Vatican, his response was basically "No Way." And he confided to Maher that in a list of saints/people that Italians would pray to in times of emergency, Jesus was actually sixth. Incredible.

My favorite line was by an Arkansas senator who was getting grilled by Maher about all kinds of things, including the creation story, and being flustered, he said, "Well, you don't have to pass an IQ test to be senator." The look on Maher's face was priceless.

The scenes at The Holy Land Experience in Orlando, FL were hilarious, and there was one interview with "Jesus", i.e. the guy who plays Jesus, that actually made Bill Maher think for a few minutes.

Overall, I thought it was good. The Islamic parts of the movie were very interesting to me. Maher covers Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and even Mormonism and Scientology. It will offend you as a Christian, but that might be a good thing, because it may cause you to think about the silly things and the brutal things that are done in the name of religion.

Youtube Video Of The Week - 10.05.08

I seriously almost peed my pants watching this one for the first time. I've heard some fabulous medleys in my time, but never a medley that combined "Christ The Lord Is Risen Today" with "That's Amore". The facial expressions at 2:14 and on are amazing.

An Interview With Ben Skinner

Ben Skinner is a journalist for Newsweek, and was assigned to do a story about the Sudan and came face-to-face with modern-day slavery. After learning that there are 27 million slaves in the world today, more slaves than at any other time in history, Skinner decided to go undercover into the slave industry on four different continents and write a book about it. Here is an interview with him from Breakpoint Magazine:

BreakPoint: Where and how did you develop an interest in modern-day slavery?

Skinner: I was raised Quaker, and the Quakers have a long history of decrying slavery. In Quaker meetings growing up we would read the stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as much as we would read Bible stories. But it was always taught to me in the past. Then I picked up a book called Disposable People by Kevin Bales [of Free the Slaves], also a Quaker. Bales began looking at slavery around the world and tried to quantify it. He came up with the number 27 million. That was more slaves than any [other] point in human history. I wanted to put a human face on that. Also, I wanted to try to get into the minds of those who buy and sell human beings. That was the biggest challenge. And, also, I wanted to get into the minds of those who were fighting the trade.

BreakPoint: In your book you say that “journalists are not supposed to be activists; they are supposed to be objective and aloof.” Did your perspective on what it means to be a journalist change on your journey?

Skinner: Samantha Power (author of Darfur Darfur) and Philip Gourevitch (author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families) were my models. In each of these cases, the journalists were writing about victims who were dead. They were not in a position to perhaps prevent the genocide from taking place.

What I’m writing about in this book is ongoing. I didn’t know that I was going to be able to find people that would offer me children for sale. I asked local NGOs how to handle this. I never got one response that you should pay for their freedom. They told me that the best thing to do is record the details and go to the authorities.

But it’s not satisfying to do that when you go and you see a young woman who has the visible effects of Down syndrome and looks like she’s trying to kill herself,[i] and then record the pimp that’s trying to enslave her, but it’s really hard to build a case.

In the story of Camsease,[ii] my feeling was that I couldn’t turn a mother down. This is a distinct situation from my being offered a girl in forced prostitution. In this case, emancipation is not enough. Unless I’m in a position to know that there is a shelter, income generation, and other resources, I may be doing more harm than good. I fear what Nick Kristof found.[iii] This case with Camsease—when I went in with her mother and we walked out with her—there’s a certain joy that you see very rarely in your lifetime. This instance of mother holding daughter for the first time in three years is that joy. From a very intimate, personal perspective, witnessing that joy makes it very, very personally worthwhile.

But you very quickly come back to the reality that this girl can’t survive on her own and might even be going back to a worse situation. So, I asked myself, What would it take to keep this young woman free and out of the hands of traffickers? It costs $87 for a school uniform, books, tuition, and one hot meal a day. A week earlier I’d been offered a girl on the streets for $50. It was worth $87 to keep a girl definitively off the streets free.

That Christmas, I got a note forwarded from Camsease. It was the first note she had ever written in Creole. There was a picture attached to the note. She was in a school uniform and she was smiling. I had never seen her smile before. To see her smile really sort of made the whole thing worth it. It underscored why every abolitionist’s cause is so worthy.

BreakPoint: When you pretended to buy a slave in Haiti, you mentioned your fear that your plot might backfire. Did you have a course of action should the worst come true?

Skinner: My greatest fear was retaliation against people who were enslaved. I considered myself the least vulnerable. In so many instances, these traffickers have no regard for the lives of those they enslave. If they feel like there’s a risk that these people could testify against them, they would take it out on them.

I found something I didn’t expect to find. In many cases, it was clear to me that they were coerced and that there was an element of violence in their coercion. In other cases, where I was off on my own—for instance in Dubai, I met a woman in a club. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. We walked in, and there were some 500 women in this club, all organized by race. I didn’t talk to one who had come over knowing full well the terms that they were coming to. For example, they didn’t know their passports would be taken away. I met one of these women in a mall the next day who told me this heartbreaking story of how she had come over from Romania. She came over because she had to feed her child. She’d been beaten and, at times, tortured by the people who were renting her body. When she eventually broke free, you would think that she could rebuild her life, but the options that you’re left with after something like that are so narrow. She felt that the only way she could keep going was to stay in prostitution. I think that any restorative justice on this has to address the psychological aspects.

BreakPoint: It seems like one of the slaves you got to know the most was Gonoo.[iv] How long did you stay with him?

Skinner: I was on and off with Gonoo for two months. Gonoo had lived his entire life in slavery. The thought of being free was more daunting than the thought of staying enslaved and miserable. The thought of freedom hadn’t been presented to him as a very attractive option. The world of bondage was, in a dark way, almost comforting to him. That isn’t to say he wasn’t miserable and didn’t live with daily humiliation and the constant threat of the women in his life being raped. To you and [me], that would be absolutely intolerable, but for him, that was his world.

BreakPoint: Of the freedom fighters you met, who had the greatest impact on you and why?

Skinner: One I didn’t write about was Father Raymond D’Souza, a Catholic priest in northern India. He runs an organization that goes in and finds carpet looms that are enslaving children. They monitor the place and gather testimonies, and, in daring raids, they go in and free these children. That isn’t the end of the story. They then put these children in places where they get education and vocational training, and the children go back and start tea shops.

Another is an American woman named Sharla Musabih in Dubai who runs the only functional shelter for trafficked women. She’s been living in Dubai for about 25 years, and she does this over the resistance of the Emirates. She’s doing what the government should be doing and helping victims become survivors. The Emirate government views that as tarnishing the reputation of the Emirates. She says, “God is watching, and God is judging us on this.”

BreakPoint: It seems like many of the human-rights advocates/liberators you mention, like John Eibner and Michael Gerson, claim a Christian faith. Would you say the majority of the freedom fighters you met were Christians?

Skinner: The majority are nominally Christian. The hard fact is that there is no abolitionist movement in Islam correlative to the Christian tradition. By the same token, I did find a great number of people who were doing great work [who] weren’t Christian. In the U.S., particularly, they tend to be people who are moved to this issue because of their faith. The secular media hasn’t picked up the story the way the Christian media has. What I’m sincerely hoping is that the secular media will pick this up with an equal amount of vigor. There is some doubt in the secular media that slavery really is slavery, as opposed to a metaphor for something else. You hear the term “slave wages,” but that’s not really slavery. If you can walk away, you’re not a slave. But there are still more slaves today than in any [other] point in human history.

BreakPoint: You say that the sex trade, like Picasso’s painting,[v] has many faces. What was the worst face you saw and why?

Skinner: You don’t get much worse than the young woman in Bucharest[vi] who had been presented to me in exchange for a used car. But, it’s hard to compare misery. Slavery is always monstrous. The rape that she endured was no more endurable than the rape the woman in Miami[vii] endured.

The fact of the matter is I respectfully disagree with those who say that the victimization of this woman in Bucharest is the same as that of any woman in prostitution. Prostitution is not always slavery. They’ve made a choice I would never want my daughter to make, but, at some level, they made a choice.

BreakPoint: So many of those you interviewed, like Natasha,[viii] lived lives of such hell, it’s unimaginable to me that they could have any hope. Did you ever find a hope that shocked you?

Skinner: My friend Bill Nathan, who was a child slave in Haiti: There were a couple of things that helped him recover from that. He did have a loving mother, and he holds her up as one bedrock of unconditional love. Also, the faith and the redemptive power of Christ—that has given him a tremendous amount of strength. He would say it was God’s will. I found him to be superhuman. I have no doubt that he kept me alive when I was laid out with malaria. And he prayed for me. You hear stories of child molesters who were molested as children. Well, why didn’t Bill end up that way? I think it has to do with the people who welcomed him right after he got out of slavery. They told him, “You are a child of God, and we will embrace you.” Bill would call them his family. Let’s be frank, he’s lucky.

BreakPoint: You said that this knowledge came to dominate John Miller: “For every free slave, there were ten, twenty, a hundred who suffered in the shadows.” Has this knowledge come to dominate you too?

Skinner: Yeah, absolutely. The degree to which I’ve been able to cover all the slaves in the world in this book is really insufficient. The main contribution that most of us can make is to get as many people as possible to care about this and to own the issue. Neither Miller nor I have the capacity to free every slave. I know that for every one Camsease, there are 26.999 million others. That’s where the multiplier effect of someone like Wilberforce comes in. But, in some sense, our challenge is greater than Wilberforce’s. Wilberforce just had to show that slavery is a monstrous crime. We have to show that it even exists.

BreakPoint: What’s going to be your next project?

Skinner: It’s too early to say. I’m still wound up in this. The next book will be a bit easier on my soul, because the rest of my time will be spent on this issue.

Modern-day slavery is not only a relatively solvable problem, but relatively cheap. On average, it would take about $400 to free and rehabilitate each slave for four to six years. We’re talking about $11 billion roughly. If you do that, you will be creating consumers who will contribute $22 billion to the global economy. It makes sense to do this from a development perspective. The tunnel in Boston cost about $11 billion. Even if you’re talking to these trade guys who don’t have a human-rights bone in their body, you don’t have to make a moral argument on this, you can make a development argument on this, and it’s a very coherent one.


----

Looks like I have another book that I need to get.

A Christian Bookstore's Shameful Actions

I just finished reading an interesting commentary from cnn.com concerning the decision of Lifeway Christian stores to effectively ban the recent issue of GospelToday magazine, because it featured five women pastors on its cover. Now, Lifeway didn't actually refuse to carry the magazine, they just put the magazine behind the counter rather than feature it on display.

I'm still thinking through a response - it is their prerogative to do so, yet I think Lifeway made a huge mistake by doing so - but I think a response in the comment section from someone who isn't a Christian says it best:

"Wow. You Christians are what is so wrong with this country. I don't think Jesus would be caught dead in most of your churches let alone stand beside you in defending an archaic code of inequality and injustice. What was the group he so vilified for their clinging to the purity code while ignoring the plights of the marginalized? Oh yeah...Pharisees. What a bunch of hypocrites! Jesus was obviously way ahead of his time. Maybe its time to dump the sections of the Bible that made the cut that are so offensive. How do you justify Paul's marginalization of women but not condemn his statements about slaves? Again...hypocrites."

Wow.

Estes Park

If you asked me or my wife where we would want to live if we could live anywhere in the U.S., both of our answers would be Estes Park, Colorado. It's a town in the mountains, about half and hour from Boulder (where CU famously beat West Virginia last night). It's the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, which is amazing. We went up there today as a family, and this is what we did:

- we walked through the downtown shops, of course spending money on shirts and hats and stickers and such. We also bought a caramel apple.

- we went to the Dunraven Inn, which is an Italian food restaurant that my wife used to go to on special occasions growing up. (Her grandparents lived in Estes Park for 25 years, and she would come up and spend the summer with them.)


- we went to the new Starbucks in town and sat out back right next to the river (awesome view).


- we saw the most amazing elk - he had the largest antler rack I've seen on an elk since the famous elk named Samson who wintered in Estes Park (and was shot by a poacher).

- we did not go to the Stanley Hotel this time - made famous by The Shining.

- we did go to a couple of the shops downtown where I cleverly located cards and flowers the day I asked my wife to marry me. We got engaged in Estes Park, up on the pipes that overlook the lake.



It's about an hour and forty-five minutes from where we're staying, but it was definitely worth it.

Demotivational Posters, Part 2

Demotivational Posters

I'm working on a short talk for a See You At The Pole Rally, and to open I'm going with my big home-run I have used often: the demotivational poster series. They're like those motivational posters that you can buy to motivate you at work, but they don't motivate you at all. They may make you laugh, and they may actually be true, but they don't motivate you to do your job well. Here are a few of my favorites.

Youtube Video Of The Week - 09.11.08

So I haven't done one of these in awhile.

I wish I was a part of the church that did this - I would be so proud.

Cake Wrecks Blog

I'm not really into making cakes, I am into eating cakes...and I thought this blog of pictures of horrifyingly bad cakes was pretty awesome.

Palin And Church Leadership

Dan Kimball has a really good article here. I think he has an excellent point that America is willing to perhaps elect a woman as vice-president who would then be leader of the entire country if something happened to McCain, yet in most Christian denominations, this same woman would not be allowed to lead a congregation of 50 people.

Bible In A Minute

Awesome. These guys are pretty darn funny.

Bible In A Minute - barats and bereta

The Luxury Fund

It's amazing, all of the creative ways people are thinking of to help when it comes to social justice issues.

Take The Luxury Fund. The idea is to take the money that we would spend on a luxury item- i.e. a latte at Starbucks, a candy bar, whatever - and instead give it to The Luxury Fund, which then splits the money four-ways: International Justice Mission, Love 146, Blood:Water Mission and Compassion International.

You can also read more about the Luxury Fund at their Myspace Page.

Love146 Blog

Looks like Love146 has a new blog. Cool. Check it out here.

The Walmart Virus

I'm not a big fan of Walmart. Most people who know me would know that. Although my dislike of Wal-Mart started several years ago, this article in Harper's Magazine really cemented it for me. I try not to shop there, although sometimes you just have to when there aren't any other options.

Anyway, I thought this demonstration of how Wal-Mart has spread through the good ol' U.S. of A throughout the years is pretty indicative of the virus that Wal-Mart has become.

The Ordinary Radicals Movie

THIS looks pretty interesting.

It's a documentary about how faith in America is being reshaped. It's about ordinary God-followers who are tired of the labels that society puts on Christians - most of them rightfully so - and have decided to change the world through love. Not religion.

This documentary comes out September 4th. You can go to the Ordinary Radicals website to find out more information.