Still a pile of great $5 albums at Amazon. Check out my recommendations including Radiohead, Frightened Rabbit, Band of Horses and more.

A few other recommendations on some new albums. The Autumn Film: The Ship and the Sea is outstanding (same folks from some of my favorite worship music, Page CXVI). Titus Andronicus: The Monitor is getting tons of playtime on my iPod. It rocks. Makes me think of a mix between The Gaslight Anthem, Conor Oberst and Flogging Molly. 

SPECIAL NOTE: The new David Ford: Let the Hard Times Roll was a must buy after I fell in love with his previous album, Songs for the Road. Some of the most "felt" music being made. Melody and heart. The dude can sing, and is a great songwriter. Even better for my Louisville, Kentucky friends. Go TONIGHT to the Zanzabar to hear David Ford play with Sojourn's Brooks Ritter. It's only $10! If you live in or near Louisville and miss this concert you are a moron. I say that in love. Also check out Brooks' album, The Horse Fell Lame.

Go watch The Antlers play a Tiny Desk Concert. Their album, Hospice (only $7.99) was my #1 album of 2009 and this live performance shows you why. Outstanding. Warning: There is some language.

The National have a new album out in May, High Violet. Here's "Terrible Love" played on Fallon (via Heather)...

The Heavy do "How You Like Me Now?" on Letterman. So much fun. Just crank it up and bop along. Grab their album, The House That Dirt Built, for only $6.99.

A couple of months ago, I let the world know that we were hiring a communications director. The world sent us Phil . Now we need to hire Phil’s partner in crime.

Our team at West Ridge Church is looking for a media director. I’m not very knowledgeable about these things, but this is the person that takes pictures, videos and moving graphics and creates visual stories. Only we need someone who is really, really good at that. My amateur film-making skills don’t qualify.

As an amateur describing this very specialized role, here’s my description of the person we want to hire:

• You are an artist looking for the freedom to use your creative gifts.
• You’re a leader. You inspire and bring the best out of others…especially gifted volunteers.
• Your mobile phone is filled with other artists and techies who can help you get the job done when a special talent is needed.
• You’re good behind the camera. You can edit with the best of them, but you’re most comfortable directing and producing multiple projects with other talented people.
• You don’t necessarily have church experience, but you love Jesus and you want to reach others.
• You love sharing stories visually.
• You love the creative process.
• You believe video is critical to reaching today’s culture with the Gospel message.

Here’s the deal–we’re building the dream team at West Ridge, and we see this role as critical to where God is taking us next. Is it you? Is it someone you know?

Seriously gifted and interested folks can email me with a resume and a link to your online home so we can check out samples of your work.

I can’t wait to have you on our team!

Related Posts:

• Announcing Our New Communications Dude
• How to Deal with Change
• Hiring a “Chief Launch Officer”
• Children at Compassion International School
• Heading to Africa

It reminded me of a discussion I had recently with a friend about another article Shane Claiborne wrote for Esquire. My friend seemed to think that Claiborne took too casual a tone about the serious topic of salvation, and ignored the very real nature of sin and judgment. I disagreed, because I thought an approachable, love-centered gospel is the most efficient way to explain the benefits of life with Jesus to someone who is put-off by judgment from those who are also sinners.

In both of these cases, it seems, the conflict is between a desire to present a gospel that appeals to a certain kind of audience and a concern about emphasizing some aspects of our gospel over others. As you might expect given my story, my rhetorical training lands me firmly on the side of audience sensitivity, for a few reasons.

First, all presentations of the gospel select aspects to emphasize and aspects to de-emphasize. Claiborne believes, for example, that some Christians over-emphasize judgment at the expense of love.  While the theologian who is skeptical of introducing the gospel through the Koran is right that it de-emphasizes differences, he misses the fact that, as language theorist Kenneth Burke says, all language selects, reflects and deflects.

Second, I think Jesus provides an extreme example of audience sensitivity. The NYT article talks about some missionaries growing beards and giving up pork as extreme; how about the incarnation? God became a Human to communicate with us. That is a pretty extreme example of adapting to the culture to get your message across, don’t you think? And within Christ’s incarnation, he had different ways of approaching different people. Of course, our adaptation will be less perfect than Jesus’ were. We make mistakes, we misunderstand each other, we assume things that aren’t true. Nonetheless, I think Christ’s example, in addition to Paul’s suggestion that we be all things to all people promotes audience adaptation.

My sister made fun of me last week because I said I was conducting an audience analysis before composing thank you notes, “you are such a rhetorician.” Perhaps it is my particular professional oddity that I am especially sensitive to questions of audience, but I think it might also be something we should all consider. Who you are speaking to should change how you speak, because conversation happens in a relationship, and relationships are different. Just as I don’t talk to my students the same way I talk to my mother, my relationships with others changes how I explain my faith, and I think that’s good.

And yet what we don't understand so well is how Christ nourishes us through Lord's Supper. When Christ instituted it he said,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.

Christ says that just as eating ordinary food nourishes and strengthens our body, so feeding upon Christ, in a figurative sense, will feed our souls. In this act we both symbolize our dependence upon this food and we experience that nourishment. Though we do not quite know how this happens, we know that we receive spiritual strength through it. And certainly just about any Christian can testify to the joy and strength and spiritual refreshment he has received through the Lord's Supper. We cannot quantify it and yet neither can we (or would we want to) deny it.

Ultimately, though, we celebrate Lord's Supper out of obedience to the Word of God more than we do out of a firm and exhaustive understanding of exactly what it does in us or through us. Though we do not fully understand it, we do it. Christ does not tell us exactly how it works and all that it accomplishes in us, but still he commands us to participate in it and to do so regularly, as part of the life of the church. And so we obey in grateful obedience.

Last year I spent a fair bit of time thinking and writing about sex, mostly in the context of the Sexual Detox booklet I was writing at the time. As I did so, I found myself beginning to think of sex within marriage as an interesting kind of parallel with Lord's Supper. Now, before you accuse me of blasphemy, know that I am not equating the two; rather, I am simply drawing out some similarities between them. What I mean to say is, I think it can be helpful to understand sex as a kind of "marriage sacrament."

We don't fully understand sex. Yes, there is a lot we do know and understand about it; we know that it is a means of grace within a marriage by which a husband and wife are drawn closer together in a uniquely powerful way. We know that sex is more than mere biology, that in the sexual act there is more than just body parts. Instead, sex is an act that involves the body, the soul, the mind, the emotions. It is far more than the sum of its parts.

Yet what we don't understand so well is how and to what extent the sexual union between a husband and wife draws them together. We know that a healthy marriage and a healthy sex life are nearly impossible to separate (which is to say that it is difficult to imagine a healthy marriage in which there is an entirely dysfunctional sex life). And so, like the Lord's Supper, we are often left pursuing sex not because we entirely understand what it is and what it does, but because God commands a husband and wife to have sex and to do so regularly. We trust that he knows the details that remain hidden to us and trust that we ought to be committed to this special act. And so we are to participate in it regularly and joyfully and as means of obedience to him.

Now God has graciously given sexual desire as a means of compelling or encouraging a husband and wife to have sex. And yet any couple can testify that desire rises and wanes, that there are times when sex seems like more work than it is worth or when life just interferes and we find that it has been weeks, months. Here we need to trust that God will reward our obedience in carving out the time and even working deliberately to find the interest. Just as we would be incomplete Christians in an incomplete church if we neglected the Lord's Supper, letting it get pushed aside by other concerns, in the same way a marriage will be incomplete if a husband and wife neglect this gift of God. We may not understand sex as fully as we would like, we may not really know what it does and how it does it, but we do know that God requires it of us and that he does so for our good. And that ought to be enough. We do not need to understand it in order to receive its benefits.

All this time you’ve been hearing about a land that God had for you…one that flowed with milk and honey, that had wells you did not dig, houses you did not build and vinyards you did not plant that would all be yours.

THEN you get to cross the Jordan River…you see God literally put an interstate highway through it while it is at flood stage and over a million people walk through it on dry ground.

You are on a roll…you are about to receive what God has for you.  He has promised you victory over your enemies and there is a sense of anticipation in the camp like NEVER before…

And then…

“At that time the Lord said to Joshua, ‘Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelites again.’  So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites at Gibeath Haaraloth.”

WOW…bummer…news like that will seriously crash ANY party…but there is a lesson here…

EVERYONE loves the idea of progress…it’s the sacrifice associated with that progress that we have a problem with.

God was saying to His people, “you are about to go to a place that is greater than anything you could have ever expected…but it’s going to cost you.”  OUCH!

One of the mistakes we can make today as church leaders is begin to believe the lie that we’re supposed to merely be comfortable when the call of Jesus on our lives is actually to carry our cross daily.

I think God has AMAZING things in store for His church…I think He wants to do GREATER things that we could ever imagine…and it’s NOT His power that is the limiting factor but rather our unwillingness to sacrifice.

AND…as in this case…sometimes the sacrifice gets VERY PERSONAL!  (We love the idea of others sacrificing…we just don’t like it when it comes to us.)

We will never get to where God wants us to go in we are not willing to give up what He’s saying we need to let go of.

This means our personal preferences, our desire to please others, our adaptation to a denomination rather than being who Jesus called us to be, please the biggest giver, remaining silent when God says to speak b/c of fear…WHATEVER…needs to go out the window.

Progress does not come without sacrifice.

Forgiveness - Near to home a police officer was shot and killed in the line of duty. I was moved to read of his wife (both the officer and his wife are believers) and her fight as she seeks to find the ability to forgive the murderer. 'God has freely offered us forgiveness,' she said at the packed sports arena where her husband coached their three sons in hockey. 'To the best of my human ability, with God’s help, I will offer it as well. My hope and my prayer is that all of you will do the same. I know it’s what Vu would have wanted.”

Last Words - The Freakonomics blog writes about some analysis of the last words of criminals about to be executed. For example, "in 36 percent of the last statements, the inmate admits responsibility, and in 32 percent of the statements, the inmate expresses sorrow or seeks forgiveness from the victim’s family.  In contrast, only 10 percent of the last statements were coded as criticizing the legitimacy of the death penalty."

The iPad Paradox: Less is More - This article takes an interesting perspective on the limitations of the iPad. "For most users, having more features degrades experience. People suffer information overload and its ugly cousin, runaway gadget complexity. They're harassed and annoyed, not by limitations, but by features they can't find or figure out, and by problems they don't understand. They feel a thrill when gadgets perform basic tasks without fail or hassle."

When the churches that formed the Uniting Church arrived in Australia as part of the process of colonisation they entered a land that had been created and sustained by the Triune God they knew in Jesus Christ.... The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in the land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.

• The Uniting Church's Basis of Union – a remarkable confessional statement on the nature of the church
  
• Rob Bos and Geoff Thompson, ed., Theology for Pilgrims: Selected Theological Documents of the Uniting Church in Australia (Uniting Church Press 2008) – includes the theological texts that underpin the Basis of Union
  
• Pope John Paul II's address to Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Alice Springs, 1986
• The Rainbow Spirit Elders, Rainbow Spirit Theology: Toward an Australian Aboriginal Theology (ATF 2008) – probably Australia's most sustained and insightful experiment in indigenous Christian theology
• Chris Budden, Following Jesus in Invaded Space: Doing Theology on Aboriginal Land (Pickwick 2009) – a problematic but important study of the colonial context of Australian theology; the book's central claim is that "the primary defining context for those who live in Australia is invasion" (p. 17)
  
• Rowan Williams' essay on Trinity and pluralism in On Christian Theology (Blackwell 2000)
• Rowan Williams' address earlier this month on "The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World"
• Frank Macchia and Paul S. Chung, ed., Theology between East and West: A Radical Heritage (Cascade 2002) – a predominantly Barthian collection, including several essays relating to other (mainly Asian) religious traditions

During his March 2, 2010 radio broadcast, Beck said this:

I beg you, look for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I’m going to Jeremiah’s Wright’s church? Yes! Leave your church. Social justice and economic justice. They are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, “Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?” I don’t care what the church is. If it’s my church, I’m alerting the church authorities: “Excuse me, what’s this social justice thing?” And if they say, “Yeah, we’re all in that social justice thing,” I’m in the wrong place.

Almost immediately, reaction statements emerged with furor, found in press releases and public statements made by figures like Sojourner’s editor Jim Wallis and various social justice advocacy groups. Like Captain Renault in Casablanca, various media outlets rounded up the “usual suspects.” The resultant public conversation has not been very substantial, but it has offered media magnetism.

Some of those outraged by Beck’s statements immediately insisted that social justice is the very heart of the Gospel, while others insisted with equal force that Beck had offered a courageous call for Christians to flee liberal churches that had abandoned the Gospel.

As anyone familiar with incendiary public debates should have expected, though the truth is a bit harder to determine, the issue is indeed worth whatever hard thinking a clarification of the issue requires.

Is Glenn Beck right? That is the question most in the media were asking, along with a good number of Christians who were aware of the debate. With just a few words, Beck, a convert to Mormonism, set the world of American religion into a frenzy of discourse.

At first glance, Beck’s statements are hard to defend. How can justice, social or private, be anything other than a biblical mandate? A quick look at the Bible will reveal that justice is, above all, an attribute of God himself. God is perfectly just, and the Bible is filled with God’s condemnation of injustice in any form. The prophets thundered God’s denunciation of social injustice and the call for God’s people to live justly, to uphold justice, and to refrain from any perversion of justice.

The one who pleases the Lord is he who will “keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (Gen. 18:19). Israel is told to “do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness you shall judge your neighbor” (Lev. 19:15). God “has established his throne for justice” (Psalm 9:7) and “loves righteousness and justice” (Psalm 33:5). Princes are to “rule in justice” (Is. 32:1) even as the Lord “will fill Zion with justice and righteousness” (Is. 33:5). In the face of injustice, the prophet Amos thundered: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:18). In a classic statement, Micah reminded Israel: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).

To assert that a call for social justice is reason for faithful Christians to flee their churches is nonsense, given the Bible’s overwhelming affirmation that justice is one of God’s own foremost concerns.

But, there is more going on here. Glenn Beck’s statements lacked nuance, fair consideration, and context. It was reckless to use a national media platform to rail against social justice in such a manner, leaving Beck with little defense against a tidal wave of biblical mandates.

A closer look at his statements reveals a political context. He made a specific reference to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and to other priests or preachers who would use “social justice” and “economic justice” as “code words.” Is there anything to this?

Of course there is. Regrettably, there is no shortage of preachers who have traded the Gospel for a platform of political and economic change, most often packaged as a call for social justice.

The immediate roots of this phenomenon go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when figures like Washington Gladden, a Columbus, Ohio pastor, promoted what they called a new “social gospel.” Gladden was morally offended by the idea of a God who would offer his own Son as a substitutionary sacrifice for sinful humanity and, as one of the founders of liberal theology in America, offered the social gospel as an alternative message, complete with a political agenda. It was not social reform that made the social gospel liberal, it was its theological message. As Gary Dorrien, the preeminent historian of liberal theology, asserts, the distinctive mark of the social gospel was “its theology of social salvation.”

Even more famously, the social gospel would be identified with Walter Rauschenbusch, a liberal figure of the early twentieth century. Rauschenbusch made his arguments most classically in his books, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). In a 1904 essay, “The New Evangelism,” Rauschenbusch called for a departure from “the old evangelism” which was all about salvation from sin through faith in Christ, and for the embrace of a “new evangelism” which was about salvation from social ills and injustice in order to realize, at least partially, the Kingdom of God on earth. He called for Christian missions to be redirected in order to “Christianize international politics.”

The last century has seen many churches and denominations embrace the social gospel in some form, trading the Gospel of Christ for a liberal vision of social change, revolution, economic liberation, and, yes, social justice. Liberal Protestantism has largely embraced this agenda as its central message.

The urgency for any faithful Christian is this — flee any church that for any reason or in any form has abandoned the Gospel of Christ for any other gospel.

As I read the statements of Glenn Beck, it seems that his primary concern is political. Speaking to a national audience, he warned of “code words” that betray a leftist political agenda of big government, liberal social action, economic redistribution, and the confiscation of wealth. In that context, his loyal audience almost surely understood his point.

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ — the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church’s main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ’s command and the example of the apostles.

There is more to that story, however. The church is not to adopt a social reform platform as its message, but the faithful church, wherever it is found, is itself a social reform movement precisely because it is populated by redeemed sinners who are called to faithfulness in following Christ. The Gospel is not a message of social salvation, but it does have social implications.

Faithful Christians can debate the proper and most effective means of organizing the political structure and the economic markets. Bringing all these things into submission to Christ is no easy task, and the Gospel must not be tied to any political system, regime, or platform. Justice is our concern because it is God’s concern, but it is no easy task to know how best to seek justice in this fallen world.

And that brings us to the fact that the Bible is absolutely clear that injustice will not exist forever. There is a perfect social order coming, but it is not of this world. The coming of the Kingdom of Christ in its fullness spells the end of injustice and every cause and consequence of human sin. We have much work to do in this world, but true justice will be achieved only by the consummation of God’s purposes and the perfection of God’s own judgment.

Until then, the church must preach the Gospel, and Christians must live out its implications. We must resist and reject every false gospel and tell sinners of salvation in Christ. And, knowing that God’s judgment is coming, we must strive to be on the right side of justice.

Glenn Beck’s statements about social justice demonstrate the limits of our public discourse. The issues raised by his comments and the resultant controversy are worthy of our most careful thinking and most earnest struggle. Yet, the media, including Mr. Beck, will have moved on to any number of other flash points before the ink has dried on this kerfuffle. Serious-minded Christians cannot move on from this issue so quickly.

________________________________

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

ABC World News Tonight, “Beck Attacks Church, Christians Boycott,” broadcast March 12, 2010. I appear (very briefly) in this coverage.

Tobin Grant, “Glenn Beck” ‘Leave Your Church,’” Christianity Today, “Political Advocacy Tracker,” posted March 12, 2010. This appears to be the best source for the transcript of Glenn Beck’s comments.

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900-1950 (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003).

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900 (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001).

Walter Rauschenbusch, “The New Evangelism,” Independent, 56 (May 12, 1904). Found in William R. Hutchison, ed., American Protestant Thought in the Liberal Era (University Press of America, 1968), pp. 108-116.