a new doxology

I’m preaching at Journey this Sunday. I feel a bit arrogant and somewhat manipulative mentioning it here, so please don’t feel any pressure to attend. I assure you that I get more than enough personal affirmation from my family and from God — so I don’t need your support — but if you’ve been thinking about checking out the worship service I helped start last month or are interested in hearing a guy who loves pop-culture preach about how Jesus washing his disciple’s smelly feet has something to do with us today, it’d be great to have you there. For directions or more info, go to the Journey webpage.

This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Psalm 128:24 (NIV)

I’m not sure if the psalmist knew about leap years, but I’m sure he would have found plenty of reason to “rejoice and be glad” on a bonus day to the year.

Have a great leap day.

In case you didn’t notice, anewdoxology has anewlook. Don’t worry though…all the old stuff is still here, the layout is basically the same and I’m going to continue adding content that reflects my faith-influenced perspective on popular culture (and my popculture-influenced perspective on faith).

What do you think?

I’ve been to a lot of incredible concerts in my life, some that I’m still proud to tell people about (Garth Brooks, Chicago, Jay-Z, Ben Harper and Jack Johnson, to name a few) and others that I’m now a little bit embarrassed to admit that I attended (so I won’t list any of them here). Concerts can get pretty expensive, but rarely have I let the high cost of a ticket keep me from seeing a band or artist that I really like put on a great show. Yet one of my biggest regrets in life so far was not going to a Coldplay concert with one of my roommates during our senior year of college (the video above for “Clocks” is from that tour). In my defense, I wasn’t a huge Coldplay fan back then (like I am now), but that shouldn’t have mattered. Sure, I was a college student at the time, so driving to Minneapolis from Iowa on a weeknight (aka “a school night”) and paying $50 for a concert wouldn’t have been a great financial or academic decision, but I should have realized that a band like Coldplay was basically guaranteed to put on a “that was the best concert I’ve ever been to in my life” type of show. In fact, that’s exactly what my roommate said about the show when he got back from the concert, and five years later, he still says the same thing about that show today. I suppose it’s possible that his memory of the show has improved with time, but during that same time period, my regrets about not going have only increased. I wish I had gone to the Coldplay concert at the Target Center in 2003…

I’m not someone who likes to live in regret, I suppose no one does; I just don’t see the point of it — especially as a person of faith who believes in the forgiving power of God’s grace — but if there’s anything we can take from our past mistakes (things we’ve done or not done that lead to feelings of regret) it is the wisdom that will help us not repeat them. So today I have a short list of bands and artists who I will do whatever I can to see in concert if I get the chance, regardless of ticket cost or other factors; the list includes Coldplay, U2, Michael Jackson and possibly John Mayer and Kanye West (I would definitely love to see either of them in concert, but I’m just not sure if they’ve achieved “short list” status yet).

Coldplay’s new studio album is rumored to be set for a May ‘08 release and according to an official post on the band’s website earlier this fall, it’s going to be “the album people will remember them by.” Hopefully the tour for this album will include a stop in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Who is on your short list that you wouldn’t miss seeing in concert for any reason???

Click here if you’re looking for the Journey worship playlist.

My roommate’s girlfriend walked into our apartment tonight carrying a bright yellow shopping bag from the store Forever 21. She stood in the living room while we were watching a basketball game and held it proudly until we asked her what was up with the bag? “It’s for Andy,” she said. I was confused. I’ve never been in the store Forever 21 before and every time I’ve walked past it at the mall I’ve assumed it’s just another place where teenage girls shop for clothes that their parents wouldn’t approve of them wearing. Why would she bring the bag for me? Well, it turns out that all Forever 21 bags have “John 3:16″ printed in small letters on the bottom, so she thought I might be interested. She was right.

Seeing that shopping bag got me thinking about how other “Christian companies” (or companies run by Christians) use their influence on consumers to share and spread their faith. Since earlier tonight I’ve spent quite a bit of time “researching” Forever 21’s bags and other stores/businesses that practice similar acts of subtle consumer evangelism. I’ve also been hungry since seeing that bag. You see, Forever 21 isn’t the first business I’ve known about that prints Bible verses on the packaging of their products. The mecca of fast food burgers and fries, In-N-Out Burger (California and surround states), has been printing Bible verses on the bottom of their drink cups and food wrappers since the 1980s. In-N-Out Burger is my absolute favorite fast food restaurant — I once walked from LAX to the closest In-N-Out (probably about a mile away) so I could taste it one more time before returning to Minnesota — and it turns out the former president of In-N-Out was a Christian who wanted to share his faith with customers in a discrete way, and the company has decided to continue the practice today. It seems the president of Forever 21 has decided to do something similar by sneaking a little Gospel message into each customer’s purchase by, as one blog called it, “Bible bagging” their goods.

During my research on all this I found several sites that were neither helpful nor informative (mostly online forums where teenage girls discussed what they bought at Forever 21 during their last trip to the mall and how “like cool” or “totally dumb” they think it is that the store has a Bible verse on the bag), but I did manage to find a few articles that offered credible insight into what appears to be a growing phenomenon in the industries of retail clothing and fast food. For instance, in August of 2006 The New York Sun ran an article titled “Evangelism in Fashion“ discussing the Forever 21 bags. Included in the article were responses from Forever 21 customers who were asked if they were aware of the religious message on the bottom of the bags. The two responses shared in the article are priceless for their own unique reasons. The first was from a 22-year old guy who, when told there was a Bible verse on the bottom of the bag he was carrying didn’t seem bothered at all, but he did offer the insightful comment that “Jesus wore clothes.” I’m going to give the dude two benefits of the doubt by assuming that 1) he was shopping at Forever 21 for his girlfriend and 2) he’s not a seminary student. The other customer response was from a young woman who was shopping for a “black sparkly halter-top to go with a pair of red high-heeled shoes.” She was not as understanding as the young man we met a few sentences earlier; when she found out there was a religious message on the bottom of her shopping bag, she responded by saying “That’s so freaky. It kind of annoys me that I’m carrying this around without even knowing it.”

I learned about a few other businesses that make similar faith statements on their products and/or through the practices of their stores in a USA Today article from 2005. The most notable, in my opinion, being that Chick-fil-A (a fast food restaurant mostly in the southern US) is closed on Sundays so that employees can “focus on faith and family.” I thought that was a pretty cool move for a company to make, but I can’t help but wonder how much money they give up making by only being open 6 days a week.

If you know about other examples like these, please share them.

I created this video for one of my seminary classes on ministry in a media culture. It’s a collection of photographs, Scripture passages and quotes that I find meaningful; set to the song “Broken” by Lifehouse. As a whole, I think the message of the piece is powerfully simple…God enters into our brokenness and offers us grace, hope, healing and strength. I hope you find it inspiring, affirming, comforting, challenging, or whatever other words you’d use to explain how it moved you to feel or think. If you’d like to share your thoughts in reaction to the video, please leave a comment.

(3/11/08): Thanks for all the comments and emails about this video, it has been cool to hear how it has touched so many people. I never expected this to be anything but a project for class, but I’ve now been asked for permission by a church to use the video during one of their services for Holy Week and we plan to use it in worship at Journey in the coming months as well (if others are interested in using it in worship, please let me know). I made a few small changes, so this is now the second final version of the video (the two earlier versions are still on youtube).

Several of the people who visit anewdoxology each day get here by following a link on the Journey webpage. Journey is the worship service that I helped start last month at a church in Golden Valley, Minnesota (a suburb of Minneapolis). We worship on Sundays at 5:00pm and if any of you live in the Minneapolis area and would like to experience something different than what most churches offer on Sunday mornings, you should check it out. You can read what I wrote about Journey, or go to the Journey webpage for more information (including directions and a link to podcast sermons).

We have a lot of fun “doing church” a bit differently at Journey, including the music, messages and overall worship “style.” We realize that not everyone is immersed in the Christian sub-culture (music, media, books, etc.), and we also realize that when people come to worship — or a concert for that matter — their level of comfortability is often influenced by how familiar they are with the music. If they know the songs, they feel right at home; but if they’ve never heard the songs before, they might feel uncomfortable and out of place.

The last thing we want to do at Journey is create an uncomfortable atmosphere where people don’t feel like they can connect in worship. So, as a small step to help people connect, I created a playlist on iTunes of all the songs we’ve used in worship at Journey (so far). These are not recordings of Ben and the worship band, but the original versions of the songs that we borrowed for worship. You can download the songs for $0.99 each and burn them onto a CD, put them on your iPod/mp3 player or just listen to them on your computer. The thought is that if we are more familiar with the music, we will feel more comfortable in worship and be able to sing together with confidence. Our hope is that these songs will become anthems for our community and a soundtrack for our lives.

Here’s a link to the “Journey: fresh worship” playlist on .

Note: if you don’t have iTunes, click here to download it for free.

In honor of it being Valentine’s Day, here’s part of a wedding sermon that one of my seminary professors shared in class today…

Marriage by Roland D. Martinson

The heart of marriage is a promise. On the face of it, it’s a crazy promise; two people who have only a partial understanding of one another stand up and make this bizarre statement that they’ve going to cherish and care for one another for a lifetime. They say, “I take this one and this one takes me as long as we both shall live,” not “as long as we both shall love.” To many persons this seems like a mad and risky thing to do. Yet I would suggest that the madness is the romance. Without risk there is no beauty or strength or goodness.

It’s not a very courageous thing for two people who have found themselves mutually delectable to say, “I will shack up with this one, and this one with me, as long as the delectability continues.” It has no gallantry. It’s just a mutual optimism. So that if people want to create all kinds of lovely music about what is simply one of the higher forms of self-satisfaction, I find nothing admirable about this at all. I find it completely understandable. I find it even momentarily delightful. But I don’t think it has much to do with marriage. Certainly nothing to do with a promise. I’m really only challenged toward fulfillment, or at least partial fulfillment, when I understand marriage as a mutual acceptance of crazy challenge to fulfill the seemingly impossible. Then there is something that is really worth the human effort.

Bach produced greatness within the strict musical limits of his time, and the severity of the limits engendered the greatness of the accomplishment. Just as Bach accepted limitations and discipline in musical composition, so marriage means limits. Without limitation there is not expansion. Without the risk of a promise there is really no joy. There is only a kind of serial, episodic history of partial joys with interchangeable parts.

The problem with the temporary, ad hoc relationships which many people enter into today is that when there is a way out, the couple deprive themselves of the deepening effect of going all the way in. When there’s an exit, they can split. This is not to say that all marriage should survive. Sometimes the damage done in staying together is so great that the only answer is dissolution; we all know marriage like that.

It does not fit today’s popular mood, but we all need fidelity: the intention to do what we say, to accept discipline in order to solidify the good. Fidelity means more than not sleeping around the neighborhood. It means that we have made a promise, a commitment, and that we have accepted the limitations that are a part of that promise. There are great satisfactions in saying, ” I have done what I undertook to do.”

When the old guys emphasized “for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health,” they weren’t being sentimental; they meant it. A commitment like that takes guts.

If you read what I wrote last week about my classes this semester, you may remember that one of my classes is on ministry within a pop/media-culture. I don’t have class on Wednesdays, so I’ve been (trying to) studying all day, and when I checked the syllabus for the ministry in media class to see what I was supposed to read before class next week, I was happily surprised to learn that there was no reading assigned, but instead I needed to watch several videos on youtube. Seriously? That’s awesome.

Watching the four videos assigned for class was one of the most enjoyable 30 minutes of homework I can remember. I’m going to share two of them here because I think they offer a fascinating and informative look at the history and evolution of digital technology (and text) as tools for sharing information, with style. Both videos were created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Information R/evolution