Lake Neuron

There aren’t many people who could be interviewed by both Christianity Today and the Onion AV Club and sound completely at home in either place.

I may have to go see Wall*E tomorrow night.

Christianity Today has a really nice, and not sugar-coated, piece on the late Larry Norman.

Of course, I’m a big Daniel Amos fan, and like many fans tended to blame Larry Norman for the dispute which prevented DA’s seminal “Horrendous Disc” from being released in the 70s, when it might have been ground-breaking, until 1980, virtually simultaneous with “Alarma!” on DA’s new record label. After waiting decades for Norman to release “Horrendous Disc” on CD, I and other fans were particularly annoyed that Norman saw fit to add a couple of “bonus tracks” to the CD of himself singing DA songs. It seemed like a deliberate slap in the face, especially since “Horrendous Disc” is considered a concept album, making extra tracks a redundant intrusion.

But you can’t dispute the key role that Norman played in creating Christian rock, both through his own talent and by giving a forum to artists like DA and my other particular favorite, Randy Stonehill.

Just within the last year I was reminded of Norman’s “I Wish They’d We’d All Been Ready,” by Randy Bonifield’s very funny send-up of end-times theology, which incorporates parts of Norman’s song:
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Since moving back to Bedford County and getting my own place in the mid 1980s, I’ve been a member of two different United Methodist churches. I left the first one under strange circumstances — my father had been assigned there as a pastor, and I felt he had been mistreated in the way the PPR process was handled one year. So I left that church (bearing a lot of very un-Christian anger, which I hope I’ve put behind me) and started attending my current church, Shelbyville First UMC — I had moved into Shelbyville by that time anyway, and so First UMC was the closest church to where I live. I have happily attended First UMC ever since, and after my father retired from the ministry he and my mother joined First UMC as well.

Even though I’ve changed churches myself, I’ve sometimes looked down my nose at “church-shoppers” — people who seem to hop from church to church and denomination to denomination for a variety of reasons, ranging from perceived slights at their old church to the allure of cool and exciting churches with dynamic, contemporary worship. I have always had the concern that people who “church-shop” are trying to make church serve them instead of seeing church as a way for them to serve God. Maybe in some cases they’re running away from preaching that steps on their toes, even though that’s part of what preaching is supposed to do.

But Richard Mouw, writing at the Christianity Today web site, defends the practice of church-shopping and notes that some of the people who criticize it are being elitist, even hypocritical — they get more upset when church-shoppers move in one direction than the other. I’m not completely convinced, but he makes some very good points, and I’m probably guilty of some of the attitudes he rightly condemns.

Here is what the author self-deprecatingly calls a Reader’s Digest version of a defense of Christianity. It’s simple and concise — a basis for discussion rather than an authoritative closure — but I think it reads pretty well.

I wrote this post in a hurry and misspelled “Christian” in the headline, a misspelling that will be forever preserved in the permalink. I also misspelled “concise.” Apparently, I need a day off.

A terrific and thought-provoking essay on the Christianity Today web site notes a medical shift — more people dying from protracted illnesses as opposed to sudden ones — and the way in which we as a society have failed to recognize it or deal with its implications.