My quiz results...

It has been years since I've tried answering online quizzes so that I could post them on my old blog. I did that back then with my old blog and just now since I don't have much to do (better yet have a lot to do but I lack the concentration required to do them) and have a lot in my mind I decided to take one in Beliefnet entitled: What Kind of Christian Are You?

The funny thing with quizzes is that it often misses the point...

...I mean since when has historic Christian identity been identified with personalities other than the person of Jesus of Nazareth?

Anyways I decided to post it here for good clean fun.

Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church

On September 8-9, 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina, a first-of-its-kind national conference of church leaders in the United States of America will take place, Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church.

What's interesting about this conference is that apart from it being the first of it's kind, it is a national event organized by Conservative Christianity's favorite whipping boy the so-called, Emergent Church Movement --however what makes this really great is that it seeks to put together some of my favorite contemporary speakers, pastors and theologians but also tries to bring Pat Robertson and Bishop John Shelby Spong to the event and to my mind perhaps the emerging moving toward a new ecumenical movement, I just hope that they'll be able to get the two of them there and maybe even get them on the same page about this easier said than done question of what it means to become a Christian Church in today’s complex society.

Below are short profiles of some of the speakers in the conference whose works I admire.

New Year’s Repentance

It’s New Year’s Day and its that time of the year again to make resolutions hoping to change for the better. Below is an interesting resolution that I would like to share a nifty insight from one of the largely misunderstood personalities in the Evangelical world –Brian McLaren, who I believe helped me face the brutal truth of escapism in me and in the Christian faith that I adhere to:

Christians (rightly) tell non-Christian individuals they must repent to be “born again”” You must repent to enter the kingdom of God. You must repent, or you will perish. Now it is time for us Christians to practice our own preaching. We need to look back over our corporate history so far, and facing our failures and atrocities both ancient and recent, we need to repent. In terms of Gerald May’s definition of denial (from Addiction and Grace, Harper 1991), we Christians cannot continue to avoid knowing what we already know: that something is rotten in the state of our religion.

We must not separate ourselves from the past and present Christian failures and atrocities in a holier-than-thou-schism, suggesting that “they” did it –Catholics, medievals, fundamentalists, liberals, whoever –not us. We must not indulge in a naïve-and-arrogant protest, denouncing the failures of our forebears or cousins in the faith with sufficient vehemence to somehow exonerate ourselves. No, rather, we need to say that those bad guys back there or over there are “us,” here, now. We need to say, as the people did in Nehemiah’s day, that we are no better than our fathers (Nehemiah 9). Only that kind of repentance will enables Christians to be truly born again in any way that matters.1

1 McLaren, Brian. A Generous Orthodoxy. (Zondervan 2004) pp.303-304