My Idea For the Name of the South Campus

A while back, the school district was taking submissions onto what the name of the new 9th and 10th Grade Center in Southern Lewisville should be. On this momentous eve of the school's opening, I thought it would be a good idea to publicly release my submissio that I sent to Mrs. Burns in the communications department. Here it is:

From: Jeremy3416 <jeremy3416@aol.com>
To: burnsl <burnsl@lisd.net>
Sent: Fri, Jan 28, 2011 5:17 am
Subject: LHS 9th and 10th Grade Center South Name

I respectfully nominate that the new 9th and 10th grade center be named after our President, Barack Hussein Obama. This new facility in so many ways captures the essence of his presidency thus far. Similar to many of our President's initiatives like Health Care and the Stimulus Package, this campus is extremely unpopular amongst the members of the community it actually affects as well as being a huge waste of money. This campus also has been shoved down the throats of Lewisville residents just like so many of the liberal policies of the Obama administration without any kind of public input by the people it would actually affect. Similar to President Obama, the school board and the superintendent have been stubborn when dealing with this issue and refuse to listen to the majority voice of the community. That is why I feel that the new south campus exemplifies the administration of Barack Obama and why it should be named the Barack Hussein Obama Lewisville High School 9th and 10th Grade Center South. It has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Jeremy Page


I never received a response back from the ISD. Oh well...

When Christians Get It Wrong: Science and Politics

This week at the Brown Bag Bible Study, we moved onto the second chapter of When Christians Get It Wrong which involved how Christians deal with scientific advancement as well as how we incorporate politics into our Christian life.  While these two topics may seem very dissimilar, they distinctly have in common both fear and ignorance.

Growing up in a conservative area, anytime the evolution theory came up at school, it was met with much criticism from my classmates... and myself.  It was derided as a concept incompatible with Christian teaching, and you either had to believe God created us or we were evolved from more primitive life forms, and there was no in-between. Looking back on my days in biology class, I wish there had been a third explanation.  It would have been an explanation that allowed both the Creation Story and the Evolution theory to complement each other instead of forcing them to tear each other down.  An explanation that wouldn't box God into something that limits his powers.  An explanation that wouldn't make Christians seem like we're living in a bubble.

Yes, that would have been nice.  Instead of embracing scientific advancements, many Christians will reject anything that doesn't exactly line up with a literal reading of the Genesis account.  And I think the motivation behind this rejection is not just ignorance, but fear. Fear that the next advancement will disprove God all together.  Fear that science will prove their way of life a sham.  When Christians have these fears, I must question how deep their faith is.

The other topic of the day was how Christians deal with politics.  Once again, growing up in the Bible Belt, I have found that if a church does indeed align itself to a certain political party, it will more than likely be the Republican Party they align themselves to.  However, when I was in DC, I found that many churches align much of their views to the Democratic Party.  What happens again is that we box God into a certain political party making His ultimate wisdom and power only as great as either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.  That would be a really sucky world if that were true.  Christians use fear and ignorance again by promoting a message that says God takes a certain side in politics.  Adam Hamilton mentions in his book about how it is important for us to be involved with issues of our time.  Our time being the key words.  We must differentiate worldly issues that will at some point come to a close and Kingdom issues .

In addition to last week's descriptions of Christians, judgmental, hypocritical, and unloving, we now have ignorant. We can fix this moniker. We don't have to be the joke of the scientific community. Instead of constantly shooting down any scientific idea, we could instead use it to magnify and glorify our God. Crazy, I know. Only when we are able to identify our ignorance will we as a Christian community be able to minister to an increasingly educated world.

-Jeremy

When Christians Get It Wrong: When We're UnChristian

So I'm leading a bible study at church based on Adam Hamilton's When Christians Get It Wrong, and I thought I would do a corresponding blog post for each week's topic.  The first week's topic is when Christians are unChristian.

The different scriptures Hamilton picks for the first chapter paint a startling picture for today's Christians.  As opposed to many of today's "dynamic" preachers, Jesus didn't constantly condemn sinners.  He condemned the religious leaders of the time, and instead invited the sinners to eat with him among other things.  These religious leaders were so concerned about religious orthodoxy that they forgot how to love one another like God taught us to do.  Jesus had a disdain for these Pharisees, and because of it, we get some of the most beloved stories in the bible.

One of those is the Prodigal Son parable.  The younger son asks for his inheritance early, but spends it all and has to come back to his father broke and hungry.  Instead of rejecting him, the father welcomes him with open arms, much to the chagrin of the older son.  The older son does not like that his younger brother is going to be rewarded with a feast after years of unwise living.  In the older son's mind, he has followed the rules, kept in line, and done everything the father had asked him. 

It is so easy for all of us to be the older brother, constantly pointing out the sins of others without identifying your own, constantly thinking that we are more deserving of God's love because we have done certain things, and constantly refusing to love our brothers and sisters.  The Prodigal Son parable is about us, and it always will be.  We have a choice to either be the jealous, condemning brother, or we can be the loving father open and welcoming to all.  

Christians are called many different things. Judgmental, hypocritical, and unloving are just a few.  And of course, it would be easy for me to say, well, there are some Christians and some churches that are like that, but for the most part we're pretty nice.  But instead, I want myself and the few others that will read this to look at themselves and truly think about and identify ways that they have not been Christian to others. Only then can we become a church that fully reflects the ministry of Jesus Christ because a church that does not love sinners and the least of us is no church at all.

  

-Jeremy