A Tale of Two Tables (reblogged from Heather Goodman)

[This is a reblog post from my friend Heather Goodman who describes experiencing a phenomenon that is unfortunately too common in Christian community: going out to a restaurant after church where the trendy, attractive people sit together at one table while the outcasts are relegated to a second table. As Heather points out, Jesus would be sitting with the outcasts.]

Something to read whenever you’re feeling trollish

I’ve been reading a book called You are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the IT industry who is very alarmed at the way social media has negatively impacted our culture. He talks about the way that structurally it tends to make us behave like trolls to one another. Even when I’m not completely anonymous, having interactions with people whom I don’t have to encounter face to face gives me much greater freedom to be a jerk and not take responsibility for exuding Christ in how I speak. Well, my friend Osheta wrote something really beautiful in our Despised Ones facebook group that I wanted to put on a virtual sticky note for myself and anyone else to read as a reminder whenever we’re feeling trollish.

Five verses God has tattooed on my heart — #1: 1 Corinthians 1:28

In seminary, I learned to think of truth as a symphony rather than a single voice or instrument. The goal is not to get everyone to play the exact same note with the exact same instrument; the goal is to enter into harmony with each others’ instruments so that we can become God’s song. It’s not the absolute relativism of playing our own autonomous songs; that would be a disastrous cacophony of sound. Rather, we are all playing our own particular improvisational variations on God’s melody. God designs the harmonic that we have been created to inhabit by helping us appropriate a particular set of experiences of His grace and by tattooing certain verses in His word onto our hearts over the course of our lives. Though there are tons of scripture passages that have touched me, five in particular define the gospel I was given to proclaim. The first I’m going to cover is 1 Corinthians 1:28: “God chose the base things, the despised ones and those who are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”

Exclusively for the excluded

I recently read a post by fellow Methodist blogger Talbot Davis critiquing the pursuit of “inclusivity” in United Methodism, which he interprets to be a strategy for church growth. Davis shares that his church has achieved a large, inclusively diverse population because of the exclusivity of their doctrine. Well I wanted to raise the ante on Davis’s claim. I don’t think churches should have inclusivity as a goal at all; I think faithful kingdom living requires that we exist exclusively for the excluded.

Could you worship a God who makes Himself nothing?

[This is the first synchroblog of our new blogging collective The Despised Ones addressing the question of power and authority in the light of Philippians 2. Check out other synchroblogs on our facebook page and like it while you’re there!]
What does the cross say about God’s nature? Not just Jesus, but God — all three members of the Trinity, including the Father. When Jesus says to Philip in John 14:9, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” how do we apply that statement to the cross? If Jesus “made Himself nothing, taking the form of a slave and being born in human likeness” (Philippians 2:7), does that tell us something about what God is like or is Jesus’ incarnation and crucifixion only a very specific tactic that God used which reveals nothing about how God really is?

The Despised Ones: A Bloggers Collective

You may have noticed that an eery looking emblem recently appeared on my blog with some Greek and Hebrew along with a reference to 1 Corinthians 1:28, one of my favorite verses in the Bible: “He has chosen the despised ones and those who are not to bring to nothing the things that are.” Several nights ago, I got into a casual conversation with my blogger friends Zach Hoag and T.C. Moore. We decided to join forces in some fashion under the banner of “The Despised Ones.” We made a logo and invited some friends to join us, whatever it is that we will end up doing.