Sent: 2006-06-09 22:30:01 (PST)
Subject: The Formation of a Christian Mind

A Newsletter for those who want to teach worldviews and the biblical worldview.

Fellow Buzzards,

I'm going to try to keep these newsletters relatively short.

The "fool's errands" are things you can do to help get Blah, Blah, Blah out to those who need it most.

FOOL'S ERRAND #1: Order 3 copies of the book from amazon.com and give two away. They're selling the book for 20% off, and if you buy three or more you don't have to pay any postage.

FOOL'S ERRAND #2: If you like the book (or even if you don't) consider writing a review for amazon.com. A little negative publicity hasn't hurt Ann Coulter's sales of her books.


ARTICLE #6: THE FORMATION OF A CHRISTIAN MIND -- USING THE MISSION ST. CLARE WEBSITE (http://www.missionstclare.com) by Bayard Taylor
(This is a reprint, with slight modifications, from the June 8, 2006 College Forum page of the website, found in the "Thought Crimes" section.)

God calls each of us to "not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our minds]." (Romans 12:1-2) We're called both to radical dissent from the system that opposes God and a radical re-formation of our thinking processes.

This is hard because so many things pull us from God. So we need to be mindful of the things that can point us back to God and deeper into our relationship with Christ.

To that end, scripture reading and prayer are absolutely essential. But the Bible is a big book -- where to start? And prayer -- if we haven't grown up in a church (and sometimes even if we have), we barely have a vocabulary for it.

What to do? I'd like to share a plan that I've been using on and off for the past several years. This plan bathes your mind in God's Word (the Bible) every day and over time helps you develop your prayer life.

The website is http://missionstclare.com. Now let me tell you what makes this such a great website.

1. It makes use of The Book of Common Prayer (BCP). This book of worship has been used in the Anglican and Episcopal tradition for close to 500 years. It's a rich and deep spiritual treasure-chest.

2. The BCP has prayers for morning and evening, so you can be reminded of God regularly. It only takes a few minutes each time, so you're not being asked to make up a whole program on your own, and you're not being asked to spend hours and hours each day. It's manageable.

3. If you follow the morning and evening prayers, you'll work your way through the entire book of Psalms every several weeks. The Psalms are the most beloved book in the Bible because they express to God the gamut of human emotions. Twice a day you'll be saturating your mind with praise, laments, cries for help, and shouts of confidence and joy. Familiarity with the Psalms will make all your prayer times more fruitful. You won't be at a loss for words anymore because you'll have developed a vocabulary for praise.

4. Each day the prayer book also gives you readings from the Old and New Testaments. In the space of two years you work your way just about through the whole Bible (some of the most repetitious or gruesome sections are omitted). As a result, over time you become more and more familiar with the major themes of the Bible and how the whole Bible fits together.

5. The BCP laces the readings from the Psalms, Old and New Testament with special prayers and petitions based upon scripture, as well as a confession of sin, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the prayer of St. Francis and Chrysostom's prayer. It also has prayers for days of the week and seasons of the year, such as Advent (leading up to Christmas), Lent and Holy Week (leading up to Easter) and Pentecost. A person who uses the BCP is praying along with God's people worldwide during these themed periods of the year.

6. Mission St. Clare has some other nice bells and whistles.

• If you don't have a match and candle handy, you can strike a virtual match and light a virtual candle. (This might seem silly, and I think this feature plays kind of tongue-in-cheek -- but there's something to be said for setting a contemplative tone for prayer.)
• There are hymns that have music files attached; if you don't know the hymns you can learn them by clicking and singing along. (Singing softly along to computer tones isn't quite the same as joining a organ and a congregation in soul-stirring singing -- but there's something to be said for learning the great songs of the church. Not all of them are great, some might even be a little sappy, but some are really, really good.)
• There's a missionary prayer each day for a country of the world.
• There's a prayer each day for a Christian denomination.
• One of my favorite features -- and something that makes Mission St. Clare's saint list totally unique -- is that, unlike other saints' catalogues that trace only one Christian tradition, Mission St. Clare's recognizes the great saints and martyrs from all the Christian traditions: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican. It recognizes stand-bys like Felicity and Perpetua, the Cappadocian fathers and the great popes, but also reminds us of Calvin, Luther, Anabaptists, Baptists, missionaries, the first Christians in African and Asian countries, and even people like Dante, John Milton, John Bunyan and Chief Seattle. It's broadly ecumenical in the best sense. By learning about these saints who have gone before us, we gain appreciation not only for what Christ did through them, but for what Christ can do through us if we allow the Holy Spirit to take over our lives. It also helps us enter into the communion of the saints, emphasizing that we are part of a cross-generational, cross-cultural people of God.

7. There are two quibbles I have with the website that in no way outweigh the good points, but about which I feel I should inform you.

• Sometimes the denominations listed in the daily prayer for denominations will have prayers for "our brothers and sisters" in denominations which are founded on principles in strong conflict with the biblical worldview. Two that I remember are the Swedenborgian church and the Unitarian-Universalists. I'm not begrudging prayer for these groups; I just think it's presumptuous to say without qualification that they are "our brothers and sisters" in Christ.
• I'm not sure what to make of some of the Eastern Orthodox biographies. To my mind they seem to excessively glorify asceticism (as if this material world is unimportant and almost to be despised, thrown off in favor of purely spirutal concerns). There are also strange stories of the bones or graves of martyrs having the power to heal or bring people back from the dead. Now, I'm not saying that God isn't in the business of miracles (I believe in the resurrection!), and maybe it's my lack of faith -- but some of these stories really stretch my credulity.

Sent: 2006-06-09 22:21:02 (PST)
Subject: More Than Just a Buzzword

"Before you dive, get the big picture."

Fellow Buzzards,

THE PURPOSE OF THIS NEWSLETTER: This newsletter focuses on the TEACHING of the concept of worldview, worldviews and the Biblical worldview.

NEWS: The release of the book Blah, Blah, Blah was delayed until June 7. On that day, the book was sent to the bookstores. Praise God and Halleluia!

FOOL'S ERRAND: I'd like to ask each of you to think through who your friends are and if there are any who are already interested in worldviews and the biblical worldview, or if they're potentially interested in worldviews, encourage one of them to sign up for this newletter.

ARTICLE #5: GETTING PAST WORLDVIEW AS A BUZZWORD (a reprint from the June 9, 2006 blog)
About three weeks ago I had a chance to address a group of students from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The campus minister who set up the meeting used to work as the Resident Director at a well-known Christian college. He also taught a worldview orientation course to first-year students there.

His opinion was that on Christian college campuses the term "biblical worldview" had become something of a buzzword without adequate content attached.

He said that after awhile, when a professor used the word "worldview" many kids would push the snooze button in their minds. They just assumed they knew what "worldview" was about, but they really didn't get it. (This also happens a lot in churches, even churches that talk a lot about worldview.)

Further, he said it was generally assumed that if you taught the Bible and Christian theology you were teaching the biblical worldview.

We ended up agreeing that many Christians miss the point about worldview and worldviews (if they're even aware of the idea). You haven't taught the biblical worldview adequately until people understand the underlying concept of worldview and how a person's or a culture's worldview structures their experience and perception.

You haven't taught the biblical worldview adequately until you've empathetically taught the other worldviews, demonstrated their operating principles ("rules") and put them side-by-side, showing what makes them similar and different.

In other words, teaching "positive" Christian truth -- what the biblical worldview is -- is good, but it's not enough. If you want people to really understand how to communicate Christian truth into the culture, you also need to teach "negative" Christian truth -- what the biblical worldview is not.

This means moving away from Christian isolationism, out of the Christian echo chamber and into exposing people to the other worldviews. By teaching people both what Christianity is and what it isn't or can't be, you give them the analytical tools to know when they're looking at the biblical worldview and when they're face to face with something that's totally not.

This process gives us a basis for developing spiritual discernment. But we need to remember that spiritual discernment is not just an intellectual exercise or having a nice tidy categorization system planted firmly in the mind.

It's also a spiritual process -- the development of a personal relationship with God and Christ through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit -- by which we ask God for wisdom (James 1:5) and God answers through the Word (the Bible) and the Spirit (the same Holy Spirit Jesus promised he would send in John 14:26 and 15:26).

It would also help -- as long as we're trying to develop a biblical worldview -- if we left room in our worldview for God to be a supernatural, mountain-moving, freeing, healing, miracle-working God.