As I write this I am flying over Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. After spending three days in Minneapolis I have been reminded that the people of Minnesota are polite, reserved, and kind. So I was a bit surprised to pick up a New York Times story and read that a divisive controversy has been raging at the Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood, Minnesota. The controversy has caused the church to lose 20% of it’s membership. Since Woodland Hills is a body of 5,000 members that is a stunning loss of 1,000 folks. Must be pretty serious stuff, huh? Must be heresy or moral sin that is involved, right? But the controversy in Minnesota is about how the church should embrace patriotism and politics into the sanctuary. Dr.Gregory Boyd founded the Woodland Hills Church in 1992.  He wrote a book that I loved called “Letters to a Skeptic” so I knew his name before this story came to my attention. Before the last presidential election he preached a series called “The Cross
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I have struggled for years with the concept that God somehow intervenes in athletic events. I have seen the post game interviews where athletes thank God for helping them make the big play or for helping their team win. And I wonder if God really chooses to get involved with sporting event outcomes. Does He sovereignly evaluate the two teams and inventory the number of Christians on the home team versus the visiting team? Is it quantity or spiritual maturity that determines the eventual outcome? Would God bless a team with 20 nominal Christians or the one with 10 really committed believers? What if two equally committed players, one a wide receiver and one a cornerback, are going for a pass in the end zone for the game deciding play? Who gets the blessing of victory? The best prayer or the best player? Faith in sports is an ongoing debate and was the subject of a recent story in USA Today. Tom Krattenmaker wrote a thoughtful
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One of my favorite ancient characters is Diogenes of Sinope. Born in Turkey about 400 years before Christ, he was a student of Antisthenes (444-370 BC), who was himself a pupil of Socrates. His philosophy was “marked by an ostentatious contempt for ease, wealth, and the enjoyments of life.” Diogenes would have had a field day skewering the consumerism and materialism in modern day America. One of the things that I love about Diogenes is his moniker. The irascible philosopher was known as Diogenes the Cynic. What a great name! How cool would that be to have a title like that? It certainly is better than Diogenes of Sinope. I would gladly swap Dave of Garland for Dave the Self-Deprecating as my appellation any day. One story relates that while Diogenes was sunning himself, the powerful and feared Alexander the Great came up to him and offered to grant him any request. “Stand out of my light,” he replied. For a man who
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Recently my bride and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. I wish I could say it has been 30 years of wine and roses. Or,  for my legalistic friends, 30 years of Welch’s and practical cut flowers. But it has not always been easy. Neither one of us came into this little nuptial adventure with any idea of what we were doing. So I was a little disturbed to pick up a publication today that would have told me everything that women wished that men knew. How helpful that little bit of info would have been in 1976 instead of 2006. But I decided to proceed to see if I had figured anything out on my own. The survey was a joint effort of Woman’s Day Magazine and AOL. The title of the article is “What we wish men knew”. Here are some of the findings with my totally objective self-evaluation of my beginning marriage grade and current grade. When you tell
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This has been a hot Texas summer. Even by Texas standards this has been a scorching July. How hot has it been? Thank you for asking. The birds have to use potholders to pull worms out of the ground Farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice to keep them from laying hard-boiled eggs. The cows are giving evaporated milk. The trees are whistling for the dogs. You learn that a seat belt makes a pretty good branding iron. You discover that in July  it takes only 1 finger to drive your car. (Note to environmental hall monitors…I am not making light of global warming. Please work with me on the analogy to follow. I wrote about how it is not easy to be green and evangelical in an earlier post.) We are struggling to keep our lawn alive while trying to be good citizens and obeying the water conservation guidelines. Some flowers planted by our entry way have lost the battle and died. Others struggle to
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My wife has many endearing qualities. But she has one trait that is really annoying. She has a amazingly fine tuned balderdash detector. I toyed with other words to title her detector but decided that even a Bad Christian should show some decorum now and then. Her gift is a problem for me. I am a world class vendor of “balderdash”. So occasionally I find myself in an uncomfortable moment. One of those moments that I used to hate was when Joni would ask me this question. “What is God teaching you?” I hated that question. How can you fake an answer to that one? Even if I could fool my bride (unlikely) I could certainly not fool the object of the question. I would hem and haw and then come to the uncomfortable truth. Not much. And that was a real revelation to me. If I could not answer that question then there is not much going on in my relationship with God. When
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Regular readers of these ramblings have been contacting me this week. Thousands of irate viewers…uhh…make that hundreds….okay….seven people have written to ask what is going on? “Why I have been *&*#$^ banned from your website?” asked one reader who represents the demographic I reach. For a week I received the same message that all of you read. “You (Bad Christian) are not authorized to view this (your very own site) website. Contact the webmaster if you think this is in error.” And therein was the problem. My webguy was busy cruising the seas with his beautiful bride and had no email access. Apparently a new spam filter installed to block some very persistent jerks decided to block all of us as well. Since I could not contact him we were caught in a perfect cyber storm. So please forgive us. And be encouraged that starting Monday you will be deluged with several days of  pent up “Bad Christian” rants! Thanks for
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