Wednesday, June 10, 2009

House Hunting

Some time ago, when Westside began talking to us, I began looking around at buying a house in the Murray area. Apartment living is nice, but so is having a place of your own, a yard for a puppy, and the lack of noisy neighbors moving couches all hours of the day and night.

Looking for a house is a lot like going to the store for a shirt. You have a pretty good idea what you're looking for when you go. With a cup of coffee in your hand you scour the ads, the website, and you look for what other people are wearing and how it fits them. Then, when you go to the actual store, you look at 2 or 3 top choices, and some other ones just to be fair since you're already out.

When you realize that you can't afford the one you really like, or when you see it in person it looks hideous, you retreat and sulk for a while and make the statement that you have nothing and will never find anything. Then you buy a loom and start thinking about making your own shirt, until all the headaches associated with that come to mind and you decide to give Old Navy another try.

After some more looking you decide to go for the markdown section. Never being trendy or cool, this is the place you should have looked all along. You dig and dig and find a shirt with a stain on it, another one that looks like it was in a 70's disco movie, and then you find it! How could it be overlooked, you ask.

You begin to wonder what is wrong with it until you realize that somehow or another, it fell to the clearance rack and it is a shirt you can afford and you will like. You frantically run to the front to check out before anyone else starts to negotiate with the manager for the same shirt, and you excitedly tell people about it, put it on Facebook, your blog... um, well... yeah :)

You then wear your shirt proudly, and know that for years it will fit perfect and never go out of style because it can always be washed.

That's pretty much buying a house in a nutshell, except a shirt costs $20 and you don't sign a mountain of paperwork to get the shirt. You know, buying a house is nothing like buying a shirt. What was I thinking! Sorry for wasting your time

PS- Here is the house though, in case you care to see it :)



Interesting...

Came across this from Russell Moore's Twitter page this morning. It is a commentary on a new work by Rob Bell. Many youth ministers are familiar with his NOOMA videos, and his impact on the evangelical subculture has been well noted. Bell is however associated with the "emergent church" movement. I have no problems with differing methodologies, and even different ways about doing church to meet the needs of a post-modern, post-Christian culture. However, the point at which I break (and many others have as well) with them is over a fundamental shift on doctrinal issues.

Many of the historic orthodox positions of the church are up for debate or even exclusion by many in the Emergent movement. I believe a fundamental issue for Christians is the nature of Truth, that it is both Objective and Revealed, and that Truth comes from the person and nature of God Himself. The debate over Truth is considered in the Emergent movement, and so are other views such as substitutionary atonement, men/women and their roles in the church, morality and the definition of sin, and even the character of God. The traditional view of God as Father/Son/Spirit has in many circles been replaced by Creator/Redeemer/Sustainer, in essence losing the gender language.

I submit this link and encourage you to come to grips with the issue at stake. The rise of the feminine God movement is here, and we must have an answer for those who would seek to undermine what has been taught throughout the centuries. We must be able to explain that the Fatherhood of God is part of His goodness, and that while God is Spirit and has no physical form, He has chosen to reveal Himself to us in the masculine, and we are not to redefine how He has revealed Himself. God is all good, and He is both the warrior king and compassionate parent. But to say that He embodies "she" is a reduction of God's own revealed nature to us.

Disagree if you will, but I will challenge you to follow out what a shift in the perception of God means for the church, evangelism, and the nature of theology itself.

Suffice it to say, I never had planned to use anything Bell put out in my own ministry, and I never will. Theological error can never be used when it is "relevant." In that regard, I stand as a dinosaur on Jude 3. People like Mark Driscoll, my friend Rob Turner, and others who stand on theological conviction but seek to reach the culture are men I greatly admire in this time of confusion.

Article - http://www.cbmw.org/Journal/Vol-14-No-1/Rob-Bell-s-Feminine-Images-for-God

SDG,
Scott

Well, it's almost over!

Sorry for the long delay in posting, the last few weeks have been very eventful!

For more frequent updates, find me on Twitter: ScottMDouglas

A few weeks ago, Carrie and I announced to our church that we would be leaving to pursue a ministry opportunity in Murray Kentucky at Westside Baptist Church. It is an awesome opportunity for us, to be closer to family, and to be able to invest much more of our time and effort into the ministry of a local body. There are many great things we are looking forward to, and we are very excited about the chance to pour Scripture and time into student's lives in the hopes of seeing Kingdom impact. I personally am very excited about the opportunities to be discipled and mentored by our senior pastor, and for the chances to be part of the pastoral ministry of the church.

We leave Broadmoor with many fond memories and will cherish the friendships that have cultivated since our time there. If you are ever in the Murray area, stop by and say hi!