djByron [Dan Byron]husband, father, christian, musician & technophile ( but not a dj )

The Acts 29 Network blog posted this recently.

With almost every social site offering the ability to post ones ’status’ to the world this is pretty humorous.  If Jesus had the ability to post his status and keep it short what would it look like?

These are a few of my favorites from that post.

• Adam is lonely, really lonely, naming animals…starting with A - Aardvark
• Adam is having surgery today - taking out a rib
• Adam is the husband of the most beautiful woman in the world. Okay, she’s the only one, but she isn’t wearing any clothes
• Eve is looking at pretty apples and talking to a snake. He’s a sly little creature.
• Adam is leaving the garden and shopping for “the perfect leaf” with Eve
• Abraham has a knife in hand but sees a ram caught in the bushes. Man that was close!
• Noah is building a huge boat - really huge boat and the neighbors are complaining and laughing
• Noah is really hating elephant dung and those two chimps are trying my patience
• Moses is walking through the Red Sea…no, really.
• Solomon is writing Songs that all the boys want to read
• Enoch is outta here
• Job is sick of his friend’s advise
• John the Baptist is eating locusts and wild honey and looking for the One whose shoes I am not worthy to tie
• Peter is walking on water-oops, not anymore
• Peter is hating that the rooster crows

Read more over at Acts29.

My thoughts based on the opening pages of Pop Goes the Church by Tim Stevens.

In my Christan walk I’ve been a part of many different churches. I grew up in church, attended a Christian college, attended a few more churches (in a few different states) and ended up back here in New York where I started. Of all the churches I’ve attended, the believers I currently associate with are by far the most “connected”. We’re not what you would consider a huge church (thought we’re not small either), we’re in a small town on the other side of a mountain it’s an awesome place to be. I love it because I know that we’re heading in the right direction. Moving away from “religion” and moving into societal relevance. We’ve managed to establish a good reputation within our community and are becoming more and more relevant. We started on this journey in 2001 when God brought us through a series of new “revelations” within the Word and it’s been an exciting time or us. Though we’ve never been overly “religious”, God has corrected our course numerous times over the past seven years to bring us more in like with His vision. Here are a couple of paragraphs within these first few pages that jumped out at me.



From the Foreword:

“We do not worship the church: we worship God. The local church is the vehicle Christ left us to communicate and share our love for God. When the traditions of the church become supreme, God will seem very irrelevant to people, both inside and outside the walls of the church. As I’ve often said, the tendency of any church is to always look inward and become navel gazers. And when we bend over into our holy huddle, guess what the rest of the world sees. You got it! If we do not look outward intentionally and strategically to engage and become change agents in our culture, we will become self-obsessed and wrapped up in meaningless tradition. That is neither attractive nor helpful for a world looking or real answers to the real problems it faces in this new millennium.” - Ed Young (Foreword, Pop Goes the Church)

From the Introduction:

“I love the way John 1:14 is written in The Message. It says Christ “became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” He came to us - met us where we were. In Jesus’ case, the neighborhood was a rural, agricultural society in first century Palestine. He immersed himself in that culture. He wore the clothes, used the language, and illustrated his stories with the signs and symbols of the day to communicate the Gospel of an upside down king om here on earth.



He didn’t wear God-clothes, speak God-words, and expect the culture to connect. he didn’t spend years learning big words so he could impress but not communicate. he didn’t look for music that was unfamiliar to the culture and expect people to learn to like it.



Jesus spent his time with real people such as Peter, James and John, the blue-collar workers; Martha, the over-extended homemaker; Matthew, the IRS agent; and Simon, the political activist. He watched the popular culture of his day and wove it into his teaching. Jesus identified the needs of the people around him and started there as he taught” - Tim Stevens (Introduction, Pop Goes The Church)

And one very interesting question was posed:

“Would your community be any different if your church disappeared tomorrow? Have you ever asked yourself this question? If your church suddenly disappeared, could the community even recover? Or would they go on as though nothing at all had changed?” - Tim Stevens (Introduction, Pop Goes The Church)

My answer to this question? I know that there are people that would definitely take notice if we closed our doors but there’s still work to be done!

Click here to buy the book from Amazon and follow along!

My copy of Pop Goes the Church came yesterday from Amazon. I’ll post my thoughts as I read through it.

Stay tuned…

“Whether you’re a regular attendee, a leader, or have yet to step foot in a church, you may have questions about church that aren’t being answered, How can the church remain relevant while communicating the unchanging integrity of God’s truth?

Author Tim Stevens makes an inspiring case for leveraging pop culture to reach out to people in the language of their lives. He offers a new perspective that gives relevance and impact to the church by using popular culture‚Äîmeeting people in the real world with words, sounds and images that speak to them. He encourages us to get out of our comfort zones and look people in the eyes, meeting them wherever they are, relating to their problems and society’s challenges‚Äîeven celebrating pop culture, where there are exciting signs of spiritual seeking.

Pop Goes the Church will open your mind to church in a way that breaks down walls, engages the culture and speaks to a generation that needs to hear the good news.”

- PopGoesTheChurch.com