The starting caveats: I don’t think drinking alcohol is a sin. I don’t think dancing is a sin. I think both are things that, without self-control (as is the case with much in life), can go far past the two prior statements I’ve just made and become a very huge problem.

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In reading a post at Slice about the Mars Hill Red Hot Bash, I can only say, with great theological eloquence, that I don’t get it. A dance and champagne bar at a church? I wondered if I was, perhaps, misunderstanding what MHC Ballard Campus was: is it, indeed, a church? Or some kind of Christian rec center of sorts?

Perhaps I’m too rural farm girl. I was recently at a Christmas party with very fine Christian people who were sipping on martinis and wine and talking about all kinds of exotic drinks and discussing fine literature, and though I didn’t feel uncomfortable and although I understand this was a private party not associated with a church function, I realized I carry around a kind sterile and winter-like mindset that makes reading about a party at a church, such as the Red Hot Bash, seem completely bizarre. Perhaps it’s an over-riding guilt and isolation issue that makes people from my background live rather strict lives which, in all honesty, don’t seem a bit deprived in any historical sense of the word but, in comparison with less rural churches having dances and parties and all kinds of get-togethers at church….well. We have meals after church, at most, sitting around talking with each other.

I once read about a singles dance at a church, and remember thinking it was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard of. Why would you have a dance at a church? I thought at the time. What is the point of a singles dance? You don’t get to know people well at a dance. Wouldn’t a different kind of setting be better? Can’t you go to a dance anywhere? What is the benefit of having the dance under the umbrella of a church? Less groping?

So, I start with thinking of definitions. What is the church? Is it the building, or the body? Is the building a place where the body meets for worship only, or is it a kind of general, all-purpose center where the real church, the body, can interact in both social and spiritual ways? Is holding anything in a church in order to bring people into the building little more than pragmatism, some sort of Christian capitalism that deals in humans instead of money?

Pleasure is a strange thing. I often read of the feasts in the Bible, the grand wedding celebrations and suppers and banquets, and wonder about how different my view of the proper way of having church is. Or the proper way to be church. The proper way to view enjoying the company of others, of my fellow Christians. The proper way to view pleasure through the lens of self-control and not through the lens of no-control or all-out feeding frenzy.

I know that growing up as I have has put a mindset of “do not waste be a good steward” locked into my head, and so thinking about money spent on a church dance immediately becomes a comparison of thinking how many tracts Gospel for Asia, for example, could have purchased. But I wonder at the rightness of always thinking that way. There are those examples of such great feasts and celebrations in the Bible, and if the church is the body and not the building, the body was very much a part of those feasts. The church was to experience the pleasure of each other’s fellowship, in a sense.

I seem to struggle with falling into the trap of being either an ascetic or a gourmand. I would very much like to do more things at church, like the Valentine’s banquet we had at our church this past February. Granted, there was a little Bible study in the midst of the evening, and there was no swing band or champagne. And the decorations were simple and crowd small. But it was fun. Life isn’t supposed to be a sour-faced dour grump-fest; we are to enjoy this gift of life that God has given us through art and music and good food and friends some of the time.

I would love to hear thoughts on the church and enjoying the pleasure of the company of our fellow Christians and what being church is, in this regard.

I still think the Red Hot Bash sounds weird. Maybe I’m not West-coast enough to get it. If any church in North Dakota had a dance and champagne bar, something would really hit the fan. I understand there is a cultural issue at work here. But I still think it’s weird.

(For you non-geeks out there, “!=” means “does not equal”. We now return you to normalcy.)

Please hang on with me on this. This may, at first, come across as simply an apologetic for Mark Driscoll. But I’m merely using him as an example — that we recently cited, no less — for a much broader point that I’ll get to.

In Tim’s recent plug for Mark’s message on the first part of Philippians 3, one commenter jokingly said:

That’s the first Driscoll sermon I have heard, and there was a disappointing lack of potty language and emerging concepts. Not like what I was told by ODM’s. I liked it.

A couple follow-up comments were made stating (accurately) that Driscoll has distanced himself from the EC, but doesn’t toss the whole thing out the window.

If I may paraphrase Barbara Mandrell and George Jones, Mark was emergent when emergent wasn’t cool.

He was in the movement back before chunks of it developed some of the beliefs with which he is in disagreement. Because of this, he had the advantage of seeing that there are aspects of the movement with which he does still agree. And so his later distancing himself was not a wholesale “baby with the bathwater” thing. He hung on to the parts that he still agreed with, and maintains friendships with those with whom he theologically disagrees.

Many today don’t have that advantage. And, to be honest, it’s human nature that if the first thing you hear from an ECer is something with which you strongly disagree, you may ignore him completely thereafter.

Note that I said it’s “human nature” — I didn’t say it was “right”.

This is, unfortunately, how many Christians operate. They equate being in non-agreement with something to being its enemy; sometimes, even when the stuff that they don’t agree with is non-essential. (And, no, I’m not getting sucked into an argument over the definition of “essential”.)

I have to count myself among the “many Christians”, as I know that I am sometimes guilty of the same thing. Whether it’s Steve Camp telling us that Driscoll is lying when he says that he wants to pursue humility or John MacArthur unequivocally telling us that Doug Pagitt is going to hell, my tendency is to ignore (or severely discount) anything else that comes from the mouth, pen, or keyboard of these men.

And even from a pragmatic standpoint, that’s wrong. Steve was a great songwriter (I’m not familiar with his current work, or I might say “is”). And when he’s concentrating on exposition, there are very few that hold a candle to the vast majority of MacArthur’s teachings.

But let’s delve even deeper. Scripture is loaded with examples of God using the most unlikely of vessels. And lest we think that we are reading too much into that, 1 Corinthians 1:27-29" href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%201:27-29;&version=50;" target="_blank">Paul tells us explicitly:

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.

We see, then, that it’s not just the great songwriter or the solid teacher through which God speaks. So, I would caution us not to shut out someone with whom we disagree, because what we are doing when we do that is bordering on blasphemous — as we tell God that He is incapable of speaking truth to us through anyone that He pleases.

God is not simply truthful — He is Truth. So when truth is spoken, He is in the midst of it. Now this is not an argument for a “divine spark in everyone” or pantheism. There is (obviously) a great distance — in logic, if not solely by definition — between omnipresence and pantheism. So if we shut out someone who is speaking the truth, we are really shutting out God.

That’s not something that I think we really want to do.

The only thought I had when reading this article was “DUH!”  And yet, the ODMs still see no need for churches that focus on preaching a biblical message through a method that speaks to a generation that sees little worth in the church.  You do the math.

On a completely unrelated note, I found it funny how Silva is trying so hard to pin Bell over a message he has yet to hear.  He feels this new assignement from God himself is so important that he needed to post this article twice.