I am working on a book with Douglas M. Strong, Sarah Babylon Dorrance, Robert P. McDonald-Walker, and Ingrid Y. Wang. The book is called Reclaiming the Wesleyan Tradition. It is scheduled for publication in September of this year. You can see the cover here.

The proofs just got here, which means we have one more intense round of editing and then we are done with our work. Being a part of this project has really been an amazing experience, and I believe we have created a resource that has great potential to introduce people to John Wesley’s sermons and to help them come to know more profoundly what the basics are of Methodists beliefs.

I am sure I will write more about this later, but for now it is just exciting to see concrete progress and another step toward this idea becoming a reality.

Thank you for finding the new site! I have been blogging now for just over one month. During that month, I realized that there were some things that I would like to be able to do with this blog that I could not figure out how to do with blogger. So, ultimately, I decided to move deeply committed here to wordpress.

I do want to remind you that if you want to continue your subscription to deeply committed, you need to subscribe to this site. Your old subscription will no longer bring you new posts. The right sidebar has links that enable you to subscribe to deeply committed 2.0 in a reader or as an email subscription. For you information, the feed address is: feeds.feedburner.com/DeeplyCommitted

Also, if you have included deeply committed in your blogroll, thank you! Would you be so kind as to update the url, so that folks will be directed here, rather than to the old site?

Because I am still new to the blogosphere, this transition was more labor intensive than I expected. I am glad to be here at wordpress, but even more than that, I am looking forward to putting energy into writing, rather than tweaking widgets and changing the color scheme (so it doesn’t look quite as much like a certain blog that I will not name… this one. Sorry Andrew…

Anyway, welcome to deeply committed 2.0.

This past Sunday was the first sunday of my third year here in Lamont. I tried to start this next year off by first taking a look back. I highlighted some of the ways that we have seen God at work in the past and drew attention to some of the areas where we have room for improvement. If you are interested you can listen to the sermon by clicking on the deeply committed sermons link on the right, or by clicking here.

The Scripture passage I focused on was Romans 12:3-8. This part of the passage really grabbed my attention:

For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.

I believe that the best is yet to come for Lamont United Methodist Church and for the United Methodist Church in general if we take this passage seriously. To me, it says that we are not called to some generic form of Christianity where faithfulness will look the same for every one of us. Instead, it says that God has created each of us with a unique combination of gifts and grace. Each one of us can make a contribution to the church that no one else can match.

That means that we have a freedom to exercise our gifts with passion and enthusiasm. I think it also means that we don’t have to spend a lot of time pretending to have gifts that we don’t have. It also means that if we refuse to exercise our gifts within the church, the church will be missing a key contribution, the church will not be all that God is calling it to be.

Since Sunday, I have found myself wondering what the UMC itself would look like if we were all faithful in exercising the gifts that have been given to us. I sometimes wonder if we value certain gifts above others in the way things play out within the institutional UMC, and as a result we unintentionally encourage members and pastors to try to have these “ideal” gifts, rather than simply using the gifts that actually have been given to them, and trusting that God has given those gifts for a reason.

In light of last week’s post about Derek Webb’s music, I thought I would draw attention to the article in the current issue of Christianity Today that discusses Derek Webb’s new CD, The Ringing Bell. You can read the article here.

I found this quote to be particularly insightful:

Webb is the rare Christian songwriter who calls us to conversation. Rather than merely reciting timeless scriptural truths, he asks listeners to use God’s Word to examine current events. More importantly, he does so without pushing an overtly political agenda. Rather, he asks questions.

By the way, as you might guess, I would recommend The Ringing Bell!

I am thinking about moving deeply committed to wordpress. I like the option that wordpress gives me to have pages and the ability to upload documents without having to include them in an immediate post. Advantages I see of this are being able to upload sermon texts or other documents.

I am looking for advice from those of you who have more experience than I do with either blogger or wordpress. What do you think are the advantages/disadvantages? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

If you are like me, there are albums or songs that you listen to when you want to turn up the volume and sing along because life is good. Then there are songs that you crank up and listen to because they help you to feel the pain that you are trying to find a way to let out. And then, there is, at least in my experience, the hardest to find variety… the music that you listen to because it is actually a conversation. The lyrics resonate with you in many ways, challenge you in others, and help you think through the same old ideas in new ways.

In some ways Derek Webb’s music has played all of those roles in my life. Center Aisle and Table for Two from his Caedmon’s Call days helped me to wrestle with the loneliness that I occasionally wrestled with in college. I have also been known to just turn up the volume and sing along to Daring Daylight Escape and Thankful (also from Caedmon’s days).

But then in seminary I went to a concert to hear Caedmon’s Call. I was honestly going to hear Derek Webb sing the songs that were almost all of my favorite songs by Caedmon’s. Except he wasn’t there. After the concert I learned that he had left Caedmon’s to start a solo career.

And then came album after album that have brought both good music, and challenging, edifying lyrics. Each album has had different themes, but they have all had songs on them that were profound. “Crooked Deep Down” was my favorite on his first solo album, “She Must and Shall Go Free”. He sings:

my life looks good i do confess, you can ask anyone
just don’t ask my real good friends
because they will lie to you
or worse, they’ll tell the truth

because there are things you would not believe
that travel into my mind
i swear i try and capture them
but always set ‘em free
it seems bad things comfort me

chorus: good lord, I am crooked deep down,
everyone is crooked deep down.

and then there are the occasional lyrics that are just awesome, like at the end of “Crooked Deep Down” when he admits to having one thing on his mind, “squeezing me and my camel through the needles eye.”

And then there are the lyrics that just make you stop and think, because they are so powerful and so confrontational. A great example is from “My Enemies Are Men Like Me” from the album “Mockingbird”:

peace by way of war is like purity by way of fornication
it’s like telling someone murder is wrong
and then showing them by way of execution

He is one of the few people who I do not know who has helped me to grow in my faith. I am grateful for his music and his ministry. If you have not heard the music of Caedmon’s Call or Derek Webb, I would recommend them both to you. You can see the full listing of Derek Webb’s albums here.

Last night I realized I need to update my “currently reading” list. I recently finished Free of Charge by Miroslav Volf and was wondering what to read next. I thought, hey why don’t I go and check out what I’m currently reading on my blog. And there was one book left. Then this morning I thought, why don’t I ask for help from the blogosphere…

So, what are you reading? Or, what have you recently read that you would highly recommend?