Pastors, shepherds of minds. Here's a challenging statement: "…all Christians are to be theologians." Your pastor wants to bring out the theologian in you. How does Peter Beck do it for his congregation? Dwell on this: "…my mantra has become “orthodoxy leads to orthopraxy”—right thinking leads to right action."

Don't shy away from the intellectual side of your faith when your pastor brings it up. Take it on!
Is your pastor wondering about developing an academic/scholarly side to his ministry? Here are some points made in an interview about finding that path:
  • "I’ve always loved being very involved in the church and teaching in the academy. I’ve never really drawn a sharp line between the two."
  • "…pastoral ministry may be the best thing I ever did, because nothing has helped me as a professor in the classroom more than being a pastor in a church."
  • "If a student is seeking the Lord with all his heart and longing to please him, and he’s divided between pastoral ministry and an academic career, I would ask which desire is strongest. I trust God is leading and directing him, so which desire is stronger in his heart?"

There are other points in the interview that will help your pastor think about blending the professional and academic dimensions.

The most important statement for me was, "But the Lord also leads by circumstances." Some people might call this the door theory, God opens some doors and closes others. You might consider circumstances the call, and the ensuing journey the pursuit of your calling. I pondered this when I wrote my book, Your Unfinished Business: Find God in Your Circumstances, Serve Others in Theirs. God calls you in your circumstances and guides you toward your calling.

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Your calling is your unfinished business. Read Your Unfinished Business: Find God in Your Circumstances, Serve Others in Theirs to start pursuing your unfinished business.

Click one of the links below to buy the book in your favorite format:

Pastors versus scholars

  • Scholars, like pastors, serve the local church.
  • Both pastors and scholars are called and gifted by God for his glory.
  • Both pastors and scholars are lashed to the Word of God.
  • Pastors should strive to be public theologians.
  • Scholars should strive to be committed churchmen.

Hold up your pastor in prayer and be glad for scholarly inclinations.
Pay attention to your mind. Here's an organization dedicated to theological scholarship, the Evangelical Theology Society. Scholars like these generate ideas that filter into the mainstream and shape the thinking of lay people.

While it's important for seminaries to turn out well-grounded pastors, it's also important to turn out well-grounded scholars. In our media-centric age that values knowledge and creativity, the scholars give us intellectual tools for engaging the culture.

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Your calling is your unfinished business. Read Your Unfinished Business: Find God in Your Circumstances, Serve Others in Theirs to start pursuing your unfinished business.

Click one of the links below to buy the book in your favorite format:

How to thrive in the age of robots

Via Robotics Industry Association, how collaborative robots are part of the workplace. When compliance in areas like safety becomes a focus, that means the technology has become more established. How can people thrive?

Key point: "As a growing number of collaborative robots inhabit the factory floor, safety continues to be a major concern. Collaborative robotics and safety go hand in hand. You can’t have human-robot collaboration without mitigating the risks for injury."

Points:
  • Specs out: "…technical specifications in the collaborative robotics realm was released in February. ISO/TS 15066:2016 Robots and Robotic Devices – Collaborative Robots provides data-driven guidelines for designers, integrators, and users of human-robot collaborative systems on how to evaluate and mitigate risks."
  • The real story: "…it’s a common misconception that if the robot is 'inherently safe' then the operation is safe. Not true."

Impact on the workforce: "The question is how do you achieve that higher output without adding people? Sometimes it’s very hard to add people because of the space constraints. By adding robots, we were able to achieve higher output with the same number of people, at the lowest cost possible with technology that is low cost and flexible."

So how do we help people who would have otherwise been put into roles now taken by robots?
Progress, decline, and the gospel

Via Arts and Letters Daily, a review of Stephen B. Smith's Modernity and Its Discontents: Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois from Machiavelli to Bellow (hardcover, Kindle) that makes for an interesting read. Does modernity really afflict us and set us up for a dystopic future? Smith thinks so, concluding, "The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable…The regime officially dedicated to the pursuit of happiness [the United States] has found the attainment of happiness an increasingly elusive object of desire." Is that really the case?

Points:
  • Modernity defined: "…a handful of core convictions: the value of freedom and equality; the importance of being able to think for oneself; the real possibility of universal enlightenment."
  • Modernity born: "…in the past two centuries those who have moved to a city and entered into ever more cosmopolitan social relationships have experienced accelerating change."
  • Modernity resisted: "…new forms of fearful rural populism and religious fundamentalism have arisen, furiously resisting the main currents of social change."
  • Modernity rationalized, according to the reviewer: "…we can, and should, acknowledge improvement when we see it. Our discontents are real, but so is our uneven progress in the past 200 years in reducing poverty, spreading literacy and lengthening the life span for ordinary people around the world."

Book reviews are useful to read. The reviewers don't just summarize the book, they also bring up points the author may not have considered or considered and disregarded. A review also gives us food for thought. In this case, we have to deal with a dilemma, the grim future in Smith's book and the reviewer's assertion that progress is still possible.

Christians have a third way, a way off the horns of that dilemma. The gospel is good news because it's about an intervention from outside, the Word made flesh. The incarnation happened at the height of the Roman Empire, a response to the dilemma of a oppression by the dominant empire and the good news the Emperor Augustus proclaimed.

So you're presented with 2 alternatives from the same source, the world shows you a dark trend but promises a bright future if you only believe it's message. The gospel of Christ punches a hole in that, giving you a 3rd way, a world that's outside of this one and not subject to the contradiction of decline and progress.




Are we already in the Matrix?


Focus: "Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data."

Points:
  • Big trend: "…given enough biometric data and computing power, this all-encompassing system could understand humans much better than we understand ourselves. Once that happens, humans will lose their authority, and humanist practices such as democratic elections will become as obsolete as rain dances and flint knives."
  • Big threat: "…humanism is now facing an existential challenge and the idea of “free will” is under threat. Scientific insights into the way our brains and bodies work suggest that our feelings are not some uniquely human spiritual quality. Rather, they are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to make decisions by quickly calculating probabilities of survival and reproduction."
  • Big fear: "…we are now at the confluence of two scientific tidal waves. On the one hand, biologists are deciphering the mysteries of the human body and, in particular, of the brain and of human feelings. At the same time, computer scientists are giving us unprecedented data-processing power. When you put the two together, you get external systems that can monitor and understand my feelings much better than I can. Once Big Data systems know me better than I know myself, authority will shift from humans to algorithms. Big Data could then empower Big Brother."
  • Big takeover: "…eventually people may give algorithms the authority to make the most important decisions in their lives, such as who to marry."

Are you indeed the sum total of data collected about you? Are you willing to hand your life over to the cloud? Since the computing power that crunches all that data about you resides in the cloud, I'm reminded of the Michaelangelo fresco in the Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam. God, dwelling in the clouds, is reaching to Adam to give the spark of life. Will that be us, gaining the spark from algorithms instead of God?


Pragmatic spirit, critical mind

From Your Unfinished Business: Find God in Your Circumstances, Serve Others in Theirs (paperback, Kindle) We want to be able to discern pragmatically, so let's mimic the mind of the centurion in the New Testament who sought help for his ailing servant from Jesus Christ. This man, responsible for one hundred Roman soldiers, certainly worked long hours, paying his soldiers on time, training them well in their profession, and properly equipping them for missions given them by the Empire. In his years of campaigning, he probably developed a pragmatic and critical attitude. He was certainly pragmatic, the Biblical account crediting him with building a synagogue for the Jews in his geographic area of responsibility. This act suggested at the very least a practical sensitivity to the local culture and the need for occupying forces to be on good terms with the inhabitants.

He could think critically. Having seen different cultures and encountered diverse philosophies and religions, he would certainly probe for authenticity, closely examining truth claims by others. So when he sent representatives to Jesus, seeking Jesus’s help in healing an ailing servant, it’s not surprising he told Jesus, “Just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man placed under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it” (Luke 7:7–8). He understood if Jesus were the real thing, there would be no need for the incantations and rituals he saw in the other cultures and religions he encountered.

Such incantations and rituals were designed to call down supernatural power, but if this Jesus were whom He claimed to be, He could heal the servant with a word. By giving such a command, Jesus, far from calling down supernatural power, would prove to be supernatural power itself. That centurion’s background, therefore, prepared him to understand the significance of Jesus’ claims and act on that knowledge.

Hmmm. Wasn't expecting that a pragmatic spirit and critical mind would lead to faith.

We’re like that Roman centurion. Whether student, professional, homemaker, or tradesperson, we’re faced with the same daily challenge of integrating faith with daily life. Like that centurion, we don’t spend time pondering theory in an ivory tower or avoiding the world on a desert island. Instead, our circumstances daily call us to examine whether faith is truly showing up in daily living, and our backgrounds cause us to look for those answers with the same pragmatic and critical mind as that centurion.
Moral injury

Via Military Missions Network on Facebook: "Moral injury is not classified as a mental disorder such as the more familiar post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. By definition, moral injury can develop when a veteran experiences or witnesses acts during war that violate deeply held moral beliefs. It may stem from the act of killing or witnessing death and may leave veterans struggling with their faith and experiencing inner conflict."

Other points:
  • "Moral injury also may present itself as the spiritual struggle experienced by veterans who feel they’ve violated their moral code during war or betrayed God."
  • "As a result of moral injury, some veterans may experience shame or guilt and many veterans are seeking forgiveness from a moral authority…It may be God, peers, family or friends."
  • "Even if a person is not very religious, those concepts come from a spiritual part of who they are"


I wonder if other professions can be subject to moral injury. For example, could someone told to prepare a false report suffer a form of moral injury?
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