Congrats on becoming a daddy! It’s a fantastic new world that lay ahead of you.

Now, in regards to your post: I love this article. It might be one of my new favorites. I actually affirm the role and responsibility of the church in training its members for times of reflection.

I would also like to propose that this is one of the reasons that so little good congregational worship music is being produced these days. Church Worship Departments all across the nation need to spend more time in reflection and less time on service planning etc. I apprecaite groups like Sovereign Grace Music and the various bands that play at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, not only do they write all their own music, but they write realy good music! I can only imagine that it comes from times of reflection and prayer.

Great post!

I’m praying that everything will go well with the delivery and recovery.

Ps. Get off CAPC today! You just became a father!

At the moment I’m at the hospital… my wife is in labor! So I probably am not in a state to answer fully.

Scott, I think your question is a great one. I agree that this isn’t a problem simply solved by a long Sunday School series. I’ll think through some possible longer answers later, but my short answer is that discipling relationships and home groups should be a key factor in encouraging each other to bring peace and time for reflectiono into over-busy lives.

Alan, I think you’re definitely right. Too many churches think their moral responsibility for each other stops when the church member walks out the door, but I don’t see any reason to think that’s true. As the culture presents increasingly complex moral problems and challenges, we as Christians must find ways to respond with proportional corrective force in each others lives.

Maybe more when my son has arrived!

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I just got around to reading this this morning. What an uncomfortably convicting post!

Issues like this one will be increasingly important for the Church. As with many insidious aspects of our culture, Information appears to benefit us when it can actually enslave us and make us more susceptible to idolatry (consumerism, personal entitlement, etc). It will certainly not be an easy thing to address in discipleship, but if we know that there is a great danger here, don’t we have a moral imperative to hold each other accountable in this regard?

For all the efficiency that many present day devices offer, they also have the power to control us. This is manifest in a thousand ways, but one form that’s rather obvious to me is educational method. Even in seminary, there is a poverty of study that involves sustained reflection on a single theme.

I’ll be doing a 3 credit study this summer that will involve reading over 4000 pages of somewhat technical writing in three months. To me, this is insane. There is no way that I can really digest the substance of the material in that time. I would much rather spend three months slowly working through the core 600 pages or so, taking notes, reading commentary and so on. But the tendency to reduce education to data intake is sickeningly pervasive.

So, yeh, I hate it, and I’m with you on the need to confront it. There’s some sort of insidious idolatry about it, though I can’t quite put my finger on it yet. Still, I wonder what it would mean to integrate awareness of the problem into mainstream Christian discipleship programs. To be sure, patience, wisdom, and meditation are desirable for the Christian life, but I’m not sure what the proper context or structure is for teaching these things. For example, I would be suspicious of a 6-week Sunday School curriculum that focused on the need for solitude and peace. True or not, I don’t know that it’s appropriate to the Church’s educational ministry. Time seems better spent teaching people the Scriptures directly. Do you have some ideas?

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