oh hallelujah!

I could totally dance like that if I wanted to (I don’t).

My favorite part is the part where it goes:

LIKE THIS YA’LL
LIKE THIS YA’LL.

Poor Rich Mullins… I’m sure this is exactly what he had in mind for this song when he wrote it, especially given this quote from his Wikipedia article: “He often called St Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) his hero and modeled his life after him by showing great compassion towards the poor and adhering to a vow of poverty.”

I’m not sure intelligent lighting fits in real well with a vow of poverty

I could be wrong though.

Hey…love the Exodus series. You should create a new category for “The Exodus” that can be linked to.

I’m sorry but my favorite line had to be “Devil, There Ain’t no Blockin’ Us”

That is classic and I plan on using that phrase for the rest of my mortal life.

Videos like this make my proud to carry the name “Christian.” Man, we are so cool. Look how we can dance.

eric you are not wrong. this kind of shit is completely dishonoring to rich’s legacy.

on the bright side, it is a wonderful piece of evidence for those who argue that Christians should not dance.

[...] The demand for quality, the building, the lights, and all the costumes, (don’t know what I mean? See Josh’s post entitled, “The Exodus: An Auxiliary Illustration”) made me queasy. [...]

OK, all I’m saying is that based on Nick & Leslie’s dance video I think Leslie could totally rock this out.
How many HOURS did it take for these people to learn these “moves”. And then someone had to take hours before that to come up with the “moves”? Can you imagine the try outs for this thing? Sad, really sad – but funny at the same time.

[...] After I graduated I started volunteering at the same youth group that changed my life. I met some amazing people, including a boy named Tank. Eventually we got married. We started working for a church, he as the youth pastor, and eventually I joined the staff as the children’s pastor. It was a church of about 500. During that time I realized that the things in church that made me so content before, no longer made the cut. Sermons sounded like regurgitated bull shit. Good musicians, powerful worship, and perfect media shout timing didn’t matter. The demand for quality, the building, the lights, and all the costumes, (don’t know what I mean? See Josh’s post entitled, “The Exodus: An Auxiliary Illustration”) made me queasy. After soaking in church culture with my new perspective I struggled with the realization of the big and beautiful Sunday morning show called church. I also began to see that the bigger and better the show, the more “offering” people gave, and the more offering they gave the bigger and better the pastor’s paycheck became. I don’t care what anyone says, it was all about the Benjamin’s. Or should I say the Cleveland’s? At the church we worked at the pastor banked in over $80,000 dollars a year. Which, by the way, was over twice as much as the next highest paid staff member at the same church. I began to think about the teachings of Jesus and compare them with the churches I had been a part of, and the church in general, (whatever that means), I couldn’t see how the two fit together. Here are some reasons why … from my personal experience … I don’t see the politics of Jesus behind a budget that allocates monies galore for the new building project but leaves petty pocket change for the widows and orphans outreach. I don’t see the grace of Jesus behind a pastor who get’s upset at his overworked and underpaid worship pastor for misspelling a word on the worship lyrics slide. I don’t see the justice of Jesus behind a church that weighs sins on a scale, calling some worse than others and then shuns those “dirty” sinners from the church. I don’t see the love of Jesus behind a church that locks it kids up in a shoddy little room upstairs so they can’t be seen or heard. And that’s the just beginning… I have plenty more frustrations with the church. I don’t believe in being a cynic without alternatives. I hold plenty of new possibilities and new ideas for the church close to my heart. Anyways, this blog has become way too long and who knows if it evens has anything to do with my generation not “fitting in”, but it’s why I don’t fit, actually it’s why I don’t want to fit in. Eventually Andrew and I could not take working and pouring our lives into something that’s priorities and ideals were something we could never honestly defend. So we resigned. We left the church on good terms, and they were sad to see us go. But, just because I don’t fit it doesn’t mean I quit entirely. Even before we quit our jobs working for that church Andrew and I started attending a Saturday evening church service because of the amazing people there. We are there now. I consider it an alternative to the modern church because in addition to amazing relationships, “Saturday Night”, (the name of the church service), strives for authentic community, conversations versus sermons, art, lot’s of beautiful art, and a meaningful role in social justice, here and abroad. My favorite part about this service is the bar afterwards, no there isn’t a bar in the church, many of us go out to celebrate life afterwards, and it’s most often the best times of my week! The service averages about 70 people a week, and we sit around tables, it’s awesome! Something else that makes Saturday Night different than the other churches I have been apart of, (with the exception of my senior year youth group), is the fact that the people I DO CHURCH WITH I also DO LIFE WITH, and that’s pretty huge to me. …And when I say DO CHURCH I mean it, we are the ones that started the service, we are the ones that set it up and tear it down every week, and we are the ones that sing and draw and sculpt during the service. …And when I say DO LIFE I mean it, we are the ones that struggle along side each other through life’s crap, and we are the ones that celebrate with each other through life’s goodness no matter the time and place, (but my favorite place is McNellies Pub downtown because hey have good cheap beer). The poem by Calvin Miller, “My Easy Christ Has Left The Church”, (read it here), is easy for me to relate to as someone who has “left the church”. It also forces me to see how I have myself acted in ways that would make Christ want to jump out of the pew and run away. I leave you with an excerpt: [...]