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I like the way N.T. Wright describes the new landscape defined by Pentecost and the explosive growth of the early church, as related in Acts 2. Jesus wants the same thing to happen in cities today:

Imagine a world without this astonishing teaching! Imagine a society where there was no ‘common life’ built around a shared belief in Jesus! Imagine a world without ‘the bread-breaking,’ or a world without prayer! Life would be bleak indeed — as it often is for many people, not least those who embrace a relentlessly secularist lifestyle, shutting the door on any of these possibilities. And if you lived in such a world, and then suddenly found yourself swept up in this pattern of teaching, fellowship, bread-breaking and prayer, you would know that new dimensions had opened up before you, and new vistas of how the world might be had suddenly become visible. - Acts for Everyone Part One, page 45

Lindsay has a theory that when we come to know Jesus, he takes our preexisting avenues of aesthetic grace and expands them. For example: Before conversion, indie music and theater dramas were the things that made your soul jump up and wave its arms around, but you thought that the Grand Canyon was a yawn-inducing hole in the ground.

Then, after Jesus resuscitated the walking corpse that was your soul, you walk by the Grand Canyon again and are so inspired that you nearly fall off the edge in a paroxysm of John Piper-like worship. You still love music and drama, but now the Grand Canyon is GQ too–all because Jesus has enlivened your heart with his grace so now you see created beauty in more places.

You think the theory stacks up?

Rich Mullins poetically describes something I like to call “happy self-forgetfulness”:

And especially in a day when so much emphasis and so much pressure is put on us to esteem ourselves. I don’t know how anyone can wake up with morning breath and pillow head and feel any self-esteem. That is not the sort of thing that I want to put my faith in. And in the church—it’s unbelievable to me that this whole foolishness about esteeming yourself has leaked into the church. I kinda go, ‘Christ didn’t ask us to esteem ourselves.’

I think if [we] would have asked, I think He would probably say, ‘Look, buddy, you’d be lucky if you could forget yourself. If you could lose yourself, you’d be luckier than if you found yourself.’ It would be wonderful if you knew the names of the trees between your house and where you work, between your house and your church. If you knew that was a tulip tree and that was a redbud. It would be great if you knew the names of the constellations. It would be great if you knew something about your neighbors. It would be a lucky thing for you if you forgot yourself, if you lost yourself.

Couldn’t agree more.

HT: Gospel-Driven Church

Here’s where I take a stab at answering those “What do you believe about ____?” questions. The short answer is that I’m a Bible guy. While we don’t know everything there is to know about God, the Bible speaks clearly to the things that are essential to our salvation and lives down here–things like sin, hell, depravity, grace, atonement, justification.

The Bible also has clear positions on some secondary-but-still-vital issues like homosexuality, church leadership, a Christian’s relation to culture, etc. These things are founded on a commitment to the authority and adequacy of the Bible–which will continue to be challenged by secular thinkers and by liberal theologians, both of whom will need to be lovingly smacked down.

If you’re looking for labels, I typically find myself in the Reformed theological camp. That’s because I’m convinced that God’s sovereignty should be paramount in our thoughts about him and given precedence over the way we happen to feel about his job performance at the moment. However, I don’t really get excited about waving TULIPs and taunting people who don’t like John Calvin.

I’m biblically conservative and culturally liberal, in the sense that I think Christians need to live within their cultures, enjoying the good stuff, dismissing the bad, and salvaging what they can, in order to know and love the people around them.

Finally, here’s a belief statement I wrote which will help to give a little formality to this “theology” post:

Cultures change, truth stays the same: I believe that Sin is real, that Christ defeats it, that the Bible relates it, and that faith in Jesus is the essence of life and the escape hatch from eternal Hell.

Unity on the propositional truths of God’s authoritative, infallible word makes it possible for us to enjoy a diversity of cultural perspectives and voices. In other words, belief in the Godhead (triune, co-eternal and co-equal), Christ (his substitutionary death and resurrection), and salvation (God’s grace-gift received by faith) makes it possible for hard-sweating jocks, wired hipsters and starving artists to hang out together.

The Bible says to have solid doctrine (1 Timothy 4:16), love other Christians (1 Peter 4:8) and avoid needless divisions (Romans 16:17). Apparently God thinks all these things can happen at the same time-and I do too.

I mentioned that I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, which is essentially a mini-city with a thriving music and arts scene, a diverse population, and the most storied and awe-inspiring NCAA basketball team in the nation. My parents were part of a college town church plant pioneered by Great Commission Ministries, and when the church moved to the greater Kansas City area, we followed. This was kind of a let-down in that there were no back alleys to run down with my friends, but cool in that we found other things to do, like rig the local park with booby traps and throw snow balls at Suburbans.

Fast forward to now, and I’m still in the Kansas City area, church planting is still in the air, and I’m still predisposed to throw things at Suburbans (mostly because I’m jealous). On to the important stuff: While I was in college, Lindsay and I met at a church where my dad pastored, enjoyed an awkward friendship for about a year and a half, and started dating so we could relate naturally. That worked out pretty well. We got married in August, 2001, spent a few years learning how to live together, and started making little Vanderhorsts.

God hijacked my dream to pastor a young, hip, collegiate church (it was the cool thing to dream that year) and replaced it with the puzzling, nagging desire to start a new church plant that would take the gospel into a part of Kansas City where people weren’t hearing it.

For about a decade, I had felt a strong desire to invest myself in gospel ministry, so after I completed my English degree (Thomas Edison State College), I concluded that it was time to act on that impulse. Also, I didn’t want to spend my life writing catalog descriptions and bad poetry–so I signed up at a nearby Baptist seminary to develop my theological moorings and prepare myself to effortlessly handle whatever the world would throw at me in the years ahead. Ha ha ha.

While learning about biblical Hebrew, systematic theology, and what the heck the Baptist General Convention is, God hijacked my dream to pastor a young, hip, collegiate church (it was the cool thing to dream that year) and replaced it with the puzzling, nagging desire to start a new church plant that would take the gospel into a part of Kansas City where people weren’t hearing it. I started considering the Bible pattern of putting God’s truth out there in culturally targeted ways that didn’t dull the gospel’s ability to make your jaw drop. I started thinking about what a new church could look like and started talking to people about starting one.

And here we are. Lindsay and I are getting ready for the next step, which will involve training our kids as greeters, collecting money, praying desperately, and bringing a group of humble, others-focused people together to serve Jesus and our neighbors in Kansas City. When the time is right, we’ll go for it.

That’s us. Feel free to introduce yourself, we’d love to hear from you.