Now that Barack Obama has sworn in as president we will get our first glance as to whether his use of alternative media outlets was a ploy for voters or a true attempt to connect to a younger audience and offer transparency. President Obama, more than any other politician I know of made use of sites like
Twitter,
Facebook, and
Youtube. One of the most apparent changes in his first 24 hours as president, is the change of
whitehouse.gov. A dramatic change from the previous design of the web page took place yesterday which shows the clean design of Obama's campaign sites.
Only time will tell if this trend will continue. Will Obama continue his internet presence, or will the time requirements of the Oval Office slowly strangle them out? Lets hope it will continue, and change will really take place. Now if we could get churches to follow his lead, and get into the 21st century. Wake up and pay attention pastors; younger congregants want transparency and new ways to connect with their leaders.
John Cade has more on this subject at
threeparts.com
2 comments:
Good word here, man. Good word.
RYC:
Thanks Tim,
First, I think current historical evidence is demonstrating that tongues was not as absent as we originally thought. More and more evidence is popping up showing that we were wrong about that - and sometimes not so innocently wrong. That is, some church historians, with theological dispositions toward cessationism, skewed the evidence by either making tongues speakers look heretical or freak-show-ish, or just denied the existence of the phenomena among them. I think the Montanists were one example of a group that did speak in tongues. Though there were unofficially labelled as heretics b/c their ecstatic religious expressions.
Also, even if tongues had disappeared amongst most people -which it probably did, there is no logical reason to go from that evidence to the ceasing of tongues altogether. That is, there were many things that changed when the church became institutionalized under Constantine and a focus on the supernatural experience of Tongues may have had little place in their practice - much to their spiritual detriment, I’m sure. It could also be evidence of the Holy Spirit’s sovereign withdrawl of Himself from certain forms of ekklesia b/c of their refusal to believe.
I think I Corinthians 14 speaks about tongues in this way, so that’s why I made that comment. Though, I would add that there may be many, many more expressions of tongues that the Bible doesn’t comment on. Paul is not setting limits to the expressions of tongues in I Cor., he is setting limits on how the gift is to be understood in the context of the church gathering.
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