What is Acts 29?
You may recall Pastor Winfield Bevins from my post last week. Pastor Bevins’ byline on the Resurgence blog lists him as an “Acts 29 Pastor.” Curious as to what that was, I first tried to look up Acts 29 on Bible Gateway, but apparently it doesn’t exist. (Acts stops at 28.) So, I followed the link at the bottom of the Resurgence site to Acts 29 Network.
I couldn’t find any explicit explanation of the name on their site, but I assume their intention is to imply that their work is the “next chapter,” as it were, of the “Acts of the Apostles” (or the “Acts of the Holy Spirit,” whatever you prefer to call it). Their About section says that “Acts 29 Network exists to start churches that plant churches.” They go on to say that their intention is “to plant 1,000 new churches in the next 10 years.” (That’s one new church about every three and a half days, so… good choice not to have a starting date prominently displayed. Good luck with that!) The page explaining their doctrine says that they are “first Christians, second Evangelicals, third Missional, and fourth Reformed.”
Well, okay, so what does this doctrine actually say? Most of it is pretty straightforward. I did like the line: “First, we are Christians which distinguishes us from other world religions and cults.” Heh. Okay, if you say so. As Evangelicals they “believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God,” and you already know what I think about that subject. I’m curious which parts of the Bible they’re choosing to care about when they say that, as Missionals, they “believe that our local churches must be faithful to the content of unchanging Biblical doctrine,” and I also wonder how their churches can do that and simultaneously “be faithful to the continually changing context of the culture(s) in which they minister.” All the bullet points under the list for being Reformed sound pretty traditional to me; some other time I’ll look into what the term means in this context.
Of perhaps more note are the things which Act 29 Network does not endorse. There is a long list.
For example, they write, “We are not fundamentalists who retreat from cultural involvement and transformation, but rather missionaries faithful both to the content of Scripture and context of ministry.” They also write, “We are not liberals who embrace culture without discernment and compromise the distinctives of the gospel, but rather Christians who believe the truths of the Bible are eternal and therefore fitting for every time, place, and people.” (Aside: note the implication that “liberal” and “Christian” are mutually exclusive… also, that liberals don’t use “discernment.”)
First of all, I’m not sure I would say that fundamentalism is generally known for advocating retreat from attempts to transform culture. But even if we take that for granted, what exactly does it mean when they say they’ll be faithful to the context of ministry, if they think there is one set of rules for everyone at every time in every place? It sure sounds like they respect cultural differences, but they have two distinct bullet points in this list proclaiming that they are not “relativists.” I guess they remain faithful to the context of ministry by telling people to change only in the specific ways they need to. But they’re not fundamentalists! They just think the Bible has only one set of truths which absolutely everyone ought to live by!
They also have a statement called Acts 29 and Alcohol [PDF] which lists vomiting as among one of many sins resulting from drunkenness (citing three verses, none of which seem to really say that it’s a sin, just that it’s nasty). I guess you’re just out of luck if you get the flu or food poisoning!
But my favorite thing that Acts 29 Network doesn’t like, other than fundamentalists, liberals, and vomit, is egalitarianism. Yeah, that totally crazy notion that people should be treated as equals, with the same rights. In a blockquote so you can’t miss it:
We are not egalitarians and do believe that men should head their homes and male elders/pastors should lead their churches with masculine love like Jesus Christ.
Well, that sheds some light on this mysterious no-girls-allowed event that Act 29 is apparently promoting in Columbus, OH called Act Like Men. I know many evangelical Christians think wives should be subservient to their husbands, but I always thought “egalitarian” was an unambiguously positive word. If you were going to say that you didn’t think men and women have equal worth, I’d expect you’d find some more positive way to say it. Maybe you “believe in traditional gender roles,” or perhaps you “believe in celebrating the naturally different strengths of men and women.” Both of those are crap (the first slightly more than the second), but at least they don’t sound so blatantly awful. It’s really demonstrative of exactly how anti-woman this group is, that they don’t even perceive a negative connotation from saying, “We are not egalitarians.” Even a genuinely stingy person would probably describe themselves as frugal instead.
I know that some people are less than thrilled when I do these “somebody is wrong on the internet” kind of posts. To be honest, it’s not my favorite thing either. But it feels important. This isn’t just somebody; this is a large group of somebodies trying to start a new church every three or four days. This is truly a network of organizations, spread out all over the world. The Resurgence blog, just one part of the Acts 29 Network, has a sidebar promoting their Facebook page where they have over 14,000 fans. They have more fans than Fareed Zakaria, even if you add together the page for just himself and for his CNN show. I know that’s a silly, random measure, but I think it’s enough to say that if it’s worth discussing Zakaria’s opinions here, it’s worth discussing Acts 29′s.
Also, I hope that a couple of those 14,000+ fans, and some prospective future ones, stumble across this post and give it some real thought. Does this group’s belief system really make sense to you? (If so, please explain it to me.) Is this really the kind of group you want to be a part of?
Grad students, 1…
…Big box retailers, 0.
Did you catch this story in the New York Times? I rarely read anything in the N.Y./Region section, but this was really interesting.
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.
A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.
Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.
They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.
According to a Wal-Mart spokesperson, this is atypical; they say they usually donate their discarded clothes to charity and don’t seem to know why or how this happened. Not so for H&M, apparently.
During her walks down 35th Street, Ms. Magnus said, it is more common to find destroyed clothing in the H & M trash. On Dec. 7, during an early cold snap, she said, she saw about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up.
“Gloves with the fingers cut off,” Ms. Magnus said, reciting the inventory of ruined items. “Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.” The jackets were tagged $59, $79 and $129.
And nobody from H&M seems to be talking about it. Reporter Jim Dwyer writes, “various officials did not respond to 10 inquiries made Tuesday by phone and e-mail.” No one has answered the letter that Cynthia Magnus wrote. Are they embarrassed by their flagrant disinterest in helping the poor? By their demonstration that they’d rather destroy these clothes than let some charity case wear them? Being quiet doesn’t make it any less embarrassing; if anything, it makes it more so.
Well, kudos to Ms. Magnus, and Mr. Dwyer, for bringing this to our attention. I never really thought before about what happens to unsold merchandise. I suppose I just assumed it sat on the shelves until it eventually sold, but then again I’ve never really grasped the concept of “new fashions for spring” sort of stuff. I would guess most places donate unsold clothes, but this article definitely makes me want to start asking.
Rules for prayer
Google Reader recommended to me a blog called The Resurgence. In their words: “The Resurgence is a movement that resources multiple generations to live for Jesus so that they can effectively reach their cities with the Gospel by staying culturally accessible and Biblically faithful.” Hmm, interesting choice, Google. But you’re right, I would certainly find this informative and worthwhile reading.
Sadly, but I think understandably, The Resurgence does not have any mechanism for leaving comments on their posts. I have a lot of questions I’d love to discuss with the post authors. There is a feedback form, and I sent in a message that way inquiring about how best to ask questions on specific post content. (I sent it anonymously, even though it asks for first and last name, so who knows if they will deem my message worth replying to.) In the meantime, I’m curious if anyone out in reader-land might have an answer for these questions that really stick out in my mind.
In a recent post about intercessory prayer, Pastor Winfield Bevins writes,
There are five major areas of intercession that we should pray for in our daily prayer life. Each one represents a circle of influence and authority that God gives us to pray for. When praying we should start with the first area and then work our way down to the last.
The circles listed below are family and friends, church, city, nation, and world. All of those are ostensibly things “that God gives us,” provided you believe in a God who gives us things. On my first reading of this paragraph, though, I thought that Pastor Bevins was saying that God in some way delineated these circles, these divisions. Are the five circles just a helpful mnemonic, so that everyone worth praying for gets covered, or is there some basis for choosing these particular five, scriptural or otherwise?
Also, it feels to me like there is a high degree of “should” in this short passage. What happens if one doesn’t pray for each of the five areas, or doesn’t pray for them on a daily basis? What happens if one starts with the last area and ends with the first, or jumbles up the order entirely? What is the basis for knowing that these are the ways one “should” pray? I know not everyone who prays believes that there are strict how-to rules, but I’m curious, in the case of those who do, what the supposed consequences of failing to follow them are. Does your prayer just not get heard? (Like calling a fax machine line from your telephone?) Or does God actually get upset at you for not following protocol?
On “Our World,” the final item in this list, Pastor Bevins writes,
Lastly, we should pray for the people and governments of the world. Although you may never leave your country, you can still have an influence in the lives of others across the world by praying for them. Remember, it is God’s desire to save the elect. Ask the Lord to speak to you about a certain country that you should pray for. God promises to listen when we pray.
Okay, tell me if I have this straight. God wants to save people. If you ask God to tell you who to pray for, and then pray for them, God will “listen” and, it is implied, actually help those people. Why doesn’t God just help those people in the first place? Why does he have to wait for some random person to pray the prayer he told them to pray?
Also, there’s this whole issue of “God’s desire to save the elect.” The elect basically means “the chosen people.” This sounds to me like a way to weasel out of any apparent failures of prayer. (As in: You prayed for the people of such-and-such country and then they had a bloody civil war and/or their cities were destroyed by earthquakes and/or everybody died of cholera? Well, I guess they weren’t the elect!) And aren’t the elect already, you know, elected? Why is it necessary to pray for people if they’ve already been chosen as part of the group God desires to save?
I realize that many of my readers don’t share Pastor Bevins’ perspective, and may not be able to clarify his meaning. I am genuinely curious, though. What is the thought process behind this understanding of prayer?
Older isn’t always better
The Washington Post has this really silly article about an on-again, off-again diet trend called the “Paleolithic diet.” It consists of eating “lots of lean meats, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables; no grains, salt, sugar, legumes or dairy products.” Unsurprisingly, like most hip and fashionable diets, this is just an approximation of the tried-and-true but boring calorie-counting approach. They give the green light to fruits and veggies and lean meats, but cut out starches and added sugar — that sounds like a regular diet to me.
Of course, the “Paleolithic diet” has added appeal because it’s old. If traditional is good and ancient is better, why not go all the way to prehistoric?
[Fitness coach John] Main says at least half of his gym’s 80 or so members follow the diet pretty consistently, thanks to his convincing pitch that “this is how our human bodies have evolved to consume and process our nutrition” before the “onset of modern agriculture.” (“Modern agriculture” can sound like a disease in Paleo-speak.)
… [Colorado State professor Loren] Cordain writes that our Paleolithic ancestors were “lean, fit and free from heart disease and other ailments that plague Western countries.” Now, he adds: “Look at us. We’re a mess. We eat too much, we eat the wrong foods, and we’re fat.”
Any critical notions are constrained to one paragraph which begins, “Of course, there are skeptics.” Because you know how those skeptics are! Always being disagreeable, with their actual claims about human evolution and the human body’s ability to process various foods! As the reporter returns to Jennifer Jeremias, the star of the article, we read: “What’s important is that she’s never felt healthier.”
I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad diet. Like I said before, it sounds pretty much like normal calorie-counting with an added gimmick. However, it’s dangerous to endorse the idea that if humans did it a long time ago, it must be healthier than and generally superior to anything we do today. There are plenty of other so-called traditional or ancient health/medical practices that definitely result in harm, and even if this one is harmless, it teaches and normalizes an ideology that opens the door to danger.
What blows me away about the whole ancient=healthy idea is the fact that most of the people attracted to it have a great standard of living in the present, and they have no idea how bad things were long ago. Sure, people in the Paleolithic may have had a diet with the “proper balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats,” but they didn’t have, for example, meat thermometers to make sure they never got sick from undercooking it. Pretty sure they also didn’t have refrigerators or freezers. We also have penicillin, vaccines, a deeper understanding of anatomy and genetics — heck, we have the germ theory of disease! I could go on and on. Modern life isn’t looking so unhealthy now, is it?
And let’s not get our facts muddled up, please. I agree that it’s unlikely that many people in the Paleolithic era died of type 2 diabetes or heart disease, but I’m pretty sure that has less to do with the precise details of their diet and more to do with the fact that the average life expectancy was 33.
The bottom line: there’s nothing wrong with a diet that’s high in valuable nutrients and low in calories, but there’s no reason to involve any pseudoscientific hype.
More on gamer stereotypes
By way of follow-up on my post from Wednesday, here are some interesting tidbits from a recent LA Times article (via):
- Women spend more time playing online role-playing games than men.
- Women “play more intensely” than men and “are happier playing.”
- Women play “less aggressively” than men, especially when gaming with a male romantic partner.
- Women prefer in general to play games with others, while men prefer to play alone.
Reporter Alex Pham sums it up in a nutshell, saying
Why does this matter? In part, because developers have puzzled for years to figure out ways to get women to buy and play more games. Figuring out what motivates them to play is a key step.
I think this study sounds right in line with what commenters Chris Guin and Emily K were saying on Wednesday’s post. Gaming on the Wii, “dancing” to DDR, games with complex and inclusive storylines… all these things attract more people to video games one one level simply because they increase the diversity of available games, and thus the probability that there’s a game out there someone will find interesting. But it seems that the particular aspects of group gameplay or more engaging storylines are especially appealing to women, in the aggregate.
Oh, and happy new year, everyone!
Video games for girls
Here is a TED talk from 1998 by Brenda Laurel, software designer and researcher who founded Purple Moon, in which she discusses her philosophy about making video games for young female gamers (via Sociological Images).
I actually owned and played one of Purple Moon’s games, Rockett’s New School, on our old Power Mac back in middle school. Honestly, I found it mildly entertaining while it lasted, but ultimately not worth playing again. It has a plot that you could only deviate from slightly (disappointing given the box’s promise that you’ll “make choices that change what happens”). I never really felt like I did anything — mostly just watched things happen. I didn’t hate it, but it didn’t seem like much more than a primitively interactive sitcom.
I may not be a typical female computer user, and it’s possible that other girls loved it. It certainly sounds like Laurel and her company did plenty of research to back up their design. But this video got me thinking: what should video games designed for girls look like?
Now hold on for a second before you jump all over that sentence. Yes, we’re dealing with stereotypes here. Obviously not every girl would like a “video game for girls” just like not every boy would like a “video game for boys” — and this is true of all the other gendered toys out there as well. (To say nothing of the glaringly false binaries!) But, but, but. Let’s accept for a moment that in order to develop and market a product and ideally keep one’s business afloat, one has to think of the big picture, find a large enough target group, and so on. Some level of generalization is necessary.
The Rockett model of girl’s games hasn’t exactly made it to the big time over the past decade, yet female gamers are a substantial demographic. In 2005, a Nielsen study counted nearly 40% of gamers were female, and I’d expect the numbers are even closer to even now. Perhaps the barely-interactive, storybook-type game wasn’t really what girls were looking for after all, and perhaps that “certain flavor of feminist” was right to point out that the premise is kind of demeaning. Sure, girls do think a lot about the social choices they make daily, and do enjoy narrative play, but must their games be so tightly restricted to those stipulations that the ideal game for them consists of helping an eighth-grader navigate middle school cliques? I doubt it.
Look at the most popular games of this year — it’s stuff like Call of Duty, Dragon Age, Assassin’s Creed, Left 4 Dead. We’re on the edge of our seats waiting for the next StarCraft game to come out. Arguably these are all male-targeted games, though females play them too. Regardless, I don’t think that this screenshot (from StarCraft 2) is intended to remind guys of their daily lives:
Most people don’t want to play games that closely mirror their everyday thoughts and actions. Most people, I think, wouldn’t even call such a thing a game. Most of the games we play — board games, computer games, pretend games we made up for ourselves as children — are based on the fantastic, the unfamiliar, the surprising and new. They incorporate elements of the familiar but give us a new context in which to experience it. If they didn’t, why would we play the game? We’d just go out and live our lives, and it’d be equally fun.
I think the question that game developers should be asking themselves isn’t so much “What do girls think about?” as “What do girls want to think about?” And perhaps also: “How does that differ from what boys want to think about?” I suspect that these questions will lead girls’-game developers to reduce the number of huge-breasted heroines and probably also the extent to which games are centered around gruesome destruction of one’s opponent. Change the average level of testosterone in your target audience, and you’re pretty likely to change their demand for such things.
So what would developers replace those things with? I haven’t done the market research, so I can only offer my conjecture, based on my own gaming experience and conversations with friends. Although I enjoy real-time strategy games like Warcraft and StarCraft, and remember really liking some first-person shooter games like Heretic, the aspects of those games I most enjoy have always tended to be the “building” rather than the “battle” ones. I like the parts where you set up a base, get upgrades, or train for new skills. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I also love games like SimCity and Civilization. (And hey, maybe it’s my girly nature, my interest in social interactions, that makes me appreciate the diplomacy and public relations aspects of games like these.) I’ve also heard of games more in the FPS mold where, instead of walking your character into another battle, you walk them into a puzzle challenge. That’s not typically my cup of tea but I know girls and women who enjoy it.
At the end of the day, I hope people remember that male-targeted games are currently enjoyed by girls and women, and female-targeted games can be enjoyed by boys and men. I doubt that when they began their long line of Sim games the developers at Maxis were even thinking of a female audience in particular, but I’m sure they had a sizable one even before The Sims. “Video games for girls” don’t have to be all about fashion and parties and make-up in order to be appealing; simply by having a premise other than wreaking testosterone-fueled havoc they are making a major step in the direction of inclusivity.
Michael Specter on the Charlie Rose Show
I’m watching Michael Specter, a science writer for the New Yorker, on the Charlie Rose Show right now. I’d never heard of this guy before but I adore him already. (I’m also admittedly not usually a fan of Charlie Rose, I suppose because I’ve fallen victim to the flashiness of modern media — I struggle to stay awake for his one-on-one interviews in front of a black screen for a full hour. The interviews are usually brilliant, though, and this is no exception.) The show’s bio of Specter says he’s just written a book called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives. The interview and the book are about some of the same things he covers for the New Yorker: the current anti-vaccination chaos and its effects, misconceptions about organic food and genetically engineered crops, obsession with vitamins and supplements that don’t do any good … among other things. A few highlights that I managed to type before the moment passed by:
- Insightful line from Specter: “Science isn’t a company, it isn’t a country, it’s a method of doing something.” People often oppose scientific consensus and dispute the results of study after study because they claim that political and business interests shaped the results. To be sure, some funding-source bias may slip through occasionally, and a couple so-called “researchers” pop up from time to time who are outright sleazy. But to portray the entire institution of science as something so malleable, so easily lobbied and influenced, is to misunderstand deeply the concepts at the root of science.
- Explaining that eating locally grown, organic food is a nice goal but not a workable solution to the problems of starvation in the developing world, Specter emphasizes, “We’re not going to be serving everyone Swiss chard from the backyard. We’re just not.” The normally somber Charlie Rose starts giggling and says, “That’s true.”
You can watch the interview here once it goes online, probably later on Wednesday.
Don’t talk about politics or religion
It’s a rule of thumb for polite conversation that most of us had drilled into us as children, here in the US. Don’t talk about politics, and don’t talk about religion. You’ll only start an argument.
Maybe that’s true. After all, merely by saying “I am a member of such-and-such political party,” you are implying that you think its platform and philosophy are superior to the platforms and philosophies of all other political parties. If you didn’t think that was the case, you’d be a member of a different party. And by saying, “I am such-and-such religion,” you are saying that there is a certain set of statements about reality that you believe to be true. That means that other people, who don’t think that set of statements is true, are wrong in their beliefs. You don’t even have to say it outright. You just have to let it be known. Maybe someone spotted a bumper sticker on your car, a pendant on your necklace, a logo on your t-shirt. You can say that you think we should “coexist,” that we should be tolerant and all get along. Those are worthy ideals. But you have to face the fact that if you every commit to any opinion, you’re effectively telling everyone who doesn’t share it that they’re wrong, which doesn’t come across as very “tolerant.”
But that’s okay! I actually think we should be talking about politics and religion more freely. The discord is still happening, when the very existence of Democrats is an implicit affront to Republicans and vice versa, and when religious (or irreligious) groups rally support from within by directing anger at the mere presence of other groups. I think that by stifling conversation, we’re only silencing the argument, not really stopping it. No one gains anything from that.
I really wish I could remember the details of this story, because it made a real impression on me, but sadly I can only offer vagueness. At any rate: I read a news story once about an election happening in another country, quite possibly a country relatively new to the whole “election” thing. The focus of the story was on how the citizens were all eagerly arguing with each other about which candidates to support, all over the place. It was not a taboo topic in the least. And that’s an exciting thing to see, because it means that people are engaged in their democracy, they care about the outcome of the election. Most importantly (to me), they don’t see the election as rooting for their own team, but as a search for the best possible candidates. They’d prefer to get the right people into office, even if it means changing their minds.
Well, I’m sorry that anecdote came across as completely made up; I promise you it’s not. (If anyone remembers reading something like that – or experienced something like that! – and could help me figure out details, leave a comment. I’d bet there are plenty of countries this could apply to, but I only read a news story about one of them.) My point is that when we disagree and argue about it, it may feel a little uncomfortable and unpleasant at the time, but there are major benefits in the long run. After all, what’s more important: that your political party control a majority of seats in the legislature, or that the legislature is as full as possible of thoughtful people who have the best interests of the country in mind? Sure, you’d hope those things are the same, but you have to recognize the possibility that they’re not always. And what if there is one particular deity (or set of deities) who really wants you to live your life in a very specific way or else. Wouldn’t it be good to figure out which deity/deities it was, as soon as possible? (Alternatively, what if there are no deities like that? Wouldn’t you want to figure that out before spending your entire life obsessed with made-up rules and nonexistent judgment?)
“Sure, Z,” I can hear you saying. “I guess it would be great if we could all have these calm, reasoned debates. But how? I’m sure of my beliefs, and you’re sure of yours – we’ll never work it out!” It does seem daunting. What I do is, I try to keep a bit of agnosticism in my attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t come across that way… maybe it’d be better to call it best guess-ism. I feel strongly about my beliefs, having reflected on them and examined them before actively calling them my own, but I try to remember that they only reflect my current best guess. At any time, I could come into new information that might lead me to change my mind – to make a new, better guess. I welcome arguments because they’re the primary way I might get that new information.
I’d like to live in a society where more people had an attitude like that. But I’m open to debate about even that belief!
Astronomy at home
If you’re looking for a constructive way to use your critical thinking skills in your spare time, then I have some good news for you: Galaxy Zoo wants your help!
In partnership with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Galaxy Zoo is looking for volunteers to help with image processing: identifying what types of galaxies SDSS has seen, and trying to understand how observed galaxy collisions may have happened. It might seem like these jobs would be a perfect application for computers. Actually, image identification is harder than you’d think – if it wasn’t, Captcha would be useless – and collision simulations are very cumbersome programs to run. The human eye (with brain attached) is a better tool for these sorts of problems, if you can get enough eyes (and brains) working together on all the data. And that’s exactly what Galaxy Zoo was set up for.
No scientific background is necessary. There are very helpful and easy-to-understand tutorials on how to answer the questions they’ll ask about each image. All you really need is your eyes, and you’ll be contributing to astrophysics research in no time. So go help out!
(Thanks to Elles for posting about this over at Teen Skepchick.)
Is this just fantasy?
I think it’s about time for some lighter fare around here.
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