The traditional Christian view of life is get right with God by saying a sinner’s prayer, then wait for him to rapture you away from this awful, sinful world, or die and go to heaven. Sound familiar? This story has captivated the church and is the story that many, many Christians live in.

There is another story and it is well articulated by Tom Wright in his article from Time Magazine. Go ahead, take a look, which story do you want to live in? It’s your choice.

I echo Tom Wright’s view in my book God’s EPIC Adventure:

If you went to the streets today or within the corridors of the church and asked what Jesus meant by “repent and believe,” you would most likely hear that he meant “Give up your private sins (most likely sexual, alcohol, and drug abuse) by accepting Jesus and gain some “inner peace” by believing a body of dogma and joining the local church at the corner of walk and don’t walk so you can go to heaven when you die.” God’s EPIC Adventure, 187.

AND

With the resurrection of Jesus, God created a new world and sent Jesus’ followers off to announce it to the world. If you go to the resurrection chapters in Luke 24, or in Matthew, or Mark, or John, and say, “What do the evangelists think this stuff means; why are we telling this story?” The answer is not, “Jesus is risen again, therefore, we can go to heaven when we die and be with him.” It’s interesting they never say that, those resurrection chapters. Rather, they say, “Jesus is risen from the dead. Therefore, God’s new creation has begun, and you are commissioned to go off and make it happen.” That’s the emphasis. And it’s a new world of justice and freedom; it’s the exodus world, the return-from-exile world, the world where Jesus already reigns as Lord, it’s the world with good news for all, especially, as in the New Testament, for the poor, 213.

Also see Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Here are two audio presentations presented by Tom Wright from Reformational-UK, June 2007. I based my first book God’s EPIC Adventure on his five-act-play model. The second recording starts off a bit low in volume, give it a moment and it will brighten up.

Thinking about God in Tommorrow’s World

Whatever did St Paul do with the Kingdom of God

Here’s a short video clip of Brian McLaren asking me a question about God’s EPIC Adventure. Enjoy.

Two important events have occurred this week. My first book, God’s EPIC Adventure, is in print and I’ve been Simpsonized!

It has been and interesting process starting a publishing company HarmonPress and publishing my first book, God’s EPIC Adventure through that imprint. It’s an interesting feeling to hold a book in your hand and seeing your name on the front cover. For years I have researched and written lots of material. I was used to writing things like, Sweet says, or McLaren says, or Wright says, but when I saw my name appear in that context in the ForeWord which is written by Len Sweet, Griffin says, it seemed a little strange. Brian McLaren wrote the Afterword. You can read all about it at HarmonPress.

Secondly, I received an email from someone who had been Simponized and followed the link to see how that happened. It was kind of fun and you can see the results to the above.

The day came and will go quickly, just like all other days, a mere 24 hours or 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds. Even though we count each day by hours, minutes, and seconds, it seems that the older one gets the quicker the hours fly by.

On my birthday in 1958 I was junior in high school and my dad was sixty-five years old that year. I though he was pretty old or at least it seemed so to me at the time. I was wrong. Today, I turned sixty-five and it seems really young to me.

It is true that I am in the winter of the life span. Lord only knows how many years I will have left and what effect I will have in God’s EPIC Adventure to partner with him in the recreation of his creation. Today, I am alive and am enjoying the time with two great projects. First, is the creation of Harmon Press (named after my dad) and the second is the creation of Missio Dei Learning Community.

Harmon Press has been in the womb since 2001. It’s been a long time getting born, but that’s not unlike lots of projects in life. The seed thought comes, it settles in, and sometimes it sees the light of day. The simple purpose of Harmon Press is to help authors, who have something important to say, get into print so the world can have the joy of reading their words and thoughts and they can have the joy of seeing their very words produced in a book. It’s true, if you are not visible today, the print world is not really open to you. However, with print on demand technology, it finally becomes affordable for an author to produce her or his own work. Our job at Harmon Press is to help these folks accomplish their dream of being in print. To kick of the fray, we are producing my very first book God’s EPIC Adventure which intends to help readers of Scripture have a fare shake at seeing the storyline of Scripture so they can become less fragmented in their own reading. It will take a reader on an excursion through Scritpure from Genesis to Revelation using the five-act-play model from Bishop Tom Wright. Its production target is the first of November.

The second project in hand is Missio Dei Learning Community. Missio Dei (the Mission of God) is being created to attract adult learners in our computer based society to access learning within an ongoing community online and live face-to-face encounters. We are not an accredited school but we do hold the status of being a “religious exempt” school in the State of Washington. We will be using a state of the art Course Management System to deliver courses for busy-in-life folks who won’t have to fight the freeway to get to class. The ultimate goal is to help Christ-followers experience the Grand Narrative of God and find their place of ministry in his Story. We are presently targeted to begin this process in the last quarter of 2007.

Both of these projects will have a web presence and will be fully online soon.

While retirement at age sixty five seems to be a goal, it seems to me as I have reached that age that life is full and enjoyable, and busy at this point with work. Since work is good and not a part of humankind’s rebellion, that’s a subject for another time, let work continue.

The Bible is the world’s best selling book! We own tons of them. Most folks that will read this will most likely own more than one Bible. Why do we own so many Bibles but read so little of it? Unlike other books that we often read, the Bible needs special care in reading. Below is a small bibliography that can help you get the help you may need to read the text of Scripture itself for both enjoyment and spiritual life. Living in God’s Grand Narrative as his new creation brings new meaning to why we live. Just move your mouse over the book to see more information about it.

• The Art of Reading Scripture
• The Beauty Behind the Mask: Rediscovering the Books of the Bible
• The Bible: A History: The Making and Impact of the Bible
• The Bible As Literature: An Introduction
• The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity (The Bible in Early Christianity , So3)
• Birth of the New Testament
• The Book: A History of the Bible
• Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts
• The Cambridge History of the Bible
• The Canon of Scripture
• The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
• Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading
• Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, Second Edition (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)
• The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations
• The Formation of Christian Biblical Canon: Revised and Expanded Edition
• A History of the Bible as Literature
• How the Bible Became a Book: The Amazing Story Behind the All-Time Best-Seller
• How the Bible Came to Be
• How the Bible Was Built
• How to Read a Book (A Touchstone Book)
• How to Read the Bible Book by Book: A Guided Tour
• How We Got the Bible,
• The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford Bible Series)
• The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible
• The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible
• How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth
• The Literary Guide to the Bible
• The Literature and Meaning of Scripture
• The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture
• The Making of the New Testament: Origin, Collection, Text & Canon
• The Making of the New Testament Documents
• Making Sense of the Bible: Literary Type As an Approach to Understanding
• The New Testament Canon: Its Making and Meaning
• The New Testament in Its Literary Environment
• The New Testament in Literary Criticism (Library of Literary Criticism)
• The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism
• The Origin of the Bible
• The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible (Oxford Illustrated Histories)
• The Septuagint (Understanding the Bible and Its World)
• Studies in Early Christianity

Have fun reading and learning!