Velvet Elvis - Part One

Hi all, after reading Mike's first thoughts on Velvet Elvis, I finally got around to ordering it and now I've started reading it. Mike asked if I'd be interested in doing a "blog dialogue" on it, and I think that'd be fun. This whole thing is going to be geared toward us processing our thoughts on the book together. But hey, who knows, add my 3 readers to his 7, and we could be in double digit readership, bay-bee! ;-)



Here are my initial thoughts after reading the cover back and the introduction chapter. And because people like lists (what, you don't?), I'm doing it in list form.

• I really appreciate his note on the back of the cover: "Don't swallow [this book] uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it." I think that line's exactly what should have been on the back of "New Kind of Christian", if you ask me. And this is exactly why Mike and I are starting this dialogue.
  
  
• One of his main points to start the book off is
  
  

  I embrace the need to keep [...] reforming. By this I do not mean cosmetic, superficial changes like better lights and music, sharper graphics, and new methods with easy-to-follow steps. I mean theology: the beliefs about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, the future. We must keep reforming the way the Christian faith is defined, lived, and explained.
  
  

  - page 12

  OK, this is both a dangerous point and yet a good point at the same time, depending on how you understand his words. And this ambiguity is precisely what I am hoping will not happen all too often in this book. This statement is ambiguous enough to be understood to mean "I embrace the need to reform my beliefs of whether the Bible is God's word, whether Jesus was bodily resurrected, etc., etc." Sorry, but that is a dangerous direction to head in. And to be honest, I don't think that's what he means.
  
  But, if you understand the sentence to mean "I embrace the need to take fresh looks at ancient truths, and to be willing to change how I live out my faith if I recognize that a part of my 'faith' is actually only my culture.", then it's great and I fully agree.
• Something practical I've recognized over the past few years is how I've changed in my missiology because of precisely this healthy side of "reforming". Being as much as possible a part of the culture around me, not forming a competing culture. Allowing unbelievers to be a part of our church as much as possible, to feel accepted and loved, and not that we set up a bunch of hoops for them to jump through so that they can be a part. I realized I had kind of had that mentality. That's not because I was somehow taught something wrong before or anything (this is definitely not at all a dissing of my "home church" where I started from!), rather it's because I had allowed my Christianity to actually become my culture, which, to put it bluntly, isn't Biblical. BTW, one book that really put into words what I mean is Radical Reformission by Mark Driscoll.
• Now, note the final words of the introductory chapter:
  
  

  If it is true, then it isn't new.
  
  I am learning that what seems brand new is often the discovery of something that's been there all along - it just got lost somewhere and it needs to be picked up, dusted off, and reclaimed.
  
  

  - page 14

  
  
  
  That's precisely the way that ambiguous statement from above should be understood. I really agree with this, this really resonates with me. It isn't truth that somehow is changing or isn't absolute, it's our view as Christians of those truths that over and over again throughout history has to be recalibrated.