"The Bish" and "The Bob"

Of all the things I would have hoped to have had in common with Bishop N.T. Wright, I don't know why I never even imagined that one of them would be an appreciation for Dylan.

Here is one of the many Wright sermons on the web, this one with a twist. It begins with Wright's rendition of "Blowin' in the Wind." Listen to the first couple minutes if you are someone who appreciates Wright. (There are, as one might suspect, better covers of "Blowin' in the Wind.")

Many thanks to the Internet Monk for sending me searching for this in an excellent post entitled "The Missing Voice of the Christian Counter-Culture." (And many thanks to Jen for sending me to the post!)

You should click on the link and read the whole thing, but here's a little sample with which I could most certainly agree:

"My students will be offered a hundred "Christian" things to buy for every one time they are challenged to give anything away or to use their money to dig a well. Thank God for the thousands of Christians who generously give time, talent and money to help the suffering, but they do so in the midst of an evangelicalism that has found a way to bless every excess of the American materialistic lifestyle.

"My students will hear hundreds of moralistic, pietistic and privatistic applications of the Gospel for every time they see or hear the Gospel lived out in Jesus shaped ways. If evangelical sermons and publishing is our measurement, then economic, missional, socially redemptive discipleship is far less interesting than end times scenarios and diets.

"My students will be encouraged to accept the evils of society as the unfolding of the end times plan a dozen times for every time anyone tells them to go out and personally do something to make a difference in that world. After abortion and homosexual activism, the average evangelical’s engagement with social issues goes off the radar.

"My students will be told that church should be fun, entertaining, cool and better than a mall a thousand times for every time they see a church embodying the suffering, justice, poverty, prophetic truth and radical love of Jesus for the poor and the sinful."

3 comments:

Eyes_Wide_Open said...

"The Bish"....nice.

I agree 100% with everything said there. I'm going ot read the whole article now.

Thanks brother.

JPB said...

Well, I think in England in the 60's they did call Dylan "The Bob" (as Wright does in the exchange); and then the guy he's talking to (it's not a sermon it's an interview) calls Wrigth "The Bish" at one point.

Eyes_Wide_Open said...

Yeah, I saw that he said "The Bish" in the article. That's a great article, by the way. I never knew about "The Bob" but I trust you oh Dylan follower.

Have you ever heard of Shane Claiborne? I really appreciate him and his work and he fits right into the counter-culture voice that needs to be heard (in my opinion).