The “Is that contestant on American Idol a Christian?” Scorecard

31. On their acoustic guitar they have a “To Write Love On Her Arms” sticker = + 1 point

To add up your score with over a 130 other ideas on this scorecard, visit stuffchristianslike.net.

Stuff Christians Like Book Available Today

Over the past two years, I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of a community of strange people who are experts in the quirky Christian subculture in America called Stuff Christians Like. Jon Acuff, the writer, has invited me to write several guest posts for him when he got tired. Anyway, his book is out today, and that is fantastic! Here are his words from SCL today:

Open the gates and seize the day … the Stuff Christians Like book is now officially available.

Two years to the exact date that the site started, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and several others started selling the book online. I’m not sure if it’s stores yet but it should be soon.

Click here to buy it on Amazon.

Click here to buy it on Barnes & Noble

Click here to buy an autographed copy on Books Christian

Click here to get the audio edition

Click here to find a local Christian bookstore

Why buy it?

1. It’s cheap. Only $9! You can get one for you and a friend for under $20.

2. It’s a great Easter, graduation or “I know you like funny things” gift. (One pastor bought 30 copies.)

3. It’s got 80 new essays, 40 classics and 40 illustrations.

Want to help support it?

1. Tweet – “I got the Stuff Christians Like book from @prodigaljohn – Check it out http://bit.ly/bMYGTm #SCLB”

2. Write a review on Amazon.

3. Blog about it, mention it on Facebook, email friends, tell people on the street etc.

Kerry Wins Photo Booth Contest!

Yep, it was a close race, but Kerry wins! I think the cute picture with his son won the people over.

Maybe in addition to all the other stuff, he should get a gold medal. Anyone know where I can get one?

Congratulations to Kerry for winning the Photo Booth Contest. You are a unique individual who will soon be the proud owner of one unicorn.

A Step Toward Freedom: A Review of Hear No Evil

I almost don’t believe this story. Let me explain.

In Hear No Evil, Matthew Paul Turner retells stories from his upbringing as a music deprived, Independent Fundamental Baptist in Tennessee. His church, complete with a Fourth of July flag-waving Declaration of Independence worship service and a scare-the-hell-out-of-you “terror house” on Halloween, scoffed at any music with a hint of syncopated beats. Turner writes: “Independent Fundamental Baptists hated drums, tambourines, and cymbals because the devil loved them and used them in all the music he sold at record stores.” His church upbringing makes my Southern Baptist crew in Oklahoma look like a bunch of tongues-speaking Pentecostals.

Hear No Evil begins with Turner’s reflection of the anti-Sandi Patty movement among extremely conservative Christians. He has to keep his identity as a Sandi Patty fan a secret, because people in his church might think he’s not really a Christian. Situations like this seem ridiculous to us now, but this was reality for Turner, and his new book explores how he slowly breaks free from a world where fear motivates most decisions and thoughts and discovers that “freedom is an amazing thing”. One place Turner consistently finds freedom is in music.

One of my favorite moments in Hear No Evil is when Turner is in the middle of a piano lesson with his single, middle-aged piano teacher, Ms. Lansing. Turner describes her as an independent spirit, who people in his church would describe as “loony as a Democrat”. Ms. Lansing, a Baptist who wasn’t welcome at the IFB church, encourages Turner to be creative. She says she’s fighting for his imagination: “Without the imaginations of artists, the church will die or lose its ability to help people.” What great advice. This wisdom leads a teenage Turner into a moment where he “hears from God”, and God tells him that He needs him to be the Christian version of Michael Jackson. Turner’s pursuit of this high calling leads him into a mess of trouble and self-discovery.

I almost didn’t believe this story, but it’s part of my story as well. I needed to read it so I could laugh along with someone else who sees the evangelical-fundamental brand of Christianity as misguided, at best. Reading Hear No Evil helped me take another step toward freedom. I’m not there yet. To echo Turner, “I was learning that I didn’t know a lot of things. And I think a part of faith is learning how to become okay with that.“

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If you’d like to get a copy of Hear No Evil, (I think you should) you can purchase it directly from the publisher’s site by clicking here. This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.

Rock the VOTE: Photo Booth Contest

Vote for your favorite Photo Booth Contest entry by leaving a comment on this post. Voting will stay open through Tuesday, 2/16. Winner gets a unicorn.

Here’s a recap of the entries. Click on the photos to see their entire entry:

Entry #1: Katie

Entry #2: Matt

Entry #3: Saskia

Entry #4: Kerry

What a weird and awesome group of entries. Vote for your favorite by leaving a comment on this post. Happy voting!

http://justwallpaper.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/100210-075244.jpg?w=300&h=225

Photo Booth Contest Entry #4

Kerry just threw it on the ground. Here’s his entry, aka Photo Booth Contest entry #4:

Holy wow. Mr. Cyclops, a cute kid with dinosaurs, three eyes, no face, and creepy making-out-with-yourself…and to top it off, he’s a youth minister who wears Castro hats. Mad bonus points. This one may be hard to beat! Are you up for the challenge?

Photo Booth Contest Entry #3

Time is running out to send in your Photo Booth Contest entries! Send them to justwallpaper(at)gmail.com by 1:00pm eastern time today.

At some point this afternoon, voting will begin to see who’s going to be the winner winner chicken dinner of his/her very own unicorn!

Props to Saskia who deciphered my Dutch clue last week. Here is her Photo Booth Contest entry…

Dinosaur in the background? Awesome. Bagpipe guy in kilt in the background? Maybe awesomer. This is the stuff unicorn dreams are made of.

Last Hours to Enter the Photo Booth Contest!

You have until 1:00pm eastern time to send me your photos for the Photo Booth Contest! If you’re just coming to Just Wallpaper from Stuff Christians Like, you can receive bonus points if you send me photos of you dressed as a youth minister (going by the rules of my post) or are, in fact, a youth minister.

Send me your Photo Booth Contest entries at justwallpaper(at)gmail.com.

To recap: The winner will receive a unicorn. In addition, the winner will also receive an old Christian pirate record, Derek Webb’s Stockholm Syndrome, David Goetz’s Death by Suburb, some Burt’s Bees chapstick (my drug of choice), a large bag of Skittles, and anything else I decide to throw in the box.

Here’s how the Photo Booth Contest works:

1) Send me up to five funny pictures of you in front of a web cam. If you have an Apple Macintosh, you can make weird faces using Photo Booth.

2) Once you send them to me, I will post your pics in a series of posts and next Friday, February 12, we can begin voting on the best/weirdest/funniest series of photos. Bonus points will be randomly awarded if the following things appear in your photos: famous people, your favorite Super Bowl ad, dinosaurs, and/or plaid. Get creative…have fun with it!

3) You can enter the contest until 1pm eastern time today.  Then you’ll probably want to get your friends to vote for you. Unless your friends aren’t true blue and they decide to vote for someone who is more interesting…

4) The winner will get a fabulous prize package, which will include a minimum of one unicorn…I will mail it to the winner. Trust me, you’re going to want to win this.

Photo Booth Contest Entry #2

Here is entry #2, from Matt aka @mattyfitz. Is it just me, or does the first one look like the old guy from Up?

Matt requested bonus points for this last photo. He claims Carman (star of Riot) is famous and a dinosaur. We’ll see what the judges think.

Anyway, thanks Matt for setting the bar high for the Photo Booth Contest…very unicorn-worthy. Voting will start tomorrow at some point and will go through Tuesday, 2/16. I want to wait and see if I get any more entries tonight or tomorrow morning.

In Defense of Baptist Missionaries

Recently, a group of Baptist missionaries with good intentions made a poor decision with major ripple effects. Some well-intentioned missionaries from Idaho attempted to bus 33 Haitian kids (not all orphans) to the Dominican Republic after the massive earthquake that continues to devastate Haiti. Now, indirectly, children who need life-saving surgeries aren’t getting cleared to leave the country. Honestly, that makes me angry. All the red tape that surrounds any Haitian child who needs help can’t be avoided at this point, even in life or death situations.

This is really too bad. Sure, they weren’t trying to “traffic” these kids, although that does happen to thousands of children per year in Haiti. However, you just can’t do things like that; you can’t bend the rules just because God has given you a holy calling. Just because you feel called doesn’t mean you’re immune to the law. We must abide by laws, U.S. and international. This group shouldn’t expect to receive special treatment because they were on a mission, although I think the Haitian government needs to realize it wasn’t their intention to steal these kids.

I’m not defending this group. They broke the law, whether or not their intentions were malicious.

Anyway, as a result of this, “Baptist missionaries” has become a bad word. I’ve been critical of Baptists in the past, but today, I’m going to attempt to redeem the term “Baptist missionaries“.

Here are just a handful of Baptist missionaries who I consider heroic individuals:

Joseph Booth was a Baptist missionary to Malawi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became unpopular among missionaries because he wanted the land of Africa to be for Africans, not for Europeans to colonize so they could do whatever they wanted. He did this by teaching the local people to plant, grow, and harvest coffee. This may be the first example of a fair trade coffee organization.

Many people know about Jim Eliot. Jim was a Baptist missionary in Ecuador among the Auca people. He approached the Aucas in a peaceful and friendly manner, but was tragically killed by a group of Aucas who had been lied to about the missionaries’ intentions. Jim Eliot is often quoted for this famous passage from one of his journal entries: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”

Lottie Moon may be the most well-known female Baptist missionary of all time. Although all direct evangelism was practiced exclusively by men at the time, Lottie discovered that the only way to minister to Chinese women was by another woman. Frustrated by those in authority not allowing single women to practice direct evangelism, Moon wrote this in an 1883 article:

Can we wonder at the mortal weariness and disgust, the sense of wasted powers and the conviction that her life is a failure, that comes over a woman when, instead of the ever broadening activities that she had planned, she finds herself tied down to the petty work of teaching a few girls?

This feisty and persistent Baptist belle eventually blazed her own trail, becoming a successful female missionary who was culturally sensitive to the Chinese people’s strange (by western standards) customs. She also formed groups of female Baptist missionaries into a well-run organization of women raising support for missionaries in the field. This eventually led to the annual Southern Baptist Christmas offering known as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. The money raised through this special seasonal offering goes to support missionaries spreading the love and hope found in Jesus locally and around the world. Lottie’s eponymous offering has raised a total of $1.5 billion for missions since 1888, and finances half the entire Southern Baptist missions budget every year.

This is part of my spiritual legacy, and I’m proud to claim it. Even today, Baptist missionaries are displaying quiet acts of heroism that go largely unnoticed and unrewarded; most of these missionaries come from a representational model of missions, and only get attention from local churches on their birthdays or when they need money. Today there are thousands of Baptist missionaries serving the least of these by meeting physical and spiritual needs, and they deserve to be recognized as great women and men of faith.

Don’t let the term Baptist missionary become tainted just because an irresponsible group of them keep showing up on the nightly news.