CHERRY PICKING???

Yesterday, Mrs. Ref took both The Kid and Hoosier Kid to summer camp. Due to road construction and location, it's about an 11 hour round trip from where we live. We meet the Hoosiers in Bozeman (the new mid-point between our respective towns, which is a whole lot closer than .... oh .... someplace like Blue Earth, MN).

After church, our foreign exchange student went off to go hang out with one of her friends for the day. That left me all alonesome in the house. I happened to be channel surfing (because, you know, Sunday afternoon TV is just not great without football, and getting stuck watching a 19 inning BoSox/ChiSox game or 13 inning Astros/Cards game just doesn't do it for me), when I ran across TBN.

Normally I don't pay attention to that, and normally I try to click through so as not be be blinded by all that gold-gilt stark white furniture that is somebody's idea of heaven ... ish. However, they were interviewing Joel Osteen and his Lovely Wife about their ministry and their new building etc. He was talking a little bit about his dad, a Pentecostal minister, and his role in taking over dear old dad's ministry. And I heard this:

God does something new with every generation . . . You need to change with the times.

I thought I had misunderstood at first. But no, here he was talking about God doing new things with every new generation and that we needed to change with the times to accomodate God's will into the current culture.

Did he run this by James Dobson or Pat Robertson? Do the people on TBN really understand what he is implying with that statement? Is the rich-white-male dominant fundagelical culture really ready to buy into that?

On the other hand, I was only channel surfing and didn't catch the entire interview. So maybe when he is talking about doing something new and changing with the times, he's only talking about watering down the gospel into a feel-good-be-prosperous-because-God-loves-you kind of thing and moving your church into a former arena called the Compaq Center.

And, of course, maybe I'm simply cherry picking selected statements that I want to hear. "God does something new with every generation . . . You need to change with the times."

So maybe he wasn't talking about women bishops, gay clergy or full inclusion regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation afterall.