Author Archives: Mark Hughes

Last week William Swinimer, a Grade 12 student was suspended from his Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin, Nova Scotia for five days.  The offense?  Wearing a T-shirt that read Life is Wasted without Jesus.  Swinimer wore the shirt for several weeks and ignored requests from his Principal to refrain from doing so. Finally, the Principal suspended him for 5 days in hopes that he would come to class the next week wearing something else.  (For the record, no teen should ever wear the same T-shirt for several weeks regardless of what it says on it.  It is possible he was sent home for a week in hopes the shirt would at least go into the laundry.  Just a thought.)

When Swinimer returns to school Monday he plans to continue wearing the shirt every day, and is even willing to risk not graduating with his fellow students if that is what it takes to stand up for his freedom of expression.  The main offence according to the School Board is how the slogan is worded.  If the shirt said. MY life is wasted without Jesus, they say that would be acceptable.  Their claim is that the shirt can be interpreted as being a slight against other’s faiths or those of no faith at all.  Swinimer insists that that is not at all his intent and has no ill-will or criticism against non-Christians.  He merely claims it is his constitutional right to express his faith and he is not going to comply with the school or school board’s requests.

Before we go any further with this we do need to ask the question if the slogan in question is indeed offensive or not.  I think the best way of doing that is by simply wording it from the perspective of other faiths, and then asking ourselves if we are offended.  Let’s try it.  If I saw a Muslim wearing the T-shirt, Life is wasted without Muhammad, I would consider that an expression of his faith and not take any personal offence.  Although I do not agree with the sentiment it certainly does not incite hatred or violence.   A T-shirt that reads Death to the Infidel on the other hand is in a whole different category.  Let’s try a few others.  Life is wasted without Buddha.  Sure, why not?  Life is wasted without Krishna.  Fine.  Life is wasted without Darwin.  Whatever.  Life is wasted without Led Zeppelin.  I hear ya.  Life is wasted without Abba.  Getting close to the line.   Life is wasted without Charlie Sheen.  We should be so lucky.

No, I think most would agree that the Principal and the school board are off side on this one. If the T-shirt simply said Let’s get Wasted we would not even be having this debate.  What is really at issue is the new intolerance.  The intolerance of tolerance.  Those that claim that they want to ban the T-shirt in the name of tolerance, are they themselves being intolerant.  The fact probably remains that if Swinimer was wearing any one of the other T Shirt slogans I mentioned he would still be in school.  It is only because he was wearing a Christian T Shirt that he became a victim of the Tolerance police.

In our culture today you cannot (and should not) criticize anyone’s religion, but Christianity is fair game.  It has become open season on Christians.  We routinely get called hatemongers, bigots, homophobes, racists etc.  All without cause or evidence.  Nobody cries foul, nobody gets censured when it is done in the media or in the public square.  Christianity is without question the most persecuted religion in the world.  Michael Horowitz, a U.S. Jewish activist who has written on Christian persecution contends there is a “blissful lack of awareness to this fact that is fostered by preconceptions and conventional wisdoms that lead many in the West to dismiss anti-Christian persecution as improbable, untrue, impossible.”

Horowitz is right.  We have been told for so long that we are the persecutors we have failed to realize that we have become the persecuted.  For the most part we sit quietly by as our faith is attacked form every side.  The media paints us intolerant, hate filled, religious zealots who are against women and gays and drinkers and gamblers and prostitutes and just about anyone that wants to have a good time.  Science portrays us as ignorant, uneducated peons that blindly follow mindless fables.  Radical leftists like to attack us as being war mongers and greedy capitalists that hate the environment and health care.  Others think we are so gullible that we are lead by manipulative hucksters that are just after our money so they can buy themselves Rolls Royses.  Everyday the impression of who we are becomes further and further away from the Christ following lovers of humanity that want to give every person an opportunity to hear the good news that God loves them and has secured a glorious place in eternity for them.  So when I see a 17 year old High School student in Nova Scotia that says, “No, I will not be stripped of my right to religious freedom”, I say… good for you William, I am behind you all the way.

Recently a friend lent me a Blu-ray copy of the movie In Time starring Justin Timberlake. He thought it would be right up my alley.  He was right.  I will warn you that if you go into this one with too critical of a mind, you will not enjoy it at all.  It is not always the best acted and there are some glaring holes in the plot, but it is easily the most original and cleaver story line I have seen in a very long time.

I can tell you this much without ruining the story for you – It is set in the year 2061 where the secret of eternal life has been discovered.  However in order to keep the population under control they have to limit the number of years a person can live.  Everyone gets the first 25 years at which time you stop aging.  After that a digitally installed clock implanted in your arm starts and you have one more year.  I know, not a radical departure for a sci-fi flick so far.  The novel part of the story is this; time is now money… literally.  People are paid for working with minutes, hours and days, all added to you arm clock, (which they sometimes call a ‘watch’).  Everything you purchase you must pay with time which is immediately subtracted from your clock.  A cup of coffee for example costs 3 minutes.  So every purchase and decision you make determines how much longer you live.  People who run out of time die instantly, which they refer to as ‘clocking out’.  There are time bandits, so to speak, that are called ‘minutemen’ and police that are called ‘time keepers’.  People of different economic status live in different ‘time zones’.  The plays on words go on and on. The expression “I’m running out of time” will wear a little thin for some, but I didn’t mind it.

I don’t want to give away too much, but Timberlake’s character Will Salas discovers that there is actually enough time to go around for everyone to live a reasonably long life, but the ‘rich’ have figured out a way to hoard the time to themselves and some have 100′s or 1000′s of years. They loan and broker time at unreasonable rates of interest (advertised as Time Shares) and ensure that the poor die young so that they can live forever.

The social commentary that the producers are making is clearly a reference to the modern day manipulation by the rich of the world’s financial system, stockmarket, banking etc.  And make no mistake about it,  like a slot machine at the casino, the whole system is rigged so that they will win and you will lose.  The economic meltdown of 2008 that caused some two million Americans to lose there homes since that time was completely man made.  Known today as the sub-prime mortgage crisis, using a complicated scheme of investments and mortgages companies like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Countrywide Mortgage and others effectively assured that millions of people would be put into homes with mortgages that could not afford.  When the homes were forced into foreclosure, which they knew was inevitable, it was not the banks that would lose, but individual investors and pension funds that were sold the bad mortgages bundled as high quality investment instruments.  Many people lost both their homes and their pensions.  Instead of sending the CEO’s of these companies to jail, which they should have, the Bush and Obama administrations then gave them a trillion dollars in bailout money.  These companies then went out and used the bailout money to purchase stocks at rock bottom prices in a market that collapsed under the weight of the crisis they created.  They made billions and gave themselves multi-million dollar bonuses for ruining the lives of others.  It seems almost too bizarre to be true but I assure you it is.  I wrote a blog on it with more detail back in 2009,  you can read it here: GREED

And you absolutely need to take the time to watch this parody done about it by John Bird and John Fortune.  It is the most accurate and entertaining description you will ever find of the criminal nature of the global economic meltdown.

Getting back to the movie, for me the most important message of In Time was not the metaphor for financial corruption and greed.  For me it was Will’s (Timberlake) attitude towards time.  Throughout the entire movie his clock is always running down to zero, but whatever time he does have he freely shares with others.  For me, that alone made the movie.  While most others were hoarding and protecting very minute, he is giving it away regardless of how little he has.  I am always inspired by people of generosity.

The reality is that today people’s most precious commodity is ‘time’.   Rush, rush, rush… and because we have become so busy we would rather give up our money than our time. With the exception of the church, volunteerism is way down in North America.  People would rather throw a few dollars at some worthy cause than actually get personally involved.  Most have become very stingy with their time.  And it is not like we are using it wisely.   Folks will spend hours in front of a TV watching shows like Dancing with the Fat American Celebrity Losers and even more time in front of a computer screen managing cyber friends and shopping on Amazon.

Eph 5:16 declares redeeming the time, because the days are evil.   Time really is our most precious commodity.  Unlike Will Salas we never really know how much we have left on the clock.  We really need to quit wasting our time and live everyday to the fullest and maybe, just as importantly, we need to start giving it away.  The only thing that we do on this earth that really matters in eternity is what we did for another person.  The money we made, the car we drove and the house we lived in is all forgotten by the time we have cooled in the grave. But the ‘time’ we gave away to make this world a better place for another… that lives on for eternity.

Easter at the Rock can only be described as an extraordinary experience.  On Good Friday we do a worshipful and ‘almost’ traditional service centered around the passion of the Christ and His cross.  It is beautiful, touching and meaningful.  Easter, however, is something all together different.  It has always been about celebration and joy… for Christ has risen.  But nobody on the planet does it quite like Church of the Rock.  We have taken the amazing story of the resurrection and have presented it in modern parable form that can only be described as ‘Hollywood does Easter’.  Donning sets, costumes and a home grown script written by ‘yours truly’ we have had some of Hollywood’s finest masquerading as the Christ.  In The Wrath of Khan it was Captain Kirk who died and rose again.  The next year it was Captain Jack Saviour (Sparrow) in the Pirates of the Galilean.  I appeared as the villain Captain Barabbas (Barbossa).

Last year it was Westley from the Princess Bride of Christ.  I did a cameo as Miracle Max and if you are watching on television this Easter Sunday you will catch at least a  snippet of my performance doing the memorable “he’s only mostly dead” scene.   One year I did my best impression of Michael Jackson in Robin of the Hood.

This year we are pulling out all the stops and doing Batman: The Dark Night.  The Caped Crusader along with Robin the Boy Wonder will be arriving in the Batmobile.  I will be making the requisite cameo, but I am afraid at this writing, that information is top secret.

If you are from out of town and ever wanted to come to a Church of the Rock service, Easter is the one to come to.  If you had to drive half way across the country, I guarantee it would still be worth it.  We have some immensely talented singers, actors and musicians that bring the resurrection story to life.  Last year we had 4,000 people show up for our three services so you have to come early to get a good seat.

UPDATE:

We had a record attendance over the Easter weekend.  Probably close to 5,000 people.  Dozens of seekers came to faith in Christ which is the whole reason we do it.  The Winnipeg Free Press covered the story and we got a front page mention.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/jesus-to-rise-as-batman-in-churchs-easter-play-146514375.html

Despite what our critics said about using Batman to tell the story of Easter, those who actually came, realized it did not cheapen the message of the resurrection at all.  I will say this again. We do not think that Jesus is Batman, Jack Sparrow or Captain Kirk. The play is an allegory along the lines of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The key to telling a parable is to take a well known cultural truth and use it in an analogous way. Before you call foul consider this: In Jesus parables He compared God to an unjust judge that does not fear God or man (Luke 18), a hard man who reaped where he did not sow in the parable of the talents (Matt 25:26), a rich man that commends unrighteous dealings (Luke 16) and an unjust and cruel nobleman in Luke 19… to name a few. He never says God is like these people in ever way.  They are only analogies. He uses some aspects of their life to explain spiritual truths about God and His kingdom.

Just because Batman is a vigilante in our modern day parable of The Dark Night, that in no way implies that Jesus is one. Parable telling is a perfectly acceptable and orthodox homiletic and has been used for centuries. The religious mind will always be offended just as it was in Jesus day. If we read the gospels the religious elite were offended almost every time Jesus opened His mouth. It was not that they did not get the point He was trying to make… they did not ‘want’ to get the point because more often than not, they were the ones getting skewered.

Then His disciples came and said to Him, “Do You know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” Matt 15:12

Last week was an interesting one for us as Church of the Rock was the subject of a CBC radio series specifically on our congregation.  We were approached by CBC producer Donna Carriero who told us they were doing stories about communities that they don’t know anything about.  They had already done one on the Muslim community in our city and wanted to do one on an Evangelical church because they admitted they really didn’t know anything about us.   It is absolutely true that we are a misunderstood and a poorly represented community in the media.  Evangelicals generally get presented as square headed Christians that are against a bunch of things; like same sex marriage and abortion and the like.  They never seem to see that that is a tiny slice of who we are and that evangelicalism is really about loving, helping, serving and blessing our communities and our world.  My title, Dancing withe Devil, is perhaps a little misleading, but letting the media into our fold for a closer look was a bit of a roll of the dice.  Typically when dealing with the media, what you think the story is going to be about and what it ends up being, are usually two totally different things.  When I was younger I was given some good advice about dealing with the media; “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel… you are going to lose”.

Irrespective of that advice, I was intrigued by the offer to let the CBC do the story because I have long felt that the Church needs a better relationship with the media.   On the other hand Jesus said, Woe to you when all men speak well of you.  Well, you could argue that we are doing just fine then because there is no danger of that happening.  Maybe I have been thrashed so many times I have just become numb to it all, but we decided to give it a go. We invited Donna into our ranks to see what we were doing.  It seemed to me that she was genuinely impressed with the manifold activities of a church like ours.  She was completely blown away by a group of our young people, who instead of heading to Banff to ski on their spring break, were heading to Mexico on a 42 hour van ride to work in an orphanage and a home for women that are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse.

She also did a piece on our ESL (English as a second language) class, where free of charge and without strings attached, new Canadians come to our building to learn English. Donna also visited ‘Overcomers in Christ’ which ministers to those who are overcoming drug, alcohol, pornography, gambling and other addictions.  She interviewed ‘Isaac’ who was hopelessly addicted to porn and through God’s grace and ‘Overcomers’ he is walking totally free today.  She asked me why we even let people like this in the church.  After I finished chuckling I told her the day we didn’t let sinners into the church, was the day we would need to close our doors because I would be the only one there (yes, she knew I was joking about the very last part).

The first 4 programs were generally accurate and very positive in nature.  And sure, they pulled the most controversial audio clips from our program.  They particularly zeroed in on my Michael Jackson jokes.   If a late night talk show host told them they would be hilarious, but because a pastor told them many said they were mean-spirited and had some sort of hidden social commentary.  The CBC had lots responses on both sides of the ledger.

Some of the CBC faithful called foul and were appalled that they would run such a positive story about such a terrible, bigoted, sexist, racist and hate mongering church.  These of course, are the very listeners that needed to hear this series.  They are the people that don’t know anything about us.  They don’t know that we have more women on staff and leadership than we do men.  They also don’t know that approximately 10% of our congregation come from a Native background.  They have no idea that we are probably the most multi-racial church in Winnipeg… not to mention that 1/3 of our budget goes out of our building to reach people in other nations and of other cultures, and that we are a church that is founded on the very principle of loving our neighbours and as well as our enemies.  But never mind that, because you will always have free wheeling, uninformed people that will just throw labels at you.  Which in my mind is the very lowest form of debate. Rather than addressing the ideals, you merely brand your opponents with some disparaging label and in doing so you dismiss them and any reasonable position they might hold.  As I mentioned elsewhere it is also known as argumentum ad hominem, where you impugn the character of your opponent to try to dismiss their position as invalid.

I need to give Donna Carierro full credit.  She did four days of fair minded, lively and informative coverage on the church.  I know she would have taken abuse for doing this kind of story but she honoured her word to me that she was not out to get us.  On day five however the story turned negative and Donna was nowhere to be heard.  So called experts that do not know me or anything about us offered their completely uninformed commentary. BTW, one comment during Part 5 makes it seem like I was invited to participate in that mornings discussion, but they were referring to different forum entirely.  At any rate I wasn’t upset about it.  Honest reporting should always include the counterpoint.  I get that.  In fact, to be completely honest, it was actually laughable.  They were so inarticulate that they barely made sense.   At any rate the audio clips are below and you can draw your own conclusion as to whether we built significant bridges to our community, or were just dancing with the devil.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five