Jin Converted

I used to be a big hip-hop fan. Still am, but I can't stomach most secular rap lyrics. Thankfully there are many Christian rappers who have fantastic, bible-saturated lyrics. Most won't remember the Chinese rapper named Jin, but I do. Before I became a Christian, I used to be a fan of BET's Freestyle Friday's. Basically, the show consisted of a freestyle battle between two rappers. The winner stayed on and faced a new challenger the next Friday. For those who may not know, freestyle battles consist of two guys going after one another through rap. It is called freestlye because there are no pre-scripted lyrics. It is all off the top of the rapper's head in the heat of the moment. Well, Jin dominated Freestyle Friday for several weeks in a row in 2001 and eventually made the Freestyle Hall of Fame and was signed with a major hip hop record label (Ruff Ryders). I would post some of the battles, but most of the content is inappropriate.

Jin is now a Christian. He was baptized in 2008. I have posted his most recent music video above.

Gordon Fee on Revelation

I love Gordon Fee. I recently found out that he has a commentary on Revelation coming out soon for "New Covenant Commentary" series. In a recent interview about the book, he had this to say about Dispensational theology and Revelation: "I just experience enormous pain when I hear it used in a Dispensationalist way because frankly they know almost nothing about the book as John intended." Wow.

David Wells on Pastors & Personality

"Television accentuates personality. It is all about the projection of personality.. . . . This has carried over into some of our marketing megachurches and more generally into how churches look at their pastors. Especially in megachurches of the seeker-sensitive kind, the pastor is preeminently a personality on the big screen up front, a performer, who seems close to everyone in the church but in fact is quite remote in most cases. The personality profiles of many of these pastors show them to be loners. The heavy lifting for the day-by-day pastoral care of the church therefore falls to a circle of trusted assistants. How very different this is from the older model, in which the pastor was not so much a performer as a shepherd who knew the flock and whose relations with the people in the church were the very means of fulfilling pastoral calling. To have been solely a performer in the pulpit would have spelled disaster."

(The Courage to be Protestant, 150)

To Every Tribe Ministries