Update to the ACORN voting fraud

Here we have a story of a mouse and some rats.

Not only are Ohio voters finding their votes diluted by ACORN (as I wrote about this morning), but our Floridian friends are suffering a similar fate. In Florida, Mickey Mouse has decided to vote in their state, his registration stamped with the approval of ACORN. Fortunately Orange Country elections officials caught the scheme.

I wonder if major media outlets are going to give this story the attention it deserves, or if it’s going to be pushed under the rug. It seems that, regardless of your personal politics, this sort of corruption in the process is alarming and something of which you should be aware.

Franke on missional, Emergent, and emergence

I found a page with a few short, easy-to-follow videos of John Franke (Biblical Seminary) discussing the terms “missional” and “emergent.” Feel free to check those out (I had some trouble getting the last one to play, just so you know).

One of the points Franke makes is that the idea of mission, of being missional, is not simply God’s response to an Option B, fallen Creation; actually, mission is Edenic and is a component of God’s character. God has always been missional, and it has everything to do with a God who is present and incarnate. Mission is not simply a response to the need for rescue; it is the personality of God.

Franke also indicts (rightly, in my opinion) those churches that have become “missional” in the same way that they were once focused on “church health,” “seeker sensitivity,” and so forth. He acknowledged that “missional” has become the new program – the new one-and-only-model for doing church – and said that we should think beyond all programs. He contrasted that outspoken missional-as-program with a church whose missionality reflects mission as a characteristic of God, that is, always speaking and always moving just as the world is always shaping and changing. 

From what I gathered, Franke believes that churches should be growing and emerging in method and message alike. He describes a truly missional church as necessarily emergent (in the lower-case sense). If I’m understanding him correctly, he’s suspicious of the notion that a church could be missional and not emergent.

There are certainly many churches out there that want to re-package their heritage, and whatever theology their heritage has cryogenically frozen (whether that tradition is Protestant liberal, Pentecostal, Reformed, Mainline, Evangelical, etc.), seemingly thinking that we were once in a process of questioning and figuring things out, until their tradition’s founder or theologian of choice came to deliver all of us into a final, once-and-for-all orthodoxy. (Mini-messiah?) Their idea of missional is really their “orthodoxy” with an added emphasis on social gospel. If those churches wish to lean into a social gospel, that’s okay – but it’s not missional, let alone emergent! 

If we aren’t seriously putting our theology through a test of current epistemology, or, if, on the other extreme, no theology – old or new – is actively encouraging and convicting us into a stronger engagement of God’s Spirit and a radical pursuit of holiness, then we lack either fluidity or seriousness (depending on which extreme is our pitfall). And I think there are a lot of Jesus-believing people who find themselves lacking one of those two elements (often times I’m probably one of those people).

Personally I sense that I’m best responding to God – His unchanging character, and the way He is moving today in our monumental time – when I am willing to challenge and poke at supposedly-orthodox theologies while simultaneously allowing my pursuit of Him to transcend the academic/intellectual and become an embrace of mystery, an appreciation for the grandeur of God, and a call to be holy like God is holy. It’s only in that balance that I begin to feel that I’m living out my calling as a member of God’s emerging Church.

Fraud waters down my vote

As a registered Ohio voter, I feel quite important throughout the presidential primaries and general election. It’s a good time to be from “The Heart of it All.” Candidates are basically sitting on your front porch from mid-October until Election Day. There’s a lot of wooing taking place.

Being an Ohio voter is probably much like being a 16-year-old Baberaham with a rich family in a day and age when arranged marriages were the going thing. You’re the commodity.

So when I find out that ACORN, an Obama-endorsing (their declaration, not mine) voter registration initiative, is planting nearly 4,000 fraudulent votes in the Cleveland area – an influence of more than five percent of their total garnered registration – I get a little ticked off. Not only are they skewing the election, but they’re diluting my super-hot Ohio vote.

I kind of want to be a big deal. No stealing my thunder, people.

I doubt that Democrats will ever do anything about voting fraud because the benefits of misconduct are so sharply titled in their favor. But next time the Republicans have the House and Senate, they should really try to pass something at the federal level to clean up the voting process nationwide.