Celebration of ... Death?

Mortification of Spin

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2016

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Does anyone wear black to a funeral anymore? Seems increasingly common to have "celebrations of life" in lieu of funerals. As Christians, we mourn but not as those without hope, but that's just it, we do and should mourn our losses. So why is grief displaced with "happiness", as if we were throwing a party? And is this happiness genuine or are we genuinely in denial that something legitimately sad has happened? Beware Church, you may be sending mixed messages with these "celebrations". Just how difficult is a pastor's job made by all this confusion? To help us consider it, we have a Scotsman who weaseled his way into the recording studio after trading in his kilt for some urban slims.Donate to Mortification of Spinvar r_protocol=(("https:"==document.location.protocol)?"https://":"http://");var r_path="https://www.razoo.com/javascripts/widget_loader.js";var r_identifier='Mortification-Of-Spin';document.write(unescape("%3Cscript id='razoo_widget_loader_script' src='"+r_path+"' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count.
0:21.7	With Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird, Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
0:30.6	Let's join this week's conversation.
0:36.8	Music Well, thank you for joining us on Mortification of Spin.
0:47.4	I'm joined as always by my friends Carl Truman and Amy Bird.
0:51.5	We also have a straggler that just showed up this morning,
0:59.3	Liam Gallagher, the pastor of 10th Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Hi, Liam. How are you doing?
1:07.4	I'm well. Thank you. Good. Well, we wanted to talk just a little bit about the reality of death,
1:13.3	and more specifically, about how to handle funerals. One of the things that we've seen a lot in evangelical churches is that the word funeral is rarely, if ever used, and instead
1:19.0	we talk about celebrations of life, as though perhaps we can mask the fact that something
1:26.1	very tragic and heartbreaking has actually happened with the death of a loved one.
1:31.2	And so I want to kind of throw the topic out to us here today, folks.
1:35.1	How do we address death with our congregations?
1:37.9	How do we handle a funeral in helping people to grieve?
1:42.7	Certainly, as Paul says, we don't grieve as those without hope,
1:46.8	but nevertheless we grieve.
1:49.7	How do we help our people walk through that without missing kind of that necessary step that
1:57.4	they have to go through without making them feel guilty that somehow if they grieve
2:02.3	they're being unfaithful or somehow sub-Christian.
2:07.7	So what's been your experiences with funerals?
2:10.2	We have two pastors with us besides myself.
2:12.8	How have these men tried to shepherd people during funerals?
	...

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