More than meets the eye? Probably not.

I watched the film with my son tonight after work. Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay are co-executive producers and Bay directed. I read a review that said the first half of the film is Spielberg and the second half is Bay and that turned out to be pretty accurate. Characters are developed and you sort of begin to care about them in the first half. Everything blows up in the second half. The visual effects were stunning. The acting was not horrible and there was a joke about it being 7 times better than Armageddon (an abysmal Bay film).

There were some excellent values in the film. The Autobots have honor and loyalty and respect Optimus Prime’s leadership. They are willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause. These are laudable things that Hollywood more often than not messes up. They can’t seem to understand virtue.

However, there was some unnecessary crude humor in the film that ruined it. My family will not be seeing this film. The ‘humor’ was brief but it was still too much. Because of it I would say that this is not a family film. Don’t take your family to see it. Instead take the family to see Ratatouille. A few times. It was good natured humor with lovable character.

A good portion of Transformers was filmed at Edwards Air Force Base, my old stomping ground. It served as Qatar and Nellis AFB. I saw the place I used to work a couple of times. :) We used to call it North Hollywood Air Force Base for a while. That was back when Bay filmed part of Armageddon there. When the A-10s rolled in to save the day I just about cheered. What a nerd. Hey, I was too old to watch Transformers on TV so I got to nerd-out over something else in the movie. The Air Force came to the rescue.

Author: D. Goodmanson

At the Acts 29 conference Ed Stetzer spoke on the history of the word missional which traces it’s origins from three streams of thoughts: missio dei, missionary & mission. He presents why we may all use the same word, yet it means radically different things for emerging churches, evangelical camps and the reformed community. So when Tim Keller speaks about being missional it is not the same thing as when it used by John Franke or Alan Roxburgh. He plans to publish a paper on this soon which will be extremely helpful for the missional conversation. I thought I’d share a few thoughts from his presentation framing missional from a triperspectival view:

Missio Dei (Normative) – The Mission of God is the reality of why the church is on mission. It is bigger than the mission of the church, yet the church is central to this mission. Why is this important? One danger of the emerging church is that they can reject the Biblical call of the church as the central place of mission (situational) and therefore see their call to be missional only from the Missio Dei perspective. This error is no different than a Calvinist who rejects a call of proclaiming the gospel (existential/situational) to the lost because the doctrine of election (normative). Stetzer provided one example where a missionary group helped fund the over-throw of a government as part of their missio dei understanding of being missional. The clearest picture of the missio dei that we have is from the Bible.

Missionary (Existential) – As part of God’s mission, he changes the heart and identity of people. This conversion includes becoming a person who is sent on mission. Our identity also changes into being citizens of the Kingdom of God, which is both already & not yet. A sense of Missional that stems from missionary can lead to para-church ministries and ‘lone-wolf’ evangelism that doesn’t truly reflect the unity of the church as the family of God or the bride of Christ.

Mission (Situational) – The church exists for God and for others. At the center of our identity is being a people on mission to the world around us. This mission includes evangelism, mercy ministries and other tangible signs pointing to the Kingdom of God. It is in this situation we see being missional as an outflow of our lives in all situations to reflect the glory of God.We must see all three working together so that being ‘missional’ means that we are participating in God’s mission as He intends as a collective group of missionaries on mission to this world. Any reductionism of this can and may lead to errors which include uniperspectival churches (great post by David you need to read) and people with limited views of the church as God’s agent of mission.