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  • With Youth Ministry, A Gram of Prevention is Worth a Kilo of Cure

    Travis Johnson’s piece on reaching people 18-35 is great but perhaps it would be interesting to look at the problem from another angle: how did we get into this mess of having to reclaim this age group to start with?

    If we think about how young people are raised in this country, we’re looking at a situation where 9 out of 10 of them are basically incarcerated in the artificial environment of the public school, micromanaged as only a Boomer run system can, and subject to a wide variety of restrictions which grow every day.  All the while they are put into all kinds of performance-based scenarios which may or may not relate to reality.  Their eighteenth birthday comes, and poof! they turn into adults.  So what is their response?  They chuck all restraints and try to make up for the lost time of their delayed adulthood, which wastes another decade and forces them to learn yet another set of freedoms and restrictions in the process.

    The church’s response is to go along with this trend.  They direct those who are born to parents in church through a series of ministries separate from the main life of the church–nursery, children’s church, middle school and high school youth ministries.  The magic number of 18 comes up again, and the church expects them to become adults in the church, to worship and take their part like the adults do.  But it means nothing to many young people because the church has been too busy trying to meet what the church thinks is their present need rather than prepare them for their certain future.  So they disappear from church, many never to return.

    This is a classic example of the culture leading the church rather than the other way around, and the results are all too predictable.  In spite of their outward rebellion, young people instinctively are drawn towards maturity.  It’s true that Christianity is, in a sense, an attempt to preserve childhood.  Christianity’s enemies such as Philip Pullman know this.  But Jesus Christ never intended that the gospel be lived in a vacuum.  God’s coming to earth–which we celebrate at this time of year–is a sign that God intended his way to be lived in the reality we have, not simply under ideal conditions.  The goal in raising people in church is not to put them either a temporary or permanent childhood but to make the road to adulthood easier and more fruitful, fruitful both in a secular sense and certainly in the ministry sense.

    And that leads to the best solution.  The church is the best place where young people become adults, and the best way to accomplish that is to involve them in the main life of the church–all of its ministries–at the earliest possible moment.  There are certainly risks to that.  But a church that does this for its young people–to say nothing for its adults–will have its young people stick around a lot longer than otherwise.  And it will attract other young people from the outside to join in, because they will see something in the church they’re not finding elsewhere in the society–real maturity and purpose.

    Many years ago, I found myself drawn into one Catholic parish in part because it–out of desperation, not vision–literally called me out of the pews as a senior in prep school to do the work of God.  It’s time to bring Christian young people out of the ghetto of youth ministry and into the mainstream of the church, for their sakes and ours too.

  • The Aggie Definition of Political Correctness

    David Virtue’s weekly digest contains this gem from College Station:

    "Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a lump of feces by the clean end." — 2007 winning entry from an annual contest at Texas A&M University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term.

    Gig ’em!  You can play the Aggie War Hymn to go along with this.

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  • Stacy Sauls and the Danger of Centralisation

    Stacy Sauls’ recent address to the Chicago Consultation at Seabury-Western Seminary brings up an interesting issue he may not have intended:

    There are proposals, of course, to make us either a federation or a confederation, or God forbid, a unitary governmental structure such as the Roman Catholic Church has. The draft Anglican Covenant is a serious concern in this regard, particularly because it abrogates the constitutional principles that make us Anglicans. It abrogates the principle of lay participation in the governance of the Church by placing disproportionate emphasis on the views of the highest ranking bishops.

    What neither Sauls nor his African opponents may be thinking about is that the long term deterioration of Christian orthodoxy in TEC started at the top, i.e., in its seminaries and clergy, and filtered down through its bishops and finally landing at its laity.  What liberals taught in seminaries and from parish pulpits eventually gained credibility as the truth when in fact it was not.  Giving laity a greater voice in the church is one way to counteract this kind of thing; the experience of the Southern Baptists is instructive in this regard.  On the other side, those who advocate the Anglican covenant are not thinking about what would happen if the top went left.  That’s the central problem they’re having with Rowan Williams right at the moment, but that’s gotten lost in the endless appeals to "authority" which are the staple of conservative Boomer thinking.  (That relates to the issue of authority in Protestant churches in general and Evangelical ones in particular, which I discuss elsewhere.)

    Sauls’ position on TEC’s fiduciary responsibility is very lawyerly but a little disingenuous:

    The obligation to protect property rights flow from fiduciary responsibilities, but carrying out those responsibilities reveals a polity and governance issue within TEC. A fiduciary duty exists in secular law for an organization’s leadership to guard its property for the good of the whole. It is a duty imposed additionally by vow in the case of the ordained and by canon in the case of others.

    The problem here is that TEC cannot afford to litigate every property departure.  As a practical matter, TEC will have to pick and choose its battles carefully to properly husband its resources, which is also part of its fiduciary liability. Put another way, bankrupting the church isn’t the way to defend its property rights.  Since Sauls is doubtless in the centre of that thinking process, his remarks should be taken in that light.

    His position on foreign oversight is almost laughable:

    Another issue that threatens to seduce us into being untrue to the identity we have claimed for ourselves in our constitutional principles is the persistent call to submit TEC to some sort of foreign oversight, jurisdiction, or consultation, not as to matters of interdependence, but as to matters of autonomy.

    Any organisation that resists foreign oversight on the one hand and enthusiastically supports the UN’s Millennium Development Goals is talking out of both sides of its mouth.  What do you think the UN is about anyway, if not reducing national sovereignty?  If it’s good for the US, why not TEC?

  • Archbishop says nativity ‘a legend’

    The Archbishop of Canterbury says that the nativity story in the New Testament is ‘a legend’:

    Dr Williams said: "Matthew’s gospel says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that’s all we’re really told. It works quite well as legend."

    That’s more than one can say for Rowan Williams.  He’s more of a nightmare than anything else these days, and his Advent letter doesn’t help matters.

  • Don’t Like Official Christianity? Just Move to South Florida

    Elaine Glaser’s complaint about Christianity being Britain’s official religion and the impact that has on its Jewish minority may signal someone else who needs to bail out on that "right, tight little isle."

    Why suffer through another dreary English winter when you can a) move somewhere that is warm and  b) find a place where the holidays are dealt with on an entirely different basis?  I wrote a piece two years ago–my first on Christmas and the culture wars–where I noted how this played out:

    For those of us from South Florida, this issue is old hat. Merchants and governments there have long been sensitive about the subject because of the large Jewish population. This always made Christmas something of an adventure. Jews and Gentiles in jobs which required work on Christmas would swap days off so they could celebrate their respective holidays. We learned Hanukkah songs in public schools (I think the God-hating liberals at the ACLU have had that cut out.) My mother always insisted that we decorate for Christmas because “people would think we were Jewish” if we didn’t. Meanwhile a Jewish classmate of my brother’s would witness a “Hanukkah bush” sprout at his house.

    I also suggested that Evangelicals need to be creative in their response:

    Since evangelical Christianity is enamoured with all things Jewish these days, this situation suggests a new tack for Christians. Perhaps we should quit decorating for Christmas so people will think we’re Jewish! I am sure that there are Christian schools that are teaching Hanukkah songs, and we since so many praise and worship choruses are in the Hebrew style we can do the same thing for Christmas music. If we can’t force our opponents to clarity, perhaps we can gain victory through confusion!

    The problem here–and in the UK also–is that too many people confuse a secular state with enforced atheism.  If we could ever get past that, things would be much simpler.

  • When Timing Is Everything

    The claims that the ten plagues of Egypt are natural phenomena doesn’t really answer the question of their Creator’s intent.  As anyone knows, timing is everything, and it makes sense (to me at least) that the Creator of the universe (and by extension the natural laws that govern it) would operate within the framework that he set forth.

    This claim isn’t new either; it has been floating around in Biblical studies literature for at least a half century and probably longer.

    About ten years ago, a fascinating article appeared which discussed geotechnical phenomena in the Holy Land.  It discusses things such as the natural origin of the parting of the Jordan and the collapse of the walls of Jericho.  While these explanations certainly make sense, the timing of these–just when Joshua needed them the most–wasn’t fortuitous.

  • The Connection Nobody Makes

    Bob Marcotte’s recounting of the story of Episcopal minister Algernon Crapsey reminds us of many things.

    The first is that the storm in the Episcopal Church that is now the spectacle of the world didn’t start with Vickie Gene Robinson’s being made a bishop.  It didn’t even start with James Pike’s journey to nowhere.  It started long before that with ministers such as Crapsey.  Pike was able to get away with what he did without a trial (unlike Crapsey) because he had more sympathisers in TEC than many realised.

    Second, Crapsey’s departure from orthodoxy was tied to his embrace of the social gospel:

    As Crapsey later wrote in his autobiography, “It was the humanity of Jesus and not his divinity that won and held my allegiance.”

    Or as one commentator notes: “In stressing Jesus’ humanity, Crapsey sought to motivate Christians to follow Jesus’ example and become more responsive to the suffering of others. More concerned about moral reform than adherence to doctrine, he emphasized the spiritual meaning of the creeds rather than their historical veracity.”

    That was true for many people.  But the tie between social liberalism and theological heterodoxy wasn’t a given in Crapsey’s day.  If it were, why didn’t the Pentecostals, at the bottom of society, make the connection?  The Pentecostals added injury to insult by emphasising miracles and healing, not just in Biblical times but today.

    The problem with people like Crapsey is that they don’t make the connection between the Incarnation–where God himself comes and shares our condition in the worst way–and the need for Christians to reach out and share God’s love for us with others.  Put another way, without a divine impulse, the impetus to relieve human suffering and equalise incomes isn’t obvious.  The Pentecostals, contrary to Main Line legend, were as concerned with helping others as their better heeled counterparts.  But their view of it–and the resources they had at their disposal to deal with the problems in front of them–were and are entirely different.

    Today we see a left that is secularising rapidly.  But it’s real concern for social justice–not the phony rhetoric trotted out at election time–is fading.  It would rather support “tolerance” for well-heeled groups than tackle real inequities with solutions that would empower other groups rather than just subsidise them.  The “social and heterodox gospel” combination of people like Algernon Crapsey was not necessary in his day and certainly isn’t now.  A better connection is the one between a fully divine Saviour who came to share our condition so that we could be set free from it, some in this life and entirely in the next.

    “Jesus, in the days of his earthly life, offered prayers and supplications, with earnest cries and with tears, to him who was able to save him from death; and he was heard because of his devout submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from his sufferings; and, being made perfect, he became to all those who obey him the source of eternal Salvation, while God himself pronounced him a High Priest of the order of Melchizedek.” Hebrews 5:7-10

  • Scientology: Germany May Be A Special Case

    I am uncomfortable on general religious freedom grounds with Germany considering a  ban of Scientology.  But given the German’s history in the last century, they may just be a special case.

    Problem number one is Germany’s unenviable track record in handling modernity.  As I note in my own commentary on modernity:

    Part of the problem stemmed from that paragon of modernity itself, Germany. It was here where "modernity" as we understand it first became the philosophy of an entire society in the years leading up to World War I; indeed, the enthusiasm generated by those heady days fuelled Germany’s aggressive prewar stance and led to the war itself. Its defeat was not educational; Adolf Hitler simply used a more "populist" form of modernity to propel the rise of the National Socialists and the return of Germany as a world power, albeit unwelcome after 1 September 1939.

    Germany’s place in modernity was better understood during the 1930’s and earlier than now. For some of those involved in aviation, an obvious centre of modernity, the temptation of admiration for Germany in the 1930’s was too much…the German influence on many during this period is too great to ignore. It is easier to see the horrors of Nazism in hindsight than through the lens of the 1930’s. There is a sober lesson: just because something is popular, successful and outwardly attractive, it doesn’t make it right.

    Scientology is certainly a manifestation of modernity.  L. Ron Hubbard was in the middle of it, and as I note elsewhere:

    …its (modernity’s) unleashing was a dangerous business for most of the twentieth century. Attempting to build a religion in that context is no safer of an enterprise than building a political system or an ideology. Hubbard added to it the element of fantasy, which is also a product of modernity. The ability of an individual, a political party or the state to build its power based on the projection of illusions was a well trodden path in the twentieth century.

    It’s also interesting to note that the Germans were quick to pick up on the cash flow part of Scientology.

    The Germans are trying to avoid a repeat of their past history with modernistic ideologies such as Nazism and Scientology.  It’s a sad commentary on themselves that they are considering this ban, but then again no one else wants a repeat of World War I and II–especially with the WMD’S out there unavailable to the Kaiser or Adolf Hitler.

  • More Than Dreams In Expanded Formats

    One of the more popular features of this site is the More Than Dreams video series, from the Muslim world.

    For some–especially those with slow internet connections–downloading these took a long time, if possible at all.  For others, the screen size and quality left something to be desired of.

    Now these riveting videos are offered in formats that will solve both of these problems.  Click on the graphic below to take a look.

  • Admitting the Obvious, in a Biblical Way

    In a conference call earlier this week, Pat Robertson fielded a question he gets often these days: why did he endorse Rudy Giuliani for President?  He reiterated the whole business of the importance of national security (which I brought up back in February and he stated in his endorsement speech) but then he made two interesting observations:

    • We have had two “born-again” Presidents in recent times (I’m assuming he meant Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, but he didn’t say.)
    • Both of them have been “disasters.”

    Honestly, I’m inclined to agree with him on this, and have said so in bits and pieces on this blog.  The only serious question left is why.

    There’s no question that the elites in this country don’t like Evangelical Christianity, and haven’t for a long time.  I’ve spent a lot of time on that too.  But let’s turn the discussion around, assuming that there is a critical mass of people left who are not content with letting those elites lead them around by the nose.  Why is it that the leaders Evangelicals put to the forefront have not fared any better than they have?

    The best place to look for an answer is the Bible, and the best man to study is the most successful leader Israel and Judah ever had, namely David.

    It wasn’t God’s first plan for Israel to have a monarchy, but the Israelites got to the place where they couldn’t see themselves without one, so God granted their request.  (This puts the whole Evangelical concept of the “perfect will of God” in jeopardy, but that’s another Bible study.)  The first king was Saul, but for many reasons he proved unsatisfactory, so God sent Samuel to anoint David, who had to be pulled away from tending the sheep to receive God’s open approval.

    The usual Middle Eastern method was and is for David to mount an immediate power challenge, but David wasn’t your typical Middle Easterner.  He first served as a musician at Saul’s court, having popped off Goliath, but Saul saw the inevitable conflict coming.  That conflict was complicated both by David’s marriage to Saul’s daughter Michal (which was Saul’s idea) and by David’s friendship with Jonathan Saul’s son (which wasn’t.)  David eventually left Saul’s court and formed his own band of “desperate” men.  He had a chance to dispatch Saul, but refrained from it.  Just as God had anointed David, he had anointed Saul before him, and David acknowledged that fact.  That’s an extraordinary act, one that Christians justifiably make a big deal out of.  But David was skilful enough not to let that be an act of weakness.  When Saul finally did himself in, David was able to assume the throne.

    By local standards David looked like a “soft touch,” but the Twelve Tribes—and especially the ten in the north—weren’t the most cohesive group.  Without strong central leadership for centuries, they had an independent streak in them.  David managed to pull together the fractious Israelites into a kingdom whose physical expanse was greater that it had been before and would ever be after.  He had his difficulties with the neighbours and with the usual harem/sibling politics that were built into the system.  The most serious of these was Absalom’s rebellion, but David was the original “comeback kid,” and had inspired enough loyalty in enough people to put that down—and was tenderhearted enough of a father to mourn the loss of a son, rebel though he was.

    David left his son and successor Solomon a vibrant nation that the latter could rule more absolutely than David did.  The road to Solomon himself was rocky; the king so noted for wisdom was the indirect product of an impulsive, illicit relationship which David compounded by de facto murder of Bathsheba’s husband to cover up moral failure.  God, through the prophet Nathan, dealt with David on this, and the direct product of the relationship died.  But David remained king; one shudders to think of the consequences of such an act with a modern electorate.

    And that’s just the point of this study: it’s unlikely that modern Evangelicals would give David the vote for city council, let alone President.  They are too enamoured with the image of moral (and now ideological) perfection in their headship, a perfection frequently at the expense of real leadership qualities or even a true vision of what God wants for the country.  Such visions of purity aren’t the sole property of Evangelicals; a visit to most left-wing blogs will reveal a mind-numbing moralism very quickly.  And it should be obvious that Lloyd Bentsen’s line applies here:  from the Scriptures we know David, and the “born-again” presidents we’ve had are no Davids.

    When Saul finally bombed it with the Amalekites, Samuel told him the following:

    But now thy kingdom shall not continue: the LORD hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the LORD hath commanded him to be captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the LORD commanded thee. (1 Samuel 13:14)

    That man, of course, was David.  For all of his failings, he was a great leader, and beyond that he began the long road from the power holder/power challenger, eye for an eye/tooth for a tooth cycle that still dominates the Middle East to the time when his descendant Jesus Christ propounded the concept of servant leadership and enacted it vividly when he washed his disciples’ feet:

    When he had washed their feet, and had put on his upper garments and taken his place, he spoke to them again. "Do you understand what I have been doing to you?" he asked. "You yourselves call me ‘the Teacher’ and ‘the Master’, and you are right, for I am both. If I, then–‘the Master’ and ‘the Teacher’–have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet; For I have given you an example, so that you may do just as I have done to you. In truth I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor yet a messenger than the man who sends him. Now that you know these things, happy are you if you do them.  (John 13:12-17)

    Jesus’ kingdom was and is not of this world (John 18:36.)  If we venture to be rulers of this world, our duty is to do so with as much rectitude as possible.  But we must ultimately realise that the reason why his kingdom isn’t of this world is due in some measure to the nature of secular politics and power itself.  Like our family yacht, to cruise in dangerous waters we need a native guide, and what better native guide than the man who was after God’s own heart.

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