The Internet Monk Archives

Another Look at Church Collapse Statistics

I would like to preface this post by saying that I do not have any joy in reporting these statistics. My hope and desire is for vibrant, growing churches, that are an increasingly effective witness in the communities in which they are found. That being said here is a snippet from a couple posts that I wrote five years ago in support of Michael Spencer’s contention that we were/are on the verge of a major evangelical collapse. It also began my ongoing collaboration as a writer for this site.

“We are on the verge within 10 years of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity.”
According to ARIS, currently 21% of adult Baptists are over the age of seventy. (I keep using Baptists in my examples as they are a good representation of evangelicals and it helps to keep things consistent for now.) In ten years, based on what we know of life expectancy, roughly this number of Baptists will have died. Yes, some of those who are currently older than 70 will still be with us, but at least a corresponding number who are currently under 70 will also have died. They will be replaced by the children of those Baptists who are now in the eighteen to twenty-nine year range, which as mentioned previously is 11% of adult Baptists. Assuming that those who are in the eighteen to twenty-nine year range roughly reproduce themselves over the next ten years, you will have a net decrease in Baptists over the next ten years of roughly 10%.
So as Michael has said, the next ten years should be the beginning of the collapse, and as was shown earlier in the article, this collapse should continue for several decades until half of the Baptists are gone.

Mainline Christian churches have been declining in Canada for 50 years. In 1965 the Membership in the United Church of Canada stood at 1,064,000. By the end of 2012 was down to 463,879. and average weekly attendance was 158,510.

Statistics in the Anglican church of Canada are even more startling. They hit a membership high of 1,365,313 in 1964. The Anglicans stopped producing statistics in 2007, but at that point membership was 545,957 and average weekly attendance just 141,827.

How do you lose over half your members in under 50 years. Quite simply you just have to lose about 1% per year.

I had predicted in 2009 that “you will have a net decrease in Baptists over the next ten years of roughly 10%.” Well, attendance at Southern Baptist churches peaked in 2009 at 6,207,488. By 2013 attendance had dropped to 5,834,707. That is a 6% drop in just four years. My prediction of a 10% drop in 10 years is looking fairly accurate.

You should also note that this is a yearly percentage decline that matches that of the Canadian Mainline churches. If the Southern Baptists continue to decline like they have done over the past four years then their fate will likely to be very similar to those churches in Canada where many congregations are struggling to keep their doors open.

Again, I take no joy in reporting this, but your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Another Look: Evangelicalism as a Way Station

Note from CM: We will continue with Michael Spencer’s “Coming Evangelical Collapse” series and get back to an overview of the “Age of Evangelicalism” in the U.S. — roughly 1970-2008 — in a day or two. But for today, here’s another look at a suggestion of something that evangelicalism does well. This reflection was first posted in April, 2013.

• • •

I want to say something in praise of evangelicalism today. Evangelicalism has played an important role in my spiritual formation, and I know from experience that it has done the same in the lives of many others.

The graph of my spiritual history is simple: from mainline Christianity to adolescent rebellion to spiritual awakening through evangelicalism to gradual dissatisfaction with the world of evangelicalism and back home to mainline Christianity.

I have met others who have followed a similar path. Just the other day my pastor told me about a young man who had grown up in the Lutheran church, left the church as a teenager, was “converted” in an evangelical church, then became “burned out” in that church environment, and one day stumbled back into a Lutheran congregation, where he is now settling in as an adult.

Evangelicalism is at its best when it gets the attention of prodigals, gets them moving, and points them toward home. Evangelicalism provides a way station where people weary of the world can stop in, find rest and refreshment, get some guidance, and then find their way home. Evangelicalism has a missional mentality and focus. It is good at attracting people, waking them up, and getting them back in touch with God. It is spiritual CPR. It’s a voice in the wilderness that gets people into the waters of Jordan to repent and believe.

But what happens then? In my opinion, evangelicalism, for reasons often discussed on this blog, works best as a mission but not as a church tradition. In general, it does not have the theological depth, historical heritage, ecclesiological and liturgical traditions, or institutional ballast to provide a stable home where people may be formed into communities with the ability to pass the faith on for generations and centuries.

To be sure, mainline traditions have not always grasped the importance of being that home, nor have they always been keen to support missional efforts to “seek and save the lost,” preferring rather to maintain their traditions and institutions rather than do what was necessary to reach people. Nor have the historic traditions been immune to chasing silly fads or getting distracted by political agendas — though they were certainly different ones than the revivalists, church growth practitioners, and Christian Right of evangelicalism have been running after.

Nevertheless, where liturgy has been faithfully practiced, tradition honored, and historical memory maintained, there is hope of a good foundation and solid structure in which one may leave the pilgrim life for a more permanent home.

Back in 2007, Michael Spencer wrote that this may be the very moment when the mainlines and historic traditions have just what disaffected evangelicals are longing for:

It’s a moment that — believe it or not — some people actually want to go to something that looks like church as they remember it, see a recognizable pastor, hear a recognizable sermon, participate in the Lord’s Supper, experience some reverence and decorum, and leave feeling that, in some ways, it WAS a lot like their mom and dad’s church. It’s a moment when reinventing everything may not be as sweet an idea as we were told it was.

Perhaps it is time for evangelicals and mainline Christians to recognize what each has to offer the other and to work on creatively forging new understandings and partnerships that will allow each to do what it does best.

As for me, I am thankful for both. But only in a historic mainline tradition have I found a home.

Another Look: The Coming Evangelical Collapse (2)

Note from CM: Looks like we’ll be on this subject for a couple of weeks. Since we’re five years out, I will re-post all three of Michael’s “Collapse” pieces, reflect on “My So-Called Evangelical Life” through the lens of Steven P. Miller’s “The Age of Evangelicalism,” and . . . well, we will see what else.

• • •

What will be left after the evangelical collapse?

1. An evangelicalism far from its historical and doctrinal core. Expect evangelicalism as a whole to look more and more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. The determination to follow in the methodological steps of numerically successful churches will be greater than ever. The result will be, in the main, a departure from doctrine to more and more emphasis on relevance, motivation and personal success….with the result being churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.

For some time, we’ve been at a point that the decision to visit a particular evangelical church contained a fairly high risk of not hearing the Biblical Gospel. That experience will be multiplied and expanded in the years to come. Core beliefs will become less and less normative and necessary in evangelicalism.

2. An evangelicalized Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Two of the beneficiaries of the coming evangelical collapse will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been steadily entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more media and publishing efforts aimed at the “conversion” of evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox ways of being Christian.

A result of this trend will be the increasing “evangelicalization” of these churches. This should yield interesting results, particularly in the Orthodox church with its ethnic heritage and with the tensions and diversities in Catholicism that most converts never see during the conversion process. I expect the reviews of the influence of evangelicalism in these communions to be decidedly mixed.

3. A small portion of evangelicalism will continue down the path of theological re-construction and recovery. Whether they be post-evangelicals working for a reinvigoration of evangelicalism along the lines of historic “Mere Christianity,” or theologically assertive young reformed pastors looking toward a second reformation, a small, but active and vocal portion of evangelicalism will work hard to rescue the evangelical movement from its demise by way of theological renewal.

This is an attractive, innovative and tireless community with outstanding media, publishing and leadership development. Nonetheless, I believe the coming evangelical collapse will not result in a second reformation, though it may result in benefits for many churches and the beginnings of new churches. But I do believe many evangelical churches and schools will benefit from this segment of evangelicalism, and I believe it will contribute far beyond its size to the cause of world missions.

4. I believe the emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, becoming part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision. I expect to continue hearing emerging leaders, seeing emerging conferences and receiving emerging books. I don’t believe this movement, however, is going to have much influence at all within future evangelicalism. What we’ve seen this year with Tony Jones seems to me to be indicative of the direction of the emerging church.

Continue reading “Another Look: The Coming Evangelical Collapse (2)”

My So-Called Evangelical Life (1)

This book explores the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in the United States from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. It pays particular attention to the uses that a diverse array of Americans — self-proclaimed evangelicals, of course, but also movement conservatives, secular liberals, journalistic elites, and sundry others — found for born-again faith. Beginning with the Jesus vogue of the early 1970s, evangelical Christianity was seen and heard, then seen and heard again. During these years, evangelicalism (the label commonly given to the public expression of born-again Christianity) influenced American history in profound, but only partially appreciated, ways. As befits the subject matter, this is something of a story of rebirth. Public evangelicalism gestated in the space created by the Watergate scandal of the early and mid-1970s. Out of that context emerged both a born-again president, Jimmy Carter, and his equally evangelical arch-nemesis, the Christian Right. The climax came three decades later with the presidency of George W. Bush, who synthesized the former’s therapeutic Jesus talk with the latter’s political agenda. Along the way came two evangelical scares, innumerable born-again spectacles, and several broad reconsiderations of the place of faith in American politics and culture.

• The Age of Evangelicalism

• • •

That, my friends, is the context in which I’ve lived my so-called evangelical life.

Today, part one — the 1970’s and 1980’s.

And what shall I say of Billy Graham, Hal Lindsey, the Jesus People, the charismatic movement, David Wilkerson, Bill Bright and the Four Spiritual Laws, Chuck Smith, Calvary Chapel and Maranatha! Music, Pat Boone, Explo ’72, Francis Schaeffer, Charles Colson (Born Again), Eldredge Cleaver (Soul on Fire), Bob Dylan’s gospel period (Slow Train Coming), the LaHayes and Marabel Morgan (The Total Woman) and the invention of Christian Sex™, Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schafly, James Dobson and a new focus on the Christian Family™, the NIV Bible, Harold Lindsell and the doctrine of Inerrancy™, and of course, televangelists and pastors like Jim Bakker, Robert Schuller, Pat Robertson (who himself ran for president in 1988), and Jerry Falwell, the Christian Right’s™ most public spokesperson in the 1980’s.

Then, because my so-called evangelical life has spanned the years when evangelical Christianity embraced political activism in a way not seen before, we must note the politicians. In the seminal years of the “Age of Evangelicalism,” they were quieter about their faith and were mostly moderates and liberals — people like George McGovern, John Anderson, and Mark Hatfield. Those who supported them advanced a more progressive agenda — men such as Jim Wallis and Ronald Sider. Even Republicans like President Gerald Ford, who took his faith seriously, were more moderate, talking and acting much differently than the rightward leaders who wore evangelical religion proudly on their sleeves in the 1980’s. Jimmy Carter, who became president in 1976, “The Year of the Evangelical,” was the first politician to bring evangelicalism out of the prayer closet and into mainstream media consciousness.

But it was 1980 that formed the real dividing line. Steven Miller says, “If 1976 was the Year of the Evangelical, then 1980 was the Year of the Evangelical Right.”

Of course, 1980 was the year that brought us President Ronald Reagan, the first president to use “God bless America” in a major speech (except for one time when Richard Nixon was trying to save his butt during Watergate). Steven Miller observes that Reagan “was more an evangelical’s president than an evangelical president,” but that didn’t stop Jerry Falwell from proclaiming that Reagan was “the greatest thing that has happened to our country in my lifetime.” This, despite the fact that evangelicals saw few actual substantive policy changes amid an abundance of symbolic actions and gestures. Still, their leaders and spokespersons had unprecedented access to the halls of power, and that was heady stuff.

Continue reading “My So-Called Evangelical Life (1)”

Another Look: The Coming Evangelical Collapse

Note from CM: This week, we will focus on the state of evangelicalism in the U.S. It was five years ago that Michael Spencer wrote his “Coming Evangelical Collapse” posts, which brought him a great deal of attention and caused much discussion.

I have begun reading Steven P. Miller’s book, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years, which looks at of “the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in the United States from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century” (p. 4). In the book’s introduction, Miller notes how a great change happened in evangelicalism between 2004 and 2008, and that one might even say evangelicalism went from being “the new normal” in the U.S. to “yesterday’s news.”

Michael wrote his piece in 2009 and suggested that within ten years, we would see a major collapse in evangelical Christianity. I hope that reviewing these, his most read articles, will help us have a good discussion this week about the past forty years of evangelicalism, its current state, and its future prospects.

• • •

My Prediction

I believe that we are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity; a collapse that will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and that will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. I believe this evangelical collapse will happen with astonishing statistical speed; that within two generations of where we are now evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its current occupants, leaving in its wake nothing that can revitalize evangelicals to their former “glory.”

The party is almost over for evangelicals; a party that’s been going strong since the beginning of the “Protestant” 20th century. We are soon going to be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century in a culture that will be between 25-30% non-religious.

This collapse, will, I believe, herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian west and will change the way tens of millions of people see the entire realm of religion. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become particularly hostile towards evangelical Christianity, increasingly seeing it as the opponent of the good of individuals and society.

The response of evangelicals to this new environment will be a revisiting of the same rhetoric and reactions we’ve seen since the beginnings of the current culture war in the 1980s. The difference will be that millions of evangelicals will quit: quit their churches, quit their adherence to evangelical distinctives and quit resisting the rising tide of the culture.

Many who will leave evangelicalism will leave for no religious affiliation at all. Others will leave for an atheistic or agnostic secularism, with a strong personal rejection of Christian belief and Christian influence. Many of our children and grandchildren are going to abandon ship, and many will do so saying “good riddance.”

This collapse will cause the end of thousands of ministries. The high profile of Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of students, pastors, religious workers, missionaries and persons employed by ministries and churches will be unemployed or employed elsewhere. [ ]. Visible, active evangelical ministries will be reduced to a small percentage of their current size and effort.

Nothing will reanimate evangelicalism to its previous levels of size and influence. The end of evangelicalism as we know it is close; far closer than most of us will admit.

My prediction has nothing to do with a loss of eschatological optimism. Far from it. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But I am not optimistic about evangelicalism, and I do not believe any of the apparently lively forms of evangelicalism today are going to be the answer. In fact, one dimension of this collapse, as I will deal with in the next post, is the bizarre scenario of what will remain when evangelicals have gone into decline.

I fully expect that my children, before they are 40, will see evangelicalism at far less than half its current size and rapidly declining. They will see a very, very different culture as far as evangelicalism is concerned.

I hope someone is going to start preparing for what is going to be an evangelical dark age.

Continue reading “Another Look: The Coming Evangelical Collapse”

Gathering Sparks

Yesterday, I officiated a wedding. The couple wanted to make sure we honored the traditions of their families, and the groom was from a Jewish background. Indeed, one family member present was a Holocaust survivor. So, in the ceremony, I included readings and emphases from the Tanakh and we ended on a celebratory note with the groom breaking a glass, stomping on it while the crowd shouted, “Mazel Tov!” to congratulate the couple.

Here is what I said before the glass-breaking ritual:

In the Jewish tradition, the wedding ceremony ends, as we will today, with the breaking of a glass. This has come to symbolize many things over the years.

First, breaking the glass reminds us that all of our relationships are fragile and must be protected. In this ceremony, we pray in our hearts, “As this glass shatters, so may your marriage never break.”

Second, in the Jewish tradition, breaking the glass serves as a reminder of the sufferings of the Jewish people. Even in this moment of great joy, we are asked to remember that pain and suffering still fills this world and that we have a responsibility to help relieve some of that suffering. ______ and ______, may your marriage be one means of making this world a better place.

Finally, it symbolizes the breaking down of all barriers between us. After the glass is shattered, we invite all of you to lift your voices in unity and shout, “Mazel Tov!” which is a cry of celebration and good wishes for ______ and ______.

After the service, one of the Jewish relatives came up to me and thanked me for what I had said, commenting on how meaningful and important she found the second point especially to be. “Tikkun olam,” she said. “This is a central pillar of my faith. Every day I pray the Aleinu and this is why I believe we are here.”

We ended up sitting with her and other members of her family at the table during the reception and enjoyed a wonderful conversation about our lives and work.

One is a doctor who has devoted his life to caring for women and helping them bring new life into the world. Another is a nurse, who also assists new mothers in an inner city hospital. Yet another is an epidemiologist who travels all over the world giving consultation on public health matters. As for us, my wife is also a nurse as well as a licensed mental health counselor, and I work with hospice and have been in pastoral ministry for decades.

In many ways, we were a table of strangers, coming from different places, with different religious commitments and having some very different life experiences. In another sense, we came to see that our hearts are one. We are people walking in the same direction. All of us have been led to place a high value on service to others and we find not only personal satisfaction but hope for the world in God blessing our works.

We each believe that the fabric of the world is torn, but that through God’s gifts of faith, hope, and love we have been handed needle and thread and invited to participate in mending some of its rent places.

This is Tikkun olam, an idea that many contemporary Jews have embraced in their vision of the religious life. It means “to repair the world.” The roots of this concept run deep in Judaism and, as my friend said, may be seen the ancient Aleinu prayer. Like the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, the Aleinu asks that God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as in heaven. One translation puts a portion of it like this:

Therefore we put our hope in You, Adonai our God,
to soon see the glory of Your strength,
to remove all idols from the Earth,
and to completely cut off all false gods;
to repair the world, Your holy empire.

This idea of “repairing the world” was developed in a great myth which became infused into Jewish tradition in the 16th-century by the renowned Jewish mystic, Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, known as the Ari. He proposed that the Jewish people are God’s partners in repairing the world, and to teach this he constructed a cosmic myth from biblical stories, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the Messianic Era. Here is a summary of that myth:

At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring the world into being, to make room for creation, He contracted Himself by drawing in His breath, forming a dark mass. Then God said, Let there be light (Gen. 1:3) and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.

God sent forth the ten vessels like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. But the vessels—too fragile to contain such powerful Divine light—broke open, scattering the holy sparks everywhere.

Had these vessels arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. Instead, God created people to seek out and gather the hidden sparks, wherever we can find them. Once this task is completed, the broken vessels will be restored and the world will be repaired.

Source: Tikkun Olam, the Backstory

Many Jews in the Ari’s day had been exiled from their homes and homelands. The Ari gave them a renewed sense of meaning and purpose when he explained that, wherever they found themselves, they could gather up sparks when they studied Torah or fulfilled one of God’s commandments. This emphasis went beyond the notion of obeying God’s commands strictly for the sake of obedience or even to honor the Lawgiver. It helped these dislocated people view their exile with a new sense of mission. Now they could be God’s partners in gathering up the sparks of light from all corners of the earth.

Tikkun olam tells us that our good works do matter. Our neighbors need them. Our world needs them. And we hope that God will use them as a part of restoring the full light of righteousness and peace to a dark world.

Saturday Ramblings — August 9, 2014

We’ve been talking lately about eschatology here on IM, hearing from people who are pre-millennialists and a-millennialists and probably a variety of other positions as well. You may have been wondering: where does your Chaplain stand?

I’ve concluded that I am an “æstas-millennialist,” one of a growing number of people here in the Midwest who believe that the millennium comes every summer when the tomatoes and sweet corn are harvested. I mean, what could be better than that? It’s culinary (and spiritual) perfection. Surely Satan must be chained and the saints reigning whenever we sit down at the table to enjoy these summertime blessings!

Well, enough profound theology for today. It’s time to ramble.

Mosquitoes (which, come to think of it, might disprove my millennial theory) were all over Kerry Sanders like progressives on Mark Driscoll in a recent Today Show segment. They tested a new app, which promises to keep mosquitoes away by emitting a high frequency noise that the bugs supposedly hate.

News correspondent Kerry Sanders took on the challenge of trying it out. . . . and he lost. It was estimated that he contracted about 300 bites, and Today Show host Matt Lauer, who was watching the experiment, ended up with a permanent grimace that may require plastic surgery. You too can squirm by watching the video HERE.

In more entertainment news, it’s another week, another blasphemous program on TV, and yet another Christian backlash to said show.

“Black Jesus” premiered Thursday on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim series. I did not watch and will not be watching, but the network describes the show like this: “The new show stars Gerald “Slink” Johnson as a modern-day black Jesus living in rough-and-tumble Compton, Calif., spreading “love and kindness” with a “loyal group of downtrodden followers.”

However, Monica Cole, director of One Million Moms, says the show is “blasphemous, irreverent and disrespectful.” Her group is basing its criticisms on the show’s YouTube trailer, which shows Jesus using explicit language and includes violence and drinking.

As if you didn’t guess, a campaign has been launched, petitions are being circulated, advertisers have been warned . . . blah, blah, blah. Next.

How dysfunctional is Congress? It has been 18 months since Pope Francis became the Holy Father, and some thought it might be a good idea for U.S. lawmakers to say, “Congratulations!” However, the bill acknowledging him, H.Res. 440, which seems straightforward, applauding Francis on his March 2013 election and recognizing “his inspirational statements and actions,” couldn’t muster enough bipartisan support to pass, or even make it out of committee (where it has been since last December).

It seems there is a dearth of GOP members who have signed on to the measure, which could be attributable to assertions that the pope is “too liberal,” according to a Republican backer of the legislation. Some Republicans, he said, believe the pope is “sounding like [President] Obama. [The pope] talks about equality — he actually used the term ‘trickle-down economics,’ which is politically charged.”

I hereby insist that the bill’s opponents stay after school and write on the chalkboard 1,000 times: Catholic Social Teaching is NOT socialism, Catholic Social Teaching is NOT socialism, Catholic Social Teaching is NOT socialism. . . . Oh, and clean those erasers while you’re at it.

In case you were wondering, here’s how to raise a furor among evangelicals in two easy steps:

Become musicians that sing “Christian” music good enough to win Dove Awards.
Tell everybody you don’t believe in a literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis.

Here’s what Gungor (Michael and Lisa) said on their website in the blog post, “What Do We Believe?”

I have no more ability to believe, for example, that the first people on earth were a couple named Adam and Eve that lived 6,000 years ago. I have no ability to believe that there was a flood that covered all the highest mountains of the world only 4,000 years ago and that all of the animal species that exist today are here because they were carried on an ark and then somehow walked or flew all around the world from a mountain in the middle east after the water dried up. I have no more ability to believe these things than I do to believe in Santa Clause or to not believe in gravity. But I have a choice on what to do with these unbeliefs. I could either throw out those stories as lies, or I could try to find some value in them as stories. But this is what happens…

If you try to find some value in them as stories, there will be some people that say that you aren’t a Christian anymore because you don’t believe the Bible is true or “authoritative”. Even if you try to argue that you think there is a truth to the stories, just not in an historical sense; that doesn’t matter. To some people, you denying the “truth” of a 6,000 year old earth with naked people in a garden eating an apple being responsible for the death of dinosaurs is the same thing as you nailing Jesus to the cross. You become part of ‘them’. The deniers of God’s Word.

Some churches have cancelled concerts because of the controversy. And such evangelical writers as Jeff Koch at World have indeed consigned the Gungors to the company of those who have “drifted from biblical orthodoxy,” who (as the Charisma article linked above says), “don’t believe the whole Bible anymore,” who are (and this is my favorite) “wandering away from a biblically defined Christianity to a land twixt and tween.”

Man, if I didn’t love the name “Internet Monk” so much, I would so use “A Land Twixt and Tween” for this blog.

RNS-ASSEMBLIES-OF-GOD — Racial reconciliation began among white and black Pentecostals at the Pentecostal-charismatic unity meeting in Memphis, Tenn., in October 1994. The reconciliation effort became a historic three-day meeting, later called “the Memphis Miracle,” in which church leaders and scholars explored ways to heal wounds and create racial unity. The all-white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America was dissolved and replaced by the inclusive Pentecostal/ Charismatic Churches of North America. (RNS)

Happy 100th birthday to the Assemblies of God denomination, a group from which maybe we could all learn something. Despite a beginning marred by splits that led to segregated Pentecostal church groups, 41% of the members of the AoG in the U.S. today are non-white, and that number continues to grow.

RNS reports: “During an eight-day trip in July, Scott Temple, the Assemblies’ director of ethnic relations, traveled to settings that bore out the range of what American AG churches look like. He went from a multiethnic congregation in Englewood, N.J., where 40 different nationalities worship together, to a Messianic Jewish congregation, to a biennial meeting of the denomination’s National Black Fellowship.” The denomination has also persevered in ongoing efforts to reach out to historically black Pentecostal denominations from which it has been separated over the years, seeking better relations.

Finally, we had an unusual highway incident here in Indy last week. A semitrailer overturned on one of our major interstates when its driver fell asleep and hit a barrier, spilling 45,000 pounds of butter and dairy products all over the road. The butter was in tubs, but many of them burst and the surface of the highway was coated with delectable spread, forcing it to be closed for several hours.

Which, of course, makes me hungry for sweet corn. With some tomatoes on the side, please.

Have a great rest of the weekend.

Where do I belong?

I want to spend the next couple of Fridays talking about community. This week I want to focus on one way that you can find a church community that is a good fit theologically.

I left the Plymouth Brethren in 1986 over a matter of biblical interpretation, with no idea where I would end up. I spent nearly a year visiting various churches, spending six weeks at each, visiting their services, participating in the their young adult groups, and pouring over their statements of faith and constitutions. I ended up in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and even went so far as getting a Master’s of Divinity degree at one of their seminaries. I was involved in various Alliance churches in different cities for over 20 years. When the last Alliance Church in our area closed, we ended up at a North American Baptist church where we have been for six years. My views have changed a lot over the years, and I though it would be an intereting exercise to see where I best fit now.

Many have come to this site because they have become disenchanted (or perhaps disenfranchised) with where they had been worshiping. Many are not sure where to look next. Finding the right fit some 27 years ago was not an easy process for me. With the advent of the internet, the initial research can be a lot easier. Here is a brief look at some of the online quizzes I have taken recently and what they suggested would be right for me. If you have questions about where you belong, some of these quizzes might be right for you.

If you want to narrow things down to some very broad religious categories you could start with Belief Net – Belief-O-Matic It is a Multi-Faith quiz that paints with very broad strokes, and there were a couple of questions where none of the answers really seemed to fit. It also gave me my most surprising result: That of Orthodox Quaker.

Another quiz asks What’s Your Spiritual Type?. It gives results ranging from “Hardcore Skeptic” to “Candidate for Clergy” I ranked at the low end of “Confident Believer”, just a bit above “Questioning Believer”. This was not a surprising result at all.

If you want to know What kind of Christian are you? This quiz compares your beliefs with some well know Religious leaders. While I might have expected to come out close to Billy Graham, it identified me as closest to emergent leader Brian McLaren. Which, in hindsight, isn’t really that surprising.

There we a couple of very good quizzed to help identify the best fitting denomination. Probably my favorite was the Christian Denomination Selector. It said that I was a 100% match to Anglican.

Another interesting quiz was the one that asks: What Christian Denomination do you belong to?
It was a pretty straight forward quiz and said that I was a 92% match with both Lutheran and Methodist. (Shhh, don’t tell Miguel, Steve, or Chaplain Mike. i will never hear the end of it.)

I did one final test: The Religion Test. It pegged my as a Catholic, but didn’t say what the alternatives were, or how I scored.

So there you have it. I am a Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, Orthodox Quaker, Emergent.

Not sure where you belong? Give one of the quizzes a try. I would suggest starting with my favorite one. Even if you are sure, why not try as well. You might be surprised at your results. Let us know what you found out, and whether or not that seems like a good fit.

Paul among the Philosophers

But in essence, Wright’s argument in this part is fairly simple. Paul needs to be understood against all of these backgrounds — Greek, Jewish and Roman, imperial and local, philosophical and cultural — but primarily, he is a second-temple Jew, and a Pharisee at that.

• Andrew Wilson
A Review of Tom Wright’s Paul and
the Faithfulness of God (Book I)

• • •

It has been a long while since we’ve looked at N.T. Wright’s two-volume study, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, but today we’ll take it up again.

I included the quote above to remind us all of where we are in Book I. Part one of the first volume of PFG introduces us to Paul’s world, the cultural contexts in which he lived and fulfilled his vocation as an apostle.

In the last post (back in April), we looked at what Wright says about Paul’s Jewish roots and his identification with the Pharisees, who were “zealous for the Torah.” But, as we all know, Paul became “the apostle to the Gentiles” and we are most familiar with his role as one who journeyed around the Greco-Roman world proclaiming the good news of Jesus the Messiah, forming faith communities in his name, and building them up in faith, hope, and love through personal ministry and written epistles.

That means he lived and served and breathed in the air of the Greek philosophy and Roman religion, which dominated the ancient world as well.

In chapter three of Book I, Paul takes up “The Wisdom of the Greeks,” giving a brief overview of the history and ethos of the four major schools of Greek philosophy and discussing how Paul interacted with the common teachings of his day.

But if Paul did not derive the central themes and categories of his proclamation from the themes and categories of pagan thought, that doesn’t mean that he refused to make any use of such things. Indeed, he revels in the fact that he can pick up all kinds of things from his surrounding culture and make them serve his purposes — much as philosophers of his day could quote rival schools in order to upstage or refute them. There are, I suggest, two things going on here. First there is direct confrontation; perhaps the most vivid examples are in the realm of Jewish-style monotheism as it confronts pagan polytheism, and Jewish-style sexual ethics in contrast to the practices of the pagans. But second, there is adaptation. Here again we have a programmatic Pauline statement: “we take every thought prisoner,” he declares, “and make it obey the Messiah.” This is not simply a cavalier attitude, grabbing anything that looks useful. It is based on Paul’s robust creational monotheism: all the wisdom of the world belongs to Jesus the Messiah in the first place, so any flickers or glimmers of light, anywhere in the world, are to be used and indeed celebrated within the exposition of the gospel. (p. 201)

In particular, Wright shows how Paul interacted with Stoicism, which was the “default mode” of thinking for a large number of Paul’s hearers. He even suggests that, for many in the ancient world, the whole Christian movement might have appeared to have been more of a “philosophy” than a “religion” as they understood it —

Presenting a case for a different order of reality, told through stories about a creator God and the world.
Arguing for a particular way of life.
Constructing communities which transcended normal ties of kinship, geographical identity, language, gender, and class.

“Philosophy” was not an academic discipline in Paul’s world as it is in ours and Wright thinks we are not wrong to view Paul’s place in that world, at least in the eyes of others, as a kind of philosopher: teaching a way of viewing and living in the world. “We must never think of the ancient philosophers as working out schemes of ideas detached from everyday life. Philosophy, in the ancient world, was ‘everyday life,’ lived, reflected upon and interpreted in this or that way. Each of the traditions inculcated a way of life, and what each meant by ‘reason’ or ‘wisdom’ was a meaning which nested within that totality.” (p. 232). Wright notes Paul’s affinity with Seneca and Epicetus in particular, quoting passages from the latter that use the exact “diatribe” style and wording that Paul uses in the epistle to the Romans.

Paul’s relationship to “wisdom” is somewhat complex. At times it seems that he simply dismisses the philosophies of his day:

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.

For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1Corinthians 1:18-25)

However, at other times as an apostle and pastor uses terms from the Greek schools of thought quite freely:

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Philippians 4:8)

This final quote sets forth a good summary of what Wright says about “Paul among the philosophers”:

Whatever. Paul believed that he had been given insight into all things, all wisdom, through the divine pneuma, the spirit of the Messiah. This kind of wisdom already made “the wisdom of the world” look like foolishness to him. But precisely because this spirit was the spirit of the one God who had made the whole world — already we glimpse large areas of disagreement to be explored in due course — Paul expected that there might be points of overlap, of congruence. He would indeed regard it as his right and calling to “take every thought prisoner and make it obey the Messiah,” but there were plenty of thoughts out there which, he might have judged, would be ready servants if only they were set within the right household. Not only thoughts; methods. How this plays out we must explore later on. (p. 236)

In the next installment, we’ll look at what Wright says about Paul’s engagement with the religions of the empire.

The Wisdom of Christian Piatt

Now, here’s an honest man.

I’m thankful someone finally had enough guts to say what Christian Piatt says in his post, “Five Reasons Progressive Christians Secretly Love Mark Driscoll.”

Without giving any kind of a pass whatsoever to Driscoll or suggesting that he and the celebrity pastor of Mars Hill have anything in common with regard to their respective perspectives on the faith, Piatt nevertheless is self-aware enough to recognize that progressive Christianity has come to need someone like Driscoll in these days of social media and branding.

As a student of Roger Ebert, I know that any given James Bond movie is only as good as its villain. And in Mark Driscoll, those on the progressive end of the Christian spectrum have found a villain that is too good to be true.

Piatt gives five reasons why he, as one of Driscoll’s critics, honestly loves the guy. The commentary after each point is my summary of how I read what he is trying to say.

He helps us define who we are. Conservatives always have the advantage of black and white definitions on their side. Progressives, on the other hand, emphasize mystery and complexity. They have a harder time making a case for themselves. Thank God for someone like Mark Driscoll, who enables progressives to say, “Who are we? We’re the people who are not like him!”

He distracts us from working on ourselves. Piatt is magnificently eloquent here: “damn it if it isn’t so much more fun to crap on Driscoll’s parade than to get the pooper scooper out and go about the laborious task of cleaning up our own messes.” And facing Jesus’ commands, like, “Love your enemies.”

He gives us causes to rally around. Driscoll makes progressive causes look more reasonable and attractive because his own rants have been so extreme and vulgar. Again, as Piatt says, “Driscoll saves us the heavy lifting” by making all these issues look like clearer, less ambiguous choices.

He serves as a common enemy. Protestants and evangelicals can’t agree on much and are willing to split over the smallest matters, but Mark Driscoll is a lightning rod that pulls lots of different people together in a unity of opposition.

His shortcomings are obvious. If we are lucky, ours are not. And that can lead us to think, “Sure, I’m a sinner, but I’m no Mark Driscoll!”

I love Christian Piatt for saying these things because it recognizes that even when Christians think that they’re right about something, even when it’s as obvious as the nose on your face, being “right” is just about as dangerous a position as any of us can find ourselves in.

There is no greater sin than self-righteousness.

Even when — perhaps especially when — we may be thoroughly right and backing a righteous cause.

Even when it’s about Mark Driscoll.