Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Religion

All posts relating to religion, including those on the relationship of religion to other fields, such as science and politics

  • And Now About Church Success

    It’s interesting that just after reading an article that suggests we’re misreading school success I find one that questions our measure of church success. I find all of the points in Five American Myths of Successful Churches and Ministries (CharismaNews) by Joseph Mattera.

    In my reading of the Word of God over the past 34 years I have noticed a keen difference between the biblical measure of success and the way many American churches seem to measure success.

    Many of the ways American churches measures success are in fact direct violations of the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 23. In this passage Jesus speaks against people loving titles, celebrity status, and desiring prominent places in public events. Through the centuries theology and church practice have been greatly influenced by the surrounding cultures. …

    Well, that’s both true and not terribly exceptional. Unfortunately we all say this, but we continue to do the same things.

    Mattera lists five myths, which are generally closely related. These are 1) by size, 2) budget size, 3) celebrity of leader, 4) leader’s title (bishop, apostle, whatever), 5) leader’s affluent lifestyle. Some of these relate especially to the charismatic movement, where unfortunately apostles are a dime a dozen, not to mention bishops in charge of single churches. Mattera mentions churches offering prophecies for money. I’ve seen churches where having prophets pray for people is a good way to fill the offering plate even if there’s no quid pro quo for a “word from the Lord.”

    I find the issue of titles particularly interesting. Mattera speaks of titles that aren’t backed up by training or mentoring. I’m wondering if we have need of most of these titles. In addition, I’ve noticed a tendency amongst some Christians to be very anxious to get degrees, creating an excellent market for diploma mills.

    It’s interesting that the author is then identified by his titles that include both “presiding bishop” and “supervising bishop.” I’m not entirely against any titles. Sometimes we need them just for identification. But it seems odd to use that bio after this article. I don’t mean that as particular criticism of this author. There are plenty of things in my life that do not match the ideals I see in the New Testament. We almost need to throw everything out and start over.

    Come to think of it, is the idea of a “measure of success” even appropriate to Christianity? I think it’s a good question.

     

    In my reading of the Word of God over the past 34 years I have noticed a keen difference between the biblical measure of success and the way many American churches seem to measure success.

    Many of the ways American churches measures success are in fact direct violations of the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 23. In this passage Jesus speaks against people loving titles, celebrity status, and desiring prominent places in public events. Through the centuries theology and church practice have been greatly influenced by the surrounding cultures.

  • For Gospel Preachers

    Scot McKnight has some excellent advice.

  • Trouble at My Alma Mater – Walla Walla University

    Over the last few weeks I’ve been following events at my undergraduate alma mater, Walla Walla University, largely via the Spectrum Magazine blog, starting with the news that Pastor Alex Bryan of the Walla Walla University Church had been recommended as president by a search committee. Now it has been a number of years since I was a student at WWU and I don’t know the players personally. But as the story developed (you can follow it by using the search box at the link shown above and searching for either Bryan or McVay), various groups got together to campaign against Dr. Bryan, and the board, while considering him sound enough theologically to pastor the university church, decided they didn’t want him as president of the university.

    If I had been leaving the SDA church for personal reasons, this would have been one of them, “this” being the tendency of various small groups to get together to guarantee the total orthodoxy of all selections. My lifelong missionary parents even saw their membership blocked at a local SDA church.

    But wait a minute … I said “if”.

    The reason I bring this story up is as the backdrop for saying quite clearly: If you’re thinking of leaving your church for personal reasons (solely or even primarily), don’t!

    If I had left the SDA church for personal reasons, I would long since have found an equal number of reasons for leaving every church in which I have held membership since. The specific issues are different, but human nature remains the same. It is so easy to start a rumor campaign. One doesn’t even have to plan it. But when you add a little fear, such as people thinking “maybe our church won’t be the same as it always was,” and you can have a full campaign going before you know it. Fight it where you are, because it may well happen elsewhere.

    Perhaps this is why gossip is considered such a serious sin in Scripture. Paul often includes it with his “sin lists.” It’s right there in Romans 1:28-32, but for some reason I’ve never heard a sermon preached from that passage that concentrated on gossip as a sin. If we have any sin in the church that we refuse to give up and that we tolerate openly in contradiction to Scripture, I’d suggest gossip for the title. And just because gossip is spread through Facebook groups or on Twitter doesn’t make it any less gossip.

    But this is the other side of the coin. I said don’t leave your church if your reasons are personal, including this one. I’d suggest that one’s choice of a church home should be based on where you can carry out your call to ministry as a member of the body of Christ. All of us are called to ministry, and our faith community should be helping us carry out that call. You may have to leave a more gossipy church for a less gossipy one, assuming you can find one. But consider that God may be calling you to stay where you are and try to make things better.

    I have doctrinal disagreements with the SDA church that make it impossible for me to be a member. But I continue to be a member of a very imperfect church, just an imperfect church where God is working through the efforts of many imperfect people–like me.

    If we’d think more about service and less about our own comfort and safety, I think things would go much better.

  • Finding the Sound of the Bloody Cross Gospel

    Russell Moore looks at some comments by Pat Robertson. There’s everything here including a response to the prosperity gospel. Make sure to read right to the end. (HT: Unsettled Christianity.)

  • A Monopoly on Healing?

    I’m enjoying editing Bruce Epperly‘s new book, to be released this fall, Healing Marks. Here’s an excerpt:

    A Monopoly on Healing? Quite satisfied with their orthodoxy and ability to maintain the purity of Jesus’ healing ministry, the disciples come to Jesus with what they assume is good news: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” They expect a pat on the back for maintaining decency, order, and clarity in Jesus’ healing lineage. Imagine their surprise when the Healer retorts:

    “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterwards to speak evil of me. 40Whoever is not against us is for us. 41For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” – Mark 9:39-41

    The one who opened the floodgates to divine healing and hospitality to all people by welcoming sinners, social outcasts, diseased women, lepers, tax collectors, foreigners, and persons possessed by demons, adds one more scandalous footnote to his healing ministry, divine healing is not restricted to his direct followers or even to Christians. God wants everyone to live abundantly and will use any healthy means to bring us to well-being (page 138 in advance copies).

    Yep! I’m enjoying this …

  • Quote of the Day – Chicken Sandwiches or Daily Bread

    From Allan R. Bevere (author of The Politics of Witness):

    [W]e Christians in America need to ponder the reality that while we were arguing over eating chicken sandwiches this past week, that there were people in many parts of the world who were, at the very same time, hoping only for a morsel of daily bread.

  • Scot McKnight on Dominion Theology

    Well, actually he’s summarizing Paul C. McGlasson. I recently wrote about hearing Dutch Sheets speak and mentioned what he had to say about the term “dominionism.”

    There is something that concerns me here, and that is that Rushdoony and those who agree with him are lumped in with folks like C. Peter Wagner, and of course Sheets. There are similarities and there are differences. There are differences in goals, such as the basis of whatever biblical law various leaders would apply. Is this a reapplication of at least the civil portions of the Mosaic law, or is it a gentle application of the Sermon on the Mount? I don’t see either of these as a basis for civil administration in a pluralistic society, yet the two goals are substantially different. Then there are differences in terms of strategy. Is force permitted? Is one simply working through the democratic process, or is one trying to undermine the entire system?

    I happen to believe that the Kingdom of God, insofar as it is manifested on earth, should be manifested through the people of God, what we often call the “upper case Church.” I believe that civil administration should be secular or as religiously neutral as possible. (I’ll have to write sometime about how I combine those two potentially conflicting ideas.) But at the same time I believe that we need to be careful when we lump groups of people with quite different goals and approaches together.

     

  • Shades of Outrage but Comments Closed

    I pointed earlier to a post by J. R. Daniel Kirk responding to the post at The Gospel Coalition by Jared Wilson. Wilson has now responded to some of the outrage generated by his original post. But generally his new post says we shouldn’t read his excerpt as saying what it actually says, but should understand it as saying something completely different. He then closes comments.

    I have two issues here:

    1) The minor one is that the effort to respond and then cut off public discussion. E-mail is an easy way to take on only those you want to, and not have your responses subject to public scrutiny.

    2) This is not a good characterization of complementarians that I know. I’m egalitarian. I’m quite willing to argue the issue. But I believe most of those complementarians of my acquaintance would not be any more comfortable with this language than I am. It’s important to recognize nuances of one’s position. It’s easy to make all of our arguments based on what some position might lead to or what might be associated with it.

    Wilson tries to maintain that his excerpt is saying nothing more than the ordinary complementarian position (fourth paragraph), and then wonders why people are so perverse as to fail to realize this, especially after the author has said that he really, really didn’t mean what we read his words to say. But unfortunately if language means anything, that summary is inaccurate (the fourth paragraph), and Douglas Wilson’s denial is disingenuous.

    Consider this paragraph, the second in the exerpt:

    When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, [note that this is not said to be offensive to all decent people, but to egalitarians] and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed [in other words, authority and submission is appropriate to the marriage bed, and is suppressed] (bolding and bracketed comments are mine).

    I vigorously reject this paragraph. Obviously I do so as an egalitarian. But I also reject it as a fundamental statement of complementarianism. Were I to accuse my many complementarian friends of holding such a position, they would justifiably accuse me of constructing a straw man.

    Wilson accuses detractors of decontextualizing this post. Is this excerpt insufficient context? Let him tell us what context would suffice to make this acceptable. The only context I could imagine that would justify the paragraph would be one that made it the statement of a villain in some sort of theological novel.

    (See also this post from Political Jesus regarding Douglas Wilson and a discussion of slavery.)

  • Responding to TGC on Sex and Power

    Well, I’m not responding. I found someone who wrote a better response than I could manage. That is J. R. Daniel Kirk. The payoff quote:

    When Jesus came and showed us what Christian manhood was all about, he did not conquer, but allowed himself to be conquered; he did not pierce, but allowed himself to be pierced; he did not plant by scattering his seed forcibly, he planted by giving up his own life–the grain of wheat falling to the earth and dying that it might produce a crop 100-fold.

    A certain number of the differences between egalitarians and complementarians might be resolved if we all took our concept of authority and power from Jesus and the way he loved. Not all the differences, but a good number. “As Christ loved the church.” It’s not about putting you or me in charge.

  • Measuring Liberal Christianity

    There have been a number of posts around the web regarding the decline of liberal Christianity. It got started by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. There have been a number of good responses, including Rachel Held Evans (which connected best with me), Chaplain Mike, and Diana Butler Bass. All these responses are good.

    There are so many factors in making a church a vibrant, successful operation that it’s easy to see how people can disagree so widely on what’s wrong and what ought to be done.

    My first problem is with how we measure the success of a church. Most of us are quick to claim that numbers don’t matter when the our own numbers are in decline, yet we are quite ready to accept that the decline in someone else’s numbers is an indication that something is wrong with them. And there are good scriptural examples of both. Jesus began his ministry with crowds following him and ended it pretty much alone. The early church, on the other hand, experienced steady growth.

    We can easily use “numbers don’t count” as an excuse for not doing our duty. At the same time, I don’t think that numbers really tell the story. When I look at a conference dashboard (a UMC thing!), the first thing I notice is the context-free use of statistics, with numbers not normed for church size nor adjusted for the demographics of the community in which a church is located. But more important, I think managing churches by the numbers is a sign of the very laziness of which some pastors are accused. It’s an excuse for bishops to fail to do their duty to use spiritual discernment in leading the church. I must confess that at first I was merely ambivalent about this approach. But the more I watch it, and the more I read about it, the more firmly opposed to it I become.

    This doesn’t mean that declining numbers cannot indicate failure. It’s just that they are not the one and only indicator. Determining the difference requires spiritual discernment and a willingness to take responsibility for acting on that discernment. I think the church is badly in need of this sort of leadership.

    But let me now turn my discernment to liberal Christianity, and take responsibility for my own views. I use the label “liberal charismatic” along with “passionate moderate” in the header to this blog. This doesn’t result from a rejection of labels, as one might take it from Brian McLaren, but rather a search for a set of labels that are applicable. I think I look at liberal Christianity with one foot in that camp.

    From that perspective I see a great deal of life in liberal or progressive Christianity. Unfortunately, like conservative Christianity, there is often a great deal of difference between the pastors and leaders and the folks in the pews. There are also dead spots in both versions (and all those between). I think these dead spots result from the same thing.

    Too many liberals in the pews are liberals not because they are liberal in theology but because they are not conservative. (I’m sure this applies to some pastors as well, but I don’t know many like that personally.) By this I mean that they really don’t have a theology of scripture. They reject the conservative doctrine and then just go along “not taking it as literally” as conservatives. They don’t have a liberal doctrine of the atonement; they just don’t accept the conservative view.

    I think it’s quite possible that it’s as a result of this lack of interest in doctrinal positions that liberal pastors often don’t preach much about doctrine. But there are liberal interpretations of all these things, and quite robust ones. I know liberal preachers who do preach about them, and in general their congregations are doing well. (Note that all such comments are from personal experience, not any sort of survey.)

    I have the privilege of publishing some authors who would identify themselves as progressive. Bruce Epperly, Bob Cornwall, and Bob LaRochelle come to mind immediately. I hope they won’t mind my taking their names in vain here, but they are all serious about their theology and active in discipleship and mission. They are deeply interested in Bible study. Indeed two of them have written Bible study guides that I publish. I list these three because of personal knowledge, but I would add that when I recently attended the Academy of Parish Clergy conference, I heard a number of presentations from people who are serious about both theology and mission. (Some of these folks should probably be categorized as moderate as well, but they were generally mainline.)

    While there are certainly churches in decline, what I question is the potential of the organizations for success. It is not that there is no life at the local level. It is rather that organizations are not tending to respond to the realities of ministry today. In the United Methodist Church, I think there is a substantial number of both clergy and laity whose main occupation is keeping things as they are. It is these people who are bringing death to the church, not the active liberal pastors and thinkers.

    I believe there is life in liberal Christianity, and in conservative Christianity as well. There is no life in the way we’re trying to determine success.