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

  • Shifting Theology

    Last week I was talking about doctrinal distinctives, and today Scot McKnight has a post very close to that topic. He’s more specific, talking about pastors who shift theology. I think he would have done better to illustrate this post with something other than pastors who have become secret atheists, though I know such things happen.

    The interesting question I would have is just how much can a pastor shift, and on what issues. From there I’d be wondering how much a leader can shift, for example, a Sunday School teacher. Finally, where might the standard be for members?

    Having grown up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where I had to affirm a large number of doctrines before baptism, I have experienced the very tight option. After I had left the SDA church, I received a call from someone who wanted to complain about my parents’ positions. They were debating about very minor points and were completely shocked when I pointed out that I didn’t accept either of the positions they were comparing. (The topic was the SDA doctrine of the investigative judgment, which I reject.) To me the issues they raised, and which were critical to them, sounded silly.

    In an earlier, Unity, Diversity, and Confusion, I argue that it’s important to have some essential doctrines, but it’s also important both to know what they are and to keep them limited to actual essentials. A church denomination (as opposed to belonging to the universal church), has limited impact, in my opinion. If one finds that one is drifting from the essentials, as understood by that organization, one should cross the street openly and honestly.

    Let’s say that a local congregation regards tithing as essential. I think it is just as much a lack of integrity to pastor or lead that church if you don’t accept that essential from their point of view, as it would be to pastor a church after you have lost your faith. (I use this example, because I do not believe tithing applies to Christians.) I would make an exception for those cases in which the congregation is aware of the difference, but accepts the leader in spite of it. In that case, however, I would question whether that doctrine was truly an essential in that particular congregation.

    In addition, what precisely is essential? That is not an easy decision either. Are your differences actually on doctrines that are essential? Most congregations have more stated doctrines than are actually essential. Perhaps your shift is one on which you should teach and preach.

    I always like to add a caveat here. I’m a publisher, not a pastor. I work for myself. I teach Sunday School, but I’m not on the church board. Thus I speak from the cheap seats. A pastor who has committed his or her life to a calling and to a particular church group has a  much more difficult decision to make than I will experience.

  • On Doctrinal Distinctives

    Dave Black links to an article regarding the recent statement on the traditional Southern Baptist understanding of the doctrine of salvation. Craig Benno comments further. You may well wonder what a United Methodist is doing commenting on this particular issue. Is it any of my concern whether Southern Baptists accept Calvinism or not, or which view is more traditional?

    No, not at all. What’s interesting to me is the process of looking at “distinctives” and essentials (and you must read at least the first article to understand what I mean here), and distinguishing them. Dr. David Allen lists a number of items on which Southern Baptists can agree generally, but then explicitly places the Calvinist/Traditionalist split outside those boundaries, and thus a topic on which Southern Baptists can disagree.

    Many of us might disagree on these items. I’d see the distinction between Calvinism and other views of salvation as much more important than the distinction between inerrancy and other views of biblical inspiration. But, again, I’m not a Southern Baptist. But making these things explicit is a healthy process, I believe. Knowing what we consider essential is important.

    The United Methodist Church can often tend much too far the other way. It’s hard to tell precisely what it means to be a United Methodist. Certainly we have statements of belief, but there is really no expectation in most churches that the members actually believe any portion of those statements. Of course, the idea of “essentials” is not itself an essential, at least as I see it.

    I actually wrote all this mostly to link back to some previous posts I wrote on this topic:

    Unity, Diversity, and Confusion

    Excessively Large Tent = Crash

    Not All Doctrines Are Equal

    Finding and Protecting the Essentials

    I’d say the first of these is the most important statement of my views.

  • Glorious Stories

    … or “My Wife Reposts Me.”

    Every so often I write a devotional for my wife’s devotional list. She’s been faithfully writing a devotion each weekday (with a very few short breaks) for around 10 years now. You can find here at Jody’s Devotionals. She’s a master of the short devotional form, while I’m not, but I try.

    On even rare occasions, she reposts an older devotional, and today she reposted one of mine, titled Glorious Stories. I read it and found it interesting again. I rarely find re-reading something I wrote interesting. So I decided to link to it.

    Enjoy! Narcissism ‘R Me!

     

  • Discovering What Young Adults Want

    I hear (and participate in) many discussions about what young adults want from the church, usually in the context of asking why the youth and young adults don’t attend church services or the events we put on for them. I’ve arrived at an age where waitresses at restaurants ask me if I want my senior citizen discount (I recently turned 55!), and I sometimes even get one. The interesting thing is how few of the discussions of what young adults like ever include any young adults. I may feel young, but I’m not in touch with the twenty-something or even thirty-something crowd.

    I recall being in a church committee meeting where we discussed what we should do with the church services to get more young people to attend. After more than half an hour of ideas, I felt constrained to point out that there was nobody in the room under 40, and maybe only one or two under 50. The rest of us were in our 50s. Isn’t there are problem with this sort of discussion?

    But when I read Dan Dick’s Beyond Label or Cateogry, I felt much more sympathy (or perhaps empathy) with the girl in the story than with my friends of a similar age. My first reaction was that listing the contents of her purse seemed like a violation of privacy. (I note that some time after I read the post, but before I wrote this, another commenter noted the same thing.) But then I thought that this was an effort to discover her identity, and nothing personal was revealed.

    I too have struggled with labels. I can’t just join a group, in many cases, because I’ll be on their side on one issue, but not on another. People in groups tend to expect you to be on their side, at least most of the time. But despite my own difficulties with labeling, I can get lost in trying to follow the various commitments of those younger than I am.

    So please read Dan’s article and give some consideration to flexibility. Is our complaint that young adults don’t like faith? Or is it, rather, that they don’t like all of our extraneous commitments and our expectation for conformity?

  • Trusting God less than the Government

    Or I could say, I think we trust the Gospel (God’s plan), less than we trust the government.

    Yesterday I posted something from Dave Black to Energion.net (with permission), and e-mailed several of my friends (and Energion authors) to see if they might have a comment on it. As I’ve been thinking about the post, I decided I had a few words of my own to say about it. That post in turn links to a post titled Evangelicalism == Christian Legislation at Juris Naturalist. Though the original post specifically uses abortion as its key example, I am not posting about abortion here, but rather on the question of Christian involvement in politics. Also, I am not going to talk about evangelical Christianity, but rather about mainline Protestantism, of which I am a part.

    I confess that when I went to read the post the first thing that jumped out at me was this:

    I don’t think morality can or should be legislated.

    It seems fairly obvious to me that morality not only can be legislated, we do it all the time. I’ll continue to argue that point. But then I thought of some of the idioms I’ve studied in the Bible, and how the meanings of the words as such may not convey what the phrase has come to mean. So I think it might be possible that this obviously false statement (read one way) might mean something rather different. In fact, over the last few months, I’ve asked some folks who use this just what they’re trying to say. In this very informal and unscientific survey, nobody intended to say that a law couldn’t prescribe doing something that would qualify as moral, nor that it could not proscribe something immoral. Rather, they meant that the law could not make people more moral. Perhaps some linguist will get a good research paper out of surveying what people are actually thinking when they say this.

    I actually have a problem with that as well, in that I do believe that carrying out moral behavior on a regular basis, even when one is constrained to do so by someone in authority, may contribute to one becoming a moral person. Habits do make mental impressions. I think there is a good deal of this illustrated in the Torah. But that is for another time.

    The key issue here, it seems to me, is the strategy that Christians should use in promoting what we think is right in the broader society. The contrast presented in the Juris Naturalist post is that exercising self-sacrifice would be a better strategy for accomplishing our goals than action in the public square. The illustrations used were paying a woman not to have an abortion (with a related question of just how much that would be worth) as opposed to participating in the March for Life in Washington, D.C. While I personally dislike marches as a means of accomplishing political goals, I will admit that’s a prejudice, and I would also see plenty of drawbacks to the proposal to pay women not to have abortions.

    Let me illustrate with a slightly less heated issue. In my home church (which is mainline protestant rather than evangelical), we have a group that is interested in reforming the juvenile justice system. I have great sympathy with their goals, but I’m interested not in the validity of the goals, but in the strategy here. I suspect that nobody would suggest they can accomplish their goals without political action. The juvenile justice system is, and must be to a large extent, run by the government. If one is to reform it, one must make changes at the political level.

    Such changes come slowly. There is a tendency right now to believe that harsher punishment and more cases of trying juveniles as adults is the best approach. Ignoring the validity of each option, let’s think strategy. The temptation is to become frustrated and angry when the government doesn’t go our way. I’m not going to comment on the state of the evangelical church, but for mainline protestants here in the south there is a great deal of frustration.

    What do we tend to do about it? We tend to throw up our hands and say that in this atmosphere there’s really nothing that can be done. It’s not that we trust government so much, it’s that we tend not to see any other options.

    And that’s where, I believe, we need to start thinking much more about the gospel. There’s a stereotype of those who think the gospel can solve these things, one that suggests that “solving a problem with the gospel” means that we preach to people, get them to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and when we have accomplished this they no longer commit crimes that result in them being in the juvenile justice system, they no longer use drugs, and they no longer consider abortion an option. I don’t know how many people might mean something like that, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I do believe in transformation of life through the gospel, but that’s one aspect.

    What we need as well is a gospel based transformation of life at the church and Church level, that is churches who are living the gospel on a daily basis, where Christianity is not just what you do on Sunday morning but drives everything. We’ve come a long ways since the church was acting in unity as described in Acts 2:43-47, and the long ways hasn’t all been in the right direction, to say the least! Coincidentally, my wife is reposting some things I wrote about this on her devotional blog. The first part, Church: Alive or Dead – Part I was posted this morning. The result of such a transformation would be to keep many youth out of the juvenile system in the first place, and while this does not eliminate the need for reform, it does help young people. And it isn’t exclusive either. We can do both.

    We no longer expect a community of faith as they did. In fact, our expectations of members are rather low. We no longer assume that when a member of the church is in trouble the primary source of help, encouragement, and support is the church. Similarly, we don’t see the church as the source of accountability. Being part of one body will involve rebuke as well, but I fear we have lost the skill (and perhaps the discernment) to do that right. But even further, we don’t see the church so much as the people as a matter of buildings, programs, and organizational structures.

    I’m sure someone will point out how many people have said things just like what I say, and that my accusation is unfair. I recall a church where I spoke on prayer. I was told that prayer was the second highest priority of that church. (I didn’t inquire as to what the first priority was.) In view of this, the prayer coordinator was shocked that only about 20 people from a 500 member church showed up for the prayer seminar my wife and I were there to conduct. I simply pointed out that our real priorities are not necessarily indicated by what we say. Looking at the church grounds, I’d have to say that sports was a higher priority at that church. That’s where the time and the money were going.

    Similarly look at your church’s budget. Where does the money go? That will give you a good idea about priorities. Yet it isn’t all about money. Where does our time go? Is it looking inward? Is it taking care of a core group of “important” members? I recall a case in which a church board rejected an outreach project to young people. They said it was not a good outreach project because most of the youth involved were not church members. Besides, of course, learning the English language, that board needed to consider just what their church was there for. We often have nice mission statements, but the question is whether our actual mission is the same as our mission statement. You can tell what the mission of a church is by what it actually does.

    And this is what I mean by trusting God less than we trust the government. We take our issues to the political sphere and when that fails us we often give up or we make token efforts. There are a huge number of Christians in this country, even a huge number of active Christians. If our money was backing up our words we could accomplish great things. We’d have to find ways to get around some of our structures. I consider church buildings the most wasted structures around. Whole sanctuaries getting used just on Sunday morning and perhaps Wednesday night! Gymnasiums used just a couple of times a week!

    Then there are our denominational structures. When I look at downtown Pensacola, I see Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches, along with quite a number of others in close proximity. There are some really good things going in terms of cooperation between these churches. I suspect much more could be accomplished if we dropped some of our concerns with denominational identity and credit. And there are many places were dozens of churches exist close together and the members of one church don’t know what the next church is doing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone points out to me something happening in the downtown area of Pensacola as the result of this blog post–something I should have known about.

    In fact, there are many small lights around the country. I have been tremendously impressed with things I see in smaller churches. What we need is for those things to spread. My mother’s home church has a program that prepares a personalized bag of supplies, including a quilt and other helpful items for children who are going into foster care. I’ve been telling people about that program and over and over people have said, “What a wonderful idea!” And there are plenty of wonderful ideas that result simply from living the gospel on a day-to-day basis, a plan God had in place quite some time again.

    I think we could carry out major reforms in our country simply through active discipleship. I don’t think that would keep us out of the public square. In fact, I think it would find us there quite a lot, and much more successful. I just think many of us have given up on the gospel as a force in the church. If so, it is no wonder we are doing poorly as a force in the world.

     

  • Christianity Today on Short Term Mission Trips

    Christianity Today has a good article giving multiple views on short-term mission trips, specifically those that are travel-intensive. I like getting the multiple views.

    As someone who has participated in and even led mission trips that were “travel-intensive,” I would suggest that leaders and organizers should give serious attention to these evaluations. Don’t take just the negative. It’s easy to imagine that if the money was not spent on a mission trip it would be put into some other good cause. It might, instead, go to a cruise.

    I’d suggest several points to consider if you’re planning such a trip.

    1) Have a good contact in your host country. By a good contact I mean someone who will point you in the right direction. This doesn’t need to be a missionary. It’s best if this is a good local contact. I can’t overemphasize this. Work in connection with the local church.

    2) Be sure you’re listening to your local contact. Don’t plan to do things your way.

    3) Have good church support at home. I don’t mean people to pay the bills. I mean a church (or churches) that commissions you, supports you, and provides accountability.

    4) Choose your team wisely. Not everyone who says “I want to go” actually wants to contribute as part of a team. I could say a lot of things about how to do this, but connection with their local church community, pastor, elders, or other leadership is a good thing.

    5) Be sure you have good leaders on the team.

    6) Prayerfully evaluate what you will accomplish, both for the team and for your hosts. Is this building the kingdom or is it just making us feel good about ourselves? How could this mission be accomplished better?

    Bottom line is that a short-term mission trip is much like any other project. It needs to be done prayerfully and wisely and according to God’s call.

  • Free Book from My Company

    Giving away one free copy of God’s Desire for the Nations: The Missionary Theology of John Piper (Energion Publications).

  • Witnessing and Friendship (Again)

    Some time back I wrote a post titled Witness without Being a Pest. There are a number of things that make Christians pests when they witness, but I think the most important is when we think witnessing is a separate activity that we “do” as opposed to something that happens when we live. If you take the name of Christ (Christian), then you are a witness. You might be a very bad witness. You might even be driving people away, but you can’t not witness.

    So when I caught wind of an article in Outreach titled My Jehovah’s Witness Broke Up with Me (HT: John Meunier), it drew my interest. I find the story and the article interesting and helpful, yet I can’t help but question certain things.

    These two men got together for the purpose of converting one another. Was it ever likely that this friendship would last? How much “friendship” is produced by questioning one another’s faith for an hour each week? I don’t have a problem with such discussions when both parties want to be involved. But when you meet for the purpose of changing someone’s religion, I think trouble is around the corner. One problem is that doubtless someone will eventually detect the fact that you are in the conversation to change their religion.

    Friendship can only be friendship when you’re not trying to get something out of it. I don’t mean the general mutual things friends do for one another. What I mean is a situation where one person is “friends” solely for the purpose of accomplish some goal. I suspect some Christians will object that in trying to change this other person’s religion, they are not trying to accomplish some personal goal. They’re trying to save the other person’s soul! It’s for their own good!

    This reminds me of a Bible study group I led during a time of disunity in the congregation. At one point members of the group were complaining how the people of the other party in the church put them down, questioned their salvation, whether they “had” the Holy Spirit (who on earth can “possess” the Holy Spirit?), and so forth. After listening to the complaints, I asked them if they had not, perhaps, done many of those same things to non-Christians they encountered. Everyone was very honest and acknowledged that they had done precisely that. I had to confess that myself. It was an important lesson to us.

    It’s not my job to save people. It’s simply my job to be a witness. Let God take care of the rest. If you’re getting nervous and thinking you have to push your friends into a decision, or if you feel that you need to make an end of an unfruitful friendship, then you need to do two things. First, check your motivation. If you find a friendship unfruitful, perhaps you were only there for what you could get. Second, check whether you truly trust God to do God’s work.

    Just be who you are (a Christian) and be a friend. Sometimes talk will happen. Sometimes it won’t. Somebody might express great interest in your faith, and then again they might not. It’s not your problem, and it shouldn’t change your friendship.

     

  • Have You Ever Crossed the Street?

    Crossing the StreetNo, I don’t mean this in the very literal sense, but either in the spiritual sense or in terms of affiliation. One of the defining experiences of my life involves crossing the street in this sense. I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist. That involves quite a number of things, including keeping the Sabbath (Saturday) as a day of rest and worship, accepting certain ideas regarding the last days (eschatology), and rules for dressing, eating and drinking.

    In my case, I can easily see my life experience as multiple street-crossings. Most of my younger years were spent in the self-supporting organizations in Adventism. These formed, at the time, a sort of subculture within Adventism that was stricter in adherence to many of the teachings of the church. I moved from that to a more mainstream Adventism before I left the church entirely. I then spent time outside of any church and quite determined I would never be involved again. Finally, I found my way into a United Methodist congregation, where at first my feeling was that I had found a place of comfort. Then I got active and engaged in the work of the church again. Each of these experiences involved some aspect of “crossing the street.”

    Bob LaRochelle has just written an essay for Energion.net regarding the current controversy in the Catholic church regarding American sisters religious (nuns). It’s well worth checking out.

    I’m getting the crossing the street metaphor from a book my company recently published, titled—you guessed it!—Crossing the Street. That book, by Dr. Bob LaRochelle, describes his personal journey of crossing the street, moving from the Roman Catholic Church to the United Church of Christ. In it, he gives two reads of the metaphor “crossing the street.” The first is a negative one, in which one crosses the street to avoid what one believes is evil. “Don’t get too near the Catholics!” the protestant might say, or vice versa. But crossing the street can, as Bob makes clear, also be a positive experience.

    I have encountered the negative view of crossing the street many times in negative reactions to my own street crossing. Seventh-day Adventists find it hard to understand that I could leave their church. The more conservative of them regard me as an apostate, more to be avoided than even the ordinary non-believer. (To some SDAs, non-believers include most non-SDA Christians.) Others express understanding that I had problems with the church organization, but can’t imagine how I could have problems with the doctrines. Others assume that I’ve found a kinder, gentler organization in the United Methodist Church, and that must explain everything.

    Non-SDAs who know my background often wonder why I don’t go hammer and tongs against the horrible heresies perpetrated by the Adventist church. Surely I should use my extensive knowledge of Adventism (I’m a graduate of an SDA college with an MA from the graduate school at Andrews University, earned in conjunction with the SDA Theological Seminary) to rip apart all those wrong people.

    My approach is different. I value my experiences growing up as an SDA. I can reject certain elements of what I was taught without decided that the entire experience (or those I experienced it with) are horrible, without value, and not deserving of respect. In fact, I like to encourage SDAs to get into more dialog with the larger church and the larger church to get into dialog with them. There are things we can learn from the SDA experience. There are things they can learn from us.

    This street crossing is very much a part of who I am. It forms a lifelong defining experience.

    So when I got a proposal for a book titled Crossing the Street and discovered what it was about, I was excited. At the same time, I figured this experience would be different, because the author was moving from the Roman Catholic Church to mainline Protestantism. And, as I had learned thoroughly in growing up, there really is no organization less like the SDA Church than the Roman Catholic Church.

    Wrong! Bob’s experiences in crossing the street were very similar to my own. The authority issues in the Catholic church were similar to those I found in the SDA church. What was more, Bob had moved from the Catholic church to the United Church of Christ and still saw great value in his former tradition. Instead of seeing it as a change of sides in a war, he saw his move as a new opportunity to improve dialog.

    One of the things I like to emphasize to my SDA friends is that if you leave the SDA church, don’t do it because you think you’re going to find the perfect church, one without the problems in SDA churches. There are many things in the SDA church that I’ll criticize. I follow the news. I see some of the things being done currently, such as the rejection of the La Sierra University Choir by an SDA academy in Michigan, and they make me angry.

    But the United Methodist Church doesn’t get everything right either. Not even close! Many of these things are based on the same human emotions as those in the SDA or the Roman Catholic churches.

    I wish I had read Crossing the Street before I crossed the street. It wouldn’t have prevented the crossing, but it would have saved me time in terms of finding my balance. Yes, this book talks about a change from the Roman Catholic Church to the United Church of Christ, but it would have facilitated my own move from SDA to United Methodist just as well. In fact, I commend this to my SDA and ex-SDA friends as an example of a healthy attitude to take to such changes. I suspect that others will find similar help.

     

  • Free Copies of The Jesus Paradigm

    My company Energion Publications is offering five free copies of The Jesus Paradigm by David Alan Black. All you have to do is comment on the post and you’re on the list from which five recipients will be selected.