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

  • Organizing Small Groups

    Will Rice, Discipleship Pastor at University United Methodist Church in San Antonio, is suggesting retiring the term “small group” because he thinks it is not well enough defined (HT: Dave Black Online). It is hard to know precisely what one is talking about when one says “small group.” He’s right–it is hard.

    He also has some suggestions, such as defining the mission of the small group, making sure you have leaders gifted and trained to accomplish that mission, and evaluating the results according to the mission. I intentionally repeated the term “mission” multiple times there for emphasis. His suggestion is good. I’ve said many times, and I’m pretty sure I’ve said it within the last several posts, that I can tell how a church is doing on its mission by asking a member if they can state that mission.

    I’m also completely in agreement with the idea of finding the right people with the right gifts to put into the right position as facilitator. I’ve even written a book about it, and the title includes the phrase “small group!”

    But there’s another side to this that I’d like to underline briefly, and that’s the church (in my experience Methodist, though I have no reason to believe this is exclusively our problem) that tries to over-organize and over-control small group developments (see my earlier post Putting Up Barriers to Ministry). If a group of people meet and they don’t fit the favored definition of “small group” they are actively discouraged. I even encountered a pastor who objected to prayer groups meeting off-campus without church sanction. It’s quite possible to define, organize, and train our way out of existence. I say this as someone who loves defining, organizing, and especially training.

    I think there are small groups that develop naturally in a church that are detrimental to mission. I would suggest, however, that the solution is not to force all groups under a regimen of control, but rather the preaching of the gospel and teaching discipleship, along with appropriate, Christ-like, church discipline. I don’t mean that Rice’s good suggestions amount to forcing groups under a regimen. I’m referring to what I’ve observed in certain churches. I think one can tell the difference by observing the fruit–if groups of Christians are gathering and doing mission, it’s working.

    Somewhere between (or away from) control and chaos (with apologies to Get Smart) there’s a place where we function as the body of Christ under One Spirit.

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  • Converts to Orthodox Churches

    … are increasing.

    I don’t find this all that hard to understand. I personally have been enjoying more reading of the eastern church fathers, and have found much good material in the theology and liturgy of the Orthodox churches.

    Chron – Houston and Texas News reports on some churches in that area which are largely made up of converts and are often pastored by converts to that tradition. People come, amongst other reasons, because they are looking for stability. When the church changes as fast as the culture, one can easily wonder just what the church is for.

    While I am attracted to some of the theology, I can’t say that I am much attracted to the ecclesiology or the church structure. In fact, I find even the structure of the United Methodist Church a bit annoying. At the same time, I think I see similar ideas and attitudes in action in the ICON service at my home church, First United Methodist Church in Pensacola. Many people wondered about the traditional elements of the liturgy. There’s a tendency in many of our churches in this area toward worship services that are just contemporary. Would people want a service with the more traditional elements?

    The answer appears to be “yes.” Most of the new members of the church are coming in through that service. People are attending who haven’t attended church in years. People love the service. It combines technology, contemporary music and a traditional structure for the liturgy.

    I do like this liturgy that tends to provide stability, but perhaps we could do even more if we recovered the counter-cultural nature of the Christian message and really became God’s upside-down kingdom.

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  • It’s Broken!

    Soviet electric locomotive VL60pk (ВЛ60пк), c....
    A little bigger than the one we were playing with!
    Image via Wikipedia

    “I know what’s wrong with it,” said six year old Steven.

    From the eminence of 12 years old, I was showing Steven my electric trains, most of which I had salvaged from other sets and lovingly repaired. Suddenly one of the engines we’d been playing with just quit.

    That’s when Steven said: “I know what’s wrong with it.”

    I turned to Steven, wondering how he had figured it out. “What?” I asked.

    “It’s broken!” he announced solemnly. The look on his face told me he clearly believed he had solved the problem.

    I got quite a good laugh about that little incident, telling my parents and friends, and we all enjoyed the humor. Clearly the 6 year old’s lack of understanding was on display and very amusing. Knowing something is broken doesn’t mean you know what’s wrong, and certainly doesn’t mean you know how to fix it.

    But over the years since, I’ve begun to wonder. Nobody would really claim that just pointing out that something is broken means you’ve accomplished anything. Yet many, many people, who exceed age 6 by many, many years, behave as though this were the case.

    “My community is broken. People don’t talk to one another or know one another any more. Problems turn into lawsuits for no good reason.”

    So what is causing this? Where is the problem? How can it be fixed? Many of the same people have no idea and clearly have no intention of trying to fix it. They want to identify the problem and complain. Let me ask you this? When was the last time you did more than wave to a neighbor?

    “My church is going the wrong way. It’s broken! Things are falling apart! We’re losing members.”

    But what’s the problem, and what are you doing about it?

    I had an interesting experience with this once. I was leading a Bible study group, and somehow a text led to a series of complaints about our church.  Now there was a visitor there. I knew that she was the chair of our staff-parish relations committee. Those in the Methodist church know this is the group that theoretically deals with complaints about how the pastor and staff are accomplishing their mission. If you have a complaint in a United Methodist congregation, the SPR chair is one person to talk to.

    The rest of the group should have know who our visitor was too, but they didn’t (problem #1). The visitor pulled out a notebook as the complaints flowed, and started to ask questions. When did these things happen? What might be done? “I’m the SPR chair,” she said. She wanted to go do something about the complaints.

    What happened? The complaints dried up. Like six year old Steven, folks wanted to say, “It’s broken,” but they didn’t know where to go from there, or perhaps the desire to pursue the issue was missing.

    “Washington is broken. The politicians don’t listen to the people. We need to fix things!”

    One of my favorite questions at this point is to ask the person whether they voted in the last election. You might be amazed at how many complaints come from the non-participants. But if you want to get even closer to the problem, ask the person if they know how their representative or senator voted on the problem. If you want to get into even darker territory, mention state representatives, county commissioners, or city councilmen.

    Realizing that something is broken is important, but it’s the easy part. It’s where the work starts, not where it ends. At least if you’re not six years old, and thus don’t have someone else to make it better for you!

    (I’m submitting this to the one word at a time blog carnival, on the word broken)

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  • Listening to Whose Voice(s)

    Quote of the day:

    The sin of the church too often is to listen to the voice of those already in it. We let the comfortable voice of the familiar become the voice of God. Breaking free of that sin is necessary. But replacing one human voice with another is not the same as following Jesus.

    From: John Meunier

     

  • Evolutionary Links

    James McGrath has an interesting crop of evolutionary links from the blogosphere today.

  • William Barclay Commentaries Dangerous

    So declare the Catholic bishops of Vietnam. I find it hard to see why, but that’s because I don’t think books that teach doctrine different from my own “dangerous.” I would call a couple of paragraphs in Barclay less than fully accurate, but there are some paragraphs that are positively brilliant, which is all one can expect from a popular, largely devotional book. If you’re wondering what I might call inaccurate, I do think he smooths the rough edges of some of the more difficult passages, and not always in full accord with the intent.

    But my point here is neither to criticize the Catholic church, nor to criticize or praise Barclay and his series of commentaries, but rather to note that this isn’t about any one denomination. Despite a slogan that includes “open minds,” I’ve encountered a number of cases in United Methodist churches where material from other denominations was deemed dangerous. In one case curriculum material written by a Baptist was deemed dangerous, because it, well, it was hard to tell. Mostly because it was Baptist.

    In another case, a young adult class was disbanded because they were reading and discussing dangerous books. A replacement class was formed that would hold the young people to the straight and narrow. The result? The class went from a full room to an empty room (yes, zero attendance) in less than a month.

    What I would say is dangerous in Christianity is a mindset that would consider Barclay’s commentaries dangerous. Debate the views, consider some of them wrong–absolutely. That’s good experience in discerning (Hebrews 5:11-14).

  • Alden Thompson: SDAs and the Charismatic Experience

    Ellen Gould White vor 1900
    Ellen G. White
    Image via Wikipedia

    Since I grew up as an SDA and later got involved in a somewhat charismatic stream within Methodism, I found this article by Alden Thompson pretty interesting. It’s not surprising, however, that the SDA movement, which arose in the mid 1800s, had some charismatic elements.

    The funny thing for me in reading this is that I did actually read the passages from Ellen White’s Testimonies when I was younger, and simply didn’t understand what some of those phrases meant, so I never made the connection.

    One thing that has puzzled and interested me since I left the Seventh-day Adventist church is the way in which Adventists tend toward the respectable side of religion even though they’re a bit out of the Christian mainstream. It seems as if SDAs prefer that in everything except their specific doctrinal distinctives they be seen as solid and respectable. Those who do not seek distinction from other Christian churches (and interesting split in the church in my view), tend to seek acceptance with conservative evangelicals, not mainline Christians who might be more willing to listen.

    (Note: I’m publisher of Dr. Alden Thompson’s book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?, which will soon be released in a new edition. [Some slightly damaged copies are still available.] I’m also publisher of another book on the SDA experience, Finding My Way in Christianity: Recollections of a Journey by Dr. Herold Weiss.)

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  • Responding to Adrian Warnock on Arminocalvinists

    Jacobus Arminius
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve had Adrian Warnock’s post, An Arminocalvinist Spectrum, sitting in my starred items for some time, but I do want to write just a few words about it before I move on. But first, I want to note that Adrian Warnock is one of the Five Sites I Read Because I Disagree, and I’m on his list of top 60 referrers for 2010, even if only at #56. Glad I could contribute, Adrian!

    I’m also happy to see this issue divided into a spectrum rather than viewed as a simple, two-sided issue, because there are, indeed, substantial differences between various positions all along the line. I would personally have to say that I accept some points from #5 (Reformed Arminian), #6 (Strong Arminian), and #7 (Open Arminian), though not all points from any of them. But that is part of defining points on any spectrum–there are always people who fall between the points.

    As a follow-up, I would suggest reading Spectrum or Divide? A Response to Adrian Warnock, and Adrian’s response in turn here. Matt O’Reilly of Incarnatio, is a neighbor here in the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, though I have never actually met him.

    While I understand that some Arminians are embarrassed by open theists, I do think open theism at least grows out of Arminianism. I am attracted to, but not certain of, some elements of open theism. I think there are scriptures, particularly those that refer to God repenting, which sound quite open.

    What always bothers me in these discussions, though to his credit Adrian doesn’t bring it up until his point on open theism, is the belief that this is largely a debate about the sovereignty of God. I don’t even believe it deals with the nature of God’s sovereignty. It actually deals with the way in which God exercises his sovereignty.

    I’ve encountered this same issue in creation-evolution debates. The argument is that God is more glorified if he created the world in six literal days than if he used some mechanism that took more time, or in which God appeared more distant. But the question is not about God’s power, or about who has the choice. God clearly has the choice. God is sovereign no matter how he chose to create. Finite human beings have no concept of the power involved no matter what the method.

    When God works in salvation, it is totally a divine choice how to act. Whether God created human beings with the power to choose good, some of which remains, or God empowers them to make the choice through prevenient grace, or simply makes that choice in predestination, it is nonetheless God’s action in God’s time and it’s God’s sovereignty.

    It seems to me that the argument that God gets greater glory if he predestines all who will be saved actually tries to force a very human view of sovereignty onto God. Similarly, a claim that God is more glorified if he gives his creatures freedom is to force our human perspective onto God’s actions.

    The only question, it seems to me, is how God actually has acted. To be more precise, I should say how God has chosen to present his actions. Because I don’t think any of us understand this. Deeper than any conviction I have about Arminian soteriology is the simple conviction that we don’t really know–none of us.

     

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  • An RSS Feed for Dave Black

    Dave Black discusses RSS feeds, of which he has none:

    12:18 PM Yes, yes, yes, let’s hear it for RSS feeds!

    You may have bookmarked this blog, and/or other blogs and webpages. But you have no idea when new content is posted. So every now and then you click your bookmarks to see what is new. Sometimes nothing is new, and you’ve wasted a click.

    Impeccably good logic. Unless, of course, when you click on a bookmark and the site you visit is always publishing something new!

    But you can get an RSS feed of Dave Black’s blog. Really you can! Here’s how you do it:

    1. Got to http://page2rss.com
    2. Enter the URL for Dave’s blog, (http://daveblackonline.com/blog.htm)
    3. The site will give you back an RSS feed that will follow updates to that page
    4. Put that feed URL into your RSS reader

    For example, my reader currently shows the selection I quoted above as the latest update.

    I do update the Energion Publications (my company) book pages for the three of Dave’s books that I publish (with Dave’s permission), Why Four Gospels?, Christian Archy, and The Jesus Paradigm with relevant material from Dave’s blog, but that only gets a limited selection.

  • When Do You Get On Board?

    Christian Girl at College has an answer: Now!

    Oh, well… I can’t do that now. I’m too young; I’m not really in control of my life – my actions. I’ll change after college, when I’m on my own. It’ll be a big turning point. That’s the perfect time to start being the Christian I want to be.

    …

    As if that will be ever.

    Read the rest!