I think she has two excellent points, the first about the danger of thinking of oneself as a celebrity (evangelical or not!), and the second about the value of structured prayer. I’d add a note on the value of structured Bible study, which also forces one to leave one’s comfort zone and one’s own desires and to let God speak.
Yesterday I posted one of my short stories over on my Jevlir blog. For those who don’t read that blog (its readership is quite low), I wanted to write a couple of notes here.
Many churches think they’ll find the solution to the problem of declining membership or financial problems by hiring just the right staff. But in most churches, the problems are much deeper than who is on the staff. In most declinining churches, I would suggest there is a need to change the church culture. You can’t hire a “Minister of Evangelism” and expect that to make the church grow. A “stewardship consultant” is only going to be able to go as far as the church’s commitment will take it.
The solution to declining membership, in my view, is discipleship. If you can’t get the church to commit to being disciples in all ways, then no number of paid staff is going to solve your problem. In order to change the culture of the church, you may have to lose even more members. Let the folks who don’t want to be disciples and who don’t want to be ministers (every member should be!) move on.
I don’t mean by this to sit in judgment on their discipleship. What I mean is to allow the self selection. If the church determines to be Christ in their community and to take this commitment seriously, then those who don’t want to go along will get annoyed and leave. Too frequently, our response to this is, “Oh no! We’re losing more members!” So we keep the problem alive by sacrificing discipleship to numbers.
I don’t have a problem with church staff when the purpose of that staff is to facilitate the ministry of the members. But in an overwhelming number of cases, the paid staff is expected to do the ministry, and the stewardship problem is to get the members to cough up enough money to pay the staff to do the things that they, the members, should be doing themselves.
The gospel fulfilled in discipleship is the only answer … not more paid staff to replace the ministry of the whole body.
At today’s church service there was something I wish I had caught on camera. I’m not really quick, even though I have a reasonably good camera in my cell phone.
Our pastor, Geoffrey Lentz, was preaching the final sermon of his Summer in the Psalms series, this time from Psalm 150. He talked about exuberant praise, and suggested that if we could really get a vision of God’s grace we would doubtless be ready to sing and dance ourselves. He’s been using musical styles with his sermon, and today’s style was jazz.
As is our custom, the offering comes immediately after the sermon. The offertory was jazz, with quite a catching rhythm. I was sitting near the back and looking across a congregation sitting quietly in their seats while the band rocked the house; well, would have rocked it had it been movable. And no, this is not about me. I was sitting in my seat like the rest.
But a few rows ahead of me, close to the center of the sanctuary, there was a little girl, perhaps two years old. She was quite noticeable in a bright red dress. She was standing on her chair, dancing, waving her hands above her head, and clapping (mostly) to the music.
I think she was the only one who got it!
When I first started attending a United Methodist church, and the leadership figured out what my background was, I was soon invited to teach various classes around the church. I was fairly pleased with this, as I love to talkteach, and it gave me plenty of opportunities.
My approach was to search for ever newer things to talk about. I wanted to work from my most recent reading and find something that nobody had ever heard of before. Above all, I didn’t want people to feel bored because I was covering topics that were too simple or basic.
I would note here that due to my detour from the church following graduate school, this was my first extensive experience teaching the folks in the pews, and not dealing with folks in the halls of academia. In academic circles, one often brings up a topic only to be informed that the listener has read an article in some scholarly journal on that topic, or to be asked if one has read something even more recent. That’s all well and good in scholarly circles. It saves time. If you’ve both read the same article you can go on with the discussion on that basis.
A very nice education director called me aside one day and pointed out that I was really missing telling people the things that they needed to know. I thought I was keeping their interest. They were impressed with my intelligence and breadth of knowledge, she told me, but they weren’t really getting what I was trying to teach. Her suggestion was that I keep things basic—from my point of view—and they would be at about the right level from hers, and that of the listeners.
I don’t know that I always follow that advice. I occasionally find myself rambling off into strange territory, and I’ll suddenly ask a class if I’m saying anything of interest. Some honest soul will tell me that I’ve gone off the deep end.
I’ve noticed this with some scholars of my acquaintance. First, there are many more scholars who believe they speak clearly to common people than actually do. By common people here I don’t mean stupid people or ignorant people; I mean people who are not scholars in the area of a particular scholar’s expertise.
Second, there’s the “we’ve already covered this” syndrome. This covers hundreds of topics. I’ve recently heard it with regard to a range of controversies. The method here is to refer one to a prior magazine or journal article, or a book written a few years ago and then shrug and say that nothing more needs to be said on that topic.
It doesn’t look that way where I live. I don’t live in academia. Yes, I have an MA degree, but that was my last academic experience. The rest of my life has been outside of academia. Nonetheless, both through my reading, and now through my publishing, I encounter scholars on a regular basis. I also encounter the comments of intelligent and informed readers who are not scholars. They often tell me that the scholars aren’t being nearly as clear as they think they are.
There are many fields of study where it is appropriate for one to spend a lifetime communicating only with other scholars. One can think of various scientific fields, or even of some of the more technical branches of biblical studies, such as textual criticism. But ultimately when dealing with faith, what doesn’t get out to the broader community is, in my view, largely wasted.
We need more scholars who will spend their time learning to communicate their views to the public. In order to learn to do this, they will need to listen to what people are saying with regard to their writing and speaking. Are people hearing, or are they not.
I’m not going to name names, because I don’t want to single out people of my acquaintance, but I’d like to give an example. One speaker of my acquaintance was invited to speak at a church for the weekend. This was not a church in the same religious tradition as his. At a Friday night meeting he felt he had not communicated. He listened to what people said after the meeting. He talked to me. He talked to the pastor. He spent much of the night in prayer. When he returned to speak Saturday morning, things were completely different. He had listened to the people and to the Holy Spirit. By the time he preached his Sunday morning message there was a bond between him and the congregation.
We need more scholars and experts who can follow that example.
John Meunier asks if he can be replaced by a video screen. It’s a good question, considering the number of megachurches that are broadcasting a sermon to multiple locations.
I have several objections to the idea of a broadcast sermon:
I think every worship service should involve active participation and personal contact. I can watch or hear great sermons from great preachers on my television if I want.
And while we’re at it, we need a service long enough to cover the ground, which includes hearing the scripture itself (not just someone’s discussion of it), prayer, interaction, discussion, learning discipleship, and preparing to take the message outside during the week.
The Christian Post has an article on depression amongst pastors and ministry leaders, which, in turn, links to an article at The Gospel Coalition. Now the Gospel Coalition article is part one of a five part series, so I’m not going to comment on how far they will go before they are done, but I think they could expand on their first item: Unrealistic expectations.
Not only are our expectations of pastors unrealistic, but they are sinful, and our descriptions of them are deceitful. The surprising thing is not that there are depressed pastors and ministry leaders. The surprising thing is that we have any functional leaders at all! I have long believed that if we described what we want in a pastor in a job description, nobody would be able to fulfill the role.
What we want, I believe, are Christ figures, who, rather than leading the church, will be the church, and will eventually sacrifice themselves, and probably also their families on behalf of a local church. That local “church” is only a church in name, because they are not behaving as the body of Christ, but rather delegating that task to a paid professional. Visiting the sick and shut-ins, serving in the community, spreading the gospel message, giving, and study of the Word are all functions of everyone, not just one ordained person.
Just leading the teaching ministry of a mid-sized congregation would be a solid, full-time job for one person, and that only if he or she spends most of the available time equipping other teachers in the church.
As long as we have unrealistic–yes, sinful!–expectations enshrined in our church organization, we’re going to have leadership problems, not to mention plain old “living the good news” problems.
Dowd, Michael. Thank God for Evolution. New York: Plume, 2007. 380 pages + front and back matter. ISBN: 978-0-452-29534-6. (All numbers in parentheses are page numbers from this edition of the book.)
I was interested in this book from the moment I saw the title, not because I immediately expected to agree, but because it, along with its blurbs and description, takes a celebratory approach to evolution. My own position is that evolution is a fact and a valid theory, but it requires some theological work to deal with that. So a book that claims that evolution is not only compatible with Christianity, but something that Christians should thank God for, sounds pretty challenging to me.
The early pages of the book set some pretty high standards. In the “Author’s Promises” Dowd makes some very strong promises, claiming that he is bringing forth a new form of Christianity. For example, speaking to “devoutly committed Christians” he says that “. . . whether you consider yourself conservative, moderate, or liberal, my promise to you is that the sacred evolutionary perspective offered here will enrich your faith and inspire you in ways that believers in the past could only dream of” (xxvi). He also expects that his exposition will be enriching to atheists and freethinkers, amongst many others. That’s a tall order, and if you read the complete section of author’s promises, you’ll find the mission gets even more daunting.
I was reading this book along with my Sunday School class, and I tried to look at it in two ways. First, I wanted to see how much it challenged my thinking and made me reconsider things I already believe. Second, I wanted to see how well it fulfilled the author’s own stated mission.
So how does he go about his task? He divides his presentation into five sections:
The first section lays out the view of evolution that underlies the rest of the book. I would summarize this by saying it’s a very directed and goal-oriented view of evolution. The evolutionary process is not just natural laws being laws; it is a process that is leading the universe, and of course our world, to ever greater heights. The second section attempts to relate the concept of revelation with science, and deals, in a sense, with epistemology. The third section attempts to restate basic Christian doctrines in terms of evolutionary theory. The fourth expands this into a more general spirituality, including presenting some ideas of spiritual disciplines. In fact, the fourth section goes so far as to discuss speaking in tongues and relating it to this evolutionary spirituality. The fifth section, to be honest, started to feel rather redundant, but I’d summarize it by saying that it restates the evolution of the entire universe such that it is leading to the fulfillment of the dreams of an American 21st century liberal. Many of these dreams are not at all bad–the question that remains is whether evolution is inevitably pushing in that direction.
As usual, let me state the positives of this book. I’m afraid my reaction is not all that positive, so this is harder than usual. The author’s style is engaging, though I must temper that note by noting that it seems redundant from time to time. The section of spiritual disciplines and some on evolutionary psychology were interesting, though understandably a bit basic. I’m not sorry I read the book, but it doesn’t go onto any of my “you ought to read this” lists.
There are a some things this book is not. It is not an outline of evolutionary theory. There are some basic descriptions of evolutionary processes, but nothing that I find challenging, and I am not trained in any of the natural sciences. (I should note, however, that I’ve been reading books on creation and evolution since I was about 10 years old.) It is not a deep book of theology. While it runs through a number of theological concepts, the major contribution, in my view, was in redefining terms. It does not deal extensively with scripture. If you want to look at how to interpret scripture in the light of the principles expressed here, your guidance is limited to telling you not to take the Bible literally, and to look for revelation of God in the ongoing, evolutionary story of the universe around you.
Before I discuss the success of this book at attaining its stated goals, I want to write a note on accommodationism. Accommodationism is the view that science and religion can be accommodated and need not conflict. The problem with this is that it doesn’t define “religion” and “science.” My religion and mainstream science can be accommodated, but let’s say someone believes that the only way to faithfully read Genesis 1 & 2 is as historical narrative description the creation of the world, then that particular form of religion and mainstream science cannot be accommodated.
I might want to suggest that this view of Genesis 1 & 2 is less important or less essential, but it’s not my place to tell others what about their belief system is essential. I can suggest, but obviously the decision is theirs. I cannot claim to have accommodated their faith to science unless, in the process, I have respected what they regard as important.
Similarly one must define what one means by science. I see science as a way of studying the natural world. If something is supernatural, it can only be observed by science as (and if) it impacts the natural world in a measurable way. So I don’t understand science as the one and only way to know. Yet there are those who do. If one believes science is the one and only way to know, then accommodation with religion will again be impossible.
Thus accommodationism itself tends to become a scientific and religious position on its own, rather than a reconciliation of other positions. In accommodating science and religion, proponents often alter the components in ways that will not be acceptable to adherents of the supposedly accommodated views.
Note that I distinguish a form of political accommodationism, in which proponents of the teaching of evolutionary theory work together even though their positions on religious and philosophical issues may differ greatly. This is simply agreement on certain goals, something much different, in my view.
What Michael Dowd has done, in my opinion, is to create an accommodationist religious position, with some prejudice to both Christianity and evolution. It’s hard to say which takes the bigger beating, though I think Christianity in any orthodox form comes in for the worst treatment.
Evolutionary theory, it seems to me, loses as well, by being presented as a teleological process. It is a very optimistic view, which essentially holds that all the competition and death and suffering of biological evolution leads ultimately and (almost) inevitably to cooperation, enlightenment, peace, and joy. It’s not that I disagree with the kinds of goals that Dowd expresses. His hopes are very attractive. I actually wish I could believe they are as inevitable as he seems to think. I just don’t think it’s so.
Christianity comes in for redefinition. All the words are there, but they come into new meanings. You can claim that resurrection or eternal life means coming back as some sort of stardust (97-100), but that’s not what it means to most Christian believers, and I suspect you’re not going to find that many who want to exchange one view for the other. Similarly, the “realization” of various miracles (Appendix B, 357-370) is going to fall flat for most evangelical or orthodox Christians.
In fact, I would say that if you being this book as an orthodox or evangelical Christian, and substantially accept what it teaches, you will no longer be recognizable as a Christian, except in vocabulary. You’ll use some of the words that Christians use, but you will not mean the same thing. I try not to tell other people whether they can call themselves Christian; I believe God can deal with the labels issue. But these changes in vocabulary are so radical that they really no longer appear to relate to the same religion.
In a sidebar titled “Realizing ‘the Centrality of the Cross’” (210) there is a great illustration of what I’m saying. In describing the traditional Christian understanding of this phrase Dowd says that “. . . it is often taken to mean that only Christians who believe that God’s Son suffered and died on teh cross for their sins will ascend to a place somewhere outside the universe called heaven. Everyone else will be tortured forevere in hell. . . .” In its place, evolutionary Christianity would say that this refers to “vertical integrity,” or “getting complete with the past and being responsible for the future . . .” and “horizontal integrity,” “being in right relationship with my nested world.”
Now the vertical and horizontal components do form a sort of cross, but the only connection between those two views is in the vocabulary. Further, the orthodox position could be stated much better, and would subsume integrity, though in quite a different way. I do like the concepts of horizontal and vertical integrity, but they are not the essence of “the centrality of the cross.”
The main purpose for which I could recommend this book would be in order to understand this evolutionary Christianity movement. Many of the theological positions would be better studied from writers expressing theological positions such as process theology or panentheism. I rate the book three stars out of five.
I believe that both Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God and Richard Colling’s Random Designer provide a better presentation of ways to reconcile Christianity with evolution.
Yes, that’s a big collection of topics, but I think they’re connected. John Meunier links to an excellent post by Dan Dick, which you should read before you read this one. The topic here is the conference dashboards in United Methodist annual conferences, such as this one for the North Alabama Conference.
I do have substantial problems with the church dashboard, including a great deal of the way in which the statistics are presented. I also am concerned about numerical measures of success in the church. It’s quite possible to build up numbers and be missing the mission and ministry of the church, and the proclamation of the gospel message. Some people will leave a church that is aiming for full commitment and discipleship. At the same time, as Dan Dick pointed out, some people’s professed disdain for such numbers is the result of laziness. But all of this has been thoroughly discussed amongst the Methodist blogs.
It seems to me, however, that the use of these numbers on conference dashboards is just a symptom of a certain retreat from personal responsibility. I don’t mean by this that our United Methodist bishops are off trying to avoid hard decisions. Rather, we are systematically trying to codify and quantify so much of human behavior and organizational policy that not only can avoid taking personal responsibility; they must.
For example, in my district, the district superintendent has 53 churches for which he is responsible, and the conference as a whole has more that 600 pastors, for which our bishop is responsible. Each year, pastoral appointments are made by the bishop, with the advice of the cabinet and many people in the churches, for those 600 churches. I think the temptation is going to be very strong to put some kind of simplified set of numbers on performance. The more details you have to consider, the harder it is to make a choice.
What I wonder is how often a bishop could get by with ignoring the numbers because, let’s say, one pastor is making better disciples, even if his numbers (for some reason) didn’t look as good. Could the popular pastor with the watered-down message be overlooked in favor of the pastor with the harder message of sacrifice and service? I recognize here that the pastor with the good numbers may be an effective disciple maker. I know some pastors in that category. The pastor with the bad numbers may be either lazy, or much more likely simply too beat up by parishioners, the system, and the unrealistic expectations we have for pastors that he is, in fact, performing badly.
But can the leadership determine this with accuracy in all (or nearly all) cases? Would they be willing to send the less popular pastor to a larger church?
It seems to me that collecting statistics is valuable, though I think someone well qualified in analyzing data should rework the conference display. I sense a few cases of deceptive use of numbers. Most importantly, the numbers are not related to the nature of the existing church body and the community in which it is located. All of that requires personal knowledge such as cannot be collected remotely.
But what if such information was collected and available? Would our leadership be willing to act against popular pressure? I see this as a common problem in leadership, at least in the United States today. We have a problem making a decision and standing up for it. Of course, in employment situations, the decisive leader may well have to present statistics as evidence in court in order to justify a decision.
That’s one reason for “zero tolerance” policies in so many cases. “Zero tolerance” means that people in leadership don’t have to make responsible, nuanced decisions. But “zero tolerance” is just the extreme case of avoiding responsibility. Putting it all on a set of numbers is another one. It’s a trend I don’t like, even though I recognize it as a response to the other extreme–a complete lack of accountability. (I have tremendous respect for Bishop Willimon, for example, whose dashboard I linked as an example. Yet I’m still not happy with it.)
I ramble because I don’t know a solution, other than to say we need leaders to take responsibility, and we need to make sure we know who is responsible for what, so they can be accountable. I also think we need to bring leadership closer to the local church so that each person in leadership is responsible for a reasonable number of people and churches. That would allow individuals to seek out all those nuances that back up the numbers.
I don’t know the solution, and since I am neither a pastor nor a church administrator, and have avoided most church committees, I am probably the wrong person to propose one. What I do believe is that, though structural changes can help, the answer doesn’t lie in precisely how the church is organized. There are congregational style churches that are just as dysfunctional as any Methodist church whose bishop sent the “wrong” pastor.
What we do need is a change of our personal culture, from that of an organization that must maintain itself to one of gospel driven discipleship.
Some time ago I was teaching a Sunday School class and the topic of prayer at public events came up. Now I would have a serious problem offering prayer at a public event. Though I support the idea of separation of church and state, my major objection is not based on the constitutional principle. After all, courts have allowed prayers in congress.
My opposition is simply that I believe public prayer is prayer offered for a group. If it is just a ritual, or if it cannot reasonably be expected that the group joining in the prayer actually does join, then to me it is empty. I could sit out in my car and pray for a blessing on the activities of government, but I could not stand up in the group and offer a prayer as though God and the governmental meeting were on the same program.
In my private prayers for the government, I pray largely that God will give wisdom to political leaders. I do not make the assumption that those political leaders and the political system under which I live are somehow more on God’s program than any other.
I think that prayers at government events are not designed to invoke God’s favor, nor are they designed to seek God’s will. They are designed to give the impression that those who are doing the government’s business are, in fact, blessed, and are somehow blessed. It’s the whitewash on the sepulcher.
In any case, to get back to the story, my explanation of my own view didn’t get through. One gentleman raised his hand and said, “I think you just don’t have the courage of your convictions.”
“No,” I told him, “I don’t have the courage of your convictions.”
In the discussion that followed, it became clear that he simply could not conceive of a reason for not offering a public prayer, other than that I was afraid of offending people in the audience. He (and many in the room) were so certain that this was an appropriate activity that they simply couldn’t see any reason not to. To them, America is God’s country, a Christian nation, and there’s no problem with Christian prayers.
I was reminded of this when reading this post by Arthur Sido (HT: Dave Black Online via Christian-Archy.com). This is a topic that will shock many, many American Christians. Why not wear a “God Bless America” T-Shirt? It’s not something they’ve ever considered. The conviction that God is on our side runs very deep. Often it erupts in the claim that American policy carries out God’s will, either knowingly or unknowingly. That claim in turn can lead us to give up the church’s mission and ministry to the world.
If we truly believe that the Gospel is “God’s power for salvation to everyone who believes” then we ought to act that way. But over and over again our solutions for economic problems, crime, moral issues, and even family relations is to get the government to solve it for us. I don’t doubt that the government needs to have its eye on such things, but how much of our effort as Christians needs to be used in that way?
Would we not change more people and make more of a difference in our world by living and proclaiming (and I believe proclaiming without living is no proclamation at all) the good news accomplish more than all the political activism we can do as a church?
I don’t know this, but I think most of us simply don’t believe that the Gospel will transform people’s lives. I don’t think we really believe the Gospel will work. I suspect that, throughout Christian history, our resort to the sword of the state results from a lack of faith.
The separation I’m most concerned about is the separation where the church says, “We cannot compromise the gospel with the state’s structures of power. We need to stay away to maintain the integrity of the gospel.” The theological separation is more important than the constitutional.
I was talking to a friend the other day. Our main topic was church and the way it was done. In the course of our conversation I discussed what I feel is the 1 Corinthians 14 church, you know, the one Paul was trying to correct. (I discuss what I think about it in my post The Problem with 1 Corinthians 14 Worship.) I was also discussing handling of incorrect statements in church, whether these are off-the-wall interpretations of Bible passages, or people claiming to speak a prophetic word that is truly not from God.
In summary, I believe the Corinthian church was active and alive, and everyone came in with a message. There would be multiple messages given to the group, and there would be discussion. I believe the New Testament model would be for people to speak and then for others to affirm or correct as necessary. I acknowledge the problems, and in our conversation I mentioned how many friends of mine who are pastors are not too happy with my view. They’d prefer to check the message before anyone hears it, so none are led astray, and they’d also prefer not to have to affirm or correct any statement in a public setting.
I acknowledge that I am not a pastor and thus may be less sensitive to these problems. I also know that telling someone they are actually wrong in a public place is very much against our cultural norms. We really prefer to keep the face of things happy and affirming, and take care of any questions out of sight. But I don’t think a church modeled after the ideal presented in 1 Corinthians 14 (and elsewhere in the NT) can function in that way.
In our discussion, this brought forth my first intemperate statement. After we’d discussed these points, and both agreed about the difficulty of accomplishing this, I said: “It had better be possible. If not, my life work thus far has been in vain.”
It was out of my mouth before it passed through my brain. But it has stuck with me, and I haven’t found much reason to back off of it. To me, the church, if it is to be the body of Christ, must have input coming from everyone, and must have everyone involved. We are all baptized into the same Spirit (read all of 1 Corinthians 12-14 to get this picture), and we all have gifts. These gifts are to come together. That, to me, is church. If church doesn’t work, I have truly been wasting my time.
I would note that I don’t mean spreading people’s private issues and problems in public, where they can be kept private. I don’t mean gossip and tale bearing. I mean every member involved in the theological thinking and practical visioning of the church body on a regular and constant basis.
What do you think? How intemperate was I?
Then there was the second intemperate statement, which needs more qualification on further thought. My friend asked me which seminary I would recommend a young person go to in preparation for Methodist ministry. My intemperate answer? “I wouldn’t.”
Yet there are things I like about various seminaries. My problem here is that I don’t like the professional education approach to preparation for pastoring. In fact, I don’t like it much for anything at all. I think our educational system is well-designed to prepare people to live in the 19th century. it’s not completely incapable of preparing people for the 20th century, but it’s not fully equipped for that task. Unfortunately, none of us have the option to live in either of those centuries.
I may really stun my friends in educational institutions, but I think the traditional university is a surviving fossil. It’s going to go away over time, or at least become a very minor factor. The reason is that technology and information is developing too fast for one to dedicate a certain percentage of one’s life to going to school, then assume education is complete, except for an occasional refresher in some continuing education program.
We’re going to need to find a way to work and further our education simultaneously. We’re also going to want to benefit from scholars from around the world in any educational program, not just those who happen to be in the local area. This is a long subject, and I’m sure people will be very annoyed as things progress. There is already a great deal of prejudice against distance learning. Some of this comes from growing pains. Some of it is completely unjustified. Note to critics: You need to do more than point to problems with distance/online learning. You need to realize the imperfections of resident learning as well.
So again, how intemperate was I?
