Twelve Steps to Healing an Abusive Church

Neil Ormerod offers a very nice piece on the church and the culture of abuse which often goes unaddressed.

It’s obvious in reading the piece that he has the Roman Catholic church in mind, but that’s not to say that Christians of other denominations can afford to avoid taking notice.

Twelve Steps to Healing an Abusive Church

A Step-by-Step Plan to Get More Young People Into Church

The below is taken from the blog “The Owls and the Angels” — passed onto me by a Facebook friend (Garry Kerr) — and simply too good to pass over;

Here is a step-by-step plan for how to get more young people into the church:

1.  Be genuine.  Do not under any circumstances try to be trendy or hip, if you are not already intrinsically trendy or hip.  If you are a 90-year-old woman who enjoys crocheting and listens to Beethoven, by God be proud of it.

2.  Stop pretending you have a rock band.

3.  Stop arguing about whether gay people are okay, fully human, or whatever else.  Seriously.  Stop it.

4.  Stop arguing about whether women are okay, fully human, or are capable of being in a position of leadership.

5.  Stop looking for the “objective truth” in Scripture.

6.  Start looking for the beautiful truth in Scripture.

7.  Actually read the Scriptures.  If you are Episcopalian, go buy a Bible and read it.  Start in Genesis, it’s pretty cool.  You can skip some of the other boring parts in the Bible.  Remember though that almost every book of the Bible has some really funky stuff in it.  Remember to keep #5 and #6 in mind though.  If you are evangelical, you may need to stop reading the Bible for about 10 years.  Don’t worry:  during those ten years you can work on putting these other steps into practice.

8.  Start worrying about extreme poverty, violence against women, racism, consumerism, and the rate at which children are dying worldwide of preventable, treatable diseases.  Put all the energy you formerly spent worrying about the legit-ness of gay people into figuring out ways to do some good in these areas.

9.  Do not shy away from lighting candles, silence, incense, laughter, really good food, and extraordinary music.  By “extraordinary music” I mean genuine music.  Soulful music.  Well-written, well-composed music.  Original music.  Four-part harmony music.  Funky retro organ music.  Hymns.  Taize chants.  Bluegrass.  Steel guitar.  Humming.  Gospel.  We are the church; we have a uber-rich history of amazing music.  Remember this.

10.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

11.  Learn how to sit with people who are dying.

12.  Feast as much as possible.  Cardboard communion wafers are a feast in symbol only.  Humans can not live on symbols alone.  Remember this.

13.  Notice visitors, smile genuinely at them, include them in conversations, but do not overwhelm them.

14.  Be vulnerable.

15.  Stop worrying about getting young people into the church.  Stop worrying about marketing strategies.  Take a deep breath.  If there is a God, that God isn’t going to die even if there are no more Christians at all.

16.  Figure out who is suffering in your community.  Go be with them.

17.  Remind yourself that you don’t have to take God to anyone.  God is already with everyone.  So, rather than taking the approach that you need to take the truth out to people who need it, adopt the approach that you need to go find the truth that others have and you are missing.  Go be evangelized.

18.  Put some time and care and energy into creating a beautiful space for worship and being-together.  But shy away from building campaigns, parking lot expansions, and what-have-you.

19.  Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7.  Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.

20.  Listen to God (to Wisdom, to Love) more than you speak your opinions.

This is a fool-proof plan.  If you do it, I guarantee that you will attract young people to your church.  And lots of other kinds of people too.  The end.

That is a pretty decent manifesto for the church, I reckon. Thanks to Garry for sharing.

An Ordered Universe (Even After Darwin)

Sometimes somebody points out the stark-raving obvious and I wonder why I never noticed it before. Today’s slice of “Facepalm” comes to us courtesy of Dallas Willard.

Following a brief discussion of historical (i.e. pre-Darwinian) notions of the way in which order in the universe was taken as pointing to the existence of a creator, Willard acknowledges that Darwin’s theory of natural selection blunted the impact of such arguments.

But then he points out that;

…the complexity and order of the physical universe reaches far beyond, and is prior to, the complexity of  living beings, to which Darwin’s theory applies, and that prior order would have been there even if life and evolution had never occured. (Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge. New York: HarperOne, 2009. p.100. Emphasis in original.)

What follows from this is the failure of claims that Darwin’s theory explains away apparent design in the universe. In fact, it does nothing of the sort—but only as long as it is recognized that the ordering of things upon which design arguments depend occurs below the surface of the obvious biological phenomena.

So, for instance, what one must not do is appeal to obvious features of living organisms such as the giraffe’s neck or the bacterial flagellum. Similarly, one cannot overturn the suggestion by counter-appeal to similarly obvious features such as the Panda’s “thumb” or purported “design flaws” in such organs as the human eye.

Rather one needs to look at the deep structures of the universe, those which make the evolution of such features possible. When one does, it turns out that evolution of living organisms depends upon the universe being a fundamentally ordered place. A point which is reinforced by the ability to construct those law-like descriptions of the development of living organisms which gives evolutionary theory its power as an explanatory framework.

I reckon there’s more than a few interesting implications of such a trivial (I really can’t say “obvious”!) observation.

The Present State of Johannine Studies (Raymond Brown, 1966)

One of the curious aspects of scholarly study on the Gospel of John is that skeptical treatments of the gospel—those which argue that it’s a late non-Jewish fabrication—are actually decreasing in credibility. There are a few aspects to this which I’d like to comment upon, but for now here’s a brief overview of this curious historical trend from a Johannine scholar of note, Raymond E. Brown;

In this century an enormous literature has been devoted to the Fourth Gospel. Indeed, the most instructive introduction to the study of the Gospel is to read one of the surveys of the literature on John—for instance, that of Howard, or the shorter article of Collins. The ephemeral character of some of the positions taken merits sober reflection. The most valuable analysis of Johannine literature is found in French in the writings of Menoud, whose own very competent and balanced opinions emerge from his criticism of the works of other scholars. His bibliographies are most helpful. Haenchen’s German survey is also remarkably complete.

In particular, in the decade after the Second World War there emerged a number of major contributions to the study of John. The commentaries of both Hoskyns (1940) and Bultmann (1941) may be included in this group since they had no wide circulation until after the War. In addition, Dodd’s Interpretation (1953) and the commentaries of Barrett (1955) and Lightfoot (1956) come immediately to mind. The difference of approach in these various works caused much discussion, as evidenced by the articles of Grossouw, Käsemann, and Schnackenburg.

Even a cursory acquaintance with this literature reveals that the trend in Johannine studies has passed through an interesting cycle. At the end of the last century and in the early years of this century, scholarship went through a period of extreme skepticism about this Gospel. John was dated very late, even to the second half of the 2nd century. As a product of the Hellenistic world, it was thought to be totally devoid of historical value and to have little relation to the Palestine of Jesus of Nazareth. The small kernel of fact in its pages was supposedly taken from the Synoptic Gospels which served as a basis for the author’s elaborations. Needless to say, few critics thought that the Gospel according to John had the slightest connection with John son of Zebedee.

Some of these skeptical positions, especially those regarding authorship and the source of influence on the Gospel, are still maintained by many reputable scholars. Nevertheless, there is not one such position that has not been affected by a series of unexpected archaeological, documentary, and textual discoveries. These discoveries have led us to challenge intelligently the critical views that had almost become orthodox and to recognize how fragile was the base which supported the highly skeptical analysis of John. Consequently, since the Second World War there has emerged what Bishop John A. T. Robinson calls a “new look” in Johannine studies—a new look that shares much with the look once traditional in Christianity. The dating of the Gospel has been moved back to the end of the 1st century or even earlier. A historical tradition underlying the Fourth Gospel similar to the traditions underlying the Synoptic Gospels is being posited by some. In fact, the author of the Gospel is gradually having his status as an orthodox Christian restored, after long languishing in the dungeons of Gnosticism to which he had been relegated by many critics. And perhaps strangest of all, some scholars are even daring to suggest once more that John son of Zebedee may have had something to do with the Gospel. This reversal of trend, however, does not mean that all the intervening critical scholarship has been in vain. Scholarship cannot return to pre-critical days, nor should it ever be embarrassed by the fact that it learns through mistakes. Indeed, it is the admirable honesty of biblical criticism and its ability to criticize itself that has led to a more conservative estimation of the historical value of the Fourth Gospel.[1]

Footnotes:

[1] Raymond Edward Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, vol. 1, 1st ed., The Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), xxi-xxii.

Christmas Makes Me Paranoid…

Every Christmas we lament the increasing commercialisation of one of Christianity’s most significant days. And every Christmas I grow just a little more paranoid with the idea that the free-market is out to destroy Christianity. Not, I hasten to add, because they are evil, anti-Christian villains (although sometimes I wonder…) but because there is something intrinsically incompatible with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth on the one hand, and the idea that unbridled consumption is somehow an intrinsic good on the other. You can’t serve God and Mammon both, and according to my paranoid fantasy, one must first kill Jesus if one is to grow fat and wealthy. Yes, yes, it’s a silly thesis, I know, but the advantage of being paranoid is that a firm grasp on reality isn’t a prerequisite.

Except…

A really interesting article by Matt J. Rossano (Professor and Department Head of Psychology, Southeastern Louisiana University) gives my thesis a bit more in the way of support.

“I” is not the Answer

I met David Opderbeck online through the now defunct ASA listserve and found him to be an interesting thinker who often has interesting things to say, and says them in interesting ways (yes, that is a tautology). He blogs at “Through a Glass Darkly” and has just published a post entitled “God and Creation: Transcendence.”

He writes;

The first common popular idea is that “God is in everything and everyone.” In popular culture, what we hear often sounds more like “pantheism” — the notion that God and the world around us really are essentially the same thing. In fact, in American popular culture, this usually boils down to God becoming the same thing as our own individual selves. How often have you hear a line like this in a song or TV show or movie: “what you’ve been looking for has been right inside yourself all along” or “the most important thing is to find out who you are.”

The truth of God’s transcendence is that the real basis for a meaningful and good life lies outside of ourselves. We are part of creation, and therefore we are not God.

… in our created humanity we are made for an intimate connection with God. It is right to look into ourselves as we seek God. An honest search of the self should reveal a nature that is not self-sufficient, that is not meant to be alone, that longs for relationship with a beauty and harmony and love that the individual self cannot sustain. The great Christian thinker Augustine called this a “God-shaped void” at the heart of every person.

There’s probably something rather “old hat” about this given that true novelty is a rare thing in theology (not to mention that David cites Augustine in support!) but there is something here which strikes me in a new way. In teasing this out I actually discovered (or think I did) that what David is saying is, in fact, “old hat” but also very, very important.

NT Wright on the Historical Jesus

New Testament scholar NT Wright offers some fine insights on the birth narratives of the Gospels and the resurrection of Jesus. I’m currently preparing a post on Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the virgin birth—a subject on which Wright says some helpful things—so I’ll likely be returning to this in the near future.

GM4: The Biblical Passages (Isaiah 13:15-18)

This post is part of the series; God: Merciful? Maniac? Mass-Murderer? (GM4) and belongs to the subthread GM4′s treatment of the Biblical materials

Isaiah 13:15-18

In response to “the idea God is all forgiving” GM4 offers a brief excerpt from the Book of Isaiah 13—a chapter in which the destruction of Babylon, or more precisely the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is prophesied. This prophesy certainly contains some nasty elements, but there’s at least two major issues we need to take into account before trying to draw any conclusions from the text.

The Purpose of Life by William Lane Craig.

I’ve just watched a very interesting video in which William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens respond to the question: “What is the purpose of human existence?”

The person putting the question suggested that for theists the purpose of human existence is found in serving God, to which Craig gives the following reply;

Why the Virgin Birth?

“What is the theological significance of the virginal conception? Some have argued it was necessary to protect Jesus’ sinless nature, but the narratives themselves do not indicate this purpose. The Messiah could have entered human life free from sin with or without a virginal conception…
In the final analysis, the details remain a mystery. What is certain from the text is that the conception of Jesus was a supernatural act of God, confirming that God himself was about to accomplish the salvation which no human being could achieve.”

– Mark L. Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus and the Gospels. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007).

via Zondervan’s Facebook page without a page reference.