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.

“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.

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;

What’s the Bible Even For?

Roland Boer makes an interesting comment on the irrelevance of the Bible in Western society with particular reference to the Netherlands. I find interesting his remark that Bible reading occurs only amongst a small minority, and their interests can at best be described as individualistic and pietistic to the  exclusion of concerns regarding political influence or societal reform. Boer is, I think, about right—although I predict an outpouring of objection from those who think the US Bible belt is to be taken as normative for World Christianity;

GM4: Simplicity This Side of Complexity

This post is part of the series; God: Merciful? Maniac? Mass-Murderer? (GM4)

One of my favorite quotations is Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

His point, simply put, is that when we try to make a complex problem simple, we end up with something not worth having. But if we can sit with the complexity long enough, to actually tease it out in a substantial way, then we end up with something of rare value indeed.

I think it helps at the outset to recognize that the morality of God’s behavior as reported in the Old Testament falls into this category. It’s not a simple problem, and folk who are looking for simple answers “this side of complexity” are going to short-change themselves.

God: Merciful? Maniac? Mass-Murderer? (GM4)

A couple of days ago a Facebook friend asked me to give my response to a YouTube clip entitled “God: Merciful? Maniac? Mass-Murderer“—I’ll be labeling it GM4 for short. Essentially GM4 tries to argue that certain Christian claims about God are contrary to the portrayal of God in the Old Testament. My initial reaction upon watching the video is that it doesn’t do so in a particularly compelling way.

The Absence of God?

People often ask “where is God?” and that’s certainly a legitimate question.

Sometimes, however, it’s interesting to view a question from a different perspective. Here’s a wonderful few lines from the poem “This is What It’s Like” by T. Michael W. Halcomb (Virtual Prayers) calling us to reflect not upon God’s absence, but upon our own;

Sometimes God, I wish
Your presence wasn’t a gift.
Or, maybe I should say
“like a gift”.
Gifts come every now and then.
Gifts show up once in a while.
Gifts excite for a moment
and then excitement fades.
Why is Your presence
so much like a gift God?
Is it just me?
Then I wonder,
“Does my presence seem
the same way
to You?”

The “Babylonian Captivity” of Theology

In a very interesting article [1], Paul Griffiths talks of the “Babylonian captivity” of theology wherein theology’s subjection to “alien epistemological gods” leads to such a radical restructuring that what remains is hardly recognizable as Christian theology. Although this may seem a strong claim, I think anybody familiar with contemporary Protestant theology—the main focus of Griffiths’ critique—and with the difficulties it has in supporting its knowledge claims will recognize where Griffiths is coming from. I’m preparing a synopsis of the article to be put up on the blog shortly, but for now I’d like to cite a paragraph from near the end of Griffiths’ article in which he outlines some of the impacts of this Babylonian captivity of theology. It’s too long to find a place in my synopsis but such a good summary of the impact of epistemology upon Christian theology that I had to make some use of it. Note that the terms Christus in se [Christ as he is] and Christus pro nobis [Christ for us] can be taken as referring to an objective and a subjective view of Christ respectively;

A few comments are in order at this point about the effects of Ogden’s epistemology upon his theology. Briefly, and much too simply, it is obvious that the effects are radical: theology is eviscerated because the epistemic principle that controls it constrains and reshapes it in rather the way that foot binding used to constrain and reshape the feet of aristocratic women in China. The constraint, as might be expected from the nature of the epistemic principle, is in the direction of assimilating theology to what goes on, intellectually speaking, in the academy. In this, once again, Ogden’s work is typical of most contemporary Protestant academic theology. As a result, and to take only the most striking examples, christology becomes, in the first instance, a matter of addressing existential questions, which is to say that Christus in se is reduced to Christus pro nobis. It follows from this that the sacraments of the Church are representative rather than constitutive that much of the Church’s liturgical practice is based on conceptual and attitudinal mistakes of various sorts; that the ecumenical credal formulae, the symbols of the faith, are propositionally false; and that the canon of the Church is not to be identified with the Scripture identified as canonical by the Church, principally because the Church made significant mistakes in the historical judgments it used to delimit the the canon. To show that Ogden does think all of these things would require more space than I have at my disposal, and to show that he is wrong in so thinking would require yet more. I want only to indicate that these are the results to be expected from requiring that theological claims pass the test of universal epistemic principles, that they are abundantly evident in Ogden’s work, and that they issue principally from confusions about epistemology. They are the death of theology properly understood, the assurance of its pale half existence as a Lockean shadow of the body of Christ, proudly proclaiming its right to exist in the university (a right that should be of scarcely any intrinsic interest to it) instead of speaking the Gospel to the world. [2]

More on this article in the coming days.

Notes:

[1] Griffiths, Paul J. “How Epistemology Matters to Theology.” Journal of Religion 79, no. 1 (1999): 1-18.
[2] ibid, pp.15-16.

Monton, Seeking God in Science (Overview, Resources)

Monton, Bradley John. Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009).

Overview:

After a preliminary read, I regard this as one of the most interesting treatments of Intelligent Design theory on offer. I found it surprising for a number of reasons (1) the author (Bradley Monton, Prof. of Phil., Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) is an atheist who doesn’t reject ID outright; (2) it treats ID as a serious philosophical/scientific hypothesis worthy of serious analysis rather than knee-jerk acceptance or rejection; and (3) it takes a rather broad view of ID – one which doesn’t restrict itself to an evaluation of ID as concerned with biological phenomena only. The book really is a work of philosophy rather than science, and I think those who approach ID purely as a scientific hypothesis will wonder at points just what precisely Monton is on about. The first chapter, in which Monton seeks to formulate a clear definition of ID, scientifically focused readers may find frustrating. Those with a more philosophical bent will have far less problem. The two central chapters on the legitimacy of treating ID as science and an analysis of some plausible ID arguments cover familiar topics in a quite unfamiliar, and thoroughly thought provoking, way. The last chapter on the teaching of ID in schools is concerned mainly with ethical and pedagogical concerns rather than with legal concerns arising from the US Constitution. It may, accordingly, help those in a non-US context process the issue in locally relevant ways. Monton has provided a fair-minded critique of Intelligent Design from a philosophical perspective which very nicely augments other works on offer. A highly recommended read for those with the stomach for dispassionate philosophical analysis and a willingness to have challenged their preconceptions about the Intelligent Design debate.

Resources:

Author’s Pages:

• Bradley Monton’s Blog: Containing, amongst other things, several reviews and Monton’s response to same.
• Bradley Monton’s Staff Page at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Book Pages:

• Google.
• Amazon.
• Purchase via BookFinder: Search for the best price online.