Syncretism and Christmas

There was an article in USA Today on December 10 based on a recent Pew religious survey that had some statistics from the survey on current U.S. religious beliefs. The findings included things like 1 in 5 Roman Catholics and 1 in 4 of the overall population believe in reincarnation, about 1 in 4 believe in astrology, and 65% have incorporated some elements of far eastern or New Age beliefs into their thinking. This mixing of contradictory beliefs is called syncretism, and it is nothing new even though the article seems to think it is.

This subject tends to come up at Christmas time because of the mixture of various Christian and non-Christian elements in our Christmas traditions. Things like Christmas trees have roots in pagan traditions in Europe, along with mistletoe, lights, and yule logs. There is also the often crass commercialism of the holidays that stands in stark contrast to the baby born in poverty on that first Christmas. The Pilgrims forbade things like Christmas trees along with overt feasting, feeling that it detracted from the spiritual significance of the day.

I think syncretism has always been a cause for concern, though I am not overly concerned about the Christmas traditions. Nowadays I am concerned about what I see as an easy acceptance by many Christians of things like abortion, homosexuality, and unmarried co-habitation whle at the same time ignoring things like the meaning of baptism, the Lord's supper, and personal holiness. While this is not an incorporation of different religions into Christianity, it is an incorporation of godlessness into their lives and a willful ignoring of anything beyond the very basics of the faith.
This is not exactly syncretism but it is a weakening of the faith in a manner similar to syncretism. And I have no doubt that there are also some who are so ignorant of the faith that they mindlessly include new age, eastern, and other beliefs in their beliefs as well as simple godlessness.

Christmas trees, lights, yule logs, and such do not bother me, though. Perhaps if I had been living at a time when those things were done by pagans who later converted I would have been more concerned. In those days, many centuries ago, the practices would have been associated directly with non-Christian beliefs. But these things have been practiced by serious believers for so long and their meaning so thoroughly re-interpreted (or co-opted some would say) that they do not carry pagan connotations any longer. Indeed, the Islamic world would no doubt reject them because they are so thoroughly associated with Christians.

Syncretism is and always has been an issue for Chritianity, but today it is not Christmas trees that should cause concern.

Visions

In the sermon at our church this past Sunday the topic was Joseph and the announcement to him of Jesus birth by an angelic vision, convincing him to go ahead and take Mary as his wife despite her pregnancy. It is easy for me to relate to the idea that it would take something very dramatic to convince a man to go ahead with a marriage when he finds his betrothed to be pregnant, so the idea of God doing something very convincing is not hard to understand. However, visions seemed to be a thing that God used more often in Biblical times than we see now. We get detailed vision stories with Peter and Paul in Acts, one regarding 'unclean' foods and taking the Gospel to the Gentiles and the other for Paul's conversion. Paul mentions other visions later, being caught up to 'the third heaven'. There are many instances in the Old Testament.



One point in the sermon was that in undeveloped countries, especially where the Bible is banned or most people cannot read, missionaries sometimes meet people who claim to have heard about Jesus in a vision before the missionary arrived and are prepared to accept Christianity when the missionary shows up. This has been heard in a fair number of instances in these kinds of countries but not in developed countries where the Bible is readily available.



Jews were different for their day in that literacy was more common than in many countries because of their being 'people of the book', where the Torah was revered. But, we don't know much about Joseph, and don't really know if he could read. However, even if he could read the materials for writing were very expensive and most ordinary folks would not have any written material in their home. That would be all the more true in a backwater village like Nazareth. If their local synagogue were financially able to have a Torah scroll, it would normally have only one and it was very precious. Even for 'people of the book', having the scripture in the home was prohibitively expensive. Even after Gutenberg made printing more affordable, it wasn't until the industrial revolution with its mechanized papermaking that Bibles in every home could be practical. That would be 17 centuries later than Joseph.



I lose sight of things like that today, with our low cost access to all things written. Visions make a lot more sense to me, however, in the context of a time when very few could read and even those who could would go through life in most cases without ever having a written document in their own home.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

When I was in the 5th grade at Pleasant Run Elementary school, I heard something new. As far as Christmas music was concerned, I had grown up with shape note music at a country church, with Gene Autry on the radio singing about Rudolph, with Alvin and the Chipmunks, and with American Bandstand playing things like Bobby Helms 'Jingle Bell Rock' and Elvis' 'Blue Christmas'. Just before we moved to the suburbs in the summer between 4th and 5th grade, we did a concert trip at Washington Elementary school in Camp Washington to see the Cincinnati Symphony and ballet do 'The Nutcracker', but that was not everyday fare for me. At church we did the usual hymns like 'Silent Night' but not with a choir, and with a distinct 'country' sound. So when my teacher in 5th grade played 'Do You Hear What I Hear' and 'Little Drummer Boy' from a brand new album release performed by the Harry Simeon Chorale I was stunned. I just had never heard anything quite like that before. I thought it was the grandest music I had ever heard.



I like a wide range of music. My collection of Christmas music covers country, classical, pop, and jazz. I like it all. But it wouldn't be Christmas without choirs. There is still nothing quite like it. I don't like most of what our church high school choir does, because it mostly isn't really choir music. It is rock n roll in disguise. Choirs don't really do rock n roll. At least, they don't do it well. To catch the magic of a choir at Christmas, it needs to be SATB parts at least; maybe more parts than that. And the music needs to be majestic. It can still be fun like 'Children Go Where I send Thee', but it needs to be majestic. Adult choirs do that best.



I have been to 2 choir performances so far this year, with one more 2 days from now. It's great. And Christmas just wouldn't be the same without it.

The Incarnation and Bodily Life

As Christmas nears it is a good time to ponder the significance of the Incarnation, God becoming man. The December issue of First Things reviewed a new book titled Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible which tries to address some of the findings of neuroscience and how bodily problems (spine damage, Alzheimers, chemical imbalance) can seemingly change a person dramatically. The book reaffirms that we are not souls that happen to have a body, but we are thoroughly integrated, embodied creatures in which body, soul, and spirit are all critical. This is my greatest disagreement with the Grace Walk folks, who insist that we are souls that just happen to have a body. Not so. The Incarnation of Christ is one important part of understanding this.

This is not to say that our mortal bodies are not fallen. They are. And as Paul pointed out, this mortal must put on immortality to be worthy of being in the immediate presence of God, so it must be changed. Christ demonstrates this for us. He took on mortal flesh, to fully experience our bodily existence, and in His resurrection demonstrated how it must change. His body changed so much that the Emmaus road disciples did not recognize him even though his wounds remained visible. But even in His resurrecton He maintained His connection with us, with a body. And in all the Biblical discussion of eternity with God it is clear that our life will be bodily, but in a new body. Bodily existence is integral to our existence, and it will always be so.

This has lots of implications for mortal life. One reason that 'two becoming one' in marriage includes bodily union is that our bodies are integral to who we are. Marriages in which there is no bodily union are candidates for annulment in the Catholic church for that reason, and that is grounds for divorce in public law as a result of this even though secular philosophy would probably no longer acknowledge this. A marriage without bodily union denies a fundamental part of our identity. This is one reason that Paul in his writing on marriage warns against staying apart for more than short periods of time. In death, one reason we treat the body with respect even after the spirit and soul have departed is in recognition that this was an integral part of the person during life. It is also why recreational sex and promiscuity is a serious sin: it violates the sanctity of the total person and is not just 'something your body does' as if your body is separate from the real you. It is also a reason why homosexuality is fundamentally disordered: it violates the fundamental reality of who we are as people who were intended for 'one flesh' marriage with the opposite gender. Our bodies are in many ways integral to who we are. Pope John Paul wrote about this much more completely in his Theology of the Body (which could be on my Christmas list, for anyone so inclined!), but at Christmas as we ponder the coming of God in the flesh it is a good time to ponder if we are treating our flesh as the Creator intended.

Queueing Theory and Health Care

I attended a seminar last week on improving R&D effectiveness and part of the discussion involved queueing theory. Wherever queues form waiting time increases and productivity goes down. Some things make queues worse, including things like 'free' resources: resources that are perceived to be 'free' or at least prepaid. These 'free' resources are nearly always over-utilized as folks seek to 'get their money's worth'. So, for example, if expedited testing costs no more than normal testing, everyone will try to 'rush' their testing. If a corporate testing lab is paid for by allocating the cost to everyone regardless of how much they use it then people will try to use it as much as they can to get their money's worth. All of this reminded me of the health care debate.

It seems to me that by rushing towards a plan that just provides more 'free' resources to more people we may be making things worse, not better. We have not taken time to define the problems with the health care system but have only been fixated with spreading more health care 'free' or prepaid benefits to more people at a time when everyone agrees that cost and overconsumption is already a big part of the problem. This is similar to the corporate problem mentioned above: when health care is prepaid or perceived as 'free', people will over-consume. If their cost is fixed to a set co-pay, they will not shop for a better price. When the provider is not penalizing his patient via higher cost to prescribe excess testing to cover himself against a suit because their co-pay does not change, he will also cause over-consumption. To provide more insurance to more people will simply provide the incentive for over-consumption to still more people without addressing any root causes.

Another R&D problem related to this is that some resources, like pilot plants, tend to be managed for high utilization of the assets. Excess capacity is seen as 'bad'. But for every 5% increase in utilization beyond about 70%, wait time doubles in the queue. As a result, high utilization results in slower product development. High utilization for low cost results in slow speed to market and lost sales. Often the cost savings are no where near compensating for the lost sales and growth that could have been. To lower health care costs there is much talk of better utilization of resources, and the queue time will necessarily increase exponentially when it is managed that way. This simply trades one problem, over-consumption, for another one, long wait times, without ever attempting to address the root causes.

We also have a resource allocation issue in health care. We have excess capacity in specialty areas where much money can be made while other areas like general practice and obstetricians go under-served. Much of this is due to malpractice issues and much to the cost of med school and the huge debt many doctors start with. Insuring more people does nothing to help move resources to underserved areas, though it may well drive out some of the specialists by dramatically cutting their pay if the government does as it proclaims it will to lower their fees. This may well simply make every area short of capacity.

It seems to me that we would do better to address some underlying issues before trying to add more people to coverage. Some things that come to mind include:

• Move toward medical insurance that is primarily aimed at avoiding catastrophic costs and bankruptcy, while letting routine care be directly felt by the consumer. This would reduce over-consumption and promote shopping for price.
• Provide incentives for practice in under-served areas by offering forgiveness of med school loans in return for service in rural areas; also limit malpractice liability.
• Require posting of prices and quality ratings by doctors and hospitals. This may require some sort of Consumer Reports type of agency to standardize quality assessments, but this would allow patients to compare cost and quality.

Some of this has been mentioned in the current debate, but none of it seems to be getting addressed. The effort seems to be more about buying votes than about fixing the real problems.

Remembering

Today is November 18, my dad's birthday. He would have been 88 today. He left us 51/2 years ago now on another birthday (Jonathan's). I have been at a seminar in Chicago this week, and one of the men at my table was from Luxemburg and we were chatting at a reception at the end of the first day about Europe and Switzerland came up for some reason, along with the watch industry there. Since I wear dad's watch most days that conversation reminded me of how he would never have purchased this watch for himself; it was a long service award from his work. He did eventually get accustomed to the idea of a fancy watch, though, and after not wearing it at all for the first few years he had it he eventually wore it most of the time for about 20 years. That makes it all the more valuable to me.


While I was there I was able to watch the documentary WWII in HD on the History Channel, and I find myself looking for him or his unit or the type of anti-aircraft half-track he manned whenever I watch those programs about WWII. It was on each night this week. Since I don't get the History Channel at home, that also put me in mind of dad.

I have been reading in Job recently and last night I read the famous passage in which Job comments, ' I know that my redeemer liveth...and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes..' Dad had that same confidence, which in turn gives me confidence of a reunion with him someday.

Then today is his birthday. While I am reminded of him whenever I put on the watch, it seems that this week many things have brought him to mind. So, dad, I just wanted to let you know that I am thinking about you today. Happy birthday!

The Evil Rich and Righteous Poor?

‘Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God’; so says the Luke version of the beatitudes (Luke 6:20). The Matthew version says ‘blessed are the poor in spirit…’ and I suspect that Jesus used both versions. I was reminded of this recently in thinking about the current economic recession and as a result of seeing a PBS program a couple of days ago about the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression in which my parents grew up. This verse on the poor is in contrast to the passage on how difficult it is for the rich to be saved, like a camel going through the eye of a needle. A result of this contrast has been a teaching, especially of the social gospel proponents, of the ‘righteous poor and the evil rich’.

There is some basis in common experience for this, of course. Many rich have gained their wealth in unrighteous ways, whether from usury, trafficking in drugs or sex, extortion, slavery or any number of other evils including armed conquest. Until the industrial revolution, producing more than what you consumed was a difficult task indeed, which limited the ability to create wealth. As a result, when wealth was accumulated it quite often was due to unethical, if not illegal, means. We now have far more opportunity to create wealth than in most of history, but there is still much evil. The PBS program on the 1929 crash spent considerable time on how the market was manipulated by a few rich speculators who would collude to drive up a stock price, then sell after it went up by a multiple of 2 to 10x, and watch as other investors suffered huge losses when the price plummeted back down. This was not illegal at the time but it clearly was dishonest, literally stealing from those who were unaware of the collusion going on. This was so rampant for as much as 50 years before 1929 that it contributed to the severity of the crash. This was clearly an ‘evil rich ‘ scenario. Historically, the rich have indeed often stolen from the poor.

The current recession and the crash that started it has also been attributed to the evil rich, as bond rating agencies ignored the risk in the ratings they gave to bundled sub-prime loans and the banks excessively leveraged their balance sheets with subprime loans, resulting in collapse as the default rate rose. There is plenty of blame for the rich in this, but there is also plenty of blame for the poor. Those who took on home loans they clearly could not afford hoping to flip the house quickly, the enormous credit card debt buildup over the last decade, the negative savings rate: all of those were in the lower income groups. To me one of the differences in this current economic mess is that it is much more egalitarian in its causes than the Great Depression. I personally think the government’s pressure to make more subprime loans was the most serious root of the problem, but there was so much get-rich-quick mentality everywhere that rich and poor both have plenty of blame to go around. Of course, those we call ‘low income’ in the U.S. are not all that poor compared to those living on less than $5 per day in some parts of the world. But in the U.S. at least, the lesson in this current mess is not that the evil rich brought this onto the righteous poor; it is that ‘all have sinned and fallen short’.

Spiritual Discipline

Our pastor at church recently returned from teaching at a new pastor's training conference in India and participated in outreach events there. He mentioned in the pulpit today how much more modest the attire is there, especially among young women, and that you realize how much American culture is overly sexualized when you visit another more traditional culture. As he was preparing to return to the U.S. he was in a restaurant that had an American export, a sitcom, showing on a television screen. One of the local Hindu men, there with his family, became so upset about the trashy content of the show that he stood up in the restaurant and demanded it be turned off.



Being immersed in our own culture 24/7, we can easily fail to see that the media is all that most of the world sees of America. If that is all you know about America you can only conclude that America is focused mostly on satisfying our own appetites, as we feel that we have the right to satisfy any and all appetites at will. That of course has all kinds of non-sexual ramifications, like taking on too much debt to chase immediate gratification of other kinds (cars, houses, vacations), obesity, and whole cult of self-fulfillment.



While the Hindu world of the man in the restaurant includes an understanding of God that I cannot accept, most of the world, including the Christian world for most of history, has recognized that humans are prone to falling into bad behavior, behavior that is bad both for his overall culture and for himself. To prevent that bad behavior requires the practice of discipline, which conflicts head-on with the pursuit of self-gratification. It also requires many other things: grace, forgiveness, understanding among them. But it certainly requires disciplining ourselves as well.



One of the things that our pastor saw vividly when leaving our culture for a while is how very unwilling we are to practice self-discipline. This affects many areas of our lives: financial, eating, sexuality, education, anger, and more. While many of these appear to be matters of the body or money, they seem to me to be driven by spiritual discipline. If we do not recognize that our desires and appetites are prone to go bad, then we will not see the need to control them. If we believe that we have a right to fulfill any sexual desire, no matter how disordered it may be, we will not strive to control that desire. If we do not see the use of our money as a way to do what is right and make the world better, we will seek to consume rather than invest in a better tomorrow.



I think the TV picture of America that the outside world sees is, sadly, all too true. As a culture we have decided to pursue the fulfilling of all appetites instead of passing judgement upon them and controlling them. That is fundamentally a spiritual problem. Too bad that folks here in the U.S. are not demanding change like that man in the restaurant. But then that would take some discipline.

National Parks and Tsunami

This week the new Ken Burns series on the National Parks is airing. It is very good, and as I have been watching it I am both reminded of the experiences I have had viewing the handiwork of God in Yellowstone, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, the Smokies and also find myself anticipating the time when I will get to visit Yosemite for the first time. The National Parks are indeed a national treasure and I agree with Teddy Roosevelt that the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone/Tetons are so unique in the world and so breathtaking that all Americans should endeavor to visit them.

Yet I am also struck with the tone of the series that presents nature and wilderness as an unqualified good with no dark side. Though they mention at times how the frontier was in the 1800's viewed as something to be conquered rather than preserved, that point of view is presented as something to be looked down upon. This strikes me as a very recent point of view, and one that would fit into what C. S. Lewis calls 'chronological snobbery'. We take our own modern opinion to be so vastly superior to what came before that we don't even try to understand why our viewpoint is different.

Today the news provided a good opportunity to recognize the dark side of nature and reflect on our chronological snobbery as tsunami hit the Samoan islands and an earthquake hit Indonesia on the same day. Meanwhile the typhoon that hit the Phillippines a couple of days ago has now passed over southeast Asia and the death toll is starting to emerge. Among all of these some 1000 or so folks are now dead with the count likely to rise further in the days to come. The economic damage is huge as well.

While these kinds of storms and quakes are not the same as simply undeveloped land in parks, they do illustrate that nature is both enemy and friend. To the Pilgrims and all those after them who lived on the frontier, cutting down the woods for shelter and fuel and to allow farming was necessary to avoid death due to winter cold and lack of food. Killing grizzly bears and mountain lions and rattle snakes was to necessary to keep your children and milk cow alive. While nature provided wood and meat, it was also menacing in its ability to kill you and your family. It was to be conquered to stay alive. While many took this very much too far, slaughtering animals for feathers or hides, the threat of wilderness was clear to everyone.

In our sanitized, urbanized world we romanticize the wilderness and overlook the real threat the natural world posed to frontier families. Many early pioneers went to the opposite extreme, demonizing it. The truth lies in between. We are stewards of the earth, to both utilize its bounty and also keep it sustainable for the future. Nature is both beautiful and threatening, as people also can be. And so the apostle Paul concluded that both man and nature are fallen, and both are created by God and reflect His handiwork. Those two sides remain in tension as long as this earth remains.

Yom Kippur, Passover and the Lord's Supper

The sermon at our church this past Sunday was about the marriage feast of the Lamb in the book of Revelation, chapter 19, which seems to occur immediately before Armageddon. Since the chronology of Revelation is rather hard to sort out, it may not actually be in that order in my opinion, and in the sermon the pastor discussed the various concepts of the second advent of Christ and whether it happens pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation or post-tribulation. I agree with him that the pre-trib point of view requires a very strained reading of Scripture and is rather in conflict with the rest of the teaching in the Bible about suffering. I tend to think that the church may have to endure the entire tribulation, not escaping even mid-tribulation, but the truth is that no one really knows. The excessive confidence of the pronouncements by Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and others are out of line in my opinion. We just don't know how all of that will unfold.



Anyway, after that discussion came the wedding feast of the Lamb and one of the points was that the Lord's supper anticipates that wedding feast. I commented here recently about how often the Bible compares Christianity to marriage, and this is another of those and this time the comparison has to do with when He is fully united with the Church, which is His betrothed until He returns. As we take the Lord's supper, we both look backward to the cross and forward to the marriage feast.



Since Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, happens in September the same week as this sermon, I was reminded of how that holiday relates to Passover, one looking back and the other more forward looking. The Passover lamb died to provide the blood for the doorpost in Egypt, protecting Israel from the death angel, causing him to pass over their homes. It is celebrated with a roasted lamb, bread, and wine as well as bitterherbs and salt water and looks back to that event in Egypt. Jesus became the Lamb who took away the need for more sacrificial lambs and took away our tears and bitterness, so the Lord's supper is celebrated with only the bread and wine. No other lamb will ever be needed. We look backward to His act of sacrifice in that way at the Lord's supper, and the absence of the lamb, bitter herbs, and salt water give testimony to what He did and it, as Paul said, 'proclaims the Lord's death until he comes' (I Cor 11:26).



And when He comes, we will do what Christ promised when He first celebrated the Lord's supper with the Disciples, saying about the bread and wine, ' I will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God' (Mark 14:25 but also Luke 22:18 and Matt 26:29). This could well be at the marriage feast of Revelation 19. I think of Yom Kippur as a fresh start, with the sins being carried off by the 'scape goat' and a chance to begin anew, and in that way the forward looking part of the Lord's supper, coming as it did in a sermon at the time of Yom Kippur, reminded me of that. Yom Kippur also comes at the start of the Jewish new year, which is a forward-looking time. Most often I only think about the backward looking part of the Lord's supper and omit the forward looking part. I appreciated, and needed the reminder about, the forward looking part.

Discipleship: Mentoring, Tutoring, or something else?

Our men's group just finished reading and discussing the book Transforming Discipleship and I have reached a few conclusions based on that discussion and the book. Things I like in the book include the description of a disciple as 'a self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted follower of Christ' and the diagnosis of some of the reasons why there is so little discipleship within the church, which has mostly to do with both pastors and the congregation not seeing making disciples as a primary reason for the existence of the church. Most act as if the Great Commission in Matt 28:18-20 says 'go and do church' instead of 'go and make disciples of all nations'.

As the book reaches its recommended course of action, though, the recommendations seemed to me to be pretty much the same as what happens on a college campus: commit to a one year small group, commit something like 5 hours a week to the overall effort (that includes group time, preparation, going and doing ministry), commit to the relationships and the risk of being transparent in the group, and committing to at least seriously consider leading a group the next year. This is to me a key issue: most folks with careers, mortgages, kids and some other basic commitments at church already don't have that time even if they are interested.

I had commented before on how discipling ministries seem to be effective on college campuses but much less so in local churches, and so here are some conclusions about what I think it would take for discipling to work within the local church:

• First it needs integration within the church program. At least in evangelical churches there is already a lot of 'content' on offer through Sunday School classes, sermons, other bible studies, etc. Adding more content is not needed: making the current content more relevant would be much better than yet another, separate time of study.
• I have commented elsewhere that I see discipling as different from mentoring. Mentoring is more about offering advice and sponsorship, less about training and doing things jointly. Discipling is more a group activity, less of a leader:follower activity. In that regard, a blog I saw today titled 'Mentoring is Overrated:Try Tutoring Instead' by Michael Schrage at Harvardbusiness.org made me think: maybe tutoring is a good paradigm for discipling in a church. If sermons and sunday bible study is the 'classroom', then the small discipleship group is more like a peer tutoring session (working on the difficult areas, asking the questions you can't ask in class) and peer tutors are not nearly so intimidating as a professor or a pastor.
• The time commitment has to be manageable: integrating the content with sunday school can certainly help that. Integrating the 'peer tutoring' with other ministries would do even more. Why isn't the goal of discipling built into all the other church ministries? How does choir build disciples? How does the sports ministry build disciples? How does women's ministry build disciples? Integration will be a must for it to work. The current patchwork of programs that seem to be unrelated to each other and without a common theme should have a common theme of building disciples.
• The content has to have more flexibility than in the book. An effort that takes a canned program of weekly meetings, works through it in a year, then moves those people out to do the same content with others next year is not likely to work for people who are out of school in my opinion. There is such a wide range of backgrounds in a church, folks with totally different gaps regarding how they could become 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' that one canned program is going to fit only a few.
• To do all of this the pastoral staff will need to see building disciples as their key calling; not preaching, not worship, not pastoral care. Those others are important parts elements of being a disciple but are not ends in themselves.
• All of this re-confirmed to me what a great window of opportunity are the college years. If those years are missed it is much harder to build disciples in small groups later.

More on Marriage in the News

Continuing from last time, the current (October) issue of First Things has an interesting article titled 'What does Woman Want? The War between the Sexless" which discusses a number of recent articles by women in The Atlantic, Time, various blogs and books that have a common theme of middle aged women divorcing their husbands, claiming that their marriage is barren of sexual intimacy, and assigning blame mostly to things like extended life expectancy making marriage unsustainable, having been intended for a society where most people die much younger than now. The author of this article, Mary Eberstadt, effectively points out how bizarre this all is and makes some pointed observations, such as:

• Wharton economists have assembled surveys over the past 35 years showing steadily decreasing female happiness in general. This is despite large advances in education (more in college now than men), in job equality, sexual freedom, longer life expectancy,closing the wage gap, etc. Instead of improving their happiness, women's happiness is steadily declining, now less than men though historically it had been higher than men.


• Womens' and mens' narcissism is increasing. A study of 16,000 collegians personality tests showed a sharp increase in responses to such statements as 'I am an important person' (in 1950 12% agreed with this one; it was 80% by the 1980's)


• Women are becoming more the instigator of divorce. A recent Parade poll showed 70% of men said they would never leave their spouse, versus 50% of women say they have considered leaving.


• Men used to complain about sex-withholding wives and used it to justify affairs; now women do exactly that same thing. That is the whole gist of The Atlantic article 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off'' by one Sandra Tsing Loh about her decision to seek a divorce.

Eberstadt could have done better in coming up with more clear conclusions from her survey of the angst this summer about marriage from female 'elites' in the media, but she does point out that much of this is the price of feminism, and part of the price of feminism has been its acceptance of pornography. As the article points out, pornography becomes an easy substitute for sexual intimacy in situations where that intimacy is strained by the pressures of life and marriage, and porn's easy availability now only makes it worse. Women have accepted porn in their quest for their own sexual license. Now it is helping destroy the intimacy they say they want, in addition to their own destructive work via promiscuity, abortion, narcissism, and career obsession.

I would add another point: competition. Loh paints a generality of the modern man as a sexless, sex-withholding 'competitor wife'. That is amazing since men historically have been blamed for being sex-obsessed and indeed that is why men are so vulnerable to porn. So what is going on? My opinion is that feminist women have been obsessed with competition with men to the point that they have made the home a place of competition instead of a place of acceptance. The word 'competitor' in 'competitor wife' is key. Men do not like to compete against women, especially their wives. Not in sports, not in school, not in a debate (see Hillary versus Barack for example), not anywhere. But now, men are competing with their wives to maintain their self respect as a provider, as a leader, and as a lover. In the home competition does not work. It shuts down intimacy and porn becomes an easy escape for many. I am not justifying porn: as I have said before, porn is a lie. But is an easy out for those tired of competing against their own wives. It is rather ironic that these feminists who have so strenuously insisted in competing against their husbands now find themselves in a no-win competition against the air-brushed, silicone-implanted, liposuctioned lie that is pornography.

Marriage in the News

Today's USA Today included an op/ed piece about how secularism is saving marriage. Since I commented recently that 'marriage is on shaky ground' in the post about grace and the radical idea that is marriage, I thought I should comment on that article. In addition, the current issue of First Things (the October issue: yes, the magazine gurus have decreed that it is now October even though it is only September 14) includes and article titled 'What does Woman Want', which goes well beyond Mel Gibson's take on that.

First of all let's look at the USA Today nonsense: either Oliver Thomas, who wrote the article, simply doesn't understand statistics or he is living in a land of make believe. Here is a broader view of the statistics: yes, the divorce rate did drop to the lowest rate as a % of marriages since 1970. Unfortunately, several other trends have been going on for a number of years as well including:

• The total % of unmarried women has moved steadily upward since 1960, from about 30% to over 40%. In 1960 the number of unmarried women was about half the number of married women; now the numbers are nearing equivalence and if the current trend continues, unmarried women will pass the number of married women in a decade or so.
• The average age of marriage is increasing (up to 27 for men, versus 22 back when I got married)
• The number of unmarried couple households has increased 10x since 1960

So how does this translate to secularism saving marriage? It doesn't. What it does imply is that fewer and fewer people are getting married, and those that do so marry later. This would more likely imply that those most committed to the idea of marriage are the ones getting married since the stigma of being unmarried, either alone or co-habiting, is now less. When the people most committed to marriage as a concept are the ones getting married, wouldn't you expect lower divorce rates? I would. And is there any evidence that the folks most committed to the idea of marriage are the more secular, non-religious folks? None.

To look at the long term trends in marriage statistics, visit www.biblenews1.com/marriage/marriags.htm . They have plotted the data from the U.S. Census Bureau, so this is not some survey skewed by the sampling plan. It is just census data, conveniently plotted. One thing you will note is that in 1982-83, during the last recession of similar severity to the current one, the divorce rate also dropped. There have also been several articles about how hard times force marriage partners to delay divorce and often to come together as a team.

So what is to be made of the drop in divorce rates? My opinion is that in light of the long term marriage statistics and the current recession combined, it was entirely predictable and has absolutely nothing to do with secularism. Quite the opposite.

However, there are some secular forces that are contributing to the long term negative trends in marriage, which the First Things article discusses. More on that next time.

Missions and Foreign Aid

In finishing up Philip Yancey's book Finding God in Unexpected Places there was an essay on fund raising for Christian causes, and in the current edition (Summer) of The City (this is a free quarterly from Houston Baptist University, and well worth reading) there was an article on foreign aid and why it has failed so miserably, especially in Africa. I was struck again by how foreign aid and church missions are two sides of the same coin: those who are 'haves' seeking to help the 'have nots', though the one is more secular and driven by governments and celebrities (or the crooks at the U.N.) and the other by churches. Neither one seems to be working very well from my point of view.

The article in The City reviews the book Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working... by Dambisa Moyo who was born and grew up in Zambia and has worked for both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. The author seems well qualified on the subject of grants and loans to Africa, whether from governments, the World Bank or folks like Bono and Live Aid. The book concludes succinctly that those who think well of handing cash to corrupt and incompetent regimes are not focused on the facts and are more interested in salving their own conscience than in making a difference. Her gripe is not with emergency disaster relief after an earthquake or that sort of thing: more with the ongoing handing over of billions to local programs that consistently fail to make a difference, and have been doing so for years.

These are in contrast to the 'micro loans' efforts, which are mostly private and to individuals to start a small business, not done through government. These do seem to make a difference, but do not address huge issues for the most part (like Aids, building schools, and so on).

I agree that most foreign aid programs are 'broken', and I wonder if many missions are, too. Again in Yancey's book he comments on his visits to Africa and how even the church pastors admit to multiple partners outside their marriage in many places (72% of pastors in South Africa, by a World Vision survey there, with an average of 3-4 partners). Yet 70% of South Africans attend church. Something is seriously wrong. As I look at the history of missions, especially the short term mission trips so popular at the moment, I wonder what they have accomplished for the 'have nots'. They seem to be more aimed at the 'haves', to stir up their interest and emotions. I wonder if we would not be better off to focus on buidling water purification plants and sewer systems, for instance. Certainly just sending money instead of going on short term trips is not the answer, as the Dead Aid book clearly shows. We would not be able to just send money to build these things: we would need to go do it. And yet there also needs to be some amount of personal touch, person to person. Infrastructure alone won't do it.

It seems to me that both official aid programs and missions may be out of balance: the governmental and quasi-governmental efforts all about money and the church programs all about people, when a balance of both people contact and infrastructure (instead of money) is needed.

Faith and Grace in Marriage

The Bible very often and very intentionally compares our relationship to God with marriage. Unfaithfulness to God is called 'adultery' in both the Old and New Testaments; the church in the New Testament is called the 'bride of Christ'; Revelation speaks of Christ's return as the beginning of the 'wedding feast'; and so on. In Corinthians we are told that marriage within the faith is the only permissible type of marriage since to marry someone who does not share the faith is to join Christ with Belial, uniting the concepts of marriage and our relationshi with God, not just comparing them.

With that in mind, Phillip Yancey in Finding God in Unexpected Places includes a few essays on what he calls 'the scandal of grace'. One of those scandalous parts of the faith is that grace is accepted 'in advance': that is, Christ ann0unces that our sins are forgiven once for all, and then provides the indwelling Spirit as a 'seal' to show it is permanent, before it is seen whether we will remain faithful. This is very much like announcing that marriage is 'until death do us part' in advance of seeing whether your partner remains faithful. So much of our culture is premised on performance: work, school, athletics all hinge on being accepted conditional on our performance. The 'scandal' of grace is that acceptance is offered in advance of performance, on the premise that if our heart is changed our actions will also change. Many religions remain performance based. So do many families.

For many this is a stumbling block for both marriage and Christianity. In his essay, Yancey points out that 'if a bridegroom on his wedding night sat down to negotiate terms of infidelity (saying) 'Ok, you have guaranteed the future, so just how far can I go with other women?" we would be shocked, and we would also know that this man does not understand what love involves. We know that in this marriage his approach of 'what can I get away with' will prevent him from knowing what love is really about and will prevent him from making the necessary commitment that allows marital love in the first place. We will question his heart. We accept the reasons for an up-front commitment in marriage but do not see how our relationship with God would be the same way: committing permanently at the front end while requiring ongoing grace and forgiveness in order to last.

Marriage in American culture, and western culture generally, is on shaky ground. I think that is in large part due to our approach to it with a consumer mentality, of getting what we want, rather than approaching it as a matter of faith and grace. Clearly the up-front commitment is an exercise of faith, not knowing what trials lie ahead but committing to do what it takes to remain faithful, just as Christ commits to keep and sanctify His Church. The ongoing grace to keep it alive seems to in short supply, however. We are hesitant to extend grace in everyday ways, to meet our spouses daily needs for respect or acceptance or affection, let alone in bigger things.

The idea of what we call 'the security of the believer' is indeed scandalous as Yancey says, but no more scandalous than the idea of marriage. Both ideas are losing traction in western culture, and that explains a lot of our problems.

Optimum versus Ideal

We recently implemented at work our new Organization Optimization plan after completing a downsizing. First you downsize, then you roll out the optimum organization. Of course, about two and a half years ago we did an even larger downsizing after which we rolled out the Ideal Organization. It was so ideal that some folks never did quite figure out what their job was. So now we are un-doing the Ideal in favor of the Optimum. We have also done several other ideal organization plans over the past several years. The ideal never seems to remain ideal for very long. I expect that the Optimum Organization will fare similarly.



'Optimize' is an interesting concept and is much like 'utopia' only more technical. In the engineering world, where a response variable may be expected to follow a response curve across a range of conditions like varying temperature or pressure or concentration, it makes some sense. In that technical case, the curve may indeed have an 'optimum' point where it is best to operate a unit operation. Of course, even these technical 'optima' often only exist on paper: in the real world we are usually happy to have an 'operating window' as a range of conditions within which we get good commercial results. This is because almost every commercial process has many things varying all the time to some degree: raw materials vary, wear and tear of the equipment, temporary malfunctions, operator skill, and so on all vary at once, so the optimum conditions are rarely seen. And in reality, all products can be made better and all processes can be improved so today's 'optimum' is tomorrow's 'obsolete'. So while the concept has some value in identifying the response curve so you can avoid really bad places to operate, truly 'optimized' processes don't really exist.



Once you start talking about humans, there is truly no 'optimum'. There is no more an optimum organization than there is an optimum economy or optimum marriage. That is one of the great flaws in the current universal health care proposal: it assumes the government can do centrally for a huge economic system what communism was unable to do centrally for any portion of an economy. It is an attempt at utopia in one large area of the economy by means of centralized planning and control. Some areas (like Europe) claim to be doing this successfully for health care, but I see them as free-loaders, sponging off the American system where the vast majority of new drugs and treatments are funded and developed. If America loses the economic incentive to create new drugs and methods, no one will have that incentive and they will cease. That would certainly not be optimum. As with our Ideal Organization, however, it would take time for this to be clearly seen. It took a long time for communism to fail, too.

Prayer as Punishment

On Monday morning this week as we discussed discipleship in our men's group we spent a few minutes on the concept of confession to each other for support and prayers as well as confession to God. I asked those in the group who had grown up in the Catholic church how they felt about the rite of confession. There were different takes on it but one of the men mentioned how the habit of the priests assigning a certain number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys to say after confession had created in him the impression that saying prayers was a form of punishment for having sinned and gone to confession. I don't know that everyone reacts that way, but I suspect a good many do. I thought it was a good insight on how we can create impressions of punishment or legalism very easily in the way we practice the faith. In a little book being passed around in our couples small group at church, A Man's Helper by Wilfred Grenfell, MD (published in 1910; he was superintendent of the Labrador Medical Mission) he has a chapter on prayer and mentions some other types of 'prayer obstacles' that includes long winded prayers, fancy words, and some others . Here are some of my personal prayer obstacles, which overlap his to some degree:

• Prayer as information to God: droning on at length to tell God what He already knows, which is generally more to tell others listening what you think they need to know. For the most part they don't need to know.
• Prayer as sermon: praying in public as a disguised form of preaching is still preaching just the same, not prayer.
• Written prayers read without feeling or fervor: written prayers may be just fine, especially when sung. That is what the Psalms are, after all, and song is a fine way to express praise, worship and thanksgiving. But a monotonous reading or mindless repetition of a written prayer is much like 'prayer as punishment'.
• Prayer as punishment: not only when assigned after confession, but what are we conveying when we 'make' kids 'say their prayers' at night? I suspect that it varies with different children, but sometimes it is punishment.
• Prayer as King James vocabulary exercise: for some this is just habit, to others it is a performance.
• Prayer as laziness: praying for what you need to get up and do. Some things can only be done by prayer, some can only be done by work. Some require both.May we have the wisdom to know the difference!

The worst prayer, of course, is no prayer at all. That is the one that is most common of all.

Back to School, Back to Discipleship

I have commented before regarding my concern about the lack of discipleship in the local church and how I have wondered why it seems easier to for ministries centered on discipleship (like the Navigators and Campus Crusade) to thrive on a college campus than in a local church. As we continue to read and discuss Transforming Discipleship in our men's group, today the chapter for discussion focused on 'reproducing disciples' and made reference to the relationship of the Apostle Paul with Timothy and with Barnabas as well as the author's experience. While this was not in the book, it seems to me that one key element of what Paul did in his church planting and development of leaders as well as what Jesus did with the 12, is that they moved on after a short time. Paul might stay for a couple of years at most, but he then moved on. That of course forced the local followers to 'step up' and take on the leadership role(s) that Paul left vacant. That was also true for Barnabas, and Jesus left the entire fate of Christianity in the hands of the 12 after only 3.5 years!

This is also true of ministry on college campuses: the seniors graduate every year and the underclassmen have to 'step up'. There is a new freshman class every year, and if they are not reached then the ministry will be gone in 4 years. This makes for a dynamic of student leaders and new disciples both knowing that the leaders will leave and that the younger folks will of necessity take over. There is no option other than the ministry folding. I am wondering if this is indeed an important part of discipleship ministry. While one can ask new members up front for a 'commitment' to start another discipleship group themselves, this is not the same as a situation like graduation where it is clear that is an absolute necessity. My experience in the local church is that very few will make that kind of commitment: and when there is no driving necessity, as there is in a campus ministry, why should they?

Early in the book the author (Greg Ogden) had asked rhetorically what would happen if pastors new that they only had 3 or 4 years to establish a church and then they had to move on and leave it with the lay people? That is what Jesus did, and while Paul kept in touch by his letters to some degree, it is what he did too. How would that change the church? It is a good question. I am not suggesting that there is no need for ordained clergy. However, the dynamic of knowing that we are accountable to pass on the faith seems to me to be vitally important. I am not sure how to duplicate the sense of necessity that is clear on the campus, but it seems to be a good thing.

The Nature of Words, the Nature of Prayer

In Phillip Yancey's book Finding God in Unexpected Places he recounts from Augustine's Confessions the history of how St. Ambrose had learned to read silently without moving his lips, and how Augustine and his friends would gather round to watch this incredible thing, amazed that Ambrose could understand and retain the unspoken words. This was a very unusual and groundbreaking feat, and turned out to be a somewhat controversial one as folks debated whether this was a good thing to do or not since words were clearly intended to be spoken. It was also a feat inaccessible to most people at that time since very few could read and write. As a result, reading was normally a group event and was done aloud. This remained the case until well after the arrival of the printing press. Interestingly, when reading silently became common, personal prayer also became more common. Until then, prayer was also normally a group event, done aloud.



This was not entirely consistent with Biblical practice, however, though it may shed some light on why the 12 Disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. It may well be that public prayers were their main experience with prayer prior to Jesus. Prayer aloud was indeed very common. Jesus, however, apparently did not limit Himself to prayer aloud or at least not to prayer in public. In Matthew14:23 we are told that he went up to a mountain by Himself to pray after feeding the 5000; Luke 5:16 says that He often slipped away to the wilderness to pray; Luke 6:12, Luke 9:28, and John 6:15 are other instances of His going off to pray alone. It seems to have been His custom. I don't know whether He spoke his prayers aloud or not when He was alone, but He may have. That may be how we we have the record of his prayer in John 17 and in Gethsemane. However, when He instructs the disciples in Matt 6 he tells them not to pray as the hypocrites do in public, but to go to an inner room, shut the door and pray in secret.



There is something about words that demand to spoken, and writing becomes a surrogate form of speech. It is understandable that prayer would at times be aloud and in groups due to that, especially among those who cannot read. And yet, Jesus clearly set the example for personal, private prayer, whether sp0ken aloud or not. It is interesting that His example did not seem to become the norm in the early church, however. As with other areas in life like education, it seems to be easier for us to talk about subjects of importance and depth in public, like in a classroom, than at home or in one on one conversation. How easily we relegate the matters of ultimate importance only to formal settings and do not attempt to deal with them with our children at home or our neighbors in daily conversation. I think for a similar reason personal, private prayer may also be harder than public prayer. Private prayer is too easily confined to our list of needs and wants. This is not to say that public worship is always deep and deals with ultimate issues; the public practice of our faith can also become trite if we allow it. But it often happens that we want the church or school to deal with the hard stuff.



This reminds me of the need for both the formal and the informal, the private and intimate as well as the public. The public can remind us of the hard topics that we otherwise avoid, the private challenges us to get beyond the merely public.

Health Care and Education

In the debate over universal health care it seems to me that a number of things have not been included in the debate. I have seen articles and blogs that talk about whether health care is a right, some saying it is while others compare it to housing or other purchases that may in some cases be subsidized but are not rights. As I have written some months ago in this blog, health care is not a right but it is something that we all care about and would like to make available to as many people as possible. Because it is a service and not property, it seems to me that in many ways it is like education.



Education is also not a right, though most of us would agree that it is a good thing and critical to having citizens informed enough to exercise the right to vote as well as to effectively participate in the economy. It is an important thing, but not a right. Life, liberty, property, justice in the courts, voting: these are all rights. Having housing, clothing, food, and education are not rights, they are responsibilities for us to provide for ourselves, but they are important and in some cases we provide a safety net for those unable or only partially able to provide them for themselves.



In the case of education, public education is made available everywhere, though the local citizens have a say at the polls about how much is spent (by voting on tax levies and bond issues), have a say in how it is run by electing school boards, and put a cap on how much is provided 'free' to everyone by limiting free public education through high school only, not college. And many people want something better or different from the public schools, so private schools and home schools also are available. Beyond high school, all additional schooling is at the student's expense. The basic issue here is that everyone sees the value in basic education and are willing to pay for it--to a point.



It seems to me that many of these approaches should apply to public health care as well if it is to be done at all. It should be run locally; the local citizens should be able to control costs and management by voting on the funding and boards; it should cover basic health care, but not health care beyond a certain point; there should be options for private health care in addition to the public health care. These principles would make certain options, like a single payer system run by the government, off limits.



Public education was not intended to provide all the education needs of the country, just the basics, and that with accountability to voters on the results and the cost. It seems to me that health care should have the same kinds of accountability and limited scope.

Demonizing the Left

As I mentioned in my last post, the books Velvet Elvis and The Prodigal God both comment on how we as evangelical Christians can set-up our children for a shock when they enter the real world. In the first case, Rob Bell talks about how those who are raised in evangelical churches and especially in Christian schools can come away from that with the impression that the only truth that exists is located in their church or school. In the other case, Timothy Keller talks about those same kinds of home and school environments in terms of the people who have liberal, leftist views about sex, politics, and culture and that anyone outside the circle of their faith is not to be trusted. The one is about truth, the other about people, but they are similar. When those children go off to college they find that there is some truth to be found in the liberal universities and some loveable people to be found, causing them to doubt what they had been taught, including their religious teaching. In trying to protect our children, we often go too far and demonize those we disagree with and it later comes back to haunt us when our children abandon the faith because it mislead them about truth and about people with too extreme a position.



In The Prodigal God Keller points out that the father of the prodigal son would have been the object of derision by his peers for giving the prodigal his inheritance early. He would have been told that he let that child walk all over him; he would have been called weak; he would have been told to stand up to those boys! Instead, he was more than patient and forgiving, taking the loss himself by allowing the prodigal to blow his inheritance and later accepting him back. He would have been told by his peers to refuse to take him back, that the son needed to live with the consequences of his actions. Indeed, that is exactly what the elder brother wanted. In other words, he would have been demonized by his peers for failing to uphold the honor of the role of father. Similarly today in the Arab world fathers are 'shamed' into killing their daughters who balk at their parents arrangements for marriage or who become Christians, among other things.


When we demonize the left, we do something similar to what peers of the father would have been doing; trying to cut them off, teach them a lesson. It is similar to what the Arab world does to those who embrace Christianity. We don't recognize the similarity to these things many times, but it is there just the same. To demonize those we disagree with we simply cut off or at least reduce the possibility of redemption.


I must admit that I do get tired of hearing how awful Obama and company are every day on talk radio. I disagree with most everything Obama does and, as with his predecessor Carter, most of what he does will have to be undone later. But demonizing does not help. As with the examples in these books about how demonizing the left sets up our children for a shock when they enter the world, this constant demonizing of the left sets us up for losing all support from moderates as they must get more tired of this than I do as conservative. And he may accidentally do something good along the way.


Disagree? Yes. Make the issues clear? Yes. Demonize? No.

Two Kinds of People in the World

Someone has noted that there are 2 kinds of people in this world: those who think there are 2 kinds of people in the world, and those who don't. At times this does seem to be a very time-worn set-up for a comparing and contrasting of two alternatives. There are spenders versus savers; conservatives and liberals; Chevy guys and Ford guys. I didn't grow up on a farm, but I laughed out loud at a restaurant in the Midwest when I saw a green John Deere hat that said 'Friends don't let friends drive red tractors', so there apparently are also Deere guys and Farmall guys. The Chevy/Ford/Deere/Farmall thing has suffered of late, though, due to Toyota, Nissan, Kubota, and others so the next generation may not relate to that as well. Being of a certain age, though, I do still laugh at the line in Christmas Story about 'my dad was an Oldsmobile man!'

Yet the '2 kinds of people' comparison does have some validity, which is no doubt why it gets used so often. I just finished reading The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller and, lest there be any confusion from my last blog, I liked it very much. It is a fresh look at a very familiar passage of Scripture, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Most sermons on this passage that I have heard in the past focused on the licentiousness of the younger son; recently, I have heard more about either the hard-heartedness of the elder son or the sacrificial love of the father, but I think this book gives all 3 the most even treatment that I have come across for even a very oft-cited passage. He does, of course, use the 2 kinds of people paradigm; the younger brothers of the world, whom Kierkegaard calls the 'aesthetic', and the elder brothers, the 'ethical' in Kierkegaard's terms. I have heard them also called the 'party-ers' and the 'do good-ers'. I never related quite as well to this dumbed-down version of the comparison, I think in part because in college the 'party-ers' were clearly the Greeks, but the non-Greeks did not fit any neat category as far as I could tell. Keller comes up with slightly different terms: moral conformity versus self-discovery. I like this because I think it captures the spirit of the age rather well.

The younger brother, of course, was the self-discovery agent, out there to 'grab all the gusto he could get' and experience life! Meanwhile, the elder brother is demonstrating his moral superiority and self-mastery through his diligence. The book spends some time pointing out the cultural context, though, and how the actions of both sons would have been unthinkable in that culture: the younger because demanding his part of the inheritance while his father remained in good health was basically saying that he considered his father more valuable dead than alive, and the elder by his confrontation of the father's acceptance of the returning prodigal in telling the father what he should/should not do with his wealth. The elder brother knew that the younger one had squandered his fair share, and if he were accepted back he would start consuming the inheritance that would have come to him, so he challenges the father's right to control his own resources. Both sons were fundamentally self-centered, but they demonstrated it in very different ways. Both were seeking to be in control and escape the control of the father. Yet both were loved and pleaded with by the father, though the elder brother, as with the Pharisees in Jesus' day, had a much harder time being reconciled to the father. They, like the elder brother, were convinced that they needed no reconciliation. They had done all the right things. Only those profligate party-ers needed that. How hard it is for those who do all the right things to see their sinfulness!

I commented about Velvet Elvis a couple of weeks ago regarding why so many church-going kids abandon the faith when they go to college, and that topic comes up in this book as well. He mentions how he moved to New York city from the Midwest to start a church and how he met 'many young adults who had come from more conservative parts of the U.S. to take their undergraduate degrees at a New York school. Here they met the kind of person thay had been warned about for years, those with liberal views on sex, politics, and culture. Despite what they had been led to believe, those people were kind, reasonable, and open-hearted. When the students began to change their views, they found many people back home, especially in the churches, responded in a hostile and bigoted way. Soon they had rejected their former views along with their faith.' I would not limit this to just those that go to New York, and I think this does often happen. Keller points out the 'elder brother-ish' reaction of those back home, but there is more to consider here.

It also raises another, more fundamental question on those who lose their faith: were they simply 'elder brothers' as well, doing what is right because of what was viewed as right at home? When they went to a place where a different approach is considered 'right', they struggle briefly, but then fall into line. The hostile reaction from home pushes them along, of course, but it seems to me that if we lose our faith when it is challenged, then it must have been insecure all along. To say it another way, were they simply 'Church-ians' back home instead of Christians? Had their lives actually been changed by the invasion of Christ into their lives, or were they just following the rules like the elder brother? I tend to think the latter.

This all goes to say that I fundamentally believe that there really are just 2 kinds of people in this world: those whose lives have been invaded by the living Christ, and those that haven't.

The Purpose of Church

I have started reading Timothy Keller's book The Prodigal God which I was recently given. The book is a re-examination of the parable of the prodigal son and he makes a good case for spending more time understanding the elder brother, who never went wild, along with the prodigal son. He provides a different look at the father as well, whose extreme love was 'prodigal' in its excess, as is God's love. Along the way he makes some comments about how Jesus attracted sinners and rebels while repelling and alienating the religious community. He comments that while Jesus attracted the irreligious and offended the religious, our churches today do not have this effect. 'The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church' he points out. 'That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did' he goes on to say. This raises the issue of what is the purpose of church services.



His implication is that organized church services should be aimed at attracting the irreligious, the marginal, the rebels, the alienated. Much of the 'seeker sensitive' movement has agreed with this approach, as does the 'emerging church' effort. I disagree.



Church services are not aimed at attracting unbelievers; they are aimed at worship by believers. Jesus did not reach out to the irreligious and sinners in His time of worship. As best I can tell, though, His worship was mostly either alone or at the temple, so I don't know that our conept of worship is all that great either. However, worship is not outreach. The sinners and irreligious were attracted to Jesus during his public conversations with his opponents or during his 'hands on' ministry times (healing, feeding, having one on one conversations, at dinner, etc), not during temple worship. To try to aim worship services at the irreligious is to deny believers a time of group worship and encouragement. Seeking to have teaching times that reach the unbelievers is a valid thing to do, but it should not replace group worship for believers.



Our church states that 'worship is our number one ministry priority' in its statement of core values. I personally think that discipleship should be our number one overall ministry priority, but worship is indeed the number one priority for public worship services. Our attraction to the irreligious should be in our 'hands on' ministry time (feeding the poor, helping the helpless, etc) and in events that raise issues in the public square, as Jesus did. Confusing the attraction of the irreligious to the active work of Christ with attracting them to worship services does worship a serious disservice.

Velvet Elvis, Discipleship and Truth

I just finished reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, who is a pastor in Michigan. I generally liked the book, though the style of it interfered with the message for me at times. The writing is a hybrid between a Powerpoint(r) presentation and prose, with lots of 'bullet points' (sentence fragments standing alone without a paragraph) mixed with paragraphs. It is something like reading half of a dialogue. While this was distracting, much of the content was good as I seek to understand the disconnect between my generation and my children's generation. I read in the paper last week that there is a bigger 'generation gap' now than at any time since the 60's. It certainly seems that way in church, so I hope to gain some insight into that over time.



I liked Velvet Elvis much better than Blue Like Jazz. The latter seemed to me much more existential, making comments about how Christianity can be experienced but not understood, that 'truth means much more than accuracy', that the 'mystery' of the Orthodox church was 'cool' just because it was different. The overall tone of Blue Like Jazz struck me as very existential, as if he had given up on the concept of truth as anything other than personal experience.



Velvet Elvis, while the style was neither fish nor fowl, was more truth-oriented. The book was worth the price (or more, since I got it at a discount book warehouse in Pigeon Forge for about three bucks) for the chapter on discipleship. I suppose you could call it a chapter; maybe it was a Powerpoint section. In any case, it was about discipleship. That chapter gives a terrific overview of how rabbis of Jesus' day had followers, how they were the best-of-the-best from the Torah schools, how the rabbi did not accept just anyone to be a disciple, and so on. This gave both a great context for what it meant in that culture to be a disciple, and how Jesus also made discipleship into a new thing, gave it new life, by calling as his disciples a group of men that would not have made the cut into the discipleship groups of the other rabbis of the time. Frequently in the book, Bell puts this kind of context around his point, illuminating how understanding the culture of the time changes how we understand many of the teachings of Jesus. He includes information about a place known as 'the Gates of Hell' in Casesarea Phillipi, and that the god Pan was worshiped there in obscene ways, and that His declaration that His church would be build on a different rock and the Gates of Hell would not stand against it was a reference to that place and that kind of worship. We usually miss that connection, even though we may have seen pictures of that place, as I have. The great grace of discipleship is that the Christ, the ultimate rabbi, thinks we can be like Him, and that we can carry on His teaching and ministry, even if we could not make the cut for the other rabbis.



He also directly addressed a question that has been on my mind: why so many kids who grow up in a Christian home and a sound church leave the faith when they leave for college. He suggests that one possibility is that they may have been taught that Christianity encompasses all that is really true, that all the truth in the secular world is suspect. Especially if they also went to a Christian school they may have gotten this idea. Then they find out that there is some truth out there in the world but are not prepared for the reality that all truth is God's truth. This can appear like a refutation of the faith they grew up with. It is an interesting thought, though probably not the only reason for this falling away of many at college. This emphasis on truth was much more palatable to me than the existentialism of Blue Like Jazz.



There is quite a lot in the book that still left me feeling the generation gap. His reference to being in a punk rock band while also a pastor is one example of that. The wedding at the lake for his friends who wanted it to be 'spiritual' but not 'Christian' was another example. At times he was a bit New Age-y, but he still managed to hold on to the concept of truth. 'If it is true, then it isn't new' he says at one point. Exactly!

Senior Week, Leadership, and Love

We have been going through a downsizing at work and the folks who took the voluntary severance package just finished their last week on the job. Many of them were near retirement and the package gave them enough incentive to go ahead and move into retirement now. With so many senior folks leaving, this past week has reminded me of high school days when the seniors were getting ready to graduate. Deja’ vu all over again, as Yogi would say. In addition, my daughter turned 20 and so for the first time in 16 years we have no teenagers in the house. That passage out of the teen years also made me think of the milestones and passages in life. It was a strange sort of week in that way.

Of course, some younger folks who were considering a new direction in their life also left. One of those was a man who had worked in my team as a project leader and is moving to Canada to join his new bride. They were married shortly before this severance package was announced. He is from India, though he spent much of his teen years in Canada, and he met his wife on the internet via a match-making/dating service for Asian Indians. She lives in Canada. Since marriages in India are traditionally arranged marriages, that approach seems to fit. He is an avid reader, so I am giving him a copy of The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis as he leaves and begins his new life with his new bride. I suspect that those from cultures of arranged marriages have fewer unrealistic expectations about romantic love than those from cultures like America, so the message that ‘Eros makes promises that she cannot keep’ may not be as desperately needed in his case as it is in America, but I suspect he has lived here and in Canada long enough to have been corrupted by our culture.

That our culture desperately needs this message was made clear yet again this past week by the news of the Argentina affair carried on by Governor Sanford of South Carolina. While the press rarely gets anything right, the comments that have been in print about how he felt that this woman was his soul mate, that this is about love, and so on indicates that he certainly does not yet understand about Eros and her promises. There has been such an ongoing stream of these types of revelations among governors, presidential candidates, preachers, and others in power that I am beginning to wonder if there are other lessons here as well. So many of these ‘leaders’ have such enormous egos that it seems to me that we have a cultural problem in not being able to tell the difference between egotism and leadership. So many of our ‘leaders’ appear to be leading when they are mostly just serving their own ego. They seem to do the same in their relationships with women, serving their own ego and thinking they can talk their way out of anything. And so many women, for their part, seem to prefer this fast talking, outgoing, self-serving type, often choosing them over men who are more introverted but also more reliable and less self-centered. While the ability to communicate is important, it is not enough. For my part, I will take depth and integrity over skillful rhetoric any day. It seems to me that many women, like the electorate, do not recognize the difference between leadership and egotism either. It should not be a surprise that so many have swooned over the words of Obama regardless of his lack of having ever done anything of consequence and regardless of his arrogance. That seems to be the concept our culture has of leadership.

Meanwhile Gov. Sanford clearly still has lessons to learn. Perhaps I should have sent him a copy of The Four Loves too.

Father's Day and Sustainability

It was Father's Day this past Sunday and it was good to be with extended family and children on that day. With the bankruptcy of GM and the talk of needing 'greener' cars, the high price of oil this past year, the debates about wind and nuclear power, climate change, and so on sustainability is all very much top of mind as well. However, still this few days after Father's Day I am thinking and wondering more about the sustainability of fatherhood in our culture. Perhaps it is bigger than that, an issue of moral sustainability.

In the news today Governor Sanford admitted he had been missing the past week due to an affair with a woman in Argentina. A few days ago Senator Ensign admitted to an affair with a staff member and gave up leadership roles. Both are conservative Republicans, the party less reputed for supporting such behavior. Of course, many in both parties have had the same problem, as does culture in general. Something like 40% of all children are now born out of wedlock in the U.S. , up to 70% among African Americans. The family itself is looking to be not very sustainable, regardless of what happens to Father's Day.


I heard in a sermon recently that something like 60% of kids who are active in church youth programs leave the church entirely when they graduate from high school and go off to college. These are not all kids, these are the ones that show up regularly and participate. This is clearly an unsustainable approach to building the next generation of Christians.

The Southern Baptist Convention is meeting this week in Louisville, KY, and the news there is glum; church membership and baptisms are falling. If the rate continues, the denomination will be half its current size in another 30 years or so. Unsustainable.

All of this is symptomatic to me of moral unsustainability. Someone has said that we are living on the fumes of prior generations morals, our own moral gas tanks having long since gone empty. The results seem to support that. We attempt to honor Father's Day while abandoning marriage and leaving our children with no father in the home. We think marriage is only about our own personal satisfaction so we cannot distinguish between so-called 'gay marriage' and the real thing. We do not live our faith daily so our children run away from the church at the first opportunity.

Rev. Johnny Hunt at the SBC Convention says we need revival. That is true, but it doesn't go far enough. We need to be actually living the faith, having it as our own. We need to be fueled with our own personal walk with God, not trying to live on the fumes left from the faith of prior generations. Nothing else will ever be sustainable.

The Private, the Secret, the Intimate

The sermon yesterday at our church, one in a series about family life, was about sexuality and its proper role. Much of the sermon was about the current problems with internet pornography and how that is destroying many families. It may well be the biggest sin problem within the church. The fact that an addiction to internet pornography can be idulged in 'secret' is part of the problem, since many are lured into it thinking that it will always remain a secret, not realizing how indulging in this secret sin will eventually destroy their marriage or lead them to other less secret sins with prostitutes, underage partners, or other crimes.



Besides being a troubling reminder of how sexuality continues to be a point of vulnerability for most men and many women, it also made me think about the role of the secret things in life and how pornography turns that role on its head.



In years past it seems to me that I heard more sermons and discussion about how our secret, private life exists to empower our public life. This idea, that the role of prayer, meditation, and marital sexuality provide a foundation of strength to help us resist the temptations of public life, is a powerful concept that I think deserves more attention. At the same time, in parallel to this idea of a private life that strengthens you, was a parallel idea that if you instead had a private life of secret sin you could be sure that it would find you out. In fact, this came up in a family discussion recently, whether that quote 'Be sure your sin will find you out' was in the Bible or just was a saying , so we looked it up and it is in Numbers 32:23, telling the Israelites that if they did not do as the Lord commanded then they should be sure that their sin would find them out. Of course many of the Proverbs talk about this as well in regard to sexual sin and failure to learn the Law among other things. Our private failures eventually become public, even if we are not running for public office.



Today we instead treat the private portions of our lives as the area where we alone should be god. We insist that these are 'victimless crimes' rather than self-destructive behaviors. As the movie Fireproof pointed out, porn plays a role in the failure of many marriages now. Pastoral counselors confirm that they find it to be an issue when counseling marriage problems. Just as we seem as a society to be less and less willing to defer gratification until later (via saving money, for instance) we also seem not to recognize that there are behaviors with penalties that arrive later. There is such a thing as postponed penalties as well as deferred gratification.



Yet the private, the secret, the intimate can provide strength instead of weakness in its proper role. Marriage provides times for both sexual self-control and times for fulfillment that should strengthen our character and provide the fulfillment needed to resist temptation. Similarly, private devotions can provide the knowledge and strength to withstand spiritual deception. Secret sin like porn takes that which should enable our lives and instead undermines it.



Someone pointed out to me many years ago that porn is basically a lie. It is a lie in many ways: the airbrushed photos of 'perfect' bodies, the implants and other surguries to make 'perfect' bodies, the false implication of seductresses who are always available for pleasure, in addition to the lies that it is victimless, that it is just normal, that no one will know, that sex should be just for pleasure and nothing else. These are all lies. But in addition to telling us lies, porn turns our secret life which should be a source of strength into a source of weakness.

Time for Remembrance

June is always a major time of remembrance at our house with birthdays and wedding anniversaries. This week in the news were some other major remembrances as the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe in WW2 was highlighted by President Obama's visit to that site. Since my dad went ashore there a day or two after the initial landing and went through a number of battles all the way to Berlin, D-Day is one that I always remember (also because of my wife's birthday!). This same week was also the 20th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square protests in China, causing us to reflect on the many changes that have taken place in China since that sad time.



This year is also the 25th anniversary of the death of Francis Schaeffer. It is hard to believe it has been that long. As I reviewed his book Genesis in Space and Time this week I was reminded again how very much his writing impacted the way I view the world, especially how I view the culture we live in. His writing on abortion, the arts, movies, literature, politics, and sexuality all caused to me to think more critically about how these things either reflect or deny Christianity. He more than anyone else I have read made me understand what it means to have a Christian 'worldview'.



One comment that I noticed more in this re-visit of his book than I did at the time was his comment that the church is by-and-large a middle-class institution in the western world, appealing to neither workers not intellectuals very much. That is quite unlike in Jesus' time or in other parts of the world like Africa, where the poor and working folks are the predominant members of Christian churches. Certainly as I was growing up the poor and the workers were all that I knew of the church, since that is where I was. As our prosperity has grown, we somehow have lost touch with the poor this country. I am not exactly sure how or what it means, but it is a concern.



As for the intellectuals, I think that they have always been a very small part of the church. Just as with the rich, I think they find it harder than the poor to view anyone but themselves as being in control, including God. Perhaps I should say 'we' instead of 'they'. It is a good time to remember my roots and not get too impressed by my own prosperity and education, which are enormous blessings that I should be more thankful for.

Poetry

I have little patience for poetry. Most of what passes for poetry these days, and for art in general, seems to me to be mostly a rejection of the idea of art and poetry, rejecting form and structure as much as possible. In many cases, it rejects the very concept of truth rather than giving an insight into truth. Yet in the latest issue of First Things a poem caught my attention. That is hard to do. They publish some poetry in every issue, and most of it is really quite bad, but every year or so one will catch my attention. This one is quoted in full below (so it is obviously short). It is entitled 'I Did Not Come to Call the Righteous' and listsMatthew 9:9-13 in the subtitle. Here it is:

We ninety-nine obedient sheep:

we workers hired at dawn's first peep;

we faithful sons who strive to please;

forsaking prodigalities;

we virgins who take pains to keep;

our lamps lit, even in our sleep;

we law-abiding Pharisees;

we wince at gospels such as these.

-Julie Stoner

The allusions to so many various passages of Scripture, and the gathering of them together so succinctly, caught my attention. Being a person who values doing things right, following the rules, it pokes me in a place I need to poked every so often. Art should do that: give you a view of reality, of truth, that you need to see but often don't. My thanks to Julie Stoner for this reminder of the truth!

Europe's End of the Age

Europe as we now know it continues to matter less and less. The current issue of First Things magazine includes an article on how Israel can survive and one thing is clear: Israel cannot depend on Europe. Neither can America.

Here are some startling statistics mentioned in that article: 'Of the 6,000 languages now spoken, half of them will disappear over the next century'. 'We stand on the cusp of a great extinction of the nations without precedent since late antiquity'. Europe cannot survive long in light of their current demographic decline: indeed birthrates in most of Europe are so low that some are saying that it cannot be reversed now and so it is just a matter of time until the current indigenous people are gone, replaced by either immigrants or no one. Even in the most Catholic area of Europe, Poland, the birth rates are below replacement rate and the population there will drop by a third by the middle of this century.

The author, David Goldman, makes this observation: 'The four millennium miracle of Jewish survival fails to impress the nations of Europe, who themselves cannot expect to survive long if their demographic decline continues' and 'why should gentile nations go out of their way to help Jews survive when they have neither the desire nor the capacity to survive themselves?' He also comments that 'the data indicate that many of the industrialized nations do not care to survive'.

That is really the crux of it. The end result of what is called 'liberalism' is a society that does not care to and is not capable of surviving. Israel, on the other hand, with its constant day to day struggle to survive, has the highest fertility rate and lowest suicide rate among the industrialized nations.

It is very clear that Israel cannot depend on Europe for much of anything. It ought to be clear that America cannot depend on them, either.

What is Discipleship?

A while back I made some comments about discipleship. The brief 'definition' in Greg Ogden's book Transforming Discipleship is a good start: 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ'. That does not capture the whole of it , but it is a good start. I am about half way through the book now and he adds more later, such as refering to discipling as 'a process that takes place within accountable relationships over a period of time for the purpose of bringing believers to spiritual maturity in Christ'. He also offers an interesting challenge to pastors: what if they, like Jesus, had only 3 years to serve and would have no one to replace them? How would that change their approach to ministry? Would that force them to build discipling processes instead of just 'doing church'?



I was reminded of all this, especially the part about 'spiritual maturity' by an article in the new June 2009 issue of First Things magazine. The archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, writes there, ' If 65 million Catholics really cared about their faith and cared about what it teaches, neither political party could ignore what we believe about justice for the poor, or the homeless, or immigrants, or the unborn. If 65 million Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn't need to waste one another's time arguing whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow balanced out or excused by other social policies'. He goes on to say that 'we need to stop lying to each other, to ourselves, and to God by claiming to oppose personally some homicidal evil-and allowing it to be legal at the same time'. He goes on to discuss the importance of truth, truth that is greater than this world, and how vital it is to what he calls 'Christian formation'. He decries the idea, so common today, that people can 'create their own truth and then baptize it with an appeal to personal conscience'.



While his viewpoint is Catholic and mine is evangelical Protestant, his concerns are very similar to my concerns about the lack of folks in the church whose entire life, whose total world view has been dramatically altered by the invasion of Christ into their life. Many claim to be Christian but the things they consider true, regarding abortion or justice or marriage or truth itself, are undistinguishable from those rejecting Christianity. As a result, they can in fact be ignored by the political power structure, even in a democracy. The article observes that 'There is nothing more empty-headed in a pluralistic democracy than telling citizens to keep quiet about their beliefs. A healthy democracy requires exactly the opposite. Democracy requires a vigorous public struggle of convictions and ideas. And the convictions of some people always get imposed on everybody else. That's the nature of a democracy.'

Someone's views will be imposed; shouldn't those views be based on truth? Our current culture seems to be more concerned about 'rights' (gay rights, abortion rights, animal rights, etc) than about either truth or the common good. But to make a difference in the debate, your faith must be more than a private thing. It must be something that impacts your whole world view so that you see clearly its implications in all areas of life, and can verbalize it.

So our concept and definition of discipleship must include more than self-initiating in our daily walk with God, and reproducing the faith via witness and evangelism. It must include this part about 'spiritual maturity', about living a life that is distinctively Christian, and about applying the Truth to all areas of life, not just to a compartment of life that we think of as our 'spiritual life'.

The Great American Road Trip

We just returned yesterday from 9 days of driving around the Southeast U.S.. Some folks like to go one place and stay there for a length of time, and I can enjoy that sort of relaxation at times; but I also feel an urge to see many of sights and places in this vast country that I have not seen and get a feel for those places, their history, their lifestyle, the little things that set apart one area of the country from another. This time we did some of both.



The first few days we visited with family in Kentucky, just visiting family, seeing our 2-month old nephew, and enjoying home-cooked meals. Then we set out to the Smokies, a place to which we often return. This time we spent more time shopping at outlet malls and eating than in the park, but we did take a detour onto the Blue Ridge Parkway near the Carolina entrance to the park and drove through some of the towns along the Carolina side of the mountains that I had not visited before. Just driving along the Parkway with the rhododendrons starting to bloom was enjoyable. We stayed near Asheville one night as well and took a quick look at the little college town of Montreat near Ridgecrest, which is tucked under the forest canopy on the side of the mountains along the eastern continental divide. The World of Clothing in Hendersonville is a unique though somewhat dated outlet with some real deals if you can find what you like in your size. I settled for a khaki cap to protect my head from the sun. The searsucker suits were tempting, though.



Then on to Charleston! The restored historic homes are both majestic and inviting, with very walk-able neighborhoods around them. It is much like Savannah, but larger homes and a bigger area to walk though fewer parks. The city hall has a terrific collection of portraits in the assembly room for the city council that includes Washington, Monroe, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and General Beauregard among others of more local notoriety. The parking is not very convenient , and the parking rules unclear to a visitor like me (hence my parking ticket), but once you understand the rules you can deal with it. Good seafood is easy to find. Overall, it gave me a better feel for how very different life in a prosperous seaport was in the South of the antebellum 1800's from the pioneer farmers in Appalachia, where my family roots are.



Overall, we did about 1700 miles on the trip, spread across 9 days: a relatively modest road trip compared to the nearly 5000 miles of our visit to the Grand Canyon. I still think that seeing the country by auto is a great way to travel.