Patrol Magazine is consistently on top of the current evangelical evolution. David Sessions and the Patrol staff have been doing outstanding journalism for two years now. It’s a young evangelical Rolling Stone, the magazine Relevant would like to be. There’s more to say, but this is a true note amidst the confusion that surrounds us. Expect this editorial to get the “people who criticize the beautiful bride of Christ are pathetic” treatment, but don’t be deterred. Evangelicals have their strong suits, strong churches and worthy messengers, but overall, this is what mainstream evangelicalism is cooking. Add Patrol to your feed and stop in frequently.

(Reprinted with permission from Patrol Magazine)

HOWEVER LONG it may take to relinquish its hold on American culture, evangelicalism in the United States—still probably best defined by the British historian David Bebbington as a movement whose members adhere to conversionism, Biblicism, activism and crucicentrism—faces near-certain extinction. It has been blinded by its symbiotic relationship with the Enlightenment, and has perpetually failed to see beyond its hopelessly Western perceptions. Confined to the paramaters of liberal rationalism, it has mounted no challenge to the present political order and offered no intellectually acceptable explanation for how one is to live and think in the postmodern world. As this magazine has chronicled, its brightest children are throwing up their hands in record numbers, defecting heavy-heartedly to less temporal churches, or to no church at all.

But rather than recognize evangelicalism for the sinking ship it is, its cheerleaders are calling in increasingly desperate tones for a regrouping. Last year, a collection of prominent leaders met in Washington, D.C. to consider an “evangelical manifesto” designed to clear up the theological and political confusion that is intrinsic in the movement. In January, the hard-right Web site WorldNetDaily offered a checklist for identifying “true Christians.” Southern Baptists assume the apocalypse is coming from within, and mobilized this year to draw lines between themselves and cussing drunkards like Mark Driscoll and Rob Bell. (Ironic considering that those same leaders, often perceived as “liberals,” are just as insistent on salvaging the term for themselves.) Most recently, the ecumenical journal First Things launched an evangelicalism-focused blog that devoted its first few days to further pulpifying the dead horse. Evangelicals simply cannot stop talking about who is and who is not an evangelical.

This definitional masturbation is frustrating for those who see many of the values typically associated with evangelicalism as worth preserving. First, it behaves as if evangelicalism were once a unified, coherent tradition to which Protestants can return. On the contrary, with its scatter-shot, authority-averse tendencies, evangelicalism has always been a concept in constant cultural flux, particularly in the democratic United States. Some evangelical denominations have kept a firmer grasp on their senses than others, but the broad sweep of American Christianity is hopelessly fractured, diluted, politicized, ideological, nationalistic, and often plain idiotic. The notion that the term and the culture it represents can be salvaged from this smoldering heap is naïve at best.

The fight to define evangelicalism in its latter days also operates on the mistaken premise that an imagined theological purity or conformance to a “lost” orthodoxy, rather than an emphasis on ethics, spiritual discipline and mystery, will revive the power of the Christian church. It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers. In this respect, evangelicalism’s true believers resemble the faction of the Republican Party that asserts with a straight face that returning to “core principles,” and not a radical restructuring of priorities, will bring waves of Americans back to the right wing.

But so many twenty-somethings are not calling themselves “post-evangelical” because they know too little theology or have put too small an effort into synthesizing it with reality. They have come from the most apologetics-obsessed generation of Christians in American history, and have realized that many of their prepared answers are for questions that no one is asking. Adrift in the cultural sea, many turned to traditions and theological systems of the past, only to find those similarly unequipped to address the questions of our time. The only choice has been to begin the messy and at times overwhelming process of drafting something new.

The growing collection of post-evangelicals is what the defensive, definitional evangelical fears the most, and could by itself explain the recent obsession with protecting the label. Surely many of the intelligent professors, students, writers and bloggers rushing to its defense have also felt the naggings of cognitive dissonance and the inkling that the world might make more sense if they abandoned some of their cultural presuppositions. But haggling over the details of theology provides a psuedo-intellectual haven from real-world questions, where evangelicals can exercise their minds without coming to any unsettling conclusions. And thus the cycle of definition and redefinition continues, providing endless diversion as it cuts deeper and deeper ruts into what was once known as the Christian dialogue.

Refusing to align squarely with evangelical shibboleths requires courage, but the sooner it happens on a larger scale the better. All signs point to a near future where religion will play an increasingly climactic role in global culture and politics. Men and women who, as Mark Noll puts it in the final pages of The Evangelical Scandal, “think like a Christian”—by which he means “take seriously the sovereignty of God over the world he created”—should be leading the way on the meta questions that are already besieging society. But as long as they are busy drafting manifestos in their barricaded salons, hubristic rationalism will continue charging unchecked into the 21st century.

(Reprinted with permission from Patrol Magazine.)

When I first began this book I was rather dubious. What did this author have to say about such a tried-and-true topic that hadn’t already been said a hundred times? My reluctance was unfounded, however, and I’m happy to report that I enjoyed the book immensely.

Father Haase seasons his prose with stories from his own and others’ experiences to illustrate his points. Each chapter ends with “Reflection Questions” and “Gospel Passages for Meditation and Prayer.” This makes Living the Lord’s Prayer a book that could easily be featured in a study group as well as read by individuals.

Living the Lord’s Prayer breaks down the prayer into short sections and tackles each one in chronological order. It does go where you probably think it will, but Haase then takes the reader down less-worn paths. For example, in “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” we begin by reading about the common experience of temptation and a look at Satan. But then Father Haase launches into a detailed examination of John Cassian’s “Eight Thoughts” the devil uses to tempt us, as well as the corresponding eight virtues that can help us fight evil in our minds and hearts. I found this section to be especially fascinating.

Oh, I should probably note: If you’re not Roman Catholic, don’t let “Father” Haase scare you. This book is decidedly ecumenical. Protestants can enjoy it every bit as much as Catholics–I promise!

Living the Lord’s Prayer is aptly subtitled “The Way of the Disciple.” Father Haase gives ample suggestions for putting The Lord’s Prayer into practice in our daily lives. His approach makes this book both wonderful devotional reading and a call to action.

Don’t simply recite The Lord’s Prayer. Live it–just as Jesus intended for you to.

You can purchase the book and find helpful excerpts at the IVP web site.

As a student at Southern Seminary in the early 80’s, I was blessed beyond measure to have a young, brilliant and engaging church history professor named Dr. Timothy George. I’ve long admired Dr. George and his teaching on the Reformation ranks as some of the most formative teaching I ever received. His books and talks bear all the marks of a true Christian statesman, scholar and ecumenist. He ranks among the foremost Baptist historians in the world.

Today Dr. George continues to serve as the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham and a senior editor of Christianity Today. He is a participant in the project known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together and also serves on the International Baptist-Catholic Dialogue team.

I recently wrote Dr. George and asked for his comments on this question: “How can Baptists respond to Catholic and Orthodox Christians who challenge our view of the Lord’s Supper as having no deeper historical/Biblical roots than Zwingli?”

Dr. George was kind enough to send along this reply. I’m deeply appreciative of his generosity.

Among many Baptist Christians there is a growing awareness that the Supper of the Lord should have a more prominent (and frequent) place in the life of worship, as it certainly did in the early church. There is also the realization that a more robust doctrine of (what Calvin called) the real spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper is called for by the participationist language of the New Testament itself and is in keeping with the best traditions of Baptist life. No less a figure than Charles Haddon Spurgeon portrayed the Lord’s Supper as nothing less than an encounter with the living Christ himself: “At all times when you come to the communion table, count it to have been no ordinance of grace to you unless you have gone right through the veil into Christ’s own arms, or at least have touched his garment, feeling that the first object, the life and soul of the means of grace, is to touch Jesus Christ himself.”

For most of our history, Baptists have been more concerned with the externals of the Table—grape juice or real wine, who may preside, who may partake—rather than with the question of what actually goes on at this sacred meal. It is well known that Luther and Zwingli differed strongly, and actually broke fellowship with one another, over the meaning of the words of institution, “This is my body.” Historically, Baptists have belonged more to the Reformed (whether Zwinglian or Calvinist) side of that debate, but it is important to realize that all of the mainline reformers reacted against the displacement of the Lord’s Supper as the central focus of Christian worship in medieval Catholicism. They criticized the fact that the Eucharist had become clericalized (the service in Latin and only bread for the laity), commercialized (votive masses used as a fundraising scheme in much of the church), and scholasticized (the dogma of transubstantiation and the view of the mass as a sacrifice).

The reformers harked back to the teaching of the New Testament, the practice of the early church, and especially to the theology of St. Augustine. Augustine argued that in the sacrament the sign must be identified as a sign by a word spoken about it, thus making the sacrament itself a “visible word.” In commenting on John 6:50, Augustine wrote: “ ‘He who eats of this bread will not die.’ But that means the one who eats what belongs to the power of the sacrament, not simply to the visible sacrament; the one who eats inwardly, not merely outwardly; the one who eats the sacrament in the heart not just the one who crushes it with his teeth” (In Ev. Joh. Tract. 26.12). While Luther could speak of the manducatio impiorum, “the eating of the ungodly,” the Reformed tradition picked up Augustine’s distinction and emphasized the cruciality of faith for the proper reception of the beneficium of grace in the Supper. This same theology they found echoed in other pre-reformation figures including Ratramnus, Wycliffe, and Hus. What they rejected, in keeping with Luther, was an understanding of the sacrifice of the mass as an expression of works-righteousness, a theology which seemed to them to undermine the all-sufficiency of Jesus’s once-and-for-all death on the cross—where, as Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer put it, he offered “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.”

Since the sixteenth century, and especially in the liturgical renewal stemming from Vatican II, many of the changes called for by the reformers have been accepted in the practice of the Catholic Church. Yet important, church-dividing differences still remain and I think the Church of Rome is right to resist the kind of easy-going ecumenism that would ignore such differences in order to achieve a false unity. In our discussions with our Catholic brothers and sisters, we Baptists and evangelicals must learn to distinguish the unity we are called to affirm and the divisions we must still sustain. But this we should do in the spirit of Jesus’s high priestly prayer for his disciples in John 17—“that they may be one, Father, as you and I are one so that world may believe.”

Sources:
Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers
Steve Harmon, Towards Baptist Catholicity
Geoffrey Wainwright, Eucharist and Eschatology

My three main responses:

Christians and non-Christian Gays:
God loves every human he has made. What he wants most is not for gays and lesbians to become heterosexual, but for them to choose a relationship with himself through Jesus.  For us as conservative Christians, this means acting in a way that encourages all people to pursue a relationship with God, rather than defending God’s moral law.  Frankly, it’s a lot easier and more comforting for me to defend moral laws.  I think this is because, deep down, I don’t think the Holy Spirit can do the defending.
 
Christians and Gay Christians:
A Christian’s spiritual journey towards a deeper relationship with God is a personal journey that requires a community to support and encourage it.  The path of that journey is different for everyone. Straight Christians tend to judge the gay Christian journey by how heterosexual the person is becoming.  But God may be more interested in another area of growth for many years.  Gays need room to attend church, be in Bible studies, and be loved and accepted while they are still gay.  They need room to be Christians while still gay. They need to have a community of fellow believers, straight and gay, that allows them to talk and think about what their same-sex attraction means in their spiritual journey.  This doesn’t mean “accepting” homosexuality.  It means accepting that we are all sinners seeking wholeness in whatever way the Holy Spirit works in us.  
 
Christians and Andrew Marin:
I am deeply touched by Andrew Marin’s love for the GLBT community.  He has made them human again in my eyes – people who want relationship with God and meaningful lives as much as I do. I am broken by the depth of pain that the gay community has felt, often in the frightened, rough hands of Christians who don’t know how to balance their desire to help with their disgust of the physical and cultural strangeness.  I am encouraged that God can redeem both the gay and the straight.  I believe this book will help with that redemption.

Adrienne Williams

The importance of this book cannot be overstated. The Christian community has done tremendous damage to their ability to effectively communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ to the gay and lesbian community and I am no exception to that broken relationship the church has with the GLBT community. This book humbled me, making me realize that even with the good intentions I might have had, I have hurt people because I approached situations without the proper care and humility I needed. It opened my eyes to the pain that the gay community feels in regards to their relationship with the Christian community, especially the one I belong to: evangelical Christianity. I was reminded of the times I was more concerned with being right than being loving. But I also know that I have not always acted carelessly. My friendships and acquaintances with those who would identify themselves as gay or bi-sexual have never been conditional (at least in regards to their sexuality or religious convictions), but Andrew Marin’s book still convicted me of my past mistakes.

Probably the most important thing Marin offers is his experience. His book is not an untested theory or how-to on engaging the GLBT community. He’s not offering some 12-step approach to fixing the broken relationship between gays and the church. Instead, Marin offers years of his experience and growing wisdom about mending relationships and building bridges. Marin has spent years living in a predominately gay community and has heard the stories of people who have been hurt and often abandoned by Christians in their past. It’s this personal touch – the human story of both his own journey and the journeys of those who he has come to love and call his friends that makes this book so special. I’ll admit that I teared up a few times when I read some of these stories of people feeling rejected and abandoned by the very people they thought they could trust to understand their struggles. Marin’s approach to building bridges is really quite simple: Our only job is to love. Leave the controversy off the table. Accept and love gays into our Christian community without reservation.

Some Christians may accuse Marin of offering a watered-down Gospel or even of “giving in.” I don’t believe so. Marin is not offering all the answers to the tough questions – especially on how we interpret and apply those passages of scripture that deal with homosexuality. What Marin offers is the most practical Christian advice there is: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The fact is, straight people do not know what it is like to be gay. We don’t know what it’s like to feel the pressure of two distinct communities telling us how we should live (embrace our sexuality or deny it). But many of us know what it’s like to be rejected, abandoned, and hurt. All of us know what it’s like to struggle with sin. I know what it’s like to struggle in my own relationship with God. So if I were to love others as I love myself, I have to love them unconditionally and with open arms. This is difficult to do with any relationship, but Jesus commanded it none-the-less. 

Kenny Johnson

From one of those who received this book from Chris Giammona:

When I received and began reading Marin’s book at the beginning of this month, I was in the midst of a situation in which I was and still continue to be criticized, excluded, misunderstood and vilified by, to use iMonk’s phrase, “a theological Barney Fife” because we don’t share identical theological perspectives. I completed reading the book a week ago in the course of two long flights traveling halfway around the globe to the part of the world in which we’ve been laboring for more than 15 years to make Jesus known so that those Muslims we know there may become His followers. So Brian McLaren’s foreword grabbed my attention, as I recognized the ravages and ridiculousness of “the judgmental lifestyle”, a lifestyle I had lived for far too many years of my life. And Marin’s approach to love as an orientation rang with truth– the same truth that has guided us in loving our Muslim friends and neighbors, and in finding ways of building bridges of trust and relationship with them strong enough to bear the truth we bring.

I could practically re-write this book, substituting “Muslim” for “GLBT”, “Islamic religion” for “homosexuality”, and other similar phrases, and it could become a challenge to elevate the conversation with the Muslim community in the same spirit as Marin offers regarding the gay community. Perhaps that is how this book found a path through the backdoor of my heart to resonate so deeply within me and to point out to me what a poor job we’ve done of living as Jesus’ disciples in relation to that gay community. I had to take another look at the conflict and controversy which dominates the discussion around homosexuality and the church, while letting go of the kneejerk reactions I’ve been steeped in through nearly 35 years of evangelical culture, before I could begin to see gay men and women as those created by God to be His beloved children first and foremost, and those whom He longs to draw into intimate fellowship for eternity with Himself through Jesus His Son.

[Edited for a format problem] 

In the same way, Marin challenges us in his conclusion: “So we’re called by Christ to be different by being loving– by choosing humility over hostility, by braving the unknown rather than huddling in safe enclaves, by daring to face people who we’ve offended and who have offended us, and inviting them into a reconciled relationship with God and one another.” Whether it is members of the gay community, members of the Muslim community, or my own Barney Fife, I’m called and committed to approach them with love, humility, grace, and a passion in order to be reconciled with them, and to see them reconciled to my loving Father through Jesus.

“Bones”

Hey guys. Sorry this took so long.  I’ve been busy moving.  Hope this isn’t too long and isn’t the last one in. Here’s the response:

Its not very hard these days to convince twenty-somethings like myself that homosexuality is not an unpardonable or even unique sin meriting condemnation or exclusion.  Having already reached the conclusion that the GLBT community is loved by God and thus should be loved by the church, Andrew Marin’s “Love Is An Orientation” didn’t shock my system as much as it would for some, I’m sure.  But Marin does more than convince his readers that the GLBT community is loved and worthy of love: he shows his readers how to love the GLBT community as Jesus would.  It is easy to find people who assert the former but fail to do the latter without sliding into some limp version of acceptance and an even weaker version of love.

But Marin is different.  The greatest strength of Marin’s book is, like Paul’s ministry, not in eloquent words but in power.  Marin actually lives out his message and does so in a way that can only described as contagious.  Similar to when I read Shane Claiborne’s “Irresistible Revolution,” many times throughout the book I wanted to put it down and just go do the same things he has done: immerse myself in the GLBT community, make genuine friendships, wait for an opportunity and introduce people to Jesus.  In reading his stories of joy and pain, breakthroughs and breakdowns, delights and disappointments, I couldn’t help but envy his life and want in.

Thankfully, he shows the way.  He first removes the 2×4 in the reader’s eye and then teaches the reader how to help others know Jesus through all kinds of extremely practical insight gleaned from real relationships with real people.  In the process, he answered every major question I had and alleviated most of my fears by pointing out common Christian faux-pas.  Most importantly, Marin continually reminds the reader that judging isn’t our job (much needed for me) and consistently points to what this is all about anyway: Jesus.

Of course, simply reading or praising Marin’s book isn’t worth much; it requires action.  Personally, I am committing to love the one gay friend I have but I also am planning on getting involved in the sizable gay community of the college town where I live.  In fact, because of this book, I hope to do these things the rest of my life. 

Marin’s book isn’t perfect (I can’t wait for a revised edition or the next installment ten years from now filled with more stories and insight from new experiences) but it is the clearest example I’ve seen of how to love the GLBT community. Or anyone, for that matter.  Thanks, Andrew.

James

Dear Michael,

Thanks again to you and to Chris for the opportunity to read Andrew Marin’s Love is an Orientation. Please feel free to edit my paragraphs to you for whatever content you feel is appropriate for your blog. I’m not sure exactly how much information you want or what sort of format you prefer.

I was educated in Madison, Wisconsin, which has a fairly sizable GLBT community. I never really thought much about it until I ended up at a Gay Pride parade and “outed” a family member. She was extremely embarrassed and essentially stopped talking to me for several years, fearing (I guess) that I would “out” her to the rest of our family. Flash forward a couple of years when I was attending a local evangelical free church where the pastor stressed “building bridges while keeping boundaries.” His point, though not nearly as fully and well articulated as Marin’s was essentially this: love your neighbor, but let them know you’re a Christian, too. For me, I was always left wondering what exactly that would “look like” in practice. I had several gay friends in law school, one of whom constantly asked me questions about God. I tried to explain God loves everyone and that I don’t have all of the answers, but I wish now that I had Mr. Marin’s book.

Mr. Marin’s approach to the gay community in Chicago, to me, shows the ability to be filled with Christ-like love while still holding true to Biblical truth. Instead of wielding a hammer and telling GLBT in Chicago they are wrong, sinners or whatever hateful “truth” seemingly justified by the Bible, Mr. Marin spends his time in relationships with members of the GLBT community. People know he is a Christian and seem to feel free to discuss what it means to be Christian with him on their own terms. His point, “…the bombardment of doctrine or the pressure of a decision is not what is needed to get the eternal point across. Presence is more than enough.” (p.160) is refreshing and provides a great framework for talking with anyone (gay or straight) who is a non-believer.

I could see people disregarding this book for Mr. Marin’s presentation of why GLBT pastors believe what they do. I could see more conservative Christians thinking this book too liberal in its approach (because Mr. Marin, apparently, does not tell members of the GLBT community they are going to hell or need to change their behavior). I, for one, am gladdened by his response to those two issues: ultimately, it just doesn’t matter. What matters is one’s personal relationship with Christ. God will do the rest. Marin tells us to not, “step in between the other person and God” when a new believer reveals he or she will continue in his or her homosexual lifestyle (p. 175). Marin urges us not to get into the theology of whether being gay is a sin, and instead encourages believers to switch the theological conversation like Jesus did (”…refusing to treat a complex question simplistically-which is the biblical basis for elevating the conversation in similar situations that Christians find themselves in today with the GLBT community.” p. 181). Instead, he encourages us to let God do the work (whether in convicting someone to change their lifestyle, to bring others to Christ, etc.), saying, “None of us will ever know what happens in the end until heaven answers it for us.” (p.158).

I was most impressed by Marin’s knowledge of which he speaks. He truly spent time getting to know members of the Boystown community and really has sought out relationships will all sorts of people there. His honesty about his reactions when his friends told him he was gay and when he thought he would finally reach someone for Christ, but didn’t, made this book seem much more “real” than others which would profess how to “deal with” the gay community. His passion for his work must only come from God, and Christians throughout the world who have a heart for GLBT people would gain a lot by reading Marin’s book.

Thanks again for the chance to read the book. I apologize for the delay in writing to you; I was on vacation with my two young sons, and they didn’t make it easy to read a book where I actually had to think. I look forward to sharing this book with my Christian friends and local pastors here in Utah.

Sara

“I have designed a theological toolbar to lead you to all the best and most trustworthy sites on the web.

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* Online Bibles Sites
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It is very clean. Check it out.”

This is a useful tool and your downloads will also help support Michael’s ministry. Check out the dates for the next Theology Program term. At $100 a course, it’s a great way to learn theology.

Before I could begin this essay, I had to pull up my thesaurus and check for alternatives to the word “delightful,” because I could very easily overwork that adjective in a book review of Jason Boyett’s Pocket Guide to Sainthood.

The Pocket Guide to Sainthood is just that. At 219 pages and dimensions of 5″ x 7″ x 5/8″, this little book just might fit into a large pocket. Definitely a purse or backpack. But wait–I’m beginning to sound just a bit like Boyett.

Subtitled “A Field Manual for the Super-Virtuous Life,” the Pocket Guide is a fast-paced, easy-to-read volume chock full of general information, biographical summaries, interesting tidbits and Boyett’s quirky sense of humor on every page.

Continue Reading At Denise’s blog…

Lots of great Cornerstone personality videos at Prof Rah’s You Tube page.

NOTE: Richard Twiss is going to be at Asbury October 15-17.

I thought I’d post a small sampling of Dr. Rosenbladt’s presentation which iMonk mentions, The Gospel For Those Broken By The Church, since it’s so timely in discussions regarding justification, sanctification and assurance. It’s hard to cherry-pick the presentation, though… it’s essentially one big cherry. I still listen to it regularly.

For your consideration I submit this sample of the PDF version of Dr. Rosenbladt’s presentation:

If the Ten Commandments were not impossible enough, the preaching of Christian behavior, of Christian ethics, of Christian living, can drive a Christian into despairing unbelief. Not happy unbelief. Tragic, despairing, sad unbelief. (It is not unlike the [unhappy] Christian equivalent of “Jack Mormons” i.e. those who finally admit to themselves and others that they can’t live up to the demands of this non-Christian cult’s laws, and excuse themselves from the whole sheebang.) A diet of this stuff from pulpit, from curriculum, from a Christian reading list, can do a work on a Christian that is (at least over the long haul) “faith destroying.” You might be in just this position this evening.

Many of us have friends whose story is not a far cry from this. We all regularly rub shoulders with such “alumni of the Christian faith” who are sad that the Gospel of Christ didn’t (for them, at least) “deliver the goods,” didn’t “work.” In a Christian context, the mechanism of this can be, I think, a very simple one:

1. You come to believe that you have been justified freely because of Christ’s shed blood.

2. Freely, for the sake of Jesus’ innocent sufferings and death, God has forgiven your sin, adopted you as a son or daughter, reconciled you to Himself, given you the Holy Spirit, and so on. Scripture promises these things.

3. Verses like “Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” seem now – at first read – to finally be possible, now that you are equipped for it. Or you hear St. Paul as he writes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Same thing.

4. You realize that you might have had some excuse for failure when you were a pagan. But that’s over. Now you have been made a part of God’s family, have become the recipient of a thousand of His free gifts.

5. And then, the unexpected. Sin continues to be a part of my life, stubbornly won’t allow me to eliminate it the way I expected.

6. Continuing sin on my part seems to be just evidence that I’m not really a believer at all. If I were really a believer, this thing would “work!”

We start to imagine that we need to be “born again again.” (And often the counsel from non-Reformation churches is that this intuition of ours is true.) Try going again to some evangelistic meeting, accept Christ again, surrender your will to His will again, sign the card, when the pastor gives the “altar call,” walk the aisle again. Maybe it didn’t “take” the first time, but it will the second time? And so forth.

How do I know this one “from the inside?” (You might be able to tell that I don’t have to search for words? And you’re right.) I was brought up in a pietistic Norwegian Lutheran church. For those of you who haven’t heard the term, “pietism,” it began with certain Lutherans (Arndt, Spener, and others) who wanted a more “living Christianity” than seemed to be taught and encouraged in their Lutheran parishes in Germany. But it was as close as Lutherans in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and America ever came to being just like teutonic or Scandanavian outposts of Biola or Wheaton College! The Reformation emphasis on Christ outside of us, dying for us, and on the justification of sinners “gratis” was de-emphasized. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were de-emphasized. Instead, the emphasis shifted to the individual’s experience of conversion, and to the victorious life of the true Christian day-by-day.

One of the reasons Dr. Rosenbladt’s words are so powerful on this subject, beyond his credentials, is that he has actually walked this walk. He’s traveled this path and come out on the other side.

This presentation was written and presented, by Dr. Rosenbladt’s own admission, for those many, many people who would hear or read the presentation later who couldn’t attend the live event and for whom this material is so crucially important.

Very few are able to offer real Christ-centered comfort to the bruised reeds and smoldering wicks as Dr. Rosenbladt.

If you find yourself struggling on these subjects at all, I can not recommend this presentation enough. And it’s priced low enough so that just about anyone can pick it up with a minimum of financial strain. Don’t miss it.

You may have heard people say that the “average” sized church in the U.S. or Canada is about 75 people. You also may have heard someone say that the “average” sized church in North America is about 185 people. Who is right? It all depends how you define “average”.

Statisticians use three terms when describing populations. “Mean”, “Median”, and a third term that won’t really enter our discussion today called “Mode”.

I have borrowed, and expanded upon, an analogy from the The National Congregations Study that was released last month, to help us understand the differences in these terms and why they are important to our understanding of churches in North America. What you will read here is U.S. data, but the numbers are very similar for the Canadian situation as well.

Imagine you are looking down a very, very long street, and all the churches of U.S. are lined up along the left side of the street from smallest to largest. In behind each church are all their Sunday morning attenders.

If you counted the grand total of everyone standing behind each church and then divided this number by the total number of churches that you see on this very long street, you would come up with a “mean” or “average” size of 184. “Mean” is usually what we mean of when we think of “average”. But this number of 184 is a very misleading number.

Lets say you start walking down the street, passing the churches with 5 people on a Sunday morning, 10 people, 15 people, 20 people. You continue walking until you have passed half of all the churches in America. Half of the churches in the U.S. are now behind you, half are still in front. The “average” church that you are standing in front of is called the “median” church. You look to see how many people are lined up behind it, and you see 75 people. That is right, half the churches in the United States have less than 75 people.

The average or “mean” church at 184 is 2.45 times the size of the average median church at 75. Why is this so? If you continue walking, you will get a better understanding of how skewed church numbers are within the United States.

So, you continue walking, past the churches of 80, 90, 100, 110. You walk until you have passed 90% of all the churches. You look to your left and you see 350 people lined up behind this church. Much to your surprise, although you have passed 90% of all the churches, over half of the churchgoers are still in front of you! This is why the “mean” is so much higher than the “median”. While most of the churches in the United States are small, most of the attenders go to large churches.

You keep walking, past the churches of 360, 370, 380. It isn’t until you reach a church of size 400 that you will have the same number of people behind you as in front of you. This means that half of church attenders in the U.S. go to churches larger than 400. If we were to use the word “average” again, we would see that the “average” or “median” churchgoer was in a church of 400. Not only that, but this means that half of all those who attend church are in less that 10% of the churches!

So know we know the “median” and “mean” of the average church, along with the “median” of the average churchgoer. What about the “mean” of the average attender? Let me mess with your mind a little bit more now. Imagine that you can interview everyone, standing behind each church, and ask them what size church they go to. You then “average” their responses. The “average” or “mean” response from the perspective of an attender is… drum roll please… 1169! Just to help us understand this number, let me give you an example. If you have 1000 people attending churches of 75 in size, then you would also have 1000 people attending churches whose sizes averaged out to 2263 people each. If you average out their responses you get the average or “mean” number of 1169. ((2263+75)/2=1169)

To see what this looks like graphically I created a graph of 100 representative churches. If you took a cross section of 100 churches from all the churches across America, the graph of those churches would look something like this. The churches are along the bottom of the graph. Their attendance ranges from 10 for the smallest church to 4000 for the largest. In reality, we do have churches much larger that than 4000, but out of every 100 churches, you might have 1 megachurch of about 4000 in size. As you can see, most church attenders in America (and the same holds true for Canada), attend big churches. Half of them attend churches larger than 400 and many of these are experiencing church many times that size. In fact, out of every 100 churches, the one largest church (in my example 4000 attenders) would have as many attenders as the lowest 70 churches combined!

This has huge implications for denomination structures and for Pastors.

Lets take an extreme example, the case of the Brethren in Christ in Canada (not to be confused with the Christian and Plymouth Brethren). For those not familiar with the Brethren in Christ, their theological heritage and influences are Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan. Right now, as I understand it, they are part of a North American Conference for decision making. What would happen if the Canadian churches, for whatever reasons, needed to go their own way? In Canada, half of the attenders of Brethren in Christ churches are in associated with a single church, The Meeting House, which has experienced significant numerical growth over the past 10 years. Currently it has over 50 staff, spread over 9 locations, with most meeting in movie theaters. If half your denomination goes to one church, what do you do when it comes to denominational decision making? One church, one vote? You are then saying that half your people don’t really have any say. One person, one vote, or one pastor, one vote? Then one church wields an inordinate amount of influence within the denomination. And what happens if that one church doesn’t like the direction that the denomination is headed? If it leaves, you lose half of your denomination, half your support for you national office, half of your support for your missionaries, half your support for your educational institutions. (Note that I am using the B.I.C. as a hypothetical example of a separate Canadian entity which does not currently exist.) Such a disproportionate split between numbers of churches and numbers of attenders that are seen throughout the U.S. and Canada, cannot be healthy for denominations. But what should we do about it, if anything? I am interested in hearing your responses.

There is a potentially a greater problem when it comes to bible college and seminary graduates, most of whom will eventually aspire to become solo or senior pastors. As previously shown, if these students come from churches in the same proportions as church attenders, then 50% of seminary students, come from roughly 8% to 9% of the churches. Their life experience in church is with larger churches. If they are initially placed as an associate, they will be building on their experience in other large churches. Yet, 90 percent of senior pastoral positions are in churches less than 350 people, and 50 percent of senior pastoral positions are in churches less than 75 people.

So they get placed in inappropriate situations: In places where people enjoy their church of 50 and don’t really want it to change. In places where power-point is a dirty word. In places where words like “missional” and “emerging” don’t really compute. In places where three piece suits still rule the day on Sunday morning. In places where you still can hear, “If the King James was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me.” So the church gets frustrated, and the Pastor gets frustrated, and unless there is some give and take, it is a relationship that doesn’t last long. Some Pastor’s will get so frustrated that they will be out of ministry within a relatively short time frame.

Has this been your experience, either from the perspective of the church or the Pastor? What are the solutions? What can we do to prepare our Pastors and our churches better? I would love to hear some of your ideas?

I have just touched upon one aspect of the The National Congregations Study. I would also encourage you to follow the link to the original report and read some of the other interesting information that they have gathered about American congregations. Compared to most statistical studies that I read, this one is particularly well written.