• • •

A Matter of Motivation
by Adam McHugh, author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture

The defining feature of introversion is where you find your energy; introverts, even though we may enjoy social interaction, even though we may really like people and be socially confident and skilled, lose energy in the outside world. We retreat into solitude in order to be restored.

But as I have continued to learn more about introversion, I have also come to see that there is a motivation factor for many of us. Introverts have rich inner lives and we can spend hours in our worlds of impressions, thoughts, reflections, and in the other dimensions of our inner life. From a neurological point of view, introverts have more brain activity and brain blood flow than extroverts, and we have less tolerance for the dopamine that is released from social interactions and activity. So in many cases it actually may be more pleasurable – in terms of the good feelings released in the brain – for us to be alone or at home than it is for us to be at a party or a church activity. In other words, we are more motivated to be alone than to be in a crowd. It’s not that we don’t like people or are anti-social or standoffish, it’s that it actually feels better for us to be alone sometimes. Reading a book on a Friday night may feel better than a night out with friends, especially when we have spent the week in a socially charged atmosphere at work. In that case, it’s not that we are choosing out of something, it’s that we are choosing, joyfully and purposely, another activity.

Often, in Christian circles, we idealize those people that have a “passion” for community. Those people who constantly want to be around other people and who love organizing and mobilizing social events are often considered those people who have the most “love” for people, and by derivation, God. And, let’s be clear, those people are absolutely indispensable for the formation of relationships in a community. Those churches that don’t have those people suffer because of it. At the same time, let’s also acknowledge that there is more than “love for people” that is happening here. For those social galvanizers, it feels good to be around people and to see people connect with one another. They are thriving on the dopamine that is released in their brain from those experiences. And that’s how God intended it for them.

Love for God’s people does not have to look for everyone like an overt, uncontainable passion for being with others. Love, as we know from the scriptures, is self-sacrificial, in which we lay down our rights and place the good of others ahead of our own. Thus, it can be a great display of love for those of us who relish our inner worlds, to lay those things down sometimes and be present with others, when we might otherwise prefer to be alone.

I asked Lee if we could share his articles here on IM, and he graciously agreed. We will run one each Tuesday afternoon for the next few weeks.

Thanks, Lee!

• • •

Part One: Ministry as a “Career” vs. a “Calling”
by Lee Adams

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming.”

• Frederick Buechner

I spend a good deal of time thinking about the church and faith on various levels.  I love church history, and looking at trends, practices, and the evolution of what we call Christianity.  It’s impossible for me to remove my own personal experience from that equation, as a guy who grew up in a liturgical, United Methodist tradition; who viewed the rise of the religious right in the 1980′s and 1990′s; who was a part of the seeker-friendly, post-modern mega church movement in the early days of my own ministry;  who experienced being a part of church plants and splits (better spoken, I was a part of a church split that called themselves a plant…I didn’t realize this until I had been on staff for quite a while);  who had great moments of triumph and equally emotional moments of defeat as a pastor; who ran from post-modernism to historical Christianity; and who eventually wound up right where I started…In the little United Methodist Church in which I grew up.

All of those things combined together make quite of pot of hash.  If you don’t know what hash is, just imagine taking all the meat you currently have in your freezer, throw in a hogs head, onions, tomatoes, and whole lot of spices, and let the mix simmer in a black cast-iron pot over an open fire until it tastes good.

That being said, I’m going to do the best I can to describe what the hash is going to taste like once you get a spoon in your hand.  The aforementioned faith ingredients are all mixed up, and I wanted to take a few moments over the days to come to make my best attempt to tell you what I believe the flavor of Christianity is going to be over the next few years.

Too Many Cooks, Pillsbury

There are some trends and cultural phenomena that must be considered as you take a whiff of what I’m cooking.  Consider these things we’ll be looking at as the spices that I’m throwing in the pot:

1. Ministry as a “career” vs. “calling”.
2. The evangelical response to growth in orthodox denominations.
3. Return to liturgical practices:  Here to stay?

For now, let’s look at spice #1…..ministry as a career vs. ministry as a calling.  I’ll speak a good deal from personal experience, and provide some concrete stats that hopefully, will support where I’m coming from.  The end result will be some thoughts that are solely my own, my personal opinions on what I think will make this stew more than just palatable, but downright delicious.

I’ve got a great friend who has been a deacon at a small, rural Baptist church with a membership of about 80 people for several years.  He’s in his late twenties, married, college education, and has a good career.  He’s led a home group consisting of twenty-somethings and college-aged folks for some time now.  He’s addicted to sound doctrine.  We don’t always agree on matters of theology, but he’s a great guy, wonderful teacher, and he’s serious about his belief system.

Quite a while back, he was discussing his frustrations with the institutional church, mostly to support his idea that the early church met in homes, not temples or cathedrals.  In the midst of his conversation, he mentioned that his pastor at the time had an annual salary of $72,000.

$72,000.

To minister to 80 people.

I was shocked.

Later on, I did a little research to see just what the average salary was for pastors in my region.  There are some wild cards in the data.  There’s one mega church in the area, where the pastor has a salary of a little over $100,000 each year.  There’s also a number of very small, rural churches with memberships less than thirty.  I looked at some specific criteria:

1) Churches located in Madison County, Georgia.  Madison County is a bedroom community for Athens, Georgia, where the University of Georgia is located.  There’s a good mix of agricultural, blue-collar, and white-collar folks.

2) Salaries of pastors with a seminary degree only.  A friend of mine pastors a very small church in a rural area of the county, and gives his salary back to the church each month as a gift.  It’s a part-time career, but full-time passion for him and his wife.  He works full-time for our local school system. There are others like him in our area, who have miniscule salaries from the churches they lead, and didn’t attend college with the idea that they would be “full-time” pastors one day.

Using the aforementioned criteria, I plugged into www.payscale.com, just to see what pastors were making in the MC.  The average pastor makes a salary of $39,050 each year.  Now, keep in mind, salary doesn’t include mileage, housing allowance, and other tax-free perks that many pastors enjoy.  25% of pastors in Madison County make more than $50,969 per calendar year.  10% make over $62,995.

Here’s some more stats, courtesy of www.city-data.com. There’s a population of about 28,000 in Madison County, about 38% of whom are involved in some type of active practice of faith.  There are 35 churches in the county.  Over 8000 of about 10,000 folks who report religious affiliation in the county are Baptist.

16.9% of Madison County residents live below the poverty level, above the state and national averages for poverty.  The most common occupation in the county is “construction worker”.  The average household contains 2.6 individuals, 2 of whom are typically adults.  The median household income for Madison County is $40, 764 annually.

What strikes me about the above stats is that the average individual pastor’s salary is virtually equal to the average household income in this region.

Now, I’m not going to argue that your calling can’t be your career.  I’ve worked in the medical field before, and have seen physicians and nurses who were completely devoted to their patients, regardless of whether they had a great health insurance policy.  I currently work in child protective services, and admire the devotion of my co-workers to the children to whom we strive to provide safety and stability.  I believe that I’m called to this job, and do my best at it.  Lord, you can’t see the things we see on a daily basis and escape insanity without it being a calling.

There just seems to be something crazy going on with pastor’s salaries.  In England, the primary Christian body is, well, the Church of England.  BBC News reported some time back that the average vicar makes 16,400 Pounds annually, or $26,362 each year.  Dailymail.co.uk reports that the average annual salary for any individual in England is 25,543 Pounds, or $41,059 in US dollars.  So, pastors back in the mother country don’t seem to do quite as well as they do over here in the colonies!  They don’t do any less work, or have less responsibility.  They just make less money than the average Joe.

This spice is not smelling so good to me.

I’m not advocating the idea that every pastor should take a vow of poverty.  I suppose the point I’m making is that statistics prove that pastors in our culture tend to make more money than the average working family in the communities they serve.  My fear is that pastors making a lot of money produces the idea that pastors should expect to make a lot of money!  How long will it be before congregations, in these difficult economic times, begin to stand up and take notice that the pastors called to wash their congregation member’s feet are getting their own pedicured on a regular basis, while mama’s toes back at home are startin’ to look a mess?

I’ll admit, that was probably a little mean.  I’ll give the podium to G.K Chesterton for a moment:

“He that serves God for money will serve the devil for a better wage.”

Ouch.

To focus this rant a bit, I would say that the danger in paying pastors a high salary is that they will not only fall in love with money, but become slaves to those who give the most, in terms of dollars.  If you have a pastor who tells you, “I don’t know who gives what amount in this church. I don’t want to know.”, then friend, your pastor is telling you a story. And I use the phrase “telling you a story” not meaning to indicate that he is relaying details of an incident, but instead in the Southern sense of the phrase. In the intended context, “telling you a story” means he is flat-out lying. Having been a pastor for years, and served with every personality type of pastor you can imagine, in tiny churches and in a mega church, I can tell you, they know who the big givers are. They may not know how big, but they know who to call when the church van breaks down, or the church can’t make this month’s mortgage payment.

Setting the Table, Dial

As I stated earlier, much of this post and posts to follow about the future of the church are little more than my own opinions.   I don’t advocate the elimination of professional clergy.  I do believe that God ordained a three-fold order of bishops, priests, and deacons.  We need pastors to provide order and Biblical leadership.  I don’t believe that a “house church” movement without designated leadership is the direction the church is going.

I believe that we are about to see a shift in the culture of church leadership, however.  I believe that we will begin to see more “home-grown” pastors, serving for years on the parish level, sent to seminary with the blessing and support of their local church, graduating to serve in a part-time capacity at the church they grew up in, with more delegation of responsibilities to members of the congregation.  This won’t excuse preachers and priests from the responsibilities of pastoral care, visitation, counseling, etc.  In fact, the primary responsibilities of the pastor should be, in no particular order, pastoral care, preaching, discipleship, and ordering Sunday worship.  I believe that you will see less pastors attempting to manage every aspect of the church, though (money, building projects, etc.).  The John Maxwell-inspired CEO model of leading churches is dying a slow and painful death, along with many of the churches that latched onto that format.

In the next twenty years, I anticipate that there will be more pastors who pursue a life in ministry because ministry is what they are passionate about, not because it’s what they wish to do for a living.  Some of the most dedicated and enduring pastors I’ve known in our region spent much of their lives doing construction work to support their families, in addition to being church planters, leading significant congregations, and making a lasting impact for the kingdom in their communities.  In an area where the primary vocation is construction work, doesn’t it make sense that a pastor who is willing to work with his hands would have good results in ministry?

It’s not a new concept.  Neither Lifeway nor Ed Stetzer has a patent on the idea.  Jesus started the business.  Remember, “The word became flesh and dwelled among us…”?  Jesus became the target demographic that he wished to reach, and I would say that he did a pretty good job of church planting. Heck, look at all the satellite campuses he’s got going!

With congregation members suffering economically, there will be less to put in the offering plates.  Paul made tents to feed himself while doing ministry, a hands on, workman’s job.  Is it unrealistic to expect that we would have pastors who are more committed if they have to work for the privilege of the position, rather than working the position for the benefit of its privileges?

Now, that smells a little bit better.

The author of this post, Donny B, is a minor league baseball and hockey broadcaster who lives in Central California. He reports that, while only in his late 20s, he has been in churches since he was 5 years old, and has seen both the miraculous and the ugly (and most everything in between).

• • •

Quiet Desperation
by Donny B

In recent years, the Irish have finally begun to address one of their country’s lesser yet age-old problems: How do they keep hundreds of young rural farmers from hanging themselves?

It’s a dilemma that stretches back for centuries. Starved of any kind of companionship, surrounded by nothing but sheep and potatoes and the pointlessly green beauty of the rolling Eire countryside, without  a wife or the meaningful prospects of ever finding one because of their perpetual isolation (the farm and its crops can’t be abandoned, and what town girl wants to move to the back country to live with a bucktoothed hick anyway?), many decide that ending things is preferable to living extended, miserable lives of crushing isolation.

By contrast, today’s young, lonely, suburban American men generally don’t commit suicide; they just surf the internet, play video games, and watch movies. You could call them lazy, and some of them are, but that’s often unfair. They’re simply stuck in an early-life dead end and aren’t sure how they’re supposed to get out. Henry David Thoreau’s famous observation that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” is usually applied to middle-aged fathers of three who have an insatiable mortgage, a nagging and aging-around-the-edges wife, and a soul-numbing white-collar job. But it could increasingly be applied, with greater accuracy, to those of a younger generation who would kill to have such problems.

So what is the church going to do about their single, insecure, internally desperate twenty-somethings who are now graduating from school only to find an economic climate that makes it incredibly difficult to earn any kind of decent living for many years? The old Christian paradigm of marrying young is increasingly unrealistic for many. And most Christian adults over forty don’t seem to understand this. They attack today’s male semi-youth as being slow, unmotivated, and stereotypically rooted to his parents’ basement. They make condescending, unhelpful statements about “lack of biblical initiative” and “faith in God’s provision.” I wonder, though, how they would have fared if they had come out of college in this environment? I suspect they wouldn’t be quite so glib.

Unlike non-Christians, single believers can’t cheat (theoretically, at least). They have no sexual outlet. No, it’s not death. Sex isn’t an absolute basic requirement. But it is an undeniable, powerful drive, and a growing number of Christian guys are finding themselves without the ability to support a spouse and family at  the most basic level. Furthermore, they’re facing an uphill battle to attain even those modest means within the foreseeable future. If they were good boys and went to college like everyone told them to, they’re likely loaded down with debt, and that degree is looking like a fairly worthless (and expensive) scrap of paper that doesn’t do much to land them a job. If they didn’t go to school, they’re fighting tooth and nail for the unskilled retail and service gigs that everyone (including the ones with college degrees) are desperately flocking to. It’s an economic catch-22, and it’s creating a whole new generation of financial and relational non-starters.

For some, this will be an excuse to gently push aside biblical restraints on premarital sex as outdated or simply unbearable. Frankly, these will make up the majority (just as, statistically, they already do). For the conscientious minority, however, a different (and, arguably, even more dangerous) problem is on the horizon: they are going to find themselves part of a swelling tsunami of single, sexually frustrated male adults in an institution that has, historically and in contemporary times, had no idea what to do with them.

Add the potentially crushing weight of a lack of institutional understanding and support to the already difficult loneliness and physical frustration of extended Christian singleness, and you have a recipe for volatility. All those pent-up desires and dreams can create a toxic internal stew of anger if they’re allowed to bubble unattended. And, unfortunately, many young Christian men’s emotions will be left to do exactly that. They’ll be told (either through implication or overt command) to just smile and praise God’s perfect timing…in public. Then, they’ll go home to their small, lonely apartment and wonder just how long they’re supposed to keep on smiling and pretending they’re fine. Some will be able to keep up the charade for years. Others won’t.  Eventually, they’ll crack…and the resulting explosion could be devastating, even deadly.

Unfortunately, many church leaders remain blissfully ignorant to this issue. It’s understandable; they always have a thousand other pressing issues that demand their attention, and other constituencies that are much more vocal. But they would do well to see this growing cultural trend and have some honest discussions about how they’re going to support their ominously growing subculture of young (but not for long) singles.

The revolution is coming, whether we want it or not. And lame chastity pledges aren’t going to cut it this time.

Note from CM

I have asked our friend and Liturgical Gangsta, the Rev. Dr. Joe Boysel, to give us perspective from one who serves in AMiA. I hope this will be informative and helpful to those who have wondered about what happened, what issues this situation raises, and what the future may hold.

• • •

Rev. Joe Boysel

The AMiA Leaves Rwanda: What Happened?
By the Rev. Dr. Joe Boysel

When Charles (Chuck) Murphy and John Rodgers were consecrated bishops by the archbishops of Rwanda and Southeast Asia in January 2000, many people believed it was the beginning of what might become a new way of being Anglican in North America. Indeed, many people in the Anglican family presumed that foreign oversight offered a means by which we could maintain an ecclesiastical requisite (i.e., connection to the worldwide Anglican Communion) without having to be attached to what we saw as the sick, dying, and apostate Episcopal Church (TEC). The Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA), as we came to be known, thus offered a novel – yet authentic – alternative to TEC. The AMiA was a lifeboat for Anglicans in a rough and inhospitable sea of apostasy.

Surprisingly, however, things weren’t always so pleasant in those early days for the newly rescued Anglicans. Bishop Murphy was called “arrogant” and a “schismatic,” not just by those who were adversarial to orthodox Anglicanism, but by people who not only shared an orthodox theology but who would also, in very short order, pursue the very same path themselves, seeking overseas episcopal covering as they too jettisoned TEC.

For nearly 11 years the AMiA’s life with the Anglican Church of Rwanda (PEAR) was not only fruitful it was bountiful. The AMiA’s church planting strategies were blessed and we watched our tribe grow and grow. Our relationship with PEAR was such a blessing on both sides of the Atlantic. What grew out of that relationship, however, was an awareness of a unique missional vocation in the AMiA. Bishops, priests, deacons, and lay people all shared a passion to reach the continent for Christ. Not many of us cared about ecclesiastical politics or structures, we had a home in Rwanda and we had a job to do. Many people willingly sacrificed personal comforts for the sake of the mission. AMiA folk began to see ourselves as missionaries in our own culture in ways that mirrored what one would think of in cross-cultural missions. We began to realize that we were not a lifeboat for disaffected Episcopalians, we were a Mission.

In 2008 a Conference of Orthodox Anglicans, led by archbishops and bishops, particularly from the Global South, met in Jerusalem (this same year many of these bishops also boycotted the Lambeth Conference in London). The rationale for the conference was to determine the future of the Anglican Communion in the world, especially as that related to the areas of the world where the Gospel was under attack from what it saw as rogue churches like TEC. The consensus of the conference was that new provinces were needed to operate in areas of great apostasy. While this may seem like no big deal to American Evangelicals, I assure you it was a very big deal to Anglicans! Essentially then, what the Global South bishops were communicating was that they no longer recognized TEC as an Anglican Church and thus saw the need for a new province in North America. The new province they envisioned would become known as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Not coincidentally, then, the following spring saw the birth of the ACNA as an orthodox alternative to TEC.

At first, many in the AMiA assumed – like everyone – that we would “fold in” as it were to this new province and gradually unfurl our ties to Rwanda; that is until the ACNA actually began to develop. Almost immediately, the leadership of the AMiA saw that the aspirations of the ACNA were not the same as ours. We were a Mission, ACNA was a province (a structured church). We wanted to do mission – only, the ACNA wanted (and needed) to build structures (diocese, canons, hierarchy, etc.). The AMiA wanted loose structures, the ACNA needed tight structures. So, the AMiA decided to take a step back from the ACNA. When we did this, we assured the ACNA leadership (and the world) that we had no break in fellowship with our ACNA friends, but that we felt we had a particular vocation in North America and it was not to build a province. “Provinces are good and necessary,” we agreed. “We just don’t want to go about doing that work. We only want to do mission.” In other words, the AMiA began to see our distinctive role in North America becoming clearer and clearer: “We are a Mission; nothing more, nothing less.”

Unfortunately, the AMiA’s course correction caused people to misunderstand its motives, and particularly the motives of its chairman, Bishop Murphy. The bloggers criticized the AMiA and Bp. Murphy, but most of the people in the AMiA never felt insecure because we knew we had the support of our family in Rwanda.  Of course, anyone watching Anglican news of the past few weeks will know straightaway that that luxury no longer exists. The question, then, is how did this break with PEAR occur?

It all began with a perfect storm. Archbishop Kolini (who oversaw the AMiA for ten years) retired and a near complete turnover took place in PEAR’s House of Bishops. Concurrent with this turnover in leadership, Bishop Murphy and the Counsel of Bishops in the AMiA began to believe that it was time for the AMiA to alter how it related to PEAR in a canonical way (i.e., as a matter of Church Law). Instead of the informal structure which we had for 11 years with +Kolini, +Murphy et al believed it was time to clarify who we were in America and how it was we understood the divine hand of Providence to be leading us. AMiA was not a church, nor was it heading in that direction, it was a Mission (“nothing more, and nothing less”). Although not a perfect analogy, try to imagine the way the Jesuits relate to Roman Catholicism. No one questions whether a Jesuit is Catholic, likewise no one should doubt that AMiA is Anglican. Nevertheless, the Jesuits have a distinct mission within the Church, and so too the AMiA’s leadership saw the distinct mission it has within North American Anglicanism.

So, in the summer of this year, 2011, Bishop Murphy began to discuss the manner in which we would clarify this new structure PEAR through the development of a “Missionary Society.” We promised to continue to remain under the Constitution and canons of PEAR, but the new structure would no longer require us to be under the direct authority of the PEAR House of Bishops or the Archbishop. As I understand it, the archbishop of Rwanda, the Most Rev Onesphore Rwaje, consented to the plan and even wrote a public letter affirming his relationship and confidence in the AMiA and its leadership.

Bishop Chuck Murphy

The next step in the process, then, was for Bishop Murphy to gather counsel from the various levels of responsibility. First, there were meetings with the bishops. As I understand it, one bishop rejected the plan to form a Missionary Society, another bishop refrained from taking a position, and the remaining 9 bishops agreed this was the best way forward. After the bishops’ meeting, a meeting with Network Leaders was called. I was present at that meeting, and while there was some push-back and attempts at clarity, in the end most of the Network Leaders appeared amenable to the plan of forming a Missionary Society. Third, a meeting was held in Pawleys Island for all AMiA priests to outline and discuss the plan. It was at this meeting that a few priests offered considerable resistance, but their voices were a small minority to the nearly 70 who were present. Bishop Murphy concluded the meeting by explaining that the Missionary Society concept was still very much in its infancy and that it would be detrimental to relationships for anyone to begin to talk about their thoughts to the news media. We were having a “family discussion,” as I would call it, before we began to have a public one.

In what has been the most unfortunate and precipitous event in the entire saga leading to the AMiA’s departure from PEAR, a few priests in the Washington D.C. area released a statement just days after the Pawleys Island retreat, called The Washington Statement (WS), wherein they conspicuously did what Bishop Murphy had expressly requested they not do: discuss their thoughts publically. The WS raised concerns without providing context, it created adversarial relationships where there had been trust, and it exploited uncertainty in order to cause division. I found this action by my Washington brothers deplorable and inexcusable.

Nevertheless, after the release of the WS, Bishop Murphy met with Archbishop Rwaje in a face-to-face meeting in Washington D.C. to explain himself and to explain, more fully, the details of the plan for a Missionary Society. According to the minutes of the meeting and the testimony of people present, it concluded with unequivocal assurances from +Rwaje that the AMiA’s relationship with PEAR was strong as was the personal relationship between himself and +Murphy. Everyone smiled and warmly embraced everyone else.

And that’s when the shoe dropped.

Archbishops Rwaje & Kolini

Immediately upon returning to Rwanda a letter was sent from +Rwaje to Bishop Murphy (with simultaneous copies sent to the press) replete with adversarial language. In the letter, ideas that had been previously agreed upon were now caricatured as rebellious and defiant and a demand for repentance and recantation was issued by +Rwaje. In response, Bishop Murphy did apologize and then together with the entire AMiA Counsel of Bishops, save for one, submitted their resignations from PEAR (Bp Terrell Glenn had already resigned from the AMiA while retaining his relationship with PEAR).

Today the AMiA lives in what some might call “canonical limbo.” Some parishes see themselves as Rwandan and have viewed +Murphy’s resignation as the end of their relationship to AMiA. Although, to be clear, I think these churches represent a small minority in the AMiA. Most of the parishes see themselves as AMiA churches and they understand +Murphy’s resignation as the end of their relationship with PEAR. I suppose there are still other parishes who see the crumbling relationship between AMiA and PEAR as an opportunity to reassess all affiliations. It’s a mess.

Sadly, these events I have detailed are not the ones you likely read on any of the Anglican blogs. The reason for this is that most of us did as our bishop asked: we avoided talking to the press. But not all did. The ones who talked were those most disenchanted with +Murphy, personally, or with the AMiA in general. It seemed to me that they told their stories so that the events could be interpreted in ways that were most unflattering to +Murphy. Indeed, I felt that they used the Anglican blogosphere to supply misinformation, conjecture, and speculation, which only led to misrepresentations and damaged relationships. One blogger (not affiliated with Rwanda or AMiA) called Bishop Murphy an “arrogant schismatic,” despite only knowing part of the story. Indeed, what has bothered me most of all, throughout these past few weeks, is that I was seated in meetings which were later described on blogs by people who were not present and in ways that were fundamentally contrary to what actually happened. The whole thing made me feel like I was watching Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter! Anything for a story, even if the truth be damned.

How do I see the future, then?

I think the AMiA will continue its plan to restructure itself as a Mission Society, likely under the constitution and canons of the ACNA (although it is possible that another province could also provide the needed oversight).

Is the AMiA doing this because +Murphy is an arrogant schismatic? I suppose my answer would go something like: If you think Francis of Assisi was an arrogant schismatic for forming the Franciscans, or Ignatius of Loyola was an arrogant schismatic for forming the Jesuits, or that the Wesleys of England were arrogant schismatics for establishing the Methodist Societies, then, yes, the AMiA is doing all this in order to feed the ego of its chairman. But if you believe that God raises up, not just individual missioners but entire societies to promote mission in the world, then perhaps the AMiA is just following the path of Providence. Only time will tell.

Finally, thank you for your time in reading this essay which offers my perspective on how this division between the AMiA and PEAR took place. I pray that people use it for clarity, not to exacerbate further divisions. Most of all, I thank you for your prayers for healing and reconciliation.

With Blessings,

The Rev Dr Joseph Boysel
Rector, Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Hudson, Ohio
Network Leader, CrossRoads Network

Honor Your Head. Don’t Live in It.

One of my favorite Biblical scholars writing today is Peter Enns. At his blog, Biologos, and in his books, he works through complex issues of biblical interpretation and the relationship of the Bible and Christian thinking to the broader culture. And he does so in a civil, and in my opinion, reasonable manner.

I also like that he occasionally gives us a glimpse into his own spiritual journey. Thanks to Pete, he allowed me to reprint this post, which I know will resonate with our iMonk community. Enjoy.

• • •

I think I am a Protestant.

I’ve spent my entire Christian life, since childhood, as a Protestant, but I got tired of it. I tried being nothing for a while, but that didn’t work. I tried being anything else, too, but that didn’t work either.

So, I think I am a Protestant.

It seems to me that the root reason is that I have a personality defect. I like to live in my head.

Protestants tend to focus on having better arguments than the next person—after all, claiming to be more right about God is how it all got started, a legacy that is downloaded from the Reformation onto all Protestant offspring.

Protestantism allows me to stay in the Comfortable Place—my head; a refuge, a rock, an ever-present help in time of trouble.

In fact, Protestantism positively encourages me to stay put in the fantasy world of my brain.

From there I control my life, my surroundings, the universe—God himself. Which is ironic, since Jesus has a few things to say about letting go of control, dying in fact, so that you can gain true life.

I have tried to take this to heart in recent years, the reason being that I came up against a number of experiences that I (wait for it) could not control—namely my life.

Of course, that control was illusory to begin with, but God in his mercy doesn’t leave us there for long. Without pressure points, without the messiness of life invading the command center of my brain, I was free to continue thinking I was moving the pieces of my life when and where they need to be moved.

So, I have been pushed into places where I am learning to honor my head without living there.

For the past ten months I have attend a liturgically minded church—15 minute (at most) sermon and 45 minutes of a lot of sitting, standing, and kneeling, plus a lot of reading of prayers out of books.

All that makes me uncomfortable and annoyed—which means it’s working. It means my monkey brain is jumping up and down, “Look at me, look at me!” but is given no branch on which to land.

Call me a slow learner, but maybe God is not a Protestant. Maybe God does not enter only or even primarily through our heads. In fact, our heads are sometimes the last parts of us to catch on. The head is where we are most alert to any threat to our control,

to any threat to our need to be right,

to any threat to our need to divide the world into those like us and those different from us.

Which is to say,

to any threat to our need to create God in our own image.

My control center is not happy now because it is having a harder time finding things to criticize, new lands to conquer, new things to be right about, new arguments to win.

So the point of all this seems to be to help the head learn its place. To honor the head but not to live there.

So, I think I’m a Protestant, but maybe the edges are being rounded out a bit.

Last week Craig Bubeck took at look at a video that has been making the rounds, a video prepared by the Thinking Athiest.  Craig then gave us his counter-narrative. Today, Liturgical Gangsta Daniel Jepsen looks at Welcome to the World–the atheist remix.

By Daniel Jepsen

My child, welcome to this world. Before you grow up, there are a few things we must tell you.

First, you are the chance, random result of certain biological processes, and nothing more.  Your father and your mother were inborn with a desire to spread their own genes, and thus, you are here.  This is why they “love” you. In turn, your parents are also solely the result of the same impersonal drive of their ancestors to competitively reproduce their own DNA.  In truth, just as a chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs, you are your gene’s way of making more genes.

Oh, you will have false, deluded people who insist on making up stories about life having a purpose beyond this, but they lie. The cosmos is a closed system of matter. There is nothing outside it. Nothing.  The universe simply is. It has no purpose. And your own life, as part of this material universe, likewise simply is. It has no purpose.

Again, because there is nothing outside the universe (or at least nothing that could conceivably affect the universe), then matter is all there is.   You may someday wonder about the “why” of this.  “Where did the matter come from? Why is there something rather than nothing?” But there is no answer to that. The matter simply always existed.  There is no reason why.

Matter exploded into order not through the design or plan of anyone or anything, but solely through an impersonal explosion (again, don’t ask about the who or why of the explosion).  As the matter cooled, it formed itself into galaxies, stars and planets, and then somehow (we haven’t figured this part out yet) it changed into life.  That life evolved without help or design from anyone, and, in time, single cells of bacteria turned into ants, dogs and humans (including you of course).  Life is simply organized matter.

As your young mind learns logic, it will also see the implications of this truth.  You will see, for example, that your sense of free will is an illusion.  Just as we can tell the occurrence of the next comet, we could, if we had all the data, tell the next occurrence of everything, for everything in a closed universe must operate according to the laws of physics working out the results of the big bang.  Of course, you may feel you can do as you desire.  But you forget that your desires themselves must have a previous material explanation in a closed, material universe.  As one of our great prophets, Nietzsche, said,

If one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition . . . this assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculable mechanism.

In other word, my child, your free will is an illusion.  Your own mind will convince you of this if you think through it: in a material world, where your mind itself is simply molecules colliding without reason or purpose, what could the concept of “free will” possibly mean? As another prophet, Skinner, has said, “A person does not act on the world, the world acts on him”.

Since this is so, it follows that no actions can be “good” or “evil”. They simply are.  The Prophet Nietzsche again:

We don’t accuse nature of immorality when it sends us a thunderstorm, and makes us wet: why do we call the injurious man immoral? Because in the first case, we assume necessity, and in the second a voluntarily governing free will. But this distinction is in error.

Therefore, we will not punish you for being “bad” nor reward you for being “good”, for you had no choice in the matter. In any case, who are we to say what is “good” or “bad”?  We are simply pre-determined bodies of organized molecules like yourself. The only thing we have chosen by free will is to believe in a closed, materialistic universe that makes free will impossible.

As your mind grows, you will also need to make sure to not be deluded by the idea of “truth.”  Certainly, some things will seem true.  But remember your origins! Your mind is simply your brain, a physical organ, and it, like the rest of your body, has evolved from non-thinking matter.  And no-one and nothing is there to guide this evolving, other than the unreflective desire to reproduce.  Therefore, your mind evolved, not to find truth, but to reproduce your DNA.  Simply put, we have no reason to believe your mind has any other purpose than your genitals have, and thus no reason to think the idea of truth (if there is such a thing) matters to the mind.  The Apostle Steven Pinker puts it well:

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking.

Exactly. The question to ask is not whether an idea is “true” but whether it is “useful” to spreading your DNA.  (You may wonder if this makes our worldview self-defeating; it’s is best not to think too much about that. It is not useful).

This is the glorious world you have been born into.  Do not be deceived by those claiming you have value because you are human, or made in the image of some imaginary god.  The only difference between yourself and a fly is that your genetic information is more organized, just as a car is more complex and organized than a bike. In reality, they are both just matter. To be sure, sometimes one is more helpful than the other to get around in, but that all depends on whether you live in the Texas countryside or in downtown Hong Kong.  In reality, the matter in you (and thus, you yourself) is not more valuable than the matter in a corpse or a stone of the same size.  Of course, this applies to the other people you will meet also. Everyone and everything is the same: simply matter. And when you die, nothing will remain of you except a few memories in a few other bodies of soon-to-be dead matter.

My child, in keeping all these things in your mind from the start, you will be one of the few to rise above the herd and see clearly.  Even some of our fellow atheists still cling stubbornly and inconsistently to foolish notions of human freedom, human meaning, absolute truth, and all the accompanying nonsense of morality, justice and purpose.  BE CONSISTENT! Then you can end up like our great martyr Nietzsche, who bravely endured the insane asylum for his consistency. Yes, you will find for yourself the greatness seeing the world like the wise skeptic Mark Twain did near his death:

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; … they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; … those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It (the release) comes at last—the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them—and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence,…a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

Yes, my child, welcome to the world!

Commenter Jack Heron always brings well-thought-out ideas to the table here at the iMonastery. He has now stepped up with a very good look at the topic of dogma. Read carefully and comment accordingly, iMonks. JD

by Jack Heron

Having a dogma is a tricky thing. It’s irregularly conjugated, for a start:

My dogma irresistibly conveys the divine truth.

Your dogma is a well-meaning attempt to bring unity to the faith.

His dogma is a despotic weapon of the Thought Police.

As Christians, we are in the middle of a period of great religious change. New religious movements – Christian, non-Christian and debatably Christian – are springing up all over the place. At the same time the faith itself can seem under attack from secular, atheist and heterodox opinions. What, in this modern world, are we to do with our dogmata?

If we listen to some of the voices of Progressive Christianity, the answer is to throw them all out and enter a happy, peaceful world in which everyone follows their heart and nobody tells anyone else what to think or professes an absolute dogma. Alternatively, we might listen to more conservative voices that announce our beliefs will never need to be reconsidered and we should defiantly remain in the Good Old Days when men were real men (and women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri).

From the slightly mocking tone, you can probably guess I don’t approve of either viewpoint. Fortunately there aren’t too many people who hold to either extreme, although there are plenty who border on them. I am going to argue that robust examination of our beliefs is important, but that we must be examining them, not abandoning them willy-nilly.

Both unquestioning acceptance and dogma-free religion are wrong for the same reason: they destroy that which they set out to defend. The doctrinal universalist who holds that all beliefs are equally valid eventually ends having no beliefs at all. But the obedient and unquestioning audience of the magisterium ends up in the same place, for none of his beliefs are truly his.  Both are stung by a kind of unhealthy intellectual humility, the worry that perhaps they have nothing to say. This is distinct from healthy intellectual humility, which is the knowledge that one’s powers are limited. A modest theologian carefully constructs his arguments while acknowledging that he may be mistaken – this is good and productive humility, for it leads to discussion and debate. But an over-modest theologian constructs no arguments at all for fear that he can’t get anything right – and this is unproductive, leading eventually to no theologians at all. Both, ultimately, are trusting in a kind of magisterium while simultaneously undermining the very foundations that make magesteria useful. In the case of the doctrinal universalist the magisterium is called Humanity; in the case of the unquestioner it is probably a church of some sort. In both cases those august bodies to which they submit are made up of people just like them – and they have decided that such people can make no comment.

“But they are so much wiser than I!” Yes, but their wisdom is the cumulative effect of generations of men reasoning and arguing and disputing. Orthodoxy didn’t drop fully-formed from some pure Platonic sky. It was fought for, and wrangled over and thrashed out on debating floors. Some of the people who did so were intellectual giants before whom we are as dwarfs. But, though dwarfs, we can climb onto their shoulders and sometimes see further than they could. G.K. Chesterton referred often to the ‘romance of orthodoxy’. He was right, and a romance is an adventure to be grappled with. A complete lack of doctrine in the face of the Vague Deity Concept is a surrender, but its human analogue is the Omniscient Council of Vagueness who are so good at using reason that they prove the uselessness of reason.

Ask a hiker who goes wandering off the trail a lot: he’ll tell you there are two ways to get lost. One is never to get your map out; the other is never to question the map.

I should say a few words here about the Holy Spirit. The arguments above about the importance of questioning tradition and authority are often opposed by the assertion that since the Spirit works in the world, guiding us and inspiring us, tradition has been guided so as to be totally correct. Now, I believe in the Spirit’s presence as much as any of you. But this will not do. There are schisms aplenty in church traditions: has the Spirit issued a statement indicating the one He’s backing? There are categorical contradictions in the Bible: why were these not important enough for the Spirit to correct? It looks like the difference between a tradition inspired by the Spirit and one that has gone off the rails is not so easy to determine. It looks like the Spirit has better things to do than correct every single misapprehension in our minds. Further, let us consider the early Church when the broad outline of orthodoxy was thrashed out. How did the Spirit work then? It worked through people, inspiring them with arguments and analogies, guiding them to make suggestions and call debates. It didn’t just descend one night and resolve everything with a quick memo. The Spirit is acting today, sure: but in whom? I don’t recall that the third Person of the Trinity has signed an exclusive contract with one organisation.

Now, if we’re going to use our own reason, we face another set of objections. People will object that we can’t rely on reason and rationality here. We run the risk of producing that very same Vague Deity Concept we hope to avoid: infinitely reasonable and infinitely remote. But that presupposes that rationality leads to materialism and it isn’t so. I shall follow Chesterton in distinguishing two types of rationalism.

The first is true rationalism, the realm of inference and deduction.

• All cats are animals.
• Some cats are black.
• Therefore some animals are black.

This is indisputable and it is an essential component of our faith. If God is not subject to this kind of logical reasoning then all bets are off. An irrational God might save us by damning us to Hell. It would strike at the foundation of every sentence ever uttered, every idea ever conceived if once we deny the essential nature of true rationalism. Lucien Gregory in The Man Who Was Thursday was rather surprised to find out that bishops didn’t go around crying ‘Down, presumptuous human reason!’ Let’s not make the same mistake he did.

The second is empirical rationalism, the realm of experience and science.

• When I drop cups, they fall.
• Therefore, if I drop this cup it will fall.

We may use this every day, but we can’t rely on it in matters of theology. It is predicated on experience and no one has any experience of being the Creator except Himself. It is this kind of rationalism that would lead to materialism and Deism and it is this kind that we disqualify from the debate.

We must have a faith that relies upon true rationalism, we cannot have one that relies upon empirical rationalism.

But doesn’t this fly in the face of that Biblical criticism we irritating doubters are so fond of? Actually, no. There is a distinction between using empiricism to pronounce on matters beyond its ken and using it to pronounce on historical facts that may have implications for matters beyond its ken. It is foolish to say ‘Mary could not have been a virgin, because virgins don’t give birth’. We have very little experimental data on the fertility of virgins subject to the Holy Spirit and Divine Will and so are not qualified to make that statement. But we are qualified to say ‘The attestation to Mary’s virginity in Luke is problematic for reasons A, B and C’. That is a matter of scholarship and hereto can empiricism come, but no further.

This is a time when religion is in the dock and being judged by all and sundry. The foundations are under attack, it’s true. There are those who say that we should get rid of the foundations the better to survive their being attacked. This seems counter-productive. And then there are those who say we must defend the foundations without checking to see if, perhaps, the attacks on them are in some way justified. This runs the risk of having the whole structure tumble down when an attack does indeed turn out to be so. I say that we should go about trying to find cracks. Then if we find one, we can fix it. If not, we can sleep a little easier.

Finally, I offer a disclaimer and warning. Orthodoxy is important, but it’s not everything. Even amongst those who hold to salvation through faith alone there are thankfully few who hold to salvation through exact dogmatic assent. I don’t believe that God is a kind of cosmic bureaucrat whose only means of judgement is to check you’ve ticked the correct doctrinal boxes on your Kingdom of Heaven Application Form (KH#1, to be completed in triplicate). Chesterton, who I will never tire of referencing, said that a heretic was a man mad on one idea. Let us not be that strangest of creatures, a heretic mad on orthodoxy.

Note from CM: Mockingbird is one of the finest, most interesting blogs you will read on the web right now. Their ministry is located in Charlottesville, VA, but for the first three years of operations, their offices were at Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City.

As I was thinking about someone to give us a New Yorker’s perspective on 9/11 and its aftermath, I contacted David Zahl, Mockingbird’s Executive Director, and he said he would gladly have one of his writers share with us.

So, today we at IM are happy to present this fine essay by R.J. Heijmen, Mockingbird contributor and Head Minister at St. Paul’s Church in NYC.

• • •

IN LOVE’S SERVICE ONLY WOUNDED SOLDIERS CAN SERVE
A New Yorker’s Reflections on 9/11
by R-J Heijmen

My wife and I moved into New York City 3 days after the Towers fell. Strangely, it was a great time to be driving a Uhaul into Manhattan – no traffic. Our 26th-story apartment, while approximately five miles north of ground zero, faced south, giving us a direct view of the dust and smoke rising from the great pile, and later the two skyward-soaring spotlights, nightly reminders (as if we needed them) of what had taken place on that bright Tuesday morning. Riding the subway was like touring a mausoleum, especially the Union Square station, plastered as it was with photos, names, numbers to call in the event that some survivor should be located, as well as innumerable candles, lit either in hopeful vigil or resigned mourning.

As the weather began to turn cooler, my wife and I noticed dark evening rings around our throats as we pulled off our turtlenecks – dust carried from the site by the winds and deposited in the crevice between our skin and garments. I shudder now to think of the composition of that greasy soot.

We had moved to New York to become co-directors of a youth ministry, but before we could begin programs, there were funerals to attend. There were also friends with survival stories, both fantastic and horrible: the guy who had had a breakfast meeting at Windows on the World that morning but slept through his alarm; the other guy who ran out of his lower Manhattan office building while suicidal bodies fell all around him.

Yet for all the death, destruction and despair, that Fall was also a profoundly hopeful, almost joyful time in New York, as the city seemed to rediscover its humanity. 9/11 prompted frantic New Yorkers to reconsider what really mattered, to recalibrate their priorities and motivations. New York came together like never before, and a certain graciousness, civility, even tenderness pervaded daily interactions. My wife and I had girded ourselves for the “big bad city,” but instead we encountered kindness and consideration: unexpected “God bless you’s” when we sneezed, strangers making room for us at cafes and restaurants. Thornton Wilder has written that “in love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve,” and New York seemed a demonstration of this truth.

New Yorkers also found God, or rather were found by Him. For those first few weeks, churches were absolutely packed. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying goes, and “secular” New Yorkers (which is a bit of a misnomer, I have found) went to the only place they knew to find answers to impossible questions. I do not pretend to know the mind of God, but it seems to have always been the case that tragedy turns people His way, and many never turned back again.

Although the question will be much-discussed in the coming weeks, I am still not sure what 9/11 “meant.” It may not even be appropriate or fruitful to ask, but as I have thought over that time in my life, three notions keeping coming back into my head: connection, vulnerability and sovereignty.

9/11 showed us that we are more connected, to each other, to the rest of the world, to God, than we ever knew before. For all of its multi-cultural flavor, New York can be remarkably provincial. Many move to this city to be exposed to more varied people, opportunities and experiences, but New York is also an all-too-easy place in which to forget about everywhere and everyone else. 9/11 shocked people out of themselves, forced them to see their neighbors, both across the hall and across the world.

9/11 also shattered New Yorkers’ (and Americans’, with the possible exception of the defeated South) sense of invulnerability, of unassailability. We were brought into contact with our mortality, our fragility. We could no longer live in denial of death and suffering, either here or abroad. We had to acknowledge our essential powerlessness, our need.

And yet, 10 years later, even as our country struggles economically and politically, one would be hard-pressed to find a more hopeful time in another part of the world that was deeply affected by 9/11: the Middle East. The Arab Spring is nothing short of a miracle, and while I am too firm a believer in sin to think that it will last in its current form, something very real and positive, even divine, seems to be taking place in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and beyond. I am not quite sure how to formalize it, but there appears to me some sort of connection between 9/11 and the Spring, an affirmation perhaps that, in God’s providence, love and non-violence always conquer hatred and aggression. The events in the Middle East seem another instance of God’s affirmative answer to the age-old question, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

In U2‘s song “Yahweh”, Bono sings that, with God, there is “always pain before the child is born,” always “darkness before the dawn”. What he means is that, in God’s economy, suffering seems always to precede deliverance.  Good Friday must always come before Easter morning. The Bible shows us, time and time again, the pattern of the cruciform life, how God “kills and makes alive”, how He levels before He raises up. For New York, for America, there have been few, if any, more excruciating days than September 11th, 2001. Yet, as we place our faith in the risen Jesus, we place it as well in the God who brings life out of death, working all things together for our good.

Eagle wrote me the other day and described his experiences on 9/11. I asked if I could share them with the community and he graciously agreed. His is a perspective some of us in the church need to hear.

• • •

By Eagle

I want to make you aware of a neat and limited exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History that is worth your visit if you live in the area or will be visiting it in the next week. The exhibit is about September 11, showing some personal artifacts from the disaster in Pennsylvania, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Centers.

As a heads up, the exhibit is popular and the line was long today. I wanted this to be a morning event; instead it turned into a day-long event.  I waited about an hour and a half to get in. So if you want to see it, get there early. It’s open from 11:00 to 3:00 from now until September 11, 2011. The other part of the show dealt with how the news media covered the event and how historians are preserving it. It’s a good exhibit, albeit heavy.

The final part is an interactive where you are asked to record what you were doing on September 11, 2001 — How did you hear the news? What does September 11 mean to you? I sat there at a table and decided to write down the story an acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon told me about how he had the day off from the part of the building that was hit. I also wrote how my grandmother told me that September 11 was similar to Pearl Harbor for her. When my grandmother passed away in October 2009 at 100 she was almost like a history book. She remembered being a kid, 8 or 9 and people celebrating the end of World War I. I loved talking with her because of this….

I put down those memories of 9/11….

What I didn’t put down was my experience as an evangelical/fundamentalist on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and seeing how some evangelicals responded to the event, in comparison to the Catholics and non-evangelicals that I knew. I elected not to put that down because in all honesty I wish I could just forget about some of it.

But here is the other part of how I remember September 11.

I had that Tuesday morning off, as I had grad classes at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Everything had happened by the time I had heard. Up late the previous night, I slept in and was getting ready when my Mom called. “We’ve been attacked!” she screamed. I didn’t know what she was referring to and turned on the TV. I was shocked, just shocked, by the replay of images on the television screen. I couldn’t believe I was watching a plane fly into a skyscraper.

I left my apartment and looked at how things were on Marquette. I saw that the line to give blood was lengthy at the Blood Bank and winding down Wisconsin Ave, the main avenue in downtown Milwaukee. Marquette had counselors available in the student section with people glued to the TVs and I saw that they were going to have a special mass due to the occasion at the Church of the Gesu on Wisconsin Ave.

I came back to my apartment and had a flier at my door saying that due to the days events Marquette University was closing for the day. Due to my frame of mind I wouldn’t have gone to a Catholic service but due to the events I just felt like I should go to church. I did so that afternoon. A couple of Marquette students were protesting outside the church “No Blood For Oil” as I remember one person holding up a sign. The church was packed. Many people there were in shock, upset or disbelief. As I recall I could tell that some had been crying. The mass started and the priest went through the Catholic service. I don’t remember fully what he said, what I do recall was that he started out by talking about how our generation had their “JFK assassination” event, and that the terrorist attacks were of the same size and scope of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The atmosphere was one of grief, sadness and mourning.

Next I buzzed off to Family Christian Stores in Mayfair to pick up the Michael W Smith CD on Worship which was released on September 11, 2001. Crazy I know….

The experience in the Jesuit Catholic Church service contrasted with my experience in Campus Crusade for Christ that Tuesday evening of September 11, 2001. I remember walking into the Student Union and then into the room where Crusade was. My staff director was almost giddy and talked about how his wife was watching TV when the other plane flew into the other World Trade Center Tower. Another student leader for Campus Crusade told me, “Dave, the End Times are here….and the rapture is going to happen soon! When it does happen I want to be in a skyscraper so I can fly into the air and be with Jesus!”

The atmosphere in that room within Campus Crusade was starkly different than the atmosphere in the Gesu Jesuit Church I was in several hours earlier. (Dare I say this….?) But it seemed that some evangelicals were almost elated that September 11 occurred as they thought it would “hasten” the End Times Prophecy. And sadly I have to confess that due to my state of mind I went along and it didn’t bother me at the time like it does greatly today. I don’t remember a lot of mourning or ability to empathize. Instead it seemed is if there was this subtle “joy” from many people caught up in placing End Times events in a historical and Biblical perspective.

I didn’t want to write that down and leave that on the Smithsonian record. Truth be told I wish I could forget being involved in fundamentalist theology and seeing their reaction that day.

I was thinking about this earlier at the Smithsonian exhibit and I called my dad to ask him this afternoon about how he heard the news about JFK being assassinated and what he was doing. He told me the story of what it was like to be on his Surgical Internship at Duke University on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. My dad’s internship was with the Urology Department and he worked with a number of Baptists. When the news came in about Kennedy being killed in Dallas dad, who was Irish Catholic, was shocked. What distressed and discouraged him more was watching his Baptist co-workers be happy that a Catholic was killed because they didn’t want one in the White House. One person told dad it was “about time” that someone took him out. As a Catholic, my dad still struggles with Baptists and other evangelicals because he can’t comprehend why anyone would be happy about the death of another person.

Isn’t Christianity just lovely?

Today’s post is from friend of iMonk, Allen Krell.

Note from CM: I enjoy getting comments from readers who have their own blogs. I often travel over to their sites to get a better feeling for who they are and what perspectives they have on a variety of issues, not just what we’re discussing here on IM.

Recently, I visited Allen Krell’s blog and was struck by a post he wrote discussing his experiences in a megachurch. The church operated by a particular model commonly called, “The Core and the Crowd.” Now a Lutheran, Allen reflects on that and a much different historic perspective on ministry.

Since my main interest and concern these past several years in the wilderness has been in the realm of ecclesiology, I’m always looking for ways to discuss how our communities are formed and what their values and operating principles are.  I hope Allen’s thoughts here will provide some good fodder for discussion for all of us.

Thanks, Allen.

Why Lutheran Churches Can’t Attract A Crowd (or How to grow a Lutheran church), by Allen Krell

First, a little background on my travels in the post-evangelical wilderness. I come from a strong Baptist background. In the 1990s, I became very interested in church growth methods, and studied all the typical contemporary church growth patterns. I became part of an elder team that led a church to bring in a pastor that was very experienced in the “crowd and core” church method. This pastor was very frank and honest about this method, and I learned a great deal about how it works. The church rapidly grew from 40-50 attenders to 700-1000 attenders in less than a year.

Although the church was a success, I became very disillusioned with what I was witnessing. Specifically, I realized the “How to be a better ___ in ___ easy steps” sermons were merely a rework of the law. In my disillusionment, I started down the historical path, reading my way backward through history.

After making a quick trip through a Calvinist church, and another quick trip through a house church, I decided to completely rethink my approach to looking for a church.

After studying history, I decided to find the closest church to my home that met two qualifications. First, it must somehow include the Nicene creed in its beliefs, and second it must regularly practice the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The closest church to my house that met these qualifications was a downtown Lutheran church.

During the new members class, I learned of the Lutheran distinction of the “Theology of the Cross” and the “Theology of Glory”. I have found this distinction the simplest way to describe many of my frustrations with the evangelical world.

But, I have also had my frustrations. The evangelical in me wants to tell the Lutherans to proclaim this particular distinctiveness strongly and with passion. I believe that in their history they have the answer to today’s crisis in evangelical circles, but they seem to take their distinctiveness for granted.

My pastor is on sabbatical, spending 3 months visiting multiple churches in a quest to study worship. This past Sunday, he visited a classic  ”Crowd and Core” church in Huntsville, Alabama. From my days before attending a Lutheran church, I am very familiar with this particular church. I studied its growth model, and was intimately involved in a very similar church in a nearby town. I had a first hand view of the challenges and the pitfalls of this particular church growth model.

This model is simple. The church consists of two groups of people, the “Crowd” and the “Core”. The goal is simple, do whatever it takes to draw a “Crowd”, then try to get at least a small percentage of the “Crowd” into the “Core” group. This model is entirely a numbers game.  The vast majority of the “Crowd” does not enter the “Core”, so the challenge is to get the “Crowd” as large as possible. The size of the “Crowd” is important because it must be large enough to bring enough into the “Core” to both make up for those leaving the church, and to provide the rapid growth necessary to keep the show for the “Crowd” funded.

To develop the “Crowd”, two simultaneous approaches are used. First, the show on Sunday morning  must be as professional as possible. The singers must all be young, attractive, and wear fashionable clothes. The announcer must sound professional. Lighting, sound, and cameras must all be professional. Timing must be accurate down to a few seconds. Everything is a choreographed performance.

Second, and probably more important than the show, is the content of the pastor’s sermon. In general, the way to attract a crowd is to do two things. First, the delivery must be story-driven rather than content-driven. The sermon must be a series of personal stories and illustrations.  It is important not to have substantial content. Second, the sermon must concern the concept of the “Theology of Glory”. All Lutherans know this theology as opposed to the “Theology of the Cross”. In the “Theology of Glory”, the Christian faith is more about what the individual does, and how God makes our life better here on Earth.

Typical “Theology of Glory” sermon titles are:

• “How to battle Depression”
• “How to have a happy marriage”
• “How to manage money”
• “How to be a better Father/Mother/Son”

In more fundamentalist churches that draw a crowd, the “Theology of Glory” takes a different path

• “If our country doesn’t return to God and put prayer in schools, it will collapse”
• “If you have sex before marriage, the rest of your life will terrible”
• “If you live the right way, read the Bible every day, and do not spend time with the wrong people, God will reward with you with a happy marriage”

In modern prosperity churches, the sermon is always the same

• “If you give xxx and do xxxx, God will prosper you and give you a happy life”

In one local church, the pastor ordained his son into the ministry, who then paraded his father, beautiful wife, and beautiful daughter before the crowd and said “If you follow God, you will have a happy and beautiful family like I have.”

It is ingrained into Lutherans pastors NOT to preach that way. They seem almost incapable of it.  I believe the difference in the “Theology of the Cross” and the “Theology of Glory” is so ingrained in them, most seem unwilling to copy the sermon portion of the crowd and core growth model.

I am so glad. I couldn’t take the crowd and core growth model.  In other blog entries, I have noted some of the problems, and at various times I will continue to blog on these issues. But the key point of this entry is that since the “Theology of Glory” is an anathema to true Lutherans, it is important for Lutherans to accept that the crowd and core model does not work for a Lutheran church.  It is a waste of time to try to emulate them.

Instead of emulating this growth model, I call on Lutherans to embrace their history and work on evangelism in a way that matches your rich history. Embrace the “Theology of the Cross.” Proclaim it in sermons, in Sunday School small groups, in mid-week small groups, and on Internet websites and blogs. Embrace it and proclaim it with all your heart, and do not flee from it.  Embrace it with passion, being confident and perhaps a bit arrogant about it. The “Theology of the Cross” is core to who you are, and is a desperately needed message in a world dominated by prosperity gospel.

But, you will not draw a crowd. You will gain one, two, three people at a time.  About as many that come in the front door may go out the back door just as quickly. But, don’t give up. The “Theology of the Cross” has persevered for 2000 years, and you are called to proclaim it to next generation.