Below are some great observations by a local UCC pastor about the trend of what churches are expecting of their pastors these days.  It seems like a contemporary outworking of 2 Timothy 4: 3-4:

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/opinion/08macdonald.html

Congregations Gone Wild

By G. JEFFREY MacDONALD

Swampscott, Mass.

THE American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much. Many of them need vacations, it’s true. But there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.

The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.

As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.

The trend toward consumer-driven religion has been gaining momentum for half a century. Consider that in 1955 only 15 percent of Americans said they no longer adhered to the faith of their childhood, according to a Gallup poll. By 2008, 44 percent had switched their religious affiliation at least once, or dropped it altogether, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found. Americans now sample, dabble and move on when a religious leader fails to satisfy for any reason.

In this transformation, clergy have seen their job descriptions rewritten. They’re no longer expected to offer moral counsel in pastoral care sessions or to deliver sermons that make the comfortable uneasy. Church leaders who continue such ministerial traditions pay dearly. A few years ago, thousands of parishioners quit Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., and Community Church of Joy in Glendale, Ariz., when their respective preachers refused to bless the congregations’ preferred political agendas and consumerist lifestyles.

I have faced similar pressures myself. In the early 2000s, the advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to 10 minutes, tell funny stories and leave people feeling great about themselves. The unspoken message in such instructions is clear: give us the comforting, amusing fare we want or we’ll get our spiritual leadership from someone else.

Congregations that make such demands seem not to realize that most clergy don’t sign up to be soothsayers or entertainers. Pastors believe they’re called to shape lives for the better, and that involves helping people learn to do what’s right in life, even when what’s right is also difficult. When they’re being true to their calling, pastors urge Christians to do the hard work of reconciliation with one another before receiving communion. They lead people to share in the suffering of others, including people they would rather ignore, by experiencing tough circumstances — say, in a shelter, a prison or a nursing home — and seeking relief together with those in need. At their courageous best, clergy lead where people aren’t asking to go, because that’s how the range of issues that concern them expands, and how a holy community gets formed.

Ministry is a profession in which the greatest rewards include meaningfulness and integrity. When those fade under pressure from churchgoers who don’t want to be challenged or edified, pastors become candidates for stress and depression.

Clergy need parishioners who understand that the church exists, as it always has, to save souls by elevating people’s values and desires. They need churchgoers to ask for personal challenges, in areas like daily devotions and outreach ministries.

When such an ethic takes root, as it has in generations past, then pastors will cease to feel like the spiritual equivalents of concierges. They’ll again know joy in ministering among people who share their sense of purpose. They might even be on fire again for their calling, rather than on a path to premature burnout.

I found it curious that an article by Michael Spencer (known as the InternetMonk) published last year in the Christian Science Monitor is now #2 of the most viewed articles on their website.  Even though Michael is no longer with us, his provocative writing still is.  Below is the article which continues to garner attention.

The coming evangelical collapse

An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

By Michael Spencer
posted March 10, 2009 at 12:00 am EDT

Why would someone risk his safety, destroy his schedule, and become dirty and bloody to help a needy person of another race and social class? And why would Jesus tell us “Go and do likewise”? Like the wounded man on the Jericho road, there are needy people in our path- the widow next door, the family strapped with medical bills, the homeless man outside our place of worship. God call us to be ministers of mercy to people in need of shelter, assistance, medical care, or just friendship.

Other deacon resources from Tim Keller

• Hardcopy of Ministries of Mercy ($10.39 from Amazon)
• Redeemer Deaconate Training Manual ($35 plus 7.50 for shipping)
• Lectures on deacon training at Westminster Theological Seminary (free, but registration/login required)

Caught a part of this in the car last night and found it totally fascinating.  He makes some very notable remarks about the direction of broader American evangelicalism.  The full transcript is available at the link below.

http://www.wbur.org/npr/128776382

Fresh Air from WHYY

Ousted Evangelical Reflects On Faith, Future

LISTEN NOW

July 28, 2010 9:25 AM

For 10 years, the Rev. Richard Cizik was the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents roughly 30 million constituents across the United States.

But he was forced out of that position in December 2008, after remarks he made on Fresh Air about his support of gay civil unions, among other things.

On Wednesday, Cizik returned to Fresh Air to discuss how his life has changed since he left the association and why he started a new group called the Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, which he hopes will be an alternative to Christian groups that focus on the culture wars.

Cizik says he has no regrets about what happened to him after appearing on the show.

“In so many ways, this has been good for me,” he tells Terry Gross, adding that his support of same-sex civil unions wasn’t the only reason he was asked to leave the NAE.

“It was a sum total of everything [I said on Fresh Air],” Cizik explains. “It was speaking out on behalf of creation care, climate change, a broader agenda — speaking out on a host of levels that just offended the old guard. Civil unions, well that was just one part of it.”

Cizik says that he still strongly believes that same-sex couples should be allowed to obtain civil unions.

“While I haven’t come to a conclusion on [gay marriage], I am convinced that you can’t deny rights to people based on their sexual orientation. It’s wrong,” he says. “It’s even wrong, I think, as Christians to take that position. Because we should support human rights for all people even when they don’t agree with us.”

He also explains how he believes the evangelical movement has changed in the past several decades — and why he believes the evangelical movement is overdue for another ideological shift.

“Most important, [we need to become] independent of partisanship and ideology rather than subservient to partisanship and ideology,” he says. “Evangelicalism [has] become so subservient to an ideology and to a political party that it needs, as I say, to be born again.”

Interview Highlights

On his comments about same-sex marriage on Fresh Air that forced him to resign from his position at the National Association of Evangelicals

“It came out of the depths of the heart the mouth speaks and so it just came out. I hadn’t planned on saying it, but I had been thinking about it a long time. And that’s because I had been looking at constitutional arguments that are now being weighed by the California Supreme Court. In other words, can we deny rights to others whose rights we don’t especially share? Or, in fact, may disagree with strongly? And yet, yes I agree with what I said then and I agree with it now. What’s changed since then — even over the last year — according to a poll released just this week by Public Religion Research Institute, is that a majority of evangelicals — not just younger evangelicals — say that they agree either with same-sex marriage or civil unions. That’s a majority of white evangelicals in California. And evangelicals around the country are looking at this in new light and new ways and evaluating this in terms of the Constitution and in light of our Christian values. And that’s good.”

On being asked to resign

“We have an evangelical saying that goes like this: ‘When God closes one door, he opens another.’ Well, absolutely right, I found out about that. But [God] doesn’t say anything about catching your fingers in the doorjamb as you leave. What I’d say to people who have been sacked, fired or whatever — don’t get your fingers caught in the doorjamb while leaving. In other words, don’t try to pull yourself back in. … But God is bigger than those events that precipitate your departure from that job. I’m not the only only who lost my job in recent days, weeks, years. So recognize it as an opportunity and see how God is going to help you in the future.”

On how evangelicalism has changed

“It became perceived by millions and millions of Americans as captive to a conservative ideology. Not captive to Jesus or to the Gospel but captive to an ideology that has departed, in so many ways, from historic evangelicalism. The movement has always been a reactionary movement. It was born out of reaction to the 19th century biblical criticism in biology in which evangelicals reacted to that and moved away. The new evangelicals of the 20th century saw the fallacy of that kind of approach towards society but after a number of decades, that kind of neo-evangelicalism that was founded by the National Association of Evangelicals — well it’s fallen back into the same kind of subservience to reactionary-ism. Evangelicalism is [seen] today by what it’s against, not what it’s for. And we’re trying to say, we’re for these things. And among those is this command to first and foremost follow Jesus — not the Republican Party or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else, but to follow what the Gospel says.”

On the Tea Party movement

“The Tea Party movement is irreligious and significantly so. It’s got lots of problems. I wouldn’t join it if I were an evangelical and I would urge others not to or at least to be suspicious of it because it doesn’t bring with it the whole biblical concept of responsibility and the rest to God and so I’m not a Tea Party fan.”

On religious imperialism

“[Religious leaders across the world] look upon our advocacy on behalf of religious freedom as intervention. And they resent that. And so we really have to be careful when engaging overseas that we understand how these pivotal players in these religious communities view us. And not attempt to manipulate them but understand their importance. … And we just can’t view religion through the lens of counterterrorism policy. We have to understand that religions play pivotal roles on all of these issues of poverty, development, disease and the like. Even climate change. And we have to engage these players.”

Related Links

• Rev. Richard Cizik On God And Global Warming

Jim Belcher was at Gordon College (his alma mater) on Monday from 7-9 PM to talk about his book Deep Church (thedeepchurch.com).  I boot-legged the audio from  midway up the lecture hall.  Audio is below.

Here is the blurb:

WENHAM, MA—Jim Belcher graduated from Gordon College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in political studies. Today, he is an experienced pastor and scholar whose wisdom has been widely recognized through his award-winning book, Deep Church.

Belcher, the founding pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, will return to campus, Monday, July 19, from 7–9 p.m. for, “A Conversation with Rev. Dr. Jim Belcher.” His talk will take place in the Jenks Library, room 237 with a reception immediately following. Sponsored by the Office of Alumni and Parent Relations, the event will be free and open to the public.

Chosen as one of Christianity Today magazine’s Top 12 Books of 2010, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional explores the emerging movement in evangelical churches as well as traditional models and offers insights of all sides to forge a third way between the two. Deep Church is a term taken from a letter C.S. Lewis wrote in 1952 to the Church Times to describe the body of believers committed to mere Christianity.

“This book is written for those on the outside who want to understand the debate,” Belcher writes in his book’s introduction. “But this book is also written for . . . those who are attempting to work out their ecclesiology—their theological view of the church, its purpose, structure and goals.”

Belcher, who earned his M.A. from Fuller Seminary and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, is also the co-founder of the Restoring Community Conference: Integrating Social Interaction, Sacred Space and Beauty in the 21st Century, an annual conference for city officials, planners, builders and architects. He previously led the Twenty-Something Fellowship and co-founded The Warehouse Service at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena. He has been published several articles, and until recently, he and his wife and four children live in Costa Mesa, California. Next year, Belcher and his family will live in Oxford, England, while he researches a new book.

“As an alumnus, Jim has given Christians good help and perspective on understanding and making decisions about their church connection,” said Nancy Mering, director of alumni and parent relations and organizer of the event. “I’m very excited he can speak to folk in the Gordon community and neighborhood. It’s great to have him back.”

http://www.gordon.edu/article.cfm?iArticleID=986&iReferrerPageID=5&iPrevCatID=30&bLive=1

My wife loves Susan Wise Bauer, so I perked up when I saw her name on the front page of “Books and Culture”.  Her book review was on “In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church“.  This is a fascinating account of a secular Jew pretending to  convert to an evangelical Christian in order to learn what makes them tick.  The author, Gina Welch, did this undercover work at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, VA (pastored by the late Jerry Falwell).  One wonders if she will do this for other churches or religious groups.

It appears that Susan thinks that Gina missed the point of evangelicalism and mistook it for a mere cultural identity.

The following article is located at: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/amongevangelicals.html

Undercover Among the Evangelicals

They’re nice, but they don’t know how to think.

Susan Wise Bauer | posted 6/28/2010

In 2005, Gina Welch put on ugly buckled loafers and a loose purple sweater and joined Thomas Road Baptist Church. She also grew out her short hair, gained some weight (her “temporary church body”), and replaced her gold nail polish with “good girl pink.” The dowdiness was strategic: she was trying to look evangelical.

Welch, a self-described secular Jew, had moved to Virginia for graduate school a couple of years earlier. The relocation was a shock. Suddenly she realized that a Berkeley childhood and four years at Yale had given her a slightly skewed perspective on the American religious landscape. Evangelicalism wasn’t a weird local aberration after all; secular America was actually “limited real estate on the vast territory controlled by Christians.”

She decided to investigate that vast territory as an insider. “I wanted to know what my evangelical neighbors were like as people …. I wanted to try to take them on their own terms,” she writes. “I felt I needed to go unnoticed if I was going to get an authentic understanding.” So she went to Thomas Road, pretending to be a new convert, and spent nearly a year living as an undercover atheist. Unbelieving, she was baptized. (The water was cold, and her mascara ran.) Unbelieving, she took the Lord’s Supper. (“I was hungry. Is it wrong to think of this as a refreshment?”) Unbelieving, she went on a mission trip to Alaska and led a little girl through the sinner’s prayer.

That’s a lot of effort, but Welch was driven by a sense of mission, determined to break through the stereotypes and explain to the world that evangelicals aren’t really all that scary after all. In the Land of Believers, the story of the months she spent as a member of Thomas Road, is her manifesto.

“My hope for this book,” Welch writes on her website, “is that it will provide readers with a vivid portrayal of evangelical hearts and minds to eclipse the old, broad caricatures.” By the end of her sojourn, she has developed an affection for her NASCAR-loving, gun-toting, fry-eating evangelical friends—an affection she recommends to her secular compatriots. In the Land of Believers concludes with this earnest plea:

If we don’t love Evangelicals, if we don’t make an effort to understand and accept them, to eat the fish even as it wriggles in our hands, we’ll always be each other’s nemeses. We’ll always be trying to drown each other out. Threaten them, ridicule them, celebrate their humiliation, and you create a toxic dump, fertile ground for a ferocious adversary to rise, again and again. But listen to them, include them in the public conversation, understand the sentiments behind their convictions, and you invent the possibility of kinship.

Apart from the creepy and inexplicable metaphor, this sounds good—until you realize that “understand the sentiments behind their convictions” is exactly what Welch means. She may claim to be portraying the evangelical mind, but her entire narrative is marked by a determined refusal to comprehend that there is one.

“[H]ow was I to find a place among people indifferent to facts?”, Welch writes in her introduction. It is an opinion that never shifts a millimeter. Listening to Jerry Falwell preach about the offense of the cross, she muses: “By embracing the inscrutable cross, Christians were comfortable not fully comprehending the concepts around which they built their lives.” Christian beliefs bypass the brain altogether; the whole notion of the Trinity, she remarks, “reminded me of nothing more than Dracula’s ability to transmute into a bat or mist.” She is tone-deaf to conviction, unable to comprehend that doctrine has anything to do with the behavior of the people she claims to love.

Which is simpler for her, because she can blame everything she dislikes about evangelicals on cultural influence, and cultivate her affection for them without having to think about what they actually believe. “I expected to go in as a sort of anthropologist,” she writes at the end of her experiment:

I expected to discover the sociological underpinnnings for evangelical wackiness. I never imagined that I would feel a kind of belonging. Because beyond basically appreciating my friends as fellow human beings, I finally understood what it felt like to believe you knew something that had the power to improve the lives of others. You felt compelled to share it. And whose fault was their ignorance? It was hard to blame them entirely.

The answer to the rhetorical question is, apparently, the South. In Welch’s world, Christians have “violently side-parted” hair, buckle their belts under ponderous bellies, think airplane travel is exotic, and leave lousy tips. “Could I be a Christian woman to a Christian man?”, she wonders, considering what it would be like to be a real evangelical instead of the undercover atheist variety. “Could I hold his hand and my zipper-bagged Bible as we hurried into church together? Could I look at him across a basket of bottomless fries and be content?”

The answer, predictably, is no. “I preferred analysis, reason, and the satisfying realism of hard truths,” she concludes, heading back towards her secular life. But she’s fairly sure that, one day, her evangelical friends will wipe the grease off their fingers and follow her. Chronicling a heated discussion about the emergent church among her Thomas Road friends, she predicts that resistance to the movement will inevitably crumble in time: “The emerging church was the future for born-agains, as it acknowledged that Christians needed to mold to the shape of the world–not the other way around. Signs of hope were everywhere.”

That’s a staggeringly stupid thing for anyone who claims to understand evangelicalism to write, but Welch is unable to believe that people she likes could really hold well-thought-out, strongly held beliefs that she finds repellent. (“If somehow Evangelicals were forced to co-exist with gay people,” she suggests brightly, “Evangelicals would eventually learn that their ideas about gayness were wrong.”) Ultimately, Welch is able to love evangelicals because she finds their identity in their culture, which spares her from having to cope with stubborn things like belief.

At the end of In the Land of Believers, Welch quotes a commencement address by David Foster Wallace, in which Wallace recommends that his listeners cultivate peace with others by choosing to see “the mystical oneness of all things deep down …. Not that the mystical stuff is true. The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.” This, Welch explains, became “the basis of my love for Evangelicals: I was going to choose to see the mystical oneness. And once I started to see it that way, loving them wasn’t very hard to do.” Loving them while grappling with the reality of their beliefs might be a little bit harder.

Despite its many failings, In the Land of Believers demonstrates just how illusory our peace with the secular world can be. I don’t wear my pants too low (in part because I give the bottomless fries a miss) or speak with a banjo twang; I rack up my share of frequent-flyer miles, wear black when I’m in New York, and leave decent tips. In my professional world, I go undercover just as effectively as Welch did at Thomas Road. The people I work with know I’m a Christian, but I don’t look blue-collar Virginia.

Welch’s book reminds me that this probably allows my colleagues to forget about the awkward beliefs I hold. If I spoke of the Trinity, of Christ, of sin and atonement—and if they listened—I suspect that the result would not be love and mystical acceptance. It would be appalled surprise, followed by rapid retreat.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author most recently of The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (Norton), the second installment in a projected four-volume history of the world.

This is very timely since the modern, popular perceptions of Christian origins are pretty one-sided. Early Christianity is poorly understood (embarrassingly) and under valued in our churches, and this ignorance is very easy to capitalize on (enter Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan). I hope that in endowing this chair that perhaps it might prompt GCTS to require a class on early Christianity for Master of Divinity students beyond the 2 church history classes.  Don’t forget to listen to the interview below.

Donald M. Fairbairn, Ph.D., has been appointed to the newly endowed Robert E. Cooley Chair in Early Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, effective fall 2010.

Since 1999, Dr. Fairbairn has taught at Erskine Theological Seminary in Due West, SC, most recently as Professor of Historical Theology. While there, he taught courses including historical and patristic theology and church history. Dr. Fairbairn also taught for several years at Donetsk Christian University in the Ukraine, and he teaches occasionally at several North American and European seminaries and Bible schools. He has authored books in Russian and English, most recently, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers, and has written many articles and book reviews on patristics, Eastern Orthodoxy and Christology. He holds an M.Div. from Denver Seminary and a Ph.D. in patristics from the University of Cambridge.

“Dr. Fairbairn brings expertise in the patristic period, expertise rarely found in evangelical institutions of higher learning,” says Dr. Timothy Laniak, Dean of the Charlotte campus of Gordon-Conwell. “As a noted scholar and excellent communicator, he will provide reliable information about these controversial centuries to students and the broader public and will play a strategic role in the development of the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity, a Center devoted to exploring the historical foundations of the Christian faith.”

The Robert E. Cooley Chair in Early Christianity is an endowed faculty chair that provides Gordon-Conwell and the wider community in the Southeast with a senior scholar in the area of patristics and historical theology. This chair will allow the seminary to contribute careful scholarship to the growing interest in the early church.

Source: www.gcts.edu

Here is an entertaining review by Amy Sullivan of Eileen Yuhr’s book, Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture, from the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.  I can resonate with Eileen’s description and Amy’s review having grown up on and off participating in a youth group (which met in my parent’s basement for 2 years).  Sounds like a fascinating re-telling of christian culture for the last 30 years.

The 1970s and early 1980s were good times to be a young Jesus geek. Christians may have endured periods of persecution and ridicule from ancient times through the Scopes Trial and beyond. But in the suburban evangelical church where I grew up, being Christian was not just expected—it was actually cool.

VeggieTales hadn’t been created yet, but we had Psalty, the anthropomorphic singing praise-songbook. We read Spire comics, a Christian offshoot of the secular Archie series, in which Archie, Jughead, and the whole Riverdale gang go on mission trips and talk about the Beatitudes. We grew our hair long, not to copy Marcia Brady but Amy Grant. And we strutted down our public school hallways in T-shirts from the latest Michael W. Smith or DC Talk concert.

My youth group friends and I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were part of the first wave of evangelicals to consume Christianity as a brand in addition to a religious and theological tradition. It was the moment when Christian popular culture took off, and a new Christian identity—of pride, not persecution—formed. The era is at the heart of Eileen Luhr’s recent book, Witnessing Suburbia, a fascinating look at the emergence of Christianity™ and the development of Christian popular youth culture.

The story Luhr tells about the growth of Christianity into a global marketing force is unfamiliar for the simple reason that it took place at the same time as the more controversial rise of the Religious Right. The bombastic Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson commanded media attention, whereas the enterprising pastors who founded megachurches and changed the face of evangelical worship went largely unnoticed. Book burners and lyric banners generated debate; Christian music producers and concert promoters generated profits but little notoriety.

And yet without the background and context that Luhr, a history professor at California State University, Long Beach, sketches in detail, it is nearly impossible to understand the current American evangelical community and the seismic changes that may reshape it for a new generation.

As evangelicals moved into the latter half of the twentieth century, many remained in a self-imposed exile, intent on following the biblical injunction to be “in the world but not of it.” This meant abstaining from temptations and corrupting influences, including secular popular culture. These conservative Christians had begun to develop their own parallel institutions, including entertainment outlets, but the offerings were largely limited to programs such as “The Radio Revival Hour” or “The Family Bible Hour.”

The separatist impulse held firm into the 1960s when it ran into the youth revolution. In the face of changing cultural mores and newly popular music forms like rock and roll, evangelicals were divided. One camp responded by condemning popular culture and seeking to limit its influence. But the other, sensing an opportunity to keep young evangelicals engaged, sought to appropriate the culture for Christian themes and purposes. The two conflicting approaches—let’s call them separatist evangelicals and engagement evangelicals—vied for several decades, and the ultimate triumph of one over the other directly explains the vibrancy of American evangelicalism today.

The first group of evangelicals, Luhr argues, was driven by two main beliefs about youth and culture. “Beginning in the late 1970s,” she writes, “youth came to be viewed as endangered, rather than dangerous. While the paradigmatic youth of the 1960s was a young hippie or student protester, that of the 1980s was a younger, innocent white child capable of devout belief but in need of parental guidance and protection.” This conviction that teenagers and young adults were not themselves threats to Christian morality, but were instead passive victims of a dangerous culture, allowed the separatist evangelicals to focus on battling popular culture, not their own children.

The emphasis on protecting children also enabled separatist evangelicals to mainstream their efforts by speaking as parents, not just as theological conservatives. As Luhr notes, a variety of organizations such as the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth were all formed around the same time and also promoted the idea that America’s youth were imperiled innocents.

At the same time, separatist evangelicals were convinced that the problem with popular culture was not just the content or message, but the medium itself, particularly rock music. Luhr quotes a music professor at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University who, in 1971, made the case that rock was inherently dangerous, attracting—among others—”drug addicts, revolutionaries, rioters, Satan worshippers, drop-outs, draft-dodgers, homosexuals and other sex deviates, rebels, juvenile criminals, Black Panthers and white panthers, motorcycle gangs . . . and on and on the list could go almost indefinitely.”

The university’s president, Bob Jones III, trained his fire on other aspects of the counterculture that he viewed as incompatible with a Christian lifestyle. Jones criticized the Jesus Movement, the most visible Christian youth movement at the time, because it allowed converts to retain their hippie dress and embraced more modern worship styles. Sounding for all the world like a stock character from the movie Footloose, Jones wrote: “Revival is not spawned in pot parties, love-ins, hippie pads, dens of iniquity, and rock orgies; but that is where the Jesus Movement was spawned.”

Not even seemingly innocuous secular entertainment for children was safe from judgment. Decades before Jerry Falwell denounced Teletubbies for supposedly including a secretly gay character, anti-rock critics like David Noebel went after a series of children’s folk recordings that had been endorsed by such upstanding outlets as Good Housekeeping and Parents Magazine for promoting radical political messages by communist folk singers. Noebel and others reserved a special contempt for Bob Dylan and his leftie sympathies—until the musician became a born-again Christian during the 1970s and recorded several Christian albums. (Once Dylan returned to Judaism a decade later, he became fair game again.)

The goal of separatist evangelicals was to limit the exposure of children—and, occasionally, all citizens—to objectionable pop culture. Activists affiliated with Parents Against Subliminal Seduction (PASS) successfully lobbied for a San Antonio ordinance that restricted attendance at “obscene” rock concerts to those above the age of 14. In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s evangelical secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned rock acts from the annual Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall. The previous year, concert performers had included such subversive acts as Wayne Newton and the Beach Boys.

While separatist evangelicals were busy bashing folk musicians or wringing their hands about possible satanic subliminal messages in rock songs, another group of evangelicals was more interested in adapting cultural forms for their own purposes instead of condemning popular culture outright. These engagement evangelicals drew inspiration from the theologian Frances Schaeffer, who urged them to compete in the “marketplace of ideas” rather than the “hidden censorship” of separatism.

In the aftermath of the 1960s, Luhr writes, “these evangelicals sought to fit within, rather than react to, suburban consumer culture.” Like their secular peers, young evangelicals thought in terms of rebellion against the larger culture. But, for them, the maverick path involved proudly proclaiming their Christian identity at a time when many believed the United States was becoming a post-religious society. These evangelicals reclaimed rock music for themselves by identifying its roots in gospel music. Elvis, they noted, came from a Pentecostal background, as did Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, and their earliest musical influence was gospel. Young evangelicals saw that it was possible to embrace rock music while rejecting the content.

Separatist evangelicals argued that rock music destroyed the Christian message— one critic said that listening to Christian music was like “trying to get my meals from the garbage can”—but engagement evangelicals saw a way to appropriate the art form and even infuse popular culture with Christianity. “Proponents of Christian rock,” writes Luhr, “argued that the genre provided a tool for evangelism and a way for believers to enjoy contemporary entertainment while enhancing their faith.”

Christian music really took off in the 1980s, aided by the fact that rock music had become so commercial that it was no longer easily associated with rebellion. In 1984, Christian artists sold 20 million albums, and the next year they outsold jazz and classical music combined. Christian radio stations expanded across the country, providing platforms for artists ranging from Sandi Patty to the metal band Stryper, while also promoting themselves as outlets for “family-friendly listening.” Some evangelicals even started looking for ways to sanction acceptable secular music for their children. One article for Christian parents argued that parents who played their kids’ records backwards in search of evil messages were missing a valuable opportunity to engage productively with youth culture. “Believers should scrutinize secular music for Christian—not satanic—content,” wrote the author. “Should Madonna’s repulsive ideals and behavior invalidate the profoundly anti-abortion message of ‘Papa Don’t Preach’? Do Janet Jackson’s recent sleazy videos make her bold song urging sexual restraint, ‘Let’s Wait Awhile,’ any less true? We think not.”

And while music was the most visible part of Christian popular culture, other merchandise—including clothing, toys, and books—was aggressively developed for and marketed to evangelical Christians as well. Luhr notes that Christian bookstores “cater[ed] to a growing evangelical population that believed Christianity was a lifestyle as well as a belief system.” Between 1965 and 1975, Christian bookstores grew from 725 nationwide to 1,850, and in 2000 alone, Christian merchandise produced $4 billion in sales. (The advent of online shopping has shuttered many independent Christian bookstores, as has the sale of books from evangelical authors like Rick Warren and Tim LaHaye through Wal-Mart and other mainstream stores.)

Just as megachurch pastors have learned to co-opt elements of popular culture to spice up their worship services—weaving clips from Saturday Night Live into multimedia sermons or rewriting the lyrics of popular songs to tell Bible stories—Christian songwriters have adapted every conceivable musical genre, from pop to rap to punk to metal. For the more popular artists, a tension sometimes exists between them and their fans, many of whom fear that the bands will be tempted to water down their messages in an attempt to break into secular markets. Yet it is through that cross-over that Christianity has gained a foothold in popular culture. In summer 2008, the Southern rock band Third Day became the first Christian act to land on the cover of Billboard magazine. That same year, millions of Americans listened at home as the contestants on American Idol sang “Shout to the Lord” for a special fund-raising episode.

Christian culture has undoubtedly provided a way to make the Good News palatable for secular listeners. But its booming popularity is due in large part to the fact that it allows—and in fact encourages—evangelicals to focus on themselves.

Outdoor music festivals have become perhaps the most popular way for young Christians to pursue that goal of affirming their religious identities. Dozens of gatherings take place around the country every summer, each featuring lineups of Christian artists and drawing tens of thousands of young Christians. Importantly, they are not revivals—altar calls may be issued for those who feel moved to become Christians, but events like Cornerstone or the Sonshine Festival are more about giving existing Christians a place to socialize and worship together.

They have also, I discovered a few summers ago while covering Creation Fest in central Washington State, become a magnet for conservative political causes. The subtitle of Luhr’s book is “Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture,” and she writes about the conservative tilt and influence of suburbs in the postwar era in her exploration of Christian culture. But, in truth, there’s nothing inherently conservative about Christian pop culture. As a child I spent hours at Logos (“The Word”) bookstore just off the campus of the University of Michigan and the flagship location for a chain of more than two dozen Christian bookstores with a theological, not political, mission.

I arrived at Creation Fest hoping to revel in the same Christian culture I’d grown up with, maybe picking up some Moses Bobblehead dolls or Samson action figures at the same time. But when I scouted out the vendor tents, I was surprised to find that the Christian kitsch was swamped by booths for conservative causes. The first stand I came to featured a petition to sign supporting the people of South Dakota in their efforts to ban abortion. Next to it was a book with photos of abortions, a handmade sign warning that it should only be viewed by those “13 and up.” Available for sale were T-shirts bearing slogans like “Abortion Is Selfish” and “There’s nothing intellectual about believing you and I evolved from hydrogen gas.”

Yet as I walked the grounds of the festival, I saw very few teenagers wearing political shirts. (The most popular T-shirt read, “Hug Me If You Love Jesus.”) Nor were the people I spoke with preoccupied with banning gay marriage or protecting prayer in schools. Crystal, a student at Ecola Bible College, talked about wanting to go to Africa when she graduated. She had seen a movie about boys in Uganda who were abducted and forced into a rebel army, and she wanted to help them. If she saved some souls along the way, that was a bonus, but Crystal was more concerned about their physical safety. Even one T-shirt vendor told me he wanted to add some shirts with pro-environment messages to his inventory. “It’s really ignorant and arrogant not to take care of God’s creation, this gift we have,” he said, while behind him boxes of anti-evolution wear overflowed.

The bands at Creation Fest were perhaps most vocal about acting on their faith to help others. Members of The Myriad talked about traveling to Haiti when the tour ended and their plans to build an orphanage there. “It would be fantastic,” lead singer Jeremy Edwardson said, “to get socially involved and inspire audiences to care as well.” It was hard not to wonder whether conservative political causes have become associated with Christian pop culture by default, because conservatives have shown up and engaged with the culture and liberals have not.

Witnessing Suburbia is an invaluable read for those wondering how a religious tradition that once shied away from dancing and card-playing embraced electric guitars in the sanctuary and video games about the Rapture. And because Luhr is a historian, it is most useful in understanding how American evangelicalism became the version we know today. As evangelicalism continues to evolve, we will need to wait 20 years for a look back at the role Christian pop culture is playing today.

Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture, by Eileen Luhr. University of California Press, 280 pages, $19.95.

Amy Sullivan, MTS ’99, is a senior editor at Time magazine. Her first book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap, was published by Scribner in 2008.

A few months back however, I met up with my buddy Josh over at the cigar shop “The Federal Tobaccanist” in Portsmouth,NH. We had a great time looking around at their fine pipes and cigars. We were also engaged in a good cigar tutorial by the one of the helpful people that work there. Thus we spent a lot of time in their walk-in humidor checking out their vast aray of quality smokes. As I perused the room one last time before we left, I noticed the inside cover of a box that seemed strangely familiar to me. It took me no more than a second after I stopped to look to recollect where I had seen that design and color scheme. Take a look for yourself:

It was then I realized that one of the higher ups at Crossway involved with the marketing of the ESV must be a cigar smoker. What a clever guy. Josh agreed with me instantaneously. Don’t be fooled by the piety of those involved with the ESV. They are stealing their marketing ideas from a vintage cigar company. Keep that in mind the next time you open your ESV for devotions tomorrow. Hehe.

…I spent last evening with Joel Osteen.

On a dark and stormy night I (and 10,000 others) came to see the charming preacher with bright eyes and a huge smile. I fought mile long traffic to be there…with Joel.

True confession: I came with expectations in hand that “An evening with Joel Osteen” would be bread and circus for the spiritually impoverished. If you want to know my conclusion you’ll have to keep reading through to the end, though in fairness I tried to leave my ref21 hatchet at the door.

I assumed that I would meet those unfortunate souls who at the opening of Joel Osteen’s fifteen city, four nation road show were what we (Reformed types) are so often befuddled by, those teeming hordes of sweet semi-Pelagians who seem to make up the bulk of the American Christian ghetto.

I was expecting to see the poor, uneducated and easy to command, as the Washington Post once famously described evangelicals. People who couldn’t help themselves from being there because they were put under a Vulcan mind meld from their local pastor. I expected to find ancient women with blue hair in attendance from nearby towns like Greer with pre-trib glossy magazines in hand connecting the “ten horns of Revelation” to the activities of nearby Bob Jones University.

I arrived early (taking “Jack Bauer type” precautions that I wouldn’t be followed, and notifying a Ruling Elder in my “CTU friendly” church a head of time), while searching in vain for someone who understood Carl Trueman and had heard of the Ante-Nicene fathers.

Just who exactly comes to a Joel Osteen confab?

I came expecting to find Benny Hinn people and I found instead a Tony Robbins seminar drawing a good representative sample of my community. Indeed, demographically speaking it was astonishingly integrated. It was full of upper middle class Gen X couples (and late boomers) with kids. They came in their tribes of tens and twenties with iPods rather than NIV’s.

My guess is that I was face to face with “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” free-market fundamentalists who were blissfully unaware of the Federal Vision, undecided on the importance of the OT, but definitely unamused by those rascally Calvinists causing trouble in the SBC. Simply because I could, I bought popcorn and Coke and enjoyed the spectacle of Christian roadies doing sound checks on the coliseum floor.

The overall production value of the stage, set and imagery was very good, while at the same time simple and in most ways not overly distracting. There was the obligatory dry ice machine, a few multicolored spotlights and images of the Osteen “rotating open globe thing” that seems to be the symbol of Lakewood Church. In the center of the stage there was RC Sproul’s famous nemesis, the dreaded “portable plexiglass pulpit.” It had one spotlight on it all times (except when the blonde worship leader was singing). There was a box of tissues inside its casing.

The pre-game music was surprisingly toned down (really not unlike that of an RUF meeting). I sensed that the organizers were more worried about turning folks off then they were about meaningfully engaging in crowd prep. I was somewhat proud that those present from my community were on the whole not participatory in the music and theater. Most did not know the words well enough to engage in correct contemporary praise posture. Maybe people at an Osteen event just come to watch?

Why were all these people here? What were they looking for? How had Joel Osteen come to be so important to them? These were the questions I was trying to understand.

My guess is that they came to see this strangely alluring man with his emotionally charged appeal for brotherhood, good works, and hopefulness, who is touching a raw post-modern nerve in the culture; that’s why I came. They also came –unknowingly I think—because Joel Osteen has found a new way to treat their spiritual maladies: ignore root causes and tackle the symptoms.

From the start of the event it was a family affair. The night was opened by Joel Osteen’s brother-in-law, and at different points most of his family present held forth on various matters. His mother, the Venerable Dodi, juxtaposed some classic old school “name it and claim it” with some new fangled power of positive thinking in a moral exhortation centered on recent health issues in her life. She had the line of the night, “If you have a problem, find a verse in there (the Bible) and tell the Almighty what you need.”

Victoria (the Difficult) spoke to us on the fascinating subject of what exactly it means to be married to Joel Osteen. Her story is complicated. She used to work in a jewelry store and then one day (((Joel))) came in to get a watch fixed. She ended up selling him a new watch and soon came marriage and a baby carriage. Joel’s brother (a doctor) asked people to give money to the ministry, after challenging those in the audience to give their tithes first to their local churches. At other points in the show his family in attendance including children, nephews and nieces were recognized to applause. The Osteens, it would seem are the Kennedy’s of the Charismatic Nation.

What would Joel speak about when all the introductions were over with I wondered?

Osteen would speak not once but many times throughout the evening in a succession of unscripted 10 minutes pick–me-up-talks. Each presentation was a variation on the previous theme: “Things are gonna get better… Keep positive.” It was almost entirely bereft of Scripture. In a superfluous way it was very encouraging! I found myself throughout the entire night waiting for the shoe to drop, and saying to myself is this it?

Osteen tells his life story, which in many ways is a classic American success story. He inherited his father’s position (without wanting to) and with one week of preparation takes over the family business. The church grows from 6,000 to over 40,000 in 5 years and has recently bought an $80 Million dollar sporting arena. Osteen strikes me as being amazed as everyone else at own his success and very proud of the family business, Lakewood Church of Houston, now the nation’s largest. Only in America.

The story of Osteen’s success would be a fantastic story of God’s providence if he believed in such a thing. For years he watched the ministry behind a camera, editing and overseeing the development of media. In many ways Joel understood the ministry better than most because he was involved with it in a way that would one day be instrumental in its growth. He also learned a good bit about the charismatic and Pentecostal way of preaching because he listened to these messages everyday in a studio, editing them for television and radio.

Joel’s own sermons are not like those of his fathers (the late John Osteen). They strike me as the next generation of the Charismatic movement. They aren’t about experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit in your life; they are just about encountering your feelings. He talks over and over again about your relationships with other people and in the end he doesn’t really ask you to do anything – except try to change. His language is a mix of manifest destiny and late night infomercial. If I had to characterize the 600 words “sermonettes” I heard I would say “Charismatic emergent, non-threatening, non-spritualized therapeutic language.” Maybe American Idol with Paula as the lone judge.

Never once did I hear the words Gospel, Jesus Christ, Trinity, Sin, Cross (except in Scripture songs sung by performers and in a video testimony played before the Osteens arrived in arena)

So what conclusions can be drawn from An Evening with Joel?

Joel Osteen is the slick and polished face of non creedal American Evangelicalism. Joel is youthful, exuding Opie from Mayberry, aw shucks Americana that is uplifting, believable, and even to this cynic, soothing. Joel Osteen is wonderbread.

Now I recognize that everyone (whether we realize it or not) probably has someone in their life like Joel Osteen, a relentless optimist, who simple mindedly prods one to excellence, selflessness, and endurance. I’m just thinking Joel Osteen is not actually doing this with his people. At the end of the day, Osteen encouraged his crowd not to seek Christ as the solutions to their problems but something else. That something else seemed to be a clever but highly charged view of self. Self-interest, Self-gratification, Self-fulfillment, Self-realization, Self-actualization, with a little bit of sanitized obligatory righteous buzz words thrown in to make it appear evangelically kosher for the uninitiated.

What took place at Osteen’s erstwhile crusade in my city can only be described as the next step in Post Modern Pentecostalism. It is the health and wealth gospel for healthy and wealthy people. If the Christian religion is medicine for souls that are poor and needy than Osteen is a bottle of vitamins in an operating room.

Mel Duncan’s blog can be found at http://riverandrhett.blogspot.com/

While I was gone, my wife Kalila was able to enjoy an October archaeology dig in New Hampshire. However, since it was 20 degrees in the evening up there, she brought back with her a mysterious virus that has slowly been bringing down the household. All the symptoms are creeping their way in: achy bones, sore throats, sneezing, coughing, runny noses, and fatigue. Please pray that God would be merciful to our souls in the midst of our oncoming illnesses.

One major thing that I’ve been busy with the past few weeks has been the development of local church community. God has indeed been gracious to knit a few of us like-minded friends together to start meeting as a house-group in Haverhill,MA. Danny, Cyndie, Jerry, Sue, Moses, James, Josephine, Jim, Allison, Paul, Kalila, and myself began meeting Wednesdays at 7:00 PM at Danny’s home on October 4th under the banner of the centrality of God in the heart of God. We truly believe that Jesus Christ is the most beautiful thing/being/reality in existence and that this is evident as we unfold each passage of Scripture. Our plan is for either Danny or myself to kick things off with an intentional working through of a text for 20, 30 or 40 minutes, while entertaining questions and appropriate discussion. From there, more fellowship, prayer, and perhaps communion as God may lead. We view this time as an extension of our friendship set aside for specifically focusing on God as he has revealed himself in Scripture and feasting on him together. In lieu of this, I have set up the site www.god-centered.com to serve as a way to introduce new people to the community, to provide relevant discussion stemming from our meetings, and to encourage the saints with a host of resources and links. The site is still in progress, so there are many things we are trying to do to get it tip-top. Let me know what you all think. I am really excited about what God has been doing as our recent gathering is in step with, and is overflow of what has been happening in our friendships for the last few years. Please pray that God would encounter us gloriously and delightfully.

The spring 2006 issue of Christian History & Biography contains an article with a concise overview of A. Judson’s life and mission. One of the distinguishing marks of his legacy is his status as the first American missionary. He was sent from the Congregationalist American Board to India and carried with him a letter of introduction addressed to William Carey, the famed English missionary pioneer. Judson was excited about meeting the Baptist missionary and in preparation for dialogue with Carey, he used the voyage to study the differences between the Congregationalist and the Baptist views on water baptism. While studying, Judson, a highly educated man, became convinced of believers baptism and with his wife was baptized by one of Carey’s associates upon arrival in India. The consequence of this action was immense. This meant that Judson would lose financial support from the Congregational missions board, that Judson himself had worked so hard to create. To meet the financial need, Luther Rice, a member of Judson’s missions team was sent back to the United States to promote a new Baptist mission board.

On one hand, the courage of Judson is admirable – he sought the Word of God, interpreted the text, changed his belief based on scripture and allowed his actions to coincide with his beliefs.

On the other hand, one could argue that Judson acted inappropriately – he was sent by the Congregationalists, funded by their sacrifice, commissioned with the laying on of hands and trusted with carrying out the intended mission.

Question:
Were Judson’s actions correct? If you were counseling a young missionary today facing a similar situation, what would you say? The purpose of this question is to critique the ethics of Judson’s course of action and to contemplate the relationship/allegiane a missionary has with his/her sending organization, RATHER than a theological debate concerning water baptism. This is an important issue in our evangelical world where denominational lines have blurred a bit from Judson’s era and cooperation among missions organizations is growing.

I am having a hard thinking about this question because it just seems like it is asking if our obligations should lie in a group of people and their theological convictions or our conscience before God as we look in Scripture. I mean for Judson, what’s his alternative? Once he becomes convinced of believer’s baptism is he to say nothing to his sending group as though nothing had happened? Should Judson lie because he wants to please men? It seems to me that he had no other option but to go in the direction God was leading him and have the integrity enough to say that he had altered slightly theologically. How could any one accuse him of abandoning those who had sent him? That’s like asking whether it was right for Luther to believe in justification by faith and ask the questions he did of Rome. We can’t help what we believe. We either believe it or not. And if we do believe something, we have to be able to undergo the implications that are incumbent with it. I mean, let’s ask the question the other way. Judson was the one going to the field. Was it right for the congregationalists to sever financial support to a man who had the utmost integrity and faith to do what he was doing; a man that made their mission board exist? If there were ever an ethical question to be raised here, I think that would be the most pertinent.

How can you look at this apart from a theological debate? It was a theological issue that divided these people, ridiculous as it was. This wasn’t a mere luxury preference that Judson had which cost him his support unnecessarily. He looked at Scripture and was convinced because he was open to that doctrine. Is that his fault as though he was looking for something to split from the congregationalists over because he was a jerk? I hardly think anyone believes that.

Needless to say, I learned that God can use anything he wants to accomplish his purposes, even if in retrospect they are so cheesy and out of place they make you cringe.  I think there was a number floating around of like 5,000 people that made visible commitments to Christ in our short 3-week trip.  There is surely no way to verify that at all.  But beyond that, I think one interesting thing I took away from that experience is that the groups we worked with there had no real inroad to many of the places we were able to go before the trip.  Because we were from the US and had a “program”, we “reached” more people in a few days then they could in a few years.  I thought that was pretty cool.

PBS television, on the Jim Lehrer New Hour, recently aired (6/28/06) an update on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda. The program highlighted Uganda as one example of the recent increase in United States funding for AIDS across Sub-Saharan Africa. Those who have followed the global plight of AIDS recall that while other African nations were in denial during the 1980′s Uganda tackled the disease head on with an agressive and comprehensive information and treatment campaign. The basic message is follow the ABC’s, namely:

1. Abstinence
2. Be Faithful
3. Condom

The program has been lauded as the most successful in Africa and served as a model for other nations. The United States has increased its funding for this program, while appealing to the Ugandan government for more emphais to be placed on Abstinence and less on Condom use. Many faith-based groups in Uganda have changed the “C” from condom to CHANGE COMPANY. The program stated that the U.S. is stipulating 1/3 of the finances to be used for abstinence education. Critics say this may be detracting funds from purchasing more anti-viral drugs for those currently infected. To date, there are over 1 million who have contracted the disease and only 30,000 have access to the approprate drug treatments.

Questions:
From a Christian ethical perspective, knowing that some are suffering and dying, is it right to focus funding on abstinence over medical treatment? As evangelicals can we expect abstinence to take root within an uncoverted heart? Should abstinence education over condom distribution be the appropriate plan when dealing with the health of a nation? Some marriages have one spouse who is infected and the other healthy, should abstinence be the message or condom use or another alternative?

This is a phenomenal question and is extremely relevant to the greatest epidemic of our age. First I will say, regardless of the situation, for Christians to expect abstinence to be a ligitimate “approach” toward sex education among non-christians is just out-right foolishness. I don’t say that because I think we should be fornicators, but I think that it is not our place to impose the Law of God upon people and expect that they will be able to fullfil it apart from a regenerative work of the Spirit of God. At best it’s legalism, at worst it does not help the problem. We are having a hard time enough having Christians remain abstinent before marriage. Of course, the problem in Africa with AIDS is that even people who are married and faithful (mostly wives) as well as celibate and abstinent (children) are the greatest victims. AIDS and HIV have worked there way into the family structure in African countries and the most effective strategies to fight against the spread of these diseases are education, medical research, and condom distribution. Even if there wasn’t a single case spread after this year, we would still have to deal with the millions who are ineffected right now, which would lead me to believe that the priority needs to be not on education about abstinence, but medical research and the distribution of common medicines that most people have no access to in Uganda or the rest of Africa.

Maybe I’m just dense, but I’m still trying to figure how much money you need in order to tell people not to have sex. If people are aware of what kind of problem there is with AIDS and how it is contracted, then it seems to me that people would want to take the necessary precautions in order to prevent it. Thus, general education about AIDS/HIV should be the best preventative measure. The information available at DATA’s website (http://www.data.org/) and the One Campaign (http://www.one.org/) offer the best info I have seen on this subject.

I suppose only God truly knows how effective short-term missions work really is, regardless of our experiences and studies that asked this question on the field. This should truly be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There are so many different factors involved to determine an answer that make it difficult to answer. What do we mean by short-term? Is it 2 weeks or 2 months? Where is the trip? What is the spiritual climate like there? Is it a third world country or relatively wealthy? What cultural barriers are present for Americans or other foreign cultures there? Who organized the trip? Was it a church or a sending organization or both? What was the purpose of the trip? Was it to aid missionaries temporarily? Was it to help translate? Was it for social justice or human aid causes? Was it to teach English? Was it to train leaders theologically? Was it to share the gospel with musical or drama presentations? Was it to share the gospel through Bible studies and preaching? Where they helping to plant a church? Where they doing medical work? Construction work? How many people were on the trip? What kind of education or aspirations do they have? What were their goals in being there? How long have they been a Christian? Where are they in their spiritual development? Does the team like each other and get along? Do they speak any foreign languages, particularly the one the nationals speak on the trip?

These questions are barely scratching the surface. We even need to ask ourselves what we mean by effective, because the effective results of a trip can be totally different from the intended purposes. Of course this is often heard in the sentiments of most people who have gone on a short-term trip as most say they were effected far more than they thought they were effective. For this particular reason alone, it is enough for most to justify the existence of short-term trips. Rarely does anyone ever regret taking a short-term trip, and even rarer are those on the field who regret having had short-term missionaries come. Surveys do show that almost all of the foreign missionaries on the field today (particularly from the US) are there in part as a result of a short-term missions trip. This is not to say that there are not shortcomings of many short-term trips, but as long as it serves to expose potential long-term missionaries to work in the field, I would say they are highly effective in serving the global missions movement.

With that in mind read her email to Kalila today:Last night was the Train concert. I was dead-center balcony with a good view, and they played all the great songs from all four albums. After the show, I wanted to get my CDs autographed so I was hanging around the stage with a small crowd. Someone came out and said the band wouldn’t be coming out, but a small backstage party was being held for people with backstage passes.Since there was alcohol no one under 21 was allowed, and they were carding . One girl with a backstage pass (How DO they get them???) was 16 and couldn’t get in, so I altruistically offered to get her pass and ticket autographed for her, if she gave me her pass. So there’s your mom, schmaltzing backstage, drinking beer with the band. The room was tiny, so they only let 15 people in! The only down side was that not all the band showed up! I got autographs from the lead guitarist (excellent) and keyboardist. Still, it was pretty cool! LOL, Mom

I have no idea how she did that, but my homeschooling, headcovered, conservative-minded mother-in-law is a groupie.

In Seattle, the young men are, generally, pathetic. They are unlikely to go to church, get married, have children, or do much of anything else that smacks of being responsible. But they are known to be highly skilled at smoking pot, masturbating, playing video games, playing air guitar, free-loading, and having sex with their insignificant others. However, the emerging-church massage-parlor antics of labyrinth-walking by candlelight will do little more than increase the pool of extras for television’s Will and Grace. If there is any hope for a kingdom culture to be build in Seattle, getting the young men to undergo a complete cranial-rectal extraction is priority number one.

just read the article. a few comments. first, a qualifier: this is a good word for us to hear. obviously, nobody is going to disagree with McLaren’s premise. then comes the HOWEVER…he makes the statement: ‘that too many of our most “educated” Christians are some of the meanest’. here he gives a general sweep with no examples or reasons for prompting him to write this article. who exactly does he have in mind? and now people reading the article are drawing the inference that less education equals more godliness. i have met many people, and many christians (as i work customer service for a well-known christian book company) who are not educated at all and are extremely mean. just look at many fundamentalists who actually downplay education and can be some of the meanest people. and on the contrast, most all the smartest people around me are the nicest also. i was all but ousted from a church because i had “too much” education. i just guess that the 12 inch head/heart distance thing has become very cliche. i honestly think that we act on what we believe. i don’t think knowledge is the issue, so much as it is faith. i mean, come on, people are so afraid of “knowledge” that all you hear in churches is application. having gone through a seminary that has a “spiritual formation” class/program, requiring “spirituality”, i really think that McLaren’s statements about this are not helpful. our class was a royal waste of time. think about it, do we really think that the major problem in christendom is that people are “over-educated”? absolutely not! quite the opposite. to experience or learn Christ, you must learn about him. i know that i am automatically the bad guy as soon as I critique an article about being more godly. maybe i would have been better served by this article if he made it more narrative and described some of the negative experiences he has had with the “more” educated rather than just generalizing. as Piper said on Edwards:

“How many people in your churches do you know that are laboring to know God, who are striving earnestly in study and prayer to enlarge their vision of God. Precious few. Well then, what will become of our churches if we the pastors, who are charged with knowing and unfolding the whole counsel of God, shift into neutral, quit reading and studying and writing, and take on more hobbies and watch more television?”

“If the single-minded occupation with these things is left to a few academic theologians in the colleges and seminaries, while pastors all become technicians and managers and organizers, there may be superficial success for a while, as Americans get excited about one program or the other, but in the long run the gains will prove shallow and weak, especially in the day of trial.”

“You recall what Mark Noll said: ‘Edwards’s piety continued on in the revivalist tradition, his theology continued on in academic Calvinism, but there were no successors to his God-entranced world-view. . .’ The sweet marriage of reason and affection, of thought and feeling, of head and heart, study and worship that took place in the life of Jonathan Edwards has been rare since his day and still is rare.”

“In other words, it is to no avail merely to believe that God is holy and merciful. For that belief to be of any saving value, we must ‘sense’ God’s holiness and mercy. That is, we must have a true delight in it for what it is in itself. Otherwise the knowledge is no different than what the devils have. ”

“Does this mean that all his study and thinking was in vain? No indeed. Why? Because he says, ‘The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity will there be, when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.’ (Works, II, 162, see p.16)”

“But the goal of all is this spiritual taste, not just knowing God but delighting in him, savoring him, relishing him. And so for all his intellectual might, Edwards was the farthest thing from a cool, detached, neutral, disinterested academician.”

I mean not to generalize here myself, I just think that we need an Edwards-like model to help us balance. Thoughts?

Tim and Beverly Lahaye. Time called them “The Christian Power Couple,” which does make me want to gag, but I don’t really know if that is true or not. Unfortunately, Left Behind is an irreversable phenomenon that only gains more adherents. Efforts by others to subvert this beast have been of little effect. Lahaye’s defficient understanding of biblical eschatology is evident in every page of the series, and his misleading influence has cripled many people’s understanding of what the Bible really says. I hate to say it but it’s true. Interestingly enough, Time does not really point to Left Behind so much as it points to his influence on Jerry Falwell and the organization of the Moral Majority. They also highlight Beverly’s founding of the Concerned Women for America and mention its influence. They have also authored books both separate and together that have sold many copies. All this being said, I would agree with their choice, but I don’t think I would call them the power couple.

Charles Colson. It’s cool to see one of the trustees of my seminary on this list. He hasn’t made the best of decisions in the past as an evangelical, like signing the first edition of ECT, Evangelicals and Catholics Together (it is understandable since his wife is catholic), but he is certainly behind the scenes as well as in the forefront for evangelicals. He has written many books, including his autobiography, and he found Prison Fellowship, which is unparalleled in its ministry to inmates. I agree with this choice.

J.I. Packer. Time called him the “Theological Traffic Cop,” which I’m sure many would disagree since he signed ECT too. Packer’s influenc has certainly waned in the past few years, since he is nearly 80, but he continues to teach at Regent College in Vancouver and maintain connection to England and the US. This may be a token choice because of Packer’s overall influence in the past 30 years. His book “Knowing God” is still used at many colleges and seminaries as an introduction theology. “Keep in Step with the Spirit” is linked on the side of my blog because I think it is a classic every christian should read. As Alistar McGrath continues to edit and publish Packer’s collections of essays, Packer will only gain more readers.

Mark Noll. I don’t know if I agree with this choice, but then again, I’m not exactly sure about everything he is involved in. He’s been at Wheaton for a number of years, and his work, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” is superb. His ever famous opening sentence is, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” That is classic and it could not be more true. His recent works on American church history have won him acclaim outside of evangelicalism, but again, I don’t know much else he is involved in. If I would picked someone in his area to be on the list, I probably would have chosen George Marsden. Marsden has been saying the same things in more volume and for more years.

Ralph Winter. I have been receiving Missions Frontier magazine for the past 6 years and you can tell whoever is behind it is doing some amazing things. He has been monumental in strategizing how to spread the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world, as in strengthening and mobilizing mission organizations around the globe. Therefore, his incluence is larger outside the US and we cannot even begin to imagine the impact his influence has had. Anyone who has been to Urbana or Lousanne could tell you. In either case, this was an obvious choice.

Bill Hybels. Although he received more attention at first as the founding pastor of Willow Creek Community church, being featured on Datline NBC with a whole 15 minutes devoted the movement this church started back in the early to mid-90s, he has been largely overshadowed by Rick Warren in recent years. But make no mistake about it, he is still one of the most influential pastors in America through the Willow Creek Association. His church’s push toward seeker sensativity has changed the paradigms, in many ways, as to how we approach Sunday mornings. The Willow Creek team of John Ortberg, Lee Stobel, and Hybels have pumped out many bestselling books like “The Case for Christ,” “Becoming a Contagious Christian,” and “Couragious Leadership”. Also, Hybels was one of few pastoral confidants for Bill Clinton after he “came clean” about Monica Lewsinsky. This is another obvious choice.

Brian McLaren. I have recently been reading some of McLaren’s stuff off his website that takes the name from one of his books (www.anewkindofchristian.com) and am intriqued by his appeal. He’s trying to offer a very stripped down understanding of postmodernism and the church that has attracted many from ages 20-40. Other notable titles of his are “A Generous Orthodoxy,” and “Finding Faith”. I can resonate with much of what he is saying, but am trying to filter my way through what he saying. I honestly don’t know the fullness of his impact, but I can think of others I would put on this list before McLaren. More on him later.

Jay Sekulow. I suppose we could call him the Rush Limbaugh of christian talk radio, but I can not stand either. My mom used to listen to Sekulow and whenever I was in the car with her or heard him in house, I almost always started barking back at the radio. He came across to me very arrogant and not able to sustain a conversation without jumping down people’s throats. His voice is very annoying. Nonetheless, his influence seems to be more in the courtroom, where he has wielded much with the law center he helped form. He is also a member of the ACLU, and no doubt has helped counsel Bush on certain policy. Overall, probably a good choice for the list.

John Stott. Much like Packer, Stott’s influence has generally been in the past, but he still continues to preach and write. Ian Murray’s work, “Evangelicalism Divided” explores Stott’s relationship to David Martyn Lloyd-Jones and the apparent “split” of evangelicalism that Stott and Lloyd-Jones helped create. However, that was more so the case in the UK, so it is hard to gage how it has effected American evangelicalism, although the two are inextribly linked. Stott was slated to speak at my seminary two years ago, but he cancelled due to health reasons. Stott’s book and bible studies are still widely popular, and his book, “Basic Christianity” has sold millions. I don’t think I would have picked him to be on the list, but like Packer, he is probably a token pick for years past.

People I hadn’t heard of till this article: Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Diane Knippers, Rick Santorum, Luis Cortes, Douglas Coe, David Barton, Richard Land, Steven Strang, Ted Haggard, Stuart Epperson. I am an evangelical seminary student that works at one of the most popular christian book places, but you do the math: either these people are very much behind the scene in their influence and I am ignorant, or Time just didn’t talk to many evangelicals about these unheardofs.

Snubs from the List. Any christian who walks into a christian book store or listens to christian radio can tell you who influences them. Some names come to mind that I think were snubbed and should have been there, if not close:

Al Mohler. He is at the helm at probably the best seminary in the country (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) and helping to improve the largest denomination in the states. He hasn’t published much, so he hasn’t got the credit he deserves. His blog and radio show, though, again swarms of followers daily.

Joel Osteen. One of the best selling authors now, and his TV program that he inherited from his dad is watched by millions.

Benny Hinn. As much as I hate to admit it, Benny Hinn continues to lauch juggernot crusades and sells millions of books.

John MacArthur. You don’t put your name on a study bible and not influence dramatically. As a former member of his flock and having listened to hundreds of sermons by the guy, it is easy to put him on this list.

George Bush. Well, if you consider him an evangelical he belongs on the list.

D.A. Carson. He has influenced many at both the popular and scholarly level, but his effect upon evangelical biblical studies cannot be ignored.

N.T. Wright. By far, the most influential Brit on evangelical theology.

Joshua Harris. Almost everybody has a copy of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” even if they hate him.

TIME’s list of 25, composed with the help of preachers, politicians, scholars and activists, deliberately leaves out some familiar figures–Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Don Wildmon–whose stories are well known. Instead, we focus on those whose influence is on the rise or who have carved out a singular role for themselves. The following pages serve as a primer to their growing force in American life.

Rick Warren. Warren got the lead in this article, with a large picture and favorable write-up. He is the author of “The Purpose Driven Church”, “The Purpose Driven Life”, and their acompanying paraphernalia. His websites (www.pastors.com, and www.purposedriven.com) have been fueling the the “purpose driven” movement for the past few years as they have been promoting the “40 Days of Purpose” which has been blitzkrieging America. I will blog on Warren more in the future. I would have to agree with Time’s choice here. Zondervan launched an incredible advertising campaign, so much so, that you see the “Purpose Driven Life” at every Walmart and Target across the country. Hard to criticize a guy who really doesn’t care much for the attention. He’s just looking around at the church and wondering why we can’t remove unnecessary barriers. He’s a Southern Baptist, he attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (the largest seminary in the country), Fuller Theological Seminary, and he did a lot of research before he ventured into planting a different kind of church in Mission Viejo, CA. Although I might not agree with all of his ideas, and I think he can be theologically shallow, there is no doubt that he is making an impact. It will be interesting to see in the next few years how churches defined as “Purpose Driven” will look like.

James Dobson. Again, I would agree with their choice here. He is the reigning Pope of family matters, and just gains popularity. It’s hard for me to criticize him since my mom met him in ’96 and he prayed for me with her when I was backsliding. But I will say a few things. First, he is first and foremost a trained psychologist, not a preacher or bible scholar. That kinda bugs me, because a lot of what he can say has its roots more in Freud than in Jesus. Second, he just needs to shut his mouth sometimes when it comes to different cultural stuff. I applaud his efforts for pro-life activism for the most part, but he needs to give better reasoning on the homosexual issue. I have heard him on Larry King, Hannity & Colmes, and Scarborough Country, and each time I felt like I was seeing Bush talk about the War; there are just better reasons. Lastly, stop calling boycotts. He is starting to sound like Southern Baptist leaders when they were calling boycotts on Disney. Get over it already. People at Proctor & Gamble have families to feed too.

Michael Gerson. They call him, “The President’s Spiritual Scribe,” because he is one of Bush’s major speechwriters. An obvious position of influence, so thus whole-heartedly agreed. He was probably behind the Challenger shuttle speech, as well as the first 911 speech, which I both thought were appropriately done speeches for their contexts. He seems to help Bush weave in biblical allusion where called for. (Don’t know what you think of this one James).

Richard John Neuhaus. Although he is no longer an evangelical (former Lutheran turned Catholic priest), I guess he can still count. Neuhaus is the editor of “First Things” which is linked on the sidebar of my blog, so I would probably agree with this choice. He has been a voice for many years on all kinds of ethical and religious fronts. One particular issue I recall of note is one where he debated Stanley Fish on whether evangelicals should even be invited to the “dialog” of postmodernity’s quest for truth (February ’06, http://www.firstthings.com/menus/ft9602.html).

T.D. Jakes. Unfortunately, I have to agree with this one. He is riduculous, and I hate the health & wealth/word-faith movements, but they are attractive to people. So as one of the “stars” of TBN, Daystar, and Inspiration, he cruises around in his newest Mercedes, while dressed in his previoulsy unworn Armani suit. He’s a guy I cringe at every time I come across on the tube or the tuner. I guess we can call him and Creflo Dollar “The Evangelical Pimps”.

Billy and Franklin Graham. No doubt here. Billy Graham is the most well-known Christian since the apostle Paul. I like the direction that Franklin is taking the ministry, but I thought the “Crusades” were over about 600 years ago. Billy’s theology has always been an enigma to me, but my good friend Danny O is one morsel of fruit from his ministry. We could call Billy the father/face of the Neo-Evangelical movement (if that’s what you want to call it).

Joyce Meyer. This one is a suprise to me. My mom loves Joyce Meyer, so maybe Time needed to balance out things by looking at probably the most influential woman. I might have thought of Beth Moore, Kay Arthur, or Tammy Fay for that matter.

More to come…

As one whose church is under the authority of C.J. it is pleasure to be continually inculcated with the gospel. He is as relentless in person as he is in this book of interogating the people of God with the gospel. This is a great gift book because of its readability and brevity. However, such a topic that C.J. is trying to address may beggar further extension. Sometimes we can inadvertently create buzz words that lack significance because of repetition with no variety. I fear that may result from the “cross-centered” model. People could confuse the idea of “cross-centeredness” with “cross-onlyness” assuming that if you have not mentioned the cross or some element of redemption, then it is inadequate. The danger with even the title is to accent the event rather than the person (Christ); the means rather than the end. Also, we are faced with the choice of being redemption-centered merely, rather than wholy God-centered; since God is doing other things apart from saving people (i.e. judging people). This book would be best supplemented with John Piper’s “Pleasures of God”.

I was just having a discussion about this with my friend Dave Scoggins today. He actually brought it up, but this is something I’ve been thinking about ever since I heard of this book and the SGM mentality. I really think that the way that C.J. presents this model, redemption/man seems to be what God is centered on. Is God cross-centered? No, God is God-centered. Thus man should be God-centered. Bottom line. The cross is a means to an end; it is the ratifying event of the New Covenant, the absorbtion of depravity and judgment for all who believe, and the penultimate expression of God. Now God forbid that we boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (Galatians 6:14). But we boast in the cross for what it purchased for us. All boasting is cross boasting. It purchased everything we experience that is good, and everything painful God takes and turns for our good. God designed the cross, though, so let’s center on him. Let’s give him his place. Let’s make him supreme, because that’s what he designed the cross for; to satisfy himself and enjoy himself. You can download Piper’s sermon on boasting in the cross at http://www.biblicalpreaching.info/bpaudio/piper/021300.mp3. It is an epoch making sermon. I’ve listened to it 50 times. Seriously, check it out. It has shaped much of my thinking about the cross.

Here is a picture of me and my beautiful fiance.

Been thinking about church the past few days. My good friend Danny Ovalle gave some really good links that I checkout out and are really cool:

www.mdchurch.org Missio Dei
www.a29.org Acts 29 Church Planting Network

Almost every church associated with Acts 29 has an excellent website. Missio Dei is a church in Portland, ME that Danny and I intend on visiting soon. It is exciting to see churches that are stongly Reformed, yet culturally atuned. I think much of Christian “culture” is submersed in termonology and thinking that most people find unattractive prima facie. I don’t particularly care for the Purpose Driven Church model, in that most of their churches lack strong theological foundations; they just want to get people in church. It’s not hard to get people in churches if you offer them free Starbucks and top-notch child care; Microsoft can do that. So many churches skurt around the biggest culture and life questions that people have and tell people to just have faith. When that happens, everybody thinks we are a bunch of idiots, that are intellectually cripple and not caring. Today, my roommate and I were listening to the Radio Factor (Bill O’Reilly), and I don’t know, I heard some Christians call up in response to homosexuality in schools. I was just thinking to myself, people know where most Christians stand on the issue, why do we always have to keep reiterating what we think. “Its wrong and destructive to our society.” OK, I might agree with that, but we would get a better hearing if we actually knew more people that were gay. Granted, we may think that homosexuality is a life-dominating sin, but honestly, they’ve got bigger issues we can address with them; let’s deal with them as people first. We are not even approachable to people, though, when we bark about their sexual preference. We can’t even begin to penetrate people or this society if we don’t put things in a gospel context. Let’s love people, let’s build relationships, let’s get to know people and really care about who they are. Let us exude Godwardness that is beautiful, glorious, and real. Let’s not define ourselves by the fact that we vote for Bush, that our country was built on Christian values, that we don’t swear, that we don’t drink, that we don’t masturbate, that we don’t listen to “secular” music, that we don’t watch TV, that we don’t watch “questionable” movies, that we were homeschooled, that we went to a Christian college, that we have a Christian lawyer, bank, accountant, mechanic, coffehouse, book store, or president. These are all peripheral. We can’t expect to be taken seriously by people if we don’t take them seriously. Just some thoughts.

Wedding Stuff. I was having some hang time with my friends Josh Otte and John Borquist at the Wild Horse Cafe (wildhorsecafe.com) in Beverly on Wednesday. I swear I had one of the best brews I’ve every had, Corsendonk Abbey Brown Ale. They serve it in a Goblet. Sweet beer. I’m going there tonight to have one with my friend Price. Anyhow, so we are talking about my wedding date and all and John pipe’s up. He says, “Perfect, that’s perfect. My friend from Virginia and I are starting a film company and we need to do a wedding sample. We can video your wedding for free.” Then he goes on to say that it will be a sample of a $3000 package. I was all over it. I called Kalila right there and told her a little about John and his offer and she gave me the OK. And on top of that, I had been thinking about the White Horse as a good candidate for the rehearsal dinner. I looked around on Wednesday and I thought it would be perfect. I took a few pictures on the old phone camera and showed Kalila last night. I told her at all costs I want to do it there. It is perfect. It’s a little rustic, but tasteful, and classy. It’s gonna rock.

Weekend in Philly. We had a great trip overall. Lots of laughs, lots of fun. I picked up Danny and Moe on Friday afternoon and we made our way up to Manchester Airport. We got there with plenty of time to eat and get a brew, which we richly enjoyed (Danny got a Bass and Moe and I got a Smuttynose Brown Dog). We were longing to have some time either Saturday or Sunday to kick back with a brew and a stoagie and talk about church issues. We did not get that opportunity. We got to the Philly area pretty late, around 9 PM, and spent a few hours getting to know our hosts, the Doyles. They are a great family and we really hit it off. We tried to feel them out whether Mr. Doyle would have a brew with us, but we weren’t feeling it. So we settled with the fact that we would not have that kind of fun this weekend. Sidebar: On the plane ride out there, Danny sat with me and we talked about Justification and the “New Perspective” on Paul. It seems like every time we talk about these issues, Danny says the same thing he said the last time and he asks me the same questions. I wonder if he continues to do this because he thinks I’m not understanding him, or because he just forgets. I think its the former, that’s what I’m concerned about. My biggest contention is that no one out there really understands what Ancient Near Covenants consisted and how that provides the context for covenant in the New Testament. End Sidebar. So went to bed around 12:20, but Danny and I were in the same room. We weren’t sure if that would ever happen again so we stayed up till about 4:00 AM talking about all sorts of stuff from church polity to parenting. As Danny would say, “It was a good hang”. Made me think a lot. Saturday roled around quickly and we headed off to Covenant Fellowship Church where the ministry summons was being held. My only contention with the whole thing is that everybody seems so cookie-cutter Sovereign Grace Ministries that it makes me sick. I love SGM, but it seems like they keep producing guys with the same personality and theology. Talking on the way back, I was telling Danny that I feel like such a rogue and that there seems to be no place for me out there in ministry. What do you do with a Reformed, baptistic, complimentarian, hedonistic, humanistic, integrational worshipper who loves biblical theology, rock n roll, beer, pipes, cigars, movies, and girls with noserings? Danny was pretty sympathetic and encouraging. More later, my break is almost over and the phones are red.