GeorgePWood.com

Make sure to read "Starbucks Spirituality" over at ChristianityBibleStudies.com. It tells the story of Daniel Hill, a pastor, who also works part-time at Starbucks, and what he and others have learned about sharing Christ to a postmodern audience. Here’s a sample:

Daniel Hill suggests that 90 percent of the accusations Christians face are rooted in mistrust. "I don’t find that people have a problem with Jesus," he says. "They have a problem with Christians."

Anyone who claims authority today—politicians, parents, or pastors—will face the question of trust.

Rick Richardson, author of Evangelism Outside the Box and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s national field director for evangelism, observes: "When people ask questions about homosexuality, for instance, we’re tempted to think they’re asking questions about right and wrong. But they’re not. They’re asking about dominance and oppression.

"Homosexual strugglers look at what the church has done to women, they look at slavery, at this history of collaboration between Christian faith and Western dominance—and they say, ‘In light of that, how can I trust you?’"

If that’s the question, how can we respond?

The answer requires more than words. Christians, with PowerPoint presentations and four-point evangelistic outlines, have mastered the art of proclamation. But words alone aren’t going to answer the trust question.

Trust is built by actions, not words.

"We’re supposed to proclaim the kingdom of God and demonstrate the kingdom of God," says Soong-Chan Rah, pastor of the Cambridge Community Fellowship Church near Boston. "Evangelism for our generation means learning to do both.

"Part of proclamation means that we speak the whole gospel of Christ, not just the Westernized version of it. We also need to be good at demonstration—bringing healing to our sick society and at-risk neighborhoods, bringing wholeness not just to the spiritually lost but also to those who are under economic oppression."

I thought the article made for very provocative reading.

Over at the First Things blog, Robert T. Miller takes Roman Catholic Bishop Tiny Muskens to task for suggesting that Dutch Christians pray to God as Allah. (Muskens is bishop of Breda). The whole post is worth reading, but what I thought particularly excellent was this long quote from G.K. Chesterton:

There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: “the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.” It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach. It is as if a man were to say, “Do not be misled by the fact that the Church Times and the Freethinker look utterly different, that one is painted on vellum and the other carved on marble, that one is triangular and the other hectagonal; read them and you will see that they say the same thing.” The truth is, of course, that they are alike in everything except in the fact that they don’t say the same thing. An atheist stockbroker in Surbiton looks exactly like a Swedenborgian stockbroker in Wimbledon. You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella. It is exactly in their souls that they are divided. So the truth is that the difficulty of all the creeds of the earth is not as alleged in this cheap maxim: that they agree in meaning, but differ in machinery. It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns

Chesterton had a way with words, no?.

Over at the FutureAG blog, Tory Farina posts six questions he wants candidates for the Assemblies of God’s next general superintendent to answer. I think that’s a bad idea. Here’s my response.

Tory:

As I wrote in an email to you, I’m opposed to asking these kind of questions of the candidates for several reasons:

1. The AG has a longstanding tradition that prospective national officers do not candidate for office. This has served the denomination well so far, and it fits within the biblical qualifications for office, which focus on character and proven competence rather than vision and future plans. I fear that if we begin to ask candidates essentially to write a platform for office, we will needlessly politicize the process, as people openly jockey for office. Do we really want our denomination’s elections to resemble our quadrennial presidential election campaigns? I don’t.

2. Some of the questions lend themselves to boilerplate responses. Most candidates will probably say that our biggest challenge is to make more and better disciples of Jesus Christ. I think, in fact, that all of the candidates would say something like that. We are, after all, an evangelistic movement. So what we will have learned if the responses are that generic? Nothing. The only thing we will learn is what jargon or lingo the prospective candidates use to express this basic vision.

3. Asking for specific policy ideas(women in ministry, outreach to younger ministers, etc.) is also not, in my opinion, a good idea. First, why focus only on these issues? We younger ministers think they are important, but they are not the only important issues our denomination is facing. Asking a candidate to declare what he is going to do may alienate people who like the person but disagree with the policies. Second, while the GS plays an influential role in shaping policy, much policy is actually determined by the board of administration, executive and general presbyteries, and even the general council.

4. Question 4 especially (about unique qualification) asks the candidates to openly campaign for themselves, and thus lends itself to a little chest-thumping.

5. One of the reasons many of us don’t know who these candidates are is because we are just showing up at general council for the first time. Many of us are uninvolved with the denomination (at the sectional, district, and general council levels). But all of a sudden, we are showing up on the scene, asking denominational leaders to change longstanding traditions, and respond to our specifric concerns as young ministers. If a person showed up at our churches one time and insisted that we make deep changes in our preaching and worship in order to satisfy his interests, we wouldn’t give them the time of day. Shouldn’t we be more involved in the system (at sectional, district, and general council levels) before we begin asking for major changes in the way things are done?

We younger ministers will lead this movement in the next generation. And we do things differently than the ministers and leaders older than us. But if we want them to respect us and our concerns, shouldn’t we show them the same respect by honoring longstanding traditions and refraining from politicizing this process?

We need an open forum for discussion, which is why I appreciate this blog so much, and especially your efforts. But we also need to realize that change takes time, and if we want to change the system, we must work from the inside. Asking potential candidates questions such as these, in my opinion, is an outsiders’ attempt to change the system.

See you at Indy!

George

Over at Christianity Today, Mark Galli posts some comments in response to a forthcoming book, of Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity.

Part of the scandal of the Cross is the scandal of grace. And part of the scandal of grace is that I am part and parcel of the company of the graced.

My being a Christian means I am a member of a brotherhood of sinners, some of the most embarrassing sort. Even worse, to be a Christian is to acknowledge that I have been, at heart, a televangelist, a crusader, a sheltered, judgmental, proselytizing hypocrite.

I do not mean to suggest that we should be indifferent to such sins. If books and conversations like the ones I’ve experienced prod Christians to change their ways, it will be all to the good. But the church is always in need of reform, and its behavior will always be a scandal to anyone with moral sensibilities.

When we invite people to follow Jesus, we’re inviting them into the desperately sinful church that Jesus, for some odd reason, loves. To be a Christian—or whatever term you’d prefer—is to identify not just with Jesus or with the healthy church of our imagination, but also with the tragically dysfunctional church, which is mercifully embraced, if not by us, then certainly by the One who was a scandal in his own day.

Amen!

Amnesty International is a respected human rights institution. It makes no explicit claim that abortion is right or wrong. But it considers law prohibiting abortion and punishing abortionists to be wrong (which is an implicit claim that abortion is a morally acceptable practice). Ryan T. Anderson parses AI’s moral incoherence further over at First Things‘ blog. He writes:

Cox’s assertion that Amnesty International has no position on whether abortion is right or wrong is ridiculous. If pre-natal homicide is wrong, then why can’t governments legislate against it? As Lincoln taught us, no one can consistently claim to have a right to do wrong. And, if abortion is wrong, it’s precisely because it’s the unjust killing of an innocent human being. If that’s the case, don’t governments have an obligation to prohibit it, and to make the prohibition meaningful by attaching sanctions against those who violate it? Does anyone doubt that Amnesty International does have a clear position on the legality of abortion? What option is left—to make laws against abortion without enforcing them?

Perhaps this is why Amnesty International explicitly opposes the United States’ ban on partial-birth abortion. Cox himself wrote that Amnesty International “opposes the specific provisions of the federal law upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Carhart that criminalize doctors who perform particular types of abortions.” In other words, according to Amnesty International, when the government of the United States attempts to protect partially born Americans from death at the hands of abortionists, it is violating human rights.

This, of course, highlights the true incoherence of Amnesty International’s abortion policy. Why does the group defend the right of abortionists to kill human beings up to the point of birth but provide no protection to the unborn child? Why is Amnesty International protecting the partial-birth-abortion “doctor” while offering the partially born child absolutely nothing? Is this what it means to be a human-rights organization?

Amnesty International frequently claims to take “no position as to when life begins.” But what reason can they give for taking no position on a question settled long ago by science? Does Amnesty International deny that the entity being “aborted” in partial-birth abortion is a human being? Are those feet the abortionist is holding when he jams a pair of scissors into the base of child’s skull anything other than human feet? Is the blood that streams out something other than human blood? That a child in the womb is a living human being is a matter of scientific fact. Does Amnesty International deny it?

So, if Amnesty International chooses to address the abortion issue at all, on what grounds does it deny human rights—and the most fundamental of all human rights, the right to life—to unborn human beings? Such a position undermines the entire foundation of human rights. For basic rights are founded on the conviction that all human beings—regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, intelligence, age, size, location, or dependency—are the subjects of profound, inherent, and equal dignity simply by virtue of their humanity. If this dignity does not depend on particular characteristics that vary from one human being to another and across each lifetime, then every human being must possess such dignity—and, thus, the rights it entails—from the point at which he or she comes into being. Does Amnesty International deny this?

If Amnesty International believes its support of abortion follows from the logic of human rights, then it should have no problem answering such questions.

From Christianity Today’s blog comes this post by Stan Guthrie:

While an apple a day may (or may not) keep the doctor away, a growing body of research indicates that exercise may keep the psychologist away. Alessandra Pilu of the University of Cagliari in Italy and other investigators reported their conclusions in the online journal of Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health.

"The study found that depressed women who started a supervised exercise regimen had significant improvements in their symptoms over the next 8 months. Those who didn’t exercise showed only marginal improvements.

"Before the study, all of the women had tried taking antidepressant medication for at least two months but had failed to improve.

"A number of studies have found that physically active people are less likely than couch potatoes to suffer depression. Some clinical trials have shown regular exercise can help treat the disorder, and perhaps be as effective as antidepressant drugs in some cases.

"The new findings suggest that exercise can even help people whose symptoms have been resistant to medication, according to the study authors."

Since an estimated two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, high rates of mental illness shouldn’t surprise us. Mental illness is not just mental. We are integrated, living souls, and approaches must be holistic, treating mind, body, and spirit.

In a recent Associated Press story, David Crary wrote:

The percentage of Americans who consider children "very important" to a successful marriage has dropped sharply since 1990, and more now cite the sharing of household chores as pivotal, according to a sweeping new survey.

The reader would undoubtedly think that the report was about what makes for a successful marriage. Unfortunately, as Wilfred McClay notes over at First Things, that’s not really what the report is about.

Skeptical as I am of all polling data, I found it hard to believe that Pew would have constructed a survey designed to show such a thing. I looked at Pew’s website and found that the study itself bears a radically different headline: “As Marriage and Parenthood Drift Apart, Public Is Concerned about Social Impact.” Quite different. At first I thought I must be looking at an entirely separate study. But I wasn’t. Astonishingly, I found only a mention, and no discussion, of “household chores” in the Pew Executive Summary. Instead, I found bullet points such as these:

• Public Concern over the Delinking of Marriage and Parenthood.
• Marriage Remains an Ideal, Albeit a More Elusive One.
• Children Still Vital to Adult Happiness.

In other words, the AP writer, and the headline writers (who were presumably following the writer’s or AP’s lead), seriously distorted the meaning of the report. And the distortion was intentional. Why else would so much attention be given to the matter of “household chores,” which are mentioned only in passing in the full report, and never discussed or analyzed? Why would there be so little indication of what Pew’s own headline fairly shouts: that the general public itself is uneasy about many of the phenomena here being described? Why no attention to Pew’s larger concern, that what we are seeing (particularly when one connects it with high rates of out-of-wedlock births) is a potentially momentous (and historically unprecedented) separation of marriage and parenthood? Why the need to reduce this fascinating, complex, and troubling trend to a “hook” built around the tiredest of 1970s feminist mantras—sharing the chores?

Why, indeed?