Allan R. Bevere

Can a Scientist Believe in the Virgin Conception?

2012-01-27T09:13:00.002-05:00

John Polkinghorne can... and does. Miracles are not God's interventions but rather his interactions with creation, says the particle physicist turned Anglican priest. Check it out here.

Update: David Opderbeck weighs in on the subject with some good insights.

With Thanks...

2012-01-26T09:13:00.002-05:00

...to Joel Watts for interviewing Yours Truly on his blog. The interview can be read, here.

On Letting the Right-Middle-Left Spectrum Die

2012-01-25T10:17:00.000-05:00

Roger Olsen is spot on on this one-- and let me add that what it now means to be a theological conservative today is far from clear. I am not sure that many of them are conserving much of anything significant. And substituting the word progressive for liberal doesn't fix the problem either. One has to think extremely highly of one's intelligence and vision to label their views as progressive. It's like all those 18th century elistists referring to their time as one of Enlightenment. By the way, I'd like to see Olsen's thinking applied to the modern political spectrum as well.

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No matter how hard they tried, historical theologians analyzing nineteenth century theology (and "nineteenth century theology" only ends at 1914 or 1917) could not break the spell of trying to put every Christian theologian somewhere on a spectrum of right to left or left to right with modernity being the criterion of placement. So, by this common analysis, which still works its magic over us, Hodge and theologians like him belong toward the "right" end of the spectrum, Schleiermacher and Ritschl and their followers belong toward the "left" end of the spectrum and the mediating theologians are arrayed at various points along the middle. The often unspoken question the answer to which determines where a theologian belongs on the spectrum is to what extent he or she accommodated to modernity.

Also, where does Kierkegaard belong on that spectrum? The usual way to deal with the Danish theologian is to treat him a philosopher, but anyone who reads him knows he was a theologian. He had a degree in theology, at times wanted to teach theology (but you had to have the King’s endorsement to have a teaching position in the university and Kierkegaard's enemies blocked it), and most of his writing deals with Christianity either directly or indirectly. Although he was reacting against Hegel and his followers, he was not accommodating to or reacting against modernity per se. He certainly wasn't "liberal" in any usual sense of that word. So, to rescue the spectrum, people like Kierkegaard are usually excused by being relegating to the separate category of philosophy.

I suggest the reason for the obsession with the spectrum is the ease it offers to categorizing nineteenth century theologians. The emergence of the phenomenon of mediating theology reinforced its apparent appropriateness. But I also suggest it never really worked without serious distortions. People have held onto it simply because it's easy. And it has become a useful polemical tool for labeling and dismissing theologians. Almost everyone wants to see himself or herself as somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, so the spectrum itself becomes relative to the individual using it.

I say let it die. Except when talking about theologians who really do fit on it by their own admissions—as pro-modern or anti-modern or attempting some kind of synthesis.

The traditional "right to left, left to right" spectrum for categorizing theologians and theologies was problematic from the start. It began as a way of categorizing nineteenth century theologians and it was tied to modernity. Theologians were placed on it according to the placer's judgment about the theologians’ accommodations to or rejections of modernity. That spectrum didn't ever work well, but it became especially problematic in the twentieth century as many theologians no longer responded to modernity.

Wednesdays With Wright: The Book of Acts, 4

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

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Previous Posts

Wednesdays With Wright: The Book of Acts, 1

Wednesdays With Wright: The Book of Acts, 2

Wednesdays With Wright: The Book of Acts, 3

Guaranteed Appointments for Ordained Clergy-- Is This Really the Problem?

2012-01-24T14:07:00.000-05:00

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Joseph R. Stains, posted in today's UM portal. What do you think?

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The Call to Action Report asks the UMC to terminate guaranteed appointment to ordained pastors, effectively leaving appointive status in the hands of the appointers, the bishops. In this way, the rationale goes, ineffective pastors may be more quickly weeded out, and effective service affirmed. Underlying assumptions seem to include:

1) Ineffective clergy in the parish are a/the major reason for malaise in our denomination.

2) There is not currently a sound way of addressing clergy ineffectiveness.

3) Our bishops are better-suited than any other available entity to assume the right/responsibility of deciding who among our clergy merit continued active service.

This approach deserves very serious scrutiny. It seems, as do many reports from our church’s general bodies, to derive its inspiration from the collective wisdom of the corporate world, with an emphasis on the point of view of secular, upper-level management, whose track record in the last half decade of American business is not consistently reassuring, nor famous for its Christian view of justice or concern for the dignity of the less endowed. It is, after all, the upper management of our church, the Council of Bishops, which has led bringing this striking report to the table. The present essay questions the validity of all three of the above assumptions.

No doubt some clergy are more gifted, dedicated, resourceful—even faithful—than others. So are many officers, agencies, laity and yes, episcopal leaders. The malaise is American mainline, however. It cuts across denominational lines, hierarchies and polities. Meanwhile, the same Book of Discipline guides the United Methodist Church in parts of the world where there is no malaise. Whatever is wrong with clergy in America may be just as wrong with episcopal leaders, boards, agencies, officers and laity. None are above binding scrutiny, and none has earned the right to decide by itself the validity of ministry among the others.

The Discipline does provide means for weeding out ineffectiveness. Every year, the Clergy Session at Annual Conference receives the recommendations of its Board of Ordained Ministry, including candidates for administrative location, involuntary retirement and involuntary leave. Presumably all considered for such status have been under review by the board of their peers for at least a year, by recommendation of any of an assortment of eligible folk, including those in superintendency. Resident bishops can make their own recommendations for the board’s agenda, and those concerns are received seriously.

What the bishops do not currently have is the authority to override the wisdom of the board, and that seems an appropriate check on concentrated power in our church. It provides a healthy tension, and a scope of peer review that most consider vital to reaching difficult decisions with due process.

A mechanism is in place which, astutely applied, has served conferences well, and which keeps the power to suspend clergy service spread among more than one entity. There is plenty of room for discretionary use of these tools by the bishop and cabinet without restructuring discretionary power into their hands alone.

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You can read Stains' entire article, "Job security shouldn't just be for UM bishops," here.

The Lack of Conscience in the HHS Conscience Clause

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

Michael Sean Winters is a Catholic and a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, who has been a supporter of President Obama. He is angry and feeling betrayed by the president on his recent decision to mandate that religiously affiliated institutions provide contraceptive coverage in their health care plans. Winters writes the following:

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

I do not come at this issue as a Catholic special pleader, who wants only to protect my own, although it was a little bracing to realize that the president’s decision yesterday essentially told us, as Catholics, that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us. Nor, frankly, do I come at the issue as an anti-contraception zealot: I understand that many people, and good Catholics too, reach different conclusions on the matter although I must say that Humanae Vitae in its entirety reads better, and more presciently, every year.

No, I come at this issue as a liberal and a Democrat and as someone who, until yesterday, generally supported the President, as someone who saw in his vision of America a greater concern for each other, a less mean-spirited culture, someone who could, and did, remind the nation that we are our brothers' keeper, that liberalism has a long vocation in this country of promoting freedom and protecting the interests of the average person against the combined power of the rich, and that we should learn how to disagree without being disagreeable. I defended the University of Notre Dame for honoring this man, and my heart was warmed when President Obama said at Notre Dame: "we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity -- diversity of thought, diversity of culture, and diversity of belief. In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family."

I accuse you, Mr. President, of dishonoring your own vision by this shameful decision.

As a Protestant, I am not opposed to most forms of birth control, but the current administration has opened up a hornets' nest on this one. The Catholic Church's position on contraception is a non-negotiable in Catholic moral theology and the Catholic leadership will not acquiesce on this one; and I would be surprised if Pope Benedict does not address the matter with instructions for Catholic bishops in America as to how they are to respond. And the fact that many Catholics personally use birth control is not the issue- the issue is the state stepping on what is a matter of deep conscience for millions of Christians in America and a central teaching in Catholic moral theology (of course, arguments from conscience are not without their problems).

I have often said that while the time honored idea of separation of church and state is in some ways an obtusely problematic idea, nevertheless, there are two fundamental assumptions behind the notion: First, that on the one side there will be no state-sponsored church; and second, and on the other side, the government is incompetent when it comes to understanding religion and religious practices.

In its decision to force the Catholic Church to provide contraceptive services in their health care plans, the Obama Administration has clearly demonstrated the latter. There will be those who will now demagogue this issue and hysterically argue that President Obama wants to take away everyone's religious freedom. Such an argument is, of course, nonsense. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that a central moral tenet of a Christian Church has been stepped on by the state in favor of a particular political agenda. Every Christian, regardless of their views on birth control, should be concerned about this decision.

Having said that, I also maintain that the church must worry much less about what the state does and be more concerned about being faithful to its own witness in the world. Therefore, the first issue for me is not to influence the state to do the church's bidding, but to be a faithful church regardless of what the state mandates and be willing to suffer the consequences. In other words, we must stand alongside the Apostles Peter and John who said to the authorities, "We must listen to God rather than you" (Acts 4:19-20).

In this situation, I am confident that the Catholic Church will do the same. At least I hope they do.

Could the Founders Get Elected President in 2012?

2012-01-23T14:04:00.000-05:00

Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State Doesn't Think So. He writes,

To hear the religious right tell it, men like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were 18th-century versions of Jerry Falwell in powdered wigs and stockings. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Unlike many of today's candidates, the founders didn't find it necessary to constantly wear religion on their sleeves. They considered faith a private affair.

Contrast them to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (who says he wouldn't vote for an atheist for president because nonbelievers lack the proper moral grounding to guide the American ship of state), Texas Gov. Rick Perry (who hosted a prayer rally and issued an infamous ad accusing President Barack Obama of waging a "war on religion") and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (whose uber-Catholicism leads him to oppose not just abortion but birth control).

There was a time when Americans voted for candidates who were skeptical of core concepts of Christianity like the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth. The question is, could any of them get elected today? The sad answer is probably not.

Boston employs five Founders to make his argument: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Payne. As a novice student of the Founder's religious views, I find myself sympathetic with portions of Boston's argument, but I think it does lack some nuance and that two of his examples are not helpful.

The faith of George Washington is somewhat of an enigma. Both the left and the right use him as an example to further their political agendas, but that, I believe, reveals why Washington is not helpful in the current discussion. It is true, contrary to the views of the religious right, that Washington was no card carrying evangelical. He did use the typical deistic language of his day (e.g. referring to God as Providence) and he most certainly was not trying to convert his soldiers at Valley Forge. For some reason, known only to Washington and lost forever from history, is the fact that he never took Communion during worship, although his wife Martha did. However, the evidence that he was a card-carrying deist is also lacking. His use of "deistic terminology" for God was commonplace in colonial America, employed by non-deistic and particularly Reformed theologians and pastors like Jonathan Edwards. Moreover, Washington also called for times of prayer and fasting among his troops on several occasions, hardly a regular practice among deists. Thus, Washington is not a good example because his faith appears to be a faith similar to that of George H. W. Bush- a private faith not spoken of too often, but a faith in a personal God, that cannot be described as evangelical, but perhaps orthodox on the main tenets of the faith- and Bush was elected president in 1988.

Thomas Paine is also not a helpful example. Yes, Paine's pamphlet, "The America Crisis" greatly stirred the Revolutionary cause, but his writings often ridiculed Christianity. When he died, no Christian church would receive his body for burial in their cemeteries. Paine was buried on his farm but his bones were later exhumed for burial in England, which did not happen. The whereabouts of his remains remain a mystery. Upon Paine's death, The New York Citizen observed, "He had lived long, did some good and much harm."

The point here in reference to Paine is that while he never held public office during his life, his chances of being elected president of the United States were about as slim in his own time as well as today. Thus, Paine counters Boston's argument as well.

So, now we move on to the place where Boston is on firmer footing-- John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. While I am not sure that the term deist adequately applies to John Adams, he was far from orthodox in his theology-- rejecting the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and stating explicitly that the United States was not founded upon the Christian religion. Jefferson and Madison were deists in the quintessential sense-- Jefferson rejecting the miracles of the Gospels and in particular the bodily resurrection of Jesus. In reference to James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, he did indeed reject government paid chaplains for the military and found Jefferson's deism very congenial.

So, the question remains-- could the Founders be elected president of the United States in the 21st century? The answer to that question depends specifically upon the Founder? Washington might and Payne would most certainly not, but he likely would not have been elected in his day either. But Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, who were elected in their day would likely not (and I say that somewhat cautiously) be elected in 2012. Their theological convictions and their views on the relationship between church and state would make their campaigns quite problematic in the eyes of many contemporary Americans. That being said, I think Madison's rejection of government paid military chaplains would likely be more controversial than Jefferson's rejection of the miracles of Jesus.

Of course, if Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, should win the Republican nomination and go on to win the presidency, then all future arguments on this matter are up for grabs. And for those who are so sure that none of the Founders could be elected, I ask them at what point has Mitt Romney been asked about the Trinity in the Republican presidential debates?

Perhaps the matter is more complex than our narrow political agendas will allow.

A 365 Days a Year God

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

January is racing quickly to a finish. We are now in the long shadow of another Advent and Christmas season that has been left behind with all the hustle and bustle and now we are well back into the routine of the "non-holidays." We do many activities during the Christmas season that we do not schedule and participate in during February or June or October. They are special activities reserved for a special time of year. For some, those special holiday activities include attendance at worship.

I am always pleased whenever I see a full house at church whenever that is, but the one thing I wonder about is why we do not see a full house more often? I understand that on any given Sunday someone will be out of town or out sick or have some special occasion or travel plans that make it impossible for them to attend worship. But why do we not see larger worship attendance on a more regular basis? Should worship be a special event for a special occasion only?

One of the things that the Bible affirms is that our God is not a special occasion only kind of God. Our God is present with us, not just in December, but all year round. Our God lavishes his grace on us, not in periodic spurts, but in every moment of every day. We enjoy the benefits of this wonderful world God has made always in every time of the year.

We have a 365 days a year kind of God and how blessed we are that in God's love for us God is always there for us. As the Psalmist says,

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night', even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you (Psalm 139:7-12).

Knowing that God is always engaged with us and with us, and if we are truly grateful for God's presence and all God has done for us, especially in Jesus Christ, should we not be prepared to worship God and live a life pleasing to God not just in one or two special seasons, but in the ordinary times as well?—not just in December, but also in February too?

If we have a 365 days a year God, then should we not consider being 365 days a year disciples of Jesus Christ?

Did Goliath of Gath Have a Medical Condition?

2012-01-22T16:09:00.000-05:00

Some think the powerful Philistine suffered from gigantism or acromegaly. Check it out here.

Scriptures and Prayer for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany

2012-01-22T09:25:00.002-05:00

Old Testament: Jonah 3:1-5, 10

Epistle: 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Gospel: Mark 1:14-20

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Perfect Light of revelation, as you shone in the life of Jesus, whose epiphany we celebrate, so shine in us and through us, that we may become beacons of truth and compassion, enlightening all creation with deeds of justice and mercy. Amen.

John Polkinghorne on Miracles

2012-01-21T15:36:00.000-05:00

...but what about miracles? Christianity can't dodge this issue, because at its heart is the claim of the stupendous miracle of Christ's resurrection....we surely can't suppose that it was through a clever exploitation of chaos theory that Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again. If this happened (as I believe it did), it was a miraculous, divine act of great power.

The question of miracle is not primarily scientific, but theological. Science simply tells us that these events are against normal expectation. We knew this at the start. Science cannot exclude the possibility that, on particular occasions, God does particular unprecidented things. After all, God is the ordainer of the laws of nature, not someone who is subject to them. However, precisely because they are divine laws, simply to overturn them would be for God to act against God, which is absurd. The theological question is, does it make sense to suppose that God has acted in a new way?... God can do unexpected things. Yet there will always have to to be a deep underlying consistency that makes it intelligible, for example, that God raised Jesus from the dead on Easter Day, while, in the course of the present history, our experience is that dead men stay dead.... Does it make sense to believe that God acted in this unprecedented and extraordinary way? Can we see a deep consistency beneath the surface surprise of the event?

I believe the answer to these questions to be a clear "Yes" in relation to the Resurrection.... Christians believe that what is unique in the Resurrection of Jesus is not that it happened but when it happened. What God did for Jesus in the midst of history, God will do for all of us at the end of history.

Miracles are only credible acts of the faithful God if they represent new possibilities occurring because experience has entered some new regime, where the consistencies of the past must be open to enlargement in the light of the novelty of the present. This sensitivity to regime must be the answer to one of our greatest perplexities about mircles, which is not that they happen, but that they happen so infrequently in a world that seems to cry out for more vigorous divine action. C.S. Lewis once pointed out that stories of miracles cluster around what he called "the great ganglia of spiritual history," times when powerful movements of religious discovery are taking place. A preeminent era of this kind was the life of Jesus Christ.

As a Christian, I believe that God was in Christ in a special, focused way in which God has not been present in any other person. Jesus, therefore, represented the presence of a new regime in the world (this is what he meant by proclaiming that with his coming the Kingdom, that is, the rule, of God was being realized). I believe that it is a perfectly coherent and reasonable belief that this new regime should be accompanied by new phenomena, even raising a man from death to a glorified and everlasting life.

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From John Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos & Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005), portions of chapter 6, "What About Miracles?"

The Methodist Blogs Weekly Links of Note

2012-01-21T09:09:00.000-05:00

This week's noteworthy posts from the Methoblogosphere:

Dalton Rushing: Thinking differently about Call to Action

Roger Vest: Being the church in 2012

Mike Slaughter: Hijacked - Responding to the Partisan Church Divide

John Ed Mathison: Please Pass the Broccoli

Andy Stoddard: Little Things

Tim McClendon: If God Had a Refrigerator

Dreaming of a Little Golf...

2012-01-21T07:46:00.003-05:00

...the thermometer says it's 13 degrees outside and the snow has covered the ground. So, for a little dreaming about warmers days to come here is a link highlighting the 18 most annoying golf partners.

By the way, I'm #11.

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HT: Scot McKnight

Our Instincts Stink

2012-01-20T17:30:00.000-05:00

Here's an article that is sure to cause some controversy. What do you think?

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Simple answers are so satisfying: Green jobs will fix the economy. Stimulus will create jobs. Charity helps people more than commerce. Everyone should vote.

Well, all those instinctive solutions are wrong. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out in The Fatal Conceit, it's a problem that in our complex, extended economy, we rely on instincts developed during our ancestors' existence in small bands. In those old days, everyone knew everyone else, so affairs could be micromanaged. Today, we live in a global economy where strangers deal with each other. The rules need to be different.

Hayek said: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

Look at this piece of instinctual wisdom: Everyone should vote. In the last big election, only 90 million people voted out of more than 200 million eligible voters. That's terrible, we're told. But it's not terrible because a lot of people are ignorant. When I asked people to identify pictures of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, almost half couldn't.

This is one reason I say those "get out the vote" drives are dumb. I take heat for saying that, but Bryan Caplan agrees. He's a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

"A lot of bad policies ... pass by popular demand," Caplan told me. "In order to do the right thing, you have to know something."

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You can read John Stossel's entire post, "Don't Trust Your Instincts: Simple Answers Are Satisfying But Often Wrong," on reason.com here.

Bogeyman Economics...

2012-01-20T12:55:00.000-05:00

...and politics by horror story. Michael Kruse has the sordid details here.

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction 2012.1: Would You Like Fries With Your Cow Brains?

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

420 pounds of cow brains seized at Cairo airport

BEN HUBBARD

From Associated Press

January 13, 2012 1:20 PM EST

CAIRO (AP) — Officials at Cairo's international airport confiscated 420 pounds (190 kilograms) of frozen cow brains Friday from three Sudanese travelers who planned to sell them to Egyptian restaurants, authorities said.

An airport official said it was the fourth time this week that customs officers there had foiled an attempt to smuggle cow brains into the country, reflecting the growth of a moneymaking scheme made possible by some realities of international supply and demand: Cow brains are cheap in Sudan, and Egyptians like to eat them.

A pound of raw cow brains bought in Sudan for less than a dollar can be resold in Egypt for six times as much, airport officials said. That means Friday's haul could have earned the men more than $1,500.

Restaurants specializing in liver and brains are popular in Egypt. Both items are deep fried and often eaten in pita bread with spicy red sauce.

Airport officials discovered the brains Friday while inspecting large freezer boxes brought in by three travelers on a flight from Sudan's capital, Khartoum. After inspecting the boxes, the officials confiscated the brains since they couldn't ensure they had been preserved in a sanitary manner.

The brains would be burned, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity under airport rules.

Sometimes Death Is the Only Way Forward

2012-01-19T13:14:00.000-05:00

Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24)

When the Lord heard your words, he was wrathful and swore: "Not one of these—not one of this evil generation—shall see the good land that I swore to give to your ancestors, except Caleb son of Jephunneh. He shall see it, and to him and to his descendants I will give the land on which he set foot, because of his complete fidelity to the Lord" (Deuteronomy 1:34-36).

Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, "It is written, 'My house shall be a house of prayer'; but you have made it a den of robbers." Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard (Luke 19:41-44).

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I have been thinking much over the past couple of days about the video I posted on Lovett Weem's presentation of the coming "death tsunami" in United Methodism. (If you haven't yet watched it, I encourage you to do so before you continue reading.) What I am about to write likely applies to Mainline Protestantism in general, but since my context for the past twenty-seven years has been as a United Methodist pastor, my reflections in this post are written with my denomination in mind.

When I started in pastoral ministry, in what seems like a long time ago, I and my fellow wet-behind-the-ears colleagues were told that as a denomination we were in decline and that things had to change, but we were trained not to institute change too quickly because the folks in the pews needed to be brought along slowly. They needed to be persuaded and they needed to own the change that was so necessary. So we young pastors did what we were told. We made an attempt to make the changes necessary in the church to, at the very least, slow down the rate of decline. The results of that strategy yielded very little. Our congregations continued in decline and do so now even more rapidly in this new year of 2012. That strategy was not successful because we effectively allowed those in the church who wanted no change to remain in charge and call the shots. We tried to work with "the old guard" and bring them along, but knowing that they could outlast any pastoral appointment, they continued in their old ways. (By the way, "old" here does not necessarily refer to age. There are plenty of younger members of the old guard as well.) The few visionaries in our churches who were ready to move forward in new ways of mission in making disciples of Jesus Christ became so discouraged that the old guard was left in charge thwarting their endeavors, they moved on to other places where they could do serious kingdom work (more often than not in a church that was not United Methodist).

But we continued with this strategy, leaving those in charge whose views of the church were less purpose driven and much more preference driven. I suppose we continued this strategy because most pastors are people pleasers who want to make everybody happy, and since we are about reconciliation we needed to try to bring everyone along. Of course, that is not what happened because the old guard wasn't interested in reconciliation and being brought along; all they wanted was to have their way and continue to play at church the way they had done so since the days before they could remember. After all, at some point 1957 may return, and we United Methodists needed to be ready. Albert Einstein said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result. If Einstein was right, we United Methodists are crazy all the way around. The old guard is crazy to think that if they just do what they continue to do, at some point the people will come stampeding through the door. Those who hoped they could change the old guard were crazy to continue to work slowly with them even though there was no evidence that any old guard in any old church had ever changed.

So, now it is 2012, and the numbers don't lie. Our decline as a denomination is almost in a free fall. We are an elderly congregation. The problem, of course, is not that we have elderly people in our churches. Our mature members make a valuable contribution to the mission of the church of Jesus Christ. The problem is that we have failed to bring in the younger generations and the death tsunami is now heading toward us and it is picking up speed. Some estimate that of the 35,000 or so United Methodist congregations currently active in the United States, only 5000 of them will have their doors open in twenty years. And in spite of this crisis situation we are still being told that change has to come slowly; that we have to work with people because if we upset them they might leave. The problem is that people have been leaving the church for many years now. People always leave the church-- they die, they move, they simply go elsewhere. The problem is we are not making disciples of Jesus Christ in order to replace them. A church that is more worried about keeping people from leaving than interested in whom they will attract is a church in decline. A church that is more interested in keeping parishioners than making disciples is a church that is in survival mode.

Jesus tells us in John's Gospel that fruit cannot be borne unless something dies. I have wondered out loud on this blog suggesting that perhaps United Methodism is currently experiencing exile-- an exile of its own doing-- and that is why we are in decline; and we cannot return from exile becoming a vital denomination once again until we experience the full effect of our wilderness wanderings. Perhaps we cannot move forward as a denomination until the death tsunami has passed.

While we have continued to work with the old guard hoping for something different to happen, in the Bible we see that God actually gets fed up with the old guard and shuts them down. In the wilderness of Sinai there were plenty of self-appointed members of the "Back to Egypt Committee" who had decided that the bondage of slavery was not as bad as the challenge of moving through the wilderness toward the Promised Land. And while God was patient with them, his willingness to deal with these folks had a limit. At some point, he decides the people of Israel cannot move forward as long as the old guard, who refuses to be faithful, is running the show. There will be no moving forward until the death tsunami comes upon them in the wilderness. This is harsh, to be sure, but if God will only tolerate the nonsense for so long, why do we continue to think we should?

After Jesus enters Jerusalem one last time before his death, he walks into the Temple, that area so sacred to devout Jews, and he trashes the place in a symbolic act meant to communicate that God was fed up. God was fed up with those who had turned the Temple worship into an exclusive country club instead of a place where all could come to worship. Jesus was not upset that they were selling sacrifices, which was a legitimate practice. He was angry that they had set up shop in the court of the Gentiles preventing Gentiles from worshiping as well. And now Jesus was announcing that God had reached the limits of his patience. Those who had been entrusted by God will be trusted no longer. The old guard will be replaced.

I do believe that the future of United Methodism is indeed bright. Our Wesleyan heritage is a missional one. But I simply cannot avoid the conclusion that we will be unable to move into that future, into that vital life giving future, without death. That while the coming death tsunami is tragic, it is necessary for the church to move forward once again in making disciples of Jesus Christ for transformation of the world.

I do think we have UM churches that are up to the challenge. I believe strongly that the church I currently serve is up to the challenge; but nevertheless, we must go through the full measure of our exile.

Sometimes death is the only way forward... and sometimes you have to turn over some tables.

Coffee-- The Beverage of Revolutionaries

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

I love coffee! Maybe that explains why I can be so contrarian.

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From NPR:

Wherever it spread, coffee was popular with the masses but challenged by the powerful.

"If you look at the rhetoric about drugs that we're dealing with now — like, say, crack — it's very similar to what was said about coffee," Stewart Allen, author of The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, tells The Salt.

Monarchs and tyrants publicly argued that coffee was poison for the bodies and souls of their subjects, but Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — says their real concern was political.

According to one story, an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul.

"He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government," says Allen.

Coffee fueled dissent — not just in the Ottoman Empire but all through the Western world. The French and American Revolutions were planned, in part, in the dark corners of coffeehouses. In Germany, a fearful Frederick the Great demanded that Germans switch from coffee to beer. He sent soldiers sniffing through the streets, searching for the slightest whiff of the illegal bean.

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You can read the entire article, "Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head!" here.

Kingdom Pushes Us to Church

2012-01-18T07:52:00.002-05:00

Scot McKnight has written a post on Luke Timothy Johnson's new book, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church. I have yet to read it but it sounds like it puts forth an argument which I will find agreeable. Scot writes of Johnson's argument:

I agree that Luke-Acts is misread if seen through the lens of anti-empire ideology. Instead, it is a politics "more possible to be realized by small intentional communities than by worldwide administrations" and has to do with "deep derangement of human dispositions … a liberation from dispositions that corrupt all social programs and a demand for dispositions and actions that work for the transformation of all social practices" (74).

In other words, kingdom pushes to church; he has somewhat of an ecclesial view of kingdom.

Kingdom of God today: we see an already and not yet view of kingdom, and it is a summons at two levels, both necessary: personal and political. The "political" is not reduced to partisan politics in society but to an ecclesially based new society, and the personal is not reduced to personal pietism.

This is spot on stuff. As I continue to say-- when Christians hear the word "politics" they should not think state; they should think church. For Christians, our politic is church. But that clearly is not what it has been and both the Christian right and the left are guilty of making the church somehow beside the point. Because we have reduced the "political" to partisan politics we have reduced the church to one more social agency and one more culturally acceptable option to choose from-- like the having season tickets for the local sports team and a membership in the zoological society-- though we are actually more excited about going to the ballgame than being an ecclesially based new society.

As Stanley Hauerwas has prophetically said, "in the name of being politically responsible, the church became politically invisible."
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(NOTE: Scot mentions a book he is co-editing with Joe Modica that will be released this autumn, Jesus Is Lord Caesar Is Not, which will examine current anti-imperial readings of the New Testament. I am honored to be a contributor to that volume. Yes, shameless self-promotion, I know. What can I say?)

Current Realities in the UMC

2012-01-17T17:06:00.000-05:00

"Leaders help define reality.... Nothing is more limiting to a group than the inability to talk about the truth."

In this video Lovett Weems, Jr. is spot on.

Lovett H. Weems, Jr. - UMC Realities from Lewis Center on Vimeo.

In Greece, Pedophilia Is Now a Disability

2012-01-17T07:58:00.003-05:00

Morven Baker calls attention to the growing list of state recognized disabilities in Greece that will now include pedophilia and exhibitionism.

Other disability groups in Greece are outraged. A little outrage now and again is a good thing.

MLK's Letter and Papers Now Online

2012-01-16T07:33:00.000-05:00

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, The King Center has made close to a million documents, words written by King, as well as photos, available online.

The documents are posted in the form of a collage. The site is very well done.

Check it out here.

The Methodist Blogs Weekly Links of Note

2012-01-14T13:23:00.001-05:00

Henry Neufeld: When Campaign Finance Reform Has the Reverse Effect

Bishop James King: How to have a happy New Year

Shane Raynor: Being Salt

Jeremy Smith: Why don't more Gen-Xers 'get' Online Relationships?

Jim Doepken: Looking for an Epiphany

Matt Kelley: A Little "Tebowing" of My Own

Ken Carter: the adaptive challenge and the call to action: a simple suggestion

John Ed Mathison: The Forgiven Are Forgiving

Russ Ham: Winning Involves Working

Mike Slaughter: Hijacked- Responding to the Partisan Church Divide

Becca Clark: I love Jesus, but I kinda like religion too

John Carney: God in the locker room

Dave Faulkner: Can We Love Jesus and Hate Religion?

Our God Is Too Small

2012-01-13T06:51:00.000-05:00

Methodist blogger, John Meunier calls attention to the "supernaturalism divide" between the northern Christian church and the southern Christian church. John quotes Peter Berger on the subject:

A few months ago I was talking about this North/South split with a Methodist minister in Boston. I said that, it seemed to me, the North could be put on the defensive over this split. When he asked what I meant, I said: "I would like you to explain to an African Christian why you do not raise people from the dead in your church." I said that the African interlocutor might go on: "Jesus did. The Apostles did. We do. Why don"t you?"

Thanks to our "Enlightened" and Deistic fathers and mothers in the past few centuries we have inherited a miniature God, a God that has been tied down, a God who does not intervene in our world in any dynamic way. As N.T. Wright states, the God of the Enlightenment is one who stays upstairs and lets us have control of the downstairs. In our "Enlightened" Western world we have created God in our own image-- a powerless God who does nothing we cannot explain, an absentee landlord God who leaves us only with reason to make our way through the world, a domesticated God who never stirs things up, who is always civil and who just wants us to improve our lives instead of insisting we renovate them. In short, the modern Enlightenment God is not very interesting.

The Modern Enlightened Western God is not the God of the Bible. Indeed, the very way we structure the discussion with the natural/supernatural dichotomy is in itself problematic. The Bible makes no such distinction. The Bible does not view God as spending most of his time in the upstairs only to occasionally wander downstairs to do something miraculous and then once again retire back to the attic. The God of the Bible is here. The God of the Bible is always here. The God of the Bible is working, often behind the scenes, working in the actions of the faithful and in timely words of wisdom. But God also continues to confound us in his actions, doing the unexpected-- and not only doing the unexpected, but also performing the unexplainable.

The debate is not over the natural vs. the supernatural; the argument is over whether we are going to shrink the God of the Universe into acting in the miniaturized ways we deem appropriate, or are we going to let go of our desire to control the downstairs and let God be God and let our always surprising and untameable God work in ways God sees fit?

The question is not whether we can raise the dead. We human beings have no such power apart from the modern marvels of medicine. But God can raise the dead without the aid of drugs and machines. That very claim stands at the center of our faith. Easter is not a post-it note stuck in the margin of the Christian narrative. It is the story that give life to the narrative; it is the story that makes the narrative true. And if God can create life... and you and I are proof of that... then surely God can raise the dead. He has done so; and can continue to do so if God so chooses.

There are more than a few reasons why the church in the West is in decline. But surely one of the reasons it is so is that in our miniaturization of God, we have created a God that is simply not very interesting... a God whose favorite flavor is vanilla. We have our "Enlightened" fathers and mothers to thank for such a boring deity. But we as well are without excuse because too many Christians in the West have become apologists for such a tamed, domesticated divine being. We have created a God acceptable to Christianity's cultured despisers.

We northern Christians can learn a few things from our southern Christian sisters and brothers. I have worshiped with them. I have been part of their healing services and assisted them in their mission to the those around them. Their God is the God of the Bible. Their God is interesting.

Is it any wonder that their churches are growing? Is it any surprise that our northern churches are in decline? No one wants to watch a dull movie. No one wants to worship a boring God.

The Road to Freedom Requires Courage

2012-01-12T15:08:00.002-05:00

The people of Israel have been in slavery in Egypt. They have been slaves for so long that there is no one alive who remembers what it is like to be free. Your Egyptian taskmasters are harsh, generously using the whip to keep you moving as you toil from sunup to sundown building Pharaoh’s monuments-- testaments to his power and his greatness-- and to his exploitation of others.

You are fairly well fed, not because Pharaoh is concerned for your personal well being, but because he needs your stamina for his own ends. And while the food may be decent, slavery still tastes bitter. Some of your fellow Israelites have given up hope of deliverance. They wonder where God is. They wonder why God hasn't acted on their behalf. It appears that this will simply be their lot in life. They dislike it, but they have accepted it.

But you have listened to others among your people who still have hope. They believe that God will deliver you in God's time. Why he has not yet done so, no one can say; after all who can know the mind of the Lord? But they have told you that deliverance is coming. They tell you to have hope, to believe. God is faithful. God keeps God's promises.

Then one day, while you are in the middle of your day's dosage of back-breaking labor, you hear some news-- perhaps a rumor-- but it is making its way through your people. Someone has arrived from the desert, an Israelite named Moses. He has come to announce to Pharaoh that the Israelites are to be freed, that their God demands it. Could it be true? Could this Moses be the one to lead the people to freedom? Some readily believe; they are so desperate for anything that will allow them to hang on to their hope. Others gave up so long ago, that as far as they are concerned, this rumor is just one more set up for disappointment. It's just one more opportunity to be played for a fool. But you believe. You have no reason to have faith, but you do. You are ready to place your trust in this Moses, believing that God will use him to take you on the road to freedom.

But the journey to liberation will not be easy. Just because God has promised to deliver you does not mean the trip will be easy, nor unfraught with peril. God never promised things would always go well. Indeed, even getting out of Egypt will be quite a chore. Pharaoh is not going to part with his slave labor force without a fight. Indeed, he will make things worse in the hope of turning the Israelites against their newly found deliverer, Moses. He will force them to gather their own straw to make bricks. Pharaoh is not only ruthless; he is quite savvy.

But on the road to freedom courage is critical because such a journey is not for the faint of heart. It is not for those who value comfort above all things. Some will blame Moses for their situation. How easily we human beings can forget the facts of our situation when the emotion of the moment takes over.

But God will make good on his promise. The Israelites will leave Egypt with Moses in the lead. They will travel the road to freedom to the Promised Land. But the journey will still not be easy. Some will want to give up and go back deciding slavery isn't that bad after all. But others will move forward with Moses because they have the courage needed to travel the road to freedom.

Courage is critical.