Is it really Christ-mas in Britain this year?

Last week, David Cameron made an interesting speech on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The item that received most press coverage in the speech was Mr Cameron asserting that “We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so.” He admitted personally to be a committed but only vaguely practising Christian with some deep doubts about some theological issues.

He continued: “I know and fully respect that many people in this country do not have a religion. And I am also incredibly proud that Britain is home to many different faith communities, who do so much to make our country stronger. But what I am saying is that the Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today.”

Some would argue that a time of national crisis and difficulty is precisely when the church can shine in society. The Economist from the previous week had made just such a point in an insightful piece (read it in full here, or an extract below).

Postscript added on 25 December: The Queen’s speech today was filled with Christian messages, and a strong almost evangelistic message. It’s probably the strongest specifically Christian message I have ever heard from a member of the Royal family in the UK. Is this a sign that the leaders of the country have made a decision to use the Christian faith as a means to developing the nation? If so, the church needs to jump at the opportunity. But it must do so realising that people are seeking God, not the church. They want faith, not a religion.

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Study: Why Young Christians Leave the Church

One of the biggest ‘elephants in the room’ for evangelical Christians is why so many of their young people leave the church in their late twenties. There’s no denying this happens. There are too many “used to evangelical Christians” running around. Something must be wrong.

Some people blame the way youth ministry is run. For example, see this hour long documentary produced by a young churchgoer, “Divided“. They have a point, but I don’t buy into their analysis completely.

A new book by David Kinnaman, Barna Group president, provides some more detail. “You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Church” is an excellent read. The Christian Post reviewed it and provides a summary of the findings (read it here, or a summary below).

This is a problem I have been passionate about for nearly three decades. I continue to be dismayed at how few churches are trying new things in an attempt to reverse nearly a half century of losing young people. This book from Barna provides some clues. What is your church going to do about it?

Study: Why Young Christians Leave the Church

By Jeff Schapiro | Christian Post Reporter, Sep 2011

Nearly three out of every five young Christians disconnect from their churches after the age of 15, but why? A new research study released by the Barna Group points to six different reasons as to why young people aren’t staying in their pews.

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I don’t want an easy faith

One of the most amazing things about God’s Kingdom is that, by being a conscious part of it I find myself in a truly global community through which God is able to speak and work in my life. This morning, I really needed that community. I won’t bore you with why, except to say that those who claim the title “Biblical Christians” might do well to read the verses in their Bible (even their interpretation thereof) that warn that no matter how true your statements, if you have no love you are no better than a clanging cymbal.

Some good friends gave me good advice. That helped. But, then, an email arrived in my inbox. It was the RSS feed from one of my favourite bloggers on Christian issues, Rachel Held Evans. Rachel has been in the media quite a bit over the past few weeks, as she finished living one complete year in an entirely “Biblical” way (not cutting her hair, living in a tent in the garden for one week every month during her period, no jewelry, etc). Well, yes, ironic, of course (that’s partly why I like her so much). Her almost daily insights on her blog are helpful, challenging, inspiring and smart in equal measure.

But today, her blog entry was just perfectly, precisely what I needed. It will be added to my personal liturgy as a prayer to be often repeated. Thank you, Rachel, for being God’s voice for me today.

I don’t want an easy faith

by Rachel Held Evans
A prayer for the journey in the Kingdom of God on earth

Some like to say that the bravest thing Christians can do is defend their faith, to stand their ground and refuse to change.

But it’s easier to defend our faith than to subject it to scrutiny.
It’s easier to dig in our heels than to go exploring.
It’s easier to regurgitate answers than to ask good questions.
It’s easier to cling to our beliefs than to hold them with open hands.
It’s easier to assume we’re always right than to acknowledge we may be wrong.

I don’t want an easy faith, I want a brave faith.

I want a faith that takes risks, that asks questions, that experiments, that evolves, that thrives amidst change and obeys amidst doubt. I want a faith that engages both my heart and my head, a faith that operates out of love, not fear, a faith that leaps when it needs to and crawls when it has to.

I want the kind of faith that moves mountains precisely because it is small: small enough to need, small enough grow, small enough to surrender to a God that is much bigger than it will ever be.

I don’t want an easy faith.

Source: Rachel Held Evans

Christianity as Country Club – by Scot McKinight

Author and commentator, Scot McKnight, recently wrote an article for the Huffington Post. I think he is spot on. You can read the original here, or an extract below:

Christianity as Country Club

by Scot McKnight, Huffington Post, 6 Sep 2011

Christianity sometimes presents itself as a country club. It presents itself this way even when it doesn’t want to, and sometimes it doesn’t even know it. I grew up loving to play golf but I played on the public course. I had friends who played at the local country club. When I visited the country club I felt like a visitor even though the members were wonderfully hospitable. Members felt like members and visitors felt like visitors, and knowing that you could “visit” only by invitation made the difference clear.

Many experience the church this way. Members know they belong, and visitors know they don’t. Well, after all, we might reason, the Christian faith is a religion of salvation, and Stephen Prothero’s recent book, “God is Not One,” depicted Christianity as a faith concerned with the “way of salvation.” And if you are saved, you are a member; if you are not saved, you are not. You might visit, but until you get saved you will know you are not in the club.

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From Minority to Majority – a problem for Reformed Protestants

This post was originally written on 10 June 2009, on the previous version of my blog

I was recently sent an article from the Associated Baptist Press (ABP, USA), entitled: “Baptists urged to consider risks of ‘majoritarian faith’”, by David Wilkinson. It is a news article about a recent lecture by Baptist historian Doug Weaver, speaking at the Baptist History and Heritage Society annual meeting.

His main point was that Baptists (and by inference, other Reformed Protestants) were shaped and formed as persecuted, minority groups. Now, they are majority, mainstream groups, and are in danger (I’d say they have already) lost their distinctiveness and compromised their values. In particular, he is concerned that Baptists have abandoned their belief in religious liberty (and in liberty in general).

While Baptists proudly point to religious liberty and church-state separation as their distinctive contributions to American history, Weaver said, contemporary Baptist heirs to that tradition may find it difficult to relate to their 17th-century forebears, who were part of a persecuted minority of dissenters to official state-supported denominations.

“We are used to being a part of the majority. We are the Bible Belt, maybe even the buckle of that belt. We are Baptists, the largest body of Protestants in the United States,” Weaver, a religion professor at Baylor University, said. “We have climbed the ladder of success numerically, socially and intellectually. We have an air of respectability. We are the majority; hear us roar.”

In contrast, he noted, it was the persecuted minority groups – the Anabaptists, Baptists and Quakers – that “pushed the Christian world in the 16th and 17th centuries to face the music and hear cries for complete religious liberty.”

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Four “lanes” of the emerging church

This post was originally written on 7 March 2009, on the previous version of my blog

If you’ve done any reading on the emerging church, you’ll probably know the name Mark Driscoll. He has distanced himself from “Emergent”, the voice of emerging church in the USA. But he nevertheless still considers himself as “emerging”, although he prefers the label “Reformed Missional” or “Emerging Reformers”.

The video can be found at YouTube (click here). Or see below.

I think he is overly critical of the “fourth lane”, which he labels the “Emerging Liberals”. He is incorrect about Rob Bell, for example, who does NOT say that we can get rid of the virgin birth. It’s interesting. Driscoll says in this video below that “they are asking questions that no pastors should be asking”. Maybe that’s the big difference here. Reformed guys think that some issues should not be discussed, and that all Truth (with a capital T) has already been discovered (i.e. we are not wrong on any major issues right now in the history of the church). Anyone who is open to having conversations about this is labelled a liberal, and is seen as dangerous.

You decide.

But, here, at least is Driscoll’s video. I don’t buy into his analysis of the “emerging liberals”, but it probably fairly represents the concern most people have with the “emerging church”.

The video can be found at YouTube (click here).

On the previous blog, the following useful comments were added to the original post:

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Engaging with Islam – with an agenda of peace, reconciliation and truth seeking

I wrote yesterday about the need to engage appropriately with skeptics of the Christian faith. It’s also important for Christians to engage with people of other faiths and religions. The most important route to lasting global peace right now is for the three major monotheistic religions to find ways to peacefully engage with each other.

It is amazing to me that the Christian right wing in the United States has so easily and quickly engaged – even integrated – with Judaism (and especially Zionistic Judaism). I don’t want to comment on that issue in this blog entry, but it does indicate that major religions are able to find ways to engage with each other when they share a common goal (like the protection of the State of Israel). What better goal for all religious leaders to have than world peace?

So, it was with interest that I read about Amr Khaled in the (very conservative) Spectator magazine Christmas edition. This is a Muslim cleric who seems to be gaining the kind of reputation in the Islamic world that Billy Graham or Bill Hybels have in the Protestant Christian world. Although there would be obviously be significant theological differences between us, I nevertheless support his efforts to bring about a calmer, more rational, more engaging Islam. That can only be a good thing, and should be supported by all Christian everywhere. Maybe this is a common space for all religious people (and those of no faith, too) to play.

But read the article for yourself (at The Spectator website, or an extract below) and make up your own mind.

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Reflections on Christmas and Christianity in the USA

The New York Times op-ed column this past weekend included an excellent analysis of two recent books and what they tell us about Christians in the USA. Well worth a read, especially at this time of year.

You can read the piece at the NY Times website here, or an extract below.

A Tough Season for Believers

By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: NY Times op-ed column, December 19, 2010

Christmas is hard for everyone. But it’s particularly hard for people who actually believe in it.

In a sense, of course, there’s no better time to be a Christian than the first 25 days of December. But this is also the season when American Christians can feel most embattled. Their piety is overshadowed by materialist ticky-tack. Their great feast is compromised by Christmukkwanzaa multiculturalism. And the once-a-year churchgoers crowding the pews beside them are a reminder of how many Americans regard religion as just another form of midwinter entertainment, wedged in between “The Nutcracker” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

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Is Jesus left wing? (You better believe it!)

The conservative right wing have co-opted Jesus as their personal mascot. But their Jesus is not the Jesus I see in the Bible. The latest cover article of The New Statesman magazine looks at this issue in an excellent way. You can read a lengthy extract below, or the full original at the New Statesman website here.

What would Jesus do?

Mehdi Hasan
Published 15 December 2010

Conservatives claim Christ as one of their own. But in word and deed, the son of God was much more left-wing than the religious right likes to believe.

Was Jesus Christ a lefty? Philosophers, politicians, theologians and lay members of the various Christian churches have long been divided on the subject. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev once declared: “Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.” The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, went further, describing Christ as “the greatest socialist in history”. But it’s not just Russian ex-communists and Bolivarian socialists who consider Jesus to be a fellow-traveller. Even the Daily Mail sketch-writer Quentin Letts once confessed: “Jesus preached fairness – you could almost call him a lefty.”

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Classical Flash Mob: A wonderful intergenerational experience

One of the questions I am most often asked when I do consulting on different generations with churches and faith-based groups, is “what can we do to get young and old people doing things together”. Often, the question behind the question is about how to get young and old to enjoy the same sort of worship service together. That’s a tough (but not impossible) ask.

My response is normally to push people to think beyond the church service, and to think of actual service. Serving each other, and serving others together, is probably the easiest way to create inter-generational experiences.

So, I really enjoyed a YouTube video that is the most watched video on the web in the past week. I enjoyed it even more that it was my mother who sent me the link. It’s a four minute video of a very well executed flash mob singing the Hallelujah Chorus. It struck me that this is the perfect Christmas inter-generational experience. Young and old would both love this experience. And it is such a feel good experience, one can only imagine it will live long in the memories of all who were there.

Watch the video below, or at YouTube directly (and join the – literally – millions of others who have done the same in the past few days):

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The last man to wear pantaloons

A while ago I spent an evening flipping in and out of a B-grade mini-series on life in the early 1920s. It was the time of transition between the Victorian era and the modern Industrial era. The shift from horses to cars, from provincialism to nationalism, from rural to urban living (for the rich), from hooped skirts to the sleek flappers (The term “flapper”, which became common slang in the 1920s, referred to a “new breed” of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered “decent” behavior. The typical flapper was unafraid to wear cosmetics or to be seen smoking or drinking alcoholic beverages in public – from Wikipedia), from top hats and cravats to suits and ties.

It was a fascinating look at the times of transition, following one man and his family from mid 1800s to the 1930s. One of the interesting things for me was the clothes people wore – epecially the men. A question sprung to mind: who was the last man to get up in the morning, go to his wardrobe and decide to put on pantaloons?

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God’s Kingdom Meets the Real World

A few months ago, I spoke at a men’s conference in Johannesburg, at South Africa’s leading Methodist Church. They asked me to speak on being a Christian in a world gone mad. I used the opportunity to do a bit of a “preach” on what I think is an absolute essential for any Christian man (or woman) who wants to make sense of the world: we need to change our view on what we think we’re here for.

You can listen to the podcast recording of the session at the church’s conference website (if you battle to listen or download it, please let me know, as I have an MP3 copy). If you want to download a copy of the slides I used and was referring to, I have created a PDF file and you can get it here.

Multigenerational ministries in local churches

In 2000, I wrote my Masters thesis on the topic of multigenerational ministries in the context of a local church. It was an extension of the work I had been doing on different generations, and a forerunner to a best selling book I wrote a few years later that applied generational thinking to all aspects of life and work (that book is “Mind the Gap” – see here for more details and to purchase copies).

I have received numerous requests to post my thesis online, and so, here it is. The thesis itself was nearly 200 pages in length – the HTML file is 1.5Mb in size. You can read it online by clicking here – feel free to save it to your machine to read at your leisure.

There are some parts of the thesis that feel a bit out of date and simplistic. But I hope it sparks your thinking and influences your practice of multi-generational ministry in your church.

The Gospel of Wealth – are Faith and the American Dream compatible?

An op-ed piece in a recent New York Times reviews a new book that suggests that the American Dream (health, wealth, happiness, freedom) are not compatible with the Gospel. The author says Americans should live as if they earned $ 50,000 a year and give the rest away. The NYT piece makes some great points. Read it at the NYT site here, or an extract below.

The Gospel of Wealth

By DAVID BROOKS, Op-ed columnist, The New York Times, September 6, 2010

Maybe the first decade of the 21st century will come to be known as the great age of headroom. During those years, new houses had great rooms with 20-foot ceilings and entire new art forms had to be invented to fill the acres of empty overhead wall space.

People bought bulbous vehicles like Hummers and Suburbans. The rule was, The Smaller the Woman, the Bigger the Car — so you would see a 90-pound lady in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders.

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Competing Christianities

In a recent column for the ABP (Associated Baptist Press), David Gushee wrote an excellent article on the issue of Christianity vs Christianities. I think he makes an extraordinarily good point. Given the ways in which some Christians abuse the message of Christ (just think of the recent attempts to burn qu’rans as one example), it’s important for those of us who are trying to find a way to be Christ-followers in the 21st century to state clearly that there are different versions of Christianity out there.

Gushee writes:

I remember the first time it became crystal clear to me that there is no such thing as Christianity, but only competing Christianities. It was when I was working on my doctoral dissertation on Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. During that time I attended a most remarkable conference in New York on hidden children of the Holocaust. This gathering brought together the now-grown adults who had hidden from the Nazis to survive. Some of these children were saved by Christian families.

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