When You Joust …
Don’t aim for the straw man, go for the flesh and blood one aiming a lance at you. Read the rest of this entry
Don’t aim for the straw man, go for the flesh and blood one aiming a lance at you. Read the rest of this entry
Evangelical leaders of previous generations are in the process of passing the torch to younger leaders, for whom there are at least 10 fresh challenges. We’ve considered the challenge of Navigating Newfound Authority, Waging a New Bloodless Revolution, Overcoming Spiritual Superficiality; and now a fourth challenge:
Creating Culture.
New leaders will be faced with the challenge of combating what has become transcendent societal secularism. The culture gives no one– young believers, newlyweds, young parents, mid-lifers, or the aging–help in dealing withthe hard work and hard choices that are necessary to live godly lives in a secularized environment.
Who teaches us values? Who leads the celebration for what is right and good? Who establishes the boundaries of decency? Who paints the living portraits of beauty?
Today, the answer to all of those questions is usually someone who is not guided by the biblical view of life or the Creator’s definitions of goodness and human flourishing. A rising generation of Christians seems to be attuned to cultural trends, but will the leaders among them influence the cultural waves or be carried along by them to an unknown destination?
“We bear children, plant crops, build cities, form governments, and create works of art. While sin introduced a destructive power into God’s created order, it did not obliterate that order. And when we are redeemed, we are both freed from sin and restored to do what God designed us to do: create culture.”
In How Now Shall we Live, Colson and Nancy Pearcey called this the cultural commission:
“God cares not only about redeeming souls but also about restoring his creation. He calls us to be agents not only of his saving grace, but also of his common grace. Our job is not only to build up the church but also to build a society to the glory of God. As agents of God’s common grace, we are called to help sustain and renew his creation, to uphold the created institutions of family and society, to pursue science and scholarship, to create works of art and beauty, and to heal and help those suffering from the results of the Fall.”
Os Guinness pins the blame not on the culture, but on the church:
“Much of the opposition to Christians has been brought down on our own heads through our sub-Christian behavior, as in the failure of Christians demonstrating love for their enemies in obedience to the call of Jesus,” Guinness writes in The Last Christian on Earth. “We’ve lost a tough-minded understanding of ‘worldliness.’ Though we’re getting better at recognizing and resisting philosophies and ideologies –secularism, humanism, postmodernism– we are often naïve about the shaping power of culture. But the real menace of the modern world comes in its philosophies – in things such as ‘consumerism’ and ‘secularization.’”
Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making, writes on his blog:
“Cultural transformation is something that a lot of Christians talk about and aspire to. We want to be a part of transforming the culture. The question is, how is culture transformed? Does it happen just because we think more about culture, or because we pay more attention to culture? As I was thinking about cultural transformation I became convinced that culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world. So culture-making answers the “how” question rather than just “what” we are about. We seek the transformation of every culture but how we do it is by actually making culture.”
In an interview, sociologist Peter Berger observed that in the U.S. evangelicals are shifting from being largely a blue-collar constituency to becoming a college educated population. His question is, will Christians going into the arts, business, government, the media, and film
That’s a primary question for the next generation of evangelical leaders.
I have not offered any opinion of mine own on the proposed Mosque site. I think a lot of odd things have been said about it, not the least of which was the GOP reaction to his expressing the mainstream conservative opinion on the matter, that they do in fact posses a Constitutional right to build but that it is a very bad idea. One has to remember an idea you support, when spoken by one on the other side of the aisle, remains a good idea (and recall that even a broken clock is right twice a day). Another silly thing touted is that this building is “two whole blocks away” and nowhere near the ‘Ground Zero’ location. The reason that notion is silly is that the Park51/Cordoba people have chosen this location is its proximity to the former World Trade site. It seems to me that the those who protest that this is too far away miss a crucial point. Neither the sponsors nor the objectors see that is correct. Doubtless one can point at countless other ideas fronted on this topic which are incoherent or silly. Read the rest of this entry
1. Crisis in the Environmental Community: The climate lobby has declined dramatically from its days of high confidence after the 2008 election and it is scrambling to determine the next steps:
A year ago, these groups seemed to be at the peak of their influence, needing only the Senate’s approval for a landmark climate-change bill. But they lost that fight, done in by the sluggish economy and opposition from business and fossil-fuel interests.
2. God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck: Southern Seminary’s Russ Moore writes about relying on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads.
It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.
3. Advertising Parasites: Ads that follow you from site to site.
“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”
4. Jim Wallis Apologizes: Sojourners’ Jim Wallis apologizes to World’s Marvin Olasky.
“I was wrong, out of anger at the insinuation about the dependence on these foundations, I was wrong to imply that like Beck, Marvin lies for a living,” Wallis said. “Glenn Beck does lie for a living. Marvin Olasky doesn’t lie for a living; that’s not something I should say about a brother in Christ.”
5. Crooked Afghan Partner?: Another Diem? Karazi fires his corruption fighter.
“What he was doing was very important,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said of Mr. Faqiryar. “Those charged with pursuing corruption need to continue their work without political interference. It’s something we are watching to make sure the Afghan government lives up to the pledges it has made in battling corruption.”
6. America’s Creativity Crisis?: For the first time, research shows American creativity declining.
What’s driving the drop? According to Newsweek, technology and education are particularly nefarious culprits. At home, kids are spending more time watching television and playing video games; at school, our educational system is evaporating the creative juices. Neither of these criticisms is particularly new, but they are informative within the context of the creativity discussion.
7. Baseball Replay Confirms Walk-off Homer: For the first time, the limited replay rule is used on a play that ends game.
McCann capped a stunning comeback with a replay-assisted homer that gave Atlanta a 7-6 victory over the Marlins on Sunday – the first time a game ended on a call using video. Without it, McCann might have only gotten credit for a double and the game would have continued on. Instead, he was jumping into the arms of his teammates after the umps took a second look, taking advantage of a limited replay rule that went into effect two years earlier almost to the day – Aug. 28, 2008 – to make sure they got these sort of calls right.
Evangelical leaders of previous generations are in the process of passing the torch to younger leaders, for whom there are at least 10 fresh challenges. We’ve considered the challenge of Navigating Newfound Authority and Waging a New Bloodless Revolution; now a third challenge:
Overcoming Spiritual Superficiality
In the wake of megachurch-building success and a new ability to be culture-cool, the pews are filled with biblical illiterates who may be ill-equipped for the next personal or national crisis. In many cases spiritual depth has been sacrificed in the interest of growth and new church models are designed to multiply conversions but fall short in assuring spiritual growth and doctrinal understanding.”
The fear that theological lessons will bore and drive away new converts and a generation with a miniscule attention span, churches are not guiding their members through the fundamentals of the faith and the dangers of popular theological perversions such as:
Scot McKnight of North Park University and the Jesus Creed blog told Margaret Feinberg:
“The biggest challenge facing American evangelicals is Christian universalism– the belief that everyone will eventually be saved because of what Christ has done….I think many young evangelical adults who have been reared in the church have imbibed pluralism and tolerance from their years in the public educational system.”
Norman Geisler, Christian apologist and president of Southern Evangelical Seminary said:
“The evangelical church in America is about 3,000 miles wide and an inch deep. Doctrinally, we are very shallow. We have enough religion to makes us susceptible, but not enough doctrine to make us discerning. You can’t recognize error until you can recognize the truth. I’m told that when government experts want to train people to recognize counterfeit currency, they study genuine currency. The same is true with doctrine.”
Some are recognizing the weaknesses. Bill Hybels, pastor of megachurch granddaddy Willowcreek, said after a study of the church’s ministry:
“We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their Bible between services, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.”
And that’s a key charge for the new evangelical generation: pair great growth, engaging entertainment, and compassionate service with the teaching of theological truth. Build strong and knowledgeable believers who will have the ability to dismiss error and to maintain their faith through difficult days.
Evangelical leaders of previous generations are in the process of passing the torch to younger leaders, for whom there are at least 10 fresh challenges.
We’ve considered the challenge of Navigating Newfound Authority; now a second challenge:
Waging a New Bloodless Revolution:
There is a divide in the evangelical church that is roughly along generational lines, although not entirely. The Evangelical Generation that began in the 70s has dedicated an enormous amount of its time, energies and resources to fighting the cultural corrosion of two values: First, the protection of human life from conception to natural death, threatened by the normalization of abortion-on-demand and the calls for euthanasia. Second, the protection of heterosexual marriage, seen as under fire by increasingly ambitious homosexual activism. Those who have championed these protections have often done so at the exclusion of other valuable causes, and at the cost of public popularity.
The Emerging Generation and others have identified pressing issues that deserve the attention of the church and are biblical values and imperatives that cannot be left to secular interests. These include care for the poor, stopping human trafficking, protection of God’s creation or environmental stewardship; nuclear non-proliferation; the dreadful crises of the African people, including AIDS; and clean water crises around the world. These are vital (and popular) causes.
Through my work with many organizations over the years, I have been involved in nearly all of these causes, and I have seen and felt the passion of people who commit their lives to the important missions to which God has called them. The most discouraging aspect of the Church’s work in all of these areas is that its leaders rarely speak to the importance of the followers of Jesus addressing both the traditional concerns and newer concerns.
I see two major challenges for young Christian leaders in public engagement:
To the barricades! Just don’t break anything.
I could come up with several more reasons, but thinking about Glenn Beck makes my head hurt.
Navigating Newfound Authority
During the last 50 years, neo-evangelicals have sought to break free from fundamentalist isolation and to give Christian orthodoxy a stronger voice than theological liberalism. They have gone far in achieving these goals, while also leaving the scars of the scorched earth strategy of the culture wars. A new generation of evangelicals will require the hand of God’s blessing to demonstrate the great wisdom, strength and grace that will needed to navigate current challenges and to be prepared to address the issues and crises that few of us can foresee or imagine. There are at least ten major challenges for young leaders; the first is identify these leaders.
We already know that there are many bright young leaders who can critique the church and analyze the actions of those who have preceded them. But can they lead? Will they be equipped to face fresh challenges?
Christian leaders for these times will need to be multi-dimensional and authentic; today there are few secrets and an alarming taste for exploitation of weaknesses. Leaders will need to be doctrinally sound, culturally relevant, publicly engaged, relationally winsome, attractively articulate, and morally consistent.
What young Christians may have what it takes to lead the church during the next generation and to be the face of American Christianity in the days ahead. I’m compiling a list of such potential leaders?
Here are three dozen on my list of candidates (with a hat tip to Brad Lomenick at Catalyst who has been thinking about these things). I’d like to hear for you: who do you think has the qualities and gifts to lead into the heart of the 21st century? Please let me know.
Yes, it’s that time of the week again, where I toss out a bunch of links that I was too lazy to do a full blog post on.
Turns out the Iraq war didn’t break the bank. It’s understandable that you might think that, but that only indicates a need to get your news from more sources. The MSM loves to parrot DNC talking points.
(Liberal) feminism is dead. Long live (conservative) feminism!
Jim Wallis said that Marvin Olasky (World magazine editor) “lies for a living” when Olasky noted that Wallis got $200,000 from George Soros. When it was pointed out that he, in fact, did, then came the abject apology in sackcloth and ashes, “Well, it was so small I forgot.” UPDATE: Wallis has issued a formal apology.
Three months ago, James Cameron was ready to “call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads”, speaking of those who dispute anthropogenic global warming. At the very last minute, after changing his demands over and over for how a debate was to be run, he cancelled. Now that takes guts. Or something.
In England, teachers are dropping history lessons on the Holocaust and the Crusades, for fear of offending Muslims who are taught Holocaust denial and a different view of the Crusades at local mosques. They’re afraid of challenging “anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils”. So much for academia being the standard bearer of truth and free speech.
A back door repeal of the First Amendment by … social workers? Well, when liberal ideologues get ahold of professional organizations, nuttiness does ensue. Look at most unions.
And finally, a US district judge put a temporary halt to embryonic stem cell research. Some believe this will devastate scientific research, but Steve Breen puts it in perspective. (Click for a larger image.)
As Christians, should our response to the mosque controversy be different than others? As I’ve written, I believe the Muslims seeking to build the mosque should demonstrate American instincts by building it down the road. That aside, how should Christians respond?
I certainly believe that in dissent and argument Christians should demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit. Here are some thoughts in this case:
Love (Your Enemies, Your Neighbors): We cannot hate Muslims because of their faith or even because of acts done in the name of Islam. We just can’t. Opposition to the placement of this mosque doesn’t mean we hate the individuals seeking the mosque or supporting it. Love for our neighbor does not mean we have to support everything they want to do. We’ve been down that road in other arguments.
Blessed are the Peacemakers: We do need to be peacemakers. But part of keeping the peace is to avoid provocation. While the mosque shouldn’t be built in a grieving area, Christians also should not be burning Korans and putting up signs about Islam being of the devil.
Kindness: Don’t portray these NYC neighbors worse than they may be. You don’t know them and I don’t either. Christians should not use hurtful language or false characterizations. There is enough ugliness in the media. Tone it down.
Protect the Faith: There are plenty of efforts to restrict the religious liberty of Christians in America. Don’t give those who wish us ill any ammunition to use the next time a Christian church wants to express itself in the public square. I do find it interesting that the liberals who are so vocal about the religious liberty of those who are wanted to build this mosque are rarely seen in the defense of any Christian display, building, or expression.
Jim Wallis Outrage
Did you see the articles or appearances by Sojourners head Jim Wallis on this topic? He wrote that as Christian peacemakers, we should support our Muslim friends in their desire to build a house of worship near Ground Zero.
While I don’t share Wallis’ politics, I share a Savior. But I’m troubled by what he wrote in his column. Not so much his arguments (although I disagree), but by his character assassination of his fellow Christians. He argues that peaceful Muslims should not judged because of the actions of Islamic 9/11 terrorists any more than he, as an evangelical Christian, should be “judged on the basis of fundamentalist Christians — some of whom have said and done terrible things.”
Rev. Wallis, are you really equating the rhetoric of fundamentalist Christians with the actions of terrorists who murdered thousands of people?
Over the years I have provided communications and public relations counsel and services to many Christian leaders (still do), both fundamentalists and (although not Wallis) evangelical liberals. I find this statement by Wallis as abhorrent as I did Jerry Falwell’s ill-timed assertion that Americans brought the 9/11 attacks upon themselves because of their sins.
Wallis should retract this statement. And I’ll hear him out on the mosque issue and on reconciliation when he completes a Jerry Falwell statue at the Sojourners headquarters. To paraphrase Wallis: “What does it mean to love our enemies as Jesus instructed us? Wasn’t Jerry Falwell your brother and your neighbor?“
Two generations of evangelical leaders are beginning to step aside for a younger group of thinkers, doers, and potential leaders. Evangelicalism has been led by a group of remarkable social entrepreneurs that built new churches and organizations and movements beginning in the 1950s by familiar figures such as Graham, Schaeffer, Henry, Ockenga, and Engstrom; and then by those that splashed across the front pages and airwaves from the 1970s to today–such as Falwell, Dobson, Colson, Robertson, and Bright. The giants are passing or getting long in the tooth, and tomorrow will belong to the often brash and confident young Christians who are somewhat anxious to carry the torch.
The evangelical torch that is being passed has illuminated a spiritual path for billions of people over the last 40 years. But that same flame has been wielded at times in a scorched earth policy that has left little good will for orthodox Christians, and insufficient cultural connections to the millions of people who still need to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. Today’s warriors are left with the good, the bad, and the ugly results of the bold engagement of their predecessors.
New generations rarely recognize the magnitude of the accomplishments of those who precede them. Today’s norms seem, well, normal, although they have often been achieved at a heavy price over many years:
Nonetheless, “we are seeing a head-snapping generational change,” contends Michael Gerson, who was a speech writer for both President George W. Bush and Chuck Colson. “The model of social engagement of the religious right is increasingly exhausted ” Gerson says. At the National Association of Evangelical’s 2010 convention, Gerson offered three reasons for the change: a recovery of scriptural emphasis, a revolt against the tone and style of the Religious Right, and the effects of short-term mission trips on young Christians. According to Gerson, young Americans return from short-term mission trips with a changed worldview. Their exposure to poverty, HIV/AIDS, and economic injustice make them concerned about these issues and want to improve the problems.
To fresh minds, many of the standards of the status quo seem just the intellectual stubbornness of tired leaders. The need for change is obvious; it is the route and rate of change that will test these emerging leaders. There will be many opportunities to navigate turbulent times and to determine the wise use of a powerful torch.
Over the next two weeks I will introduce 10 challenges for the new generation of leaders. These include:
World Vision is a humanitarian organization based on Christian values and, as part of their stated goal, they aim "to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of God." Its founder was an evangelical pastor who wanted to help orphans and other needy children. Its articles of incorporation include doctrinal statements.
Is World Vision a church? No, they don’t claim to be, and neither are they directly affiliated with any church or denomination.
So then; can World Vision claim the religious exemption to employee discrimination laws? Can they require their employees to also be Christian and to represent the organization’s doctrinal stance?
That’s the question that came up before a 3-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court, and they release a ruling yesterday in the case Spencer v. World Vision that says that, yes, they qualify for the religious exemption. It was a 2-to-1 decision, and the dissenter seems to think that in order to be religious you have to have worship services or, at least, Bible study or preaching.
Eugene Volokh does a yeoman’s work distilling the ruling down to 5 points. It’s worth a look. The 77-page full opinion is, well, optional.
We were one vote away from suddenly having religious organizations that don’t hold services legally considered secular and losing their right to hire folks of the same beliefs. In today’s judicial climate, I just hope we can hang on to it.
[I am working on a project that may become a book on the most influential evangelicals leaders of our generation, since 1976, and the impact they’ve had on the church and their times. I will introduce them briefly on this blog from time to time. Who should be on this list?]
#2. Billy Graham. The Godfather b. 1918
Billy Graham has been the best known and most admired evangelical Christian in the world for decades. Through his early flamboyance, his clear and public Gospel preaching, his non-partisan access to the powerful, his move beyond fundamentalism, and his life of personal and ministry integrity, Billy Graham set the standard not only for evangelistic fidelity, but also as a figure admired all over the world, by believers and unbelievers alike.
While most would recognize Graham as the most visible and influential evangelical of the modern era, his shaping of the movement came primarily in the mid-20th century. Together with Carl Henry and Harold J. Ockenga, Billy Graham was a 1950’s bridge from fundamentalist separatism to evangelical engagement. Henry rallied evangelicals to engage politics, academia, and other cultural spheres with The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947. He delivered a stinging rebuke to fundamentalists who had withdrawn from these public arenas. Billy Graham delivered the decisive break between evangelicals and fundamentalists in 1957. Graham turned down invitations to preach in New York City under the sponsorship of fundamentalist churches before accepting one from the liberal Protestant Council. [1]
Graham’s actions were strategic, not careless:
“For years, Billy Graham was lambasted for inviting theological liberals — as well as people unpopular in the Evangelical South, like Martin Luther King, Jr. — to his crusades. He invariably responded that the attendees were endorsing his cause, not the other way around. Graham knew that he would alienate some co-believers, but they were people he was happy to alienate. He was in the business of leading evangelicalism back into the American mainstream by distinguishing it from hard-core fundamentalism, one of whose most irritating characteristics was “second-degree separation,” a philosophy of ostracizing other Christians simply for dealing with people considered less spiritually pure. Graham’s national reputation flourished while that of his opponents suffered.” [2]
To guard his personal life, Graham famously had a policy that he would never be alone with a woman, other than his wife Ruth. This has come to be known as the Billy Graham Rule. Rev. Rick Warren and NFL quarterback Kurt Warner have claimed to follow the rule. Warner wrote in his book that he first applied the Billy Graham Rule in his marriage by not driving the babysitter home alone.
Graham has been a spiritual adviser to twelve United States presidents, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama (some, such as Richard Nixon, more than others). He is number seven on Gallup’s list of admired people in the 20th century.[3] It is said that Graham has preached in person to more people around the world than any other preacher in history. As of 2008, Graham’s lifetime audience, including radio and television broadcasts, topped 2.2 billion. More than 2.5 million people have come forward at his crusades to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.
Although Graham has had little involvement in activities beyond his own for many years, his early accomplishments, his commitment to the singular cause of evangelism, and his long life (he has outlived most of his contemporaries and his wife, Ruth) have made him the face of evangelicals for more than a generation. Although now retired and nearly immobilized by Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, he remains the iconic figure of the movement.
[2] TIME, Dec. 1, 2006
That’s what happens when I take a Friday vacation day.
Democrats are in a struggle with Republicans to see who can repeal portions of ObamaCare first. And now that Harry Reid has actually read the bill, he’s finally realized that this is going to hurt the hospitals in his state more than it’s going to help them. As much as Democrats complained about the delays in getting the thing passed, you’d think they’d have read it by the time it did.
Put Obama in the Oval Office, and he’ll repair our standing with the world…or so went the campaign thought. A poll of Arab public opinion, supposedly an area where Bush had destroyed our credibility, shows that little had changed. In fact, some indicators are even worse than under the eeevil Bush.
A very interesting article suggesting that Evangelical Churches are the new “Mainline” Christian churches, and that the traditionally “mainline” denominations, as they have become more liberal, shrink and thus have less influence on society (spiritually speaking). A very good interview of Rodney Stark, who’s been following this a long time.
I’ve been asked, regarding the Tea Partier’s wish to reduce government spending, why now? Why not during Bush or Clinton or even Reagan. I keep saying that the spending going on now is unprecedented, and Bruce McQuain explains some of the reasons and ramifications of this spend-fest.
How’s that stimulus stimulating the economy? Not so well, actually.
The “classy” Left, taking its usual name-calling tact against the Tea Party. And lest you dismiss this as some loner in a basement, it’s got huge funding partners.
And finally, a study in religious tolerance from Chuck Asay. (Click for a larger image.)