"There’s not one controversial idea in Love Wins that is not clearly voiced as a real possibility by the most popular evangelical writer of the last century, CS Lewis."
An interesting parsing of the camps in Evangelical Christianity including some guesses where they’re headed. As an outsider I find this fascinating and wonder again whether there’s a role for Friends among the “new evangelicals” she talks about. Via @jrobjohn.
In the world of evangelical demi-gods, John Piper is doing battle with N.T. Wright in the skies over atonement theories and eschatology and its becoming evident that this new generation, apart from a few new-Reformed oddities, are siding with Wright or at least the way of thinking represented by Wright. There is a power struggle going on that ventures beyond doctrinal categories and theological correctness. It’s a battle for the empire!
A new survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
You can take a version of the quiz online. I may be of the demographic Pew thinks is lacking but I got a perfect score.
I don’t think it’s an accident that I am frequently called to ministry between the branches of Friends. As someone who grew up in an evangelical culture but now worships with liberal Friends, I feel…
Oh, to be a young believer in Philadelphia right now, where the spirit of Christian activism is mingling vigorously with an apparently unkillable strain of old-school countercultural Jesus-freakery. Here, if you’re listening, you’ll hear hosannas on the streets, and a flavor of tambourines. A band called Psalters mounts an ululating, multi-drum offensive against the capitalist hegemony. They dress the part, too—if you saw this lot coming on a dark night, you’d run. The dreadlocked Shane Claiborne is here, author of The Irresistible Revolution (2006) and a leader of a movement known as the New Monasticism. Claiborne co-founded the Simple Way community in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood in 1998, and the area has since grown to include a branch of the young storefront evangelical church Circle of Hope.
Evangelical Friend AJ Schwanz writes about a new book from Mike King called Presence-centered Youth Ministry: Guiding Students into Spiritual Formation:
In my history of being part of faith communities I realized that those who are “group”-oriented seem more clubish, more “come in, be one of us”, more fractured, more self-interested. Those that were “ministry”-0riented thought of the bigger picture, had more awareness of the each other, practiced more over-arching hospitality. And in my faith gathering we have many ministries, but not a lot of groups … but the places where there are groups, we seem to have more lack of communication and conflict with each other.
Martin Commentary: On her post I asked AJ to tease out this distinction between “groups” that separate youth and “ministry” that keeps them in the church body.
I wonder if there’s some lesson for liberal Friends in this and not just for youth ministry. It seems like we have a tendency to compartimentalize our activities. Every purpose needs its own committee and we spend a lot of time starting and laying down committees. Why is “peace and concerns” separated from “earthcare” separated from “outreach” separated from “racial justice”? They’re all loving our neighbors.
My impression is that earlier generations of Friends did most things through two “committees”: ministers and elders. By divorcing our good deeds from ministry, we often secularlize them. How might we pull these functions together? Have any liberal Friends read out there Mike King’s work? Here’s the Amazon description:
How many programs does it take to change a youth group?
That question has bothered youth workers for decades, and the cracks in its logic are beginning to show. In place of the contrived, artificial mechanisms employed so widely in modern youth outreach and discipleship, Mike King proposes a ministry centered in the presence of God.
Young people encounter Christ not in the flash and pop of arena ministry, but in the sacred shadow of his presence. They learn what it is to love and follow Christ by observing others loving and following Christ—letting Christ shape their worldviews, their habits, their virtues. Presence-Centered Youth Ministry gives shape to such ministry through the classic disciplines and potent symbols and practices that have sustained the church over the centuries.
The sound and fury that has characterized youth ministry for so long has left too many youth workers tired and too many young people disillusioned. Come explore the deeper terrain; your students are sure to follow.
The NYTimes asked some religious pundits about Governor Mark Sanford’s repeated allusions to God and self-comparisons to King David. Some samples:
Chuck Colson:
When God created humans, His first act was to join the first man and woman as one flesh. Marriage is therefore a pre-political institution, the first of three institutions specifically ordained by God. It is therefore a sacred covenant between man, woman and God. Having read the governor’s latest statements about several prior dalliances (enough confessing already, please) I think he needs to go home, and get his own house in order before he can do much for the state of South Carolina.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:
The paradox of American evangelicals is that they are Christian on the one hand and political conservatives on the other with utterly opposing views of redemption. Christians believe that no one is blameless and all must therefore ride the coattails of a perfect being into heaven. But conservatives espouse the gospel of personal accountability. The state cannot save them. Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and not by welfare alone.
Steven Waldman (Beliefnet):
The problem with this is that Jesus never suggested that being cleansed of spiritual sin meant you were exempted from temporal punishment. A murderer who accepts Christ might still get to heaven, but he doesn’t get sprung from Leavenworth.
Colleen Carroll Campbell (whose book Julie & I reviewed a few years ago)
A politician who publicly champions traditional values while failing to faithfully live his own marriage vows may be a moral weakling, and he certainly loses a good deal of credibility on those issues when he fails to live his professed values in his private life. But his personal failings do not automatically discredit the causes for which he was fighting or serve as irrefutable proof that he never believed in those causes in the first place.
Quote:
This Quaker went on to wonder: If schools, because of their visibility and good reputations, are the chief means of Friends’ evangelism should the Quaker community do more to support them? And should Quakers do more to encourage Quaker attendance at these schools, which are largely filled with non-Quakers? And should they do more to encourage Quaker staffing, another area dominated by non-Quakers?
Martin Commentary:
She asks lots of intriguing questions. The most interesting ones look at what implied responsibilities for mutual support might exist between Friends schools and the Quaker community. Photo from site: Diane and sons.
A Phila Friend asked me if this is relevant to Convergent convs?
Julie Clawson’s review (above):
“The basic premise of the book is that the future of the church is in its global non-white manifestations, but that the church is currently being held back by its captivity to white Western systems of thought. While some are lamenting the decline of Christianity in America, they fail to realize that it is only in white America that it is in decline.”
My Philadelphia Friend’s query (via email):
I wonder whether the Convergent Friends group is a first step toward a greater convergency … or a shoring up of U.S. cultural understandings that may not speak very powerfully to Quakerism among other cultural groups, especially in what we Eurocentrically call developing nations.
The Gospel is an invitation, not a description, and woe to us if we block the entrance with our stated or unstated prejudices. If we say “God loves you” and truly affirm the universality of that…
To broadly stereotype and apply the analogy coarsely…”liberals” run the risk of being search dogs running here and there without a solid foundation in the “scent” of God. “Evangelicals” run the risk…
Evangelical Friends have a heritage particularly rich with the Power and its workings because it wasn’t only the early Quakers that quaked. For man the “born again” experience was often accompanied…
DeRich Mullinâs much loved â93 hit: “Our God Is An Awesome God” is also loved in Bujumbura, Burundi, central Africa.
