The next big issue?

I don't have any stats for child trafficking in New Zealand - though it appears that this country is doing reasonably well in keeping tabs on the problem, which is a phenomenal global evil. I suspect it will become the big issue of the next decade; certainly the fight to overcome this evil is already well and truly begun.

In the meantime, here are a very few stats from the US:
*300,000 children in the U.S. are at risk every year for commercial sexual exploitation. -U.S. Department of Justice

*600,000 – 800,000 people are bought and sold across international borders each year; 50% are children, most are female. The majority of these victims are forced into the commercial sex trade. – U.S. Department of State, 2004, Trafficking in Persons Report, Washington, D.C.

*An estimated 14,500 to 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States each year. The number of U.S. citizens trafficked within the country is even higher, with an estimated 200,000 American children at risk for trafficking into the sex industry. – U.S Department of Justice Report to Congress from Attorney General John Ashcroft on U.S. Government Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons

*An estimated 2.5 million children, the majority of them girls, are sexually exploited in the multibillion dollar commercial sex industry – UNICEF

*Investigators and researchers estimate the average predator in the U.S. can make more than $200,000 a year off one young girl. – NBC Report by Teri Williams

If you want a good overview of the way in which women are exploited throughout the world, read, Half the Sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide - it's written by husband and wife, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Faith, Ethics and Public Life

The Centre for Theology and Public Issues at Otago University is delighted to announce that Jim Wallis, founder and CEO of the Sojourners Community in Washington DC, will be in Dunedin on Tuesday 28 September. He will be keynote speaker at a conference on 'Faith, Ethics and Public Life' that afternoon, and deliver the Howard Paterson Memorial Lecture in Public Theology. The venue is First Church, Moray Place.

Jim Wallis is a leading author, speaker and international commentator on faith and public life, and one of President Obama's advisers on religious and ethical issues. He has written ten books, the most well-known of which, 'God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It', helped change the US political landscape and was on the New York Times bestseller list for four months. He is in high demand internationally as a speaker, and this conference in Dunedin - his only speaking engagement on the South Island - will be a rare opportunity for us to hear him in person.

Full information about this event can be found at www.otago.ac.nz/jimwallis, and tickets for the full conference, priced at $20 ($15 students, beneficiaries & U-16s) can be booked online at this address. The price includes afternoon tea, coffee and home-style refreshments. May I encourage you to book early, as the event is being advertised across the South Island and we are expecting tickets to go quickly.

The Howard Paterson Lecture, like all University Open Lectures, is of course open to all, but if space is tight priority will be given to people booking for the whole conference.

There is a special e-mail address for enquiries relating to this event: jimwallis.event@otago.ac.nz (phone enquiries: 03 479 8450). If you hear of someone who would like to attend this event but simply has no way of accessing the internet, please ask them to call this number or write to the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054.

Single people (not) at church

There's an interesting stat from a recent Barna report entitled, Who is Active in “Group” Expressions of Faith? Whether similar figures apply to NZ, I don't know, but it's a possibility.

• Religious activities are typically missing single adults, especially those who have never been married. Just less than half of Americans are unmarried. [see below] However, the Barna study found that two-thirds of those who attend church, participate in a small group and attend Sunday school are married.
Further, 69 percent of church volunteers are married.
Fewer than one-fifth of single adults who have never been married are involved in "group" faith experiences, with worship and volunteering the least likely to attract them.
Those participating in house churches, however, reflect a 50-50 split of married and unmarried.

The NZ Stats relating to marital status from the 2006 Census are as follows:

• 34.1 percent of people aged 15 years and over living in New Zealand have never married
• 48.6 percent are married,
  
• 17.4 percent are separated, divorced or widowed
  
  The other important stat in this are is that:
• 27.2 percent of people aged 15 years and over in New Zealand who have never been married live with a partner.

This last is a subgroup of the 'never married' category above. In effect, it says that more than a quarter of the people who have never married are not single, but living in a relationship. However, this still leaves just over 70% of the first group as single people.

To make it a little easier to grasp:
If 34 people out of a hundred have never been married, 9 will be living in a relationship, and 25 will be 'officially' single. Add these 25 to the 17 or so who are separated, divorced or widowed, and you have 42 people in a hundred who are effectively single.

Please tell me if I've got my maths wrong! :)

How do we find ways of encouraging single adults into the church scene without making them feel uncomfortable because of all the married people around them?

Equality is better for everyone

Tapu Misa recently noted: Inequality, as epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their 2009 book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, hurts us all. As well as links to higher crime, ill-health, shorter life expectancy and a range of social pathologies, inequality drives a wedge between people, corroding trust and raising levels of anxiety. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised then that an annual Massey University survey has found we've become more tolerant of income inequality, even as we've become more unequal.

An Amazon reviewer points out: Within the 400+ pages of this book, [Wilkinson and Pickett] emphasize that it is not the poor and the deprived in isolation who suffer from the effects of inequality, but also the bulk of that nation's population. According to their findings. incidences of mental illness, for example, are 500% higher across the whole population spectrum in the most unequal societies than they in the most 'equal' ones. [My italics]

Misa also notes:

In his 2009 book Justice, the Harvard professor of philosophy Michael Sandel writes that while politicians have largely ignored inequality, philosophers have been debating the just distribution of income and wealth since the 1970s.

He argues an important reason to worry about the growing inequality of American life is that "too great a gap between rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires".

This blog has recently produced its 700th post. Wow.

Tithing facts.....

Destiny Church in New Zealand has been in the news more than once relating to tithing, particularly in regard to the poorer members of the congregation being required to tithe along with the better-off. While we don't have particular details about what NZ churches do in relation to tithing, we can possibly get idea when we look at the US stats on the subject - some of which are surprising. Figures come courtesy of Scot McKnight.

Fact #1: poor people are more likely to tithe and give a higher percent of their income that wealthy people. Thus, Americans who make $10,000 or less give 11.2% of their income, while those who make $150,000+ give 2.7% of their income. There is a basic descent of percent of income given from the poor to the wealthy. I suspect, looking at the Presbyterian Church stats, that this may be the case in New Zealand too, but don't have specific evidence.

Fact #2: denominationally, the spectrum moves from Catholics (2.2%) to Liberal Protestants (3.0%) to Conservative Protestants (5.5%) to Black Protestants (5.7%) to Mormons (7.1%) in percent of income given to the church. The percent giving a tithe goes like this: RCC (2.5%), Liberals (5.9%), Conservatives (14.4%), Black Protestants (13.5%) to Mormons (34.0%).

Fact #3: those who tithe or who give more correlate with such things as church attendance.

And two more intriguing facts:

Fact: widows and widowers are the most likely to tithe: 20.1% widows vs. 16.7 widowers tithe. Following in the footsteps of the woman in the Gospels, no doubt!

Fact: older people are more likely to tithe. The average age of an American tither is 54.1 yrs.

Photo by Darren Hester

The Presbyterian Stats

A report has just been released by The Presbyterian Panel, a research group that serves the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) [PCUSA].

The panel's report is presented as a "Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians, 2008." The report contains relatively few surprises, and is filled with data about the beliefs of Presbyterian laypersons and clergy.

Albert Mohler, who is no doubt regarded as a Conservative in the Christian scene (though with kudos and plenty of insight and wisdom) opens his blog post on the topic with these words:

"Liberal Protestantism, in its determined policy of accommodation with the secular world, has succeeded in making itself dispensable." That was the judgment of Thomas C. Reeves in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Protestantism, published in 1996. Fast-forward another fourteen years and it becomes increasingly clear that liberal Protestantism continues its suicide -- with even greater theological accommodations to the secular worldview.

His focus is on this point: the most significant theological question concerned the exclusivity of the Gospel and the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ for salvation. On that question there was great division, with over a third (36%) of PCUSA church members indicating that they "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the statement that "only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved."

A much more detailed look at the stats involved appears on the GA Junkie site (GA for General Assembly, of course, and a site focused on the politics of Presbyterianism in the States). This writer looks at the actual question asked (Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with...the following statement: only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved) and debates the case from there.

I won't go into the details of his arguments here, since they take up a fair amount of space on the original post, and he has a better head for interpreting statistics than I do.

Suffice to say, the two different perspectives expressed are both worth considering, and are perhaps not that far apart. And how does it all apply to the NZ scene?

It's worth noting the following (from Mohler's footnotes): The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was formed in 1983 as the union of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. It is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States. More conservative Presbyterian bodies include the Evangelical Presbyterian Church [EPC] and the Presbyterian Church in America [PCA].

Putting the Christian back in YMCA

For many years the 'Christian' part of the YMCA acronym has been pretty much invisible. Go into most YMCAs in NZ - or YWCAs - and you'll be hard pressed to find much reference to things Christian. And it's been the same overseas.

However, slowly but surely, Christians are discovering that the YMCAs scattered around the globe can be mission fields in their own particular way. It may not be so easy in the YMCA system in New Zealand, where things seem somewhat different to the set-up in the States, but an article in the latest Leadership Journal online discusses how a vision to bring church to a particular Y has begun to grow into a vision to bring church to all 14,000 of them around the world.

What started as a temporary solution for a church that was without a home has turned into something altogether different. Again, the principle of going out where the people are instead of expecting them to come to you has born fruit.

Wellness....or not

These figures were quoted in a review on Amazon.com for the book, Mad Church Disease
Some recent statistics from The Fuller Institute, George Barna, and Pastoral Care Inc.

90% of the pastors report working between 55 to 75 hours per week.

80% believe pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families. Many pastor's children do not attend church now because of what the church has done to their parents.

33% state that being in the ministry is an outright hazard to their family.

90% feel they are inadequately trained to cope with the ministry demands and 50% feel unable to meet the demands of the job.

70% say they have a lower self-image now than when they first started.

70% do not have someone they consider a close friend.

40% report serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month.

33% confess having involved in inappropriate sexual behavior with someone in the church .

50% have considered leaving the ministry in the last months.

50% of the ministers starting out will not last 5 years.

94% of clergy families feel the pressures of the pastor's ministry.

The profession of "Pastor" is near the bottom of a survey of the most-respected professions, just above "car salesman".

Over 4,000 churches closed in America last year.

Over 1,700 pastors left the ministry every month last year.

Over 1,300 pastors were terminated by the local church each month, many without cause.

Over 3,500 people a day left the church last year, over 1.25 million people.

This shows that there's all the more need for an emphasis on Wellness amongst ministers and their families. If it's happening there, it's happening here (in fact we know it's happening here).

Thinking outside the Web

We often think that the Internet is pretty much a Western/Asian system, but in fact there are huge opportunities for digital ministry in the non-western world. 1.5 billion people now use the Web, and 4 billion own a mobile phone, the majority of them outside the West (apparently there are more mobile phone users in Africa than in the US). And with mobile phones becoming increasingly an adjunct of the Net, the potential is enormous.
A relatively new blog called Digital Evangelism Issues (DEI, for short - get it?) has appeared on the scene, with its emphasis being on exactly what the name implies. It's run by a group whose focus is Internet Evangelism Day (IED, for those who missed the mirror image) and their site focuses on encouraging people to use the Internet for evangelism. It helpfully supplies an abundance of material.

I noted on another blog a couple of days ago that there's an increasing assumption that everyone has access to the Net - businesses offer specials online, cheap air fares only appear in many cases online, online banking is being regarded by many banks as the 'norm,' and so on. However, in a Passing Notes opinion piece in the Otago Daily Times last Saturday, it was pointed out that many people in the Saga Generation (those over 55 - my description, not his) don't regularly have access to the Net, and to a degree are becoming cut off from the Internet-based trend. We need to avoid assuming that everyone is Wired.

Wanna own your own slave?

The Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Cathleen Falsani, points out that it's more than 165 years since slavery was made illegal in the USA.

It's sixty years since the United Nationas declared, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that: "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."

Yet in 2008 there are more slaves in the world than were taken during 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to the documentary film, Call + Response. This film is a combination of music focusing on slavery, and images of people who are suffering in slavery around the world.

Of the 27 million slaves worldwide, half are children and 80 percent are female.
Some more stats:

• • Slave traders made $32 billion last year.

• • The average cost of a slave is $90.

• • More than one-third of all prostitutes in South and East Asia are children.

• • More than 17,500 people are trafficked as slaves to the U.S. each year.

• • Fifty percent of slaves in the U.S. work in agriculture, manufacturing or domestic work.

For more information go to the Call and Response website. A question worth asking: how many slaves are there in New Zealand?

Evangelicals: a dying or changing breed?

An extract from an article by Christine Wicker, formerly a religion writer for The Dallas Morning News , and author of The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church .
The article is entitled: American evangelicals, once considered monolithic, are fragmenting.

Evangelicals almost never convert a native-born American who wasn’t raised in a church. That most evangelical growth comes from stealing the sheep from other denominations. And that they’ve stolen about all they can.

They’re also admitting that most evangelicals won’t evangelize. And if they did, it wouldn’t get them anywhere because the usual methods don’t work. They don’t work first because they usually rest on the idea that Christians are the only ones saved. In today’s religiously equalitarian culture, that assertion causes evangelicals to seem distastefully holier-than-thou.

Conversion tactics also focus on telling people the Good News as though no one else knows it. But most everyone has heard it. Again and again. The trouble is that they aren’t convinced. They aren’t scared of hell. They aren’t hoping for heaven. And Christians haven’t been good at giving anyone better reasons than that for following Jesus.

Wicker makes a number of other important points; you may agree with them or not. For New Zealanders, the article is of value because it looks at a society that's not too dissimilar to our own.

Churchquake

In the most recent Pastors' Weekly Briefing, H B London writes:

I have just completed reading a book by David T. Olson entitled, The American Church in Crisis. In the final portion of his work, he says, "The American church needs to be 'forever building.' Building is the church's response to God's missional promptings. But the greatest need of the church is 'being restored,' which is a spiritual and supernatural act of God." (Zondervan, 2008, p. 221)

The American Church in Crisis is filled with graphs and charts to support his conclusion that the church does need to keep building and find restoration. For instance, Mr. Olson refutes the church attendance research of both Barna and Gallup. He does not believe between 37% and 43% of Americans go to church each week. His research of nearly 300,000 churches gives evidence that the total attending services is closer to 52 million each week (versus over 100 million), and that instead of 40% attending each week, it is more like 19.5%. Just check out your neighborhood some Sunday.

These are the opening two paragraphs of his review of the book. The rest can be read here.

There is relevance for NZ readers in terms of some comments made regarding those who attend church as children, and don't as adults.

More on rural churches

From Geoff Baggett's blog, there's a report of a rural church that's completely turned around:

He writes:
Baptist Press reporter Kay Adkins published an interesting report today that focused upon utilizing methods normally thought of as “for the city” to plant and reinvigorate churches in rural areas. The story highlights the growth of the Brand New Church in rural Bergman, Arkansas. The church is a “re-start” of the former Southside Baptist Church in Lead Hill. The former 31-member congregation now averages over 1,000 in attendance each week … in a town with a population of 407. The incredible turnaround has occurred in less than four years.
"The Brand New Church utilizes many of the methods we associate with urban church plants - praise music, high-tech video, and casual dress. But, in reading the story, I thought the most interesting aspect of the church was its approach to Baptist polity. Indeed, when pastor Shannon O’Dell came to Southside (prior to re-starting as Brand New Church), one of his requirements was that the church needed to understand and be willing to be “pastor-led. He believes that God has structured the church: ‘… to be led by an under-shepherd or pastor” for the sake of Kingdom growth. “Most churches are structured for it to be congregationally led or democratic.’”

Click on any of the links to get more of the story.

Modernity dead?

And just when you thought you could put modernity behind you....

The news of modernity's death has been greatly exaggerated. The Enlightenment project is alive and well, dominating Europe and increasingly North America, particularly in the political drive to carve out "the secular"--a zone decontaminated of the prejudices of determinate religious influence. In Europe, this secularizing project has been translated, ironically but not unsurprisingly, into a religious project with increasing numbers of devotees of "secular transcendence"--all the while marginalizing forms of determinate religious confessions as "dogmatic." In the United States, the march of the secular finds its expression in the persistent project to neutralize the public sphere, hoping to keep this pristine space unpolluted by the prejudices of concrete religious faith. The religious response to this has been the confused "Constantinian" project of the Religious Right, which has sought to colonize the public and political spheres by Christian morality (or the morality supposedly disclosed by "natural law").

James K.A. Smith
Introducing Radical Orthodoxy

Jesus for President

On the Out of Ur site, there's a review of the latest book by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. (Clairborne's first book, The Irresistible Revolution - living as an ordinary radical, has been amongst the top twenty 'Christian living' titles on Amazon for a couple of years).

The new book is called Jesus for President, an intentionally ironical title, since the authors' stance is basically a criticism of the way Christians have 'got into bed' with the State, in the USA.

David Swanson has written two of an intended three-part review on the book, and the comments that follow the first part provide an interesting insight into the way thinking on this very topic is very mixed in the US.

Claiborne and Haw are amongst the founding members of The Simple Way, a New Monasticism community in the US.