Book catch-up

Happy New Year...belatedly.

For those who still catch up on the occasional posts that appear here, I thought I'd give a pointer to an interesting post reviewing (mostly in brief) a bunch of books that the reviewer thought worthy of commendation from his past year's reading.

Byron Borger (I think that's the person who's written the post) runs a Christian bookshop in Dallastown, Central Pennsylvania; it's nominally Presbyterian, but like OC Books (which also began life as a Presbyterian bookshop) he's wide open to Christians of all denominations.  However, this isn't a plug for the shop, but for the books he's commending in his post, which has been done in something of a rush by the look of it, as there are a number of typos scattered throughout (!)

Be that as it may, this list is well worth checking up on, because even if you don't go as wholeheartedly for the whole collection as he does.  There are several books in the list that I've either had my eye on for a while or now plan to get - pensioner's finances willing - and I'm sure you'll find something of interest there too.

N T Wright makes the cut (dare I say, of course) as does Rob Bell (though it seems that the study guide to Love Wins may be even more interesting than the original book, given its list of contributors).   Abraham Kuyper gets a look in twice, Richard Mouw is there, Tim Keller, Philip Jenkins, Craig Bartholomew, Walter Brueggemann, Scot McKnight, and Richard Hays.

Then there are a bunch of authors whose names I don't know (I might if I was still running the bookshop!) but whose books look very intriguing, and there's a variety of publishing houses, well-known and unknown.   The range of topics is broad, and there should be at least one book to satisfy every taste - for me there'd be far more than one book.

Here's the link: Hearts & Minds Bookstore

Vocations and leavers

Two more items in the occasional posts to this blog...

Jason Goroncy alerted me to a post by Michael Jinkins that asks the question; “What sustains you in your vocation?”

Jinkins begins by noting: 
John Calvin believed that it is the vocation itself, the fact of having been called by God which sustains us. That’s a great response, and I’m sure it is true. But, in the day-to-day slog and grind of living our vocations, beyond the assurance that we are where God called us (which is no small thing!), are there other things that sustain us? Prayer, regular Bible study, worship, the practice of Sabbath?  [I'm currently reading, at long last, Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles - it relates strongly to this question.]

The second item is the third post by Bradley Wright and his research team on the question of why people leave church.  In this post he asks, Does Christians’ bad behavior cause people to leave the faith?
This is a very useful series of posts, asking the right questions, attempting to find some answers - and of course, as always, the comments are as interesting as the posts themselves.

Second post on leaving church

Bradley Wright recently uploaded his first post about why people leave church.   The second is available today.  

If the first seemed obvious, in some ways, the second is the same.   The first related to people who had intellectual problems with their faith, and were asking questions that in fact have been asked for ever - and often answered reasonably adequately. 

The second group are those who say because God hasn't answered their prayers therefore He either doesn't exist or isn't what He says he is, or doesn't keep His promises.   Wright has an interesting comment on this:

I am struck by how much these accounts resonate with sociological theories of human relationships, especially those coming from social exchange theory. This theory describes humans as judging the value of relationships in terms of costs and benefits. One variation of social exchange theory, termed equity theory, holds that people are satisfied with their relationships when they get the rewards that they feel are proportional to the costs that they bear. An inequitable is unstable, and it usually occurs because a person thinks they receive too little for how much they give.

These blog posts are worth keeping in mind; they may explain many of the issues that people in your congregation have with God, and/or church. 

Leaving Church? Why?

Two blog posts about why people are leaving church have turned up this week, and it's worth noting them here as part of an ongoing conversation about the question: Why are people leaving the church (in 'droves' as one of these writer's notes). 

The first blogger is Joshua Graves - he's the preaching and teaching minister for the Otter Creek Church in Nashville, Tennessee.  One of his points is: Church and community are very difficult. Church is a great idea until people get involved. Bonhoeffer consistently warns us in his various writings that we destroy community when we try and create it. Meaning–community, in and of itself, cannot be the goal. Rather, community is the space in which we communally seek to experience the resurrected Jesus. That being said, anyone who’s been a part of a church community knows that relationships will suffer, endure disappointment because this is true in any community...

He has more to say on the topic. but the following paragraph perhaps sums it up: I think the real cause of disillusionment with church is self-disappointment. Pain birthed anger, now solidified in cynicism and apathy (funny how those two always go together). Frustration with “the church” is first about frustration with self. We tend to, in the wisdom of Donald Miller, judge others based on actions while judging ourselves based upon our intent. We are harder on “the church” so we can be “easier” on ourselves. This is why some Christians literally demand more from their church than they do from their own family, their own personal lives (money, time, etc.).

The whole post is called Leaving Church?

The other post is from Bradley Wright, whom I've mentioned on several occasions on this blog.   In a post called, Why do Christians leave the faith? the fundamental importance of apologetics.  Wright begins his post by writing: Several colleagues and I recently finished a study of why Christians leave the faith, and we were surprised at what made a difference as well what didn’t seem to matter. 

The post begins in outlining the sociological aspects of their study (and this post is the first of several that will be appearing) but it soon gets onto looking at some of the reasons people bring forward for why they left the church.   For Wright, many of them hinge on a lack of understanding of apologetics, which of course basically goes back to a lack of understanding of the Bible and God Himself. 

Wright's five act play...

Andrew Perriman discusses Tom Wright's 'five act play analogy for biblical authority' in a recent blog post, and, while he finds it has value, doesn't think it goes quite far enough.

He notes:

...it is a useful analogy. It gets away from the Bible-is-authoritative-because-it-says-so approach, and it brings into the foreground—stage front, if you like—the concrete, intentional, creative response of the biblical community. So far, so good.

My main disagreement with Wright here is that, in his view of things, history more or less grinds to a halt when we get to Paul.

To find out why he thinks so - and his thinking develops Wright rather than dismissing it - read it online here.

Congratulations

Christianity Today has published its annual Book Awards for books that in their judges' opinions best offer insights into the people, events, and ideas that shape evangelical life, thought, and mission.

I'm especially pleased to see Bradley Wright's Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites … and Other Lies You've Been Told: a Sociologist Shatters Myths from the Secular and Christian Media on the list, and not just because the author sent me a copy for free!

As someone who works with [religion-focused] stats a good deal, it's heartening to see an author get to grips with what the stats have actually said rather than what someone thinks they've said, or wants them to say. He's not alone in this, of course, (Ed Setzer seems to do a bit in this regard), but his book is the first to focus on the issue - at least as far as I know.

Interestingly enough, just this week on Facebook, a very regular participant on that site (the pastor of a large youth-focused church in Australia who I will leave unnamed) posted one of his typical updates, and quoted stats - without any source. As he's now deleted the original post and its many comments, I can't quote directly, but he claimed something along the lines that in the States 3500 churches close their doors every year (?) but 4000 other churches are planted each year. He was saying it was a cause for rejoicing that the net profit was 500 new churches.

When I asked for a source for the stats, he ignored me, but when another writer got rather shirty about the issue, a considerable argument (as opposed to a debate) ensued. Helpfully a third writer actually posted a reasonable source for the original stats, although not one that really confirmed anything. Some insults passed by, both from the original poster, who lost his temper at length (and later came back more apologetically) and from one particular other person. As I say, the whole discussion was deleted - perhaps after the original poster realised that some of his remarks sadly didn't do much for his image.

I tell this story just to prove that the world of statistics isn't all bland and boring....

Different take on leadership?

Bill Kinnon has recently blogged about leadership - obliquely. Early in the post he talks about a video he and his wife Imbi [I think I have that right] are involved in making. In an interview with Chris Wright, Kinnon notes:

One of the questions Imbi asked him was what he thought leadership training needed to look like in the 21st Century. His response hit us both between the eyes.

"I wouldn't start out with training leaders, I'd start out with making disciples."

From that interesting response, Kinnon goes on to quote Scot McKnight, whose pastor is Bill Hybels, a virtual CEO of one of the largest evangelical churches in the States: Willow Creek.

McKnight says: ..I want to put my idea on the line and see where it leads us. We have one leader, and his name is Jesus. I want to bang this home with a quotation from Jesus from Matthew 23, where he seems to be staring at the glow of leadership in the eyes of his disciples, and he does nothing short of deconstructing the glow:

But you are not to be called “Rabbi,” for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth “father,” for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Instead of seeing myself as a leader, I see myself as a follower. Instead of plotting how to lead, I plot how to follow Jesus with others. Instead of seeing myself at the helm of some boat—and mine is small compared to many others—I see myself in the boat, with Jesus at the helm.

Keeping stats safe

I've mentioned Bradley Wright on this blog before. He's an American sociologist who has done some writing on making sure stats are interpreted more accurately - he writes about this in his book, Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites … and Other Lies You've Been Told.

He's recently been interviewed by Ted Olsen in Christianity Today. A couple of quotes from the article:

...we have to make sense of statistics for ourselves, applying our own experience. If I went to a group of Christians and made some sort of outlandish theological or political statement, they would question it. But if I put it in numbers, people would tend to accept it without discernment.

and....

Rather than picking which statistics we agree with, we should be a little more agnostic about all of them. You don't have to believe them. Christians are called to accept and love people unconditionally. That doesn't apply to statistics. We should be cranky and judgmental.

There's another article on the subject on the CT site, by Ed Setzer. This one comes from earlier this year, and is entitled Curing Christians' Stats Abuse. He deals nicely with some typical 'myths':

"Christianity will die out in this generation unless we do something now."

"Only 4 percent of this generation is Christian."

"Ninety-four percent of teenagers drop out of church, never to return again."

Before you quote statistics...

In a short piece on the Associated Baptist Press site, Roger Lovette (he's the chirpy looking chap on the right) talks about a group of 13 pastors of various ages who've all been dismissed from their churches.   In the middle of his article he writes: 

The best statistics tell us that 1,600 ministers are dismissed or forced to resign every month in America. Leadership magazine reported more than a decade ago that nearly 23 percent of all ministers will be forced out before their careers end -- and that 67 percent of those affected will face forced termination more than once. Various indicators suggest these percentages have continued to climb. The Barna Institute says that in the United States a pastor is forced out every six minutes.

I've posted on here before about the 'best statistic' above, except that when I last read it, it was 1,500 pastors burning out every month.  I guess someone has now concluded that since that stat is supposed to be a few years old, another 100 pastors needed to be added into the mix.  

In a month of 30 days there are 43,200 minutes.   Now if a pastor is forced out every six minutes, as Barna's figure is supposed to claim, in a month that's a total of 7,200 ministers leaving their churches.  Does something strike you as a little odd here?   Barna's figures are four and a half times more than the 'best statistics.'    

I keep reading about these 1500 or 1600 pastors doing something every month, and the more I read it the more irritated I get.   Use statistics by all means - I do it in my job all the time - but for goodness sake check your facts.   As Bradley Wright points out in his book, too many statistics are badly read, poorly reported, and go on to perform a statistogynistic (think misogynistic) role in life.  Let's start nipping the worst of them in the bud.  

Bradley Wright

This morning I discovered Bradley Wright's blog, along with his recently published book (the official publishing date is July), called Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.

Wright is a sociologist at the University of Connecticut. On his blog he likes to spend time digging into statistics to see if they say what we're told they say - in other words, he's a man after my own heart (a blogger and suspicious of how stats are often interpreted). It's not that he doesn't believe the stats; but he wants to make sure we're getting real information out of them, not false.

For instance, in a post he wrote late last year called The Creation of a Useful, but Inaccurate, Statistic he takes George Barna to task for 'proving' something from a very small sample (270 participants) and from questions that were ambiguous to say the least. This is typical of Wright's approach, and typical of the information in his book too, by the sound of it.

I think Barna does a pretty good job overall, but I do question some of his polls and surveys. Having taken part in a good number of surveys myself over the years, and having had to put more than one together, I know how easy it is for the wrong questions to be asked - with the result that the wrong answers get recorded, and misinformation arises.

I'm going to be adding Wright to my list of blogs needing to be read on a regular basis. When it comes to the world of stats, we need all the insight and clarity we can get.

Quotes to Remember

David Fitch has written a post of quotes - ones he wants to remember. I've just included the quotes here. For his comments on them you'll have to check out the original post.

David Coffey: “They say the difference between a Hollywood actor and a British actor is – the Hollywood actor will ask, “how will this script be modified to suit my strengths/personality? The British actor will ask, how can I do justice to what the author intended in this script?”

Dallas Willard: “Prayer is a power sharing arrangement for a world of recovering sinners. I’m talking to God about what we’re doing together.” … “in regard to Peter’s denial of Jesus, Jesus is working through a larger system of reality with Peter. He could have stopped him right there – instead he goes and prays for Him.”

N T Wright: “When we de-eschatologize the kingdom – we make it purely about a social ethic: Jesus’ message becomes – go out and hug a peasant now.” [Love that one!]

N T Wright again: “There are many Kingdom churches that don’t know what the cross is about and there are many cross churches which don’t know what the Kingdom is about … the Kingdom and the cross go inextricably together. They cannot be separated from each other.”

A comedian whose name Fitch has forgotten: “Every morning you need to get up, go to the mirror and look at yourself and say three times ‘It’s NOT about me, It’s NOT about me, It’s NOT about me.’ You need to repeat this again and again until you get it thoroughly into your soul. Only at that point then do you need to go back to the same mirror and say ‘It’s about me, It’s about me, It’s about me.’”

Fitch himself: “Because our pastors have been so trained to understand the ministry in terms of their own success, we have thousands of them who are either manic-depressive or egomaniacs.”

And himself again: “If you’re not careful (with the attractional ministry approach), you’ll end up looking back after 30 years of ministry realizing the high point of your ministry was that one moment in time when you finally got all 300 people to come to your church and be happy at the same time.”

Virtue Reborn

Bill Kinnon, in reviewing a book by Tom Wright called Virtue Reborn (apparently entitled, After You Believe - why Christian character matters in the States) notes late in his review:

What a call for each of us as the church - to work at this life of character building - leading to virtues that will cause us to do the right thing, when the moment comes, as it will for each of us. Where and when only God knows, but when it truly matters will we know it in our bones, marrow, hearts and brains - and do the right thing, make the right decision, becoming Christ-like in our character. Are we the signposts and beachheads of God's future kingdom in this current world? It is not just a matter of "luck" (grace) but rather preparation and work and decision-making so that doing the right thing becomes automatic. (The emphases are his.)

Kinnon sums up the book in this way: [Wright] does a masterful sweep of ethics and its various roots and streams, calling us back to working at Christian virtue - identifying and then avoiding the extremes of grace and works - those two polarizing positions of Christian history. In fact, the book gives us a broad enough and thoroughly orthodox way forward - to begin to become who we already are, in Christ - doing so framed within the church, communally, for the sake of the world, missionally.

Tom Wright on Hell

Tom Wright may not be everyone's cup of tea/flavour of the month but for me he often speaks clearly and succinctly on a subject. This three minute video below is one example.



Not everyone will agree with what he has to say (which is something along the lines of the way C S Lewis writes about Hell in the opening chapter of The Great Divorce) and I'm slightly dubious about his view that Jesus didn't say anything much on Hell. I think he's trying to find a way of fitting Hell 'in' to his views on heaven and earth coming together at the end of all things; do people who totally reject God get somehow squeezed out of the Universe (both spiritual and physical?). That's not what he says, by the way!

Whatever Hell literally is, if one can speak about such a thing as being literal, it certainly isn't a place I'd prefer to go...whether it's a case of losing the Presence of God or (merely) having to live with an eternally tedious and irritating self.

N T Wright on the Resurrection

Here's a brief two minutes from Tom Wright on the Resurrection - he manages to convey a great deal in the short time.



And there are some intriguing visuals in the background...

Leadership's Golden Canon

Leadership is presenting a list of the ten books of 2008 they've decided are most useful for church leaders. They're not all books specifically relating to leadership as such, but rather titles that would help a leader in two areas: The Leader's Inner World, and The Leader's Outer World.

The titles were compiled from submissions by a diverse group of more than 100 pastors from across the country. Leadership's contributing editors then voted to determine the winners in the two categories.

The list is here. Among the titles I'm pleased to see N T Wright's Surprised by Hope, Andy Crouch's Culture Making, and the third in Eugene Peterson's recent series of books on the Christian life: The Jesus Way.

And another brief post:

The satan, it seems, is a nonhuman being, a type of angel, perhaps in some accounts an ex-angel or fallen angel, and he or it (somehow feminists never campaign that the satan should be referred to as 'she') comes to be opposed to humankind, and then to Israel, and hence, not surprisingly, to Jesus.

From Evil and the Justice of God, chapter 4 (pg 108 of the hardcover edition), by N T Wright.

N T Wright

This is the point where a genuine biblical theology can come out of the forest and startle both those who thought that the Bible was irrelevant or dangerous for political ethics and those who thought taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically. The truth is very different--as we should have guessed from Jesus' own preaching of the kingdom, not to mention his death as a would-be rebel king. His resurrection, and the promise of God's new world that comes with it, creates a program for change and offers to empower it. Those who believe in the gospel have no choice but to follow.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

Blogalogue: N T Wright and Bart Ehrman

I've just been alerted to an ongoing conversation/blogalogue between N T Wright and Bart Ehrman, on the subject of why God allows suffering. I don't think the conversation is finished yet; at least I hope it isn't, as neither seems to have come to the end of what they have to say.
When reading it, make sure you start at the bottom of the page, and work upwards. The first post is quite some way down.
Here's the intro from BeliefNet.
Is our pain God’s problem? If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow so much suffering? These kinds of questions—sometimes called the problem of theodicy—have long bothered believers and nonbelievers alike. These questions are especially pressing now as we face the AIDS pandemic, widespread hunger, and environmental degradation—not to mention the grief that humans can cause one another. Our two guests for this new Beliefnet Blogalogue have devoted part of their lives to addressing these issues. Bart Ehrman is James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of God's Problem and Misquoting Jesus, among many other titles. N.T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England and has taught at McGill, Oxford, and Cambridge. His books include Surprised By Hope, Evil and the Justice of God, and several other titles.

Trevin Wax interviews N T Wright

Trevin Wax is the Minister of Education and Missions at First Baptist Church in Shelbyville, TN. A contributor to Christianity Today, Trevin is originally from Murfreesboro, TN and is currently finishing his Masters of Divinity at Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY via the extension center in Nashville. He received his bachelor’s degree at Emanuel University of Oradea, Romania, where he was involved in mission work in several village churches in the Oradea area from 2000-2005. Trevin’s wife is Corina and they have a son, Timothy and a daughter on the way.

Two quotes from the interview, which you can read in full here
“…We don’t know how the kingdom works. Take Jesus’ parables about seeds growing secretly and small seeds becoming mustard bushes and so on. The kingdom is always a surprise to us, which keeps us humble. The danger with “building the kingdom” language can make us very proud. “Building for the kingdom” keeps you humble. It says, “These are your tasks; you’ve got to get on with them. How God puts them into the eventual construct is completely his business.”

“…It dawned on me several years ago that when somebody says “no” to God and refuses to worship the God in whose image they are made, saying “I’m not going to worship that God,” then what happens to their humanness is that it progressively ceases to bear the image of God. You become like what you worship. You reflect the one you worship. It’s one of the great truths of spirituality…”

Review: Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright

Tom Wright has several things he wants to put across in this book, but there are two particular ones that stand out for me. Firstly he wants to encourage the church to change its view of what happens to us after death, and secondly, and even more important, he wants us to realise the extent to which we're affected, in every aspect of our lives, by Jesus' resurrection from the dead, and our own future resurrection in the new heavens/new earth.

I must confess I'm a person who likes to read books that speculate as far as possible on where (and what) we'll be in the post-death future. I sometimes feel a little alone in this, as, to my surprise, many Christians don't appear to care overly much. For them vague thoughts of 'heaven' are enough. However, Wright isn't prepared to let us away with any kind of vagueness. He spends a good amount of time dealing to the usual idea of 'heaven,' which he says is not only inaccurate, it's not even Scriptural.

For him the resurrection of Jesus is of utter importance in relation to our future. The resurrection will sweep up everything in this world and recreate it in the new. For Wright, everything that's of value here will have value eternally, and he's not just talking about 'spiritual' things, but about creative things, about work and love and kindness and relationships and all manner of other aspects of our everyday lives. The 'first' resurrection happened here, in this world, and it will ultimately affect everything in this world. The new creation will incorporate the old, making all the old of immense value.

But this is just part of the message in the book. Wright presents a wide-ranging and accessible theology of the resurrection, of Easter itself, of the Christian's hope as it was understood in the early church, of what Jesus' judgment of this world means, of whether Purgatory and Paradise have any relevance to us.

And in his final section, where some of the best material lies (in a book full of good material), he writes of hope in practice: how the resurrection affects the mission of the church.

If you've ever felt that we've lost the point of Easter, that the resurrection was a one-off and rather odd event, and that our deaths are fairly irrelevant in the scheme of things, read this book. Even if you don't agree with all Wright's theology – as some (plainly misguided critics) don't – I'll be surprised if you're not inspired by at least some of what he has to say.

reviewed by Mike Crowl