Coercive decontextualized manipulation

David Fitch using unnecessarily big words - we are reacting against a coercive decontextualized manipulation of the gospel* - but otherwise making good sense in his new blog post: What the Missional Church is missing: Proclaiming the Gospel.

I like a lot of what David Fitch writes, though it puzzles me that he has such a strong focus on spending quite so much time in Starbucks - not on mission but on coffee.  However, as he notes in his third point: An understanding  of what it means to be with people, so as to listen long enough to create the opening whereby you are invited to proclaim the gospel as it most makes most direct sense within this person’s life. That's probably what Starbucks is all about....

Fitch's recent book, Prodigal Christianity, has had some mixed reactions - I haven't had a chance to read it yet (I'm in a P T Forsyth mode at the moment, thanks to Jason Goroncy), but I'll aim to get onto it at some point.  One Amazon reviewer wrote about it: Take a bit of David Bosch, combine him with Darrel Guder and Lesslie Newbigin, shake in Tim Keller, Scot McKnight, Alan Hirsch and bake on a broad Augustinian base, and you'll get Prodigal Christianity, an unique and filling book that Christians living in the 21st century should read.



*Or: there’s an epistemological shift here that goes way beyond the cognitive enlightenment modes of communication most Americans are addicted to.

De-conversion

Sociologist, Bradley Wright, has recently published an article on 'de-conversion' - in other words, reasons for why people leave the Christian faith.

This is the abstract. The full article, which appeared in the Journal of Religion and Society, can be found online here.

"This article examines the written narratives from fifty former Christians. In these narratives, drawn from an online community of deconverts, the writers described their experiences with and explanations for leaving the Christian faith. Several themes emerged as to why they left, including: intellectual and theological concerns, a feeling that God had failed them, and various frustrations with Christians. The writers gave little mention to non-Christians as pulling them out of the faith. These narratives emphasized external, rather than internal, attributions for the deconversion. They also identified primarily “push” rather than “pull” factors as the cause of deconversion. While some narratives outlined the costs and benefits of deconversion, others told of seeking moral rightness regardless of the cost."

The reasons boiled down to intellectual and theological concerns, God's failures, interactions with other Christians, and interactions with non-Christians. (Interestingly enough, this last group seems to be the least influential.) Some of this may be already well-known, but it's good to have it available in a relatively succinct form.

If you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know.

In a kind of serendipitous morning, three posts arrived from various blogs I keep in touch with that all seemed to link together.   Maybe it's not so serendipitous given that all the writers are mission-minded in one way or another....


David Fitch wrote 
Neo-Reformed Theology is built on the same logic as evangelical theology. In fact this is also the same logic as the protestant mainline theology and for that matter the Emergent theologies. They all rely on the cultural foundations of the West and in particular the Enlightenment. And, for me, this means all of these movements will eventually fail to engage the new and changing cultures of Post-Christendom in the West for the gospel, they will fail at resisting the consumerist forces of modern American society, they will fail at transformational engagement (eventually). They will all end up repeating the fate of evangelicalism – i.e. being successful at harvesting those who are already in some way culturally inclined towards Christianity but not capable of inhabiting the new post Christendom cultures of the West for the gospel. This is why we need a third way!!

Len Hjalmarson began his post in this way:
In The Secret Message of Jesus (2006), McLaren devotes an entire chapter to contextualizing the concepts of the kingdom of God for the current generation.
Len's shorter post mostly offers a variety of ways of rethinking the way we view the kingdom, and by connection, God's mission. 

Paul Fromont, on Prodigal Kiwi(s) quotes another writer - Barry Taylor - who doesn't at first seem to be writing about mission...but is - note what he says about listening....

“…On the final day [of a two-week intensive class on Theology and Popular Music] I attempted to sketch out something of a beginning posture for the initiation of a conversation between these two elements. Posture, being the operative word, because for me, any act of theology requires a posture, an attitude, from which it springs, and for me, this is first and foremost, listening - to the other - if you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know. All too often, in my experience, people begin with a pre-formed schema, which is then imposed over whatever it might be, and then, what fits is accepted and the bits around the edges are cut-off--negated etc. A bit of a broad dismissal of the theological enterprise I know, but I use that analogy simply to say that my approach is a bit different--I am interested in the surprising intersections that arise because of the rupture and disconnect as well as the congruity and synchronicity between various elements…”

 ...if you don't listen, you can't hear and if you can't hear, you cannot know. 

The Business of Making Saints

Eugene Peterson says, in a 2009 interview in Christianity Today called The Business of Making Saints: 

The problem was, I hadn't learned a way to live organically out of Sunday. I had two models, and neither could help me.

Where did you go for help?

I started discovering people who did it—Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Bernard, Newman, Alexander Whyte, Samuel Rutherford, a lot of the Puritans, and in particular, Dante. These became my mentors, my teachers, my professors. I lived with them.

We've got this wonderful history of Christian spirituality. We've got two thousand years of people who have been listening, writing, doing this. You're in a company of saints who have done this, and they've done it with great freedom and goodness.

These people weren't gullible. They developed a scent for sanctity; they were alert to the way holiness works, which hardly ever fits the stereotypes.

Some of it's an art, but if you live with these people through their writings, you develop the sense of proportion, a scent for truth.

How long did it take to learn pastoral care from these mentors?

After five or seven years, I realized, I can do this. There is a way to live as a pastor during the week that is congruent with the gospel I proclaim on Sunday. This is a pastor. This is what I want to be. I love this life.

I don't want to paint a picture that I got it all straight. It's not something you "get"; it's not like a diploma you can hang. This is a way of life in which you keep re-immersing yourself.

This interview was originally published 

Take Overs, Journeys, Arts, Theology

It takes nothing for the 'pseud' to take over language; church jargon itself is full of it.

A colleague at work passed on the link to Andrew Rumsey's piece on the word, 'Journey' to me today, and I thought it was worth sharing. Rumsey writes with nifty English wit, and a surreal imagination that sometimes slides off the edge of intelligibility. I've been reading a few of his other pieces (there are only about two a year on the Ship of Fools site) and in general find him good company.

Having attended Lynne Baab's Knox Inaugural Lecture on Monday, which was about the Arts and Christianity, I was interested to find that Rumsey's first piece on the list, written back back in 2000, is about the same subject: how do the arts and Christianity mesh together without stomping on each other's toes?

He talks about the group, Theology Through the Arts (the link he gives is now out of date), so I went exploring a little further, found that this group's work is now 'pursued' under the aegis of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts (which kind of makes it feel as though it's been taken over by the academics - or even hunted down?).

Theology Through the Arts' first major achievement was a festival of the arts entitled Sounding the Depths. You can still see the original programme online. Sounding the Depths was the culmination of the first phase of Theology Through the Arts. It aimed to draw together the strands of the project that [had]been most fruitful over the [previous] three years, and present them publicly in the form of a week of multi-media events.

Their second phase spanned from 2001 to 2008, when the group had its theological home at the University of St Andrews, and its church-related work at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. From there it seems to have shifted to Duke. During their second phase they engaged in rigorous academic research, as well as pursuing more fully the implications of 'theology through the arts' for the Church's engagement with culture and for 'grass roots' education.

To me this all sounds very academic - almost the antithesis of what the arts are about. And their primary aim was listed as:

to discover and demonstrate ways in which the arts can contribute towards the renewal of Christian theology

In the process, they sought:

• to find ways in which the arts can contribute to a sensitive and rigorous engagement of the Church with modern and postmodern culture
• to generate, through the arts, new methods of Christian education for use in the Church and wider community

Am I being picky, or does this all seem a bit too ivory tower for its own good? I know there are plenty of thinking artists - but do they think in the way academics think? Or is much/most of their thinking more of the reflective-active kind? Some artists, I suspect, don't 'think' in either sense; they work almost intuitively and make mistakes until they find what they're looking for.

Perhaps my use of the word 'theology' is too limited. But I'd hate to feel that art was being ramshackled into some clinical overcoat that ill-fitted it. Art, I suspect, is a much broader theology than what we mostly think of as theology - long-winded words and difficult by-ways -and probably doesn't want to be narrowed down into seminars and conferences and theses.

On the Duke site there's a summary of a lecture Nicholas Wolterstorff (author of Art in Action) gave: With analytical power and winsome directness, Wolterstorff questioned assumptions that often mark the conversation between theology and the arts today. In particular, he drew attention to the enormous changes in thinking about the arts that came about in the late eighteenth century – the appearance of the ‘fine’ arts as objects of ‘disinterested contemplation’, the notion that this represents art ‘coming into its own’, and, not least, the religious aura that art assumed to itself: art becomes the transcendent, social ‘other’, abstracted from the messy materiality of space and time.

This, he stressed is only one way of thinking about the arts, but not the way. He urged his audience to re-discover a wider vision that could embrace forms of art typically demoted (such as ‘mere’ craft), and that could therefore re-frame the theology-arts discussion for the years to come.

Sounds good - but what about the 'distinguished' lecture listed on the same webpage?: Early Visual Art as Patristic Theology: the Trinity, Christology, and the Economy of Salvation in Pictorial Form.

Does that sound like something the average artist would want looking over their shoulder while they were working?

The decline of the emerging church?

In the online magazine, Next-Wave, Bill Dahl writes a challenging piece about the emerging church, its critics and whether it is or isn't 'declining'. (In fact, whether the church - without the emerging adjective - is or isn't declining. 'Decline' is a word I hate to hear, by the way, in relation to church - any church.)

Bill Dahl is a freelance writer from Redmond, in Oregon. Though I must say that his name isn't particularly familiar to me, his work has been published in dozens of national and international publications, websites, ezines, journals and newspapers. One of his websites is entitled, The Porpoise Diving Life, and if that has some sort of ring about it, the subtitle might explain: 'reality for the rest of us, or picking up where purpose-driven peters out.'

Dahl tends to avoid the 'black and white' approach to Christianity, the one bound by lots of rules and regulations, so he may not be everyone's cup of tea. However, I think he's worth checking out, either in what he says in the article on the emerging church, or in the book reviews and writings on his website.

Vincent Donovan on idols

A missionary facing an alien pagan culture, to be an efficient instrument of the gospel, has to have the courage to cast off the idols of the tribe, of the tribe he came from. There are many idols, but two which, I believe, particularly mesmerize the Western church, are individualism on the one hand, and love of organization on the other.

We consistently tend to interpret Christianity either from the individual or organisational viewpoint. The love of organization and power structures have led to our ideas of lord bishops and pontiff popes and national associations of the right and of the left and (especially since Vatican II) a plethora of meetings and chapters and synods and councils and committees. Individualism has its obsessions also: individual responsibility, individual morality, individual vocation to the priesthood, self-fulfilment, individual holiness and salvation. Individualism on one side, and organization on the other, with little room for community in between.

Without paying lip service to the idea, how seriously do we consider the possibility that Christianity is essentially directed neither to the individual nor to the organization but to the community?

Vincent Donovan in Christianity Rediscovered, page 73 (SCM Press 2001)

Kaiapoi Pa

In recent weeks one could be forgiven for thinking that Pakeha in New Zealand are either continually at odds with Maori (or vice versa) or that our history together has been one of contention and nothing else. It might also be thought that the history of the church vis-a-vis Maori had always been fraught.

News, like that about Hone Harawira, doesn't tend to help much. (See Wikipedia for a very up-to-date summary of his situation.)

However, today I came across a blog post written by Steve Taylor which draws out three stories that present a rather different picture of our mutual history. They each connect to the Kaiapoi Maori pa, which was put to seige and finally destroyed by Te Rauparaha; the other link in the stories is Christianity, and its power to change and bring forgiveness and peace.

Check this sermon out (and don't be too picky about the lack of proofreading!)

ANZAMS Mini-Symposium

Mini-Symposium

Aotearoa-New Zealand Association for Mission Studies (ANZAMS)

Date & Time: 30–31 October 2009 | 1:30pm (Friday) – 3:30pm (Saturday)

Venue: Laidlaw College, Auckland Campus – 80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, Waitakere 0650

About the mini-symposium

Theme:

"From Edinburgh 1910 World Mission Conference to Edinburgh 2010 - Witnessing to Christ Today: Perspectives from Aotearoa/New Zealand"

A selection of papers will be presented which will discuss some of the themes of next year's Edinburgh 2010 centenary celebration, including:

• Metaphors of Mission in the Gospel of Matthew
• Newbigin's Trinitarian Missiology
• Missiologists as Key-holders for Theological Education Reform
• Migrant Theologies
• Christian Communities in Contemporary Contexts
• Global Christianities and Mission Studies
• History as Evangelism
• Global Christianities and Mission Studies
• Assessing the Impact of NZ Missionaries on the World Scene
• And more!!
  

Speakers

Among those presenting will be Ross Langmead (AAMS Australia), John Roxborogh, Steve Graham, Rosemary Dewerse, John Hitchen, George Wieland, Hugh Kemp and Peter Lineham.

Cost (including meals)

Prepayment: $50 (cheques payable to SGM Conference Account)

Door: $60

Accommodation
Limited accommodation may be available at Laidlaw College at extra cost.

For further information and registration, email Ian Dally, or phone +64 9 837 9758.

After McDonaldization

After McDonaldization: Mission, Ministry, and Christian Discipleship in an Age of Uncertainty, by John Drane.

John Drane's acclaimed "The McDonaldization of the Church" identified the catastrophic trend of Western churches offering uninventive, pre-packaged worship to dwindling congregations. Since its publication, church attendance has continued to decline even though increasing numbers of people are searching for spiritual integrity and turning to "spirituality."

In "After McDonaldization," Drane argues that the continuing impact of globalization and consumerism has been joined by a post-9/11 culture of fear and a search for truth. He asks what it means to be Christian in a post-Christendom context. Where are today's mission opportunities, the places where God is at work? In our fragmented society, how should Christian community be shaped? And what values might inspire the leaders of the twenty-first century?

As he addresses key questions for Western Christianity in a global context, Drane presents a case for a more practical theology, a reinvigorated style of ministry, and a restatement of classic Christian beliefs for the twenty-first century. "To continue as we are may be comfortable, but could also be institutionally suicidal," writes Drane. "Our options are simple. We either do nothing, and the decline continues, or we ask fundamental questions and take whatever steps may be necessary to re-imagine church life."

Dave Tomlinson in New Zealand

Dave Tomlinson comes to Wellington
(these details come from a joint newsletter put out by Presbyterian Youth Ministry and World Vision).

World Vision have brought Dave Tomlinson, an Anglican priest in London, over to New Zealand for a fleeting visit. Dave will give two keynote talks on "re-emerging church" on Thursday 10 September, 9 - 12:30 pm @ St John's in the City, Wellington. Door charge $10.

Who is he?
Dave wrote The Post-evangelical, founded "Holy Joes" church in a pub, and has recently published the excellent book, Re-enchanting Christianity, which follows on from The Post-evangelical in that it explores ways of being faithful to the Gospel/Bible for those who may be post-church or wondering about their faith. Bible, prayer, mission, theology, church, community, are some of the areas explored. Now he is the vicar of St Luke's in North London, an Anglican parish church that seeks to combine tradition with contemporary culture. He is married to Pat, and has three children and three grandchildren. Dave's website has more information about his work and ministry.

Re-emerging Church?

Mark Pierson, from World Vision, uses the term "re-emerging church", which he prefers to "emerging church" because it better reflects a desire to see existing churches resourced to re-discover their place in the culture, rather than feel that something new is going to come along and take them over. Dave has done this at St Luke's Anglican in London and his new book reflects this practice.

Dave's two keynote talks:

Church without borders
In a fractured and fragmented world where many starve for relationships and belonging, how can we build more open and inclusive communities? How can we create churches that people want to come to? How can we connect effectively with churchless spirituality?

Identity and change in an age of uncertainty
How do we listen and respond to what is happening in the world, whilst continuing to listen, and remain faithful, to our tradition? What do we let go of, and what do we hold on to? And how can our traditions and rituals be reconfigured and re-spirited to meet new needs?

God is Back (!)

God is Back: how the global revival of faith is changing the world, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

These two authors, both journalists for The Economist, (one is a Catholic and one an atheist) have written several books together about trends on the global level. This latest one focuses on the (surprising) increase and revival of religion in the world, at a time when it was widely believed that secularism would predominate. And the intriguing thing is that the people who are embracing religion are not just the poor and uneducated, but the ‘technologically sophisticated, upwardly mobile, urban, well-educated, middle class – in a word, thoroughly modern – people.’
While the authors focus extensively on the way in which the American First Amendment ‘simultaneously forbids the state to manipulate religion for its own ends by creating an established church while guaranteeing citizens the right to participate in public life on the basis of their religious convictions’ and thus creates a vitality that Europe lacks, they by no means focus exclusively on Western religions. Islam of course receives due attention, but so does the uprise of religion in many third world countries, as well as Africa and South America.
The book is well-researched, written in an often witty and lively style, and essential reading for anyone who wants to get a global perspective. A much more extensive review (by New Zealander Chris Marshall - pictured at right) can be found in the June 2009 On the Road Journal.

My apologies

Every so often you need to do a bit of housekeeping, and this time it's involved the links down the side of the page. I discovered that a couple of Dunedin blogs, both run by the same person, haven't been added to for several months, so they've been deleted from the list.

And Glocal Christianity had changed its URL....I've repaired that on the list.

Sorry if you've been trying to access any blogs and haven't been able to, or have found them out of date.

Cosmopolitan Evangelicals

In an article in the latest Out of Ur newsletter, Skye Jethani mentions, Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power, who refers to many current Christians as "Cosmopolitan Evangelicals."
They...

• reject signifiers of "populist" Christianity, such as the Left Behind books and Thomas Kinkade paintings.
• are less involved in local churches, but highly involved with parachurch organizations.
• may not theologically agree with same-sex civil unions, but they don't see them as an assault on the culture.
• remain definitively pro-life.
• are more engaged with matters of local and global justice. AIDS, poverty, and human rights have been added to "traditional family values" in their set of concerns.
• recognize the legitimacy of environmental matters and view them through the theological lense of "creation stewardship."

Does this sound like the sort of people you have - or would like to have - in your church? Or are these the sorts of Christians you know don't come to church in your area?

The patient is as well as may be expected

Massey University, in a survey of a 1000 New Zealanders, says results show there has been a 'sharp rise' in the number of New Zealanders with no religious affiliation. However, the 'sharp rise' has taken place over 17 years, and the rise is 11%, from 29% to 40%. Naturally, this survey result has had all sorts of anti-religious bodies telling us that religion is dead, from people on the RichardDawkins.net site to Jillian Whyte, who forecasts the future, to the Society of Atheists, Rationalists and Skeptics.

According to the survey, just over a third of New Zealanders describe themselves as religious, even though the last Census has more than 50% of people saying they have a religious affiliation, be it Christian or Buddhist or Muslim and so on.

As always it would be good to know what questions were asked of the respondents. We can get some idea from these 'results': Fifty-three per cent say they believe in God (although half of those say they have doubts), 20 per cent believe in some form of higher power and about third say they don't believe or don't know.

However, 60% (of parents, presumably) say they would prefer children to have a religious education in state primary schools - with strongest support for teaching about all faiths. Hmm, your children can be religious, but you as an adult don't have to be.

In the media release, Professor Philip Gendall, who led the research team, says the view that New Zealand is a very secular country is supported by the relatively low levels of active involvement in religion. “The survey shows that God is not dead, but religion may be dying," Professor Gendall says. This quote from Professor Gendall has made its way across the Internet in a couple of days. It's catchy, has a ring of truth, and is oddly ambiguous. The survey shows that God is not dead. Well, that's good for God to know!

Professor Gendall adds, “There is evidence that New Zealanders have become less religious over the last 17 years; however, most New Zealanders believe in God and there has been no change in the proportion of those who say they believe in a higher power.” So that bit about the 'sharp rise' was a bit of a headline rather than a reality? New Zealanders have become less religious but most still believe in God: does this mean that believing in God doesn't mean you're religious? I guess it could well do...

“So perhaps the apparent decline in religiosity reflects a decline in traditional religious loyalties - rather than a decline in spirituality as such.” And that may be much closer to the truth, a truth which churches are finding everywhere. People may not align themselves so readily to a particular denomination these days, and there is evidence that many people still regard themselves as Christians (as others probably regard themselves as Buddhists) without actually going to a church (or a Buddhist temple).

The study found that significant numbers of New Zealanders believe in the supernatural with 57 per cent believing in life after death, 51 per cent believing in heaven and 36 per cent believing in hell.

A quarter of those surveyed think star signs affect people's futures, 28 per cent say good luck charms work and 39 per cent believe fortune-tellers can foresee the future.

If religion is 'dead,' superstition is alive and well!

Finding a way home

I've snaffled the following snippet from the Prodigal Kiwi blog - hope they won't mind. (It was written back in August last year.) It comes from a talk (?) by Dave Tomlinson, and may in fact also appear in his recent book, Re-enchanting Christianity, which hadn't been published at the time the PK blog wrote their post (but has been now).

“Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.”
Lenny Bruce

“…People are no less spiritual today than they were in the past, but they are a lot less religious. A disconnect has occurred between religion and spirituality: people no longer see religion or church as the natural setting in which to explore or express their spiritual aspirations. So they are drifting away from churches in droves. However they are not doing so because they no longer believe in God, or because they have no spiritual hunger, but because in their experience church is neither offering a faith they can believe in, nor an existential spirituality that can excite or satisfy the deeper yearnings of the soul. Many long to reconnect with the sacred mystery of life, to discover their place in the cosmos, but they don’t see church or religion as a way of achieving this…I see no future in the twenty-first century for expressions of Christianity that are not Spirited. Our world longs for numinosity: for a sense of awe and mystery, for sacredness, spirituality and enchantment, for something ‘more’ than the purely rational and cerebral. If the church fails to engage with, and cater to, this longing, it has no real future…”

Wendell Berry

In an essay from 1993 entitled, Christianity and the Survival of Creation, author Wendell Berry writes

I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways; it is a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, etc. This dualism, I think is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In its best known, its most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the dualism of body and soul. This is an issue as difficult as it is important, and so to deal with it we should start at the beginning.

The crucial test is probably Genesis 2:7, which gives the process by which Adam was created: "the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul." My mind, like most people's, has been deeply influenced by dualism, and I can see how dualistic minds deal with this verse. They conclude that the formula for man-making is: man = body + soul. But that conclusion cannot be derived, except by violence, from Genesis 2:7, which is not dualistic. The formula given in Genesis is not man = body + soul; the formula there is soul = dust + breath. According to this verse, God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope. He formed man of dust; by breathing his breath into it, he made the dust live. Insofar as it lived, it was a soul. The dust, formed as man and made to live, did not embody a soul; it became a soul. "Soul" here refers to the whole creature. Humanity is thus presented to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together, but as a single mystery.

Berry has more to say about God's economy as opposed to economics, about Christianity's willingness to be part of the destructive forces of the world, about its culpability in not seeing this world as Holy, and about a number of other related issues. It isn't an essay that will encourage most of us in the way we presently conduct our lives; that's not Berry's intention. His aim is to give such breadth to our view of Creation and our part in it that we'll deeply reconsider how we behave within this world.

And just to give you a little more taste of Berry's writing, here's a quote from the title essay of his book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays. It was published in 1998.

"If you destroy the ideal of the "gentle man" and remove from men all expectations of courtesy and consideration toward women and children, you have prepared the way for an epidemic of rape and abuse. If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people, but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold."

John Updike

In a November, 2004 article on John Updike published online in the Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly magazine there is the following comment on Updike's Christianity:

While much of his earlier work contains traces of Updike's furious immersion in Christian theology, he said he looked more to the congregation of his hometown Massachusetts church as the rock of his faith today.

"When I haven't been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to be there," he said. "It's not just the words, the sacraments. It's the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity."

And in a quote from one of his books (one of the Rabbit tetralogy)

"When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ," he tells a disconcerted Eccles. "Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil's work."

Moving on

Television watching is on the decline, newspapers are folding (if you'll excuse the pun) around the world, and magazines come and go at the drop of a hat (not helped by the fact that many magazine owners think the reading public merely wants wads of glossy advertising when they buy a magazine).
The culprit (but not the only culprit) is the Internet. News is free and much more widespread; opinion is available from one extreme to the other; television programmes are watchable when you want to see them, and so are movies.
The Christian News website notes:
What does all this mean for the Christian community here in NZ and around the world? Rather than the gloom of failing newspapers, the internet has been a boon for Christian ministries. Finally we can get our content into the marketplace of ideas and compete fairly in cyberspace, something that has not been possible in newspapers or TV previously. Christians now have access to everything from written articles to MP3 seminary lecture courses to full video sermons, lectures, debates, and numerous fascinating other cutting edge materials, and all by the finest scholars in the world. We now have a playing field with the secular world that is more level than anything for a long time.
The times are certainly changing (and not just The Times of London). But is the Internet still basically the toy of wealthier nations? How many third world countries have real access to it?

Apropos of the above, I've just come across the Alltop site again. It was something that popped up sometime ago (I've written about it on one of my blogs at some time in history) but I'd forgotten about it. There are innumerable versions of it, but for those on this blog the interesting ones might be the All the Top Christianity News, or the News for pastors, ministers and church staff (which goes under the basic heading of 'Church').
Alltop provides a work-in-progress type list of blogs, sites and other sundry Internet paraphenalia that are 'hot' at the moment. The aforesaid blogs etc may well drop off in time, depending on their level of interest. While they're on Alltop, they show up as separate sections within the page, and, by running your mouse over the top of a line, you can see what the post is about.
It's totally time-consuming, but informative. Don't do it when you're supposed to be doing something more important.

from Dave Brown's blog

In Dave Brown's blog, JC's helper, he writes of throwing the baby out with the bathwater - or not. Is Christianity full of rubbish that needs to be ditched? The answer is pretty much, Yes, but Dave has some other things to add as well. The post begins thus:

I have read Cathleen Falsani's book, "The God Factor" in which she interviews 32 public figures about their spirituality. I recently read a similar one by an Australian journalist. I found them both interesting and exciting. There were so many times when I found myself saying, "Yeah! Great! Amen to that!" and that was often in response to people who would not be seen dead in a church. In both books there was criticism, hurt and sometimes anger expressed toward the Church and/or Christianity. Many had "outgrown" the religion of their youth. I mix with fire fighters, ambulance personnel and other workers who share similar positions. To them, organised religion has had its day at best, or is a destructive, judgemental and limiting force at worse.