The Unlikely Disciple

Karen Swallow Prior writes in a recent Books and Culture article about a book that's a kind of follow-up to A. J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically, in which the author tried to follow the Old Testament laws to the letter.

Prior begins her article:

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University isn't the book its author, Kevin Roose, thought it would be. It's certainly not the book he pitched to his publisher as a left hook in the ongoing fisticuffs between secularists and believers. And it's not the book I anticipated when I first heard rumors among students at Liberty University, where I teach, that a young man from Brown University had come here and spent a semester undercover in order to write an exposé on command central for one side in America's culture wars.

It's not the book it was supposed to be because, as it turns out, Liberty University wasn't what it was supposed to be.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Randall Prior

The keynote speaker at this year's Presbyterian General Assembly (in Wellington, New Zealand) was Randall Prior. Randall focuses a good deal on Gospel and Culture, on Church and the Future. In his addresses to the PCANZ, he spoke specifically about the Future of the Church. Although his talk had some Australian focuses, it was very applicable to the New Zealand scene (and in fact, to a much wider scene). You can download the talks here, or obtain them as audio files.

In one of the footnotes to his second talk, he notes: In my view there is still some considerable ‘dying’ of the present form of the church yet to take place. It is not a simple matter to anticipate a future shape of the church but the indications are that the church’s place in Australian [for Australian read, New Zealand, USA, UK - anywhere else where institutional churches are struggling] society will be:
as one faith group in a society of several faiths and religions;
the church will be marginal to the main interests and activities of our society;
there will be a diversity of forms and styles of church life;
congregations may be increasingly dependent on lay leadership;
there may be little interest among church people in denominational loyalty; there will be fewer resources to maintain the structures and activities and buildings which we have known in the past; for some church communities, there may be only a loose connection with buildings.

It would probably be unwise to takes these notes alone, without reading the rest of the talk, particularly because Prior is talking of the Future of the Church, not its death.