Goodbye Radio, Hullo Internet

It was once thought that radio was the most economical of the large-scale broadcasting opportunities for evangelism. Now it looks like the Internet is taking over in this area too.

Many churches around the world are filing podcasts on their websites, and thus making the churches' sermons and other material available to those who might have listened to the radio in the past. And it's being done at almost no cost, which means that even small ministries can play a part in reaching listening audiences.

Only a couple of years ago, podcasts were virtually unknown to those outside the elite areas of the Internet world; now they're being downloaded enthusiastically by all sorts of Internet users. And since they can be transferred onto MP3 players, they're as accessible as radio was. (Remember when people used to carry 'trannies' on their shoulders in order to listen to music? Trannies were monoliths compared to the technology now available.)

Only a few months ago a question was asked in our church: what did people think was the most used part of the church website? It came as a surprise to most of us that the downloading of sermons was the top feature - and not by church members, but by people in various parts of the world.

Incidentally, Radio NZ has a screed of podcasts available. Check them out. And here's the link to the DCBC podcast page.

The symbol at the top of the page is that used by Apple to represent podcasting.

Unfairness

For the next couple of months, the relatively new New Zealand site, Like Minds, Like Mine is focusing on the topic of unfairness in relation to people who've been discriminated against because of their mental illness. The video below, which features Samoan-born Rev. Imoa Setefano is the one that is currently showing, and hopefully will continue to be available by the You Tube link.



There are several other profiles on the site, and the site is worth visiting for its other features too.

We're still learning....

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Having a Worldview

Last week, in his speech at the National Archives, President Obama spoke of the “so-called enhanced interrogation techniques” that

... undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. ... In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts ...

And, on closing the prison at Guantanamo:

Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. ...
[I]nstead of serving as a tool to counter-terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

Almost simultaneously, in another part of Washington, Vice President Cheney, began and ended his speech with 9-11 as the justification for everything that followed: “9-11 made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat ...” He defended the “enhanced interrogation” by arguing that:

The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, and the right thing to do. ... to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.

And Cheney’s view of values was that:

... no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them. ... For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings.

We can thank God the Cheney/Bush years (as someone put it) are over. Let's pray that the Obama years bring more commonsense, good will, and real health to the nation of America.

The Postmodern Parish

Discerning the shape of the emerging church will be an inexact process, especially for those of us who still have one foot firmly planted back in the old modernist and Christendom paradigm and are only beginning to understand the impact of the new postmodern and post-Christian context for ministry. Because that process will often be confusing, we need the Holy Spirit to lead us through it. If we could rely only on our own bumbling efforts at discerning the shape of the emerging church, we would be in trouble. As a friend once described the way a new pastor is called to lead a congregation, "It's so crazy, you have to believe the Holy Spirit is in charge; or you'd go nuts!" In a similar way, we would be tempted to despair in our attmepts to discover the emerging church, were we not confident that the Spirit is at work in and through us.

The Postmodern Parish - Jim Kitchens - pg 41. Alban Institute, 2003

So you still don't think NZeders use the Net?

In a media blurb sent out about a week ago, Nielsen Research gave an overview of some recent research into how New Zealanders are using the Net.
Over the last four weeks,
1. "(48%) of us have created, updated or looked at an online profile on a social networking site; and nearly (30%) have contributed to a message board, online forum or wrote/commented on a blog.”
2. "...two out of every five have uploaded pictures (41%), uploaded music (12%), uploaded videos (10%) or posted a review of a product or service online (9%)."
3. "...almost half of the Internet population have downloaded, streamed or watched a video clip online (45%); or downloaded, streamed, or listened to music (37%)."
4. "...people using online directories (47%), reading newspapers or publications online (79%) - and a staggering (81%) using search engines..."
5. 81.3% have used internet banking.

If, as ministers, we're still not considering that the Internet has a part to play in the future of our churches, I suspect we're deluding ourselves.

And it's no different here

Figures from a survey of 300 Canadian pastors came out in the February 2009 edition of Presbyterian Record, as a sidebar to an article entitled: Breaking the Silence - the mental health of our clergy. The issue of wellness, or the lack of it, amongst clergy has tended to be covered up for decades, because clergy are expected to be so 'holy,' 'capable,' 'fit and healthy' that they never need be sick or off-duty. The situation in New Zealand is little different. There are times when it seems as though ministers have little to do all day except write the weekly sermon and visit a few elderly ladies in the parish. But the truth of the matter is, of course, that most ministers are frantically busy, overloaded to such an extent that they don't have nearly enough time for their families, nearly enough time to relax, or virtually any time to just sit and listen to what the Lord is saying to them.
There are many reasons for this, including:
Ministers working a minimum of 50 hours a week, and often more than that;
Not having the days off to which they're entitled;
Feeling as though they have to be perfect when they're often under huge stress to perform;
Feeling empty, going through the motions, in terms of prayer, worship, Bible reading, spiritual life in general;
Lacking someone who can counsel or mentor or come alongside them;
Suffering depression or burn-out or panic attacks and having to live with it.

The Canadian situation only confirms what is known in New Zealand. This is what the National Mission Office has been working on for several years: finding ways to help ministers avoid breakdowns and depression.

The full report can be found at the Caring for Clergy site - click on Current Research and then on 'Clergy Well-Being - Seeking Wholeness with Integrity'.

Calvin in Dunedin

This year celebrates the 500th Anniversary of John Calvin's birth. Round the world there are people putting on conferences, lectures, celebrations of all sorts to mark the memory of this historic figure in Christian - and world - history.
To some Christians, Calvin's name doesn't evoke good vibes, and certainly there are aspects of Calvin's life and theology that we would no longer find acceptable. However, there is much that's great and good about the man, and it's this side of him we celebrate.
Knox Centre for Ministry and Learning, in conjunction with the Theology and Religious Studies Department of the University of Otago, is presenting a two-day conference offering international and local perspectives on Calvin, with particular reference to his historical and theological influences here in New Zealand, and particularly in Otago.
The keynote speakers will be Prof Randall Zachman and Prof Elsie McKee (pictured at right).
Other speakers are: Alison Clarke, Ivor Davidson, Peter Matheson, Angela McCarthy, Murray Rae and John Stenhouse.
The dates for the Conference are: 24-25 August, 2009. There will also be a son et lumiere presentation at First Church in Dunedin City.
Register - and find out more information here.

Chaplain to the porn industry

Just over a year ago I wrote about the Number One Christian Porn site, and Craig Gross, who has website called XXXchurch.com. [Gross] has become something of a chaplain to the porn industry, writes the Leadership Journal. He has traveled with porn star Ron Jeremy to debate the dangers of pornography on college campuses, in public forums, and on news programs like ABC's Nightline. More recently, he's been taking teams of volunteers to adult entertainment tradeshows around the world.
In 2008, Craig, his wife, and the small team that runs XXXchurch moved their families from Michigan to Las Vegas to launch a ministry they call The Strip Church. Their focus is to reach the people who come to the town for conferences, and help them avoid the innumerable temptations that await anyone who goes to Vegas. (The other churches in Vegas tend to focus on the people living on the outskirts of the town.)
Gross says, "Our plan is to reach people on the Strip at trade shows with the gospel, give them the support they need to avoid making bad decisions while they're in Vegas, and then hopefully connect them with a church back in their home town."
"One pastor said, 'I like the plan, but what about the other fifty-one weeks out of the year?' I told him, a few days in this town can screw up your life and your marriage forever. Vegas wants us to believe that what happens here stays here, but it never does. We may only have contact with people one week a year, but it is a really important week."
Gross and his team go into porn shows, strip shows - anywhere where there's a need for the Gospel, and for Christ. And find there are spiritually hungry people everywhere. And Gross talks about it at churches across the country: 'Yes, but there are still a lot of pastors who are uncomfortable with the subject. Every time I speak at a church, like clockwork, a woman comes up to me crying and says, "Pornography is why I lost my marriage." If I'm a pastor and I know this is happening in my church, why wouldn't I address it? People want to hear about the things they are dealing with. Not to knock sermons about the end times, but porn is killing people in our churches. We've got to talk about it.'
He notes that in one study it was estimated 48% of pastors have struggled with porn. On the XXXchurch site there are over a 100 confessions from pastors who have admitted to problems with it.
He says that while porn is something churches will talk about more, there are still many other addictions that aren't so 'popular' in church circles: food disorders, and cutting. All these things need to be dealt with from the pulpit, because there are people in every congregation who are struggling with these and similar addictions.

The Church is right outside your window

In an article in The Acorn, Toya Richards Hill writes about a Presbyterian church in Oklahoma that was bemoaning the skateboarders who'd taken over their church grounds. The minister, Karen Rodgers, along with the rest of the church, also bemoaned the fact that there were no youth in the congregation. Rodgers challenged her congregation to start praying for the skateboarders. Up until then the congregation had preferred to put up 'No Skateboarding' signs. She reached out to the youths and invited them in for a bite to eat. There were no takers at first, but gradually the skateboarders came - they were from broken homes, dysfunctional families, and the like - and eventually they started showing up at the youth group as well.
The church still doesn't have a large youth group - an average of 21 turn up - but now there are both skateboarders and non-skateboarders in the mix, including 11 who've been baptised by Rodgers.
And the women in the congregation got money together to help build a skateboard park.

It's a scary world

When you read things like this:
During the debate about the entry of the global seed organization Cargill into India in 1992, a Cargill executive stated, "We bring Indian farmers smart technologies, which prevent bees from usurping the pollen." During the United Nations Biosafety Negotiations, Monsanto circulated literature that claimed that "weeds steal sunshine." A worldview that defines pollination as "theft by bees" and claims that diverse plants "steal" sunshine is one aimed at stealing nature's harvest, by replacing open, pollinated varieties with hybrids and sterile seeds, and destroying biodiverse flora with herbicides.

Vandana Shiva
"Worldview of Abundance"
in Food & Faith

Men's Group

After my brief comments the other day about What Men Want I need to mention a feature-length movie about men, their needs, their feelings, their emotions (and the inability to express them). Men’s Group takes six men and pulls their lives together through a series of meetings. It’s raw, the language is blunt and down-to-earth (they are Australians, after all) and it’s made a huge impact wherever it’s been shown. Boris Sokratov, of the Out of the Blue depression awareness campaign, wrote: Men’s Group explores dark territory: anger, remorse, fear and regret. In ‘man speak,’ Men’s Group is a story about men talking about stuff: touchy feely emotionally hard stuff. Regrettably many of those who might benefit the most by seeing the movie are unlikely to go near it. On the other hand the more of us who do go the better. Definitely worth a look.
You can see a trailer of the movie here, and the website is here (though it’s a bit thin on information about the film itself). The film has been showing on a limited release around the main centres of New Zealand in May. Hopefully it will soon be available on DVD for all those who aren't in the main centres.

The skeleton and the muscle

Len, on the Next Reformation site notes that Mike Breen essentially says we have two broad groups in the church, with two orientations.

* the traditional and pragmatic prefer the bounded set .. definition, boundaries, clear ways to identify who is in and who is out
* the “emergent” prefer the centered set.. direction, focus, purpose and an emphasis on process over location

Mike raises the body metaphor to compare these two groups and describe why they need each other. The pragmatic are like the skeleton, the emergent are like the muscle.

You can get a skeleton to stand up, but you can’t get it to move.
You can get muscle to move, but it wont’ stand up.

“We need to ask the Spirit of God to bring a great rattling so the bones will stand up, and then to breathe upon those bones so they will live so we will have a mighty army.”

Mike Breen is one of the founders of The Order of Mission - TOM - in Sheffield. To quote (at some length) from their website, this is what they're about:

TOM is a pioneering movement born out of a desire to fully give ourselves to making disciples of Jesus in this fast changing world. We stand in the tradition of the missionary communities of the past who lived as radical, pioneering pilgrims called to influence, serve and shape society and the church in their time: the Celtic monks and nuns who first re-evangelised these nations, the Methodists and the Salvation Army who called a people back to God in their days, the Protestant missionary societies who re-discovered global mission in the nineteenth century.

The Order of Mission is a dispersed community of pioneers, people called to lead and influence within whatever context and culture they live and work: cities and rural areas, developed and developing countries, business, education, arts, health and social care, public and private sector, family and church. We are a people who have committed ourselves to the vows of simplicity, purity and accountability. We take ‘Lifeshapes’ as our rule or pattern of life and seek to journey together, encouraging and challenging each other, as we follow God’s call on our lives.

Click on the link above to find out more about them.

In your face video about suicide

Life: a Message of Hope for a Generation in Despair.

This British-made video (from Wales) is about ten minutes long, and consists of an introduction in which a guy with a shaved head goes full on at the camera telling us that the suicide is one aspect of the approach of the 'thief who comes to destroy', and that Jesus came to 'give us life'. Following this are three young people, all of whom have tried to commit suicide as well as self-harming on several occasions. Their testimonies have an edgy and scary reality, and they don't hold back on what's happened to them. In each case, Jesus has literally been their salvation. The video ends with the first guy inviting people to think about what they've seen and get in touch with them at igniteme.org.

It was made in response to a recent spate of youth suicides in South Wales, and stars Ignite's Mark Beacher, Dai Hankey, Richard Stanton and Jess Wilson.



Check it out: it's a great and sobering resource for young people, and may well save lives.

What Men Want

According to a survey of 400 readers of the UK magazine for Christian men, Sorted, men who regularly go to church prefer "proper macho songs," and feel uncomfortable with hugging and with sitting in circles discussing their feelings. The majority of men, the survey said, go to church to be intellectually and spiritually challenged. They want strong, motivating messages, and more discussion on family issues and money, two of the most popular topics.

Only a small number - around 8% - said church was too feminine. But at least half don't like dancing in church and even more said embroidery and flowers turn them off. However, around 60% said they enjoyed singing, and were more motivated by proclamation-type hymns than sentimental songs.

Church discussion groups did very little for many men, and a number suggested that the pub would be a much better place for interaction.

So there you go: if you're wondering what's putting men off church, this might be worth checking out!

When they will not come

David Fitch always seems to have some good things to say - whether you agree with them or not. In a recent post he discusses When They Will Not Come, and the whole matter of the attractional/non-attractional church. He also looks at whether you should chase people who visit a couple of times and don't return. Should visitors necessarily feel 'instantly' at home? It's not likely, he says, given that they're coming into a formed community that has history, relationships and a host of other connections. Are welcome teams really an ideal way to greet newcomers/visitors? He talks about the value of the Sunday morning gathering, and the way in which people who come to church eventually have to decide whether they'll make a commitment there. And he talks about hospitality.

It's not a long post, but it's worth a read.

Killing the pastor

Do we only want pastors and teachers? What about evangelists, apostles, prophets? Or are people with these gifts too scary to have in the average church? Won't the evangelists be forever telling us to get out and evangelise? Won't the apostles be demanding we start up a new church every five minutes? Won't the prophets come to church dressed in weird garb and shouting loudly?
Len, on the New Reformation blog, has written:
Alan Roxburgh and others argue that the sola pastora (single pastor) model of church has not only sapped the missional impulse from the church, it has cast many pastors into relative isolation. Roxburgh claims that this model, with its focus on one dominant, usually shepherd-type leader, is “killing pastors,” leading to “terrible discouragement and loneliness, and creating a deep sense of personal failure.”
He goes on to discuss this issue, but I want just to mention that wellness in ministers these days is one of the great plagues of society, far worse than swine-flu, far worse than any pandemic we've supposedly known in recent decades. We have to change. Churches have to take responsibility for leadership, not just leave it all to one over-burdened man.

Abundance

The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis I is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses -- that is, endows with vitality -- the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."

Walter Brueggemann
"The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity"
on Religion Online

(I heard Brueggemann speak when he came to Knox Church in Dunedin, a number of years ago. I expected him to be as theological in his preaching as he was in his writing; in fact, he preached a simple but profound message which reached all those who attended.)

Being tangible

The Tangible Kingdom is a new(ish) resource from a site called !! The Tangible Kingdom. There's a book which has received quite a few kudos, and you can see a 'remix' version of it here.
I personally didn't find that particularly helpful maybe because I didn't look at it carefully enough, but there's also a video:



The video is slow and quiet, and takes a minute or so to begin to make its point, but it does make its point - by using one neat symbol.

Virtual Church again

Tall Skinny Kiwi blogs on the 5th May about a quote by Yuang Han Kim, who wrote in the book, The Identity of Reformed Theology and Its Ecumenicity in the Twenty-First Century: Reformed Theololgy as Transformational Cultural Theology, Reformed Theology: Identity and Ecumenicity, (it's edited by Wallace M. Alston and Michael Welker, who plainly aren't terribly good with catchy titles).
Kim writes: “Cyber-worship and churches have begun replacing traditional Christian worship and churches. This increasing phenomenon will result in a certain wearing away of the historical institutional churches and worship.”
The problems of the cyber-church are as follows.
First, the cyber-church can never be a spiritual church. It risks the danger that in the electronically mediated virtual world the experience of the holy will become visual and secularized. It also faces the danger that the Word of God pervading the depth of the soul will be changed into the on-screen messages of the electronically reduced multimedia.
Second, the cyber-church is not a real church. It is merely a virtual church, existing only in the electronic network of the Internet.
Third, the cyber-church lacks face-to-face encounter and personal fellowship. Dialogue with a partner on-screen is not the same as dialogue with someone whom one knows personally."
The post brings a lot of comment, and some/many of these are well worth reading. Check them out for a good discussion on virtual church.

Marriage and more

The latest statistics on marriage, civil unions and divorce in New Zealand show a declining rate of divorce, and an increasing number of marriages over the past decade.
And while the marriage rate has retained its demand and relevance, the demand for civil unions has been negligible.
Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ, notes: “The civil unions legislation has proved to be a complete white elephant, despite the claims by the previous government that it would supposedly strengthen human rights and support the choices of apparently 300,000 people who were not married but lived in stable relationships.”
According to Statistics NZ data released today, there have been only 1,646 civil unions registered between April 2005 and March 2009 . These comprised 1,330 same-sex unions (594 male and 736 female) (80%), 312 opposite-sex unions and just four transfers from marriage.

So what are the actual stats for the marriages and divorces - have we reason to celebrate? Here's what NZ Stats says:

• DIVORCES; The Family Court granted 9,700 divorces in 2008, slightly below the annual average of 10,000 for the last decade. About one-third of New Zealanders who married in 1983 had divorced before their silver wedding anniversary (25 years).
• MARRIAGES: There were 21,900 marriages registered in 2008, compared with 21,500 in 2007. The increase was due to more first marriages, up from 14,400 to 14,800. The number of remarriages remained at 7,100, the same as in 2007.
• MARRIAGE RATE: The general marriage rate (marriages per 1,000 unmarried adults) was 13.7 in 2008, down from 15.6 in 1998. The latest rate is less than one-third of the peak level of 45.5 per 1,000 recorded in 1971.
• CIVIL UNIONS: There were 327 civil unions in 2008: 256 same-sex unions (111 male and 145 female) and 71 opposite-sex unions. Up to 31 December 2008, eight civil unions had been dissolved.
  

Mission/Innovative/Monastic/You Name It

A busy week on the National Mission front, with work started on enabling Supervision to become more of a reality for ministers and laypeople around the country. ('Supervision' as in the process where a person goes, about once a month, to discuss their work and life with someone trained to listen and enable them to keep moving forward.)
That's my excuse for not having posted much on this blog this week - it hasn't been for want of trying (!)
Anyway, just 'discovered' Urban Vision. No doubt they'll be happy to learn that they've been discovered after some 13 years (they 'began' in 1996). As they state on their website:
Urban Vision is a group of households and ministries in Wellington, Porirua and the Kapiti Coast who focus on building life-giving relationships with those on the margins of mainstream society, and doing justice in the midst of urban poverty. We’ve come to realise we’re a local expression of a global revolution of hope and transformation, worked out in the neighbourhoods of need we’ve relocated to.
You might consider it a church without walls, but in fact its members belong to a number of different churches and denominations. In the last couple of years however, Urban Vision has taken on a new form:
In 2007, we took the imaginative step of becoming a contemporary Order, following Jesus on the margins. In making this step, we’ve recognised Jesus is doing new things right now in Aotearoa/New Zealand (contemporary), and that we have some things in common with some of the monastic and missionary movements of old, specifically a spiritual rhythm to life (order). We have been students of history and experience: we wanted a durable structure, enabling the continuing vitality of our pioneering, prophetic and Jesus-centred threads.
There's more on their site, as you'd expect, and they're even debating how people outside Wellington can connect with their form of contemporary Order. And they're advertising some opportunities for those who are in Wellington.

The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion

Lacking some resources in the area of religion and science? The Faraday Institute provides resources par excellence!
Just to list the most obvious:
1. Short lectures, articles and commentaries relevant to current issues in science and religion. These are posted under Current Issues and vary from time to time. As of the time of writing, there’s a piece by Nick Spencer on Darwin’s Religious Beliefs, but earlier pieces are available in links.
2. The Faraday Papers: these provide the general reader with accessible and readable introductions to the relationship between science and religion, written by a broad range of authors who are expert in the field.
3. Faraday Lectures: lists up and coming lectures, but also has an archive of earlier ones.
4. The Multimedia page. This archives dozens of papers, talks, discussions, lectures, many of them available as MP3s, or streaming video. Most can be downloaded as videos, and a good number are available as htmls or pdfs. They cover a wide variety of topics from bioethics to cosmology, and others that link religion and science in different ways.
5. A number of news items are archived.
6. Half a dozen research projects are listed and described.
7. Archives of seminars, including news about up and coming ones.
8. The shop sells CDs, DVDs, books and papers.
9. As if you hadn’t had enough, there’s a page of links to other sites of interest.
There now, that should keep you busy on your morning off!

Night Vision

Church for the Night.
St Peter’s Church is slap bang in the middle of the club scene in Bournemouth, and is usually closed during the night. However, a group of club chaplains (by which I presume they mean they’re chaplains to the clubs) decided to open up the church for a night, with decorations, mince pies, music, lights, visuals and heap more. Before they’d even got the doors open at 11 pm, a young girl sitting on the steps with a group of teenagers was desperate to get in, and kept on asking if they could pray with her. As soon as the doors were opened, a stream of people, including bouncers from the clubs, came in to look around, to ask for prayer, to seek counseling and help, and to show a host of other needs. The chaplains were constantly busy, and couldn’t even close at the time they’d decided on.

Since then the church has been opened on other occasions, with similar results.
There’s a full version of the article here, and a website with more stories here, plus there’s a book, Night Vision, that was published in February this year.
Here's the blurb:

Jon Oliver was involved in mission to the club scene long before anyone thought up the term 'mission-shaped'. Here he reflects on the kind of mission that everyone is now talking about - the church going out to where people are, in this case to the clubs and city streets in the early hours, when most churches would be locked up. Part One: looks at the changing face of mission among young people, asks whether clubbing has a spiritual dimension and makes the case for mission and evangelism in places that are about as far removed from most people's idea of church as you can get. Part Two: tells some great stories from the front line by others working in mission to the club culture, e.g: Turning a typical parish church into a 'Church for the Night' - a spiritual oasis for dehydrated clubbers, bottled water and pastoral care, how to be a Christian and a clubber or DJ, engaging with young people who have no contact with the church,and more.

A N Wilson 'returns' - albeit slowly

In a recent edition of New Statesman, novelist and biographer, A N Wilson, explains why he has decided that his 'conversion' to atheism was a foolish mistake, and that he has come to realise that God, religion, spirituality, are the realities rather than the atheistic arguments. His coming back to faith has been slow and full of doubts, but he now believes he's on the right path rather than the wrong.

A few sample paragraphs:

My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, “I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn’t go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously.”

This creed that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments (outlined in David Hume’s masterly Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.

But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers.

Love those old people

Matt Chandler, who isn't an old person, led a church of 100 through substantial change - and now has a congregation numbering some 6000. There's a short interview with him here on the rev.org site. What I appreciated were these two paragraphs, though he has some other very good things to say too.

There were a lot of older people in the church, and here's what I did not do: I did not walk into that place and beat up old saints and demand that our way was our way and they could just deal with it. I'm mortified at how often it plays out that way. And I don't know what young guys think they're doing; I don't know how they think they're pleasing God by beating up people who have been nothing but faithful to Him.

So first I started taking all these old guys out—to coffee, lunch, and dinner—and the message I communicated over and over again was the same: We need you, we need you, we need you. I immediately started putting 20 year-olds together with older folks. "Hey, this guy can show you how to live life; he can teach you about the Bible, he will have you into his home…" There's a hunger among twenty-somethings for that type of mentorship. And at that point the old saints don't care about peripheral things any more. They're not arguing about music and style and whether I'm wearing jeans or not any more.

Clean-up

The Sunday after Easter, around 1500 people gathered in the Dunedin Town Hall for a Resurrection service. There were plenty of young people, but also a large number of oldies, and the enthusiasm was full on.
During that service, Bruce Elder, from Dunedin City Baptist, called for volunteers to help with a number of 'service projects' around the town. The aim was to get around 800 Christian people going out into the community to pick up on jobs that needed doing, but wouldn't get done otherwise. These varied from street cleaning, to painting playgrounds at schools to restoring the Wakari Hospital's duck ponds.
The project had been advertised at various churches around the city already, but another bunch of people signed up for it at the Resurrection service.
In the end the number who went and worked was about half the number called for, but most of the projects that had been set up got done - and the weather stayed fine for the afternoon...

So you thought you just bought and sold on TradeMe?

TradeMe isn't just a place to buy and sell - it turns out that the message board area has a life of its own, quite unrelated to retail therapy. Stuff.co.nz tells us:

* Between 5000 and 20,000 messages are posted on the message board every day.
* The average age of someone who posts a message is 35-plus.
* The boards are largely self-censored, with 98 per cent of threads monitored by the online community and every member able to ''vote'' to remove a thread if they believe it is not suitable.
* Message topics are most active on personal or social issues, be they grief or happiness.
* There are 20 different categories for messages, from books to parenting. General and Opinion tend to be the most frequented.

Greer McDonald, in an article entitled, Web of support for the grieving, writes about the way in which Julie Adams happened on the TradeMe message board almost by chance, and discovered a world of fellow New Zealanders who were prepared to go the extra mile, offer support and encouragement, and even try and discover what had happened to Julie's missing husband. (His overturned car was eventually found on its roof in dense bush 50 metres down a steep bank just below the summit of Rimutaka Hill, Upper Hutt.)

It may not be 'church' as we know it, and it may not be 'community' as we know it, but it's certainly a place for Christians to be keeping tabs on.

Inside the World of Executive Pastors

Inside the World of Executive Pastors a (January) 2009 survey by Leadership Network.

This is an intriguing survey. It included respondents from 41 US States, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, (unfortunately, it’s not possible to differentiate the Australasian responses). Executive pastors are also known as Administrators, Directors, or Chiefs of Staff.

At first glance it seems to be talking about a world that is a long way from the NZ scene, but a quick skim down the pages soon shows up evidence that what’s happening here is what’s happening elsewhere. ‘Feeling emotionally drained and overwhelmed are the two top stressors regularly felt by executive pastors,” for example. Nevertheless, most of them felt happy in their role. However, the bigger the church, the more time executive pastors spend on administration. 'For some, this is a definite drawback: “I don’t feel very pastoral,” wrote one respondent. “I want to touch people more. I want to impact the world.”'

The report also says:
While most people in the pews are familiar with the roles and duties of a teaching pastor or a worship pastor, executive pastors are a relatively new addition to contemporary church culture. Often seen only infrequently in a weekly worship setting, the executive pastor role is one that is still misunderstood amongst many church members—and for that matter, even among other church staff.

Who are executive pastors? For starters, they’re not necessarily male. In fact, 11% of survey responders were female. While that number is likely somewhat higher than the national norm since female executive pastors were specifically sought out for the survey, it’s still an interesting finding—especially given that 100% of survey respondents indicated their senior pastor was male.

Old people and mental health

In a national study of older peoples' mental health services in Britain - Equality in Later Life - the following paragraph stands out:
As a result of the ageing population, the number of people with dementia in the UK is set to increase significantly. At present, there are approximately 700,000 people with dementia and it is estimated that there will be over a million people with dementia by 2025. The financial cost of dementia to the UK each year is over £17 billion and is set to increase.
While younger people in Britain have been increasingly assisted in terms of mental health issues, older people have received the short end of the stick. In fact, the framework for mental health only addresses the mental health needs of working people up to the age of 65. Part of the issue is cost: it's estimated that eliminating age discrimination in adult health services in England could require an additional £2 billion, against a current spend of £8.4 billion.
The situation is unlikely to be dissimilar in New Zealand. Here is another area in which churches could begin to think beyond their current approaches to older people, and become innovative.

More from Baronness Cox

Back on the 4th March, 2009, we posted an item about the visit of Baronness Cox to New Zealand. While she was here, Baroness Cox gave two lectures, one in Auckland and one in Christchurch. The Auckland lecture was to be recorded and put online, but apparently isn't available yet. (We'll try and keep tabs on when it comes online.)

In the meantime, if you want to see Baronness Cox talking, you can see a clip from the Breakfast programme that appeared on the 25th March this year, in which the Baronness talks to Paul Henry about modern-day slavery. The clip seemed to me a bit fiddly to get up and running, but maybe I'm having a bad day. Suffice to say, it can be viewed - with perseverance - once the brief ANZ Bank ad has flitted by.

People who love gardens

In a recent Books and Culture magazine, Alan Jacobs writes on Governing and Gardening, a book review of Tim Richardson's The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden.

A quote from Jacob's review:
Classical—or more specifically Palladian—buildings like Stourhead's Pantheon were common features on the larger estates, but there were also many kinds of pseudo-temple, the aforementioned grottoes, and, increasingly as the century wore on, hermitages. Usually the hermitages would contain statues or books, but it was sometimes thought that hermitages should be inhabited. Curiously, this becomes a major theme in Tom Stoppard's magnificent 1995 play Arcadia, during which Lady Croom hires a bumbling landscape designer named Noakes, whom she comes to refer to as "Culpability" Noakes [as opposed to Culpability Brown, the famous landscaper].
When Noakes tells her that he is building a hermitage, and she inquires where he plans to get a hermit, he stammers—not having considered this point—that he could perhaps advertise in the newspaper for one. To this Lady Croom replies, "But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence."
A wonderful scene, and we learn from Richardson that it's not wholly fictional. The Hon. Charles Hamilton, in the course of creating what would become one of the masterpieces of the age at his estate Painshill, in Surrey, actually did advertise in the newspapers for a hermit to live in his hermitage. He offered said hermit not only (a very small) room and (meager) board but the princely sum of 700 guineas—about $50,000—upon certain strict conditions: for seven years the hermit could not shave, cut his hair, trim his fingernails, or speak to anyone.
On the plus side, he would receive a hermit's cloak, a human skull, and a Bible. Hamilton got a taker soon enough, and was quite pleased until—just three weeks into the experiment—the hermit was found carousing in a nearby pub and was fired on the spot. Thus confirming the wisdom of Lady Croom's suspicions.

Mission - using Tarot cards

Trinity College, Bristol, recently gave a warm welcome to John Drane, one of Britain's leading mission thinkers and practitioners in relating the gospel to western culture. Drane told a packed hall of students and staff about his creative and inspirational use of Tarot cards in building bridges for the gospel to many in today's world who are fascinated with symbolism and alternative spiritualities. He has been doing this for some years and has built up a great deal of experience.
You can read the rest of this (fairly brief) report here. Drane, along with Ross Clifford and Philip Johnson, wrote a book on the subject of Tarot cards called; Beyond Prediction: The Tarot and Your Spirituality. It was published in 2001.
Part of the blurb notes: ...the Tarot was not originally designed for the art of prediction, argue Drane, Clifford and Johnson. Instead, the cards were packed full of Christian symbolism to help us understand the spiritual backdrop to life. With a revealing look at the history of the different packs, together with illustrations and descriptions of each card's meaning (and suggested examples to try), this book shows that there is far more to be gleaned from shuffling the deck than mere fortune telling.

This is quite an innovative approach to mission - though perhaps not one every mission-minded person will be keen to try...! However, if you want more detail about it, check out this report on the John Mark Ministries website.

Love versus Lust

Here's a resource your Youth Group might find useful. Actually some adults might well find it useful too. It's been produced by the Grainger Community Church, and it's well produced too.



A simple idea, very well executed. (Not quite sure why it's taking up more room on the blog than videos usually do!)

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…”

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.

Prayer@Parliament

I haven't been able to confirm the following bit of information - it came to me via a prayer letter - so would be interested to hear from anyone who can tell me more - especially who the 10 Cabinet Ministers are who attend church.

It was tremendously encouraging last Friday, at Prayer @ Parliament, to hear the MP who sponsored the evening (and later confirmed by a former MP) that 10 of our 20 Cabinet Ministers attend church each week if they possibly can. Please pray for all Cabinet Ministers and especially for those who seek to follow after the Lord. Pray that their faith will grow and be shown in their lives and Ministries.

It seems that the meeting may have taken place at Parliament Grand Hall on the 20th March. Christians from all over Wellington got together to pray for the Government, the city and the nation.

The Saga Generation

In line with some of my recent comments about older people in the church, I thought the following new(ish) booklet from Grove Books was of interest. It came out in August last year.
The title is, Reaching the Saga Generation, and for those who, like me, hadn't caught up with the term, 'saga', it apparently means older people, those from 55 years and upwards.

The blurb is as follows:
With the baby boomer generation of post-war Britain came the first post-modern values and new attitudes. Forty years on, these ‘first teenagers’ are becoming known as the ‘Saga generation.’

Ironically, they are being largely forgotten by many churches in the desire to reach the new younger generations. This study suggests it is time look again at this group and radically proclaim ‘This church needs more older people!’

In an article entitle, What Church for the Saga Generation? - Cultural Shifts in Younger Old, Michael Collyer gives us some more information on defining 'age.'

Defining old age is no longer an easy task, as the age range can span half a century, from 50 to 105.
....it is helpful to consider three distinctive cohort groups which I set out below.

•Pre-Seniors – 55-65 age group working, active and independent
•Seniors – 65-80 age group retired, active, mostly independent
•Elderly frail – 80 years and over mostly dependent and living alone

The SAGA generation includes both pre-seniors and seniors. The divide between this group and the now elderly frail before them is not merely a generational one; there are significant cultural differences...The causes of these differences are many and varied.

Collyer also notes:
The number of people aged 65 and over has increased by 50 per cent since 1960, from 6 million then to 9 million now and is set to grow rapidly to reach 12.5 million by 2020 as the baby boomers reach retirement.

So there you have it. Watch out for those seniors. They're taking over the world.

Less is more

Aim lower
Think smaller
Give up
Go have a cup of coffee.

Do these statements strike you as the best approaches to evanglising those who haven't heard of Christ? In the smart little video below, you'll find that each of these statements makes sense...in context.



I can't tell you who made the video, or where it comes from, but it's certainly an effective piece of work. It's also found under a different title: The World Congress on how not to mess up the Great Commission too much.

David Fitch

I've recently begun to pick up on David Fitch's Reclaiming the Mission site. David doesn't write every day, by any means, but when he does write, it's worth reading.
He makes an interesting statement in his latest post that Chicago, in spite of having some of the biggest mega-churches in the States, is actually the least churched city in the States, something even Dave finds hard to believe. Believe it.
At the end of this particular post he tells us he'll be running a Fuller DMin program soon. He says: We are going to first dissect Christendom/post Christendom assumptions, modern-postmodern assumptions, and what constitutes the practices of being His Body in the world. Then we are going to dissect and analyze some church planting manuals.
These include one from Tim Keller's church in Manhatten and Mark Driscoll's Acts 29 materials. David has some other manuals on this list (see the course details) and the course reading alone comprises some 3,000 pages. Even without going to the course, you'd learn a huge amount from the reading alone...

We can't resist these Top Ten lists!

One of the intriguing things we (the congregation of Dunedin City Baptist) learned in our last Sunday at the Teachers' College auditorium was that sermons on the church's website are downloaded in all sorts of places around the world. Some of those downloading will be ex-DCBC people, but by no means all.
So it was interesting to find on Cynthia Ware's Digital Sanctuary blog (a blog that focuses on innovative use of technology in the church scene), that downloading sermons came second on the list of top ten things people look for on a church website - and also appears in another form as the fourth item. Here's the whole list.

1. Find service information (times, directions, etc).
2. Listen to/download Sermons (audio recordings).
3. Learn about the church’s Beliefs/Mission/Values
4. Connect with other members.
5. Read/download Sermons (text transcripts).
6. Join and/or interact with a home/bible study group.
7. View weekly information/calendar/news/events.
8. Find serving opportunities at the church.
9. Post prayer requests or needs.
10. Read articles or other content.

Church of the Saviour

The Church of the Saviour in Washington has always been unconventional (or maybe that should read: real). Now with the retirement of its long-time leader, (he's only 91), the church is facing another change in its journey.
It's never been into 'big' church, and has split into smaller groups before. Even at the last sermon, there were only 70 people attending. The rest of the 'church' are elsewhere, doing church, or being active in the community in health, AIDs, housing, ministry to athletes, homelessness.
The Church has been well-known for its activist Christianity for decades, and continues in this vein. With a major transition in the retirement of Gordon Cosby, there is some concern that things will go in a different direction.

Michelle Boorstein, in The Washington Post, has written a longish and entirely sympathetic article on the Church and its current transition.

The photo shows the church building, as unconventional as everything else about the place.

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.

Power/less

When God acts in culture, he uses both the powerful and the powerless alongside one another rather than using one against the other. To mobilize the powerless against the powerful would be revolution; to mobilize the powerful against the powerless would simply confirm "the way of the world." But to bring them into partnership is the true sign of God's paradoxical and graceful intervention into the human story.

Andy Crouch
Culture Making

Check out a shortish review of this book in an earlier post.

Reading the Numbers Rightly

On the Albran Rountable blog, Wayne Floyd writes: Americans are notorious for trying to quantify everything; we take our numbers very religiously. [I think, New Zealanders are not much different]

“Clergy Voices: Findings from the 2008 Mainline Protestant Clergy Voices Survey” is one recent and provocative encyclopedia of statistics profiling the ordained leadership of current Mainline Protestants. A colleague just plopped the hefty 45 page report on my desk, and I’ll resist commenting on it until I’ve actually read it!

Even then, it’s not easy to decide the significance of the quantitative ‘facts’ we’ve read.

Floyd then goes on to look at the problems with numbers - and how we read them. For example, did the United Church of Christ really triple in size between 1990 and 2001, and then halve again before 2008 - or were the questions asked to learn these figures completely different?

The "anti-smacking" law

Family First reports: Almost two years after the passing of the controversial anti-smacking law, more than 80% of NZ’ers still want the law changed and 77% say that the law won’t have any effect on our unacceptable child abuse rate.

These are the key finding of research commissioned by Family First NZ, following on from similar research in 2007 and 2008. The Curia Market Research poll surveyed 1,000 people, and also found huge confusion over the legal effect of the law.

The key findings are:

83% say the law should be changed – only 13% say to keep it as is
77% says the law won’t help reduce the rate of child abuse in NZ
Less than one third of respondents actually understand the law

Here are some graphs provided by Family First to show these results:

Bowling Alone, Tribes and Facebook

Robert Putnam, in his book, Bowling Alone, claimed that Generation X people were disinclined to join community organisations. He said, ‘social capital has eroded steadily and sometimes dramatically over the past two generations.’

In an article entitled, Social Tribes: from Bowling Alone to Facebook, Tamara J. Erickson disagrees - at least in part. She says this generation is very closely tied to long-standing friendships, rather than becoming involved in social groups where friends have to be made. These are sometimes called ‘urban tribes.’ In fact, ‘tribes’ is the in-word (Seth Godin has written a book based on it).
So what about Facebook, Erickson asks? She has some interesting stats. You may not be asked to join as a ‘friend’ of one of your children, but the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the 35-54 year olds, with a 276.4% growth rate. Not far behind is the 55 and over demographic with a 194.3% growth rate.

From my small experience of Facebook in NZ, I would say this is happening here too.

Yet again there's an opportunity for the church to be innovative.

A Dark Knight of the Soul?

Christian Post reports that a group of youth pastors are emulating fight scenes in The Dark Knight and Quantum of Solace (the latest James Bond blockbuster) to draw in students. Batman and Bond employ the Keysi fighting method based on quick, instinctive movements to neutralize opponents. Keysi, which is technically not a martial art, has grown in popularity since the films.

Jeff McKissack, a Keysi instructor, is targeting churches and youth group leaders by offering to teach self-defense from a faith based perspective. The youth pastors are excited. They've been searching for an alternative since the karate outreaches featuring Ralph Macchio fell out of favor.

It would be interesting to know what youth pastors in New Zealand think of this. The comments that follow this report on Christian Post are surprisingly supportive, and, of course, use all sorts of Scripture verses to back them up.

Play and Theology

I was alerted to this quote by Robert Jenson on the Inhabitatio Dei blog, which is run by Halden Doerge. Jenson is coming to Dunedin as the University of Otago’s Burns Lecturer, and will lead a half-day seminar at the Knox Centre on the subject of the Eucharistic Church being a Missional Church on the 13th March, 2009.

Play is meaningful action that does not need to seek its meaning in some achievement exterior to itself. It is what we do because we do not have to. It is action to which the future opens as gift rather than as burden. The life of the Trinity is sheer play. As play with the Trinity, liturgy is anticipation of life in the Fulfillment–the closest we get to freedom. It must be admitted that liturgy-as-play is a rather rare occurrence in America’s recognized churches.

Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) pg 184.

The Reason for God

I've recently finished reading Timothy Keller's book, The Reason for God: belief in an age of scepticism, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's an original approach to apologetics, and as soon as I can find a copy I can afford, I'll buy it. (It's only available in hardcover at present.)
Surprisingly, my local library had a copy of it, for which I was very grateful. In fact, over the last number of years they've accumulated quite a store of good books in the Christian area. Obviously someone on their staff has realised that they have a lot of Christian readers amongst their 'customers.'
If you want a bit of an introduction to Keller's book (apart from the link already given) you can check out the site dedicated to the book. It has a video of Keller talking about his book on it as well.