Why not women?

When we think of megachurches, very often we imagine large congregations, numbering in the thousands - and we always think of them as being located in the United States.

In fact. five of the 10 largest megachurches in the world are located in South Korea. According to last year’s research by the Economist, the Yoido Full Gospel Church claims 830,000 members, (yes, no extraneous 0s in there!) and grows by 3,000 members each month.

According to the book, Why Not Women, Dr. Yonggi Cho (the founder of the Yoido Full Gospel Church) was initially unsure whether gifted women teachers should have access to the pulpit because of cultural, rather than biblical, concerns. Yet, under the encouragement of Loren Cunningham - cofounder of Youth With a Mission - Dr. Cho began to open ministry opportunities for women, including positions as ministers and cell group leaders.

Several years later, Cho visited another country and was shocked at the small size of their churches. What was his recommendation? Dr. Cho said:

I told them to release their women, but they insist that’s not the problem. They ask me “What’s the key to your church?” I tell them again, “release your women…” (Why Not Women, p. 69

This is a slightly modified version of a post that appeared in the Sojourners website, under the title, Release Your Women, by Mimi Haddad.

Focal Point

I think I've come across the FOCal website some time ago, but hadn't given it much further attention. Anyway, by serendipity I came across it today again, and thought I'd let others know about it.
FOCal's equivalent of a mission statement is:
FOCaL is set up to give a forum for those who hold to a progressive Christian faith and 'left of centre' political convictions. While not wishing to deny conservative Christians or conservative politicians their right to express their point of view, we feel that our society and the church needs to hear the voices of the Christian left.
FOCal leans towards the liberal point of view, but seems more inclusive - if that's not a contradiction in terms (!)
Anyway, the page I first alighted on was the Links page. This is worth checking out, even if you don't otherwise give the site much time - mainly because this links page will keep you busy for some time as it is!
The links are listed under various headings:

• Christian Reflections on Politics and Society (Sojourners, Third Way, WCC, for example);
• Social Services, Government Aid Agencies;
• Environmental Groups (A Rocha, ECEN, for example);
• Resources for Faith and Spirituality (Spirited Exchanges, Soulscape, Spirituality and Practice, for example)
• Worship Resources
• The "Emerging Church" (which has both Brian McLaren and the Methodist Parish of Dunedin);
• Alternative News Sources (includes Aljazeera);
• Humour and Miscellaneous (dare I say these were quite refreshing after the list above - I'm needing a holiday, obviously! This section includes the wonderful Lego Bible (the Brick Testament), and the rather odd Dog Church Org: The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua.

There's a great mix of stuff here - enough to keep anyone occupied through their holidays....

Will Britain become Muslim?

On the 26th of December, an article appeared in the English Daily Telegraph, entitled, Indulgence of Islam is harming society. It was written by Damian Thompson.

It begins:
Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Britain: the number of Muslims has grown from 1.6 million to two million since 2000. Moreover, every major public institution has changed its policies to accommodate the demands of Islamic "community leaders". The Government, the Opposition, the police, schools, the Church of England, the BBC and now Channel 4 are all helping Muslims construct a parallel Islamic state.


The article is fair in its approach, but focuses on a number of issues that are causing a major divide within the British community: bookshops attacked for selling books on the child bride of Mohammed, Muslim girls kept from reaching their full educational potential, the 'Sharia law' being introduced into the British legal system, a National Association of Muslim Police which is consulted by the British police force, and most recently, the decision by Channel 4 to let President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad deliver an alternative 'Christmas' message.

Perhaps it's too late for Britain to turn things around. On the other hand, can it sustain a Christian heritage alongside an active and dogmatic Muslim one?

Leadership by Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book in 2005 called Team of Rivals: the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, which was about the leadership lessons to be learned from Lincoln’s administration. One of the intriguing things Lincoln showed was his willingness to embrace the concept of a leadership team composed of men who were not only diverse in their views, but were his personal rivals as well. (In the last episodes of the last season of The West Wing, we see the incoming President doing the same sort of thing, particularly in relation to asking his Republican opponent to take on the role of Secretary of State.)
Jeff Knowles writes in Leadership online: Goodwin's thesis that great leadership neither punishes nor ignores ideological foes, but rather embraces them, has important implications for our increasingly large and complex church governmental structures. The danger of group-think is ever present in congregations where dissent is seen only as a problem. Church leaders often extol the virtues of 90 percent congregational confirmation votes for the new building program or the new minister, or the elders' "unanimous agreement" that the church needs to take a certain action. But we forget that many of God's commands in Scripture required leaders to go against the tides of popular opinion. If Abraham Lincoln could use the power of diverse opinions and contrary egos to save the nation, then we ought to look more closely at the benefits of dissenting opinions in our churches as well.

Loneliness

How lonely are you? How lonely are the people in the congregations you work with?
You can check out your own state of loneliness by looking at the UCLA Loneliness Scale - it'll only take a couple of minutes.

Chronic loneliness is as unhealthy as never exercising, not looking after your heart or your blood pressure. Increasingly medical people are realising that loneliness may be a major factor in people dying younger than expected.

Salon.com published an article by Katharine Mieszkowski a few days ago on the subject. Even though it doesn't mention the spiritual side of life to any extent, it looks closely at the problems of loneliness and their physical effects.

How can congregations minister to the lonely? Can they be helped at all?

Pubs as Church?

Back in July, Todd Rhoades set off a great debate on his Monday Morning Insight page, when he wrote a British Christian couple who've not only taken over a pub, but have confronted their customers about swearing, but have banned gambling on horses, and removed the dart-board. On top of this they walk around with a Bible in their hands.
Rhoades himself doesn't comment on this innovative way of doing church (!) but the people who read his page certainly do. It sets off a great argument about the rights and wrongs of the way the couple are going about 'being Christians' in this setting.
Well worth reading the comments as a way of thinking about the debate regarding Christians in the 'world'.

Social Gospel

Any gospel which is not social is not gospel. God so loved the world that.... He didn't just sit in His great theological rocking chair stroking his white beard and glory in His love for the world. He did something about it. He became social in the form of His Son. He lived, interacted, and behaved in a real social environment, disclosing God's social way. In the incarnation the spiritual "word" became a social "event." To say it another way, the social event was itself a word which communicated to men. Word and deed are inseparably cemented into one in the incarnation.

Donald Kraybill
The Upside-down Kingdom

Daniel Oudshoorn on mission in the here and now

Just came across a very good essay that first appeared in the New Zealand magazine, Stimulus, back in February 2006. It's entitled: Speaking Christianly as a missional activity in the midst of Babel. (It has a subtitle: Christian living as the exegesis of the Gospel proclamation after the end of history.)

The piece is by Daniel Oudshoorn, about whom I can't find a lot, except that he's been a student at Regent in Vancouver.

The essay is full of great quotes, but I'll stick to just one: Western Church talk about mission is often dominated by strategising. The church, driven by a pragmatism that is itself definitive of western culture, searches for the strategy that will cause mass conversion.

You can read the complete essay here.
Stimulus doesn't have all its material online; only a selection. However, many of their printed back editions are still available.

Jim Wallis on young evangelicals

"Young evangelicals really think that Jesus probably would care more about the 30,000 children who died today because of poverty and disease than he would have about gay marriage amendments in Ohio. This is a new generation of abolitionists, you might say. And they are applying their faith, using their faith, addressing their faith to the challenges we face: the moral scandal of poverty; the degradation of the environment, which they call 'God's creation'; the threat of climate change; human rights; Darfur; pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS; war and peace issues - the exclusive use of war to fight evil and the foreign policy disasters that has led us to. Their agenda is much wider and deeper."

--Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and author of The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America

Integral Mission

René Padilla writes on the Integral Mission blog and asks What is Integral Mission Anyway?
He begins by saying:
Although it has recently become fashionable to use the term integral mission, the approach to mission that it expresses is not new. The practice of integral mission goes back to Jesus himself and to the first century Christian church. Furthermore, a growing number of churches are putting this style of mission into practice without necessarily using this expression to refer to what they are doing: integral mission is not part of their vocabulary. It is clear that the practice of integral mission is much more important than the use of this new expression to refer to it.
He goes on to compare the traditional view of mission, with its four dichotomies, and then discusses integral mission:
When the church is committed to integral mission and to communicating the gospel through everything it is, does, and says, it understands that its goal is not to become large numerically, nor to be rich materially, nor powerful politically. Its purpose is to incarnate the values of the Kingdom of God and to witness to the love and the justice revealed in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Spirit, for the transformation of human life in all its dimensions, both on the individual level and on the community level.

An atheist looks at Africa

Here's an interesting title for an article:
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God. The subheading is: Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset.
This intriguing article comes from Matthew Pariss, someone who knows Africa well, and who has had a longstanding relationship with it. His article, which appeared in The Times Online on the 27th December, begins:

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Read the rest of the article here.

Leadership's Golden Canon

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

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

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

Just when you thought the secularists had it made

Long considered an aggressively secular city, London has quietly become one of Britain's most Christian areas, going from the least observant region in Britain in 1979 to the second most observant today. Much of that resurgence in piety is the result of the city's expanding and devout immigrant population. But there is also a growing number of young, highly educated and moneyed Londoners who are turning to the church. Huge numbers (some 4,000) of these attend Holy Trinity Brompton, where Nicky Gumbel still presides over the Alpha course. The average age is 27, and judging by the offerings ($US7 million last year alone) many of these new Christians are well-heeled.

Read more about this surge of faith here.

It would be interesting to know where the stats for 'least observant' to 'second most observant' come from. Unfortunately the article doesn't give us any indication. In 2001, for the first time, the UK Census collected information about religious identity in England, Wales and Scotland. The subject had been included in previous Censuses in Northern Ireland.

Just over three-quarters of the UK population reported having a religion. More than seven out of ten people said that their religion was Christian (72 per cent). After Christianity, Islam was the most common faith with nearly 3 per cent describing their religion as Muslim (1.6 million).

Thought-provoking shorts

On the qideas.org site, there's a section called 'shorts'. These are essays that provide a thoughtful perspective on an important topic about faith and culture. You can preview any one of the titles, and if you like something, you can purchase it for your library and print it out. Or come back later and read online.
These shorts include a piece by Kathleen Falsani called: The Thread: when church happens online, and it begins with a Facebook experience in which Falsani learned that a good friend had died.
Tim Keel talks about not limiting the gospel, Andy Crouch about consumerism, Andrew Martin on bridging the gap between Christians and gays, Josh Jackson and Nick Purdy discuss finding the good in popular culture. There are about twenty titles to choose from and they cost US$5 each to buy.

Transitions from work to retirement

Sylvia Dixon has produced a study for NZ Stats that looks at changes in the way people now head into retirement. Whereas in the past there was a tendency for a definite cut-off point from work and a sudden move into retirement, now people tend more and more to transition. This is another aspect of the way in which older people regard their lives differently from their forebears.

Dixon's abstract is as follows:

Survey responses indicate that the majority of working-aged New Zealanders would prefer to make a gradual transition from work to retirement, rather than move abruptly from full-time work to non-employment. This study describes the employment patterns and transitions of people who were aged in their 60s and moved from employment to inactivity during the 1999–2007 period, using longitudinal data from the Linked Employer-Employee Dataset.

Four different types of transition to retirement were defined and the relative frequency of each explored. We find that phased transitions, involving either part-time work or a number of transitions in and out of employment before the final exit, were far more common than discrete transitions from full-time work to non-employment. Men were more likely than women to take a traditional path from work to retirement. Although there were some significant variations in the frequency of different work-to-retirement paths across major industries, phased transitions were more prevalent than traditional transitions in all major industries.

International evidence shows that phased retirements are also common in other countries with similar labour markets. The literature suggests that many older adults retire gradually, but some are constrained in their labour supply choices and are unable to achieve the flexible transitions to retirement they would prefer.

Some new stats from NZ Stats

Some new stats from NZ Stats.

The following highlights are from the National Family and Household Projections 2006-2031. The projections assume medium fertility, medium mortality, and long-term annual net migration of 10,000:

• The number of families is projected to reach 1.44 million by 2031, an increase of 269,000 (23 percent) from an estimated 1.17 million families at 30 June 2006.
• Most of the growth in families will be in couple without children families, which will overtake two-parent families to become the most common family type by 2008.
• The number of households is projected to reach 2.09 million by 2031, an increase of 535,000 (34 percent) from an estimated 1.55 million households at 30 June 2006.
• One-person households are projected to increase by 71 percent, from 363,000 in 2006 to 619,000 in 2031.
• The average size of households will decrease to 2.4 people by 2031, from 2.6 people in 2006.
• The numbers of families and households will grow faster than the population, which is projected to increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2031.

The italicised points are particularly interesting: more couples without children than with children: what will happen to all the teachers and schools?
A big increase in one-person households – and loneliness.
Does it seem likely churches' focus may have to shift from ministering to the young to ministering to older people?

The god of the market

Why is it that people who praise downsizing for its salubrious effect on the economy are invariably people in no danger of being downsized themselves? The market is now our supreme power. It is a god that requires human sacrifices to keep it pacified.

Russell Baker: The Market God. First published in the New York Times in March, 1996, but extraordinarily relevant to the current financial climate. The whole op-ed piece is worth reading for its wisdom in regard to the Wall Street mentality.

Looking after the elderly

The Canadian Rural Church Network newsletter reminds us that:
A major thrust for rural churches in the immediate future is to provide adequate pastoral care for Senior Citizens (65 years plus).
Alberta's Cabinet Minister for Seniors and Community Support announced recently that the number of seniors in the Province is expected to increase by approximately 40% in the next 10 years, and to double by 2026. Similar statistics can be repeated in other regions.
Because of the Baby Boom Bulge, longer life-expectancy, and the tendency for seniors to retire from urban areas in search of cheaper costs of living, I expect similar statistics can be noted across the country.
At present, churches seem content to visit the sick, comfort the grieving and lead worship services at seniors' lodges and nursing homes. But there are very few pastoral care committees and fewer clergy and lay people learning how to address the spiritual needs of Seniors.
Gerontologists tell us that there are three stages of 'old' in our society: the young old (65-74 years), the old old (75-84 years) and the oldest old (85+). People in each of these stages face specific issues.

The issues are the same in New Zealand - and not just in rural areas. Churches have focused on youth for so long they've forgotten that older people continue to have spiritual needs, and in fact face a time of great change, what with the illnesses of old age, increasing lack of mobility, loss of faculties, losing longstanding friends to death, and many other important (and often debilitating) aspects of this stage of life.

The most recent CRCN newsletter (no 28) focuses on ministering to older people, and offers ways to think about working in this area.

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.

Innovative Church online

Mark Brown is Chief Executive Officer of the Bible Society in New Zealand and an Anglican Priest. In January 2007 he planted an Anglican Church in the virtual world of Second Life which now offers several services a week and has grown to more than 500 members.
You have to ask: why would people want to attend a church service in a virtual world? Mark's response is: The rallying cry of the Digital Revolution is:
Just for me, wherever I am, however I want it, whenever I want it.
This revolution has come about through the extraordinary growth of the internet. In just a short period of time the internet has grown to around 23.01 billion pages with some 1.3 billion people using it. It's predicted that in 2008 more information will be created on the Web than in all previous years combined. The computer is no longer a specialist tool but is now very much a part of our every day environment.

Jonathan Carson, International President for the research company Nielsen Online, notes, ‘The Internet is no longer a niche technology - it is mass media and an utterly integral part of modern life. Almost no aspect of life remains untouched by online media.'

Internet based applications now play a part in major advances in science, business, environmental care, transport logistics, government and education to name a few.

You can read a (long) post on the topic by Mark here. While this particular post focuses on the Anglican Church, everything that is said is relevant to other denominations as well.

Mark's personal blog is called: brownblog.