The bitter, painful end of 'Christendom'

I hadn't heard about this:

Lebouvier's case is among a growing wave of de-baptisms in Europe, one of the most visible manifestations of the continent's secular drift. Websites offering informal de-baptism certificates have mushroomed. Other Christians are formally breaking from the church by opting out of state church taxes.

But I must admit it doesn't particularly disturb me. The real problem for some churches in Europe (and I don't know the laws of each country, nor how the churches are, or are not, supported), is in that last sentence: people who opt out of the church entirely, are also opting out of funding the churches with their taxes.

This, of course, prompts all kinds of retorts from atheists and those antagonistic to the Church in whatever form it takes. And, as the article indicates, it may be that the Roman Catholic church especially has brought this on itself; but I don't think so. I think there is a spiritual dimension to this, and the institution of the Church (which exists as much in America as in Europe; the crucial but ultimately minor distinction being the direct tax subsidy) as an institution may well undergo a very necessary restructuring. Or maybe it will be called "creative destruction." Whatever, it isn't necessarily the end, but rather a new beginning:

The bigger worry, experts say, are plummeting rates of new baptisms. Half a century ago, for example, 90 percent of French children were baptized, said Sorbonne University religion professor Philippe Portier. Today, roughly one in three are.

"The church considers de-baptisms a very marginal phenomena and its strategy right now is to resist it," Portier said. "It is much more active when it comes to reversing the drop in (new) baptisms -- there it's put in place a new evangelizing strategy."

The parish at Paris' historic Saint-Germain-des-Pres, for example, is offering a myriad of activities, from ski retreats to support networks for young professionals. At a recent evening youth Mass, the church was overflowing.

The parish priest, the Rev. Benoist de Sinety, is counting on faith, not numbers.

"What is striking today is that those who want to be Christian really want to be Christian," he said. "I rejoice in the fact that people are free to choose."

I would much rather pastor a church of 10 people who really want to be Christian, than pastor a church of 1000 who are only there from habit or convenience or for the entertainment value. And lest you think this is a European "problem," let me resurrect a post I wrote but never published:

The plaster is cracking again:

Of course this rapid growth of megachurches doesn't mean church attendance has increased. On average 50 small churches close their doors every week in America. We've seen 40 years of the Walmart effect -- consolidation rather than expansion. And while the latest infographic reports the average megachurch was founded in 1971, most were not megachurches in 1971. They were average-sized congregations that reached mega-attendance levels in the 80s or 90s under the leadership of a baby-boomer pastor. (I've profiled a number of such churches in the pages of Leadership Journal over the years.)

This is difficult to sum up, but let me try: basically, megachurches are the creations of personality. Jethani is too polite to call them personality cults, but I'm not. I've yet to see a "megachurch" that wasn't built around the charisma and publicity skills of a single individual. And the question not addressed in this article, or in the "infographic" he bases his post on, is the very real question of what happens when the leaders of these churches depart. Jethani mentions only one example, that of Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral. Joel Osteen's church is the best example of a mega church carrying on after its founder dies, but Osteen took over for his father. Ask Oral Roberts how often that works out.

Most of the history of such enterprises is that they fail when the original leader fails. Think of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammye Faye Baker, Pat Robertson (whose influence began declining when he disavowed his pastoral office in order to run for the Presidency. CBN was once a cable channel. Now Robertson shows up on ABC's "Family" cable channel, for a few hours a night on his once powerful "700 Club.") Oral Roberts suffered a similar collapse when he tried to leave the church in his son's hands; and after Jerry Falwell died his university had some brief influence through it's alumni, but even that is fading now. Anybody heard from Falwell's church or university lately?

True, there are some churches which achieve large congregation status on the basis of being a large congregation. I know of one church which called a pastor specifically to make them grow, and he did. When he retires, the church will probably find a similar candidate to pursue a similar ministry, and they will probably succeed at it. In that model, the pastor is a figurehead for the congregation, not the reason for the congregation. But history shows such churches are few and far between, and besides, they do have a life cycle, like all institutions.

Near me are several former churches; the buildings emptied of the original congregations, some of them filled now with new congregations, mostly Mexican evangelical/charismatic congregations. The segregating of Sunday morning continues unabated. There are also churches which, as I've mentioned before, closed because the neighborhoods around them aged. Old people still go to church if they can, but their children tend not to go to their church. As Jethani points out, the average age of the mega-church is 50; which means, unlike most traditional churches I know, many of the people would actually be younger than me. But what about the 20-30 year olds? Where are they? What are they looking for? Ask Walt Kallestad, the pastor of a church I studied (briefly) in a class in seminary:

Walt led Community Church of Joy in Phoenix, a megachurch that had been an average congregation of 200 before he took over in the 80s and oversaw it's growth. But in 2002 he suffered a massive heart attack requiring six-way bypass surgery. The heart attack, says Walt, was a "wake up call" for the leaders to develop a succession plan to ensure the megachurch continued to thrive after Walt's tenure.

Kallestad began networking around the country looking for a young pastor he could bring onboard and eventually hand the church over to. One conversation stuck with him.

"It's a pretty good opportunity," Walt said. "We have 187 acres just off a major freeway, multipurpose buildings, and a great staff."

The leader looked him in the eyes and said, "Who'd want it? Who in their right minds would want to run that?"

"That's when it dawned on me," Kallestad reflected. "By the time we service the $12-million debt, pay the staff, and maintain the property, we've spent more than a million before we can spend a dime on our mission. At the time, we had plans for a spectacular worship center with a retractable roof. After that conversation, I scrapped it."

I have my own bone to pick with Community Church of Joy, but the story illustrates a truly chilling aspect of megachurches: they are institutions first, and whatever else second. If you are running a church with $12 million in debt to service, 187 acres of land, multipurpose buildings, and "a great staff," what is your first priority? Serving the poor? Saving souls? Or putting paying butts in the pews? To be fair to Kallestad, the article Jetheni links to indicates Kallestad took his megachurch in a radical direction, disdaining the "show" aspects I criticized in my seminary class (and elsewhere) of his ministry in favor of truly doing the hard work of creating disciples. In the process he lost, by his own account, some 4000 church members. This is not the first time a megachurch has decided to take the cost of discipleship more seriously. The New York Times noted Tim Keller's success in 2006. But it also noted that church attendance decline whenever Keller wasn't in the pulpit (a not unusual phenomenon, again to be fair. Even church members who seem to appear in church by habit rather than desire will fade away when the regular pastor is on vacation. But that's in no small part because Protestant churches have by and large learned to attend a church where the pastor pleases them, and not necessarily attend because it is a duty or even a religious obligation.).

On the other hand, Kallestad's concept of "empowering disciples" is illustrated by a grandfather asking Kallestad to come to the hospital to pray for his grandson, and Kallestad convincing the grandfather to do it himself. To infer that lay ministry is radical (I was doing it at the turn of the century, literally. Kallestad writes in 2006, as if he's invented the wheel.) is rather like saying you've found a new concept for December worship called "Advent."

So what is "radical" for a megachurch is not exactly radical for "regular" churches. Lay ministry is a concept working in many a small church where the pastor tries to "empower disciples" by getting them involved in the pastoral care of congregation members. But I have to say I wouldn't send a grandfather to a grandson's hospital bed instead of going myself.

Although, that's just me.

Churches are easy marks for complaint. The pastor is boring, or not interesting, or too loud, or too sleazy, or too.... I've known churches to split congregations over the question of replacing the carpet in the worship space. Churches never do what we want them to do, and when they do, we don't understand why everybody doesn't love the results. But churches can become institutions interested only in being institutions. That was the root of Kierkegaard's critique of the Danish church in the mid-1800's. It could be the root of a critique today by those who want to be "de-baptized" in Europe, or who have just "voted with their feet" in American churches.

Would I reject wholesale the institution of the church, then? No. I need worship, and that means I need others. You cannot worship alone. Moreover, I need liturgical worship, and that means I need a very distinctive institution, both spatially and historically. I need that sense of the "clouds of witness." But the institution, in the words of the old E&R prayer:

Grant that thy Church may be delivered from traditions which have lost their life, from usage which has lost its spirit, from institutions which no longer give life and power to their generation; that the Church may ever shine as a light in the world and be as a city set on a hill.

HEAR OUR PRAYER, O LORD.

But please note that is a prayer for a congregation; and any congregation is, almost by definition, an institution. And maybe it takes events like this for the church, as the Body of Christ and as an institution, to reconsider what baptism is for.

The Church, both laity and clergy, could do worse than to consider that question.

"If you have not life together...."

The ARIS study is being taken, by those who notice it and whom I notice, as news; and that's my first problem with it. It doesn't tell the churches anything they haven't known for decades. If it indicates a sharp increase in the decline in mainline church attendance since 2001 (to mix metaphors, or indicators, or something), I think the churches have noticed that, too. I can see it in my neighborhood, and attribute the decline as much to changing demographics as to huge cultural indicators such as "authoritarian preaching" in "fundamentalist churches." In my immediate neighborhood I can count at least a dozen mainline churches, some across the street from each other, all old and established. The majority are Baptist, but there are also Nazarene, Presbyterian, and UCC in the mix. One relocated recently because it was close to the freeway expansion, and it took the opportunity to move. The rest haven't been so lucky. A large (judging by the size the facility) Baptist church finally gave up the ghost a few years ago. A non-denominational church (which started from my former church, decades before I was ever there. The story is they split with the church over the decision to recarpet the sanctuary. No, I'm not making that up.) down the street from my old church, changed hands and moved away to a new facility. Most of the churches still in the area and still mainline, are suffering declines in membership, all because the demographics of the area have changed.

This neighbhorhood was the "new" neighborhood a few decades ago. It suffered badly in the oil shock that nearly wrecked Houston, and recovery came through an influx of Mexicans, Vietnamese, Koreans, and generally poor or lower income folk. It had been a white enclave built by executives and middle management types in large corporations. (Ironically my church in Austin had suffered the same fate in a different decade. It was built in a white, middle to upper middle, "new" neighborhood, and then suffered a decline as the industry built there and providing the people for the houses, moved across town, taking everyone in the houses with it. That church finally relocated, too.) The churches here that couldn't, or wouldn't, relocate, suffered a sharp decline in attendance. Those declines have not abated, despite the fact there are several Korean and Mexican churches in the area, all new (and not included earlier in my counting of churches around me). Most of the Korean churches are Presbyterian, and most of the Mexican (or Hispanic, if you prefer) churches are some brand of Mexican/Central American Pentecostal. There is a thriving one at the end of my street, not 100 yards from where I sit now. But it reflects the neighborhood, not a changing interest in religion.

Of course, a patch of ice doth not a winter make, and the example of a neighborhood here or there is not proof of a theory as to why church membership is declining. Eliot's description, though, of living dispersed on ribbon roads where no one knows their neighbor, seems still to explain more of the loss than anything else. Churches are neighborhood phenomena. I remember attending a Lutheran church (it was an assignment in seminary) in St. Louis, a tiny building occupying one lot at the end of a residential street. It fit into the neighborhood so well you had to know it was there to find it. Anyone who tried to build a church like that today would be doomed to failure, and wouldn't get the backing of any mainline denomination. It was the norm once, though: churches were built for the people around them. They were built by the people around them. Today, however, we expect to drive to church. And we expect some conveniences when we get there:

Daystar was a country church called Glory Hill Church of God when Lawson arrived nearly nine years ago. The church "relaunched" itself in the pattern of an urban megachurch in 2002 _ there's Starbucks coffee in the lobby and video screens everywhere _ and took off.

"In the next seven years 100 people became 2,000 people," said Lawson, who sports the hip, young megachurch look _ short hair, a goatee and dark clothes, minus a tie.

The church has a second-hand clothes shop for needy neighbors, and Lawson said it sends out 100 volunteers at a time for local work days. Members even are trying to raise $10,000 to put new sod on the baseball field at the local high school.

That's a church in rural Alabama. It draws 2000 people a Sunday, has a nearly $6 million building, and draws people from 45 miles away.

The church's attendance is slightly larger than the entire population of Good Hope, which has three other churches in its town limits and five others within a stone's throw. The community is a mix of farm homes, middle-class subdivisions, mobile home parks and a few McMansions.

That is NOT a neighborhood church. And it is following the pattern of megachurches across the country, because it's next goal is to set up "satellite churches." It wants to be its own denomination, in other words.

The temptation with news like this, or the ARIS study, is to jump to conclusions and extrapolate this data in to the future. A little knowledge, however, is a dangerous thing. For one thing, casting mega-churches far into the future is assuming the future will look just like the past; and already, the past ain't what it used to be. The rampant hedonism and consumerism of the past decades may already be fading. That is not to say it is gone and will never return. There are no "sea changes" in American history, no sweeping away of the old in favor of the wholly new. But the peculiar circumstances that promoted the corporate business model as the foundation of all human institutions, may well start crumbling. If people find it harder to pay for Starbucks, whether the one on the way to work or the one in the church lobby, they may also find it hard to pay for multi-million dollar church buildings. It happens to mainline churches all the time; no reason to suppose mega-churches are immune.

Is there a larger picture here? Yes, but I think it's obscuring the reality of the smaller one. Church was once a social obligation. It simply isn't, any more. My experience in community college teaching reveals that, more and more each year, any mention of once familiar Christians stories, from Noah and the Ark and Jonah and the Whale, to the Sermon on the Mount of Paul's experience on the road to Damascus, draw blank stares. Most of my students in the private high school where I've taught for 5 years now, don't even attend church. The Christian stories which were once the foundation of our common cultural heritage, are increasingly as unfamiliar as foreign countries. We have not, in a confessional or a cultural sense, been a Christian country for some time now, and the change is accelerating. Pastor Dan attributes this in part to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, but I think that's being too optimistic by half. MTD is a concept I'd like to explore more carefully later, but my experience is that more and more Americans, especially young Americans, are not deistic in any sense, nor are they necessarily atheistic, because that term has come to imply an antipathy toward religion (Madalyn Murray O'Hare; Richard Dawkins; Sam Harris; Christopher Hitchens, all come to mind as modern exemplars). They are simply a-theistic, as in "non-theistic." They have no real concept of God, and they don't feel the need for one.

Which pretty much models the findings of the ARIS study. Which means Christendom is dead; or at least, it's barely breathing on its own. On the other hand, if MTD is a valid concept, and if its underpinning is being removed, this may not present a crisis to the church, so much as it presents an opportunity.

More entries for the commonplace book

Now with more Niebuhr!

And apropos of this post (and to introduce a few entries from another of Niebuhr's books):

We had a great Easter service today....We received our largest class of new members into the church thus far, twenty-one in all.  Most of them had not letters from other churches and yet had been reared in some church. We received them on reaffirmation of faith.

This matter of recruiting a membership for the church is a real problem.  Even the churches which once believed a very definite conversion experience to be the sine qua non of entrance into the fellowship of the church are going in for "decision days" as they lose confidence in the traditional assumption that one can become a Christian only through a crisis experience.  But if one does not insist on that kind of experience it is not easy to set up tests of membership.  Most of these "personal evangelism" campaigns mean little more than ordinary recruiting effort with church membership rather than Christian life as the real objective.  They do not differ greatly from efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership.

Of course we make "acceptance of Jesus as your savior" the real door into fellowship in the church.  But the trouble is that may mean everything or nothing.  I see no way of making the Christian fellowship unique by any series of tests which precede admission.  The only possibility lies in a winnowing process through the instrumentality of the preaching and teaching function of the church. Let them come in without great difficulty, but make it difficult for them to stay in.  The trouble with this plan is that is is always easy to load up membership with very immature Christians who will finally set the standard and make it impossible to preach and teach the gospel in its full implications.

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "1919."  Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic. Louisville, Kentucky:  John Knox/Westminster Press, original publication date 1929.  p. 23.

This is Reinhold Niebuhr, recording contemporaneously his experiences as a new pastor in Detroit at the beginning of the last century.  It is the conclusion that makes the point:  what is church for?  For anyone, including non-believers?  And how many of those can be allowed in before it is "impossible to preach and teach the gospel in its full implication"?  Yet I have pastored churches where that was already impossible, and no one in that congregation would admit to being an atheist.

They were more likely to label me a heretic.

"Make it difficult for them to stay"?  The only person who would find it difficult to stay in that church would be the pastor.

And I've held fast to the idea that church membership today means nothing more than the "efforts of various clubs as they seek to expand their membership."  It makes me sound terribly cynical to out-Herod Herod on this point, but it is my experience nonetheless.  I served two churches that insisted increasing membership was a necessary goal; but all they really meant was to make the club more popular, by enticing more people like them to appear on a more permanent basis.  There is comfort in numbers, but greater comfort in people like us.

But for many churches, there are fewer and fewer such people around.  Interestingly, in 1919 only about 41% of Americans considered themselves affiliated with any kind of religion.  (I use this study constantly because I find context around these issues constantly important).  So Niebuhr is contemplating an America even more different from our own, but not in the way we might imagine.  Like the church today, Niebuhr had to work with, and accept into his church fellowship, the "unchurched."  Believers, but believers who really don't want to be asked to do anything for the sake of their belief.  Should they be winnowed later?  Willow Creek Community Church uses that model, but studies have found it doesn't really lead to any greater commitment than to show up on Sunday morning for the show.  Especially in the "seeker service" that was "a pretty good show for a buck."*

Robert Wuthnow makes much of something that never seems to occur to Niebuhr:  the need for the church to raise the money it takes to continue being a church:  building, programs, employees, etc.  But is that what church is for?  Upon re-reading his book I want to introduce him to Walt Kallestad:

Walt led Community Church of Joy in Phoenix, a megachurch that had been an average congregation of 200 before he took over in the 80s and oversaw it's growth. But in 2002 he suffered a massive heart attack requiring six-way bypass surgery. The heart attack, says Walt, was a "wake up call" for the leaders to develop a succession plan to ensure the megachurch continued to thrive after Walt's tenure.

Kallestad began networking around the country looking for a young pastor he could bring onboard and eventually hand the church over to. One conversation stuck with him.

"It's a pretty good opportunity," Walt said. "We have 187 acres just off a major freeway, multipurpose buildings, and a great staff."

The leader looked him in the eyes and said, "Who'd want it? Who in their right minds would want to run that?"

"That's when it dawned on me," Kallestad reflected. "By the time we service the $12-million debt, pay the staff, and maintain the property, we've spent more than a million before we can spend a dime on our mission. At the time, we had plans for a spectacular worship center with a retractable roof. After that conversation, I scrapped it."

Making those changes, by the way, cost Kallestad 4000 church members.  I've never been even associated with a church with that many members, much less one that could lose that many and still exist as an institution.  And maybe the lesson of the Crystal Cathedral is instructive here:  when Schuller died, the church had to sell the building to the Catholic diocese just to pay its debts.*

So how do we make Christian fellowship unique?

*An old joke I picked up in seminary, about what it "costs" to attend worship on any given Sunday.

**I got carried away with this, but you can have my footnotes.  I couldn't find any numbers on the membership of CCJ, a church I had some encounter with in seminary.  According to Internet Monk, at it's height CCJ had 12,000 members.  In 2009, when it broke with the ELCA over the ordination of gays and lesbians (CCJ was agin it), they reported 6800 members, an attendance of 2500.  Where their membership is now is anybody's guess, but Internet Monk provides more information on how two megachurches decided "seeker services" weren't the alpha and omega of Christian discipleship.  We always come back to the Church of Meaning and Belonging v. the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging.  And if I keep repeating all of this it's only because I long for a serious conversation on these topics, and the best I get is people misreading and misunderstanding the latest Pew polls.  No, I don't mean to be haughty; but damn!, the signal to noise ratio on the internet is low!

Compare and Contrast

First: there is going to be a strong need in these posts to keep in mind that "judgment" involves two sometimes contrary positions: discernment, and privilege. I will try to err on the side of discernment, and avoid the position of privilege (i.e., standing apart and claiming no connection to the item held in judgment). The fundamental teaching of Christianity, to me, is that we are all servants, no one above the other, no one fit to sit in judgment on the other. Still, we have to be discerning, to distinguish good from bad, God-sent from deceptive. Examples from the stories of the Desert Fathers will fit into that theme, and I will come back with them later. But first, let me mention this link from the Houston Chronicle before it fades behind a "subscriber's only" firewall, a link courtesy of leah in the comments.

Ironically, I receive still an unsolicitied magazine directed at pastors, all about the "business of your ministry." The one think I never thought of my ministry as, of course, is a business. But Joel Osteen knows otherwise, and concludes that business=stewardship. Perhaps it does.

From the article, we learn this:

"We have to be good stewards of God's money, so we run it by sound, solid business principles," said Osteen, who this year stopped taking his $200,000 salary from the church and instead lives on profits from sales of his best-selling book, Your Best Life Now, which has sold 2.8 million copies.

The documents show revenue for the 2004 fiscal year of $54 million, including $3.4 million from the church bookstore, which sells religious videos, CDs and books.

Records also show:

•It owns and operates KTBU Channel 55, "The Tube," a local television station that features religious shows and retro programming like Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy.
•Employees have access to retirement plans.
•It has had a multimillion-dollar line of credit at Northern Trust Bank and has seven-figure investments in securities..
•Lakewood structured a sophisticated $60 million construction loan with Bank of America to revamp its new home at the former Compaq Center using collateral pledges from its members, a deed of trust on its northeast Houston campus and a life insurance policy for Joel Osteen.
•The church has successfully sued to protect Joel Osteen's name as a valuable trademark.
•Osteen, who lives in a home appraised at $2.3 million in the ritzy Tanglewood neighborhood, is listed as president of Lakewood Church, a nonprofit organization. (A spokesman for the church noted that Osteen paid $380,000 for the home when he bought it, though it has since been remodeled.)
If Lakewood is to be compared to a business, there is no doubt it is family-run:

Osteen's wife, Victoria, his mother, brother, sister and in-laws all play central roles.

Kevin Comes, who is married to Joel Osteen's sister, Lisa, who also is a pastor at the church, is the administrator who handles the day-to-day business. He attributes much of the success to penny-pinching.

"We have an incredible budgeting system," Comes said. "We budget all the way down to hot chocolate."

Comes said Lakewood has done "significant analysis" that shows the church will increase its revenue by 42 percent, from $54 million in fiscal year 2004 to $77 million in the current fiscal year, 2006. At the same time, annual operating expenses will rise from
$45 million to $75 million.

Comes said the increased revenue will come from a sharp increase in weekend attendance — already at 30,000 strong before the church moved into the former Compaq Center. Worshippers are encouraged to tithe 10 percent or more of their income annually.

Now, the compare and contrast, which, admittedly, is a bit unfair. But an example, then, of how it "doesn't have to be this way." Other choices are available. And since our culture honors bigger and richer as better, Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church here in Houston is a good example for this comparison. Here is their mission statement:

* First, our house shall be called a house of prayer. (Matthew 21:13) Prayer guides our major policy decisions as well as our everyday lives. Our Partners in Prayer commit to fulfilling our goal that every member be prayed for every day.
* Second, in obedience to Christ's teaching, we are committed to a Dollar-for-Dollar benevolence program. Since our beginning in 1954 and continuing to the present, we annually set a goal of matching the money spent in the operation of the church and its programs with giving to those in need in the community and the world.

You might want to browse their website. They have a large campus, which I have visited because my daughter's school is nearby, and she's had athletic practices on the church's grounds, and because it has hosted Boy Scout events I attended as a church pastor. It's a large, wealthy church in a very wealthy part of town. And, apparently, like many a large church, it is building a satellite campus. But focuse on that second part of the their mission statement. So far as I know, they are still doing that: matching every dollar spent on themselves, with a dollar spent on mission work.

Imagine if every church did that.

What does Lakewood do? The article doesn't say, but if it is the typical "mega church," most of the money it raises is spent on itself.

It's common for a megachurch to have annual revenue in the millions of dollars, and for most if not all of that money to be spent on construction, highly produced services, advertising, promotion and broadcasting, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. The average annual income for a megachurch was $4.8 million, with expenditures of $4.4 million, according to a 2000 Hartford study.

I can tell you from my experience that a church with a full time pastor needs a minimum of $100,000 to operate, and half of that will go to pay the pastor (taxes, housing, salary, books, etc.). Usually a tiny percentage of what is left over is dedicated to mission, and when most churches get in financial trouble, mission is the first item reduced, because it is considered most expendable. Now, this isn't a question of judgment, or critique, but of discernment. We all tend to start from "home." Indeed, it is a recognized sociological principle that groups form around a central idea, and the protection of that idea is paramount to the group. Only when the central idea, the formative notion, is secure, does the group feel secure in reaching out to others. Threaten that core, and the group contracts, "circles the wagons," and fears for its continued existence. Non-denominational churches and churches with weak denominational polities tend to be most vulnerable to this kind of terror, what I have called elsewhere this mysterium tremndums. A mysterium tremendums because the core of any Christian church is God, the ultimate unknown, whose very call to us is to love our neighbor and care for them as if they were God. But does that care start at home? Or does care for home, start with care for neighbor?

Memorial Drive Presbyterian is not a monastery, of course, where the members voluntarily give up almost everything in order to serve others as fully as possible. But it is much further down the road twoard that goal than a ministry that sees itself first as a business, and only latterly, if at all, as a mission; or that sees it mission, as a business.

Or so it seems to me.

We were talking (and talking, and talking, and talking....)

I realize I've been talking about this since I started this blog; when will I ever tire?  But The Thought Criminal puts me on to this article, which I can't help but quote-mine:

Prominent figures in the evangelical establishment have already begun sounding alarms. In particular, the Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development—in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”

Stop right there and ask yourself:  "Why, again, is Pope Francis so popular?  What is it so many people are saying about him?"  But going a bit further, and on another topic altogether, this is an excellent summation of the recent history of churches in America:

Schuller, like Billy Graham and other name-brand evangelical ministers, led a mid-20th-century spiritual resurgence that corresponded with the birth and subsequent coming of age of America’s baby-boom generation. Even as older, inner-city mainline Protestant congregations withered in postwar America, suburban evangelical churches gained members when boomers, now having children of their own, began showing up in the late 1970s. A decade later, evangelical megachurches—some of the largest of which were in Orange County—were the dominant trend in American Christianity, growing in lockstep with the suburbs that gave them birth and set their spiritual tone.

I've seen the churches in my neighborhood, and indeed in every area of the country before I left Texas to go to seminary, affected this way.  Born by a new growth in the neighborhood, new churches would spring up or old ones would be revived.  A few decades later (one or two is all that's needed), the neighborhood has changed, especially in rapidly growing areas (or rapidly declining ones), and the old churches are empty or nearly so, everyone gone to newer churches in newer, or at least younger, neighborhoods.  And there's also this:

The Christianity practiced in these suburban churches was not of the fire-and-brimstone variety. Evangelicals are far looser and more theologically diverse than Christian fundamentalists, who emerged in the late 19th century in reaction to the destabilizing effects of industrialization, the Civil War, and advances in science. Fundamentalism, especially the view that the Bible is inerrant in all of its teachings, has been steadily declining as a force in American Christianity for decades. Recent Barna Group research shows that just 38 percent of Christians—down from close to half two decades ago—regard the Bible as “totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches.” Evangelicals, by contrast, while acknowledging the authority of scripture, place greater emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with Christ. They trace their roots in America to Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century Massachusetts divine who paired Calvinistic theology with scholarship, evangelism, and spiritual conversion. The preeminence of conversion has produced huge variety and creativity in their outreach to nonbelievers. For nearly a century, evangelicals have been at the forefront of innovations in church music, worship style, architecture, and use of media to engage the non-Christian world.

Despite the fact Sam Harris insisted only a few years ago that all real Christians are fundamentalists, and the fact that, on the internet at least, all believers are Christian fundamentalists (and therefore lunatics), only 38% of Christians identify with those claims.  The reference to John Edwards there is ironic, since his most famous sermon is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."  Not the kind of thing Robert Schuller would ever preach.

And this description sounds like the town I live in (which, according to the U.S. Census, is the most ethnically diverse city in America; and my neighborhood the most ethnically diverse in the city):

Young people in Orange County, no matter their ethnic or economic background, no longer view themselves as living in a suburban appendage of urban Los Angeles. The county is dense with Vietnamese pho joints, boba tea shops, Asian shopping malls, halal markets, Mexican swap meets, punk-rock nightclubs, and art galleries. 

There is a non-denominational "commnity church" within walking distance of where I sit, a new occupant of a building used by a Mexican Pentecostal church until it got big enough to purchase the emptied out Baptist church (it died mostly of old age) across the street from the church I came here to pastor over a decade ago.  There are Thai and Mexican and Korean and Vietnamese diners a stone's throw from me, as well as national chains, barbecue joints, Spanish speaking psychics, herablists, juice joints catering to cultures from south of the border, within two miles of where I sit.  Oh, and a huge and growing retail center catering mostly to upscale and middle class buyers, just across the freeway.  Rick Warren might find a receptive audience at the biggest Baptist church in Houston, which is about 15 minutes away from me just now; but he'd never try to open Saddleback in my neighborhood:  too many of his followers would be afraid to drive over here (the grocery store I use still courts the upper class shoppers by putting security guards in the parking lot, to reassure them).

This is equally fascinating:

 “The megachurch was a baby-boomer suburban phenomenon that folks under 45 typically aren’t perpetuating,” says Ryan Bolger, who teaches contemporary Christianity at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. Young evangelicals “want to start communities in cafés, and this isn’t just whites. We’re starting to see with Koreans and Latinos a desire to move away from the churchiness of church, to be multicultural and in an urban context, church in the profane areas of life.”

One of my professors in seminary (this was, mind, circa 1995) wondered if mega-churches weren't the sign of yet another "Great Awakening" in America.  Well, maybe, but if it was, it's worth pointing out those "Awakenings" were never really fundamental shifts in American religious life (the first one, led by Edwards, was; the rest?  Not so much.).  And again:  this explains the appeal of a Pope Francis.

This, in fact, very much appeals to me; and I say that as a pastor, as someone who dedicated four years of his life to being educated so he could be ordained as a minister in a denomination, and seek a pulpit in a church where he could earn a full-time salary.  I soon realized that such salaries were a drain on most churches, which needed to raise a six figure budget every year just to open the doors and pay the pastor to minister to them, and effort that put a tremendous strain on the real reason a church should gather:  to be the people of God.  This place seems to have figured that out:

At Epic Church, a 200-member, decade-old congregation in a northern part of Orange County populated mostly by Koreans and Hispanics, members gather for weekly worship in a rented office building but spend much of their time together working as tutors to low-income students at a nearby neighborhood center. “We haven’t been a church that understands ourselves as goods and services,” said Kevin Doi, Epic’s founder and pastor. The church welcomes gays, makes no overt effort to raise money from members, and regularly invites residents at a neighboring homeless shelter to its services. Doi said he has no long-range plan for his church and wouldn’t mind if it ceased functioning as an institution altogether. “We didn’t feel like our goal was to get people to come to our church,” he said. “We wanted to be present in the neighborhood, where we’re the guests.”

That last line, especially, puts me in mind of Dorothy Day:

I am reading (Simone Weil's) essays as a part of my Lenten reading...She says that we "...must experience every day, both in the spirit and the flesh, the pains and humiliations of poverty...and further we must do something which is harder than enduring in poverty, we must renounce all compensations: in our contacts with the people around us we must sincerely practice the humility of a naturalized citizen in the country which has received us."

I keep reminding the young people who come to work with us that they are not naturalized citizens...They are not really poor. We are always foreigners to the poor. So we have to make up for it by "renouncing all compensations..."

Dorothy Day, from The Dorothy Day Book, p. 11.

And this:

“Evangelicals are good at whipping people up into a frenzy, and then you’re like, ‘What was that?’ ” Bell told me. “I was the pastor of a megachurch, and lots of people came, and I did book tours and interviews and films. That’s fine. But I’ll take seeing God every day, which is washing dishes with my kids and walking my dog and interacting with someone I just met.”

Or what Kathleen Norris called the "quotidian mysteries," the presence of God in daily life.  Frankly, this is a guy I resonate with.  And the article ends with this startling observation:

Robert Schuller’s brand of worship might just turn out to be nothing more than a spiritual fad. 

That, in the context of this earlier statement:

America will not become like Europe, where ossified state churches proved unable to compete against the inherently secularizing forces of market capitalism—and where immigrants’ faith expressions are often met with hostility. America will remain exceptionally religious. But traditional evangelical Christianity will no longer be a dominant presence in that religiosity.

Gives me something to think about, even to feel hopeful about.

Preaching to the Unchurched

This is probably no more than a patch of ice, which doth not a winter make, but even so, it is still fascinating:

Before the last presidential election, [The Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota] preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

Why is this fascinating? Well, in part because it means the "Dominionists" aren't as dominant as we might be inclined to think they are. Fascinating because the decline of political influence was inevitable; fascinating because it is coming without any reference to the Jeffersonian separation of church and state, to the "wall" that should be between them. In fact, this is rooted in good old fashioned Protestantism.

Protestants carry a memory of the power of the state that is almost genetic. It's nearly like they remember the persecution of Luther; but it isn't that at all. Calvin, after all, ran Geneva as a theocracy. It's a memory more rooted in the experiences in Europe, where Catholicism as the state religion simply gave way to Calvinism or Lutheranism or Anglicanism as the state religion; and Mennonites and Baptists and others, were not welcome. So they came to America, among other things, and they accepted Jefferson's separation of church and state long before he formulated the idea (Rhode Island and Pennsylvania were both founded as places of refuge from religious persecution). As the Rev. Boyd says, "When the church conquers the world, it becomes the world." That is, in large measure, still the picture of the Roman Catholic church still carried by most Protestants: a church as corrupt as the long-gone monarchies of Europe, a church still stained by the indulgences which outraged Luther, and one as well left behind as the "Old World" itself. It's not a correct view, by any means; but it's still the position beneath the surface for most non-RC Christian Americans.

So the "Dominionist" policies of church running the world, while it may have a fine Calvinist heritage, grows in stony soil for most Americans. Not all, of course; 1000 members left Rev. Boyd's church, some probably thinking like this man:

“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”

That sentiment, of course, could as easily have come from a "progressive" Christian, concerned about the silence of the mainstream churches which, they would argue, has led us to where we are today. To which Rev. Boyd might reply:

He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

But this part I particularly appreciate:

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

I may have mentioned before that I don't like flags in churches, but most Protestant churches have them. It seems to be a post World War II phenomenon, since I've seen pictures of churches from before that war, and no national flags were on prominent display. I hosted a German pastor, a woman about my age, on a tour of UCC churches in Houston one day, and the flag in our sanctuary disturbed her, largely because of her memories of Nazism and the conflation of church and state Hitler wrought, and the Barmen Declaration opposed. I agreed with her, but her chaperone, a man of my father's generation, stridently defended the flag as a reminder of soldiers who had died for our religious liberty.

I didn't mention that no one had thought that connection a necessary one for worship in America until, apparently, the mid-20th century. Such is memory in what Gore Vidal calls the United State of Amnesia. Nor did I point out how lightly he skated over the concerns of our guest. Clearly "we" are never like "them."

But how can we allow the cross to get mixed up with fighter jets? It has happened, of course, and it will go on happening. Still, it's a good idea, once in a while, to at least stop and ask: what are we doing here? And why are we doing it? Just because an idea is promoted with particular vehemence by some, doesn't mean it is accepted with equal enthusiasm by all. 1000 members left Rev. Boyd's church; but 4000 stayed. And while I might disagree with Rev. Boyd on some points of theology, I agree completely with him on these:

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

It might not be the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging that I would envision or try to lead; but it's a very good step in that direction. And what is most encouraging is, it seems to be working.

In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.

At least in this case; but that's enough for me. I don't want to change the world. I just want to find some sign that God's spirit is still working in it. The story of Rev. Boyd tells me only two things, but those two things are important. One is that the "dominionist" position will always be with us, but it won't often find much welcome. The second is that not all megachurches are built by people with marketing degrees and business goals; but many people still think they should be:

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

We had a name for people like that, in seminary: the unchurched churched.

The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”

Rev. Boyd and I would definitely find a lot of commonality on the issues of ecclesiology. Finally, in a line that many in left blogistan would like:

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

Amen.

The treachery of the pursuit of happyness

But is it art?

"The number one question facing anyone who wants to help improve the quality of public discourse is: how the hell do you get a look-in?"

Actually, I think it's:  how do you lead a horse to water AND make him think?  The sad truth is, you can't do both.

So, yeah:

The critics pushing the oversimplification argument seem to believe that if only people weren't wasting their time on silly TED talks, they'd be reading books, taking evening classes, poring over scientific papers, or at the very least subscribing to the critic's uniquely brilliant blog.

But that doesn't change the fundamental point:  TED talks suck!  They're a glib excuse for feeling like you're suddenly knowledgeable and insightful and maybe even clever, without having to do any of the hard work of reading books, taking evening classes, poring over scientific (or academic, or philosophical, or theological!) papers, "or at the very least subscribing to the critic's uniquely brilliant blog" (and when ARE you people gonna subscribe to my uniquely brilliant blog?  Huh?).  They aren't much different from the college student who occasionally attends lectures, occasionally pays attention, but never reads the assigned materials, seldom does the assigned work, and then complains that the whole thing is boring because it didn't entertain him enough to get him involved.  Knowledge for the masses is not knowledge; it's just a confirmation of prejudices and commonly accepted ideas.  One interesting contrast between the two columns I've linked to here:  one is full of middlebrow "thinking," the other is a challenge to most of what you might accept as "conventional wisdom."  That doesn't weigh them out on the scales of "who's right/who's wrong."  But it does underscore the critic's point:  TED talks are "middlebrow megachurch infotainment."

I have as much use for them as I do for megachurches that assure their attendees Jesus is just alright with you, just the way you are at this moment; and only wants you to be happier than you are now, on into forever.  TED talks are all about as challenging as that kind of religious pap.

But I don't come here to denigrate TED talks (I'll put my cranky old man rants aside); I come here to praise some of the insights presented in the guise of a critique of TED talks, a critique that is actually a lament that we so much love lazy thinking.

On the subject of TED talks and their virtues, read some of the works of Michel Foucault.  When he was alive and infrequently lecturing in Paris, at the institute that paid him to think, write, and infrequently lecture (sort of like Princeton's Advance Research facility, except I don't think Princeton required Einstein and Godel to lecture), his lectures were crowded with people, most of whom taped the remarks for review later.  Foucault didn't dumb anything down for his audience.  He didn't reduce his thoughts to 18 minutes, or express much concern that what he was saying was too complex.  He spoke of power, existence, medieval history, and arcana, and let his audience keep up if they could.  And still they crowded the halls when he came to speak.

Well, that's France, you say; and probably that's it, more than anything.  But the contrast is revealing:  TED talks are an American version of that, I suppose; but even the American Chataqua has a better pedigree and promises more thinking among the speaking.

I write about entanglements of technology and culture, how technologies enable the making of certain worlds, and at the same time how culture structures how those technologies will evolve, this way or that. It's where philosophy and design intersect.

Benjamin Bratton says; and that could be academic bafflegab and jargon speak, or it could be some truly meaty stuff.  But his point is:  if you are going to take things seriously, take them seriously; don't just imagine you take them seriously because you watch an 18 minute TED talk instead of 18 minutes (between commercials) of a talk show, or a cable news program.  As Bratton boils it down:

The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like ) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realisation, its triumphs and tribulations.

What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it's all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?

I'm sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don't care about anyone's experience of optimism. Given the stakes, making our best and brightest waste their time – and the audience's time – dancing like infomercial hosts is too high a price. It is cynical.

I won't quote the whole thing, though it's tempting  Bratton points out that technology is not really changing everything; not fundamentally.  We want, as he points out, everything to be new, so long as everything remains the same.  We go home to buildings based on "kitsch architecture copied from the 18th century," and it's worth pointing out here the technology which makes our houses "smarter" doesn't really change them fundamentally at all.  The fundamental change in architecture, actually in construction, was the "balloon frame" house, the kind you're probably sitting in right now.  But it was pointed out to me in college, 40 years ago, that such buildings consume too much wood and other materials, that we needed a new alternative just as the balloon frame had been the cheap alternative when it came along, well over a century ago.  The more things change, the more they remain the same; and that's the problem.

I connect this with a story I heard on NPR yesterday about how the next "revolution" equivalent to the invention of the steam engine is in machines that can "think" at least well enough to begin replacing human thought the way steam engines replaced animal (and human) muscle.  This change was presented as inevitable, as a natural force like a river carving the Grand Canyon or making the deltas of the American South.  It's no such thing, of course; yet we yield our power to affect it, and simply have to change ourselves and our society in order to accommodate it.  There is, it seems, nothing else we can do.  And I hear such things and think more and more of the dystopias of "Elysium" or "In Time," dystopias which, in the worlds of their stories, were equally inevitable and necessary and to which we simply must bend.  As the villain of "In Time" says, for a few to be immortal, many must die.

Is it time yet to say no one deserves to be immortal if even one person must die?  Are we yet ready to examine the terms of our Omelas?

I dare say I would not confront "the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront" the same way Mr. Bratton would, but I agree with him we aren't confronting them now.  Middlebrow thinkers assure me the future is inevitable and all I can do is adjust to it.  Oddly, the future that was inevitable when I was 5 years old never arrived, and the collapse of the middle class which was never supposed to happen (George Jetson was as bourgeois as could be imagined) is hastening apace because the future we have now has become the inevitable one.  Or, to put it as bluntly as Bratton does:

 Phones, drones and genomes, that's what we do here in San Diego and La Jolla. In addition to the other insanely great things these technologies do, they are the basis of NSA spying, flying robots killing people, and the wholesale privatisation of biological life itself. That's also what we do.

The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make them serve good futures, design as "innovation" just isn't a strong enough idea by itself. We need to talk more about design as "immunisation," actively preventing certain potential "innovations" that we do not want from happening.

I would not limit the idea of "innovations" to new technologies or new designs for old technologies (the kind of thing Apple excels at, for example).  I would expand it to consider the very idea that technology itself is an unalloyed good which must be allowed to run free and reshape human society even as we adapt to it's demands and make technology the paramount goal of human existence.  The great concern of Romanticism was the impact of the Industrial Revolution, but they never engaged the fight so much as gave us an alternative to it (and in doing so invented the modern idea of humanity, a shift in perspective as profound as Augustine's invention of self-consciousness, albeit thoroughly in line with the saint's insights).   Then again, its from the Romantics that we get the idea that transformation, radical, revolutionary change in human existence, in what it means to be a human being, is not only possible but necessary.  Jefferson all but announced it (no Romantic, he, but still) when he declared the chief end of man to no longer be glorifying God and enjoying God forever, but "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

The question we have to ask our selves now is:  are we pursuing transformation, or is transformation pursuing us?  Are we still chasing down happiness, or being chased down by it?  Does the way we live merely need to be summarized and described in a TED talk?  Or do "we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation: the hard stuff that really changes how we think."

So, here's the thing....

Oh, that guy!

Salon:

On Monday, millionaire pastor Joel Osteen taught more Americans via his actions than he’ll ever do in a sermon. At least initially, Osteen refused to open the doors of his Houston megachurch to people displaced by Tropical Storm Harvey. Even though he eventually reversed himself and defended his conduct in evasive media interviews, Osteen’s message was clear: Don’t count on religious leaders to do what’s right.

But, here's the thing:

Houston Christians did more than pray from the dry refuge of their homes or evacuation spots. Clergymen were featured in a couple viral news reports from Sunday: a preacher who checked submerged cars for trapped drivers, and a priest who tried to paddle his way to Mass at Houston’s Catholic Charismatic Center.

Several churches located on higher ground served as temporary shelters or meeting points for evacuees. Members with clear routes shuttled friends or dropped off supplies.

“Right now we are getting supplies together to take to a few area shelters. Baby stuff seems to be in short supply,” said Jason Crandall, pastor of CityView Church in Pearland, a southern suburb. 

The 24/7 press coverage on local TV I'm watching obsessively (it's on practically 24/7 at Casa Adventus) runs a continual crawl of churches open as shelters for those displaced by flood waters.  And mosques in Houston opened their doors almost immediately, and kept them open. 

You see, the thing about "religious leaders" is they tend to be people anointed by the media as "leaders."  Osteen leads his church, and nothing more.  Robert Jeffress leads his church, and serves on the President's evangelical council, and nothing more.  The true "religious leaders" are pastors and priests serving congregations and putting the concept of "pastoral care" into practice through their actions and the lives of their congregations.

As my wife pointed out today, Joel Osteen doesn't provide any kind of ministry at all.  He just preaches about money.*

*I can't pass up the chance to republish Matt Taibbi's assessment of Osteen, from back when McCain was running against Obama:

Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

Yeah; I still pretty much see him that way.  As Salon points out,

Generally speaking, he only mentions the name of his alleged savior around Easter, never around Christmas. In fact, within the past three years, he has mentioned “Jesus” or “Christ” only 14 times amid hundreds of tweets. 

I pretty much don't have any use for him, and "religious leader"?  It is to laugh.  Honestly; before this, when was the last time you heard anything about Osteen?

Adding:  This is what Christians and their leaders are doing.

It Passes All Understanding

I’ll never understand how the, “America is the best country in the history of the world” true believers can make excuses for stuff like this. I guess a lot of practice making excuses for gun deaths. https://t.co/gQMVYGsSUY

— Schooley (@Rschooley) June 28, 2020

TEXAS C-19 HOSPITALIZATIONS CONTINUE TO RISE.
Pence is making a campaign appearance at a mega-church. No masks.https://t.co/8FHH0oSEgF https://t.co/2N2uZOxBZw

— lindan johnson (@lindanjohnson1) June 28, 2020

Mike Pence is at First Baptist this morning. So of course the (high risk) choir is shoulder-to-shoulder, singing. pic.twitter.com/W0eJkMoEfw

— Matt Goodman (@goodmoine) June 28, 2020

Here's what the social distancing inside First Baptist looks like this morning as the Downtown Dallas megachurch's congregation welcomes Vice President Pence to its facility for an event called "Freedom Sunday." pic.twitter.com/v4EQ5ZPjiv

— Central Track (@Central_Track) June 28, 2020

This is just funny.

Peaceful protestors tempt @DallasPD officers, stationed outside the church where Pence is currently speaking, with doughnuts. pic.twitter.com/4HFzoDIdfC

— Trace Miller (@w_tres_mil) June 28, 2020

Trump's Favorite Pastor

Looking forward to my meeting at 2:00 P.M. with wonderful Inner City Pastors!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2019

Will he ask them if they are Christians?

Trump's favorite pastor, or perhaps the pastor whose favorite President is Trump, is Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas.  It's a storied "mega-church" once led by W.A. Criswell, a reprobate and racist who accepted integration but never really, to my knowledge anyway, repented of his segregationist ways.  Criswell like the world the way it was in Texas and wanted it pretty much left alone from what he'd grown up with, and Robert Jeffress seems to be much in the same mold.

That's what I draw from this Texas Monthly article I've mentioned twice already.  It's not a particularly good article.  The author interviews Jeffress several times, and avoids any easy critique of his subject's weltanschaung, which restraint is admirable.  He even likes Jeffress as a person, which is almost laudable, since we too easily equate ideology or theology or personal philosophy with character.  But the article doesn't give you any real insight into Robert Jeffress, either.  It may be he is a remarkably opaque person, someone who knows what he thinks and stands by what he believes and offers no more self-reflection than a brick wall; a kindly, polite, personable brick wall, but still.  Still, Robert Jeffress likes Donald Trump.  He considers Trump a friend, and that friendship breeds a loyalty that is apparently unshakeable and make Jeffress forgive, forget, or just ignore, whatever Trump says that is troubling, disconcerting, immoral, or even evil.  Which is, in a way, an insight into Jeffress:  he has faith in Donald Trump.  That faith may be an adjunct of his faith in God, or faith in himself, or faith in what he believes.  But the only faith we can verify from this article, is that Robert Jeffress believes in Donald Trump, and he's not going to allow anything to interfere with that.  He seems to think it is his duty.

It's almost admirable.  I have friends I've known since childhood, and I would not speak against them lightly for any reason.  I would admit their flaws, if you were a reporter and my friends prominent public figures you were interviewing me to learn more about.  I don't mean I'd reveal stories I alone know (I don't have any, actually), or uncover things they'd wish left covered in perpetuity (ditto), but I'd be honest about their weaknesses and their strengths, as I see them (though, being a friend, strengths would be easier to identify, weaknesses just an acknowledgment they still put their pants on one leg at a time).  Jeffress doesn't know Trump that well, and it is obvious from the anecdotes in the article Trump's relationships even with his most devoted sycophants (it's hard to think of Jeffress any other way, from this article) are all transactional:

A few months after that, in August, the White House hosts an elaborate dinner for a hundred or so evangelical leaders from across the country. Franklin Graham is there. So are James Dobson and Paula White, a TV host and pastor of a Florida megachurch. Jeffress is one of the preachers Trump thanks by name.

Reading prepared remarks, the president lists his evangelical-friendly accomplishments: issuing orders limiting government funding for groups that provide abortions, helping to free an American pastor being held in Turkey, moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Of course, there’s no record of him mentioning any of these issues before campaigning for president and meeting people like Jeffress.

At the end of his short speech, Trump thanks the religious leaders. He calls them “special people.” Then he looks up from his script.

“The support you’ve given me has been incredible,” the president says. “But I really don’t feel guilty, because I have given you a lot back.”

Jeffress gives Trump his unqualified support.  Why?

“Basic core spiritual issues” is usually his answer when I press him on why he goes out of his way, again and again, to defend Trump. He cares about religious liberty—which for him essentially boils down to whether churches and businesses should be required to provide birth control for employees and whether businesses can deny service to gay or trans people. And nearly every policy discussion eventually comes back to what he sees as the national battle that started in Dallas when he was a teenager. He believes Roe v. Wade, not the issue of sexual assault or of judicial temperament, was at the heart of the fight over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The Democrats were worried that Kavanaugh’s rulings would “somehow lessen the number of babies being murdered every year in the womb through abortion.”

Which is not much of an answer, frankly.  Jeffress, it turns out, is a careful public figure, a politicians himself.  He says his congregation welcomes all political persuasions, all races, all types (well, not gays; they're going to hell.  Jeffress is quite happily clear on that point,  Like many a conservative preacher I've known, they always seem comfortable with damning some people to eternal torment just because.)  He speaks in defense of Donald Trump on television at the drop of a hat; but he never quite says just why he's so devoted to Trump, except, at the end of the article, to say he considers Trump "a friend."  Maybe it's because he and Trump share a trait in common:

This is why Trump is the sort of warrior evangelicals have long craved, a warrior who will fight for their beliefs regardless of whether he holds those beliefs himself. This is why Jeffress doesn’t worry about Trump’s personal behavior. “When you’re in a war, you don’t worry about style,” he explains. “Nobody would have criticized General Patton because of his language. We’re in a war here between good and evil. And to me, the president’s tone, his demeanor, just aren’t issues I choose to get involved with.” (When I look this up later, I learn that some top commanders and many members of Congress did criticize—and discipline—General Patton for verbally abusing and slapping two soldiers. He was suspended from his command and made to apologize.) 

I could have told you Patton was reprimanded for slapping that soldier.  My father remembered the incident (he remembered nothing else about Patton) and he despised Patton for it, decades later (the subject came up when the George C. Scott movie came out).  Jeffress, like me, is far too young to have ever known that story except as history; and he gets the history wrong, but it's the example he needs, not accuracy.  Early in the article Jeffress is on Lou Dobbs show, defending Trump's border wall by declaring the Bible describes heaven as a place with a wall around it.  The Bible says no such thing.  Revelations 21 describes the "New Jerusalem," but that's a concrete metaphor of the "basiliea tou theou" announced in the Gospels; it's not a description of an existent reality. Revelation describes a city as it would exist in the 1st century, not an eternal structure that cannot be altered.  I know Jeffress takes the Bible literally, but this is laughable, and as impossible to literalize as the nativity stories (Luke moves the Holy Family back and forth from Nazareth; Matthew moves them from Bethlehem to Egypt, and then to Nazareth.  It can't be both.).  But Jeffress wants a wall to keep people out of America he thinks don't belong here (he also balks at AOC's reference to Matthew's nativity story, where the Holy Family flees to Egypt, refugees fleeing the death sentence of Herod.  AOC is a good Catholic, and knows her Bible stories well.  Jeffress scoffs, claiming Egypt didn't have a border patrol, so the Family couldn't be refugees.  No, it's not an argument that holds up to the barest scrutiny.  Then again, it's not meant to.  One reason Jeffress never defends his positions in an interview; he has no interest in defending what he says.  He believes it, that's good enough for him.  Self-reflection, self-examination, seem as foreign to him as the concept God loves all of creation, not just the part that is Jeffress' brand of "Christian.").  He has an anchor, in other words, for his claim "the Bible says," but that anchor depends on a very particular and peculiar hermeneutic, and I doubt Jeffress is any more reflective on that than Trump is on himself when he gathers his Cabinet to hear them praise him on camera.

The only conclusion I can draw from this article is a rather obtuse one:  Robert Jeffress has faith in Donald Trump.  Maybe it's the abortion issue, and Trump's Supreme Court nominees will eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, an issue Jeffress is adamant about but which he can't explain to his interlocutor except on the grounds that “We didn’t have the ability to view a life inside the womb as we do today and understand that that’s a real, live human being.”  Who are of value until they are born:

What about children at the border and the administration’s policy of separating families? Doesn’t he think we should protect babies at our borders too?

“Look,” he tells me, “if you have a woman who is convicted of a bank robbery and she has an infant child and she’s sent to prison, I mean, her baby is going to be ripped from her.”

But of course, we have gradations of crimes in this country, and crossing a border—even if it’s illegal—is a far different thing than robbing a bank. This policy was instituted as a deterrent. I remind him that many people, including some Baptists, believe it’s a callous way to treat children.

“If we don’t secure our borders, we’re enticing the needy people, the persecuted people, to make a dangerous journey to come to this country or try to enter illegally, and I think, in part, we are morally responsible for doing that,” he tells me. He compares it to laws that hold homeowners responsible when a child strays into an unfenced pool and drowns. “We’ve got to figure out a way to secure our borders and at the same time deal equitably and justly with people who want to enter this country for legitimate reasons.”

A wall at the border is a fence around a private pool is the New Jerusalem; somehow.  And the difference between a "real, live human being" in the womb, and out of the womb, is:  the womb.  Huh.  Wonder what he'd think about that?

Jeffress has told me he was drawn to Trump’s leadership and intellect. “He’s a very smart person,” he’s said. “You don’t become a billionaire and president of the United States by being an idiot.” But none of that quite explains why a pastor goes out of his way to publicly defend the president’s every indiscretion. He could easily vote according to his views on the Supreme Court or according to his conscience on abortion without also going on TV, over and over, in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers, to explain away things like Trump’s adultery and language that inflames foreign policy. He could be in favor of immigration reform, for example, and not feel compelled to rationalize the separation of families. He could believe that God has put someone in power and still hold that person to a high moral standard.

What, at the end of the article, is Jeffress' explanation?

 “I’m his friend,” he says. “I’ll never walk away.”

I won't walk away from my friends (even if they wish I would!).  But neither will I defend fervently and publicly everything they ever said or did.  It seems to me this is beyond friendship, that this is faith.  Faith as trust, I mean.  Maybe that's a bit disturbing, since it seems very much to be blind faith; but Robert Jeffress faith in God has earned him a prominent position of power and authority and prosperity, even if he doesn't sound anything like Joel Osteen (plenty of pastors of my childhood, especially of the Southern Baptist variety, were only a whisker away from the prosperity gospel, anyway).  His faith in God has been amply rewarded, even if I'd argue it was his faith in mammon and American culture, not God.  Who am I to judge?  I don't wish to.  I just find it interesting his faith in God has led him to have what I can only understand as the very same faith in Donald Trump.

Still, Jeffress told Trump that God wanted Barack Obama to be president, so maybe God is backing a Democrat in 2020, just to fulfill God's mysterious plans.  It could happen.

Regarding Joel and Harvey

I had a run-in with Osteen's church, back before it moved to downtown Houston, and maybe before Joel took over; I can't remember that detail now.  The Houston UCC churches had set up a low-income housing facility many years before I got here, and every year the churches tried to round up Thanksgiving dinners for the residents.  But our churches were getting smaller and more elderly and on more fixed incomes, so donations were not what they used to be, and Lakewood was near enough by it had brought Thanksgiving dinners for a few years.

But the year in question, they decided not to do that.  They told the residents, few of whom had cars, to come to Lakewood to pick up the food.  We found another way to provide Thanksgiving that year, as I recall.

So now comes this contretemps over Lakewood's downtown former basketball arena being open to Harvey victims.  What I know about this I've read on in the internet, but this article seems the best summation of the story.  It does seem Osteen had to be shamed into doing the right thing, and he took his own sweet time and offered up a bevy of excuses for not doing it (and the place still isn't a shelter; or it only will be if they are satisfied no other shelter space is available, so I'm not holding my breath).

And it's worth noting J.J. Watt has already donated $500 million of his own money toward relief for Houston, and is taking donations through his charity that's already established.  Lakewood is collecting clothes, pillows, towels, etc., for distribution.  But I don't think they're distributing the stuff themselves (that would be helpful) and no word on any donations from the Osteen's.  All we've had from them is tweets.

I guess God will make the newly homeless rich, or something.

My daughter's comment on this was that Lakewood is not a church, it's a business.  Spoken like a preacher's kid.  Still, there are businesses, and then there are businesses.

When your megachurch is less welcoming to #Harvey victims than a furniture superstore, the IRS should terminate your tax exemption pic.twitter.com/77W6aWsZH7

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) August 29, 2017

Please note these two furniture stores opened on Sunday, and Lakewood finally opened as a "distribution center" today.

Asymmetry Is A Feature, Not A Bug

(1/X) Sorry to keep doing these, but I wanted to do one more thing about how poorly media handles the asymmetry between Trump and Democrats. This is torn directly from my real life experiences watching deans empower an abusive narcissistic sociopath...

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) April 17, 2024

It occurs to me I saw something similar in seminary.

In my second year, a new student arrived among much fanfare. She was reportedly brilliant and a very highly regarded student with impeccable credentials. She was also quite obviously very self-centered and enjoyed all the attention she could get (the term “narcissist” wasn’t widely bandied about in those halcyon days).

I didn’t have many classes with her, but in one I quickly realized she was not only bit “brilliant,” she didn’t know what she was talking about. I mentioned this to someone, and learned most of the faculty had figured that out. I did have one run in with her, while I was still living on campus.

I took a job at the seminary library, basically closing the place at night. She started there shortly after I did, and came into work shortly before closing, announcing to me that she was “here,” as if that was supposed to mean something. When it came time to close, the building was empty. But she came downstairs telling me there were noises in the upstairs bathroom and someone was hiding up there. I had been upstairs earlier and knew it was empty, and I needed to get home (it was nearly midnight). She wanted me to call the police (not campus police, we didn’t have any). I laughed and refused. The other worker (another student) didn’t know whether to go with me or stay with her (I’d have forced her to leave and locked up. So they stayed, and I left them to it.

The head librarian fired me the next day, saying I should have stayed because someone might’ve been upstairs. She had been called in, and found no one. But I was at fault, because the narcissist convinced people she couldn’t be wrong. She wanted to be important; she wanted to be powerful. She wanted to cry “wolf!” and have everyone come running.

That was my only dealing with her, but the system finally worked; sort of. I took a small church as pastor, cutting my time in class and extending my studies an extra year, so we graduated together. She was ordained almost immediately (required a call to a church, in our denomination. My ordination came months later.). It’s supposed to be a solemn and humble affair, where calling church gives gifts in celebration. The story was she reveled in the gifts like it was her birthday,?which left a lot of people wondering who, exactly, they had called to ministry for their church. Shortly after that, word came that she didn’t have the requisite undergraduate degree to get into seminary. How that slipped by was an administrative mystery. But it leant impetus to withdrawing her call. I don’t know how it ended up, but I’m sure it didn’t end well.

She was, I’d say now, a narcissist convinced of her own importance and glory (unless you plan to lead a megachurch, not goo qualities for ministry). The system let her through longer than she deserved, but then, we give people the benefit of the doubt, don’t we? Or the benefit of being persuasive. I remember the whole campus was buzzing with the reputation of her genius that preceded her. We all soon realized that was because she said so, and for no other reason.

I knew a lawyer like that, but for him it was not brag, just fact. He was still an asshole, though. Even his partners said so. But he was a good lawyer, so who cared?

Asymmetry in politics? Eh, seen that all my life. What brought down Sen. McCarthy? Not the courage (hah!) of the press; nor of the Senate. Not even Eisenhower. Nixon did in Nixon, just as Falwell outlasted his welcome. Jim and Tammy Faye got too greedy; Gingrich got too self-important (he always was, he just got worse). People seldom bring down such people; the “system” does because they linger too long, and become old and tiresome. What made them new and bold becomes old and dull. We honor people like that in the beginning; in the end we bury them with the refuse. We honor people like Dr. King in death, having dishonored them in life.

So it goes.