The Questioning Christian

Sermon-preachers, take note

"Congregations actually welcome thought and intelligence, opening up and investigating. [...]  When what is taught in the [theological] colleges is taught in the pews, and people are being treated like lifelong learners, then perhaps more will come along and participate in the religious adventure."  Faithspace Contribution: Churches (scroll down to June 20 2006, 12:24 am).

Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers - New York Times

In today's NY Times, Laurie Goodstein reports that evangelicals worry their teens are abandoning their faith.  Gee, there's a shock.  Think about it: 

• We tell our kids about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, but eventually we confess that we were "fibbing" to them.  So they're really likely to believe us when we tell them about God — not.

• As the kids get older, we try to teach them to be critical thinkers.  When they approach traditional Christian doctrines with that mindset, they see potential problems.  They also see the church trying to sweep those problems under the rug, for fear of offending implacably-certain and always-vocal traditionalists, instead of forthrightly reexamining dubious doctrines such as those of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds; Biblical inerrancy; Christian exclusivity; and so forth.

• Now stir in the secular culture's disregard and even mockery of religion.

• And let's not forget the natural rebelliousness of adolescents. 

It should be no surprise that many teens shy away from the religious belief systems of their parents.  Unfortunately, the church offers putatively-Christian teens little or nothing by way of a positive, intellectually-credible alternative to fill the resulting vacuum.  The surprising thing is that more of them aren't abandoning their faith.

Here's an excerpt from Goodstein's Times piece:

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

[...T]here is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers. [...]

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

[Laurie Goodstein, Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers, NY Times, Fri. Oct. 6, 2006; emphasis added]

Evangelism: Clear Soup First, Steak Dinner Later

A hiker emerges from the wilderness.  He's rail-thin, having survived for weeks on what he could forage.  Well-meaning greeters urge him to share in the rich, delicious meal they themselves are enjoying:  sixteen-ounce steaks with sauteed mushrooms and onions; baked potatoes with butter and sour cream; and chocolate sundaes with whipped cream.  The hiker tries a bite or two.  Accustomed to leaner fare, his stomach rebels.

The hiker would have been better served if his greeters had recognized his condition and started him out on just a little clear soup.  But the greeters insisted on giving him what they liked, instead of what he needed.  He turns away from the table, no better off than he was before.

Unfortunately, some Christian evangelists are like the well-meaning greeters.  They offer non-believers a rich meal of theological doctrines — delicious to those accustomed to them, but hard to digest for those who aren't, especially those brought up in the West's culture of rationality.  They are puzzled when many non-believers, like the hiker, turn away from the table after a bite or two.

For many of these non-believers, we'd serve them better if we offered to start them off with the equivalent of clear soup, instead of the complete steak dinner that some of us might like.  (Cf. 1 Cor. 3.2:  "I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it.")

Just the Thing:  Jesus's Core Teachings

As it happens, we have just the "soup" to give them:  Jesus's simple, empirically-defensible, core teachings about how we should live our day-to-day lives in relation to God.  I can't do justice to those teachings in a summary.  Even so, I would be so bold as to paraphrase a selection of those teachings — all of which can be supported with citations to the Gospels —  along the following lines:

Christianity's Elephant in the Room

Some conservative Episcopalians like to trumpet the fact that some traditionalist parishes have high Sunday attendance.  They claim that orthodox preaching and leadership pack 'em in, whereas (they claim) "revisionist" parishes often have trouble even getting people in the door.  Well, here's an interesting data point:  Despite the Roman Catholic church's overwhelmingly-orthodox leadership,[1] and even before the clergy sex-abuse scandals, an Associated Press article reports that the church's major U.S. dioceses have been seeing only about 20% Sunday attendance, at best.  And Europe is probably worse by far.   The attendance percentage at my own, very-orthodox parish hasn't been much better that that of the RCs in the past dozen years.  When I eyeballed the charts published by the national church, it appears the best attendance percentage we had between 1994 and 2004 was right around 28%.  I checked a few other parishes in town, both orthodox and liberal; their numbers tell similar stories.

People go to church for lots of different reasons, but these attendance data remind us that there's an elephant in the room:  Educated people have plenty of reason to be skeptical of the claims that traditionalists insist on making; from a purely-marketing perspective, this damages the church's credibility as a bringer of truth.   Over the centuries, Jesus's good news has become covered with doctrinal mold that needs to be stripped away so that people can be attracted again by the basics that he taught.

There's Ample Reason Not to Take Traditionalist Doctrines Seriously — and That Damages the Church's Credibility

I'm convinced that as the years go by, more and more people just don't take seriously what traditionalists claim are the key doctrines of orthodox Christianity, and that this damages the church's credibility in other areas.  If these folks don't have some other reason to want to go to church, they see little or no point in going there on Sunday morning, so they feel free to attend the Little Church of St. Starbucks (or St. Mattress) instead.

These folks may pay lip service to the doctrines of orthodoxy.  When they think about these doctrines at all, they may hope they're true. But deep down, I suspect, an awful lot of them metaphorically raise their eyebrows when traditionalist Christians say some of the things that they do, such as:

"The Point of Christian Faith" - Susan Russell

The Rev. Susan Russell says this today on her blog:

And in John's understanding Jesus was given so that we might believe in him and thus receive the gift of eternal life.   OK – but what does it mean to believe? Is it to ascent to certain facts, or as John A. T. Robinson once put it, "swallow nineteen unbelievable things before breakfast?"  

If so, then I fear Christianity is reduced to what one colleague has called “The religion ABOUT Jesus, rather than the religion OF Jesus.”  Rather is it possible that to believe in Jesus is to believe in the things he taught and the way he lived, more than to believe certain things about him?

Stacy Sauls, Bishop of Lexington, shared a great insight into the whole “believing” thing at a retreat we were part of last spring when he talked about the difference between believing IN and believing THAT in reference to his decades-long marriage to his wife, Ginger. “To say I believe that we are married is to assent to a certifiable set of facts that are as easy to verify as checking with the hall of records for our marriage license or the parish register for the service record. To say I believe in our marriage is a whole different thing: it is to name not facts about our relationship but faith in it.”

To believe IN is to take belief out of the realm of facts and into the world of faith; and to have faith is to trust. To say "I believe in" is to say, "I trust," and then (perhaps the biggest leap of all) to live as if I do trust. It means living life in trust that God is good, that God cares, that God is love, that God surrounds us with love, that we are called to love and serve others. It is placing trust in God -- not in all the things we usually trust for our security and well being: money and status, power and politics, stockpiling weapons of mass destructions and beefing up border patrols. Rather it means trusting Jesus' vision of the realm of God in our midst, and claiming both the possibilities and responsibilities this sets before us. Believing means trusting means doing. It means taking to heart the words of Verna Dozier: “Don’t tell me WHAT you believe – tell me what difference it MAKES that you believe!” That’s eternal life.

The point of Christian faith is not "believe in Jesus now for the sake of heaven later", but "trust in the vision that Jesus proclaimed and live eternal life now."

Read it all.

FOD

Traditionalists sometimes use the phrase, the Faith Once Delivered.  The phrase alludes to a passage in Jude 1.3 (King James Version):  "it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints."

The phrase makes for an intriguing TLA (three-letter abbreviation):  FOD.  It's intriguing because on an aircraft carrier, FOD stands for Foreign Object Debris — things like stray tools, nuts and bolts, etc.

On a carrier flight deck, the stuff that comprises FOD has its proper uses, at the right times and with appropriate safety precautions in place.  But FOD is very dangerous if it’s carelessly left lying about on the deck when it's not the right time.  It can easily get sucked into aircraft engine intakes, causing major damage and possibly even killing people. (That’s why flight-deck crews take great pains to keep the deck clear of FOD.)

It’s not hard to see parallels between FOD on aircraft carriers and FOD in the church.  The Faith Once Delivered has its proper uses, at the right times and with appropriate safety precautions in place.  But it can be pretty dangerous otherwise.

Strawman Alert — Reason is Not Self-Reliant

This morning my del.icio.us tag feed for “Anglican” picked up a set of raw notes of a lecture in November 2004 by renowned evangelical theologican J.I. Packer.  According to the note taker (The Rough Woodsman), Dr. Packer claimed that scriptural authority has fallen by the wayside in modern thought because “[c]ivil society replaced scriptural authority with self-reliant reason” (emphasis mine) in four respects:

1) skepticism of the Bible
2) rationalism as answer for all difficulties
3) Biblical criticism
4) evolutionism as an alternative
5) postmodernism – no absolute truth

This is certainly not inconsistent with my limited knowledge of Packer’s other writings, but it seriously overstates the case.

Bishop Wright on the Dearth of Reason

From Reason to be cheerful, by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Tom Wright, in today's Guardian:

Reason is in short supply right now, and that is always dangerous. When everybody feels strongly that they know what to do, but nobody stops to think, you will sometimes find that common sense is prevailing; but you may also get lynchings, racist attacks and the cheerful abolition of ancient rights.

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