Faith in Context

The Next Billy Graham

I guess this makes it as official as it gets. Timein this weeks issue (dated Aug. 18, 2008) dubs Pastor Rich Warren the next Billy Graham. Warren is a Baby Boomer, a Southern Baptist pastor in Orange Country, California, with a megachurch he has built up for about three decades to 20,000 to 25,000 participants. He is the author of the best-selling Purpose-Driven Life and widely influential Purpose-Driven Church. (It is very likely the single most widely-read and referenced professional book among Protestant pastors in his generation.) Saturday night he will conduct two back-to-back, one-hour television interviews with the two top candidates for President of the United States; the event that will most likely be viewed as launching the campaign proper.

The Time article does a good job of capturing Warren's personality and background, as well as his faith, although it does not say much about what he believes in terms of traditional doctrines. It also reveals that in 2004, Warren supported President Bush for re-election, but since that time has turned away from Christian Right politics. He is studiously neutral in this election. He has shifted his concerns from a narrow focus on abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research to a much wider concern for poverty, HIV-AIDS, and social justice in developing countries. This wider view was stimulated by his wife which is ample evidence of their egalitarian marriage.

Warren has never been significantly unconventional in any way. He has always hued to the middle of the road in his approach to worship, preaching, theology and evangelism. A number of writers have tried to make a serious critique of his views because they are so widely influential but no one takes them seriously because his views are always so close to the conventional wisdom of Baby Boomer pastors from all conservative Protestant denominations. So, he is probably a very good choice for the mantle of Billy Graham, and he is clearly a weather vane as one tries to discern how our culture and politics are changing.

Please Pray for Peace

It is so long ago that everyone has forgotten. In August, 1914, the nations of Europe tumbled into war when a rather small initial event led to reactions back and forth from Austria, Serbia, Germany, Russia, France and England, and so on. That is 94 years ago this month and most historians now agree that World War II was simply the second act of the war that began then.

Russia has today widened its war with Georgia, moving beyond South Ossetia (a disputed territory with a population that includes many people of Russian ethnicity). The NATO countries, including the U.S., have obligations to Georgia. This could all go down hill very rapidly. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-run it time and time again.

Should their faith be used to manipulate voters?

A new television spot by one of the major candidates for president of the USA implies that his opponent is the Antichrist and uses many symbols and allusions from a popular Evangelical approach to eschatology. These are powerful images for perhaps one in five Americans, key elements in their personal relationship with Christ. An equivalent response would be a television spot showing pictures of hundreds of actual mothers up in years and saying, "He killed your mother. His health care policies caused her early death."

One the one hand, the fact that this television spot was created demonstrates the power of conservative religion in contemporary culture. When I first took a course in Sociology of Religion in the late 1960s, the textbooks (not my instructor) all said that religion, especially traditional religion, was in decline; that as urbanization and secularization continued, religion would slowly disappear. I still have books from that era on "post-religious faith" and "the end of religion." Instead, what has happened is a fusion between popular culture and traditional religion in which Darbyite eschatology has been enshrined in the best-selling Left Behind novels.

But, that does not mean that secularization has stalled or declined. Instead we have highly secular forms of conservative, traditional faith. I am remembering a Darbyite preacher that I got to know as a ministerial student in the 1960s. He would turn over in his grave if he knew that his kind of preaching themes were being used by political campaign handlers and Hollywood television producers (mostly people with no religious commitments) simply to get the faithful to support their candidate. He would curse Tim LaHaye for becoming a millionaire in his old age writing novels (no less!) on these same preaching points.

Religion is today being suffused into the secular world. (This morning's Wall Street Journal has two news stories on religion, and so does the New York Times and this is an increasingly typical day for these major media organs.) That is a good thing, I think, but not an unmixed blessing. When key spiritual and Scriptural themes are mishandled to an even small degree, both unintentionally by religion-ignorant journalists and intentionally by unscrupulous politicians, confusion and heresy are created; the faith of large numbers of people is tampered with. It means that pastors must work harder to educate those who listen to their sermons and attend classes and study groups, so that they understand the true faith instead of the false faith disseminated (perhaps somewhat inadvertently) by the media.

Willow Creek's "Reveal" & What It Tells Us About Spiritual Growth

The Reveal study conducted for Willow Creek Community Church initially and later the Willow Creek Association has been the subject of considerable discussion. Much of what has been written in a number of blogs and even major Christian journals suffers from ignorance of the research design and an over-eagerness to criticize Willow Creek and "seeker"-focused ministries. Cally Parkinson, director of the Reveal research project on the Willow Creek staff, met with the Congregational Studies group this week at its annual meeting in Chicago. This is an interfaith professional group that brings together most of the people who do research on congregations and sponsors the FACT (Faith Communities Today) series of surveys.

Cally and one of her key marketing/psychographics consultants briefed the researchers on the second stage of the Reveal study, a sample of 420 churches across the country. The findings from the first wave of these (200 churches) is being released this week in a book entited Follow Me (2008, Willow Creek Resources). I have some quibbles with the sampling process. It started with a convenience sample (not random) of pastors who attended the Leadership Summit last year; 1,700 of them volunteered their congregation. A total of 500 of these were selected randomly through a stratified sample to provide for a balance representation of geography, urbanization, size, etc., although clearly the smallest congregations are largely left out of this sample.

The purpose of the research is to understand the attitudes and dynamics related to spiritual growth and how churches help people grow in Christ. It is clearly within an Evangelical context and not in any way interfaith in nature, which was somewhat unsettling to several of the researchers from other traditions. Yet, it provides some very useful insights into one of the core task for pastors and churches.

The data identify four categories of believers:

• Those who are "exploring Christianity," typified by these two items (although not entirely defined by them alone): "I believe in God, but I am not sure about Jesus. ... My faith is not a significant part of my life." 
• Those who are "growing in Christ," typified by: "I believe in Jesus and I am working on what it means to get to know him."
• Those who are "close to Christ," typified by: "I feel realy close to Jesus. ... I depend on him for daily guidance."
• Those who are "Christ-centered," typified by: "My relationship with Jesus is the most important relationship in my life. ... It influences everything I do."

[It seems to me that the labels on these categories do not match the typical items and a larger cluster of items (which they did not show us) actually defines the categories. A better set of labels, in my opinion, would be exploring faith, getting acquainted with Christ, growing in Christ and Christ-centered.]

The study focuses on what moves people from one category to the next. The most influential catalysts moving people from the first to the second categoryare 13: belief in a personal God, belief in the authority of the Bible, belief in the Trinity, belief in salvation by grace, belief that Christ is first, serving in a church, attending worship, being in a small group, prayer to confess sins, prayer to seek guidance, Bible reading, reflection on Scripture, and friendships which include sharing spiritual converstions.

The most influential catalysts moving people from the second to the third category include 7 of the 13 above, plus these: personal identity in Christ, serving those in need through church programs, adult education classes on spiritual topics, frequent prayer to seek guidance, frequent Bible reading, frequent reflection on Scripture, tithing, solitude, serving those in need outside on my own, personal evangelism, and spiritual mentors.

The most influential catalysts moving people from the third to the fourth category include 8 of those in the previous two clusters, plus these: belief in giving away my life, belief in stewardship, finding additional learning and worship events beyond worship at my church, daily prayer to confess sins, daily prayer to seek guidance, daily Bible reading, daily reflection on Scripture, more frequent and practice of solitude.

The research also shows that most congregations (like Willow Creek) are not good at managing the "portfolio" of activities and goals necessary to serve people at each level of spiritual development. This is true for both contemporary and traditional styles of worship, larger and smaller congregations, denominational and independent churches, etc. It is across the board. There is no significant category of churches that do well as helping people grow spiritually. The survey found that across the board one in four church members (23 percent) are "currently stalled" in their spiritual growth and one in five church members (17 percent) are "dissatisfied with the role my church plays in helping me grow spiritually," while the majority of those who feel positive show little evidence of actual growth.

It must be underlined, this is not correlated to Willow Creek's focus on seekers! The more traditional, conservative churches with heavy emphasis on Bible teaching are just as likely to have tepid results when it comes to spiritual growth of their members. Consumer religion is widespread, even among those "consumers" who prefer a more Fundamentalist approach.

What do you think this means? What is your church doing about it? You can administer the same survey in your congregation if you go to www.revealnow.com

Congregational Studies 2008 Annual Meeting

Last week I taught my class on Field Research for Ministry for a cohort of Doctor of Ministry students and this week I am attending the annual meeting of the Congregational Studies association. One of the items on our agenda is a report on the second phase of the "Reveal" survey conducted by the Willow Creek Association. The first phase was published about this time last year at the annual Leadership Summit, and now they have gathered data from more than 400 other congregations, so this research becomes much more generalizable and interesting. I do not know if they are presenting the same report at the Leadership Summit, but the researchers will be meeting with our group, make a presentation and engage in dialog with researchers from across the country. I will post a preliminary report by Thursday morning. There will undoubtedly by other interesting items from this meeting; there always is.

Landscape of American Religion: How Fast is Postmodern Faith Arriving?

A very surprising fact has emerged from the second part of the Landscape of American Religion study by the Pew Research Center. And spin doctors have emerged from many fronts. In their large, random sample of Americans, Pew interviewers asked this question among others:

• As I read a pair of statements, tell me whether the first statement or the second statement comes closer to your own views even if neither is exactly right: My religion is the one true faith leading to eternal life, or Many religions can lead to eternal life.

Much to everyone's amazement 70 percent of Americans picked the second statement and only 24 percent picked the first statement. Among Hindu, Buddhist, mainline Protestant, Jewish and Catholic respondents, 80 percent or more picked the second statement. The majority of Evangelicals (57 percent) did the same. Only members of the Later-day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses had a majority who picked the first statement.

The percentages who picked the second statement in some denominations of interest:

• Seventh-day Adventist Church - 65 percent
• Church of the Nazarene - 63 percent
• Southern Baptist Convention - 61 percent
• Church of Christ - 56 percent
• Assemblies of God - 53 percent
• Church of God in Christ (COGIC) - 54 percent
• Independent Black Baptist churches - 60 percent

Dr. Rodney Stark, one of the foremost sociologists of religion in America today, professor at Baylor University, was quickly quoted in the news media unhappy with the results. He expressed what can only be described as a put-down for the Pew Research Center and stated that the terms "my religion" and "many religions" were not clear enough. He thinks that many of the respondents were thinking of other Christian denominations and not more widely.

Dr. Stark points out that a Baylor survey asked the question this way: "How many of the following people do you think will go to heaven?" which was followed by a list of specific religions that respondents reacted to yes or now. For example, Dr. Stark says, when asked about Buddhists, 16 percent said "none," 8 percent said "a few," 5 percent said "about half," 22 percent said "most" and 10 percent said "all." The largest group, 39 percent, said they had "no opinion."

Dr. Stark thinks his question is better, but it has a very large percentage of respondents who had no opinion, which is often a good indicator that a question is poorly constructed. People don't answer because they don't understand it. If you remove the 39 percent "no opinion," then 60 percent of the respondents think that half or more of Buddhists are going to heaven and 73 percent think that at least a few Buddhists will go to heaven. That is surprisingly close to the Pew results.

I think Dr. Stark really understands what is happening. He admits that changing attitudes are moving in a more universalistic direction. In the past, he told a journalist, "you would have had ... many more saying 'none' and most people would have had an opinion. Most people now are saying 'I don't know.'"

Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist researcher, director of LifeWay Research, also expressed disagreement with the Pew study. He too was concerned about the way the question was asked. He has asked a similar question in a study that will be published later this year:

• How much do you agree or disagree: If a person is sincerely seeking God, he/she can obtain eternal life through religions other than Christianity. [This could be answered on a five-point scale; Agree strongly or somewhat, Disagree strongly or somewhat, or nor sure.]

Stetzer says that 31 percent of "Protestant churchgoers" agree, 40 percent disagreed and 28 percent were not sure how to answer. Among Evangelical church attenders, 49 percent disagreed.

But in the same statement, Stetzer's associate director, Scott McConnell, says "the Pew study is directionally right" and admits that "a surprisingly small number of self-identified American Christians believe in the exclusivity of Christ" as the path to salvation.

Bottom line, the disagreement is about the speed at which attitudes are changing, not the direction or actuality of change. How fast is postmodern faith arriving in America?

What does this mean?

More and more Americans of almost all faiths, even in the more conservative Protestant churches, no longer hold to the traditional claim that "this is the only path to salvation." They are much more open to the idea that different people may find their way to God through different theologies, practices, organizations and approaches. They are probably not ready to say that all faiths are equally good; they still have preferences. But, they are unwilling to deny salvation to the person who chooses a different brand of religion, if that person is just as sincere as they are.

This is the essence of postmodern religion. Authentic spirituality is more important than organized religion. Sincere faith is more important than orthodox doctrines. There is nothing at hand that will make those ideas go away, except to move back to the kind of segregation and conflict between religions that has existed throughout much of recorded history. The heat dims in northern Ireland, Bosnia, etc., we are all relieved. We pray for the same tolerance among sects in Iraq and Pakistan. But that heat is related to what has kept so many people exclusive in their notion of "true religion." And as religions are less likely to persecute or kill one another, then they being to live in mixed neighborhoods, inter-marry and becomes impossible to believe that the parents of one's adored daughter-in-law are going to hell because they pray in a different way and study a somewhat different scripture.

How do we maintain the claims of Christ in such an environment? What is the mission of faithful followers of Jesus in the postmodern context?

Trends in Video Usage

New generations are moving in new directions with their use of video. Americans currently under 44 years of age, Gen X and the Millennial generation, are more likely to purchase or rent a DVD at least once a month than are Baby Boomers. The generational trends are particularly apparent in the distribution of video over the Internet. The majority of Millennials regularly view streaming video (52 percent), while only 37 percent of Gen X and 21% of Boomers do so. More than a third of Millennials download videos regularly (37 percent), while only 18 percent of Gen X and 11 percent of Boomers do so. Although the numbers are still small, Millennials are five times as likely to consume video over their cell phones as are people over 30 years of age.

What does this mean? Distribution of video over the Internet is far less costly than any of the earlier methods, but those who access video this way are overwhelmingly younger people. If the product you are trying to disseminate is not produced in a way to speak to younger consumers, then it will not likely go very far through Internet distribution. Take for example, the growing numbers of pastors who are distributing video of their sermons over the Internet. Are they preaching sermons tailored to the younger audience? It is unlikely, considering the median age of the congregation. So this method has great potential, but it is almost entirely unrealized at the moment.

Source: Survey conducted by Knowledge Networks, Cranford, New Jersey

Where Do New Religions Come From?

The researchers who specialize in new religions tell us that we live in a very fertile time. Many new religions are getting started in various places around the world. Unlike earlier centuries most of these new religions are not started by splitting off from existing streams of faith. Often, they will not (at least initially) even identify themselves as "religion," the preferred term being a "lifestyle." [There is a technical debate on this point among the scholars; when is it a religion and when is it something else? Where do you draw the definitional line?]

One new religion that I have looked at recently is the estimated 25,000 adherents to a Gorean lifestyle and ethics. Their scripture is a series of more than 20 science fiction novels written in the 1960s and early 1970s by Dr. John Lange, now a professor of philosophy at Queens College CUNY under the name John Norman. In those novels he created, as a backdrop for the primary plots, a cultural context with certain vaguely medieval values, including forms of slavery and a code of honor. Although the books have largely gone out of print, in the last decade or so Internet social networking and a variety of organizations have brought together a movement that practices the values suggested in the Gor novels. (Gor is a counter Earth in the science fiction stories, invisible because it is always orbiting on the other side of the sun.) Religion is the best way to describe this movement, which includes more than one cult. It is about a set of beliefs and rules to live by, although it may not speak to all the same philosophical issues that Judeo-Christian-Muslim faiths have historically focused on.

In the last couple of days I heard an interview on NPR about a new computer game soon to be released by EA which is called Sporeand allows players to develop "beings" (really icons with meta stories) from single cell existence through an equivalence of humanity to interstellar civilizations. "You mean, you get to play God," the NPR interviewer interjected. This is the kind of game that allows the same kind of spiritual imagination as the Gor novels and many other cultural artifacts of our evolved social context. Prediction: Within a few decades, if this Spore game is at all widely distributed, it will very likely become the holy grail in some new "lifestyle" cult.

Post modernism recognizes the spiritual imagination that God created in human beings, where modernism has always been very skeptical of that natural spirituality. My reference to modern thought here is not restricted to the sciences or related philosophical disciplines. The skepticism has been especially true of modern theology, which is so relentlessly rational that it really is the source of the most of the anti-religious sentiment over the last couple of centuries. That spiritual imagination and passion was necessary to the birth of Christianity and Islam, it is clearly present in the stories of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. It is a hallmark of the moments when God intervenes in a signal way. It can also result in all manner of beliefs and lifestyles. Just open your eyes and ears and watch what is going on in the world around you, outside the confines of conventional, organized religion.

The Spiritual Life of Potential Presidents

Not since the 1960 presidential campaign has there been so much discussion among Americans about the religion of presidential candidates. And now it appears that religious prejudice may be a more powerful influence than racial prejudice. Surprising numbers of Americans believe total fiction about the religion of at least one of the candidates and indicate they have decided who to vote on the basis of this non-fact, which is the very definition of prejudice (pre-judging, before the facts are known). Whether this is manufactured by Karl Rove's manipulative disciples or reflects the actual level of religious ignorance and prejudice in America, remains to be seen.

This week's Newsweek(July 21) cover article is about Senator Obama's spiritual life. His background is from the largest religious segment in America; the unchurched. His grandparents were Midwestern lapsed Protestants. His father was an atheist and his mother an agnostic, a PhD anthropologist who may have believed in a higher power. Once in while she took her son to Catholic mass and then later to a Congregational church in Hawaii on Easter and Christmas. When he visited her as a teenager, she took him to a Buddhist temple once or twice. His stepfather knew only the common folk religion of Indonesia, a tepid kind of Islam "that [made] room for ... more ancient animist and Hindu faiths." Obama remembers that his stepfather believed that "a man took on the power of whatever he ate" and introduced the boy to dog meat, snake meat and roasted grasshopper. Certainly any imam would consider this entirely heresy and not Muslim at all.

As a college student, now on his own in New York City, Obama began to search for something to believe in, reading Augustine and visiting historic black Baptist churches in Harlem. The choir, the family atmosphere and the prophetic preaching, so typical of African American Protestantism, touched his heart. He gave his life to Jesus, but was not baptized until he got married and began family life. This is so typical of most Americans of his generation; unchurched and searching as young adults, making a religious commitment when marriage and parenthood come along.

The core of Obama's faith is that Christ's gift of salvation is to the community of believers, "not to individual people in isolation." This defines the purpose of the church as "to help each other ... respond to the call of perfection that will be fully realized only at the end of time." (See Matthew 24-25, Revelation 21) For him, faith and social action are blended, two sides of the same coin. "It's hard for me to imagine being true to my faith and not thinking beyond myself, not thinking about what's good for other people," he testifies.

This wholistic approach to faith is widely believed among mainline Protestants and taught by Evangelicals such as Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis and Ron Sider. Right here is where is where Evangelicals part company into two segments. The kind of Evangelicals who have dominated America's civil religion during the recent decades of right-wing political ascendancy tend to define their faith in an entirely individualistic manner. This is why abortion is a much larger moral issue than child poverty for them. Sin is defined entirely as individual behaviors, not the larger evils of social injustice and cruelty systems.

It remains to be seen whether Senator McCain's faith is entirely consistent with this right-wing civil religion, or if it is more nuanced. The leaders of the religious right have not been enthusiastic about McCain's candidacy, with Jim Dobson declaring that he is going to sit out the election instead of vote for his party's likely nominee. Do they know something or sense something about McCain's faith that does not conform fully to their beliefs? Obama's spiritual life has been the subject of much attention, including a share of non-factuals, but McCain's is still largely unexamined.

The political pressure on Evangelicals is very great in this campaign in large part because of the way spiritual faith is aligned with the electoral choices. Jim Dobson/Pat Robertson vs Tony Campolo/Jim Wallis; which kind of Evangelical faith will surface as the strongest in the era after this election? Since the Dobson/Robertson brand has so identified itself with the failed administration and do not find either candidate really representative of their aspirations, it appears that the answer to this question may already be emerging. But, again, we really don't know much about McCain's faith. What kind of religion does he really embrace? Does he worship weapons more than divinity? Is he among the largely agnostic business class that has supported him so strongly in his political career to date? Is he among America's second-largest religious segment, the nominal Christians for whom faith is hardly deep enough to make much of an analysis? Since he may be the next president, it would be good to know as much about McCain's spiritual life as we do about Obama's.

Confidence in American Institutions at a Low Point

Americans in poll after poll are indicating that their confidence in elected officials, the courts, big business, education, the banking system, organized religion and virtually every major institution in our society is at an all-time low. The bottom line is that our leaders, in every sector, have failed miserably. If we really did hire and fire on the basis of merit, virtually every top manager and leader in our country would be fired tomorrow and spend the rest of his or her life unemployed. The people who are running our government, our justice system, the major corporations, and our schools, hospitals and denominations should all resign in disgrace and return what they have been paid in the last couple of decades.

It is clearly time for the Baby Boom generation to step aside and let a new generation take over. Our Baby Boomer presidents, senators, CEOs, etc., have not lived up to their high ideals and generally done a poorer job than did their parents generation. The polling data is so overwhelmingly clear that those leaders who stay in position and continue to collect pay checks are either exceptional or simply being dishonest with the people they are responsible to. Look at the raw data:

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/880/baby-boomers-the-gloomiest-generation

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=915

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=876

What does this mean?It portends a major landslide toward the younger candidate this November in the presidential election. It means that incumbents in Congress will in many cases be swept aside in favor of new faces. It means that the public would like to see the courts break up Microsoft, Walmart, Starbucks, the airlines, the cell phone industry, the big banks and a lot of other major corporations and industries they way they did Standard Oil a few decades ago. And most people are just as unhappy with their denomination as they are with other large institutions, which is why so many local churches are down-playing their denominational affiliation and the house church movement is growing faster than the mega churches.

Have you noticed that neither of the top presidential candidates is really a Baby Boomer? McCain was born before the Baby Boom began and Obama is at the tail-end of the Boomer generation, with a sensibility that is really more like Gen X. At the time when the Baby Boomers should be dominating the White House, we are turning away from their leadership.