Friday, July 16th, 2010
Here’s a trailer for the forthcoming DVD that Paraclete Press made with me. It’ll be a small group resource to be used in my book, The Teaching of the Twelve.
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Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me.
In chapter two, Kenda focuses on what is “Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism,” the reigning religion of American teenagers, and on how we got here.
I found it interesting that in the comments under the last post, the criticism was immediately turned on parents — parents are the problem, was the common refrain. But I didn’t mention parents. I wrote that “churches suck,” not that parents suck. In fact, it is in this chapter, on page 39, that Kenda first mentions parents, and then only briefly,
The National Study of Youth and religion’s more incontrovertible finding is that parents generally “get what they are,” in religion as in most things.
Otherwise, Kenda is again implicating the church: it’s the church’s fault that American teenage religion is basically “benign whatever-ism,” or “benign positive regard.” You see, American teenagers lead the world in the amount of church they’re exposed to — worship, church-based youth ministry, parachurch youth ministry, yet
They do not seem to be spending much time in communities where a language of faith is spoken, or where historically orthodox Christian doctrines and practices are talked about and taught…Apart from “being nice,” teenagers do not think religion influences their decisions, choice of friends, or behaviors. It does not help them obey God, work toward a common good, compose and identity, or belong to a distinctive community. (28-29)
And Kenda does not wait till the end of the book to diagnose this problem. She gets downright theological here in chapter two, proclaiming that the American church has a “muddled ecclesiology” and preaches a “‘god’ who is too limp to take hold of.” What’s missing, she says, is a Christianity that teaches “radical particularity” and is based in the “missio dei — God’s sending of God’s own self into the world in human form.”
I couldn’t agree more with Kenda up to this point. This is the church’s problem — not parents’, and not teens’, but the church’s. It falls right in the church’s lap. But I can’t help but wonder, will Kenda turn up the heat on the true source of the cancer: church leadership? The very people that she has given her life to serve — those in seminary and going into ordained ministry — seem to be the ones who are standing up every Sunday and presiding over worship at the Church of Benign Whatever-ism.
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Monday, July 12th, 2010
I’m blogging through Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book, a theological follow up to Christian Smith’s Soul Searching. I hope you’ll join me.
In chapter one, Kenda lays out her thesis: the reason that youth ministry is failing to make disciples is because churches suck. She puts it a bit more softly:
Since the religious and spiritual choices of American teenagers echo, with astonishing clarity, the religious and spiritual choices of the adults who love them, lackadaisical faith is not young people’s issue, but ours. (4)
What she’s doing here is contradicting the common sociological interpretation of the National Study of Youth and Religion (and similar studies), which is that teenage religiosity is a reflection of teenagers, not a reflection of religion. That is, adolescence is a time in which commitment to a religious system is virtually impossible.
Kenda disagrees, and she points the finger at the American church, which has,
perfected a dicey codependence between consumer-driven therapeutic individualism and religious pragmatism. These theological proxies gnaw, termite-like, at our identity as the Body of Christ, eroding our ability to recognize that Jesus’ life of self-giving love directly challenges the American gospel of self-fulfillment and self-actualization. (5)
So, my question is this: Is Kenda right, that the NSYR is a “wake-up call for the church”(15)? Or are the results simply indicative of the nature of teenage religion, regardless of the epoch in which we live?
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Monday, July 12th, 2010
If so, then you should consider applying for a Pastoral Sabbatical Grant at the Louisville Institute. I won one in 2003 and as a result traveled the world and wrote a book (two, actually). I highly recommend it…
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Friday, July 9th, 2010
The StarTribune reports:
Hours after giving their blessing to ordaining noncelibate gays and lesbians, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) declined late Thursday to change the church’s definition of marriage, in effect refusing to allow same-sex marriages within their denomination.
If the proposal had been approved, the church’s definition of marriage would have changed from a commitment between “a woman and a man” to “two people” and allowed church weddings in states that have legalized gay marriage.
The late-night decision to table the proposal and subject it to two more years of study caught many delegates at the denomination’s gathering at the Minneapolis Convention Center by surprise, and there was a stunned silence as delegates absorbed the action.
What I don’t understand is how that body can approve gays and lesbians to serve as ordained clergy, but not allow them to get married. Yes, I understand that they will require celibacy — that’s their answer. But it’s not an answer that makes much sense.
UPDATE: This makes even less sense. Also from the article:
Hours before the surprise shelving of the marriage measure, the assembly approved changing the denomination’s ordination policy to make noncelibate gays and lesbians eligible to become clergy. The vote was 373 to 323.
Get that? I don’t.
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