church

Luke Stamps last Christmas in an article for the ERLC:

Consider that the central claim of the Christian faith is the belief that God the Son—the eternal Second Person of the Godhead—became a human being in the womb of the Virgin Mary. As the classic Christmas carol “O Come All Ye Faithful” puts it, “God of God, Light of Light; Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb!” God the Son became a human being by taking to himself a complete human nature: a true body and a rational soul (see the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon, AD 451).

Abraham Riesman in Vulture:

Only after speaking with Cuarón did I realize why I wept: not with sorrow, but with hope for my own future. Children of Men imagines a fallen world, yes, but it also imagines a once-cynical person being reborn with purpose and clarity. It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken. This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working. In a period where the philosophical pillars supporting the global left, right, and center are crumbling, the film’s desperate plea for the creation and protection of new ideas feels bracingly relevant.

h/t @logangreer, who also urged me to watch Children of Men back in’06.

Excellent conversation between Nicholas Kristof and Timothy Keller in the NYT:

Kristof: And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?

Keller: Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines.

Kevin DeYoung for TGC:

As we approach the end of the year…. Some of us will put together new exercise goals. Some of us will find the right Bible reading plan for next year. Some of us will zero in on a new schedule for Bible memorization. All of these are important (especially the last two). Let me suggest one other plan for the end of the year: check in on your marriage.

DeYoung offers 15 questions to help assess your marriage. The list was instructive for Lindsay and I to talk through, and it helped us to pinpoint some good things to be intentional about in 2017. I offer some of our notes here, in the event that they might prove useful to others, just as DeYoung’s original list was for us.

DeYoung acknowledges that his questions are neither “perfect” nor “exhaustive,” and there were a couple of questions that we had to tweak to better suit our context or dispositions. For example, while we don’t really “raise our voices” (Question 11), we can still be insolent. So we rephrased the question to read: “Have you rolled your eyes or used sarcasm against one another in the past month?” Adjusting the question like this instantly prompted us to jump back to number 7 (“When is the last time we said ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I forgive you’?”)

Question 12 asks, “Are we more eager to spend time with someone [else]… than we are with each other?” Again, for us, this hasn’t been a thing. However, exchange “someone” for “a screen” and we’ve got something worth talking about. (Number 7, again.)

But we weren’t only challenged. Happily, we also identified several fronts where 2016 has been a great year for our marriage.

Our big takeaways for 2017? Some kind of shared experience reading the Bible is important. And taking regular walks together — away from screens — to talk and hold hands, makes all the difference.

–John Stott, Between Two Worlds

Pew Research:

As of 2014, there were roughly 245 million adults in the United States, including 173 million Christians and 56 million people without a religious affiliation. These are big numbers that, along with many others in the religious demographic pie, can at times make it difficult to fully understand the American religious landscape.

But what if we looked at this big picture a little differently? What if we imagined the United States as a small town, population 100, instead of a continent-spanning nation with hundreds of millions of people?

–Alec Motyer¹

–1 Timothy 2:2

Grant, O Lord, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by your governance, that your people may joyfully serve you in all godly quietness. Amen.

Adapted from Thomas Cranmer by Tim and Kathy Keller in The Songs of Jesus (p 163)

Maureen O’Donnell for the Sun-Times:

For her funeral, Baby Jazlene was dressed in a white organza dress. It had ribbons and tiny roses, made by Allison’s Angel Gowns, a charity that sews funeral clothes for young children. Catholic Cemeteries donated a plot at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines. Funeral director John Glueckert supplied the casket, labor and hearse. Bevel Granite has agreed to provide a headstone. The funeral was organized by a nonprofit group called Rest in His Arms that has arranged Christian services for 33 babies who were abandoned or whose bodies went unclaimed by family.

About 75 mourners attended the service, all of them strangers.

Mourning for society’s most vulnerable: those who are not “viable” outside of the womb.

Russel Moore, writing for the Washington Post:

This peril exists now not only for Christian leaders, but for everyone, religious or not. Even for those who are not workaholics, the smartphone gives us an illusion of always being “active.” We don’t just eat; we must post pictures of our meals to Instagram. We don’t just have to care about where our children are; we must respond to some thread on Facebook.

We don’t just have people who are grumpy in line at the supermarket; we have to respond to anonymous critics — or even cyber-bullies — on social media. And we are always just a text message away from the words “I just want to give you a heads-up” upending an entire day or night — no matter if it’s a Sabbath or a vacation or a family dinner.

Jared Wilson in “The Story of Everything”:

The importance of the church — and the fundamental purpose of the church — is to keep pointing away from the world for the hope of the world. While everyone else points to government, family, good deeds, and whatever else as The Secret, the church keeps pointing to the alien, heavenly power of grace as the hope for our problems and for our false hopes.

h/t Toney Salva

NYT:

But the political issues, [refugees Anwar and Daleen] said they knew only from television. Their closest interactions with Americans have been largely with the members of Johnson Ferry Church, like Mr. Stocks. It was members of the church… who outfitted their tiny apartment and showed them how to navigate America’s cavernous grocery stores. They also steered Anwar through the health care system as he prepares for heart surgery.

Excellent case study of people disadvantaging themselves for the advantage of others, especially those who might be perceived as political “untouchables.”

The title the NYT gave to article — “Evangelicals Ignore G.O.P. by Embracing Syrian Refugees” — betrays the mistaken view that church ministries should somehow be beholden to a particular political platform.

Bruce Ashford reviewing Os Guinness’ new book, Impossible People in TGC:

Modernity, it turns out, is an equal opportunity offender, posing challenges not only to monotheistic religions but also to atheism…. however, atheism is Christianity’s leading rival in the West and is the dominant worldview of those with cultural power. The new atheists attack Christianity overtly while social and political activists attack it implicitly by presupposing atheism. If atheists win the day in the West, political liberalism will become increasingly illiberal and eventually nihilistic. In response to the pervasive influence of atheism, Guinness challenges the church to love atheists individually to help them see that atheism is bad for them and bad for society, and to work with them corporately to forge a constructive way forward for Western society.

Excellent book review full of thought-provoking content. I was particularly struck by the discussion of “threats to the West.” One might expect things like “secularism” or “individualism” to threaten Western ideals in general and Christianity in particular, but reading of the Western Christian tendency to “ignore or minimize spiritual realities and spiritual warfare” also as a threat provided a sobering reality check.

Emma Green in The Atlantic, expounding on Pew data:

The experience of those who are losing their religion shouldn’t obscure the experience of those who are finding it, though. Twenty-seven percent of people in the survey say they’re attending services more often than they did in the past, cutting against the country’s overall decline in religious practice. This was most common among evangelical Protestants, three-quarters of whom say they go to church at least once or twice a month. Half of the people who said they’re going to services more often explained the change in terms of their beliefs: They’ve become more religious; they found that they need God in their life; they’ve gotten more mature as they’ve aged. By contrast, relatively few said they started going to church more often for practical reasons. Belief brings people to worship, it seems, while logistics keep people away.¹