church

Pew:

Two-thirds of Christians say they now attend religious services at least once or twice a month, including 35% who say there was a time during their adult life when they did not attend as often as they do now. Among Christian traditions, 44% of evangelical Protestants, 33% of members of the historically black Protestant tradition, 31% of mainline Protestants and 28% of Catholics say they now go to church regularly — but that they did not always attended religious services with the same frequency.

So while there are more “nones” (those who don’t affiliate with any religious tradition), those who do attend church services are attending more and more regularly. The top three reasons given for more consistent participation? “Changing beliefs,” “Need God,” “Becoming more mature.”

Also interesting is the number one factor in determining which church to attend: “Quality of sermons.”

The Economist:

…Nigeria’s faith leaders also played a constructive role, at times, helping for example to keep last year’s election peaceful…. …perhaps the best recent example of religious leaders helping to maintain social peace: in the turbulent run-up to this week’s local elections in South Africa, church leaders (including Anglicans, Catholics and pan-Christian bodies) have played an outstanding role in calling for calm and denouncing politicians who in their view were inciting tension for their own ends.

—Tim and Kathy Keller

…who walk in the light of your presence, LORD. They rejoice in your name all day long; they celebrate your righteousness.

–Psalm 89:15-16

John Piper offers a clear, concise response about the biblical precedent for three church practices:

Let’s leave aside any specific person or website. I like Francis Chan a lot. I count him as a good friend. We have overlapped in lots of places and I like him, and I don’t want to pick on him at all. So I am just going to pose the very specific questions: 1) Should there be a salary for pastors? 2) Should preached sermons be a part of regular church services? 3) Should you do that weekly? Are those biblical concepts?

Often, when there is a divergence like this about what “church” really is (or is not), I think of Abraham Kuyper’s distinction between the “organic” qualities of church and the “institutional” qualities of church.¹ Both are biblical. It is biblical to share meals in homes, to bring gospel witness to the marketplace, to seek the welfare of the larger community, to practically concern oneself with mercy and justice, etc. And it is biblical to appoint leaders, to baptize, to preach, to manage strategy and budget, to educate and ordain, to share in the Lord’s Supper, etc. The church’s full expression is found neither entirely within institutional Christian practice, nor entirely in organic Christian practice.

Tim Keller and John Inazu in Christianity Today:

We can also learn from the biblical witness how to engage in the world around us. The book of Jeremiah tells the story of God using the prophet to instruct the Jews in Babylon not to hate or ignore the pagan city, but to become long-term residents, to exercise good will toward it through prayer, and to seek its peace and prosperity. They were to build up the social fabric for their common well-being (“if [Babylon] prospers, you too will prosper” Jer. 29:7). They were to be known as a people who served their neighbors and their city.

Excellent article.

(I wonder, however, if the “protestant” piece is slightly overstated. Isn’t the more fundamental issue provoking the “anxious age” the transition from a monolithic culture to pluralistic one, not from a protestant culture to a non-protestant one?)

God has a kingdom. It’s made up of citizens. Some black, some white, some red, yellow, Spanish backgrounds. His intention was never that the individual uniqueness would cause them to lose sight of the flag flying over them. The flag of the cross …  America in particular is reaching an all-time low in this issue of race and culture and class. Just under the surface there is this ever-bubbling problem that has gone unresolved…

Yet another shooting.

Two pieces come to mind:

1. A prayer from Psalm 10 that Jackie Hill Perry tweeted a week or so ago,
2. and songs of lament for churches in times of tragedy, shared with me from Mission Church Creative Arts Director T.D. Oakes.

The Psalm is a unabashed plea for God to justly intercede. The songs are both modern choruses and old hymns, and they remind the Christian that the fundamental peace, identity, and security have been already purchased for him.

Psalm 10:7-8, 12-18

7 His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; under his tongue are mischief and iniquity. 8 He sits in ambush in the villages; in hiding places he murders the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless…

12    Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up your hand; forget not the afflicted. 13 Why does the wicked renounce God and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”? 14 But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless. 15 Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer; call his wickedness to account till you find none.

16    The LORD is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land. 17 O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear 18 to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.

Songs for lament

• No Longer Slaves (Bethel)
• 10,000 Reasons (Matt Redman)
• Always (Passion/Kristian Stanfill)
• Blessed Be Your Name (Matt Redman)
• Healing Is In Your Hands (Christy Nockels)
• Take Heart (Hillsong United)
• I’ve Had Questions (Tim Hughes)
• I Need Words (David Crowder)
• It is Well with My Soul (Horatio Spafford)
• Great is Thy Faithfulness (Thomas Chisholm)

The story of the gentile woman’s encounter with Jesus in Mark 7:24-30 has been called one of the most difficult biblical passages about the life of Christ. Recently, while reading and re-reading chapter 7, I realized that the story of the gentile woman stands starkly against the immediately preceding story of Jesus’ confrontation with some Pharisees (Mark 7:1-23).

It is a study in contrasts:

A study in contrasts

The two episodes are back-to-back, and they are almost perfectly mirrored:

The pharisees spend days traveling to get to Jesus. In contrast, Jesus spends days traveling and gets to the gentile woman.

The pharisees come from Jerusalem, religious elites from the epicenter of first-century hebrew elitism. In contrast, Jesus goes to the outskirts, the territory of the outsider, Tyre and Sidon, largely inhabited by gentiles.

The pharisees purpose is to correct Jesus on the finer points of religious ceremony. In contrast, the gentile woman’s purpose is to plead with Jesus for the life of her daughter.

Borrowing Jesus’ illustration of a family meal, the pharisees’ presume themselves sons at God’s table. In contrast, the gentile woman presumes herself lowly before Jesus.

The pharisees receive unequivocal rebuke. In contrast, the gentile woman receives everything she asked for — bread from God’s table.

These contrasts demonstrate some of the fundamentals of the Christian good news:

• Humans are universally needy: Everyone is needy before the God, whether they know it or not. In fact, “knowing it” repeatedly appears to be prerequisite to one’s need being satisfied.1
• Being good enough is a fairy tale: Adhering to a code of conduct — be it ceremonial washings or sharing your ice cream — is not enough and will never be enough merit a place at the King’s table. Or stated differently, anyone approaching Jesus is like the poor begging for bread. Asking for what you don’t have is categorically different than laying claim to what you’ve earned.
• Jesus’ generosity knows no favoritism: In Jesus’ household, the “children” and the “dogs” alike eat the best food.2
• Jesus’ goodness is prodigious Jesus’ table is so abundant that even crumbs satisfy the most desperate appetite.3

Timothy Keller in Generous Justice:

In both the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Jesus delivers a famous discourse, which is usually called the Sermon on the Mount. For centuries readers have acknowledged the beauty of its high ethical standards. What is not noticed very often is how Jesus weaves into a whole cloth what we would today call private morality and social justice. Along with the well-known prohibitions against sexual lust in the heart, adultery, and divorce there are calls to give to the poor (Matthew 6:1-4) and to refrain from overwork and materialism (Matthew 6:19-24).

In Western society these sets of concerns have often been split off from one another. In fact, each of America’s two main political parties has built its platform on one of these sets of ethical prescriptions to the near exclusion of the other. Conservatism stresses the importance of personal morality, especially the importance of traditional sexual mores and hard work, and feels that liberal charges of racism and social injustice are overblown. On the other hand, liberalism stresses social justice, and considers conservative emphases on moral virtue to be prudish and psychologically harmful. Each side, of course, thinks the other side is smug and self-righteous.¹

This book isn’t brand new, but this (and much more therein) are remarkably applicable to present rhetoric and crises.

I recently heard a recording of a pastor with decades of experience say that the passage in Mark 7:24-30 is one of the most difficult passages about Jesus in the entire Bible.¹ This was also the passage from which we read a few weeks ago at our local church. How does one defend Jesus’ apparent ethnocentrism directed at a marginalized mother who is desperate to find a cure for her child?

Confronting difficult passages is, well, difficult. But this difficulty presents some important points. Here are three good things about difficult Bible passages:

1. We learn about veracity of the Bible. In other words, a difficult passage about the life of Jesus (or of any other Biblical “hero”) reinforces the historicity of the documents, because this is exactly the kind of thing that writers of hagiography or fiction would avoid.2
2. We learn about our church’s relationship to the Bible. A church leadership that routinely walks paragraph-by-paragraph through a biblical book demonstrates a posture of humility and submission to the Bible’s authority. In other words, verse-by-verse progression provides a practical demonstration of a church doing its best to simply take God at his word. It’s the difference between asking, “What does the Bible say?” and, “How can I make the Bible say what I want to say?”3
3. We learn about our own biases. It’s important to recognize that when it comes to the Bible, “difficult” almost always means, “contrary to the norms, presuppositions, or expectations of my own culture.” No single culture or people group finds all of the Bible’s teaching attractive — not even the cultures recorded in the Bible itself! The fact that the very passage that you find “so difficult” is one that millions of others find “so obvious” (and vice versa) is both humbling and heartening.

We don’t dodge Mark 7:24-30. We read it. We meditate on it. We discover that we needn’t defend Jesus at all, at least not in the way we originally feared: compelled to “explain away” or “spin” his words with present-day categories that have nothing to do with the original intent of the passage. Instead, we discover that the sum total of Jesus’ action with the woman in Mark 7 is like his action with us: offering bread (himself) that was never deserved.

So before gritting your teeth or quickly scanning to the next chapter heading, remember that there are (at least!) three very good things about encountering difficulty in the Bible.

“…you live in a narcissistic echo chamber!” That would be true, if the digital world were the only world. But it’s not. I listen to my wife, my friends, my co-workers, my secretary, my elders, the members of my church, the members of my presbytery, and on and on.

I resonate with virtually everything Kevin DeYoung writes here about engaging — or not — the twitterverse, blogosphere, Facebook black hole, etc.

Rosaria Butterfield on TGC with three things the average Christian doesn’t understand about the LGBT community.

Redemptive personal story and teaching from Sam Allberry.

Good thoughts from Logan Greer and Kevin Greer:

As the small group leader, you are a discussion facilitator, a firefighter (diffusing drama as needed) and occasionally a teacher — but only occasionally. It is important to learn to ask the right questions as well as know how to guide discussion with the students’ answers.