Lighting a torch in the darkness
At a ceremony moved to nearby St. Eustache church, the archbishop of Paris honored those who labored to save the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral from the blaze that almost destroyed it. He handed them a rescued bible in “humble thanks”:
Aupetit told the congregation, “We, too, brothers and sisters, we will rise again, just like our cathedral will rise again.”
Read more at LA Times: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-paris-notre-dame-prayers-20190421-story.html%3foutputType=amp
Our prayers go out to the victims and families of the recent mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. This kind of thing is becoming depressingly common
The Barna Group has conducted a survey of teens aged 13-18, to assess their attitudes toward religion. They found that the percentage of this group that identifies as atheist (13%) is double that of the U.S. adult population. Only 59% identify as some sort of Christian, compared with 78% of Boomers.
Generations were defined as follows:
GEN Z were born 1999 to 2015. (Only teens 13 to 18 are included in this study.)
MILLENNIALS were born 1984 to 1998.
GEN X were born 1965 to 1983.
BOOMERS were born 1946 to 1964.
ELDERS were born before 1946.
(The full report is available here).
This would seem to contradict a 2016 study showing a different trend:
a 2016 U.S. study found that church attendance during young adulthood was 41% among Generation Z, compared to 18 percent for Millennials at the same ages, 21 percent of Generation X, and 26 percent of baby boomers
(Wikipedia cites Hope, J (2016). “Get your campus ready for Generation Z”. Dean & Provost. 17 (8): 1–7.).
Time will tell which of these portraits will be most accurate. This is a generation which hasn’t yet passed through the crucibles of college, work, and family. In any case, it is our challenge and solemn mission as Christians to reach as many as possible in each generation with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622
From our parent website”:
This is the season of preparation for the coming of the Christ Child. As St. Paul said in Galatians 4:4 “But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son”. In his book Time, Science, and Society in China and the West, Nathaniel Morris Lawrence suggests a metaphor in which “fullness of time” can be thought of as the moment before delivery in a pregnancy. During advent, the universe is pregnant. All of history has led up to this moment, when the God of time and creation takes upon himself our nature, becomes enfleshed, and steps into our timeline, into the specific time and place of Bethlehem circa 4 BC. The universe is pregnant, awaiting this moment. Mary, the future mother of Jesus, is pregnant, awaiting the delivery of her child. The people of Israel are expecting a messiah. The moment is almost upon us.
I am not alone in feeling leery about revealing too much about myself. When researching information about 15th century scholar Lorenzo Valla, I ran into the blog by Roger Pearse, at Tertullian.org. He speaks from experience:
About Roger Pearse
This page was written in 1999, when this website was new. It contained my photograph, my email address, and various personal, educational and professional details and so forth.
Little by little, it has grown shorter. The internet is not so small a place as it was in those days. A troll was merely a nuisance, not a brutal thug determined to use the compulsive element in social media to drive a vulnerable teenager to suicide, and to jeer at them afterwards on their memorial Facebook page. A spammer was merely an advertiser, not an internet criminal determined to steal your every shekel, and your identity with it. Privacy was taken for granted. None of this is true today.
My email address was the first to go. That change was forced upon me by the torrent of spam. I created a form — which the spammers soon learned to attack — but this stemmed much of the trouble.
Next to go was my photograph, once I found that the nastier people online sought out personal information in order to use it to inflict pain on their victims. Professional details went next, for the same reason.
Today I have decided to remove the rest. It is a wrench, it is true. But I see no alternative. If I were to join the internet today, I suspect that I would not use my own name at all, but a pen-name. Anything else puts you at risk from the criminal element online.
I myself feel uncomfortable writing online under any name but my own. Occasionally some forum software prevents me from using my own name; but it is a weird feeling. But I think it would be absurd for me to attempt to use a pseudonym at this time of day.
All the same, I cannot sensibly allow personal details to remain on the web when I can prevent this. Nor should you.
Mr. Pearse’s advice is taken to heart. I am sure that over time, the clues I will have offered here and there might allow for someone to guess who I am in “real life”, but I don’t plan to make it easy.
I came across an interesting essay regarding the powerful impact that a single generation has had on Christian life in the U.S. The author of “The Six Commandments of the Boomers” is Reverend Todd Wilken, a blogger, speaker, and pastor within the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.
Wilken, himself a member of the “Baby Boom” generation (those with birth dates between 1946 and 1964), begins his piece with a sweeping critique of his cohorts as being generally narcissistic and self absorbed. They are now 28 percent of the U.S. population, and all of our societal institutions and power centers are firmly in their control.
Their influence on the churches of our land has been no less sweeping than it has been on other aspects of life.
Boomers seek to recreate the institution in their own Boomer image. The Boomers have brought this imperative of the individual to bear upon the Church. The Church is here to provide whatever the Boomers want or think they need… The Church has undertaken more innovations in the last generation than in all the previous generations combined, mostly at the insistence of the Boomers.
One area has been music:
And in the Church of the Boomers music is THE issue. Music was the Boomers’ voice. In large part, their music was what defined them as “hip.” Suckled at the breast of what began as tinpan alley and quickly became the music industry, the Boomers can’t wean themselves. Their kind of music is hip and that imperative of hip extends even to the Church. Again, Veith observes:
“Certainly Baby Boomers often do demand their kind of music in church. This is another of their traits —to be demanding and self-absorbed and intolerant of other styles. The World War II generation never demanded worship styles with Big Band music.”
I have been fond of saying that we seem to be stuck in a dichotomy: Boomer theology and traditional music (your average mainline denominational church), versus boomer music and traditional theology (a typical evangelical church). I now realize that I underappreciated even the sinister influence that the “Boomer worldview” has had on theology that is otherwise outwardly orthodox:
In the Church of the Boomers this rebellion against authority manifests itself as a skeptical approach to the Church’s doctrinal standards, pastoral authority, and polity.
However, the bigger problem is that in the Church there is an unquestioned authority: the authority of the Bible. The Church of the Boomers rejects this authority in one of two ways; they either deny the authority of the Bible outright, as in liberal Churches, or they relativize the authority of the Bible, as in much of Protestant Evangelicalism. The first kind of rebellion against Scripture’s authority is obvious. The second is much more subtle, and therefore more dangerous.
The relativizing of the Scripture allows the Boomers to affirm Scripture’s authority in theory while denying it in practice. They can say that they are Bible believing, that the Bible is inerrant and infallible, and even authoritative. The problem isn’t in what the Boomers say about the Bible, the problem is in how they use the Bible.
When studying the Bible there is a big difference between asking, “what does it mean?” and asking, “what does it mean to me?” The former seeks objective truth, the latter seeks subjective, relative truth. The former affirms Scripture’s authority, the latter denies it. Bible study in the Church of the Boomers is mostly the latter. If the meaning of the Bible is determined by each individual’s private interpretation, then the issue of the Bible’s objective authority is rendered moot.
Read it all at the link above.
May the day of Christ’s birth fill you with all joy!
(Imaage credit: Nativity, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre, 1714-1789).
Central Italy was struck by a 6.6 magnitude earthquake on Oct 30. This is one of several devastating quakes experienced in this region recently, including the August earthquake that killed some 300 people and reduced much of the town of Amatrice to rubble. Apparently 15,000 people have been made homeless in the current disaster.
The world of art is mourning the loss of some treasures. The still standing tower of the town of Amatrice, and the facade of the Sant’ Agostini church, were finished off. In Norcia, the fourteenth century basilica of San Benedetto, pictured above, was destroyed. Fortunately in the latest quake, no lives were lost, but the destruction of historic art and architecture has been lamented.
As the Guardian opines:
From Pompeii to Florence to Norcia, the people of Italy have lived with disaster for millennia. Out of that instability they created beauty. Any loss of that great human fabric is a loss for us all.
We agree. Our prayers go out for the people of these towns.
A small but significant semantic victory on the religious freedom front has been won by a senator from Oklahoma. In recent years, a quiet effort has been made to substitute the phrase (and concept) “freedom of worship” in place of the more traditional “freedom of religion.” One place where this change has emerged in the past few years is on the civic test materials of the US Citizen and Immigration Services.
As reported last year in the Christian Post, Senator Lankford of Oklahoma, a former youth pastor, has taken issue with this:
“Not only is ‘freedom of worship’ inconsistent with the text of the Amendment proposed 226 years ago today, saying that ‘freedom of worship’ is more inclusive that ‘freedom of religion’ flies in the face of the pillar upon which our entire nation was founded,” Lankford contended. “Our forefathers came to America to have freedom of religion, not simply freedom of worship. So valued, they made the free exercise of religion our first freedom.”
Lankford’s letter also asserts that “freedom of religion” is the ability for a person to live out their beliefs in every aspect of life.
“The freedom of religion is much more than just the freedom of worship. Worship confines you to a location,” the senator explained. “Freedom of religion is the right to exercise your religious beliefs — it is the ability for Americans to live out their faith or to choose to have no faith.”
His efforts appear to have worked. The Agency and its parent, the Department of Homeland Security, have recently agreed to change the wording of their materials.
This may prove a minor and symbolic change only, but we applaud it, as we do all efforts of Christians with convictions to stand against the tide. Our appreciation goes to Mr. Lankford.