Recently in Church Category

Today's post wraps up our brief series on Harvey Cox's new book The Future of Faith. The last several chapters of the book, and in fact various passages throughout the book,  present some of Cox's thoughts on the future of faith - and more specifically his hopes for the future of the Christian faith. Today I would like to focus our discussion on the future.

Cox notes - as have many others - that the future of the church is moving out of the western world, into Latin America, Africa, and the East.  While churches stand empty in Europe, the faith is flourishing and growing elsewhere. Notably charismatic forms of the faith are growing fastest.

The bottom line seems to be that faith is relevant for life in many parts of the world and that the Christian faith in particular meets a very real need.  Faith simply is not relevant in much of the secular west. But in the global South ... liberation theology and the power of people in small house church groups play an enormous role.  Faith flourishes when it is not micromanaged from the top, but grows from the bottom through the power of the Spirit.

Lets look at a bit of what Cox has to say:

First, for centuries Christians have claimed that the Holy Spirit is just as divine as the other members of the Trinity. But in reality, the Spirit has most often been ignored or else feared as too unpredictable. It "blows where it will," as the Gospel of John (3:8) says, and is therefore too mercurial to contain. But some of the liveliest Christian movements in the world today are precisely the ones that celebrate this volatile expression of the divine. ... By far the fastest growth in Christianity, especially among the deprived and destitute, is occurring among people like the Pentecostals, who stress a direct experience of the Spirit. It is almost as though the Spirit, muted and muffled for centuries, is breaking its silence and staging a delayed "return of the repressed." (p. 9-10)

Are we entering an Age of the Spirit? And if so, is this a good thing?

There was quite the dustup at Christianity Today's Out of Ur blog this week over Douglas Estes' article on virtual churches, and this article emerges out of his new book: SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World . I include his concluding paragraph, but I've got these two questions first:

The good news for the world today is that virtual churches, Baptist churches, banana-tree churches, underground churches, Lutheran churches, communal churches, house churches, and yes, even tragically-hip Pacific Northwest alternative 'pub' churches are real churches. You may not want to meet in synthetic space--and I would not want to meet in a bar--but it doesn't change the fact that when the people of God meet together for the purpose of glorifying Him, it's a real church. Online churches are real churches with real people in real relationships with a real God simply meeting in synthetic spaces.

It would be easy to say low church evangelicals clamor for community because there is so much individualism at work, but that's a cheap shot that misses the target. Liturgical churches can struggle as much with community too. But what needs to be observed, and it has been observed across the spectrum in the last century, is that the NT and the early churches taught a family concept of the church. 

In this brief Sunday afternoon post I'm using the word "liturgy" for the planned and calendar-based order in a Sunday worship service for Christians. Something happened, and we have to wonder if it is good for us. The complete obliteration of the traditional liturgy for Sunday services was not something the Reformers did -- Luther had one; Calvin had one; Westminster had one. So also Rome has always had one; the Orthodox have always had one, too. 

We've got a problem in the Church today with Christian branding as a form of triumphalism, and it's a charge made often enough about others and almost never about ourselves. I want to contend that it is an unhealthy influence of consumerism. (See the excellent book by Skye Jethani: The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity .)

So, I'd like to have a conversation about branding as a form of Christian triumphalism to see if my suggestion can gain some traction. I'm hoping we can find a Third Way, one that gets beyond triumphalistic branding to a genuine embrace of the communion of saints. Let's be warned: those of us who want a Third Way need to beware lest we, in our Third Way of getting beyond triumphalism, get all bent out of shape in a triumphalistic branding of our Third Way. So, in this case, the humble way is the Third Way and the Third Way is non-triumphalist by nature. It's branding seeks to brand what is true of all Christians.

My suggestion is this: Christian triumphalism is found when there is an absence of "He" (God) in favor of a "We" and a criticism of "Them" in comfort with "We." (Obviously, I use "He" because it rhymes with "we" and because I fear, well, the triumphalism of those who think using "He" is inherently some form of chauvinism's defense of an altogether male archetype called "God.") So, our definition triumphalism, seen in branding, is about distinguishing ourselves over against others and displacing God in that ongoing distinguishing.

From The Wall Street Journal ...The decline in Sunday schools appears to be gradual but steady. A study by the Barna Group indicated that in 2004 churches were 6% less likely to provide Sunday school for children ages 2 to...

This is Mary Veeneman's second post about Harper and Metzger's new book: Exploring Ecclesiology: An Evangelical and Ecumenical Introduction . This sketch by Mary of the book asks one of the most profound questions that must be asked in the...

Introverts, Extroverts, and the Jesus Creed. On at least a couple of occasions, I have been asked whether I get energized (or re-energized) when I am alone, or when with others. It is a classic, yet simplistic indicator used...

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research has a new study, available as a PDF, about megachurches. Here is the opening suggestive conclusions, and I'm wondering what you see here (or in the article itself)(HT: AR):A FEW OF THE MOST PROMINENT...