Monthly Archives: February 2013
Why the Church?
Why the Church? What good is organized religion?
“The Church comes into your life to bring you a knowledge of the presence of God. If one were going to live in a far country, would he not, if opportunity offered, make friends of the King of that country?
“The Church comes into your life to make life more joyous, more free from sin, more contented, more spiritually furnished, more sound in its judgement of things that are worth while. But likewise the Church nourishes that growing union with God through Christ which is man’s best heritage and the best compensation for his labors.”
From: “The Episcopal Church: Its Message for Men of Today,” by George Parkin Atwater, p.180. (New York: Morehouse-Gorham Co.; 1917, 1944)
Young-adults and ministry
One aspect of campus ministry that every campus pastor/chaplain understands is that we work with young people not for the long term benefit of our own ministry, because in a couple years those people, those students, will be gone. What campus pastors/chaplains understand clearly is that our work is for the benefit of others – other churches, other towns, other pastors/priests. We work to form students not for ourselves but for others. That ministry, that church, that pastor/priest reaps what we sow in the formation and development of students.
Students are transitory and are only with us for a few years, so we have to be very targeted and efficient with and in our evangelism, Christian formation, and leadership development efforts. Every student will leave the campus and continue onward in their life – this is just a fact of life.
What the Church must understand is that in our day and particularly among urban emerging-adults, our work as pastors/priests is and will be much more like campus ministry. We invest in the lives of young-adults not for what they will contribute to our parish over time, because young-adults will more than likely only be with us for a short time. Our presence, work, and efforts with 20-somethings will by necessity need to mirror the approach and attitude of campus pastors.
If we don’t change our expectations of 20-somethings in our churches, we will become incredibly frustrated and perhaps resentful because they are not “stepping-up” in responsibility and commitment the way 20-somethings generally did over decades past. This is just a fact of life and a fact of ministry in our day.
We invest our time and efforts in the lives of 20-somethings, but we will not reap the benefits over time in the majority of cases. We work in the formation and development of emerging-adults and young-adults for the benefit of others. Campus pastors revel in this, so to must we.
I’ve become…
I saw “Life of Pi”, yesterday, with Don. I had put off seeing the movie because I heard a number of more negative reports. I am so glad I saw it! As Don said something like, “I’ll have to be thinking about this movie for a long while.”, and I agree. It is an well done movie and an incredible story. The ending is what might be referred to as “profound.” (Only if you let it be, however.)
So much depends on what we choose to dwell on, what we choose to accommodate, what we decide to believe. It makes all the difference in the world, really. What story do we choose to inhabit?
I find myself in the spot I am now in, which, frankly, is not a particularly good spot, and I realize in many ways that I have put myself, here, or a least didn’t oppose progressing to this spot. I have lost an abiding joy, a positive outlook, and I’m afraid, hope. Doesn’t sound so good.
There are so many things I need to and have to let go of. While I may believe that I “fight the good fight” and for right reasons, if such a “fight” becomes poisonous, then I must stop. Over the last 10-years or so, I have allowed myself to be swallowed up by a whole lot of negativity, a whole lot of arguments that I cannot win because others are determined to win, taking upon my shoulders a burden that I cannot hope to throw off. I find myself poisoned. I let the poison happen. At times I might have even taken it willingly, though I didn’t consider the end result.
How does one let go? Blah, blah, blah… okay, but how? Really. Let go of situations, let go of people, let go of institutions… just let go. I need to let go, for my own sake. After 10-years, I don’t think I’ve changed anyone’s mind, helped changed anyone’s behavior, helped mold any outcome. I’ve just become poison, myself.
Passenger – Let Her Go
Longing
Longing begins and long remains
Deep within stirring, a modest ache
evermore building
so much light
Building to overwhelming, such desire
all else overshadowing
so much warmth
Overshadowing forward falls, into blindness
only itself allowing
dimming
Simple things, really…
To love and be loved…
the one to whom thoughts still bend…
the one for whom longing remains…
A bit ridiculous, I say.
Time has passed; opportunity has moved over; we move on, right?
Why does this longing remain
why still overwhelmed by longing
why does impossible longing overshadowing all else
It is over; it is past; it is done with, but for my heart.
The X Factor 2009 – Danyl Johnson
Danyl Johnson Audition Video
Overwhelmed by Tim McMorris – Cover by J.D. Carter – YouTube
Very nice rendition!
Overwhelmed by Tim McMorris – Cover by J.D. Carter – YouTube.
Emerging Generations and the Church
I highly recommend this review of two books written in 2002 that appeared in the magazine “Touchstone”. It is a great summary of the generational trends with regard to Christianity and the Church that began in the 1990’s among GenX’ers, and that have only increased over the past 10-years among the Millennials. The insights and the suggested trends are proving to be true!
The title of the review article is, “Orthodox Twenty Somethings,” and the reviewed books are: The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy
by Colleen Carroll, and The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World by Robert E. Webber.
Here are a few paragraphs that I find particularly compelling.
It isn’t supposed to be happening. Traditional Catholic piety is finding zealous practitioners at universities across the United States. The children of Planned Parenthood devotees are becoming advocates of Natural Family Planning. Nice suburban girls who ought to know better are making monastic professions in—you guessed it—traditional orders, and there are enrollment spikes on the charts of conservative seminaries across the Christian spectrum.
At the same time, some of today’s Evangelicals are unresponsive to the agendas of their immediate forefathers in worship, theology, and general “church strategy.” They are seeking instead “a biblically rooted, historically informed and culturally aware” evangelization of their hometowns, and the creation of new congregations attuned to the ancient faith. This isn’t quite supposed to be happening either.
None of this is supposed to be happening because it’s not the project for which two generations of Protestant and Catholic clergy have worked. And it’s certainly not what for decades a graying army of secularists has agitated for in American public life. The push for relativist moral teaching, “simplified” worship, interchangeable sex roles, and an utter separation of private belief from political expression has come from the pulpit as readily as it has been demanded by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, portions of a modern American society, which groans to find itself secularist, is returning in a quiet revolution to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.
It goes without saying that “the primary cravings of young orthodox Christians in America—for tough time-tested teachings and worship imbued with mystery and a sense of the transcendent—are often the result of deficiencies in their childhood spiritual diet.”…
The evidence of public opinion polls shows a trend of twenty-somethings “clamoring for convention,” writes Carroll. The increase in Latin Mass attendance during the 1990s, for example, can be attributed to a “retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics,” rather than a nostalgic return by the elderly to a rite with which they grew up. Marie-Thérèse Scott-Hamblen, the young orthodox wife of a young orthodox Episcopal priest, may not have been the first to use the term “young fogey,” in The Living Church magazine in 2001, but she put her finger on a phenomenon that has reached even the most liberal denominations in the United States. As often as not, those who seek traditional worship in their congregations are young men and women whose only opposition is their parents’ generation of clergy and laymen. The older generation’s response tends to be in the negative; after all, worship has to be modern in language and form to appeal to “the young people,” that strange mass of mainline census data that never actually finds its way into a pew on Sunday morning…
The evidence of public opinion polls shows a trend of twenty-somethings “clamoring for convention,” writes Carroll. The increase in Latin Mass attendance during the 1990s, for example, can be attributed to a “retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics,” rather than a nostalgic return by the elderly to a rite with which they grew up. Marie-Thérèse Scott-Hamblen, the young orthodox wife of a young orthodox Episcopal priest, may not have been the first to use the term “young fogey,” in The Living Church magazine in 2001, but she put her finger on a phenomenon that has reached even the most liberal denominations in the United States. As often as not, those who seek traditional worship in their congregations are young men and women whose only opposition is their parents’ generation of clergy and laymen. The older generation’s response tends to be in the negative; after all, worship has to be modern in language and form to appeal to “the young people,” that strange mass of mainline census data that never actually finds its way into a pew on Sunday morning…
There is a built-in nostalgia for the pre-Constantinian Church in this worldview, which assumes the death of traditional Christendom and the birth of a new post-Constantinian model for Christian life—hence “ancient-future.”