What Is Her.meneutics?
The Christianity Today women's blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
books we're reading
John Piper and the Rise of Biblical Masculinity
Why many church leaders are tempted to confuse cultural norms with biblical truth.
We’ve been hearing a lot about masculine Christianity lately.
By now we’re used to hearing Mark Driscoll campaign for more masculine church leaders and expressions of Christianity; late last year, Reformed pastor Douglas Wilson invited Driscoll to his church to speak at a Grace Agenda conference—a gathering that tactfully segregated women by offering a separate pre-conference just for them. In turn, Wilson spoke at John Piper’s Desiring God Pastor’s Conference, which this year had an explicitly masculine theme: “God, Manhood & Ministry: Building Men for the Glory of God.” No stranger to strong statements in the blogo-twittersphere, Piper again drew attention by declaring that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel.”
The insistence that Christianity ought to be muscular is often traced to American evangelists of the early 20th century, such as Billy Sunday and D. L. Moody, who emphasized sports and physical strength to counter the perception that Christians were soft and docile, in other words, feminine: a concept attributed to the 19th-century idealization of women as keepers of home and hearth and nurturer of the family’s spiritual well-being. But even then, the perception of “spirituality” as “feminine” was itself a relatively new idea. For millennia, Western ideology tended to understand women as being grounded in body and matter, while men dealt in the realm of the mind and spirit.
If nothing else, it’s clear that masculinity and femininity are not fixed and eternal sets of attributes, but are by and large culturally defined, and always changing. For example, blue was once more closely associated with “feminine” while pink was associated with “masculine.” In parts of Europe, it’s still not unusual for men to greet one another with kisses; in India, you might see two male friends walking arm in arm. And we have many examples of renaissance poetry—essentially love poetry—written by and for non-homosexual males who were close friends. By looking to other times and other places, we can see that masculinity is a way of behaving culturally that looks different in different times and places.
Continue reading "John Piper and the Rise of Biblical Masculinity" »
Christian Catfights: Why Women Leaders Don't Support Each Other
Insecurities can cause women to undermine each other.
Monica Holmes had the prettiest hair of any girl in the fifth grade. Her chestnut locks flowed effortlessly down her back, while my delicate, thin hair broke off around my shoulders. Even so, I didn’t envy her hair; I begrudged her braggadocio. No matter the context—recess, lunch, or a bathroom break—Monica couldn’t say enough about her hair to anyone who would listen. “I just love my dark-brown, beautiful hair. Don’t you too?”
By Christmas, I’d had enough. In the seat behind Monica during the annual showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, in the darkened multi-purpose room, I stealthily stuck a big wad of pink Bubble-Yum gum in a wide swath of Monica Holmes’s dark-brown, beautiful hair.
It wasn’t one of my finer moments. But lest you think my preadolescent behavior was an anomaly, a recent study from the University of Ottawa suggests otherwise. Intrasexual competition is widely demonstrated among males, so researchers Tracy Vaillancourt and A. Sharma wanted to know whether or not intrasexual competition existed among women, often believed to be nurturing, communicative, and more likely to rule by consensus. “I was convinced,” stated Vaillancourt, “having lived my life as a woman, that we’re not as pleasant as some people make us out to be.”
Continue reading "Christian Catfights: Why Women Leaders Don't Support Each Other" »
Why I'm Okay with Church Failure
At the end of the day, Christians' ministry success is not about money and buildings.
Recently a headline caught my eye: God Provides Nearly Homeless Megachurch $5 Million. John Bishop, the pastor of Living Hope Church near Vancouver, Washington, appealed to his congregation and other churches to help raise the remaining money needed to keep their home, a revamped K-Mart. Outreach magazine listed the church as one of the fastest growing churches in the nation. The church raised $4 million by itself before Bishop started the FortyFirstDay.com campaign, asking churches around the nation to give $1,000 toward the $1 million shortfall. They actually ended up raising more than what was needed, and they plan to use the excess in homeless outreach.
It got me thinking. Although I love the heart of this church and in no way disparage God's provision for their building, underneath reports like this is an assumption: When God's in a thing, it will succeed. We experienced quite the opposite when we tried to plant a church in southern France from 2004-2006. Constant spiritual warfare, financial stress, and team issues contributed to our return to the States. When we came home earlier than expected, someone emailed and asked me if I thought we missed God by going there in the first place. What she basically meant was that God must not have led us there because it didn't "succeed." Therefore the simple formula is this: God leads + We obey = Outward success.
I wondered about the small churches around this nation whose pastors might've read the report of the $5 million in provision. When a church closes, grief enters in. Even so, churches have found joy in the grief. In March this year, Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, shuttered its doors. The grief they experienced, though, was tempered by another church moving into their building. Another congregation, Bethany United Methodist Church, voted to close, but chose to give away their furnishings to a congregation that had lost its building to a fire.
As church members struggle to make ends meet in a difficult economy, as folks shift and move like migrating monarchs, how do pastors feel? Do they question their calling because they can barely pay the light bill for Sunday services? Did they look on with envy at God's extravagant provision elsewhere? According to Fox News and NPR, one of the economic fallout issues from the past three years has been churches foreclosing.
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Why Church Matters
How we can remind each of the need for the church to play a central role in our lives.
Recently I wrote a blog post entitled, Spiritual Abuse: 10 Ways to Spot it. While I'm not an expert on spiritually abusive churches or ministries, I've had my share of negative experiences, some bordering on abuse.
As I read through the comments, I saw a lot of hurting people, some of whom have left church because of the pain. Couple that with high-profile pastors leaving their churches and the fact that more and more people are emigrating away from traditional church, and we find we're in a bit of a conundrum about church. What is it? Why is it necessary? Why bother? Isn't everything church? Or nothing at all? Is attendance required for a Christ follower?
When we church planted in southern France a few years ago, we ran into an interesting obstacle. Some folks believed that any sort of gathering was "church." If we hung out, we were having church. If we went to a concert, church. If we walked down the street and ran into another Christian, that was church, too. If that is true, why bother with the local congregation?
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Why It’s Your Job to Break the Women’s Ministry Stereotype
Sure, some of us are choking on cutesy things, but many of us are working towards a new model of discipleship.
I remember the day I parted ways with the old model of women’s ministry. I was sitting in a hotel ballroom full of women. The speaker shared a gut-wrenching testimony that elicited a few sniffles from the crowd, which gradually grew into sobs, which snowballed into full-on emotional meltdown. It was exactly the kind of thing men imagine happening when women get together. I didn’t like it at all.
In retrospect, my younger self was arrogant and naïve in that moment. Women need healing from the Lord, and sometimes a good cry in a safe space is spiritually restorative. That aspect of ministry is necessary and valuable. Even so, I couldn’t ignore the part of my spirit that wanted more. That yearning has persisted ever since, and it is present in the hearts of many women I know today. Emotional forms of ministry have their place, but women in the church are eager to move beyond emotion, and beyond the surface.
Blogger Emerging Mummy recently captured this sentiment in her impassioned post “In Which I Write a Letter to Women’s Ministry”:
But I'm here with you tonight because I want what the world cannot give me. We're choking on cutesy things and crafty bits, safe lady topics and if one more person says that modest is hottest with a straight face, I may throw up. We are hungry for authenticity and vulnerability, not churchified life hacks from lady magazines. Some of us are drowning, suffocating, dying of thirst for want of the cold water of real community. We're trying really hard - after all, we keep showing up to your lady events and we leave feeling just a bit empty. It's just more of the same every time.
But she is not the first to express such concerns with women’s ministry.
Continue reading "Why It’s Your Job to Break the Women’s Ministry Stereotype" »
When a Midlife Crisis Becomes Serious
And how the church can turn midlife into prime time for the entire community.
A recent study found that there has been an alarming spike in suicides among midlife women. I am neither scientist nor statistician, but I am 52. Some have called mid-life “Prime Time.” but few midlife women in my circles are crowing that they’re living their best life now. Most of my friends tell me they’ve experienced periods of moderate-to-severe clinical depression. A good percentage of these women are committed Christians. Though the Church is called to be a community that honors life transformation and fosters spiritual growth, many at midlife report that what they’re experiencing emotionally and spiritually isolates them from congregational life – and that their churches are not equipped to respond to their needs. Continue reading "When a Midlife Crisis Becomes Serious" »
Case in point: Cathy was once the vivacious soccer mom who coordinated snacks and rides for her kids’ teams. She led the Thursday evening women’s Bible study at her nondenominational congregation for many years. She sold real estate in her middle-class suburb. She was old enough to remember the ad jingle that went “I can bring home the bacon / fry it up in a pan / and never, never, never let you forget you’re a man,” because she lived it. Doing it all was having it all for women of her generation.
Now 56, it’s been years since Cathy has fried up any bacon. Her cholesterol levels were off the charts at her last doctor’s visit, and there was no one left at home to eat the bacon, anyway. Her kids are long gone from the nest she worked so hard to create. Her only remaining parent has late-stage Alzheimer’s. The real-estate crash effectively ended her career. She sees her grandmother’s body staring back at her when she looks in the mirror. She stopped leading the Bible study at church when her marriage was unraveling 10 years ago, though she’s continued to attend Sunday services. A few weeks ago, a well-meaning greeter stuck a brightly-colored “Welcome, Visitor!” flier in her hand as she entered the sanctuary.
The Newest U.S. Mission Field: Women
In order to reach educated and professional women, Christian women must be able to articulate what they believe and why. Is the church equipping them?
For centuries, women have been the oft-silent underpinnings of church ministry. Mostly volunteers, these female church members made up a behind-the-scenes force that not only greased the gears of the local church but also functioned as the gears themselves. Even today, roughly 57 percent of church volunteers in the U.S. are women, leading everything from prayer groups to Sunday school classes.
But this dynamic might be changing. According to a longitudinal survey released by the Barna Group last week, the numbers of both men and women attending church may have dropped in the past 20 years. Although the sample size is too small to draw any firm conclusions, the research indicates that the greatest amount of decline in church attendance has been among women. Barna found that since 1991, the overall number of women attending church dropped 11 percentage points, down to 44 percent. Bible reading among women also declined by 10 percentage points, Sunday school involvement by 7 percentage points, and volunteer activity in churches by 9 percentage points (the latter representing a 31 percent reduction in the non-paid female work force at churches).
The study added that the “only religious behavior that increased among women in the last 20 years was becoming unchurched. That rose a startling 17 percentage points — among the largest drops in church attachment identified in the research.” Here it is also important to note that the number of unchurched men also increased, but only by 9 percentage points.
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Modesty: Still Missing from the Church
If our motivation is to look attractive at any cost with no consideration for others, there is a heart issue to confront.
“Why does she have on those hooker shoes?” That’s how one of my godmothers began our phone conversation Monday morning. She was disheartened by a woman’s church attire, and that was just one of her examples. I shared my observations concerning the responsibility of modesty and its challenges for both men and women.
My cultural background advises me to put on my “Sunday Best” when I enter God’s sanctuary, where my physical presentation to God speaks volumes about how I reverence him. If I don’t say anything about my spiritual condition, few people can confidently speak about what’s going on in my heart. Yet they can observe my emotional and physical condition, either through my smile, physique, or radiant skin (which can reveal proper hydration, rest, and minimal stress).
Whether I like it or not, people draw assumptions about me based on my physical presentation. As a Christian woman, I do not want people drawing the wrong conclusions about my focus. I believe that modesty is a major issue in our churches. While I cannot take ownership of someone else’s sin, I do accept the responsibility for being my brother’s keeper.
Do Christian women know when they are not being modest?
Continue reading "Modesty: Still Missing from the Church" »
Doing Authentic Ministry with My Smokin' Hot Bride
A list of the worst ever Christian cliches.
I slipped. My husband and I were asked to take on another church commitment. I was trying to decline graciously. In my e-mail response, I wrote, “We cannot help now, but hopefully in another season.” I copied my husband on the e-mail and instantly received a one-word reply:
“Season?”
You see, season is one of many words long ago banned from our vocabulary. But my lapse reminded me how hard it is to resist the lure of the handy cliché.
The trouble with prefabricated words is that they don’t require or encourage much thinking. Yes, clichés contain truth; that’s why they are used so much. But familiarity can turn even truthful words into vain repetitions.
Church-based clichés are nothing new. In 1719, satirist Jonathan Swift warned in “A Letter to a Young Clergyman Lately Entered Into Holy Orders,” against “the folly of using old threadbare phrases.”
So I did some brainstorming with many Her.meneutics writers to find some of the worst clichés in vogue among Christians. (In fairness, the cliché problem isn’t limited to Christians.) The terms here are my personal peeves. If you happen to be fond of any of them, please know I’m not judging you — just your vocabulary, and mine.
Cliche Category #1: “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice”
I drink my coffee black, prefer more potatoes to dessert, can’t abide chick flicks, and have a low tolerance for sweetness (puppies excepted). Sicky-sweet terms that certain Christians seem to love include
- precious (road trip to the Precious Moments Chapel, anyone?)
- come alongside (I can just see the strong arm of a big, burly come-alongsider draping across the shoulders of a grateful come-alongsidee)
- love on, as in, “Let’s just love on these precious kids.”
- a real heart for God: why doesn’t anyone ever talk about having a mind for God, which is just as scriptural?
Continue reading "Doing Authentic Ministry with My Smokin' Hot Bride" »
Much Ado About Mark Driscoll
What do we do when Christian leaders are imperfect?
This week the Christian blogosphere worked itself into a frenzy over a Facebook status posted by Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. The status, which was later removed, read, “So, what story do you have about the most effeminate anatomically male worship leader you’ve ever personally witnessed?”
The news of this post quickly drew responses from bloggers like Rachel Held Evans, who called Driscoll a bully, and Tyler Clark, who reflected on his own experience as an oft-labeled effeminate male. These responses consequently elicited counter-responses from writers like Anthony Bradley, who accused Evans of libel, only to be met with counter-counter-responses, such as Brian McLaren’s contribution to The Washington Post. The discussion finally culminated with Driscoll issuing his own response, admitting his comment was both “flippant” and failed to address “real issues with real content in a real context.”
The biblical author James once described the tongue as a “small spark” that sets a great forest on fire. Watching this debate ignite, I couldn’t help wondering whether James penned those words with the Internet in mind. That said, my intent here is not to throw additional kindling onto the flame.
Moving beyond the firestorm catalyzed by Driscoll’s words, many evangelicals are not quite sure what to do with him anymore. This is not the first controversial thing he has done, so is it time to draw a line in the sand?
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Gender Differences: All in the Brain
Recent findings from neuroscience highlight why the church needs diversity in order to thrive.
Last month author Lane Wallace highlighted two new studies in The Atlantic, both of which offer new insights into the relationship between biology and worldview. In her first piece, “Are Liberals and Conservatives Hard-Wired to Disagree?,” Wallace examines the work of cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Kanai. Kanai conducted MRI scans on 118 college students whose “self-reported political views ranged from ‘very liberal’ to ‘very conservative.’ " Kanai’s findings were rather compelling:
Many areas of the subjects' brains showed no difference based on political orientation. But the subjects classifying themselves as "liberal" had a higher volume of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex of their brains than study participants who classified themselves as "conservative." The anterior cingulate cortex is believed to play a role in helping people cope with and sort through uncertainty and conflicting information, as well as affecting their levels of emotional awareness and empathy. The "conservative" participants, on the other hand, had a higher volume of gray matter in the right amygdala region — which is thought to play a big role in identifying and responding to threats.
In a second article, “Why Do Women See the World in Shades of Grey?,” Wallace details a British study that found women “were more likely to reject absolute answers in favor of the ‘somewhat.’ ” Men, on the other hand, “were far more likely to assert that the objects were completely in or out of a particular category.” In short, the men saw the world in black and white, whereas women saw more grey.
Of particular note in the second study is the fortitude with which the women responded. The female participants’ answers were not born out of indecision but were instead made in confidence. The women were definitively more comfortable with ambiguity.
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Where Are All the Women City Leaders?
The way the Christian city-renewal movement is being narrated, one would assume all the leaders driving the movement are megachurch pastors.
“What can we do together that we can’t do on our own?”
The question silenced a room full of local church leaders at an organizational meeting for a city-reaching network. It was a jolt to the thinking of those who understood themselves as representatives of their individual congregations instead of a city-wide, big-C church, with many expressions and in many locations.
But they had me at the word together.
That word led to my own involvement in a local city-reaching network several years ago. It's been a delight to see churches that had once labored side-by-side like disconnected silos begin to interact with one another in meaningful community service, prayer, fellowship, and learning. The big-C church in my area has a way to go in terms of fully responding to the prayer Jesus prayed for his followers, but there have been some encouraging first steps over the past few years.
Eric Swanson and Sam Williams have served and/or coached other leaders in city-reaching church networking movements around the world, and have penned a practical guide for those interested in the notion entitled To Transform A City: Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole City (Zondervan). The book’s subtitle comes from the Lausanne Movement and reflects the power of gospel-rooted collaboration.
The book attempts to construct a theological framework for the notions of "city" and "kingdom." The authors write,
The church serves as a living proof of the kingdom, a community where the world can see what marriage, family life, business practices, work habits, generosity, mercy, race relations — all of life — look like when lived under the rule and authority of Jesus Christ. . . . Spreading the kingdom of God is more than simply winning men and women to Christ. It involves working toward shalom and the redemption of structures, individuals, families, and relationships as well as surprising others with unexpected deeds of grace, mercy and justice (Micah 6:8).
Using their solid, kingdom-centered framework, Swanson and Williams do a thorough job explaining how and why regional collaborative relationships between congregations can be formed, cultivated, and maintained. This coaching is packed with real-life examples (including my own local network) designed to inspire and motivate. These examples spotlight a gap in the current conversation about collaboration, however.
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When Christians Get Divorced
A popular Christian blogger recently announced the end of her marriage. How should churches respond to those grieving?
A popular Christian blogger recently announced that she's getting divorced. She knows all the biblical reasons to stay married, and she understands the far-reaching repercussions when Christians divorce. On her personal blog she writes, “I can see why the Scriptures say God hates divorce. It’s not that he hates either of us (although at times, it’s easy to believe otherwise), but he hates what the brokenness of divorce does to the very souls of a man and his wife. He hates what it does to the people who love them. And even the people who maybe they’ve never met.” But, as she says, her marriage is broken beyond repair. "We, along with others in our lives, have tried desperately to fix it, to bring it back to life, to see a broken covenant redeemed. But the life is gone, and in order to preserve peace and love in our relationship, our marriage needed to end."
She is certainly not alone. Although recent reports indicate that the divorce rate for practicing evangelical Christians is lower than the American average of 50 percent, it still stands at 38 percent. In other words, 5 of 10 marriages in America are likely to fail, and nearly 4 of 10 marriages among practicing evangelicals fail. (Incidentally, 6 of 10 marriages among non-practicing evangelicals [those who don't attend church] fall apart, a statistic that raises its own set of questions.) How should the people of God, both individually and corporately, respond?
Before I was married, it baffled me that anyone who could call themselves a Christian could get divorced. Jesus himself stated God’s ideal for male and female: “They are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matt. 19:6). Jesus goes on to say that divorce and remarriage is the equivalent of adultery. Moreover, other biblical passages uphold the sanctity of marriage as a covenant that teaches us about God’s love for the church (see, for example, Eph. 5:21-33). Christians had a responsibility not only to stay married, but to demonstrate through marriage the way God’s love works.
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Is Your Church Open to Autism?
Churches that make space for autistic children on Sunday mornings will be disrupted — by joy.
It’s everywhere, bursting from our schools and neighborhoods and playgrounds. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in every 110 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. But with numbers like this, shouldn’t our churches, of all places, be bursting with autism too? Certainly our pews are packed with families basking in the love and support of the church. Right?
Not exactly.
The truth is that most families with autistic children can’t make it to the door of the church. So our churches don’t always see the need. I know, because for many years we were one of these invisible families. Church, like the rest of life, just didn’t work. There were barriers, unspoken requirements, like sitting still and staying quiet and paying attention. But there isn’t a pause button for autism. Max didn’t seem to fit. For five years we stayed home on Sunday mornings. Actually, we stayed home most every other day too, me and my beautiful son, isolated like we were lepers.
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What Celebrity Miscarriages Teach Us
If famous folk can open up to the world about their pregnancy loss, why can't we in the church?
Suddenly, it seems as if miscarriage is everywhere. Famous folks from Barbara Bush to Mariah Carey have recently disclosed previous pregnancy losses. Lily Allen suffered her second miscarriage in November, and Lisa Ling shared her own grief following a miscarriage on a recent episode of The View. Kelsey Grammer and his fiancée, Kayte Walsh, released a statement in October confirming the loss of their unborn child six weeks earlier. Giuliana Rancic and husband Bill opened up about their miscarriage this fall. A topic that historically has seemed taboo has somehow become hot tabloid fodder. OMG.
Lack of privacy is a given for the celebs among us, for we live in a culture that is breathlessly absorbed by the minutiae of famous lives. And whether you’re a hard-core subscriber to US Weekly and People or someone like me, slyly dawdling in the grocery checkout line so I can catch the tabloid headlines out of the corner of my eye, you can’t miss the obsession with celebrity baby-bump-watching. As gossip mag Life & Style's editor in chief Dan Wakeford has observed, "They've always been popular with readers, stories on babies . . . It used to be celebrity weddings, but not anymore. It's all about babies." Celebrity pregnancies are confirmed on Twitter and talk shows, and reporters try to outdo one another in cutesy cleverness, using tired witticisms about “buns in the oven” and coyly talking about “baby daddies.” Celebs are inevitably “thrilled” and “so happy” to announce that they are “preggo.” And really, what else are they going to say?
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'Happy Holidays' in Church?
While some Christian groups continue the battle over seasons-greetings language, I wonder if many churches are forsaking the reason for the season.
Nothing helps us remember the reason for the season like a Walgreen’s store clerk who remembers to say “Merry Christmas” when she hands us change from our last-minute Snuggie purchase.
The culture-war frontier has been littered with the debris of yearly Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas throw-downs as a noisy segment of American Christendom have elected themselves to serve as defenders of a perfect Christmas past. This year, First Baptist Church of Dallas is encouraging visitors to their Grinch Alert website to help make a list of naughty and nice merchants. The litmus test for niceness is simple: Nice merchants say “Merry Christmas.” (Tattling on retailers who don’t say the magic words on the Internet apparently counts as nice behavior as well.) Not surprisingly, this website has gotten a fair amount of news attention in recent days.
I would like to suggest that we’d be doing our non-Christian friends a huge favor if we used some of our culture war weapons on ourselves during the Christmas season. Instead of savoring the delicious jolt of affirmation some of us get from the words “Merry Christmas,” what if we engage in a little self-analysis of how we celebrate the holiday within our churches?
Many congregations craft sentimental, gingerbread-scented ways of celebrating the season without giving our programming’s message much thought. “It’s all about Jesus,” we say, while filling our church calendars with 1brunches, sanctuary decorating parties, children’s cantatas, and “Secret Angel” Bible study gift exchanges.
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The Trouble with Confessing in Church
As blogger Anne Jackson's new book makes clear, our church culture will need to change before individual confession won't turn into gossip.
I’ve come to believe that an institutional church is not a safe place for one person’s confession.Several years ago, while we were attending a small nondenominational church, Pastor Donn* announced at the end of Sunday worship that we would have a special mid-week meeting. “It’s important that all members attend,” he emphasized. “We have an important family matter to discuss.”
Most of the hundred or so members who showed up Wednesday watched Pastor Donn summon the Hickmans, respected leaders in the congregation, and their pale 16-year-old daughter, Missy, to the front of the sanctuary. He put his arm around Missy’s shoulders and told us he’d summoned us in order to snuff out gossip about Missy before it had a chance to begin.
He then asked Missy to confess her sin to us. Without lifting her eyes, the tearful, trembling young woman told us she had just found out she was pregnant. Missy’s boyfriend, the birth dad, did not attend the church and wasn’t present that night.
I couldn’t deny that the congregation rallied around the Hickmans throughout Missy’s pregnancy and into the first years of motherhood. But Missy was never again just Missy. She became Missy the project, Missy the Girl Who Got Pregnant and Stood Up in Front of the Entire Church. And while the meeting effectively cauterized gossipy tongues and rallied prayer and practical support for the Hickmans, it also served to make Missy Exhibit A whenever the church’s youth pastors gave an abstinence sermon for the next year or so.
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A New Message at the Strip Club-Church Showdown
What happened when two Christian women entered the Fox Hole strip club in Warsaw, Ohio.
“I can’t make out what you’re saying to me. Please have someone call me so I’ll know what you’re saying.”Sitting in her car, Anny Donewald prayed these instructions to God last month.
Founder of Eve’s Angels, Donewald ministers to women in the adult entertainment industry in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She’d been mulling over the news that dancers from a strip club in Warsaw, Ohio, were picketing the local nondenominational church that for years had picketed them.
When Donewald’s phone rang moments later, it was her friend Sheri Brown, who co-leads JC’s Girls, a ministry to women in San Diego. She’d called to talk about the news. Donewald says she knew immediately that “God was telling me to go to Ohio.”
As quick as you can say holy irony, both were bound for Warsaw. There the two women would do what they did every week: get a table at a strip club, spend time with the dancers, bring them pizza, offer them gift bags — and tell them, “God loves you, and we love you.”
For Brown and Donewald, pizza and goodies are about more than pizza and goodies. “It’s all about relationship,” says Donewald. She tells the women, “Anytime you want to hang out or need something, call me.” The beautiful thing is, they do.
What made this outing different, of course, were all the church folks in the parking lot waving placards.
What Donewald and Brown would share that Saturday night, first with dancers in the club and then with church members outside, was, “What you’ve been hearing isn’t quite right.”
Continue reading "A New Message at the Strip Club-Church Showdown" »
An Open Letter to Anne Rice
What I see when I look at the church.
Dear Ms. Rice:
You don't know me, so please excuse the intrusion. I hope you won't think this too forward, but I read about your recent remarks about quitting Christianity:
For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten . . . years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.
I respect your decision. I can't even count the number of times I've felt the exact same way, but I lacked the gumption to declare it as boldly as you have done. I simply went about muttering, wishing for everything that I belonged to a different clan. A more perfect community.
I don't attend a large church, but it's large enough that I don't know everyone by name or by story. Take that lady passing out the programs at the door. I don't know her at all. I don't know if she's married or lost the love of her life to a fiery plane crash during World War II. I don't know what sufferings life has brought her way. For all I know hers could be one of the dozens of names listed weekly in the “Praying for those diagnosed with cancer.”
Sometimes it's a relief to not know people. It keeps a person from the obligation of sharing their sorrows or from the disappointment of discovering their failings.
That's the thing about being in relationship with others. I don't know about you, Ms. Rice, but I've found that to be true whether you are in relationship with people who belong to the clan of Christianity, or friends you made at the local Farmers' Market. Hang with people long enough and you're going to be disgusted by them. They'll do something that hurts so badly you'll wonder why in the world you ever considered them a friend to begin with.
You'll feel as betrayed as Jesus. On some level you'll know that's ludicrous — there's no way you can know the betrayal of the Cross. But you'll still feel that you understand his pain the way he understands yours.
That's how God designed us.
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Church Volunteers: An Oxymoron
Why I've stopped using the word volunteer to describe those who serve.
If you’ve even spent time at a local branch of the Red Cross, tutored a child at a local elementary school, pounded nails at a Habitat For Humanity build, or picked up trash at a local nature preserve, you’ve probably done so as a volunteer. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 26.8 percent of the population volunteered in their communities at least once between September 2008 and September 2009. The percentage ticked upward from previous years. Even with the economic recession, the group Volunteering in America reports, 2009 saw the biggest increase in the number of volunteers since 2003. A majority of volunteers served as religious organizations.
But does the language of volunteerism apply to the church?
I recently sat through weeks of church staff meetings. The primary item on the agenda was crafting a congregational organizational chart. Our church has grown rapidly in recent years, and as a result, klutzy collisions between ministry heads unsure of who was in charge of this program or that task had shown a need to formalize lines of communication and responsibility.
The chart helped with some of these issues, but it provided a snapshot of another issue we were facing: There were all sorts of empty slots. As in many growing churches, we were always searching for more children’s ministry workers, janitors, and sound tech assistants. Those of us on staff dedicated ourselves to find ways to recruit and retain people to fill those slots on the org chart. We held volunteer fairs. We regularly encouraged volunteers to share their stories of spiritual growth as a result of serving the church. We committed ourselves to honoring hard-working volunteers with small gestures of staff appreciation throughout the year.
But our approach to filling those empty slots left me uncomfortable. It seemed to be something sour and a little cynical about our underlying assumptions. We had appropriated the paradigm of a nonprofit organization in order to find a way to function as a growing church. And when we viewed fellow congregants as volunteers, we subtly emphasized what they could do over against who they were as members of the body of Christ. I wondered if we were unintentionally building a culture where “our volunteers” were our blue-collar laborers, doing tasks assigned by us, the white-collar staff.
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Stalked by a Priest
Donna Freitas's This Gorgeous Game, about a priest obsessed with a teenage girl, is a work of deep empathy and disturbing believability.
This Gorgeous Game (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), Donna Freitas’s new work of young adult fiction, is a first-person narrative of being stalked. Most stories that have emerged from the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal detail the horrors of pedophilia and assault. Freitas’s novel, about a bright teenager named Olivia Peters, demonstrates that being fawned over and called incessantly can be as terrifying as what are considered more “harmful” crimes. Especially if you are a junior in high school, and the person fawning over you is a Catholic priest.
Freitas, a religion scholar at Boston University, is best known for Sex and the Soul, her 2008 study of young adults’ attitudes on spirituality and sexuality. She identifies as a “stubborn Catholic,” writing for The Washington Post amid recent media coverage of the scandal, “I am still here despite my struggles to remain a Catholic and despite my scars, too. . . . My faith and place in this tradition is much bigger than one single priest and some terrible church officials. It transcends victimization and unspent anger.”
The scars, as readers might guess by now, are from Freitas’s own experience of being stalked by a priest for over two years. She makes clear that Olivia is not her stand-in, that the narrative does not mimic her own. But she says that “I never could have conveyed the first-person emotion of what happens to Olivia or known how to get into the mind of a priest who would do such a thing as stalk a young woman.”
As such, This Gorgeous Game is a work of deep empathy and disturbing believability. Readers spend their time inside the mind and heart of Peters, a cradle Catholic who has recently landed a prestigious writing prize from a local Catholic university. The prize includes enrollment in a summer writing program led by Mark Brendan, a priest and writer esteemed in church and intellectual circles. Olivia’s father has been out of the picture for some time, she tells us early on — “but my older sister, Greenie, and I have had plenty of dads over the years, it’s just that everyone calls them Fathers instead of Dads and they are married to the Catholic Church. . . . Now another one, another Father walks into my life. What luck.”
Luck, readers learn quickly, is not the right word here. We watch the red flags of boundary-breaking and obsession go up as Father Mark fosters a mentoring relationship with Olivia. Flag #1: For their first writing session, he asks Olivia to meet him in a bar, where he sips scotch liberally, telling her, “I probably shouldn’t say this [“then don’t!” we say], but the moment I first saw you, I wondered to myself: how did so much talent, such insight and imagination, come from a girl so young, and with such startling beauty? . . . I am astounded by you, to be quite honest.”
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Confessions of a Church-Skipping Mom
Is it better to attend church burnt out and stressed, or occasionally stay home but miss corporate worship?
Several Sundays ago my kids were playing outside when we called them to get in the car for church. They stalled. They whined. They asked, “Why do we always have to go to church?” My responses became less patient and my words sharper, until I slammed my hand against the steering wheel and said through clenched teeth, “Going to church is what we do. Get used to it.”
We all arrived at church grumpy — an unfortunately common state on Sunday mornings. The following Sunday, we used the fact that it was Youth Recognition Sunday (often a particularly long, dull service) as an excuse to skip church. Now that it’s summer, we, like many families, will probably find more excuses over the next two months to not attend. We’ll be away some weekends, the kids have no church school, and we relish breaks from getting everyone up and out the door by a certain time. Judging by the sparsely occupied pews in many churches during this season, we aren't the only family who skips church more often in the summer.
A few years ago, such a lax attitude toward church attendance was unthinkable to me. We were die-hard churchgoers, in the pews every Sunday barring illness or vacation. But being a die-hard means that you are given jobs, and when you do those jobs well, you are given more jobs. Sunday worship ceased to be a time of renewal; it was work. When we joined our current parish two years ago, I was determined to be more deliberate and cautious about volunteering. Being less involved makes Sunday mornings more enjoyable, but it also makes it easier to skip Sunday services altogether because we have fewer responsibilities.
Our kids are thrilled when we take a Sunday off. But our newly relaxed attitude toward church attendance raises important questions: Are we modeling a nebulous spirituality, teaching our kids to pick and choose from among religious practices while rejecting anything that requires real commitment? Is it possible to engage in life-giving, sacrificial commitment without falling into energy-draining, resentment-breeding burnout? Perhaps most important: How do I instill faith in my children, and how important is church attendance in that endeavor?
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No Right to Rest for Weary Anglicans
Why churches like St. James in Newport Beach still need support from worshipers who have left the battle.
Such is the fatigue over the Anglican-Episcopal splintering that two weekends ago, when the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles consecrated the denomination’s second partnered gay bishop, the event didn’t make a blip on many evangelical news websites. Also largely unnoticed was the previous week’s press release from St. James Anglican Church in Newport Beach, California, stating that it would appeal the latest California Court of Appeal ruling in its property dispute with the Episcopal Church. Christianity Today reported on St. James’s court case as recently as January, but for embattled congregations, months can feel like years.
St. James broke ties with the Episcopal Church and briefly joined the Anglican Diocese of Luwero, Uganda, in 2004 before becoming a member of the Anglican Church of North America last year. The court case is set to determine who gets its building and other assets.
Those of us with any investment in these matters cannot succumb to our weariness if we deign to call ourselves people of conscience and conviction. Until there is resolution, we owe faithful allegiance and support to the persons and congregations that are still wrestling with these difficult issues. Both prayer and words of encouragement cost little, while St. James has set up a webpage for donations to aid in its legal defense. Expressing public support, as I’m doing here, may not change anything, but it lets warring congregations know they are not forgotten and that others stand with them.
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Christian Female Musicians, Missing in Action
What accounts for the surprising dearth of women in today's CCM scene?
Do you know Becky? If you are a Christian woman in your 30s or 40s and married with kids, you are Becky. Becky, I was fascinated to learn, is what Christian radio stations have named their ideal listener, and most everything you hear on K-LOVE, WORD FM, or your local Christian radio station is chosen to appeal to her.
Becky doesn’t seem to like other women very much, at least not when they sing. "[Women] feel threatened by and possibly jealous of a female artist," says one Christian radio executive. "My guess is that they can't even put it into words. My joke is: If the artist's name is Becky, then 'Becky' does not want to hear her on the air!"
According to Mark Geil’s article for Christianity Today on the gender balance in contemporary Christian music (CCM), exactly zero women made Billboard's lists of the past decade’s top 10 Christian songs and top 10 Christian artists. (Billboard compiles their lists based on record sales.) Only two women made the top 50, at numbers 40 (Francesca Battistelli) and 50 (Stacie Orrico). The surprising statistics highlight how difficult it can be for women in today’s Christian music industry.
That women in CCM are outnumbered 2:1, possibly even 3:1, certainly doesn't help. But this has not always been a problem. In the late 1990s and early ’00s, the time I was most in tune with CCM, I listened to a good number of female artists, many of whom I still enjoy: Sara Groves, Jennifer Knapp, Rebecca St. James, Jaci Velasquez, Kendall Payne, Sixpence None the Richer, Plumb, Point of Grace, Avalon, Amy Grant. It’s not an issue of talent; these women are not only great singers and songwriters but also genuine rockers, folk artists, and worshipers.
So why does Becky no longer want to hear women sing? Is she really just jealous, as the anonymous radio exec suggests? Geil’s article notes as a contributing factor the shift toward worship music as the dominant CCM genre. Jenny Simmons, lead singer of the otherwise all-male worship band Addison Road, says,
I can't tell you how many times I've had people come up to me after a performance and say, "I was very, very uncomfortable having a female onstage when we worshiped. I've never seen that before." There is a fear of sensuality and sexuality within the church. We don't know how to handle it. I don't think there is any way to extricate what is raw and passionate about creating music and being on stage. At least for me, there's a huge vulnerability being up there.
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It's Mother's Day, Not Motherhood Day
When churches confuse the two, women can end up serving false (and unbiblical) expectations.
My first Mother’s Day — as a mother, at least — was a bust.
It started out well enough: My husband surprised me with a pair of espadrilles I had admired in the (get this) Neiman Marcus catalog. But somewhere after the shoes, disappointment became the theme of the day. It ended with me in a rumpled mess in my 2-month-old son’s nursery, crying. I scowled at my husband: “Today is the day to honor me, and you’re not honoring me.”
Aah, a shining moment.
Yet in a way, it was. Because as those ridiculous words oozed out of my mouth, my brain and heart took note. And I realized a problem, not only with my attitude but also with Mother’s Day. And I’ve had a problem with it since.
Mother’s Day is a day to honor moms. Clearly a good thing. Honoring parents is not only biblical, it’s one of the 10 laws God gave to the Israelites and, through them, us. But what’s always interested me about the command is that it says to honor your mother, not Motherhood.
While I can look back at my first Mother's Day and blame the tantrum on my exhaustion as a new mama, I realize that part of my tantrum was that I had bought (hook, line, and espadrille) into the expectations surrounding motherhood — and hence, what a good Mother’s Day looks like. When neither panned out, I melted.
I bought into these expectations not just because they are touted in the broader culture but also because they are taught from the pulpit. When we celebrate Mother’s Day at church, what we rarely honor is our own mothers — persons with specific gifts and talents and passions — but a stereotyped institution. We celebrate and honor the Good American Middle-Class Mother, or, as we like to call her, the Good Christian Mother.
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Therefore Let Us Keep the Feast
Celebrating the Passover meal prepares Christians for Easter.
Last night’s sunset marked the beginning of Passover for millions of people worldwide. It is the only major Jewish holiday recognized by most mainstream calendars and celebrated by the U.S. President.
Although the Jewish holiday lasts all week, until sunset next Monday, the most widely celebrated aspect is Seder, the traditional Passover dinner (Exodus 12). This is the meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the Upper Room before his crucifixion (Matt. 26:17-30; Mark 14:12-26; Luke 22:17-20). Because of this, it carries special significance to both Jews and Christians.
I had the privilege of celebrating two Messianic Seders last year, and Communion has never been the same since partaking of it within the original context. I highly recommend that every Christian attend a Seder at least once. I am missing it this year, without a community to invite me to its celebration. (Passover, like most Jewish holidays, is family-centered and essentially impossible to celebrate alone.) Surprised by my own intense craving to celebrate again, I did a little research and found multiple locations that offer Seder open to the public. These are hosted for a variety of reasons by a variety of different groups, but few are Messianic.
It’s hard to describe the beauty of a Messianic Passover except to call it a precious balance of Old and New Testament. Specifically, of course, Passover celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt in the Exodus. But the Exodus is part of a much larger story of God’s proven faithfulness in upholding his covenant with the children of Abraham.
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Minnesota Man Arrested for Prostituting Wife
Clinton Danner's arrest raises questions about Craigslist's culpability in sex trafficking — and about the church's response to criminal offenders.
A Rockford, Minnesota, man was arrested in Chicago two weeks ago for prostituting his wife using Craigslist, transporting her in a van to hotels in eight states and threatening to take away their 3-year-old daughter should she not comply.
Clinton Danner, 32, met his wife five years ago when she was a 17-year-old attending her family’s church. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Danner held a criminal record for burglary, lottery fraud, and drugs, but was working with a church counselor to change his life. The couple was wed at the church a few months after the young woman became pregnant.
The woman, whose name has not been released due to her victim status, told her parents about Danner a year ago and tried to leave him. Then, while at a downtown Chicago hotel in mid-March, she contacted Polaris Project for help. Founded in 2002, Polaris Project is one of the largest U.S. organizations battling human trafficking. Its hotline, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, gets 400 to 500 phone calls every month.
The woman’s call led to the Cook County Sheriff’s Department involvement and Danner’s arrest March 14. Several metro areas in the U.S. are attempting to change their approach to prostitution, and Cook County has made great strides. The city has educated its police force to better recognize child prostitution and to view prostitutes as victims instead of criminals. (Oftentimes, prostitutes — even if they are minors — are arrested instead of their pimps or clients.)
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A Sinking Argument on Gender and Courage
Do secular feminists really want men to stop showing courtesy?
Cultural commentator Al Mohler recently covered an unusual study that compared passenger behavior on the Titanic, in 1912, and the Lusitania, in 1915. The study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that men on the Titanic were more likely than those on the Lusitania to give up their lifeboat seats for women and children. On the Lusitania, which was struck by German torpedoes and sank in 18 minutes, more women and children died than did men, something the study attributes to the men’s physical strength and speed in getting to the lifeboats. Put bluntly, the men on the Lusitania acted selfishly, while those on the Titanic showed good manners.
Mohler draws from this study a lesson on gender roles and the created order. He writes that “modern feminists” wish to eliminate “all meaningful gender distinctions,” which he believes would lead to the disregard that the Lusitania’s men showed for women and children. “Are we really to believe that the moral call that makes men act against their own self-preservation is just a socially constructed artifact of manners?” he asks. “The feminists . . . call for a world like the Lusitania, but must hope against hope that the world is really more like the Titanic.”
Unfortunately, this argument suffers from two serious flaws. First, the most telling of all the statistics is not taken into account: the overwhelming number of upper-class people, male and female, who were rescued on the Titanic. Time magazine reports thusly: “The Titanic’s first-class passengers had a 43.9% greater chance of making it off the ship and into a lifeboat than the reference group; the Lusitania’s, remarkably, were 11.5% less likely.” In other words, it is not so much that men gave their lifeboat seats to women, but that poor men and women gave up their seats to wealthy men and women. On the Titanic, poor women died and rich men lived. Neither today’s feminists nor Mohler would, I wager, want to support that trend today.
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Confession: I Stopped Giving to the Church
There's something psychologically important about writing a check and putting it in the plate.
I stopped tithing a few months ago. Okay, no scandal here. I got married in September, and my husband and I moved to a new area and wanted to find a church. As we slowly combined our finances, it became painful. (He’s a cheapskate, and I didn’t want him to see every pair of earrings I splurged on.)
Within a few months we found a church that we really liked for various reasons. As the new year approached, we resolved to streamline our finances. Eager to get in our giving before 2009 ended for tax purposes, we talked about back-tithing. We decided to tithe the four months we had been married, which felt like a lot of money. It was daunting to put the check in the offering plate and watch the money pulled from our bank account. I then vowed to talk with someone about having our tithing automatically deducted from our account so we wouldn’t think twice about it.
On one hand, you could argue, “It’s not your money to begin with, so pretend like you never had it.” On the other hand, there’s something psychological about physically writing a check and putting it in the brass plate. If we all paid our taxes once a year instead of having them automatically deducted from our paychecks each pay period, we would probably feel the pinch much more. I often wonder whether I should stop the deduction so I could invest the money during the year and then pay up later. (But that, of course, requires some self-control.)
The authors of Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner, report that economist Milton Friedman came up with automatic tax withholding from employees’ paychecks. Americans weren’t paying their income taxes, as I would imagine it’s hard to remember to save up a huge chunk every year. Levitt and Dubner also write a lot about the importance of incentives: We need a really good reason to eat our vegetables (think Vitamin C) and to resist the temptation to speed (think a $100 ticket).
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N.C. Court Upholds Sex Offenders' Right to Worship
When extending grace and protecting 'little ones' clash.
For evangelicals who uphold both the boundlessness of redemption and the care and protection of “little ones” (Matt. 19:14), having sex offenders in church makes it hard to apply both beliefs at the same time.
In mid-December a Superior Court in North Carolina upheld the case of two registered sex offenders who had been attending Moncure Baptist Church, which offers childcare for Sunday worshipers and other children's programs. James Nichols and Frank DeMaio were indicted in March under a year-old state law that orders offenders to stay 300 feet away from facilities primarily intended for use by or care of children. Nichols’s story was highlighted in “Modern-Day Lepers,” a reported piece in the December issue of Christianity Today.
Judge Allen Baddour determined that the state law was too vague to enforce, and violated the men’s First Amendment rights to worship. “There are less drastic means for achieving the same purpose,” Baddour ruled, noting that to meet constitutional requirements, the law should specify whether or not an offender has the intent to be in the presence of minors.
But, as State Rep. Julia Howard (who sponsored the state law) told the Charlotte News & Observer, discerning someone’s intent for attending church or any other facility can be tricky. “The word intent is the most precarious word in the world. Who knows what my intent is? Anytime you see ‘knowingly’ or ‘intent,’ there’s something mysterious there.”
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Early marriage sounds great — as long as there are mature Christian men willing to initiate.
If you thought navigating the 20-something dating and marriage scene wasn’t complicated enough, former President Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson just put his oar in.
In an argument similar to Mark Regnerus’s cover story in the August issue of Christianity Today, Gerson says that “it doesn't seem realistic to expect most men and women to delay sex until marriage at 26 or 28.”
He believes that kind of self-control is possible but not likely, even among churchgoers. Besides, marrying late in one’s 20s can result in unhappier marriages, while early-20s marriages have the happiest results.
Where does Gerson get those numbers, you might ask? Slate’s XX Factor did some digging and found this 2004 study from the National Fatherhood Initiative. (Especially check out the graphs on page 19.) XX Factor also notes that some key information, like statistical significance, is missing from the graphs, so it’s hard to tell how seriously we should take the information.
Statistical reliability aside, Gerson’s argument — marry young, because people cannot handle not waiting to have sex until their late 20s — is weak on many levels. Is marriage really an excuse for sex? Should a lack of self-control be rewarded with early gratification? To say nothing of evangelical churches and families, it doesn’t seem like that mindset will lead to a healthy society at large.
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Anne Graham Lotz, the Church, and Me
Like Lotz, I've never doubted faith in Christ, but I have mightily doubted the goodness of church.
Renowned evangelist Anne Graham Lotz recently told Amy Sullivan at Time magazine, “Religion can be one of the greatest impediments to finding God.” Newsweek took that as Billy Graham’s daughter “slamming” churches. Actually, I think Lotz is expressing the difference between faith in God and faith in the church.
“I've been [burned] by local churches and by people who call themselves in God's name,” Lotz told Sullivan. Newsweek reports that Lotz has parted ways with more than one church over theological or pastoral disagreements. "I've had Christians treat me in a way that is so wrong and so vicious, I realized there's a difference between God's people and God,” she said.
Lotz’s story, sadly, is not unique. She dedicates her new book, The Magnificent Obsession: Embracing the God-Filled Life, to everyone who has ever felt disconnected or hurt by organized religion.
I am one of those people, calling myself an "uncomfortable ex-churchgoer." I stopped going around 10 years ago, after many of the same experiences Lotz described in the interview, but I was uncomfortable with giving up on the church community. During college, I church hopped — and felt bad about doing it, because most Christians emphasize the importance of making a commitment to a church home. Honestly, for a person who is not entirely convinced that church is worthwhile, visiting church after church after church for two years is a profound act of optimism.
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Adoption: Single Christians Need Not Apply
When there are 132 million orphans in the world, should unmarrieds really be discouraged from reaching out to them?
National Adoption Month is coming up, and churches are mobilizing like never before to encourage people to adopt. But there is a secret underneath it all: Single Christians need not apply.
When I was considering adopting my daughter, one of the most disheartening things was the active discouragement of many Christians who told me point-blank that only married couples should adopt. It was bad enough, I thought, to be consigned to a life of singleness because of the lack of unmarried men in church. For people to say singles are unworthy to adopt a child who would otherwise be living in an orphanage boggled my mind.
The other day, I received a copy of SBC Life, the Southern Baptist Convention’s denominational magazine, where I saw David Roach’s piece “Adoption Ministries Thriving in SBC Churches.” First, the good: It pointed out how any church, large or small, can be involved in adoption ministry toward those who want to adopt, how scandalous it is how many orphans are in this world, and that it’s up to Christians to do something about it. I was gratified to learn of a few loan programs out there for those wishing to adopt, as the costs — especially for international adoption — usually climb well past $30,000. It was also refreshing to see how many parents were supporting interracial adoption. And it providing some good ideas for preparing for November 8, which is Orphan Sunday.
All the photos and the pronouns used in the article, however, referred to couples. This was true on some of the related websites, such as Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, where I found no mention that some of the adoptive parents might be single men or women. This was certainly true on the application forms attached to these sites. I e-mailed Highview's adoption ministry director about this, and she was not aware of any singles adoptions there. “The leadership of Highview believes that it is the best for children to be adopted into traditional homes with a father and a mother,” she told me.
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The Lutherans and Twister Theology
Julia's first-person account of the strange events at last week's ELCA convention.
When is a warning from God not a warning from God? Or a "we can't tell whether or not it's a warning from God"?
This question came up last week while I was covering the church-wide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in Minneapolis. Members of America's largest Lutheran denomination voted to allow non-celibate gays to become clergy and paved the way for same-sex blessing ceremonies. Conservatives I talked to were devastated by the convention, but even they admitted that before the meeting began August 17, they knew they did not have enough votes to prevent the juggernaut.
Then the tornado came.
It was just before 2 p.m. on Wednesday, August 19, right before one of the first significant votes of the assembly. The Lutherans were slated to vote on a sexuality statement that, for the first time I know of, gave the gay-friendly view a place at the table as one of four theological positions Lutherans could have. If the statement passed, it indicated where the convention would go from that point on.
Then someone rushed into the press room and told us to vacate the place fast. A tornado had touched down close by, we were told. The police wanted us in a safe place away from the glass windows that encase the Minneapolis Convention Center.
Everyone rushed into the main hall to join some 1,045 voting members who were listening to a Bible study being led by a female preacher. (A few blogs say the debate on the statement had already begun, but that is not true. I was there). A palpable blanket of fear descended on the entire group as the doors to the outside hallways were shut, enclosing us in the giant hall, which was apparently was the safest place to be. We could hear the winds howling outside. I thought of my rental car parked nearby and hoped it would stay in one piece. After the Bible study, ELCA President Mark Hanson read the 121st Psalm to calm everyone down.
"We trust the weather is not a commentary on our work," said the Rev. Steven Loy, chairman of the ad hoc committee on the sexuality statement.
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The Persecuted Rifqa Bary?
Christians rally support for a 17-year-old believer who says her Muslim parents have threatened to kill her. Should they believe her?
Fathima Rifqa Bary's story is quickly circulating on blogs and Christian media as proof of Islam's violent roots and the cost of following Christ. While the latter is true no matter who's doing the following, the former is disputable in the case of the Ohio teen who fled her home two weeks ago to meet up with Blake and Beverly Lorenz, Florida pastors she had met on Facebook.
"They [my parents] threatened to kill me," Bary says tearfully in a YouTube video (above) posted Tuesday. She goes on to explain the logic of honor killings: "They have to kill me. My blood is now hallal, which means that because I am now a Christian, I am from a Muslim background. It's an honor, they love God more than me. They have to do this."
Bary says she hitchhiked and rode a bus July 19 from New Albany, a Columbus suburb, to Orlando, calling the Lorenzes upon arriving. She stayed with the pastors of the nondenominational Global Revolution Church until Monday, when she was placed into emergency custody with the Dept. of Children and Families.
"We are doing everything we can to protect her," Blake Lorenz told The Orlando Sentinel. Beverly Lorenz told The Columbus Dispatch they hardly knew Bary but took her in and called an abuse hotline last Friday, which prompted a visit from state police. Blake Lorenz said that he's "very concerned that the system will let her down."
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Deciphering the Pennsylvania Gym Shooting
What George Sodini's journal reveals about women and violence.
It seems from his blog that George Sodini had a longstanding anger toward women. The isolated 48-year-old took a gun to a Pittsburgh-area gym last week and opened fire during a fitness class. Three women were killed and nine were injured before Sodini killed himself.
ABC News posted Sodini’s online journal, in which he writes about his hatred for his mother and brother, his frustration of “never having spent a weekend with a woman,” and executing a “plan” as early as November 2008.
“Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend,” he said. “This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded.”
Sodini also made a list of people and places that angered him. First on the list was the church he attended sporadically for 13 years, Tetelestai Church in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.
“Religion is a waste,” Sodini wrote on his blog of Alan “Rick” Knapp, pastor of Tetelestai, a nondenominational church focused on group Bible studies. “But this guy [Knapp] teaches (and convinced me) you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven.”
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Women Pastors Remain Scarce
The Assemblies of God elected a woman to one of the highest leadership positions in the denomination, but women pastors remain few and far between.
Members of the Assemblies of God elected the first woman to the denomination's Executive Presbytery. The Ledger reports that 18 percent of the pastors in the denomination are women (where they have long allowed women to lead), but women have not been in the AG's top leadership.
The General Council elected Beth Grant who is a missionary in India with her husband where they run a ministry for prostitutes and sex-trade workers.
Grant said between the 1970s and 1990s, the percentage of ordained women in the Assemblies of God had gone down, and concerned leaders in the Assemblies asked her to chair a task force on the problem.
...In her address to the General Council, Grant admonished the male pastors present to encourage girls and young women to consider the ministry.
"You can say to little girls in your churches, 'God's hand is on you. God is calling you,'" she said.
Nationally, just 8 percent of all congregations are led by women, according to the National Congregations Study released earlier this summer.
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The Charismatic Alberto Cutie
Time will tell if the celebrity priest lives up to Church of the Resurrection's lively tradition.
It's been about three months now since we heard of Alberto Cutie, the former Roman Catholic priest who was caught kissing his girlfriend on a Miami beach. No sooner was he removed from his post than he left the Catholic Church altogether for the local Episcopal diocese, which welcomed him with much fanfare and sent him to pastor a local church.
As I looked at photos of Cutie, I realized there was something very familiar about the background: I used to attend that church.
That was when I was a reporter for the Hollywood Sun-Tattler, a daily of about 35,000 circulation when I moved there in 1983 as a general assignment reporter. Hollywood is a few suburbs to the north of Biscayne Park, where sits the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, Father Cutie's digs.
Back then, the church is not the smallish place it is today. Many of us drove 20 or more miles to attend Resurrection because it was the only openly charismatic church in the diocese. Two others were somewhat into the charismatic renewal, but Resurrection was huge on the prophecies, healings, and speaking in tongues the renewal movement is known for. It also had a healthy emphasis on the Bible and weeknight home groups.
It also helped that the rector, Cliff Horvath, and his wife, Nedda, had been committed to the place for years and held to rock-solid evangelical theology. Cliff was a risk taker when it came to things charismatic, and he drew many like-minded people to sit under him. The parish flourished with involvements in everything from Cursillo to Life in the Spirit seminars, and what was a quiet Anglican worship style when I first arrived became a full-blown swinging-on-the-chandeliers (I exaggerate a tad) church by the time I left in 1986 for a job at The Houston Chronicle.
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Dancing Down the Aisle
What a viral wedding-dance video can teach about the meaning of marriage.
If you haven't seen "Jill and Kevin's Wedding Entrance," the video that's shown up all over the Internet since late last week, I recommend you watch it now. It's five minutes of pure joy as the St. Paul, Minnesota, couple and their wedding party break into a choreographed dance down the aisle to the tune of R&B singer Chris Brown's hit "Forever." As soon as I finished watching it, I immediately posted it to Facebook and sent it to my friends with only the comment, "Stop whatever you're doing and watch this right now!" In sum, I would say that I like it.
And I'm not the only one. So far it's the second-most-watched video on YouTube this month, with over 10 million views as of today. And only five of those are mine (so far).
From the first beats of "Forever," it's clear that this isn't going to be your standard wedding ceremony. Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's playful reinterpretation of the tradition re-injects life and, perhaps, meaning into the procession. As Sarah Kaufman writes for The Washington Post:
By dancing their entrances and sending that upbeat, physical energy right back out to their guests, the Peterson-Heinz wedding turns the rote behaviors into spontaneous reactions. Of course the guests watch attentively as the wedding party bobs in. You can bet not a single child had to be shushed at that point. This was no longer a display of bad posture and dyed-to-match pumps - it was an uplifting swell of celebration with a beat. The bride - unescorted - was and wasn't the center of attention. The true focus was on the unified, wordless but palpable emotions of her whole support system.
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Jimmy Carter Speaks Up on Women
The born-again President recently penned an op-ed condemning gender inequality in the name of religion.
Former President Jimmy Carter recently penned dramatic columns for The Guardian and The Age, leading some people to believe that he's leaving the Southern Baptist Convention for the first time.
So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief - confirmed in the holy scriptures - that we are all equal in the eyes of God.
But Carter actually made the decision to leave the SBC back in 2000, even though he did not have an official role in the 16-million-member denomination.
In his Guardian op-ed, titled "The words of God do not justify cruelty to women," the former President condemns gender inequality among all religions:
The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.
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Building Up Without Walls
Paula White steps up as senior pastor of the troubled Pentecostal megachurch.
Popular Pentecostal teacher Paula White announced two weeks ago that she is taking the helm of the megachurch that she and ex-husband Randy White founded 18 years ago.
Paula's willingness to become senior pastor of Without Walls International Church - a Tampa, Florida, nondenominational congregation that once boasted 20,000+ members - shows immense optimism on her part, because the question remains if Without Walls has a future, or if it should.
Without Walls' leaders have been accused of preaching a prosperity gospel that says God will bless believers by making them succeed in all things, including in finances. One article reports that Without Walls used to have over 23,000 members (including celebrities and world leaders) and received up to $40 million in donations annually. All the while, the Whites were allegedly purchasing expensive homes and buying or leasing costly cars and private jets. Last fall the church faced foreclosure by the Evangelical Christian Credit Union, and is rumored to be in serious debt.
In August 2007, the Whites announced they were divorcing after 18 years of marriage. Since then, church membership has dwindled: three services have been cut to two, and hits to Without Walls' website and Paula's personal site have dropped dramatically.
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Julia Duin: The Anna Syndrome
When hanging out at church only hinders single women.
Summertime is when weddings abound. No one longs for them more than the abundance of single women in our nation's churches. The dearth of marriage opportunities for most of these women calls forth certain coping strategies, one of which I'll call the "Anna syndrome" after the prophetess in Luke 2:36-38 who hung around the Jerusalem temple and happened to catch the baby Jesus on a good day.
Anna had been married at one point and as a widow was presumably living off her husband's estate. But he'd been dead many years and she had no children to provide for her, so perhaps she was quite poor. But instead of resorting to prostitution, which was the sole choice for women back then, she lingered about the temple and prayed.
I bring this Bible passage up because of memories that arose while helping a single female friend move. I got the job of organizing the piles of notes she had lying around. It struck me that so many were related to various church events geared to keeping members busy: retreats, visiting speakers, conferences, and Bible studies. This woman was in her 60s, poor and headed toward an old age on Social Security. She hung around church because it's the only family she has in the area.
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The Faith of Our Mothers
Surveying the countless women in history who lived audaciously for Christ, we have a tall order to fill.
This week is Vacation Bible School at our church, and my four-year-old daughter's first year in attendance. In a moment of questionable sanity, I volunteered to help out in the nursery, with my two-year-old and three-month-old sons in tow. Suffice it to say, it's been a very VBS-centric sort of week.
On the CD of VBS songs, there's a hip-hop rendition of "To God Be the Glory" that starts out with a funky beat and a suave voice chanting, Check it out now, to God be the glory! "I wonder what Fanny Crosby would think of this?" I asked my husband as we listened to the CD in the car on our way home from church.
"Why?" he asked.
"She wrote this song," I told him. "She wrote, like, a hundred hymns or something, I think. I read a biography about her when I was little."
When we got home, I looked up Fanny Crosby online and found that my memory was slightly off. Crosby actually wrote over 8,000 hymns during her lifetime, and is considered by some to be the most prolific hymnist in recorded history.
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Women's Ordination: A Crack in the Cathedral?
Female bishops outlawed, female priests tacitly allowed at last week’s Anglican gathering in Bedford, Texas.
After the Anglican Church in North America's (ACNA) momentous inaugural gathering, the verdict is out on whether the issue of women's ordination will inhibit the budding alliance from moving forward.
Last week more than 800 men and women gathered in Bedford, Texas, to elect an archbishop and ratify a constitution for the ACNA, a new alliance for churches that have left the Episcopal Church. Led by Robert Duncan, bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, the ACNA comprises more than 700 theologically conservative churches with about 70,000 parishioners.
There were many central theological beliefs that last week's attendees could agree on in their constitution and canon laws, including the full inspiration of the Bible, the centrality of baptism and Communion to church life, and the authority of the historic church creeds. But for the time being, ACNA leaders have not reached full agreement on female priests. At this time, each jurisdiction is free to decide whether or not to ordain women, but jurisdictions cannot force others to either accept women's ordination or to stop practicing it. Women bishops are forbidden.
"For those who believe the ordination of women to be a grave error, and for those who believe it scripturally justifiable . . . we should be in mission together until God sorts us out," said Duncan in last week's opening address. "It is not perfect, but it is enough."
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Redeeming Twitter
It doesn't have to be for shallow updates.
The U.S. State Department asks Twitter to delay maintenance plans for the weekend so Iranians voting in Friday's election can communicate instantly, and defeated candidate Mirhossein Mousavi uses Twitter to organize protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The FBI tracks Twitter to stop a crazed Oklahoma City man from turning the April 15 Tea Party Protests into what he warned would be a bloodbath. Beating even The New York Times, a ferry passenger on the Hudson River uses Twitter to deliver the first reports and pictures of U.S. Airways Flight #1549's emergency landing.
The instant firsthand information sent from someone's cell phone or computer to the Twitter stream is appealing to this wiki culture; nowadays, we trust mass accumulation of knowledge more than we do an authority figure's research. Besides, there's nothing quite like being able to talk directly to the guy who watched the school bus tip over 20 seconds ago.
As popular as Twitter is (reporting over 7 million users this winter, with a 1382 percent growth rate from 2008), many people still don't know about it, or dismiss its usefulness when they learn about it. (As guest editor of Newsweek last week, satirist Stephen Colbert poked fun at the three-year-old site by proposing the cover story, "Hey, Have You Heard About This Thing Called Twitter?") I happen to know a few folks who have enjoyed a chuckle on my behalf when I call myself a "Twit." It's not worth the risk of being labeled a rabid Twitter evangelist, so I usually refrain from giving my whole spiel to my skeptical friends (I limit it to 20 minutes).
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Schuller's Eldest Daughter to Lead Crystal Cathedral
Sheila Schuller Coleman to become her father's 'legs' in new role.
The Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times reported late yesterday that Sheila Schuller Coleman, eldest daughter of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, will become "co-leader" with her father of the Garden Grove, California, church. Coleman will replace senior interim pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz, who stood in for Robert A. Schuller after he parted ways with the Cathedral last fall over clashing visions for the ministry. "[Sheila] is taking over her brother's place," Donna Schuller, wife of Robert A., told The OC Register.
With a doctorate in business administration, Schuller Coleman, 58, is already deeply involved in running the 54-year-old ministry, as superintendent of Crystal Cathedral Schools, head of the church's family ministries, and program director for The Hour of Power. It looks like she has given at least one message on The Hour of Power, but does not preach regularly.
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Promise Keepers Invites Women to 2009 Gathering
Promise Keepers (PK), the evangelical ministry known for its focus on making men better fathers and husbands, is inviting women for the first time to its main 2009 conference, the ministry announced this week.
"This year we are calling men to bring the women in their lives," founder and chairman Bill McCartney announced Monday. "To celebrate our 20th year of ministry, we are called to do three things: honor our wives, daughters, and sisters, be a tangible blessing to the poor and oppressed, and embrace our Messianic Jewish brothers as our spiritual fathers in the faith."
"The time for Proverbs 31:31 is long overdue!" PK's website announces. "It's time to bring our wives and daughters so that we can honor them together. They need to stand side by side with us as warriors of the faith. Coach will issue a two-minute warning. Like the men of Issachar (1 Chronicles 12:32), we must understand our times and know what to do. It's time to get ready!"
At its height, PK held more than a dozen large conferences a year across the country and gathered hundreds of thousands of men on the National Mall in a 1997 event, but it has diminished in size and staff in recent years. The lone 2009 event will be held in Boulder, Colorado.
McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach, returned to the helm of the ministry in 2008 after resigning in 2003 to care for his ill wife. After he left Promise Keepers, he started "The Road to Jerusalem" ministry that focuses on Jews who believe Jesus is the Messiah.
Re: Evangelical Women in Public Life
Alisa Harris, editor at Patrol magazine, responded to the question we posed last Thursday, "Where are all the evangelical women in public life?" by pointing to prevalent beliefs about women and spirituality. Here's her helpful analysis:
That's what's interesting -- women have more influence inside the church than outside it. Why is this? My guess is that the evangelical church accepts women in the role of spiritual counselors because of the lingering Victorian idea that women are gentler, more spiritual and just all around more naturally virtuous than men. They're good at Bible studies and exhorting people to live good lives. . . . But (so the idea goes) they should do it privately, not publicly since women's sphere is in the home. Not in the pulpit and not in the public square. Also (so they say) women deal with emotions and not reason. It's a way of putting women on a pedestal but also limiting their role, their development, and especially men's development, too.
Harris then links to the recently published Pew Forum survey about women and spirituality, where women self-report that they are more likely than men to pray daily, have "absolutely certain belief in God or a universal spirit," say that religion is "very important" in daily life, have "absolutely certain belief in a personal God," and attend church regularly.
My only quibble with applying the Pew study to explain the prevalence of women leaders inside the church (but not outside of it) is that the study is trying to measure generalized spiritual beliefs, not distinctly Christian teachings. Many female Bible teachers in the church are hardly "lite" or "soft" in their tone, but can pack as much of a punch in their biblical exegesis as the next Reformed pastor. Anne Graham Lotz and Beth Moore come to mind as women who take doctrinal precision seriously. They stand as refreshingly counter-intuitive examples of those who are equally concerned with loving the Lord with their minds as they are with their hearts.
Priest Who Professed Islam Defrocked by Episcopal Church
An Episcopal priest who professed two years ago that she was also a practicing Muslim has been defrocked by the Episcopal Church.
Rhode Island Bishop Geralyn Wolf informed Ann Holmes Redding, who lives in Seattle, of the decision on Wednesday. Although she lives outside the diocese, Redding was ordained in Rhode Island and remained under Wolf's authority.
"Bishop Wolf found Dr. Redding to be a woman of utmost integrity and their conversations over the past two yeas have been open, honest and respectful," the diocese said in a statement. "However Bishop Wolf believes that a priest of the Church cannot be both a Christian and a Muslim."
The diocese learned in June 2007 about Redding's Muslim profession. It removed her from ministry temporarily and told her to spend a year on "discernment of her faith commitment."
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When Serving Makes You Sick
You grew up a pastor's daughter in Texas. What was your family's experience with burnout?
After my dad finished seminary, my younger brother and I were born, my mom had her tubes tied, and our family jumped into the world of ministry. We mainly pastored at smaller, rural churches in West Texas and at first, everything seemed perfect. [But] at my dad's third church, the politics started invading. I was only 9 at the time, but I could tell my normally involved, optimistic father was withdrawing. My mom wore her concern on her sleeve. I spied on a deacon's meeting and discovered the truth: Our church was full of a lot of mean and bitter people.
We moved to Dallas a few months later, and I'd like to say everything has been great since. But almost 13 years later, my parents are still deeply hurt from the last experience. They have only recently started attending a church. . . . Their faith in the local church has yet to be rekindled. That kind of brokenness breaks my heart every day. It also propels me forward with a passion I can't begin to explain.
How do men and women experience church burnout differently?
As I've extensively researched and interviewed thousands of church leaders and their families over the last two years, [I've found] there isn't much difference. Burnout doesn't play favorites.
Sometimes the force behind our burnout may differ, though. Genesis 3 mentions how, after the Fall, men will be slaves to the earth (work) and women will be ruled over by men. I see how many times men chase ministry like it's their work — and find their purpose in what they do. Ultimately, that leads to burnout. And generally speaking, many women fall to the approval of man. We are people pleasers by nature, finding our worth and affirmation of our calling by being a slave to man — not God.
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