Tag Archives: Spirituality

Commentary

Wes Widner’s suggestions for improving the effectiveness of church

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Here’s a blog post from Reason to Stand. In it, Wes Widner examines some problems with the way churches operate today, and makes some recommendations for improvement.

Excerpt:

In the first place, a hierarchical system where non-preachers are viewed as less spiritual, where the gift of preaching is exalted above all other gifts is plainly against many passages found in scripture including Jesus’s own admonition that his own disciples not follow the pattern of the world in setting up hierarchical “power over” systems.

Secondly I would point to the perpetual spiritual immaturity that is fostered and festering in most churches (particularly Southern Baptist and Methodist churches as those are the ones I have the most experience in). When people are told that rigorous study of the word of God is limited to an elite few “chosen” men the end result is a logical abdication of serious study on the part of the “average” churchgoer. This is one of the reasons I believe areas such as apologetics have historically had such a hard time making inroads into the local church because most pastors feel threatened by the prospect of their congregation actually being educated and able (empowered?) to ask serious questions. Sadly it doesn’t have to be like this and I’ll explain in my third line of reasoning below.

Finally, I believe that the system we’ve manufactured (sure, as early as 300AD, but early errors are still errors) and have come to accept as an unquestionable fact is harmful to the Body of Christ is because it leads directly to pastors either being burned out or becoming dictators (I believe in some cases merely for self-preservation). Nowhere in Scripture are we presented with a description of a man who is supposed to shoulder the load that we expect the average “professional” pastor to carry. Nowhere in Scripture are we told that one man in a local group of believers is in charge of visiting the sick, ministering to all the members, responsible for the bulk of spiritual instruction, etc.

J.P. Moreland also recommends having a team of pastors instead of just one main pastor in his book “Love Your God With All Your Mind”, or LYGWYM, for short.

I chose this post to link to because I’ve experienced the problems he talks about here personally. But I’ve also noticed some practices I liked while listening to sermons online. One thing I like about Mark Driscoll is that he gives the sermon then takes questions from the audience. I also like Wayne Grudem because he preaches in a normal voice and isn’t afraid to talk about politics and other serious issues. And I like it when William Lane Craig surveys all points of view on interesting topics when he teaches Sunday school.

And I have some ideas of my own, too. Speaking as a man, I learn better when things are presented to me as an overview of conflicting viewpoints. I get bored when only one point of view is presented. It makes me sleepy. I like to fight, so that would be my recommendation to improve church – more apologetics, more debates and more disagreements. And I think having events where the church hosts debates for the public to attend at the local university is also good.

Commentary

Friday night links: the origin of evil, spirituality vs. theology

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The origin of evil, from Wes at Reason to Stand.

Excerpt:

There is a big difference between 1a) God choosing to actualize (or create) a world where in evil is possible and 1b) further choosing to sustain it’s order in spite of the free choice to sin and perform evil by free (in a limited capacity) causal agents and 2) God’s being the direct cause of all that happens in the world such that all things that happen do so as a direct result of his will.

Religion and spirituality, from Alisha at Far Above Rubies.

Excerpt:

I understand the folks who don’t want to be called “religious” since it often has negative connotations tied to the word. Others, though, are “spiritual” simply because they don’t want to commit to any one faith tradition. They want it all. The problem with this I’ve found, is to everything in practice becomes very little, if nothing. I once dated a guy in college who I labeled a “Christian-Muslim-Buddhist-Everything”. Although he was raised Baptist, he had fallen away from any church, and chose to cherry-pick through what he deemed the best of them all. And the strange thing is, although he thought Jesus was awesome, he never actually read the Gospels. He respected the Koran, but never attended a mosque or read more than a few Hadiths. While trying to claim it all, he did nothing and believed very little. Needless to say, the relationship fizzled out pretty quickly.

Happy Friday!

Fine, if you want to read something funny, then Drew has this post (with original drawings) from his younger brother.

News

Pew survey shows that evangelical Christian Republicans are the most rational

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The Pew Research survey is here.

They are trying to see which groups believe in superstitions and new age mysticism.

Here are the parts that I found interesting:

Click for full image.

Click for full image.

Notice the numbers for Republicans vs Democrats, conservatives vs. liberals, and church-attending vs non church-attending. The least superstitious people are conservative evangelical Republicans, while the most superstitious people are Democrat liberals who don’t attend church. I think there is something to be learned from that. It’s consistent with the results of a Gallup survey that showed that evangelical Christians are the most rational people on the planet.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal article about the Gallup survey entitled “Look Who’s Irrational Now“.

Excerpt:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity.

[…]The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Listen to William Lane Craig commenting on the Pew Research survey on the latest episode of the radio show Issues, Etc. with Todd Wilken.

Here is the MP3 file, if you don’t want to click through.