A Television Decision

My wife and I made the leap today: We took our fancy DVR cable box back to the Time Warner Cable office here in Durham and pulled the plug on our television lives.

No more TV. No cable. And with the death of analog TV just around the corner, no networks either.

Why did we do this?

We didn't watch a whole lot of television. But we did like our Daily Show and Colbert Report. And there were a few series we liked to follow as well (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Scrubs). In the end, we thought we were giving too much of our lives to the idiot box and spending too much money doing it.

Sure, after a long and demanding day, it is sometimes nice to switch off your brain and lose yourself in a great show. But life's too short. There are too many great books to read, too many wonderful conversations to have, and too many great walks to go on. In the end, I bet no one looks back on his life from the Pearly Gates and says, "You know, I wish I had watched more TV." But I'm sure plenty of people wish they had experienced a little more of what life has to offer.

And besides, there's always the Internet.

[Update: On February 6th, CNN.com posted this fascinating article on the number of people who are getting their television content on the Internet. It's not hard to imagine a time when television as we know it will be a thing of the past, in the same way cell phones are steadily pushing landlines off the scene. Now if we can just figure out how to keep the Internet from taking over our lives in the same way TV does!]

Treading water...

My posting has slowed down a little bit the past couple of weeks. I've been inordinately busy, trying to balance my work at school and my ministry at my church. I'm working on a paper on conceptions of friendship in marriage, which has been absorbing all my spare moments. I'll get back up to speed with twice weekly posts when I am able.

In the mean time, you might check out this article by my friend, Eric Van Meter. Eric is a clergy colleague from Arkansas who serves the Wesley Foundation at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. He contributes to the United Methodist Reporter from time to time, including in this post where he reflects on turning 35 and passing out of the 'young adult' category. Eric's writing is generally funny and insightful. In this article, he offers a hopeful word about the future of the church we commonly serve.

Crunching the numbers

At times, it seems like the United Methodist Church has a 'numbers obsession.' The statistics are familiar: when the church was formed in 1968, it had well over 10 million members in the U.S.. Today, just 40 years later, the numbers have dropped to below 8 million - all in a time when the population of the United States itself has risen from 200 million to over 300 million people.

That's right. While the population of the country has risen by 50%, the membership of the church has dropped by 20%. By any measure, that is a failure.

But what does it mean?

In the past, I have written disparagingly about the church's obsession with numbers. I've never had a problem with focusing on thriving, growing churches. I've just worried that an obsession with numbers would lead us to offering cheap grace, with an over-attention to adding warm bodies to the pews while watering down the gospel in order to get them there.

The Igniting Ministry campaign has always seemed to confirm that fear to me; its intent is to market the church - to 'raise awareness' and hopefully increase numbers - but it does so by offering a message so nebulous that it is essentially meaningless: "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors." (I know and have read about the work Igniting Ministry does with target congregations and the training they have received, but that is a relatively small part of the way the campaign has affected the whole church. It is bad theology, and - I can't say this strongly enough - it is a crying shame that we have spent so much money on advertising that does not mention the name of Jesus Christ, all in the name of being sensitive to "spiritual seekers." I have no doubt that John Wesley does somersaults in his grave over this.)

Today I want to offer a mea culpa. I believe numbers are important, and I believe we need to focus on them. Two things have caused me to change my tune and openly embrace a focus on numerical growth in the church.

The first is that I've come to believe we have nothing to fear from the watered down message of marketing programs like Igniting Ministry. They don't work. Igniting Ministry has been around for years, and its results are as hollow as its message. UM Communications can offer press releases every time a new Barna study says that Igniting Ministry has increased the 'favorability' of the United Methodist 'brand' in the public at large, but that has done nothing to arrest our precipitous decline in numbers. Thus, I can only conclude that my fears about cheap grace were wrong. In our cultural climate, apparently even cheap grace doesn't draw a crowd.

The second point is really more important, and it's the subject of my new column in the United Methodist Reporter. In December, I was with Wesley Seminary's Lovett Weems at a conference in Washington D.C., and he presented on the importance of pastors and congregations that are serious about their numerical growth. The core of Lovett's message to us that day can be found in this article. It really boils down to this: Jesus called us to make disciples, and the church in Acts exhibited remarkable growth by boldly proclaiming the gospel of Christ. As the inheritors of that apostolic ministry, we are called to do the same.

I've got to admit that this has really shaped my thinking about my own ministry. The testimony of the Scripture is that, when the true gospel is proclaimed, people will respond.

Might this be a litmus test for faithful ministry?

Obama: Our first Gen-X President

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as our nation's 44th president. Born on August 4, 1961, he's just 47 years old. He will be the first African-American president in the history of the U.S., the significance of which is touched on poignantly by Bishop Woodie White in his annual birthday letter to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my new United Methodist Reporter column, I ask the question, "Is Obama our first Gen-X president?" I believe the answer to that question is yes. It is true that in I have written about my skepticism of considering Obama a full X'er in the past - both here and here. But I've changed my mind.

In one sense, the Baby Boomer generation is a demographic reality. Between 1946 and 1964, the number of live births per 1,000 people in the U.S. population spiked. The U.S. Census Bureau considers those years to be the parameters on the Baby Boomers for that very reason.

But in another sense, a generation is a cultural concept that does not bend readily to hard statistical parameters. As I have argued elsewhere, a generation is ultimately defined by shared experience. And in that sense, Obama is very much a Gen X'er.

For instance, the Boomer experience is defined in so many ways by the period from the mid-1950s through the 1960s: in national politics from JFK (the dashing hero) to Nixon (the dark villain), in the Civil Rights struggle from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 'revolutions' from music styles to attitudes toward sex and gender, with all of it overshadowed by the geo-political tensions associated with the struggle against communism - the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and (most pointedly for the Boomers' enduring generational personality) Vietnam.

Obama is too young to have been affected firsthand by any of these Boomer experiences. Instead, his personality was shaped by a specifically Generation X childhood: growing up in an era of increased globalization, the shrinking world (in terms of travel, education, and religious pluralism, in addition to the economy), the rapid advance in communications technologies (cable television, evolution of the telephone, various audio and video recording devices, and the personal computer), the race and gender issues of a post-Civil Rights and post-sexual revolution period, and the reality of increased instances of divorce and broken homes, families with two parents working outside the home, and the image of the 'latchkey kid.' He was not, of course, affected by all of these in equal measure. Some of the features of Gen X upbringing were more a fixture in the 1980s (when I mostly grew up) than the 1970s (when Obama mostly grew up). But his life was touched by many of them. And in my book, that makes him an X'er.

Two points to note about this, and both of them have to do with the way Obama himself is changing the definition of Generation X. The first is the date. Noted Gen-X author Jeff Gordinier suggests in X Saves the World that Generation X should be dated from around 1961 because of the birthdates of Slackers filmmaker Richard Linklater (b.1960) and novelist Douglas Coupland (b. 1961). I've always thought Coupland deserved front rank in terms of who defines Generation X because he wrote the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that firmly entrenched the term in pop culture. With Obama's birthdate also in 1961, it seems reasonable to consider the question of Generation X's beginning date settled.

The second point is around how Obama is trying to give a certain characteristic Gen X'ers share a greater prominence. If one of the iconic images of Baby Boomers is that of 1960's protest (a mass event involving lots of angry young people chanting things), then the iconic image of Generation X has to be what I am doing right now: sitting alone in my living room, trying to make a difference but doing so in a more individual and less 'partisan' manner. In lots of ways, it seems like Gen X'ers are less partisan people in general, and the technological isolation that we experience has made us hungry for community (though in more localized and less 'mass' ways than our predecessors). That, in my mind, is a lot of what Obama represents. We've all heard his message about 'change,' and I usually take that to be transcending the partisan rancor of his Boomer predecessors. If you haven't read his memoir - Dreams from My Father - you should. It is a book about a deeply personal journey whose early life was shaped by many of the forces that X'ers have typically struggled with, and I would argue that it is also a book about searching for community. It's Gen X through and through.

Will he be up to the task? No way to tell for sure, but I suspect he will be. E.J. Dionne and David Brooks were on NPR yesterday evening talking about meeting with him recently, and both the liberal Dionne and the conservative Brooks spoke in very complementary terms about his demeanor, knowledge of issues, and approach to meeting with people from both sides of the aisle.

Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009)

In an era where 'public theology' is not nearly so prominent as it was a few decades ago, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus' voice still carries weight. It did, that is, until his death from complications associated with cancer on January 8th.

From his activity in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, to his opposition to abortion following Roe v. Wade, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1990 (which he saw as the natural evolution of the commitment to reformation of his native Lutheranism), to the creation of his influential journal, First Things, Neuhaus' career showed an unrelenting desire to pursue the truth as he saw it and an unflinching willingness to debate people and positions with which he disagreed.

Neuhaus' reputation around a place like Duke Divinity School, where I spend most of my time these days, is ambiguous. My sense is that his deep love for the church and his willingness to fight hard for moral issues is admired by many here. But Neuhaus' 'neoconservatism' and his belief in the ability of the government of a liberal democratic nation-state to achieve real goods (what one might even call 'political realism' in the Niebuhrian mold) puts him at odds with many prominent theologians here. It's a complicated issue, but let's just say that Neuhaus and many Duke professors would differ on their interpretation of Romans 13.

Still, Neuhaus was nothing if not intellectually challenging, and his death will leave a void that First Things will be hard pressed to fill without him. Neuhaus' influence and the respect with which he was held in American culture is indicated by the wide variety of obituaries that have been penned for him by more than just newspaper editorial staffs. Two of the best are those from Newsweek's George Weigel and the New York Times' David Brooks. A letter announcing Neuhaus' death by Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, can be found here.

[Update: Timothy George of Christianity Today has written a good essay on Neuhaus that can be found here.]

Yoder on the Church

I'm serving as a graduate assistant in a Christian Ethics course this semester, and the instructor (Dean Sam Wells) has got perhaps the best reading list I've ever seen for a survey course. It's going to be a great semester.

One of the theologians we'll be dipping into is John Howard Yoder, who I studied in a seminar with Stanley Hauerwas a couple of summers ago. [If you'd like to read Hauerwas' eulogy to Yoder after his death in First Things, click here.] I've been pulling my Yoder texts of the shelf, and it hasn't taken me long to remember why I love reading him so much - I don't know of another theologian who challenges me down to my core while filling me with an almost inexpressible hope at the same time.

If you ever want to be reminded why the church is centrally important to history, read Yoder. Describing the societal temptation toward Constantinianism in The Original Revolution, he writes:

"All [the] efforts to defend the cause of the church before the bar of secular analysis have in common the same basic axiom. This is then what is really important; the true meaning of history, the true locus of salvation, is in the cosmos and not in the church. Then what God is really doing He is doing through the framework of society as a whole and not in the Christian community" (p.146).

As Yoder could point out with an insight few others have possessed, the Constantinian tendency we all have is exactly that we place our trust in Caesar rather than in Christ, in the governments of nation-states rather than in the church. After all, governments have power while the church is weak - right? Yoder counters:

"Why then is it reasonable that we should continue to obey in a world which we do not control? Because that is the shape of the work of Christ" (p.155).

To embrace his ecclesiology is madness, on the surface of things. But it is also to place one's full faith that Jesus is who he says he is, and that God's promises will surely be brought to fulfillment. There is hope in this, brothers and sisters, and Yoder gives it to you:

"We are not marching to Zion because we think that by our own momentum we can get there. But that is still where we are going. We are marching to Zion because, when God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there" (p.159).

Those are beautiful words. And they're words of hope.

Veni, Domine Iesu!

God's best work...

Is the authority of the clergy in crisis?

Are pastors as respected in society as they once were?

During the fall semester, I served as a graduate assistant for a course in American church history taught by Prof. Grant Wacker here at Duke. One of our main course texts was Brooks Holifield's God's Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America. Holifield takes up these questions, in part by suggesting that the clergy of every era in American history have always viewed their power and authority as on the wane.

Holifield goes back to the earliest European clergy who came to this continent - first Catholic missionary priests and then Puritan congregationalist ministers in New England and Anglican priests in Virginia. In the colonial era, it is true that clergy held all sorts of authority that seems strange to us today. They acted as judges, drafted legislation, served as de facto physicians, and were the most widely-read authors. When institutions of higher education like Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary were founded, clergy served as both presidents and professors for generations.

As American society developed and became more complex, the clergy gradually lost their dominance in all these areas. Holifield points out that as the professions developed and as the high education level of the clergy was matched by people pursuing other careers, it became less necessary to have clergy serve so many functions in society. (And interestingly, the clergy in some populist traditions like Methodists and Baptists in the early 19th century actually eschewed education.)

But here's the catch - and this is what I write about in my new Reporter column - Holifield argues that all these arenas of authority outside of the church have always been only peripheral to the clergy's true authority. And that authority is the ministry of the church: preaching the word of God, celebrating the sacraments, engaging in the ministry of pastoral care, and leading & equipping the people of God for ministry in the world.

I find Holifield's thesis compelling, and here's why: All too often, we are tempted to think that God has abandoned the church in order to do his work in more exciting venues. Whether it is politics, non-profit work, or social advocacy, the tendency is to think there has always got to be some exciting new area that aspiring clergy should gravitate toward. And in that milieu, the church becomes a 'fall back' option for those who can't do something 'sexier.'

But the reality is just the opposite. God's best work really is done through the church. We only know what words like justice, compassion, reconciliation, and love mean because we learn them through the grammar of the faith. And it is a grammar that is taught by the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. "By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us" (1 John 3:16, NKJV). The church is the steward of God's mysteries, and it is the community of God's own people. It is the very vehicle of God's salvation in the world!

As a pastor myself, I can tell you that ordained ministry in the church truly is an exciting vocation. Is it hard? Sure, it can be. But when one begins to gain the skills necessary for ministry (courage, patience, gentleness, among others) and allows oneself to be led by the Holy Spirit, fruits can be borne to which nothing else can compare. Fruits that include seeing glimpses of the coming Kingdom of God.

Why would the clergy need any other authority than that?

Sex, marriage, and friendship

Gavin Richardson is a well-known Methoblogger through his blog, Hit the Back Button to Move Forward. Gavin has also recently written an insightful piece in the United Methodist Reporter entitled, "'Sex challenge' misses the mark."

Ed Young, pastor of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX, drew a ton of publicity recently from challenging the members of his megachurch to have sex everyday for a week as a way to deepen their intimacy with God and one another (and presumably, to show that the church embraces a healthy sexuality). Gavin's op-ed piece criticizes the sex challenge on one level for the media hoopla it generated (and the vast oversimplification required to communicate it to the press).

But, drawing on his years of experience as a youth minister, Gavin criticizes the sex challenge on a deeper level as well. He argues that emphasizing the sexual relationship in marriage as the basis for the marital relationship itself is misguided. It plays into the consumerist views of the larger culture toward sex and sexuality. (Note the common cultural message: Sex is something you've got to 'get' in order to make yourself happy and fulfilled. If you are not having it at a certain frequency and a certain level of excitement, then that's a sign there is something wrong with you or wrong with your relationship.) And it turns the focus of happiness and fulfillment to the individual's perceived wants and needs instead of to the true, intended mutuality of marriage.

Gavin makes a countercultural move in arguing that the church should be teaching that marriage is - at its most fundamental level - about friendship. It isn't that sex is not important; it surely is. But friendship is a deeper, fuller, and more holistic expression of God's intention for marriage. Gavin makes some great points about how teaching about celibacy, sexual intimacy, and marriage to youth is much more constructive when these issues are approached from the standpoint of marital relationships as friendships in their most fundamental sense.

Clearly, our culture has skewed and unhealthy views of sex and sexuality. The church isn't often good at dealing with those, probably because of our historic ambivalence about sex. And it is true that our concupiscence often finds its most ravenous expressions in our sexuality. Sex is a good gift of God when received and used in the proper ways, however, and the church should be able to talk and teach about that. I think Gavin's critique is suggesting that Ed Young's approach plays into the negative ways sexuality is framed in the culture. We can talk about sex in healthy ways, but to do so it must be discussed within a larger relational framework (of which it is only a part).

I've heard Stanley Hauerwas remark on more than one occasion that the marriage relationship is really about learning how to be friends with another person. I'm actually working on a paper right now about how Christian friendship finds its paradigmatic expression in the marriage bond. So I think Gavin is on to something, and I'm glad his youth have a pastor with such a holistic view of healthy marriages.