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An extraordinary event occurred this past Friday, though its significance is likely to go unnoticed. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, various medical experts and industry leaders gathered at the White House to announce to the nation various steps being taken collectively to address the virus’ looming threat.

This was an exceedingly rare instance of normally competing worlds agreeing to work together on a common problem for the common good. I was heartened by it.

Generally, in today’s economic climate, multinational corporations have little loyalty to the nations within which they operate. In an era of rampant financialization, the only loyalty is to the shareholder, not the country or its people.

Continue reading “Love in the Time of COVID-19”

As if beating a dead horse, I must yet again propose this simple truism – that the mainline church today is far more influenced by the secular culture than the other way around. And to make matters worse, they don’t seem to recognize it.

Perhaps the greatest fallout from this is the loss of “fellowship,” the sense of belonging, of being inextricably bound to one another, of being “in Christ.”

The surrounding culture has largely jettisoned this rather quaint notion, to disastrous result. Yet despite its pronounced effect, it remains largely unnoticed.

One of the root causes is the hyper-politicization of every aspect of modern life. One must choose sides. You’re either with us or against us. It’s Manichean, black or white.

Continue reading “Abstract Me-ism”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to say a prayer to change the weather. For some reason it’s a popular joke, implying that pastors have some special pipeline to God. More to the point, it betrays a shared sense that pastors are holy creatures, closer to God and immune to sinful pressures.

Now, I do think pastors should be held to a higher standard and that they should strive for holiness. But I also know every single one of them is a sinner. It’s biblical, after all, as well as confessional, doctrinal, and in accord with lived experience. We all fall short of the glory of God. No news flash there.

Yet some pastors seem to believe their own “press releases,” so to speak. The temptation is to assume that because you serve a religious community, you’re somehow immune to non-religious influences.

Continue reading “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”

Recently I was watching a YouTube interview with one of my favorite columnists who offered a startling observation. Except for maybe one or two, he said, most columnists avoid placing current events in the context of history. As a historian he always does.

For some reason this struck me, even though we live in an age that takes pride in avoiding history, if not rejecting it altogether. You might say it’s built into our DNA.

Though this trend has accelerated over the last 50-60 years, its roots go back at least as far as the Enlightenment some 400 years ago. Many would date it 100 years before that.

Continue reading “Making It All Up”

Pastoring a UCC church in Hawaii years ago, Tony Robinson convened an “interfaith dialogue” that included representatives from several of the world’s major religions. He discovered that while the other participants had no trouble articulating what their respective faiths stood for, the UCCers were at a loss, unable to define what they believed about their own.

This led Robinson to conclude that mainline Protestant churches tend to know what they’re against, just not what they’re for!

Then again, as with so much of mainline Protestantism, the origins of this peculiar malady are rooted in secular, elite opinion. Of course.

Continue reading “The Piety of Disenchantment”

Don’t Go There

A basic fact of human nature is that we are meaning-seeking creatures. Amid the confusion and uncertainty of everyday life, human beings require an overarching story, a narrative, that grounds us in reality and helps us make sense of life as well as death.

In his critically acclaimed book from 2017, The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray, British journalist and author, explains how Europe and, by inference, the rest of the Western world lost touch with its defining story, the Judeo-Christian story, which both birthed the West and gave it meaning.  

Now in its disquieting absence is revealed a malaise, an “existential tiredness.”

Continue reading “In Search of a Story”

One of the things I discovered during my years of ordained ministry is that the average person in the pews possesses enormous wisdom. I also discovered that many of my colleagues think the opposite.

Almost without exception, my experience is that if you are open with people and give them the facts, they almost always make the right decision.

So why do so many of my colleagues seem to disagree with this simple premise? Perhaps it’s because so many, flush with the latest speculative theories advanced by their seminary professors, patronizingly assume the average person in the pews lacks the requisite sophistication to judge rightly.

Continue reading “I Win, You Lose”

I was amazed, though probably shouldn’t have been, upon learning that a candidate for ordination in one of the major historic mainline churches today is required to answer the following question: “What is your understanding of racism and Euro-American privilege”?

What this has to do with the gospel is not immediately apparent. Neither racism nor Euro-American privilege fit into biblical or Christian categories. In fact, as I hope to establish, they’re alien to the gospel. The reason is that they come mostly from secular academia and are intended for purposes incompatible with the Christian witness.

One can see this incompatibility in the implicit rejection of at least two of Judeo-Christian tradition’s most foundational tenets: the belief in heaven and the doctrine of Original Sin.

Continue reading “Playing with Fire”

I was settling into the pew with apprehension. The guest preacher for the day was someone who a few years back had indignantly critiqued an ecumenical service my colleagues and I had held after the shooting of five police officers in Dallas, a service intended to honor their sacrifice and mourn their tragic deaths.

The preacher and his wife, both vocal supporters of the civil rights movement, complained that the service failed to account for the problem blacks have with law enforcement. This was, be it noted, at the height of the Black Lives Matter controversy.

That this issue was unrelated to the purpose of the service was, apparently, beside the point.

Continue reading “Glory Days Redux”

T.S. Eliot famously made the point, though he was hardly the first. One could go back to the New Testament reference to the “body of Christ,” Paul’s metaphor for the church.

Like the human body, the church has a head, hands, and all the other varied parts that together enable it to function as it should. There are those called to preach, some to evangelize, others to care for the poor and needy, and still others tasked with whatever the community requires, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

No one role is considered more important than another. Each must work together for the church to succeed in its godly mission. The sum, in other words, is greater than its constituent parts.

Everyone must accept his or her role. If the hand tries to be the head, problems arise. God has assigned to each of us specific gifts at birth. Using them to accord with God’s will is perhaps life’s greatest undertaking.

Continue reading “Luxury Beliefs”