Blogotional

Ron Edmondson lists "7 Lies We Believe As Pastors":

• I’ve got this
• That didn’t hurt
• I’m above that
• I’m in control
• I’m growing this church
• If I don’t do this no one will
• I’ve got to protect my people

Christian leadership is a tricky paradigm. It's really not different from good secular leadership save for the fact that as Christians we cannot pretend we are actually in charge - humility demands that we not. Leading people is more art than science. I think that people who are intellectually inclined to a profession like ministry, who love to study and read and deal with things is a logical and organized fashion are going to be naturally bad at leadership because people simply are not logical and organized.

I think that when well done, that leads to greater dependence on the Lord when we find ourselves in leadership situations. But too often when let our pride get in the way. Either that or we get worried about our paychecks.

I know that the best things I have done have been when I either knew because of the enormity of the project that I could not begin to get a hold of it all, or when something went haywire midstream and I was forced to let go. God has a way of making things work.

leadership letting go

Ron Edmondson:

As I see it, we often confuse critical thinking with negativity. I realize some people don’t know how to think critically without being negative, and some people can never celebrate the moment, but because of that, we often think of the word criticism and automatically take it personal. We develop turf wars over our areas. Fear keeps us from being open to critique. Critical thinking, however, when used correctly, is an effort to think towards making things better for the good of the organization and everyone on the team, not attacking a particular person or program.

He's right, but this is a problem that is far deeper than merely taking things too personally. We no longer teach people how to think in our schools or even in Christian education - we teach them how to have an opinion and express it, we teach them how to express their feelings, but to form an argument or break down a problem - not hardly.

We teach that faith is a matter of personal feeling - not a matter of rationality.

Students are no longer taught to criticize, they are taught to deconstruct.

If we cannot be objective about things outside of ourselves, learning to be objective about ourselves is virtually impossible.

That might even include objectivity about our sinful state.

criticism objectivity sin

This piece by Dale Coulter is tough sledding. It is mostly a defense on the Wesleyan tradtions in what he views as an onslaught from the Reformed tradition:

In 2005 Christian Smith and Melinda Denton published a study of American teenagers in which they offered a “conjecture” that the dominant religion among adolescents was “moralistic therapeutic deism” (MTD). Suggesting that the MTD creed was operative among mainline and evangelical Protestants as well as Catholics, they reduced it to three basic claims: 1) being a good and moral person is central to a happy life; 2) religion is mainly concerned with feeling good, happiness, or being at peace with oneself and thus has therapeutic benefits; 3) God establishes a moral order for the universe and intervenes to take care of human needs.

This study launched a small publishing enterprise in which evangelical writers employed MTD to critique evangelicalism. The criticisms came especially from the Reformed branch of evangelicalism with Michael Horton , Mark Driscoll and Gary Breshears , and others using MTD to talk about “Christless Christianity,” or writers like Collin Hansen employing it as a descriptor in his journey from Methodism to Calvinism.

[...]

I know that I’m getting into the weeds a little here, but my larger point is that there is a tradition of therapeutic Christianity that some versions of Reformed Christianity tend to equate with semi-Pelagianism, Gnosticism, or some modern spirituality because it does not fit with a strong equation of the gospel and justification by faith alone. Smith’s and Denton’s use of MTD to describe the modern adolescent approach to religion merely complicates any discussion of this historic tradition of a therapy of the soul. Wesleyans should resist the tendency of certain Reformed theologians to see the Wesleyan vision of Christianity, whether in its Methodist, Holiness, or Pentecostal versions, as part of the problem rather than an important contribution to the solution.

I'll but that but only to a point - the "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater" point. All traditions have something good to offer and we sold seek what is best from them. But we should also not overplay our hands. Coming from and being firmly rooted in the Reformed tradition, I do not doubt the contributions of the Wesleyan traditions, nor do I have a problem with acknowledging the shortcomings of my own.

None of Coulter's discussion acknowledges the fact that the MTD trend is real. I for one do not want to blame Wesleyans and I have one heck of a problems with a good bit of Pentecostalism - but that;s not the point. The problem is real and maybe, just maybe the solutions to the problem lie in the Reformed, or even the Lutheran or Catholic traditions. We have to have enough humility about ourselves and our theology to look at things honestly. Why do we try to defend systematic systems when we have a real problem and the solution might just lie in a synthesis of the systems. There is a bit of mental masturbation going on here.

We're sinners and nothing we can conceiove of will capture the whole truth. Get over it and deal with the issues.

humility problems solutions theology trends

The Jesuit Post looks at the decline of "Catholic Literary Culture." It's an interview with Dana Gioia who says:

There is no single cause for the decline of Catholic literary culture. The reason my essay was so long was that the situation is complicated. The decline resulted from half a dozen converging trends– both inside and outside the Church. Internally, there was the assimilation of educated Catholics into secular society, the lack of support for the arts by the Church, the confusion in the Catholic community following Vatican II, the decline of interest in culture by the Catholic media as it became increasingly obsessed by politics, and the failure of Catholic universities to celebrate and champion our literary heritage. These trends occurred as American intellectual life first grew more secular and then turned increasingly anti-Christian. Meanwhile in the broader society there was the steady erosion of print culture—the magazines, newspapers, and publishers which had traditionally supported serious writers. This erosion probably affected Catholic writers disproportionately since they appeared to be out of sync with both the cultural and commercial mainstream.

There is really two halves to that paragraph - the first part is church failings and the second is changes in the publishing industry. The second half is happening in the publishing industry generally and it is simply time to adapt - for everybody that wants to write. The first half is a different story.

Gioia succinctly captures what I would call "the evangelicalization" of the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic church is too large and too diverse to ever go full on Evangelical, but what Gioia is describing is the church, especially in America, moving in the direction of Evangelicalism. It is a reasonable description of all the problems that plague Evangelicalism writ small. Simply put, the focus is entirely too narrow to every have a hope of capturing culture.

I find is fascinating that the as the government pushed increasingly to reduce religion to a Sunday only thing, we have aided and abetted that effort. We focus on Sunday services at the exclusion of all else. We no longer have a church culture - we just have the church show that people can attend.

I worry that as society secularizes we will not have a sub-culture to retreat into - we will only have a show to watch.

church culture show

Tags: cartoons, catblogging, Aggie, Flash, LoganV

Andrew Martin in the London Telegraph:

I have been writing a series of essays for Radio 3 about national characteristics that have, for better or worse (usually worse), been dispensed with in the past 30 years. These include respect for manual labour, regarding Sunday as special, not being greedy about food, gentility… and the regarding of modesty or humility as significant virtues.

Of all of them, I now realise, the last is the most striking change. It is self-evident that modesty is not prized highly in this age of the selfie, Simon Cowell, the celebrity memoir, the first-person blog, and industry awards.

[...]

oastful character was a freak, who pointed up the virtues of the hero, as Falstaff does with Prince Hal. So Tintin had Captain Haddock; Winnie-the-Pooh had Tigger; and Ratty and Mole had self-described “handsome, popular and successful” Mr Toad, and his self-advertising motor car. I think of that vehicle when I note that, in my boyhood, personalised number plates were an extreme rarity; but there are now four million, many sported in combination with smoked-glass windows. The driver seems to be saying, “Don’t look at me” and “Look at me” at the same time, although clearly the latter message predominates.

I cannot help but reflect that this very real trend comes not only from the general absence of faith in out society, but that it is also reflective of where more modern religious expression has gone wrong.

For the sake of "the gospel," literature that is reflective of the gospel without blatantly stating it has gone away. We have substituted "The Four Spiritual Laws" for a life encompassing reality. We have placed theological statements ahead of character formation.

What makes an enterprise "Christians?" Is it just a matter of branding or is it not a matter of the character of the people engaged in it?

The world did not chase us out of relevance, we abandoned it.

Christian Character