Articles – Page 37 – Religion Online

Korean Americans Reshape their Churches

Book Review:

God's New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on Campus.

By Rebecca Y. Kim. New York University Press, 192 pp.

Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life.

By Elaine Howard Ecklund. Oxford University Press, 222 pp.

Among all the newer arrivals on the American religious scene, Korean immigrants are the champion church builders. A century after the first Koreans arrived in the newly annexed territory of Hawaii, their followers and descendants had established 3,000 congregations across the 50 states--one for about every 350 members of their community. (That figure compares with one congregation for every 850 persons in the population at large, a ratio that itself reflects a heavily churched society.)

Overwhelmingly Christian, for the most part evangelically inclined Protestants, Korean immigrants are avid churchgoers. Predominantly highly educated with middle-class occupations, they have the material and intellectual resources to found and support their own institutions.

But what about their children? Twenty years ago, Korean American church leaders began to worry about a "silent exodus" of the second generation, who seemed to be disappearing out the back door of their parents" churches on their way to college. Many worried that their children were abandoning the faith. Those who listened to the youth heard their particular concerns, which they quietly expressed so as not to dishonor their elders.

Members of the second generation were not fluent in the parents' native tongue, but at their parents' churches the pastors typically spoke English with a thick accent and without awareness of American idioms (if they spoke English it at all). The second generation was raised in a country whose pervasive popular music idolized guitars and drums and whose culture elevated spiritual authenticity over institutional fidelity, but their fathers got into somber suits to go to church and took election to church office extremely seriously. Younger Korean Christians complained that their parents were more concerned that they honor Korean culture and get good grades than that they follow the Christian faith.

Eventually, in college and afterward, masses of Korean American youth enthusiastically embraced Christian faith--but on their own terms. They did so by developing a distinctive style of praise music and organizing de facto congregations, called English-language worship services. Today, when Korean American Christian fellowship groups are highly visible on elite college campuses and congregations of English-speaking Korean American young adults abound, there is less talk of an exodus. Now the question, capably addressed by Elaine Howard Ecklund and Rebecca Y. Kim, is not whether but how second-generation Korean Americans (SGKAs, in Kim's formulation) will express their Christian commitment. (These books are revised sociology dissertations, and it is necessary for me to record that I am thanked by both authors.)

Kim looks at SGKAs who are students at one highly selective public university and asks why, given their proficiency in English, impressive educational credentials earned in interracial high schools, and rosy occupational prospects--the attributes that make them "whiz kids" or a "model minority" in the eyes of some--they so often prefer to worship with their own kind. They choose what Kim dubs the "Korean American Mission for Christ" over the available multiracial campus fellowships.

Given the critical mass of Asian Americans on this particular campus (where they make up 40 percent of the student body), they can easily segregate themselves, and a cynic might observe that they are simply acting like other Americans, the great majority of whom worship in effectively segregated churches. But neither Kim nor the more reflective of her subjects are content with such an answer, which defies the universalistic creed they embrace and the evangelistic goals that they somewhat abashedly profess. Kim is also not satisfied with the answer they do tend to give: that it's more "comfortable" for them that way.

The common cultural experience of SGKAs binds them together and divides them from other Christian students (especially the whites whose socioeconomic privileges they tend to share but whose different backgrounds SGKAs tire of having to take into account). "With each other, SGKAs can complain about their Korean parents, crack jokes using certain Korean terms, and swap stories about what it was like growing up in Korean churches."

Other elaborations on comfort point more clearly to racial experiences that SGKAs would just as soon not recount, ranging from crude taunts ("Why are your eyes so small?") to stereotyped expectations (that they are "all kung fu masters") based simply on perceived physical difference.

Writing with wisdom and authority that must stem from her personal experience as a self-described 1.5-generation Korean American as well as from her assiduous studies, Kim recognizes that the comfort account has both ethnic and racial aspects and that the religious segregation it produces goes two ways. It is both voluntary and imposed. It is pervasive, but it generates an uneasy conscience. It is persistent, but it can take forms that do not preclude interethnic cooperation. Packed with information on historical context and deeply informed by a growing literature, God's New Whiz Kids? is both first-rate sociology and essential reading for church leaders who want to ready themselves for an ethnically and racially complex future.

Ecklund's study takes up where Kim's leaves off with the church lives of SGKAs after they finish college and have embarked on careers and the formation of families. Intensely aware of, but disturbed by, the pattern of self-segregation among young Korean American evangelicals, Ecklund is less interested in understanding the roots of their religious behavior than in analyzing its consequences for American civic life. Ecklund wanted to find out what notion of citizenship is fostered in these churches. Her hope is that Korean American evangelicals might push American evangelicalism in a progressive, social justice-oriented direction

To ferret out what the ethnic church means for civic life, Ecklund knew that she needed a point of comparison. So she conducted her research at two sites, one of them a more or less typical second-generation congregation (which she calls "Grace") that meets in the same building as its parent Korean immigrant congregation, and the other ("Manna") a predominantly Asian American but remarkably multiethnic congregation that meets in a building owned by an African-American congregation. All but three of the regulars at Grace (Ecklund was one of only two whites) were Korean, whereas Manna had Chinese and Korean leaders and numerous white, black and Latino members scattered among its Asian majority. To make sure that she wasn't looking just at two outlier cases, Ecklund conducted additional telephone interviews with other Korean Americans across the country, equally divided between those who attend monoethnic churches and those who attend multiethnic churches.

Ecklund is convinced that monoethnic churches are civically unhealthy. The strongest evidence on that point appears on the first page of her book, where "Bill," a member of Grace, talks about his identity as a Christian and an American and about his volunteer work, through the church, at a local shelter for disadvantaged teens. He confesses that he cannot relate well to many of those his group serves at the shelter because they are poor blacks. Ecklund sees this limitation on Bill's part as due to the way Grace reinforces his Korean American identity without bringing it to consciousness. The homogeneous experience at Grace normalizes Bill's identity so that he can think of himself as a plain "American" and "Christian" in contrast to others who are implicitly lesser. How much better to be a member of a church that, following a different "model of civic life," has to confront its internal diversity. In People of the Dream, reviewed in these pages last year, Michael Emerson, one of Ecklund's mentors, extols multiracial churches for this reason.

At this point Ecklund's account gets murky. She thinks that for Korean Americans to be the progressive force in evangelicalism that they have the potential to be, they must not simply step outside their comfort zone into heterogeneous churches but must identify (and worship) with other nonwhites, especially with African Americans. For many reasons, this is a difficult recommendation.

First, it is highly unrealistic. Although Manna appears to be majority nonwhite, we do not know the ethnic mix of the churches of the half of her subjects that she interviewed by phone. Were they pan-Asian churches? A mix of whites and Asians? Asian-white-Hispanic mixtures? From what we know about race and religion in America, it is exceedingly unlikely that the churches had a substantial number of African-American members.

Second, the category "nonwhite" presupposes that Korean Americans will, into the indefinite future, be categorized alongside African Americans as nonwhites. This assumption ignores the possibility that a "beige America" is emerging from the high rates of Asian-white intermarriage and the self-classification of many Hispanics as "white."

Third, Ecklund's vision of nonwhite solidarity has no place for progressive whites (like herself). It's possible that an increasing white presence in Asian churches (and vice versa) might have some leavening effect on both Asians' and whites' empathetic capacities. By insisting that the rigid color line that has historically poisoned relations between European Americans and African Americans will do the same with respect to Asians and whites, Ecklund forecloses too many alternative futures.

Still, Ecklund raises many of the right questions that are left to be explored at the end of Kim's less ambitious study. She quotes extensively from interviews, allowing the reader to hear the diverse voices of SGKAs on what being Korean, Christian and "good Americans" means" even when what they say does not neatly fit her theories. She makes two helpful distinctions in her discussion of models for civic life. One is between the kind of Grace-sponsored service activity that does nothing to open the social world of people like Bill, on the one hand, and the pattern typical of Manna, on the other, where members individually choose volunteer activities that do not put them, as members of one solidary group, in the position of being benefactors to another group with whom they have no other contact. Her other distinction is between such volunteer civic activities, which many SGKAs willingly participate in, and the political activities that most still shun.

Above all, Ecklund does not patronize her subjects by asking only under what circumstances the dominant society will accept them. Instead she engages them in the question of how they can change the society for the better.

Radical Middle

Book Review:

The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love. By Matthew Miller: Public Affairs, 283 pp.

"Suppose I told you that for just two cents on the national dollar we could have a country where everyone had health insurance, every full-time worker earned a living wage, every poor child had a great teacher in a fixed-up school, and politicians spent their time with average Americans because they no longer had to grovel to wealthy donors?" So begins Matthew Miller’s book. A journalist, radio commentator, former Clinton staffer and onetime businessman, Miller intends to confound the conventional left-vs.-right framing of American politics.

Combining a social conscience with political pragmatism, he advocates using "‘conservative’ means (like tax subsidies and vouchers) to reach these seemingly ‘liberal’ goals." Programs like universal health care and a guaranteed living wage are so within reach that, if they were implemented in the way Miller suggests, "government would he smaller than it was when Ronald Reagan was president."

In today’s context, Miller’s proposals seem audacious. Universal health coverage would be provided through community-rated private insurance plans financed by income tax credits (with a negative income tax for the poor). Insurers would be prevented from "cherry picking" only the healthiest people. Miller’s plan is similar to plans proposed by the first Bush administration in 1992 and by presidential candidate Bill Bradley in 2000. It would cost $80 billion.

Schools would be improved primarily by making inner-city teaching vastly more financially attractive to the very best college graduates. Pupils in schools in dire need of a fundamental overhaul would be offered vouchers to be used at private schools, including religious ones. The plan for better schools would need $52 billion, plus the willingness of unions to streamline the dismissal of incompetent teachers.

A living wage -- $9 per hour -- would be provided through a sliding scale of subsidies to employers of the lowest-wage workers. (Miller follows the advice of sympathetic economists and his own businessman’s instincts to argue that raising the statutory minimum wage to an actual living wage would cost too many jobs.) Uncle Sam’s wage guarantee would cost $85 billion.

Miller would reform campaign finance by giving each registered voter a supply of federally financed "patriot dollars." $50 worth of vouchers, to support the candidates of his choice. Cleaner campaigns would cost $3 billion.

The total price tag -- $220 billion -- is 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product of $11 trillion; hence the book’s title. Miller would raise part of the money through savings from programs that will no longer be needed when the 2 percent provisions are in place. Most of it would come from rolling back corporate subsidies and the George W. Bush tax cuts, taxing employer-based health benefits that exceed the average plan, and imposing a hefty (60 cents per gallon) gasoline tax. The wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations would share the tax burden with those (including many union members) who enjoy the most generous employer-provided health plans and those (including inner-city residents with suburban jobs) who commute long distances in gas-guzzling cars. Miller asks people who object to such sacrifices on the part of traditionally Democratic constituencies to recognize that the benefits of his plan, especially for such constituencies, far outweigh the sacrifices.

Much of the book is taken up with lengthy discussions of the details of the four plans -- health, education, wages and campaign finance -- and briefer breakdowns on financing. But more important than the details is how the discussion is carried on. In tape-recorded conversations, Miller engages liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, big spenders and tax-cutters, politicians, professors and policy specialists -- separately and together -- in reflection on his proposals, eliciting more or less agreement with this or that plan. The cumulative effect is to inspire the conviction not so much that Miller has the right answers as that he has asked the right questions: Can we not take care of our urgent social needs? Must we not do so now? Are we not obliged to do so? How can we best do so?

As a political journalist, Miller is convincing on the "can" and "must." The size of the federal government measured against national income is smaller under George W. Bush, at 20 percent, than it was under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, at 22 percent. Economic growth in the 1990s, combined with the fiscal prudence induced in the Clinton administration by the health-care debacle of 1993-94, brought the spending-income ratio down, so that what seemed prudent in 1992 and now appears to be wildly spendthrift is in fact well within the nation’s means. Miller insists that we can afford to do more to provide health care to the millions who lack medical insurance and to address our other unmet needs. The argument that we cannot afford a better society comes from the Democrats’ fear of the wrath of tax-phobic voters and the Republicans’ delusion that symbolic gestures (unfunded mandates like "No Child Left Behind") can address systemic ills. We must remedy these ills now because by the end of the decade the retirement of the first of the baby boomers will make such gigantic demands on the national purse that any new outlays will seem utterly inconceivable.

In addressing the obligation of the more to the less fortunate (language that fits his thinking precisely) Miller, a disciple of philosopher John Bawls, is at his most prophetic. Fair rules for a social contract cannot be made after the fact, when we already know how well each of us has done. If that were allowed, each would have an interest in supporting policies that protect existing advantages or simply compensate for them. One term for such a situation is "class warfare."

Imagine instead that participants must decide on the rules before the race is run, when their ability to predict the outcome is obscured by a "veil of ignorance." To guard against the worst outcomes, they would be more likely to set the rewards for the winners at, say, ten times instead of a thousand times the rewards for the losers. They would recognize that much of the outcome would be determined by sheer luck, including the "prebirth lottery" of who one’s parents are and how great one’s native endowments of brains and beauty. Under those imagined conditions, most pregame rule-makers would rationally, and justly, choose a reward schedule that would protect them if they did poorly in the lottery. They would "design public institutions to ameliorate some of the burdens of bad luck."

Miller insists on "taking luck seriously." In conversations with conservatives William Bennett and Milton Friedman, he prods them to recognize, as Rawls does, that much of what we call "achievement" is based at least as much on luck as on personal initiative. Bennett eventually does agree, saying that many people don’t make it "because they’re in. crappy families, crappy schools, crappy neighborhoods." Even Friedman recognizes the need for "a decent minimum," to be provided ideally by charity and more realistically by the negative income tax. By placing these conversations early in the book, Miller clearly means to defend the justice of progressive taxation by questioning the moral right of the well-off to enjoy their wealth without qualms.

How does Miller propose to bring about the "2 percent society"? Miller is a Democrat with a low opinion of George W. Bush. (In a recent column, he labeled as "radical fiscal immorality" Bush’s request for $87 billion for Iraq with no new taxes to pay the bill) But he does not despise Republicans, often agreeing that market approaches are dynamic ways of organizing production, even though they are inequitable ways of organizing distribution.

Miller thinks it possible to bring thoughtful Democrats and Republicans together to work out the intricate set of compromises that would provide and pay for the large-scale programs that are both needed and possible. As an example, he cites the bipartisan commission that recommended which military bases should be closed at the end of the cold war. These discussions would have to be insulated from demagogic pressures on both sides and prodded by media that would relentlessly publicize the huge problems to be solved.. Bill Bradley and John McCain, politicians Miller admires, are quoted on the dust jacket endorsing his approach, as are public intellectuals ranging from left to right -- Paul Krugman, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Gergen and David Brooks.

Though Miller does not directly say so, everything in his approach assumes that electoral politics -- going all-out to elect a Democratic Congress, for example -- is not the way to promote justice. "What American politics needs is not a new left but a new center," he states. Thus he avoids the hot button issues that the parties use to beat up on each other. He says not a word about abortion or gay rights and makes only the briefest mention of Iraq. (Evidently not a dove, he nonetheless thinks that the Pentagon should be subject to as much fiscal discipline as the rest of us.) The 2 percent solution as a whole, especially its philosophy of taking luck seriously, is in-tended to defang Republican demagoguery on taxes. More sporadic swipes are taken at Democratic demagoguery on Social Security, Medicare and school vouchers. What’s needed, Miller insists, is less "red meat for the faithful" and more straight talk to the public. Perhaps because he sees religion as a polarizing influence, he avoids any mention of faith in general or biblical prophecy in particular.

Miller might have cited research showing that what increasingly polarizes Americans is sheer partisanship, not the issues of social justice themselves. In other words, for those who are highly politically involved and identify with either the Republican or Democratic Party, those identifications are increasingly salient. Meanwhile what really separates the two sides is the "moral" issues, especially abortion, that have been raised by politicized religious conservatives. Intense partisans think in zero-sum terms – "whatever you get I lose" -- which makes it hard to recognize that their adversaries stand for something besides besting them.

Here, it would have helped for Miller to articulate in greater depth, as he does for Rawls’s liberal ideas, the positive principles behind the Republicans’ voluntaristic, market-centered approach. Miller is typically American in subscribing to these principles at the same time that he is drawn to Rawls’s. Observers of American society from Tocqueville to the present have seen that our collective life is animated by the different, but not diametrically opposed, principles of equality and achievement, justice and opportunity. Americans are as sympathetic to the idea of a high and permeable ceiling as they are to a wide and reliable safety net.

To say that partisan politics is not the answer is not to say that citizens should sit back and let disinterested experts decide. "The fascinating thing about democracy is that good leaders are produced by good followers, and good followers are produced by good leaders," Miller observes. (His cause. has a Web site: www.twopercentsolution.com.)

Citizens should demand serious proposals in exchange for their votes, not just proofs of the other candidate’s venality. Campaign donors should ask just how far the candidate’s proposal would go to meet targeted needs. Newspapers should give less space to the "gotcha" brand of reporting and more to substantive issues. ‘No percent of the front page could be set aside for a regular "It’s Still True Today" sidebar, one day pointing out that a full-time worker in a minimum wage job still earns less than two thirds of what it costs to keep a family of four out of poverty, and the next day that 43.6 million Americans still lack health insurance. Foundation executives could do their part by funding the strategic dissemination of practical proposals. Religious leaders (unmentioned by Miller) could suggest The Two Percent Solution for adult education classes without fear that they would be "involving the church in politics." They could also provide greater depth and resonance to Miller’s appeal for justice by developing its theological bases. After all, more Americans read the Bible than Rawls.

Immigrants and the Faith They Bring

As most everyone has heard, immigration is profoundly changing the contours of religion in America. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them from what used to be known as the Third World (relatively few from Europe), stream into the country every year, bringing their religious identities with them. The number of immigrants who have arrived since 1965 exceeds the millions who came at the turn of the last century.

The Immigrants’ places of worship, identified by signs in strange languages, dot the landscape from coast to coast. Their religious festivals and celebrations are written up in the press. Their children are noticeable on college campuses. Their presence challenges the religious establishment to make room for new partners in interfaith councils and in ongoing debates about the relation between church and state.

All this is true. What many people have not heard, however, and need to hear, is that the great majority of the newcomers are Christian. Some are adherents of other great world religions (Including Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism). A larger number profess no religion. A few practice indigenous religions. But most are Christian. This means that the new immigrants represent not the de-Christianization of American society but the de-Europeanization of American Christianity.

The religious sites built by Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are surely a dramatic presence. Magnificent Buddhist temples in California and Maryland, ornate Hindu manders in the outskirts of Los Angeles, Nashville and Pittsburg, and grand, austere Islamic centers in uptown Manhattan, outside the Washington beltway and in the suburbs ringing Chicago -- all these offer visible support for the argument of Harvard professor Diana Eck that the U.S. has become "the world’s most religiously diverse nation."

Yet the facts are more complicated. Among countries of historic Christendom, France, Germany and England have proportionately far more Muslims than does the U.S. India, the home of Hinduism, has many more Muslims and Christians than the U.S. has Hindus and Muslims. South Korea, the historic bridge across which Buddhism traveled to Japan, now has nearly as many Christians as Buddhists. Indeed, a half century ago, the proportion of Jews in the U.S. population was quite a bit greater than the combined proportion of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists today. The single paragraph devoted to Christian Immigrants by Eck in her much-noticed book A New Religious America obscures the fact that the new immigration is bringing about not so much a new diversity among American religions as diversity within America’s majority religion.

It should have been obvious all along that most post-1965 immigrants are Christian. The largest single "sending country" is, of course, Mexico, an overwhelmingly Christian nation. Millions of other new immigrants from the Western Hemisphere stem from predominantly Christian countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, Ecuador and Brazil. (Some of the new entrants from these countries to the U.S. are technically "refugees, not immigrants, but their numbers are included in the totals that concern religious demographers.)

Many immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere also stem from predominantly Christian countries outside of Europe, such as the Philippines, ancestral home to the second-largest Asian American population, and Ghana, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s several rapidly Christianizing nations; Many also come from Christian sectors of such religiously mixed countries as Korea, Vietnam, India and Lebanon. Many of the Europeans come from former Soviet bloc countries like Poland, Russia and Ukraine, which is where the U.S. gets many of the immigrants who profess no religion, but also the source of Eastern Orthodox Christians (and, of course, Jews).

As a rule, people who leave their country represent a biased, not a representative, sample of their compatriots. The sampling processes, if we can use that term, are complex. In general, younger people are most likely to emigrate. But each country has a different story. The population of South Korea, for example, is about one quarter Buddhist and one quarter Christian. (How Christians became so numerous is itself a big story.) But half of those who emigrate from Korea to the U.S. are Christian, stemming from the more urban, educated and less settled segment of Korean society (Many had earlier been refugees from the communist north.) Another half of those who arrive with no religious identity later become Christian. The end result is that 75 percent of Korean Americans are Christian.

As a former French colony, Vietnam had a flourishing Catholic population before the U.S.-backed regime in the south lost its lengthy war with the north. Not surprisingly, many of the first refugees were educated, middle-class Catholics, some previously refugees from the north; these people are disproportionately represented among Vietnamese Americans today.

To cite another example, as a result of the bitter struggle between an Palestinians many Christians are leaving the Holy Land. Consequently Christians are over-represented among Arab Americans. In yet another instance, America’s need for nurses has been answered by immigration from India (among other countries), where, because of both caste taboos and uneven educational opportunities, nurses are especially found among the traditionally Christian people of the state of Kerala.

The same principle of nonrandom selection is responsible for part of the non-Christian presence in the U.S. For example, the population of India is about 12 percent Muslim, but because of both "push" factors in India and "pull" factors (especially economic opportunities) in the U.S., the proportion of Muslims among Indian Americans is probably higher than that for the same reasons -- push and pull factors -- Jews are greatly over represented among migrants from the former Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the religiously biased selection principle operates primarily in favor of Christians.

Another factor leading to the diversification of American Christianity is widespread conversion among some immigrant groups, notably the Chinese. Those from mainland China are likely to have no religious identity upon entry. In the U.S. they encounter ethnic Protestant churches in which several Chinese languages are spoken and family-oriented. Confucian values are taught. Despite initial misgivings, many immigrants find that they can affirm both their traditional Chinese identity and an emerging American identity in such churches. In response to evangelism on the part of fellow Chinese, some Chinese, especially those from Taiwan, reassert their residual Buddhism. But Christian converts predominate to the extent that an estimated one third of Chinese Americans, across all generations, are now Christian.

The above claims have been qualified with words like ‘many." "some" and "estimated." Unlike Canada, Great Britain, India and the Philippines, the U.S. has no religious census. Sociologists can speak of the age, sex and racial composition of the U.S. population with some precision, based on government counts. But for religion, researchers have to rely on other sources, each with its own limitations.

One source is the "roll data" kept by religious bodies themselves, which vary in quality from the clearly defined, meticulously updated and publicly available membership records of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to the much less reliable numbers put forth by many historically African-American denominations. Catholic data vary in quality from diocese to diocese.

In the case of Islam, one of its ethical strengths turns out to be a drawback in gathering numbers. A Muslim does not "belong" to a particular mosque, which means there is enormous racial, ethnic and class diversity in a congregation that gathers for Friday prayer -- in contrast to the homogeneity of most Protestant congregations. But when asked to come up with numbers, Muslim organizations at best can sum up estimates of attendance based on the huge, Easter-sized crowds observing Eid al Fitr at the close of Ramadan. No comprehensive roll data for American Muslims exist.

The other source for religious demography is "poll data" drawn from individuals’ answers to questions put to them in surveys. Polls vary greatly in quality. The best data on religion come from the General Social Survey, administered through face-to-face interviews to a representative sample of some 1,500 English-speaking adult Americans every other year. The GSS asks hundreds of questions and provides rich information, but the numbers surveyed are insufficient to reveal much about small immigrant sub-populations.

The opposite extreme was taken by the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which asked just a few religion questions of more than 50,000 adult Americans, also English-speaking, reached by random telephone dialing. Specialized surveys were taken in 2001 and 2002 of Hispanics and Asians, using Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese for the interviews, and one careful, random-sample survey, asking about religion among other things, was conducted in 1967 and 1998 based on INS records of legal immigrants in 1996.

Within a reasonable range of error, the poll data tell a consistent story: two thirds or more of new immigrants are Christian, no more than one fifth affirm any non-Christian faith, and as many as one sixth claim no religious identity at all. When these figures are compared to the 75 to 80 percent of the population at large who affirm one or another variety of Christian identity and the roughly 5 percent who are other-than-Christian. It is clear that the new immigration is diversifying American religion. But the case should not be overstated.

In particular no evidence supports the notion, cited in some newspapers and some pulpits, that there are more Muslims than Presbyterians in the U.S. Yes, the number of members claimed by the relatively rigorous counts of all the Presbyterian bodies in the country -- around 3.5 million -- is less than the 6 or 7 million figure claimed by some Muslim spokespersons. But in surveys, many more Americans call themselves Presbyterian than the Presbyterian churches claim. According to poll data. there are 10 to 11 million Presbyterians. Meanwhile, no national survey shows the Muslim population of the U.S. to be greater than 1 percent, or around 3 million at most. In other words, while poll data indicate that there are three times as many self identified Presbyterians as enrolled Presbyterians, there are half as many self-identified Muslims as are claimed by these Muslim leaders.

At the same time, we can reliably estimate from poll data that there are as many Hispanic Protestants in the U.S., some 8 million, as the number of Jews and Muslims put together. The massive demographic action is found among Christians.

The point is not to celebrate Christian growth nor to denigrate Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus, who have become integral constituents of the American religious system. Muslims In particular are a key electoral constituency in such swing states as Michigan (as Jews are In Florida). Any tendency to triumphalism on the part of Christians should be chastened by the equally dramatic, recent defection of millions of American Christians to the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated (not just to the "unchurched." but to the unabashed "no religion" column).

The point is that Christianity is not for European Americans to define, speak for or even disown. Millions of new immigrants are redefining what it means to be Christian. In the U.S. they are joining African Americans, who continue to be the American church’s sturdiest pillar in coloring American Christianity.

The impact of immigration is greatest among Catholics, a majority of whom may be Hispanic at some point later in this century. (To a remarkable extent, immigrants are replacing native-born defectors.) Not only are masses said in Spanish in thousands of American parishes, but some parishes are influenced by Latino religious styles. The piety is more devotional, more home-centered and less parish-centered, more visual and less verbal than the rites inspired by Vatican II. Mexican-American public celebrations -- from the December 12 feast day of the Virgen de Guadalupe through Good Friday Via Crucis pageants to the observance of El Día de los Muertos. In early November -- give Catholics a new presence in local newspapers and television. Because the Virgin has appeared to the faithful in many countries at many times, she is celebrated somewhere in the U.S. throughout the year -- in February among Maya Indians in Los Angeles, in July among Haitians in New York, in September among Cubans in Miami.

Catholic scholars have referred to such rites and feast days as reflecting the "Inculturation" of pre-Christian symbols and traditions. In cultures influenced by African religiosity the inculturation of pre-Christian elements is particularly profound. In Haitian voodoo, African-origin deities "walk with" the Virgin Mary or another Christian saint, the venerated person having two cultural sides.

Since surveys typically allow only one answer to the religion identification question – "Are you Protestant, Catholic or Jewish?" -- poll data surely underestimate the number of American practitioners of Afrocentric religions like voodoo and Santeria. But because such religions are inextricably mixed with Christian traditions -- most Haitians, for example, are located somewhere on a voodoo-Catholic continuum -- the number of Christians is not at the same time overestimated. These people can be said to practice two religions.

Protestants differ on the legitimacy they are willing to accord to the practices of inculturation. Haitian evangelicals reject voodoo out of hand, while some Mexican Pentecostal services feature mariachi bands and images of the Virgin. Pentecostalism appears to have been rapidly indigenized in Latin America. Africa and Asia precisely because of its capacity to absorb and express local cultures -- which are then brought to the U.S. by Pentecostal immigrants.

More broadly immigrant Protestant congregations are carriers of home-country cultures in matters of music, language, dress and food, if not in specific religious symbols. Even the typically dignified worship of Chinese evangelicals is distinctly Chinese. Although some immigrant Christians of color descend from people originally evangelized by Europeans, in most cases the faith has been long carried by indigenous communities. White American Protestants might learn from the example of Latin American, Asian and African ways of being Christian how inculturated their own religious observances are -- for example, how European are their celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Such Christians can learn from immigrant Christians how universal is the faith and how relative is one’s embodiment of it.

Immigrant Christians tend to be conservative in matters of religious and moral culture. Among Protestants, the influx of Pentecostals and evangelicals greatly outnumbers the adherents of mainline (or, better, "historical") denominational traditions. Many Catholics come from countries little affected by Vatican II liturgical reforms. Eastern Orthodox Christians come from "autocephalous" national churches deeply interwoven with local traditions. Family practices, gender attitudes and sexual mores are typically more supportive of parents’ prerogatives, less in tune with feminist assumptions, and decidedly less accepting of homosexuality than is the case form any white American religious communities.

Yet It is a mistake to equate religious conservatism with political conservatism. A recent study of Hispanic churches revealed a consistent pattern among this group (the largest of America’s minority groups, one continually replenished by immigrants): Hispanics, whether Catholic or Protestant, tend to be conservative on issues of sexual morality but liberal on issues of the economy and minority rights. They are less likely than African Americans to identify with the Democratic Party but most vote Democratic. Hispanics -- who, strictly speaking are an ethnic rather than a racial group, composed of people who self-identify as white, black, mixed and "other" -- are historically linked to colonized and subordinated peoples and are unlikely to be complacent about governmental provision of social services. Across the board, new immigrants bring a more communal, less individualistic perspective to our society. Therefore Americans who struggle for economic justice should not regard these religious conservatives as their enemies. If they do, they will wall themselves off from potential allies.

Above all, the new immigrants make it decreasingly plausible for Americans to think of Christianity as a white person’s religion. Both Immigration and selective conversion are decoupling religion and race. American Buddhists areas likely to be white as Asian. The U.S. Muslim community mixes African Americans, Bosnians, South Asians and people from the Middle East. And although it may not be apparent in many congregations, American Christians are increasingly people of color.

Pent-Up Power (Jer. 33:14-16, Ps. 25:1-10, 1 Thess. 3:9-13, Lk. 21:25-36.)

Born in the vast mountain ranges of British Columbia, the Fraser River floods southward to its rendezvous with the Pacific. At one stage of that long journey the mountains gather themselves to form a deep narrow canyon through which the Fraser must pass. It does so in a thunderous flood, gouging an almost 200-foot deep bed before spilling into the wide valley that takes it westward to the ocean.

The river is a word of nature uttering a spiritual truth: Confinement can empower. Confinement can bring into being a bursting-out into wide expanses. John Bunyan in his cell in Bedford, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his cell at Tegel -- they and countless others witness to this truth.

Jeremiah speaks from confinement. The psalmist feels confined by the presence of enemies. Paul, writing to the Thessalonians, is smarting from recent confinements on his ministry. Jesus speaks to those around him with a sense of his impending confinement. All are moved to deep spiritual insights.

To be a contemporary man or woman is to feel the confinement of this time in history. No society, whatever its resources, can achieve all it wishes. Today, to be American is to feel confined by a new kind of fear no less strong because it exists behind a shield of unprecedented military power. To be Islamic is for many to feel resentment -- even rage -- against a West that sets boundaries to what one considers to be a moral vision for all societies. To be Chinese is to sense the confinement of a huge society not yet empowered to claim what it considers its place in the world. To be European is to feel the confinement of the differences of language, culture and histories, all offering rich treasures yet also making unity difficult to achieve.

Empires, nations, cities, congregations, individual lives, all face the limitations that can defeat dreams but can also -- and this is the truth in these scriptures -- make possible much achievement. Confinement can send the mind and the heart on journeys toward the most distant horizons.

Jeremiah lives in a society that responds to his efforts with ingratitude and rejection. Yet even as he paces the courtyard in which he is confined, he envisages his society transformed, recapturing its original morning time. He speaks of the return of a joy in nationhood, a thriving economy and, undergirding all, a deep commitment to doing justice and being right with God. Far from crushing his spirit, confinement enlarges his vision of the essentially merciful and generous nature of God.

The realization that one has enemies, personal or professional, can make one adopt a guarded and self-limiting stance toward life. Yet in Psalm 25, where someone is wrestling with this kind of situation, we see the psalmist reaching out to the one he can trust as not treacherous, to whom he can relate, secure in the knowledge that in God he has a source of steadfast love.

There must have been times when Paul wondered if it was all worth it. Unpleasant receptions often culminated in rejection, with communities at each other’s throats about this or that issue. Paul faced it all. Yet the knowledge that there were great people to rejoice in, a community where there was at least the promise of good things to come, makes all the difference at this juncture. Such knowledge -- that there is within reach even a small circle of those who respond and care, who show enthusiasm and purpose -- makes all the difference when otherwise disappointment and a sense of defeat could make us their prisoner.

For Jesus there is a sense of time shortening, as the days themselves do at this time of year. There have been recent moments of vicious and aggressive questioning, contemptuous dismissals of the authority he seems to assume. Being human, Jesus finds his thoughts and feelings clouded. Images of threat and fear and confusion come into his mind, images speaking to him of the troubling world around him but also of his inner turmoil. As we walk with him, these images expand, becoming thoughts of cosmic threat -- sun, moon, stars, ocean, the earth itself, all heaving in turmoil. Has own sense of fear and foreboding becomes a universal fearfulness and foreboding. He feels that confrontation is near.

Jesus’ inner wrestling can be seen as a pattern of our own. Personal fears can become cosmic dread. We see a tower fall and the tower becomes more than a tower. We dread the falling of a world both familiar and dear. Our deepest psyche is shaken, and so the world itself seems to be shaken.

And yet what do we hear from this companion we walk with, this companion who has been speaking of dark and terrifying things? As we look at him we see his pace quicken. His voice changes. To our astonishment he is giving us a litany of confidence and hope. For every image of terror and threat, there is now one of hope. For everything that would limit and confine, there is outreach and expansiveness. We see a raising of his head in expectation, his hand pointing to the leaves bursting from a nearby fig tree. We hear from him a mention of summertime, a pointing to nothing less than a kingdom, a plea for alertness, a determination to stand firm. We are astonished at the transformation, and in the same moment we realize that he is demanding nothing less of us, and that he is demanding this for the world of our time

Let it Be (Mic. 5:2-5a; Ps. 80:1-7; Heb. 10:5-10; Lk. 1:39-45 [46-55])

When I was a small boy in Ireland my parents would take us to our grandfather’s farm near Castlecomer in County Kilkenny. On the farm there was a hired man whose name was John Brennan.

John lived in a thatched cottage about half a mile away. In the evening after the cows were milked, he would sit on a large flat stone outside the stable door and smoke a stained clay pipe. Sometimes I would sit beside him and he would tell me stories.

One story John told me I never forgot. He told me to look up into the sky. Summer evenings in Ireland are very long. The moon had appeared, still ghostlike because the light of the sun was not fully gone. Here and there, the odd star could be seen.

"Do you know?" said John, puffing on his pipe, "Do you know that the stars and the sun and moon move around all the time?" I said I did. "Well, said John, "do you know how the angel Gabriel came to Mary the mother of our Lord to tell her she would have a child?" I said I did "Well then," said John, looking skyward as he spoke, with my eyes following his gaze, "Do you know that when the angel asked Mary if she would bear the holy child, all the stars and the sun and the moon stopped moving until she gave Gabriel her reply? And when she said yes, they all began to move again. Did you know that?" said John triumphantly.

There were two messages from the angel. The first was that Mary herself would bear a child. The second was that her cousin to the south was already six months pregnant. This second piece of news seems to have led Mary to decide to take an extraordinary journey. That she should travel at all, considering how her own world had just been exploded by the angel’s news, is extraordinary. Her taking such a trip creates many questions. Did she share the news of her pregnancy with Joseph before leaving? Did she intend to stay away as long as she did? Luke tells us she stayed three months. We do not know if she traveled alone. More likely she looked for traveling company, perhaps a trade caravan. Perhaps the journey to see Elizabeth was merely an excuse to get away, at least for a while, and deal with the upheaval in her world. Perhaps she hoped to avoid the neighbors’ comments until she herself could get used to the news.

Her reception is everything she could have hoped for. Excited and exhausted, Mary arrives at the small town and finds the house of Zechariah. Luke tells us she entered the house, but we long for details, as with any story that fascinates us. Maybe Elizabeth was resting. After all, she was six months on in a pregnancy that had come late in life. The wisdom of that time, as of now, would be to rest as much as possible. In spite of the promises Zechariah says he has received, he and Elizabeth must have worried that this precious burden could still be lost.

Perhaps this is why Elizabeth is overjoyed when, at Mary’s unexpected arrival, the child moves strongly within her body and reassures her that all is well. Perhaps too there is the joy of an older woman in the newfound ability to identify with someone much younger in mutual pregnancy. No wonder Luke allows us to hear Elizabeth’s excited voice. The word "blessed" bursts from her lips again and again. She tells Mary how the very sound of her voice brings everything around them to life. She asks the excited and delighted question, "Why has this happened to me? Even after six months of pregnancy she cannot believe it.

Catching Elizabeth’s excitement, Mary begins to sing. Elizabeth’s joy has moved Mary beyond the quiet -- probably dazed -- acceptance of her reply to the angel, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord. Let it be . . ." Quiet acceptance has turned into ecstatic song. If we had been present in the small house, we might even have seen Mary dance, for since her inner universe is alive, the outer universe has come alive for her. Because God has done this within her, God has done much more around her in the world. Often when we experience great joy we project that joy to others, letting it spill over the world around us until the music within us becomes a universal symphony. Many of us have sung our own Magnificat without realizing that what we sing echoes Mary’s song.

Most of us who read this will soon take our journey to a house where the promises of God come true and new life comes into the world, for so we can describe the church of which we are a member. We will set out within a few days to encounter Mary and her child. We will go as Elizabeth would have gone if she had paid a return visit when the child was born in Bethlehem, and brought her son John in her arms.

With in our own souls the child of faith has been born and we go to sing the joy that comes from possessing Christian faith in a world of turmoil and transition. We know that we do not deserve the gift of Christian faith. Like Elizabeth, we could ask in joyful disbelief. "Why has this happened to me?" But since we have indeed been given this priceless gift of faith, we can with the shepherds join with others around us in Gloria in Excelsis and, with Mary sing out most joyfully.

Kingly Presence (Is. 60:1-6; Ps. 72:1-7; 10-14; Eph. 3:1-12; Math. 2:1-12

Because we know almost nothing about the wise men, our imaginations take wing. If we were brought up in the Christian faith, these characters have ridden across our minds and hearts ever since we were taken to our first Sunday school pageant. Even the most sophisticated children secretly envy those who have been selected to play the wise men. Parents will ransack attics for pieces of fabric -- the more brilliant and exotic the better -- and someone in the family will create a costume that will be linked to no particular age or time or culture but will somehow speak of far-off places, distant shores, desert sands and starry skies -- all at the same time.

In my house, which all four children have now left, there is an old pine dough box. Once it was used in a farmhouse as the repository where bread dough would rise. But year after year at Christmas, the dough box had another, more exalted role: It served as manger for the Christ child. To this day there is a brass box in our bedroom that served for years as "the gift of gold" borne up the aisle, as did two of our pottery jars, both of them filled by the congregation’s imagination with frankincense and myrrh.

They have always fascinated us, these travelers who must have loomed in the entrance to the cave before an astonished -- and probably alarmed -- Mary and Joseph. All the language we use about them tends to reach for a larger-than-life quality. One of the church’s hymns claims that to rival their gifts we would have to bring to this "brightest and best of the sons of the morning, odors of Edom, gems of the mountain, pearls of the ocean." When Isaiah speaks of such visitors, he speaks in the most extravagant terms. "Kings!" Isaiah proclaims. icings come to the brightness of your dawn." And because the traditional three camels no seem enough to do justice to the celebration, we turn to Isaiah’s evocation of "a multitude of camels . . . the young camels of Midian and Ephah." Then, "all those from Sheba" are invited too.

But even Isaiah fails to satisfy our wish to paint a vast and wonderful canvas for these visitors to the stable. We go to the psalmist for more vivid images, and he obliges by bringing on stage "the kings of Tarshish and of the isles . . . the kings of Sheba and Seba," saying of them that they "all fall down" before this child.

This child. In those two words we give the reason for our longing for the most expensive language and images we can create, for we know this child’s glory calls forth every possible beauty of utterance, image, art and song. We know that no stage is too vast for this child, no visitor too royal to kneel, and no gift too precious to offer.

Moments later we listen to Paul. How excited he is by what he has to impart -- this mystery, this revelation, this gospel! Notice how he too is reaching for the most expansive language he can conjure up to express his thought. And no wonder. For instead of a small land and a marginal people being the recipients of this news, the entire world has become a wide field for God’s seeding. To use Paul’s term, the horizon has been pushed back to include the gentiles -- the world!

As we finish listening to Paul’s excited sharing of this vast new possibility for the gospel, we hear Matthew telling us how the Magi completed their journey -- dismounting, entering into the shadows of the cave, kneeling and offering their gifts. And as we listen we realize that we have seen the coming of the very first gentiles, kneeling and worshiping before this God in human flesh, a God not yet even weaned by his mother.

The Magi fascinate us also because they do not fit into this tiny stage of hill village and humble stable. Their sophistication clashes with this simplicity, their obvious power sits uneasily beside the vulnerability of child and family. They are urban in a rural world, affluent in the midst of poverty, cosmopolitan amid the provincial.

We discern their wisdom even as we read of their dealings with the court of Herod. Civilized and mannered, they pay their respects to Herod, yet with contemptuous ease they see the reality behind the pathetic physical and mental wreck Herod has become. They have gained experience at a far more powerful court, and have no illusions about Herod’s ability to be dangerous and vicious, even in his decline.

Theirs is a deep wisdom. The Magi represent forever and for all of us the wisdom that recognizes human life to be a journey taken in search of One who calls us beyond ourselves into faithful service -- One before whom we are prepared to kneel, and to whom we offer the best of our gifts, flawed and unworthy though they be.

We watch these visitors to Bethlehem, as they kneel with supreme grace and dignity before what is to them simplicity, vulnerability and poverty. They are prepared to kneel, for in their wisdom -- and this is the heart of what makes them truly wise -- they discern the glory that is hidden in this place and in this child.

And so we too, daily engaged in our own all too human journey, searching for that which would have us be so much more than we are, and bearing our unworthy gifts, kneel on the stable floor beside these royal ones, worshiping with them the child who is most royal.

Opening Out (Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 1:68-79; Phil. 1:3-11)

People who introduce themselves as bearing a message from God do not commend themselves to us easily if we do turn an ear to them out of curiosity, or perhaps out of an amused and sometimes horrified fascination, they tend to wear out their welcome quickly. We have learned only too well that such self-styled messengers of God can carry out deeds of unimaginable ferocity in the name of their particular vision of God.

But does it follow that no messenger who claims to be from God can or should be given a hearing? We might recall the passion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he first came to the West from the Soviet Union. As had John the Baptist, Solzhenitsyn was formed in harsh and solitary places. The Siberian winds of the Gulag were as brutal in their frigidity as John’s Middle Eastern desert was brutal in its heat. Both were places where life could hang by a thread. Both the Baptizer and Solzhenitsyn saw themselves as the bearers of a moral challenge to what they regarded as a tired and effete society Both brought a stern and uncompromising style and substance. One returned to his homeland dispirited and humbled, no less sure of his convictions but defeated, not so much by an immoral West as by a place where the very idea of the moral had become a matter for discussion or contemptuous dismissal. The Baptizer knelt in the filth of Herod’s dungeon to be butchered to satisfy a drunken royal whim.

Yet one person in particular accepted John’s harsh style. One person admired his tenacity and single-mindedness, someone whose opinion we cannot lightly dismiss. Jesus not only welcomed John’s ministry he gave it the highest praise. I tell you," he said of John, "among those born of women no one is greater than John: yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."

Coming from Jesus, such praise must be given immense significance. Here is John, who sees his life and work as conveying a message from God for his time, utterly sure of his role, piercing in his assessments of a society and a people. And here is Jesus, who sees everything about him as admirable. We need to know why. We need to know what it is about this particular messenger that commends him so deeply to our Lord. Then perhaps we can find some criteria by which we can judge others who claim that they possess such messages.

Perhaps the overwhelming single attribute that commends John to us is that his whole being is directed to a focus beyond himself. He has hardly appeared on the public scene when he insists that this is not about him but about preparation for another who has not yet come into public consciousness.

At a time when response to his ministry seems to have peaked, John shows nothing less than nobility of spirit when he points two of his remaining disciples toward the approaching Jesus. Nothing could be more generous and unselfish than John’s statement referring to Jesus: "He must increase but I must decrease." If we had heard nothing else from John’s lips, those seven words would assure us that he was no demagogue trumpeting an agenda of the self. Here is a sure way to assess the claims of anyone professing to have a message for us from God.

We hear not a word of resentment from John when public acclaim shifts away from him. The evidence points to his ministry continuing in other ways. He shows extraordinary courage in his readiness to criticize the lifestyle of Herod himself. John’s reputation was such that even Herod -- whom we can assume was in today’s terms a petty dictator -- hesitated to attack John directly.

Nothing shows the faithfulness of John more than his last moments. At some stage in a ghastly imprisonment in Herod’s dungeon, beset by all the agonizing questions and doubts that come in solitary confinement, wrestling with a faith that has undergirded and energized his life for most of his adult years, John manages to smuggle out a message to Jesus that comes from the depths of his being. "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" What is beautiful and moving in this question is the unquenchable longing to be faithful to another, to someone he deems greater than himself.

The irony of John’s life is that while he is passionately proclaiming his message of judgment on his own society we come to realize what a magnificent human being he is. It may be that he remains significant for us because he is the preparer -- as he called himself -- for Jesus appearance on the scene. But John is far from being -- to use a phrase from pop culture -- the band that warms up the audience for the main act. He brings the music of his great humanity, his courage, his generosity of spirit, his unaffected humility, his faithfulness in the face of suffering and even of death itself. No wonder Jesus thought the world of him.

One can’t but wonder if anyone ever told John what his father -- even then, as Luke gently puts it, "getting on in years" – sang at the birth of his baby son. "You [my son] will go before the Lord to prepare his ways." One wonders if Zechariah knew the quality of the man his child would become, a person who would not merely point to the coming of one greater then himself; but would live so magnificently as to prepare us for him who would live perfectly.

Night Music (Zeph. 3:14-20; Is. 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18)

As World War II was ending, my uncle was about to be discharged from the Royal Navy. He decided to enjoy an evening out, and bought a ticket to see a play in London. It was opening night of a new show. He told me that he was not quite sure what the show was about, but had heard that it was a musical -- an American musical. He also said that he didn’t really care what he was going to see. All he wanted was to celebrate the fact that he had lived through a war and would be going home soon.

The first thing he noticed when he entered the theater foyer was the brilliance of the lights. For six years he -- and members of his generation -- had had to get used to muted lighting, and sometimes to no lighting. Now at least in this warm, welcoming and crowded space, the world was suddenly bright again. Another thing he noticed was how alive and excited everyone was, and to his surprise he realized that their festive mood was affecting him, and that he felt the same way.

But nothing prepared him for what happened when the curtain went up. The stage blazed with the light of a sunlit world stretching into infinite distances. The dancers and actors positively leaped onto the stage. The music was electrifying. The words, especially very first words of the show transformed every listener.

O what a beautiful morning!

O what a wonderful day!

I’ve got a wonderful feeling

Everything’s going my way

And now we know what my long-ago uncle and those other people were experiencing. Oklahoma burst into the dark world of Europe like a sudden blaze of sunshine, space, energy, hope and possibility. It came from a land not exhausted by wait, a land still strong, with almost infinite resources. It sang a song of the future.

Uncannily the song of Zephaniah echoes that theater moment, exhorting us to "Rejoice! Exult! Sing aloud! Shout! The Lord has turned away your enemies . . . I will bring you home . . . says the Lord."

The note of wild and joyous exuberance is echoed twice more in these readings. They are so clearly songs of joy that it is difficult to read them in the measured way we usually do in worship. Listen to Isaiah "Surely God is my salvation! My strength! My might! My salvation! Sing aloud! Sing for joy!"

Before we drop in exhaustion from belting out these songs -- for that is what they demand we do -- let’s hear the usually serious and intense Paul as he writes to the community in Philippi. Something is very different here, very different from the usual Paul. He’s ending the happiest letter he ever wrote, at least of the letters we know. He is obviously experiencing great pleasure in greeting remembered friends. We can hear him bubbling over as he sends greetings to "Clement and the rest of my co-workers," calling them nothing less than "my joy and crown." But Paul is only getting started. Now he really gets turned on!

Rejoice in the Lord always

And again I say rejoice

The Lord is near. . .

The ecstatic song continues, as if Paul cannot or does not want to stop.

Why are you and I offered this wonderful performance on this Advent Sunday? Because although it may be winter in the realm of nature, it is the threshold of springtime in the realm of the spirit and of our Christian hearts. We are not far from the fields and caves of Bethlehem. But before we come to them we need to know that every one of the above songs was sung almost in spite of the times. Like those wonderful opening lines of Oklahoma these songs came from a generation that had known shadow and suffering. For Zephaniah, a country was emerging from a grim regime. For Isaiah, probably a war had just ended. Paul writes from a prison cell. Knowing these things, it is salutary to look once again at the extraordinary joy that bubbles forth from these three great spirits.

We will be singing the songs of this coming season, singing them in a time and in a world that the next generations may refer to as "shadowed and threatening." They were at war they will say with wonderment. "They were concerned about their economy! They expected to be attacked at any time and in unpredictable ways! They were worried that their environment was collapsing! And in spite of this they sang joyous songs about a child and about shepherds and angels and some people called Wise Ones, not to mention utterly impractical things like frankincense and myrrh! They must have been mad!"

They may talk about us in that far-off future, when our singing is remembered as long ago. But if they judge us to be mad they will be wrong -- or perhaps they will be both right and wrong. They will be right because, if we are wise, we will risk some madness of joy in this troubled time. We will risk this for the same reason that Zephaniah, Isaiah and Paul were willing to risk a wild and joyous song when they could so easily have sung sadly in the shadows that surrounded their small islands of fragile personal joy. But the reason that it is not madness for us to risk singing our songs is that we believe what they believed -- we are a people of God, a people of a God who can be trusted.

So -- "Sing . . . shout . . . rejoice . . . exult!"

Growing Pains (I Sam. 2:18-20; Ps. 148; Col. 3:12-17; Lk. 2:41-52)

One June my family and I were spending time on the north shore of Galway Bay in the west of Ireland. It was mid-afternoon, and there was a mist on the wind. Our children were playing Frisbee on the shingle beach, and I was taking photographs. I remember pausing as I caught one them in the camera lens, and thinking, "You are my children, and I love you so much."

I suspect Hannah knew such moments when she came to the temple each year to see her child. There is the tender moment when she fits Samuel with the white robe she brings, each one larger then the last because the boy is growing. In reading of that moment, we ourselves are being called to grow in Christian faith. When we’re told that Samuel was "ministering before the Lord," we are being encouraged to develop the art of entering regularly into the presence of God -- something perfectly possible for even the busiest Christian, If only he or she is prepared to practice the art in simple ways and for even very short periods of time.

Suddenly the intimacy of this scene is gone and the psalm takes us into infinity. This psalm would make a magnificent video. It would include space shots borrowed from NASA files -- Praise the Lord from the heavens! It would ransack the paintings of the Renaissance for majestic winged creatures -- Praise him all his angels. The psalm hurls us through the solar system -- sun and moon -- and on through the galaxy -- all you shining stars. We sail on to the great aerial oceans that were once thought to be above the clouds as waters above the heavens.

This is where a 2lst-century video might stop, but we cannot. Beyond the deepest heaven and the farthest star, yet closer than our own breathing, lies the ultimate majesty who commanded and thereby created them -- the One fixed their bounds which cannot be passed.

Once again the camera roves. We explore earth itself. We plunge into oceans to encounter sea monsters, We are swept through weather systems and climates -- fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind. All are presented to us as fulfilling God’s command.

Now we climb mountains and hills. We sweep through groves of fruit trees and cedars. We run with wild animals and cattle, we shrink from creeping things, and we wonder at the grace of flying birds. Suddenly we are in a human environment, its structures ruled by princes. Beyond them are men and women, old and young together. Finally we are deafened by the combined song of all creation, singing not to its own glory but to the glory of God, whose glory is above earth and heaven,

With poetry like this, no wonder the ancients believed that the stars sang. Perhaps they do, and it is our ears that need opening. Perhaps we need to be a people who are close to God.

This is precisely what the Colossians reading is about -- the congregation as a people close to God. And we are pulled up short at its very first statement. We are addressed as God’s chosen ones. Ask anyone why he or she is in a congregation and you will get many answers, most linked with some aspect of personal choice. You will almost never hear someone say "Because God chose me."

There follows a wonderful description of gifts needed to form and hold a Christian congregation, all of them practical and realistic. We might almost call them the commandments of congregational life. Among them . . .

• Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.

• Forgive each other. The word is repeated three times!

• Be thankful. This is utterly central to our lives.

• Let the word of Christ dwell in you. Most of us think of the Word as being in a book, rather than the word of Christ being actually in each of us.

• Teach and admonish one another. Wonderful things can happen when a congregation realizes that many of its members have this gift and ministry.

• Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord.

No aspect of congregational life is outside the realm of the holy scripture that says to us, "I took you to see a child in a manger a few day ago. Today I want you to see how vast the consequences are for your life. Today I showed you another child, a boy named Samuel, growing in a long-ago temple, and suggested that his story calls you to grow spiritually. In a psalm I showed you the cosmos itself to get you to grasp the glory of the God who gave you the child in the manger. I have just told you what it takes to make a strong and vibrant Christian community, and now I want to show you something deeply significant about our Lord Jesus himself . . ."

He is 12 and has been separated from his parents in a huge city. He has an encounter that changes him forever, teaching him self-awareness and, above all, knowledge of the One whom he will always think of as a loving Father.

In the pattern of Jesus’ growing is the pattern to which each of us is called. Even the irony that he first became lost before he experienced this first growing -- even this has meaning for every Christian. We live at a time when it is easy to feel lost. Our time and world are daunting and even defeating. But that very lostness can be the prelude to our personal growing.

May it be so for us all.

Youth on the Edge

The current cohort of American teenagers between he ages of 13 and 17 is lonely, spiritually hungry and intensely aware of the threat of violence. That’s the profile that emerges from a recent Gallup Youth Survey.

Young people fear for their safety at school more than ever, despite dramatic increases in security measures. Nearly one in two (48 percent) teens say they have had bomb threats in their own school since the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Colorado. Close to one in four (23 percent) say they are fearful of going to school because of school violence. Black students are twice as likely as white students to report that they fear for their physical safety (28 percent versus 13 percent).

Also, teenagers today express feeling pressured and lonely. Among high school leaders, these feelings can be intense. A Gallup study of student leaders in the nationally recognized Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership seminar found them three times more likely than other teens to express feelings of loneliness. In addition, while 30 percent of the general teenage population feels "pressured," over half (55 percent) of student leaders claim the same.

The spiritual hunger among teens is remarkable. Millions of teens attend church and youth groups regularly. Teenagers express a burgeoning interest in learning about other faith traditions, yet most remain faithful to their own orthodox beliefs. They are persuaded that faith is an important component in their lives, and many of them want to deepen their religious understanding. The challenge for churches is to help channel teenagers’ free-floating, often vague interest in spirituality into sincere religious conviction that grounds a life of faith.

The Gallup survey showed that 92 percent of teens consider their religious beliefs important to them. A third say faith is the most important influence in their lives. That number goes up to 52 percent for African-American teens. Close to four in ten say they pray alone frequently (42 percent) and read the Bible at least weekly (36 percent).

Teens report a higher or comparable degree of Christian orthodoxy and confidence in the church when compared to their parents or other adults. Ninety-five percent express belief in God, and 67 percent have confidence in organized religion. Over half (55 percent) call themselves "religious," with an additional 39 percent referring to themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

American teenagers today more closely resemble their grandparents in church attendance. On average, the Gallup Youth Survey documents teen church attendance that is 10 percentage points higher than the national figures for all adults. In a recent study 50 percent of American teens 13-17 report attending a local faith community within the past seven days. The statistic tumbles after high school with 35 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 reporting attendance within the past week. It then climbs steadily with age: 40 percent for ages 30-49; 45 percent, ages 50-64; and 56 percent among adults over 65.

The strongest showing of youth church attendance occurs among American Protestants; three in five of them report attending within the past week. Also, young people endorse the idea that parents and their children should attend church together. Only 27 percent of the teen population expressed reluctance to have parents and teens in worship services together.

Even more teens report being part of a church youth group. Sixty-five percent of teenagers today say they have been involved in a youth group at some point, and of those, close to half (46 percent) are still involved. When Gallup asks teens why they became involved, the answers reveal a surprising degree of depth. The top response (82 percent) Is that they want to learn more about faith. Seventy-three percent got involved because of parental encouragement. Over seven in ten (71 percent) say they wanted a place to talk about what’s important to them, and nearly two in three (65 percent) say they became involved because of a friend’s invitation.

Although the American religious scene is slowly becoming more pluralistic and diverse, the number of non-Christian teens in this country remains relatively small. In fact, American young people are more likely to have no church preference than they are to prefer Mormonism, Judaism or Islam. While 9 percent of teens state that they have no religious preference, only a slim number assert that they are either atheist or agnostic.

Perhaps most pronounced about the religious lives of American teens is their spiritual curiosity Over half of them want to learn more about Roman Catholicism (54 percent) and Protestantism (52 percent). A higher proportion of Protestant teens want to learn about Roman Catholicism than Roman Catholic teens want to learn about Protestantism. Even more intriguing is the finding that the third most popular faith tradition American teens express a desire to learn about is Native American spirituality (44 percent).

Recognizing the culture of violence in which they live, over half (53 percent) of teens say "violence on TV and in movies sends the wrong message to young people." One in three teens says he or she watched a "particularly violent TV program in the past month." A similar proportion saw a strongly violent movie as well. Male teens report being exposed to more violence, but they are less concerned about it than female teens.

While many schools have gone to great lengths to prevent another Columbine from happening in their own communities, most Americans don’t place the blame for school violence on school officials or on a lack of security.

Adults’ main concern is the availability of guns. "Parents" were cited next as the source of the problem (along with media, social pressures on youth and the Internet).

Parents of teens claim that, as a result of the episodes of school violence, they have taken action. Eighty percent say they have spoken to their children about not making fun of unpopular students or groups. Nearly half report supervising their own children’s activities more closely. Also, 38 percent say they have become more involved in their children’s school in the past year in an effort to protect their children.

Still, nearly two-thirds say that a Columbine-type shooting "is likely" to occur in their own community. And one-half of teens (48 percent) say there are groups at their school capable of violence, based on what they do, say or claim they will do. Students believe these groups continue to bring weapons to schools, and 64 percent believe parents know about these groups. Fifty-eight percent of American teenagers say episodes of school violence reflect the overall mood of teens today.

Like many Americans, teenagers in recent years have sought to identify potential threats to their school communities. Four out of five teenagers (81 percent) believe dangerous individuals can be identified by their dress, appearance or manner, as reflected in the "Trench Coat Mafia" at Columbine.

The situation, however, is far more complex. Toward the end of President Clinton’s administration, the Secret Service conducted a threat assessment based on a review of more than 30 school shooters. The purpose behind the study, titled the Safe School Initiative, was to harness the knowledge and expertise of the Secret Service on behalf of police and others trying to safeguard American schools. Several interesting findings emerged from the Study:

• All of the incidents were committed by boys or young men.

• Contrary to the impression given by the Columbine event, fellow students were not the only targets chosen by attackers. In over half of the incidents, the attacker had selected at least one school administrator, faculty member or staff member as a target.

• More than half of the attacks occurred in the middle of the school day.

• Incidents of targeted violence at school are rarely impulsive. As the report states, they are typically the end result of an understandable and often discernible process of thinking and behavior."

• Prior to most incidents, the attacker told someone about his idea or plan.

• There is no accurate or useful profile of "the school shooter." They range in age from 11 to 21, come from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, exhibit a range of academic performance (from excellent to failing), and vary substantially in personality and social characteristics.

The Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center found that most attackers had previously used guns and had access to them, and most shooting incidents were not resolved by law enforcement. In more than two out of three cases, having been bullied played a key role in the attack.