Article
In a letter to his friend Eberhard Bethge (included in Letters and Papers from Prison) , theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer asks why he is instinctively drawn more to religionless people than to the religious — an affinity he feels in his language, in the naming of God before these two groups of people. He does not, …
Continue reading “A Matter of Being, and a Matter of Being Right”
Article
Last spring the Nashville Convention Center played host to both the National Pastors Convention and the Emergent Convention. While the former was largely geared toward evangelical baby boomers, the latter catered to Gen X and Millennial evangelicals (and "postevangelicals") who are trying to come to grips with postmodernity. Though the two conventions intentionally overlapped, that …
Article
A new process of forming and teaching Christian doctrine has recently emerged in the church. Theology is no longer in the driver’s seat, nor do creeds and confessions play the decisive role in the new process. Nevertheless, it does contain an emphasis on sound teaching — which is teaching that occurs when Christians join minds …
Continue reading “A New Spirituality: Shaping Doctrine at the Grass Roots”
Article
What is a great church? For many Americans, great is synonymous with large, volume equals vitality quantity means quality. But a countertradition is quietly emerging. As more churches grow to stadium proportions, small congregations are coming to see their diminutive size as an asset for mission. I had to learn this from experience in serving …
Article
At a time when the church had grown too cozy with the ruling authorities, when faith had become a means to power and influence, some Christians who sought to live out an authentically biblical faith headed for desolate places. They pooled their resources and dedicated themselves to a life of asceticism and prayer. Most outsiders …
Article
What is a healthy congregation? For some clergy and laity health is simply the absence of conflict. But we may be confusing a healthy congregation with a placid one. While conflict is seldom fun, its absence may be less an indication of health than of an insufficient sense of urgency or challenge about being the …
Continue reading “Back to Basics: Rx for Congregational Health”
Article
In the view of even the most faithful and sophisticated church members, including those who are close friends of the clergy, the theological seminary is a mysterious and awesome institution — familiar only to the privileged and spiritual elite, speaking an esoteric tongue, and turning out men and women in a highly specialized field — …
Book Chapter
What are the diseases that infect our churches? Inadequate numbers, unhealthy divisions, meager financial support, unprophetic leadership, lethargic congregations — but at the root of them all lies the fact that the very thing for which the Church exists — the proclamation of the gospel — is being in our time so feebly done.
Book Chapter
A congregation, undeniably Christian, nevertheless uses forms and stories common to a larger world treasury to create its own local religion of outlooks, action patterns, and values. I have begun to see how astonishingly thick and meaning-laden is the actual life of a single local church. Ministry in even a small church occurs in a much more abundant world of signals and images than I and, I suspect, many others had assumed.
Book Chapter
This chapter turns to the action of story, its plot, that conveys both collective memory and corporate hope, past and future, in the present bodied moment.
Book Chapter
At certain moments, most often in their worship and acts of mission, congregations intensify their own search for the meaning of their corporate lives. It is in these events, which often seem to be parenthetical moments in church life, that the local church represents its participation not only in its own story but also in that of God.
Book Chapter
There are four approaches from which one examines a potential dwelling: contextual, mechanical, organic, and symbolic. To consider seriously the capacities of either houses or local churches, in other words, is to view them as textures, mechanisms, organisms, and means of signification. While all four perspectives are in play in any single instance of inquiry, one of the four generally dominates.
Book Chapter
The basic ground of democracy is the Christian conception of man as a child of God in the innate worth and dignity of every human creature, regardless of race, color, nation, economic status, language, creed, culture, or any other man-made line of cleavage. This is the chief meeting point of the Church with men of good will outside its ranks.
Book Chapter
The idiom is primarily conveyed in story form, as the parish apprehends its corporate experience and as its members communicate their common life and draw resources from the narrative structures of the world. Telling such a story enables a congregation to comprehend its nature and mission.
Book Chapter
If the conservative churches are producing more personal religious vitality than the others perhaps the primary factors are: 1. The church going habit is earlier and more persistently associated with religion. 2. The emotional part of worship is more vivid and dramatic. 3. Greater demands are made on church members. 4. Concrete instruction in Christian doctrine is given. 5. In some matters, greater emphasis is put on the essential heart of the Christian gospel.
Book Chapter
Setting is a group’s cosmic construction that accounts for crises. This working picture of reality often goes unexpressed until challenged. Then, in that tension, the plot thickens, and world view as story is related, binding even in the light of its contradiction the self to the Other, the finite frame to the world’s outcome.
Book Chapter
The minister’s theology in preaching must be brought to bear at every point on the human situation: on prayer; on the problem of evil; on sin and repentance; on the fact of death.
Book Chapter
World views reflect and give a focus to group experience, providing a map within which words and actions make sense.
Book Chapter
The vitality of the church upon the world is in the hands of the laymen. Their economic and political life must be guided primarily by the Christian gospel; the Christian faith must be communicated to them in language they can understand. Each layman must do something about this himself perhaps through channels of fellowship, study, action, prayer, and personal witness.
Book Chapter
The three great doctrines of Christian faith are examined: Creation — The most elemental meeting place of the Christian with the secular mind is at the point of the doctrine of creation. Judgment — At the point of doctrine of divine judgment the modern mind finds both easy corroboration and an almost insurmountable stumbling block. Redemption and the Kingdom — The Christian doctrine of redemption, like the closely related concept of the Kingdom of God, is viewed in several polar relations, in which the omission of either aspect of a fundamental duality introduces distortion.
Book Chapter
Certain correlations appear between a member’s world view position and other church activities: a. Constant attendees highly correlate with the mean orientation of the congregation. b. Pastors close to the mean enjoy a more satisfying relationship with congregations. c. Persons on the periphery are often marginal to the life of the congregation. d. Lay leaders are not necessarily representative of the mean.
Book Chapter
Hopewell describes a failed course of study at his church — Trinity: “Thus in characterizing Trinity, the absentees recounted its story as its history, the rest of us accounted for its story as its metaphor, and both we and they witnessed the story transformed as gospel.”
Book Chapter
Three congregations are examined, observing how a myth helps express and explore the genius that characterizes a congregation.
Book Chapter
Telling the story develops the identity and mission of a congregation by establishing the setting of the story of a local church, its picture of the world; narrative proclaims corporate nature. The congregation in story is not permitted to reduce itself to numbers of individual contributors of money, names added to the church rolls, or ticket holders at congregational programs. Story instead weaves a living fabric of common episode.
Book Chapter
Whatever external investigators and consultants may accomplish in a congregation, its specific future still depends overwhelmingly upon its reaction to the information it gains about itself. It matters more what a congregation tells itself than what it is told. Deft analysis or intervention can, at best, resource the attempt of the local church to understand or change itself. Transformation requires a different order of knowing than that which outsiders provide.
Book Chapter
Viewing the parish as house within the world house emphasizes its participation in the frame of all language. Human imagination as a whole provides the particular idiomatic and narrative construction of a congregation; its members communicate by a code derived from the totality of forms and stories by which societies cohere.
Article
The rapid decline in birth rates from 1960 to 1980 and the extended life span of people 65 and older have changed the face of many religious institutions. Not many of the aging churches yet match the situation of one church I know, in which 90 percent of the members are 60 years and older. …
Article
A couple of years ago, my mother received a birthday card inscribed "With Love, Tom." Because it was her 78th birthday, she didn’t take too kindly to receiving a birthday card from anyone, much less, someone who addressed her with such familiarity. Besides, she couldn’t think of anyone named Tom who knew her well enough …
Continue reading “Community & Computers: Babel, Bytes & Bits”
Article
In July 1995 Chicago was wrapped in a deadly heat wave. For days the mercury hovered in the three-digit zone, with heat indices reaching 120 degrees. In that period 739 Chicagoans died of heat-related causes. Emergency teams reported finding inadequate or nonexistent ventilation in the residences of the dead. Persons living with cardiac or pulmonary …
Article
Before turning to the substance of my first address, I should like to thank the planners of this event for inviting me to participate in it. As a foreigner, and inheritor of Presbyterian identity by only one third of my ecclesiastical lineage, I have little right to be here, really. My only qualification for accepting …
Continue reading “Confessing Christ in a Post-Christendom Context”
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) James F. Hopewell provides a definitive study of congregational life. His thesis: we must understand each congregation’s unique story that catches up and gives pattern to a church’s local culture — its beliefs, its mission work, and its everyday administrative transactions, because it also reveals God’s intention for that community of believers.
Book Chapter
Hopewell found that local churches had the capacity to hold together in the face of strains and pressures, and he found little accounting for this in the appropriate literature. This ability of congregations to persist is examined here and an attempt is made to find coherence, if not unity, to the great variety of ways congregations are analyzed and apprehended.
Article
As the organizing pastor of a suburban congregation, I have experienced firsthand its faltering first steps, its seasons of growth and drought, and the Spirit’s persistent attempts to help us identify and embrace the vision of God’s own choice. Quite frankly, we’ve resisted the vision. We’ve settled for many comfortable “second bests” until prodded, pushed …
Article
This article is based on an address to the Heretics Club, an organization established by the chaplain’s office at Colgate University for students professing no religious affiliation. I am generally in sympathy with people who disparage what they call organized religion and I prefer to call “institutional religion.” I not only feel that I understand …
Book Chapter
The churches of America, though far from decadent, are doing much less effective work than they might be doing with their resources, and the major cause of the difficulty lies in failure to present the meaning and claims of the Christian faith in terms that seem vital to the common man.
Article
We are slowly and painfully becoming aware of the role of addiction in our society. We are learning not only about chemical dependency but about codependency and the roles played by members of dysfunctional families. Alcohol and drug addiction are just the tip of the iceberg. Many experts are recognizing that there are various other …
Article
1. Up the Rejang River in Sarawak in Northern Borneo the Ibans, a primitive but emerging people, dwell. I was there once. I do not claim to know their language, but one phrase I did understand. A group of little boys and girls in my presence lifted up three fingers and said, "I sa Ke …
Article
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. …
Article
Book Review A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church. By Gerardo Marti. Indiana University Press, 242 pp. Ethnic particularism, in the official form of admissions procedures and ethnic studies programs and the unofficial form of students’ seating choices in the cafeteria and the library, is a powerful force in American …
Article
Traditionally, the period of Lent has been a time for "turning inward." We examine our lives, our faith, our degree of dedication or lack thereof, and we determine to make amends in various ways. Lent is thus always in danger of being overly individualistic. Accordingly, it may be worthwhile to remember, as Lent begins, that …
Article
Faithful, effective Christian congregations make a difference. They touch people’s lives, address profound questions with insight and wisdom, and offer places where the ingredients of a flourishing life can be discovered and nurtured in relationship to the God of Jesus Christ. What do such congregations look like? In some ways, they are very different from …
Article
As worshipers walk into Central Park United Methodist Church, Bob Swoverland usually pulls one of them aside and asks him or her to help serve communion. One day he felt moved to ask Karen (last name withheld) to help. As he remembers, “Normally, I’ll just ask anybody, but when she came in it was like …
Article
Our years of warfare in Indochina and, more recently, the Watergate affair have ushered in a period of national self-examination and self-criticism. Not just radical critics but establishment types too have begun to ask, Where did we go wrong? So we sharpen our analytic tools and try to discover what those disastrous experiences tell us …
Continue reading “The Church and Social Responsibility: Where Do We Go from Here”
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) There is need of a much closer connection than we have had thus far between theology and evangelism. The Christian faith is both something to be believed and something to be lived.
Article
Book review: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. by Stephen Toulmin, Macmillan/Free Press. “Modern” and “postmodern” are terms that both fascinate and puzzle us. Here is a book that undertakes to say what “modern” has meant and why, and that gives us a chance to think about what it will mean to leave that …
Article
For at least the past generation, mainline Protestants have been worried about declines in membership. One camp has taken up the rallying cry of conservatives (and some vocal sociologists) who claim that theological “strictness” and clear church-culture boundaries mark the path to reversing this decline. Others have claimed that the church’s aim is not to …
Article
My personal religious pilgrimage is not exceptional. I grew up in a community church in Southern California that had evangelical leanings. It was a strong and caring group of people, even though the leadership of the church circumscribed the Christian faith with a relatively strong dose of moral legalism. In college I joined the InterVarsity …
Continue reading “The Reinvented Church: Styles and Strategies”
Article
When I was a child I could hardly wait for Wilhelm Roepke, my grandfather, to arrive at our farm. Though he had formally “retired” after a lifetime of farming in Poland, Germany and southern Alberta, he couldn’t stay away from the fields and the barns. His fields and animals had a hold on him, a …
Article
Since the mid-1960s, the mainline Protestant denominations have declined in membership, numbers of churches and church attendance. Statistical decline, cultural marginalization and religious displacement from the center is the recent story of the mainline churches. Conservative Protestant movements now occupy the religious center and constitute a good portion of the mainline denominations. These rapid social …
Article
Paul Wilkes led the Parish/Congregation Study, which compiled a list of 300 excellent Protestant congregations and profiled nine of them in Excellent Protestant Congregations: The Guide to the Best Places and Practices. © 2001 by Paul Wilkes. The book, from which this article is excerpted, is being published this month by Westminster John Knox. Among …
