Confessions of a Recovering Pharisee

[HTR News]
“Bye-bye church. We’re busy.” That’s the message teens are giving churches today.

Only about one in four teens now participate in church youth groups, considered the hallmark of involvement; numbers have been flat since 1999. Other measures of religiosity — prayer, Bible reading and going to church — lag as well, according to Barna Group, a Ventura, Calif., evangelical research company. This all has churches canceling their summer teen camps and youth pastors looking worriedly toward the fall, when school-year youth groups kick in.

“Talking to God may be losing out to Facebook,” says Barna president David Kinnaman.

“Sweet 16 is not a sweet spot for churches. It’s the age teens typically drop out,” says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources in Nashville, which found the turning point in a study of church dropouts. “A decade ago, teens were coming to church youth group to play, coming for the entertainment, coming for the pizza. They’re not even coming for the pizza anymore. They say, ‘We don’t see the church as relevant, as meeting our needs or where we need to be today.’ ”

“I blame the parents,” who didn’t grow up in a church culture, says Jeremy Johnston, executive pastor at First Family Church in Overland Park, Kan.

Read more here.

[From me]

I’m sure there is a lot of blame to go around. But blaming parents only is stretching it. Having grown up in Youth Ministry and being a Youth Minister myself, I think it has more to do with hypocrisy that students see. When they see adults fighting in church over_____________ then they don’t want to have anything to do with that. Having edgy music or cool games doesn’t cut it. They can find that anywhere.

I’m still working with students now and what they want are authentic relationships. Age doesn’t matter if you treat them with respect and you are honest and authentic. Just my humble opinion.

What do you think?

[LA TImes]

Calling multi-faith expansion the next step, the school will offer training for Muslims and Jews in a program that strains its historic ties to the Methodist Church. In a bow to the growing diversity of America’s religious landscape, the Claremont School of Theology, a Christian institution with long ties to the Methodist Church, will add clerical training for Muslims and Jews to its curriculum this fall, to become, in a sense, the first truly multi-faith American seminary.

The transition, which is being formally announced Wednesday, upends centuries of tradition in which seminaries have hewn not just to single faiths but often to single denominations within those faiths. Eventually, Claremont hopes to add clerical programs for Buddhists and Hindus.

Although there are other theological institutions that accept students of multiple faiths, or have partnerships with institutions of other religions, Claremont is believed to be the first accredited institution that will train students of multiple faiths for careers as clerics. The 275-student seminary offers master’s and doctoral degrees.

Read more here.

[From me]

Why? If a person wants to go study to be a Cleric, then go to a school for that religion. Studying other religions is one thing but you go to a “Christian” Seminary to study about Jesus Christ not Mohammed, Buddha or whatever else is the flavor of the month. I sure hope the good folks in the UMC stop sending them money. You can get this kind of education at a secular school. How will they pray in class? Maybe they don’t pray at all at Claremont. I had a great Seminary experience and was grateful to have professors who prayed for us daily. I saw God do great things through my professors because I knew they believed what they taught. This who story is strange.

[Time]

One Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus’ words “Love thine enemy.” As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels’ preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy blond but now white. Indeed, if there is a whiter preacher currently running a megachurch, that man must glow.

Yet neither Hybels’ sermon, nor his 23,400-person congregation, is as white as he is. Along with Jesus, he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. Then he introduced Shawn Christopher, a former backup singer for Chaka Khan, who offered a powerhouse rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” As the music swelled, Larry and Renetta Butler, an African-American couple in their usual section in the 7,800-seat sanctuary, exchanged glances. Since Hybels decided 10 years ago to aggressively welcome minorities to his lily-white congregation, Renetta says, few sermons pass without a cue that he is still at it. “He always throws in something,” she says. She’s been around long enough to recall when this wasn’t the case.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that “11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week … And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school.” That largely remains true today. Despite the growing desegregation of most key American institutions, churches are still a glaring exception. Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial mix.

Since Reconstruction, when African Americans fled or were ejected from white churches, black and white Christianity have developed striking differences of style and substance. The argument can be made that people attend the church they are used to; many minorities have scant desire to attend a white church, seeing their faith as an important vessel of cultural identity. But those many who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged — subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently. In an age of mixed-race malls, mixed-race pop-music charts and, yes, a mixed-race President, the church divide seems increasingly peculiar. It is troubling, even scandalous, that our most intimate public gatherings — and those most safely beyond the law’s reach — remain color-coded.

But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion’s most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.

Read more here.

[From me]

Lets hope this trend continues. I saw the beginning of the end when I started inviting people of color to a church I was serving at. The thing is my children don’t see color. My daughter’s best friend before we moved here was a different shade than she is. And many of my son’s best friends don’t look like him either. If we truly believe in John 3:16 then we must reach everyone!

What do you think?

[HT] Vicki Frye

[NY Times]

Things went smoothly for the first hour of the Twitter experiment at Trinity Church in Manhattan on Good Friday in April.While hundreds of worshipers watched the traditional dramatization of the Crucifixion from pews in the church, one of New York’s oldest, thousands more around the world followed along on smartphones and computers as a staff member tweeted short bursts of dialogue and setting (“Darkness and earthquake,” “Crucify him!”).

The trouble began in the second hour.

Twitter’s interactivity — its essence — made it easy for an anonymous text-messager to insert an unscripted character into the Passion play: a Roman guard who breezily claimed, “I’ve got dibs on his robe.” When another texter introduced a rogue Mary Magdalene, the intrusion only confirmed the obvious: Twitter’s trademark limit of 140 characters per message is no bar against crudity.

Religious groups from Episcopalians to Orthodox Jews have signed up for Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks with the same gusto that celebrities and politicians have, and for some of the same reasons — to gain a global platform and to appeal to young people.

Still, many clerics admit to an uneasiness about the merger of worship and electronic chatter.

In online debates and private discussions, leaders of all faiths have been weighing pros and cons and diagramming the boundaries of acceptable interactions: Should the congregation have a Facebook page, or should it be the imam’s or priest’s? Should there be limited access? Censoring? Is it appropriate for a clergy member to “friend” a minor?

Some recoil at the informality and unpredictability of the crowds marshaled by social media, and at their seeming immunity — even hostility — to the authority of established institutions. More deeply, some in the clergy see a basic tension between the anonymous world of online life and the meaning of religious community.

“In Judaism, we believe that God resides in the community — among people in the same room at the same time, hearing each other’s voices and looking in each other’s eyes,” said Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik of the Forest Hills Jewish Center in Queens, who also wanted it known that he carries an iPhone and a laptop and is talking with his congregation about a Facebook page.

“But can you tweet a minyan?” he asked, referring to the quorum of 10 people required for most Jewish devotions. “I don’t think so.”

Religious groups are answering many such questions for themselves — and, for the most part, signing up for interactive media, said the Rev. Bill Reichart, a Presbyterian minister in Atlanta who leads an informal network of Web consultants who work with people of a broad spectrum of faiths.

“If total control is what you want, social media will frustrate you,” he said, reprising his advice to the clergy. “But the trade-off is the ability to hear and learn, reach out in new directions.” Many clerics, desperate to connect with young people, have been like radio dispatchers using the wrong bandwidth, he said. “The young don’t do e-mail anymore,” he said. “They do Facebook.”

Evangelical Christian ministers were among the earliest Web networkers, and today, popular preachers like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen have thousands of followers on Twitter. At Christ Tabernacle Church in Queens, Pastor Adam Durso and his brother Chris, the youth director, keep in contact with their flock, sometimes hourly, on a half-dozen social media sites.

Leaders in other faiths are catching on, but moving slowly, said Monique Cuvelier, a Web consultant in Boston who attributes some of the resistance to the conservatism of any established institution, and some to a sense of privacy: Gossiping about the rabbi’s wife may be common in temple parking lots, “but having it end up on the Internet — that freaks some people out,” she said.

Read more here.

[From me]

I hear people lamenting the evils of technology. Sure there are bad elements to it. But you had better get on board or be left behind. The world is changing whether we like it or not. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, My Space, texting, Looped, etc…. are the way people communicate. Some can say it is impersonal but they have probably not tried it.

I have reconnected with people I haven’t seen in 20+ years through social media. I have met people online and then actually met in person at conferences later because of social media. I pray for people and they pray for me. Are they relationships? Yes. Maybe not in the same way as the past but they are relationships. People can complain or chose to adapt. The church had better adapt or be swept away in the technological tsunami.

What do you think?

[Time]

John Voelz isn’t trying to brag, but it’s fair to say he was down with Twitterbefore most people knew it was a proper noun. Last year, Voelz, a pastor, was tweeting at a conference outside Nashville about ways to make the church experience more creative — ways to “make it not suck” — when suddenly it hit him: Twitter. 

Voelz and David McDonald, the other senior pastor at Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Mich., spent two weeks educating their congregation about Twitter, the microblogging site that challenges users to communicate in 140 characters or less. They held training sessions where congregants brought in their laptops, iPhones and Blackberrys. They upped the bandwidth in the auditorium. (Finding God on YouTube)

There’s a time and a place for technology, and most houses of worship still say it’s not at morning Mass. But instead of reminding worshippers to silence their cell phones, a small but growing number of churches around the country are following Voelz’ lead and encouraging people to integrate text-messaging into their relationship with God.

In Seattle, Mars Hill churchgoers regularly tweet throughout the service. In New York City, Trinity Church marked Good Friday by tweeting the Passion play, detailing the stages of Jesus’ crucifixion in short bursts. At Next Level Church, outside Charlotte, it’s not only okay to fuse social networking technology with prayer; it’s desirable.

On Easter Sunday, pastor Todd Hahn prefaced his sermon by saying, “I hope many of you are tweeting this morning about your experience with God.”

Read more here.

[From me]

I’ve “tweeted” at conferences several times in the past year. I’ve tweeted during sporting events and while traveling.  But I had never tweeted during church until yesterday.  I was prompted because I was distracted during the sermon by a woman on the front row who decided to comment out loud after every sentence the pastor made. I understand “Amen’s” and other agreement phrases but this was rather disruptive at least to me. I don’t plan on it again mainly because Cassandra probably wouldn’t like it.

For those who don’t Twitter or understand it they can’t get what it is all about.  It is like a constant stream of information. You will never catch every “tweet.” If you try you will get frustrated. Some “tweet” to let people know what they are doing. Some tweet to market, others to meet people, and who knows what else people use it for.

It is hard to explain Twitter unless you try it.  Have you ever tweeted during church?

What do you think?