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Despite what you may have heard recently, it turns out that church-going families really do have more solid homes than their secular neighbors. In Monday's Breakpoint commentary, Chuck Colson notes that, "For a long time, misinterpreted statistics made it seem that the connection between strong faith and strong families had weakened. For example, my friend Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action has said for years that evangelical Christian families were no different from secular families. According to Sider, 'evangelicals and born-again Christians . . . divorce at the same rate as -- or slightly more often -- than other Americans.' Sider also has published data that seemed to show that Christians were having extramarital sex at the same rate as their secular neighbors. "Well, now researchers are discovering that Sider's data is flawed. At a 'Summit of Religious Leaders' that I attended last fall, the eminent authorities Dr. Brad Wilcox and Dr. Byron Johnson made a presentation showing that strong religious faith genuinely is connected with strong family life. "In collecting data, Wilcox and Johnson examined the religious practices of people who called themselves Christians -- something previous studies had not always done. In particular, they checked rates of church attendance. Their findings were striking. Although church attendance is down, those who do attend, especially weekly, are less likely to divorce. Instead they are more likely to report that their marriages are happy. And regular church attenders reported being happier in general than those who did not attend regularly. "As Wilcox and Johnson pointed out in their presentation, 'For much of our nation's history, religious institutions have been the primary custodians of marriage. . . . Family, in turn, has oriented Americans to the religious life.' It's no coincidence, then, that church attendance and marriage declined together as divorce and illegitimacy rates rise. And it's no coincidence that regular church attendance still correlates with marital faithfulness and happiness." (Click here to read the full commentary.) Michael
Duduit, Editor Click here to visit "I Was Just Thinking" (Michael’s blog) for insights and observations about faith and culture issues. Recent topics: Truth and Feelings; The Church of Recycling If
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Preaching the Mysteries of God In his new book Stewards of the Story (Westminster John Knox), James Earl Massey observes, "Mystery is something whose utter strangeness and stubbornness forever resist all attempts on our part to domesticate it, dominate it, define it or dismiss it. Life is a mystery! Death is a mystery! The incarnation -- the coming of God in Jesus Christ -- is a mystery! The resurrection of Jesus from death is a mystery! Our life on this planet involves us in mystery. The Story of God's gracious dealings with us through grace involves us in mystery! We can experience the mystery, but, try as we might, we cannot explain it. We who preach are stewards of the mysteries of God. What we offer and extend through preaching can be experienced but it is more wonderful -- filled with what arouses wonder and awe -- than we can fully explain. "Dr. Gardner Taylor has told about an experience he and Mrs. Laura Taylor had near the end of his first preaching mission in Australia years ago. They were treated by their host with a visit to the studio of an outstanding Australian landscape artist, a man whose work had earned him a British knighthood. As Dr. Taylor looked about in the studio, his eyes caught sight of a massive canvas on which the artwork was only half finished. He asked the artist about it. The artist shook his head, a little sadly Taylor thought, and explained that the unfinished picture was to have been a scene he had experienced during a visit to Australia's northern territory, but after much trying he had been unable to depict the real beauty of the scene that had captured him. "Taylor saw, in the felt limitation that artist confessed to, a parable of the glory and pain of the preacher: while there is so much that can be seen and known and said about Jesus Christ, he is still a subject too vast to fully capture in our work, because his sacrificial life and work are rooted in 'the mysteries of God.'" (Click here to learn more about the book Stewards of the Story)
Importance of defining success Reggie Joiner is on staff at North Point Community Church in suburban Atlanta. In the book 7 Practices of Effective Ministry (Multnomah) -- co-authored by Andy Stanley and Lane Jones -- he emphasizes the need for church leaders to define what success will look like in their own setting. He writes: "Don't confuse defining what a win looks like with establishing a mission statement. There is an important distinction between the two. A mission statement is sometimes too general. It is more like a compass -- it may be helpful to keep an organization moving in the right direction, but it does not necessarily ensure effectiveness. A mission statement is easy to manipulate and its impact difficult to measure. In fact, it is possible for any organization to be fulfilling its mission and actually losing to the competition at the same time. "When you clarify the win, it is like marking a specific destination on a map -- it's easy to know when you win because you arrive at your desired destination. Maybe you've heard this business aphorism: If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. A lot of churches claim to reach more people every year; yet according to national statistics the church is rapidly declining in attendance and losing its influence in our nation. The fact is, a lot of churches are just not clear about where they are aiming, and so it's easy to convince themselves and everyone else they are hitting something. When you have drawn a clear and specific target, it becomes obvious when you hit or miss your mark. "Ron Blue gave us some good advice during the early days of our church. He said, 'You can't manage what you can't measure.' Don't make the mistake of clarifying a win in terms that are too general. When you do, you cheat everyone in your organization and you fail to establish an effective way to measure your success." (Click here to read the rest of Joiner's article at Pastors.com. Click here to learn more about the book 7 Practices of Effective Ministry.) http://www.pastors.com/article.asp?ArtID=9070
Blast from the past At a website called "The Victorian Web" (yes, there truly is a site for everything now) you'll learn that in 1884, the editors of a periodical called Contemporary Pulpit -- it must have been the 19th century British predecessor of Preaching magazine -- asked its readers to submit the names of the "greatest living English-speaking Protestant preachers." A total of 350 ballots were returned, and the results were printed in Contemporary Pulpit and The Spectator. The ten preachers who received the most votes were
(Click here to visit "The Victorian Web.") http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/sermons/rhe4.html
ILLUSTRATION: Mental illness, Psychiatry In his commentary for Jan. 4, R. Albert Mohler cited a column in the Los Angeles Times by psychiatrist and philosopher Irwin Savodnik of UCLA, who argues that his own field of psychiatry keeps inventing illusory diseases. Mohler writes: Savodnik points to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM-IV], published by the APA. He warns that ads have recently appeared in psychiatric journals proposing that shyness be diagnosed as a new "syndrome" that will be soon on its way to becoming a disease. Savodnik bets that the next edition of the DSM-IV will include shyness as a disease. "As it turns out, the association has been inventing mental illnesses for the last 50 years or so," Savodnik recounts. "The original diagnostic manual appeared in 1952 and contained 107 diagnoses and 132 pages, by my count. The second edition burst forth in 1968 with 180 diagnoses and 119 pages. In 1980, the association produced a 494-page tome with 226 conditions. Then, in 1994, the manual exploded to 886 pages and 365 conditions, representing a 340 percent increase in the number of diseases over 42 years." Are we actually to believe that Americans are now afflicted with 258 "conditions" that did not even exist (or were absolutely unknown) in 1952? A quick look through the DSM-IV will reveal that almost every living human being is afflicted with one or more of the "conditions" described in this encyclopedia of mental and emotional problems. More than anything else, this just goes to prove the adage of the psychotherapeutic industry -- you are either in therapy or in denial. . . . The "triumph of the therapeutic" so well described by Philip Reiff discounts personal responsibility and flies in the face of the Christian worldview. "Pathology has replaced morality," Savodnik asserts. "Treatment has supplanted punishment. Imprisonment is now hospitalization. From the moral self-castigation we find in the writings of John Adams we have been drawn to Woody Allen-style neuroses. Were the psychiatric association to scrutinize itself more deeply and reconsider its expansionist diagnostic programs, it would, hopefully, make a positive contribution to our culture by not turning the good and bad into the healthy and the sick." (Click here to read the full commentary)
ILLUSTRATION: Stewardship, Tithing The electronic security sensors at store exits aren't just to nab shoplifters, but to stem an even bigger problem -- employee theft. About 30% of "inventory shrinkage" is due to shoplifting, but a whopping 43% is due to stealing by employees. Furthermore, the cost of everything we buy is inflated by 15% to compensate for losses due to theft. Most of us wouldn't think of stealing from our employers, but consider this: There's a Divine Employer who requires faithfulness among His workers. For financing His earthly work, He desires our tithes and offerings. And the prophet Malachi said that our failures in these areas are tantamount to stealing from God. According to a 2003 report by Empty Tomb, an Illinois-based research organization, if U.S. Christians were giving the biblical tithe -- one-tenth of their income -- our churches would have an additional $143 billion for their ministries and benevolence works. Instead, the average American Christian gives the Lord a mere 2.66% of his or her income. Tithing is trusting. We give to the Lord, trusting Him to open the windows of heaven and pour on us the blessings we need; and we, in turn, continue to tithe and trust. (Turning Point Daily Devotional, 1-13-06)
ILLUSTRATION: Abstinence During her recent trip to West Africa, First Lady Laura Bush said, "I'm always a little bit irritated when I hear the criticism of abstinence, because abstinence is absolutely 100 percent effective in eradicating a sexually transmitted disease. In a part of the world where one in three people have a sexually transmitted deadly disease, you have to talk about abstinence, you really have to. In many countries where girls feel obligated to comply with the wishes of men, girls need to know that abstinence is a choice."
ILLUSTRATION: Books The Jan. 15 edition of Southern Review of Books reports that "U.S. readers bought more copies of the latest Harry Potter adventure on the day it was released than they bought copies of any other book sold in the nation in all of 2005, according to sales figures released Jan. 9 by Nielsen BookScan." U.S. sales for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were 4.1 million copies on the day it was released (including advance copy orders), and 7.02 million copies for the full year. A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's memoir about recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, was the second best selling book of the year in the United States, registering 1.77 million for the year thanks to a boost from Oprah Winfrey's book club. (It now appears that many incidents in the book are not accurate, and last week Oprah apologized to readers for her previous defense of the book.) The rest of the top ten for 2005: 3.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (a novel about a young
boy growing up in Afghanistan)
ILLUSTRATION: Church, Ministry One Sunday morning, a mother went in to wake her son and tell him it was time to get ready for church, to which he replied, "I'm not going." "Why not?" she asked. "I'll give you two good reasons," he said. "One, they don't like me, and two, I don't like them." His mother replied, "I'll give you two good reasons why you should go to church. One, you're 54 years old, and two, you're the pastor!"
"A prophet's quarrel with the world is deep down a lover's quarrel. If they didn't love the world, they probably wouldn't bother to tell it that it's going to hell. They'd just let it go." (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking)
Great workshop leaders set for National Conference on Preaching In addition to some exceptional speakers for general sessions, this year's National Conference on Preaching will also host a remarkable team of workshop leaders. "Preaching Creatively" is the theme of NCP 2006, scheduled for April 24-26 at Fellowship Church in Grapevine, TX (suburban Dallas). In addition to the general session speakers and preachers -- including Ed Young, Jr., Haddon Robinson, Calvin Miller, Dieter Zander, Jack Graham, Doug Pagitt, Steve Wende, Bryan L. Carter, Rick White, David Allen, Leroy Armstrong, Jr., Mike Glenn and more -- there will be a number of excellent workshop leaders, including Ramesh Richard, David Allen, Reg Grant, Calvin Pearson, James S. Hall, Oscar Lopez, Cathy Johnson, and Steven Smith. You'll draw insights and encouragement from the theme-related addresses on preaching creatively, plus great sermons and many practical workshops. Mark your calendar now to be part of the conference. Click here for additional information or to register (or call 800-288-9673). Register before March 1 and save $55 off the regular registration fee.
"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there." (Edwin Louis Cole)
A Dozen Ways to Know It's a Bad Church Meeting 12. The 60 Minutes film crew shows up. 11. Your picture ends up on a milk carton. 10. People arrive at the meeting clutching copies of books about "spiritual abuse." 9. The church constitution suddenly becomes revered as the most important legal document since the Magna Carta. 8. The little blue-haired lady who's in charge of the nursery pounds the lectern with her shoe and screams, "We will bury you!" 7. The next day your spouse books a one-way flight to South America and doesn't invite you to come along. 6. Your neighbors hear about the meeting on their police scanners. 5. A loyal supporter presses a can of Mace into your hands. 4. Another loyal supporter presses a moving company business card into your hands. 3. Another loyal supporter presses Jack Kevorkian's business card into your hands. 2. You're asked to try on a pair of bloody gloves. 1. People begin referring to you as "our former pastor." (adapted
from Leadership Journal)
And finally . . . The
folks in Washington, PA are what you'd call hard-core football fans. Welcome to Steeler, Pennsylvania. According to AP, "The name change for the city of about 15,000 people south of Pittsburgh will last through Feb. 5, the day of the football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks in Detroit. "I know the folks in the state of Washington are rooting for the Seahawks, so we wanted to make sure everyone knows the city of Washington is fully in support of the Steelers," Mayor Kenneth J. Westcott told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. If you're sending a letter to anyone in Steeler, however, you'd better continue addressing them to Washington, since the name change is not recognized by the U.S. Postal Service. They must be Seahawks fans.
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