A Guy in the Pew

This short video, taken during the Bishops' visit to our parish on Trinity Cathedral, does a good job showing what worship is like at Trinity Cathedral. Sadly, there are no shots of my family that I noticed.

My Episcopal Cafe colleague (and fellow politcal junkie), the Rev. Andrew Gerns, has a post about the death of Tim Russert that is a must read: But there is another lesson. Ironically, it is a lesson that may get lost in the hoopla around his death. It is a lesson that all of us--we who preach and celebrate sacraments, we who take part in the councils of the church, we who follow the ups and downs of the Anglican/Episcopal battles in blogs and interest groups--can profit from. The lesson is this. Faith in Jesus Christ and grounded in the Church makes a real difference in this world, in this life, right now. Russert was a man of faith. It did not make him less worldly. Faith did not make him more partisan. Faith did not make him smug or self-righteous. Faith made him who he was. His faith in Jesus Christ and his life in the Church made him better. And a better Tim Russert made for a better world. At the end of day, a better you and a better me, grounded in faith and company of faithful ...

Writer Tobias Wolff has a beautiful essay in the New Yorker that makes the point that art and poetry are often the means by which we come to faith. He tells the story of seeing a Bergman film, “Winter Light,” at a local church, with a friend while a student at Oxford. He begins by telling the story of the film, and the aftermath in the church: Tomas, a Lutheran pastor and widower, is suffering a crisis of faith, barely going through the motions of his ministry; indeed, he can’t even find the heart to treat his lover, a schoolteacher, with kindness. One of his parishioners has become obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. At his wife’s urging, this man, a fisherman, comes to the pastor for reassurance, some blessed word of hope that he can grasp as a lifeline, but Tomas can offer nothing but the bleakness of his own despair. The fisherman commits suicide. Yet Bergman takes care to show that Tomas and the fisherman are not alone in their suffering, and that others, equally ...

It turns out that Americans do not have a one-size-fits-all approach to our preferred faith community. some like large churches; others like small. some prefer contemporary services; others prefer more traditional services. Some move to more conservative churches; others moved to more liberal churches. Here is the report from the Christian Post : In a study of over 1,000 American adults, released Monday by Ellison Research, 69 percent of all Americans who currently attend worship services have attended more than one place of worship - which includes churches, temples, or houses of worship - as an adult. Only 31 percent say their current place of worship is the only one they have regularly attended since age 18. When changing where they worship, not all opt for a bigger congregation or a more contemporary worship style. When choosing size, Americans are nearly evenly divided between a larger or smaller congregation. Forty-three percent of American Protestants have moved to a larger cong...

Like many churches tonight, Trinity Cathedral was pretty crowded. We actually get quite a crowd most Sunday's, but in almost every church, Christmas really brings in folks who only attend once or twice a year. I therefore thougt that the comments of Phillip Richter, and English scholar who looks at why people leave the church to be very interesting: Up to 40% of the British population, according to recent Anglican statistics, are likely to make their way to church over Christmas. For many, it may be their only visit to a church all year. For others, it may be a chance to sample churchgoing again and give it another try. One of the messages of our new book Gone for Good? is that there are a surprising number of former churchgoers. Churches have not always been very good at keeping their members or encouraging them back. For our research, we took the trouble to listen to hundreds of church-leavers. Most people have their own hunches about why the churches are getting emptier. Some p...

Freakonomics has an interesting post about how disadvantaged children who grow up in religious households do better on many measures than children who don't: According to Rajeev Dehejia, an economics professor at Tufts University, one answer may be to join a church. Dehejia, along with Thomas DeLeire, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Erzo Luttmer and Josh Mitchell, from the Harvard economics department, have written a new working paper called “ The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth .” In it, they test the impact of religion on more than 20,000 children raised by “disadvantaged” families, as defined by factors like family income, the parents’ levels of education, and “child characteristics including parental assessments of the child.” Using the National Survey of Families and Households, they questioned each child on the amount of involvement his or her parent had with a religious organization, then obse...

Today's USA Today has a disturbing report about how young adults are leaving the church--both mainline churches and evangelical: Protestant churches are losing young adults in "sobering" numbers, a survey finds. Seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 — both evangelical and mainline — who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23, according to the survey by LifeWay Research. And 34% of those said they had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30. That means about one in four Protestant young people have left the church. "This is sobering news that the church needs to change the way it does ministry," says Ed Stetzer, director of Nashville-based LifeWay Research, which is affiliated with the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. "It seems the teen years are like a free trial on a product. By 18, when it's their choice whether to buy in to church life, many don't feel engaged and welcome," says assoc...

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has a wonderful essay in the Times that describes the different views of faith and reason in the united States and Europe--and the different challenges that face both the United States and Europe as a result. He thinks that the united States tend to be more comfortable with faith and reason as compatible, but notes that we too often believe our own rhetoric of being a chosen people: Today Americans still readily embrace both religious faith and patriotism, a striking paradox in a land where Church and State are deliberately separated. We have much to learn from the people of the United States. Their search for a better life and their optimism are linked with their religious faith. From their first day at school, American children learn to salute the flag and declare their Americanness. They say: “God bless America,” and then happily add: “I’m a Baptist, or a Jew, a Catholic or a Muslim.” To them, it seems, being a good Catholic, a good Jew, a good Bapti...

The Prosperity Gospel is well known in the United States. As Paul Gifford, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, reports in Christian Century , however, the fastest growing Christian Churches in Africa--Pentacoastal Churches--are preaching a Prosperity Gospel as well: Though virtually all forms of Christianity in Africa are experiencing explosive growth, the churches growing most spectacularly are the ones that are Pentecostal or neo-Pentecostal or "Pentecostal-like." After 23 years of visiting African churches, I would venture another generalization: the growing Pentecostal churches have one thing in common—a focus on achieving success. Discussing African Pentecostalism without discussing its emphasis on success is like discussing computers without mentioning software. In this form of Christianity, a believer is successful; if not, something is very wrong. This emphasis can be seen in the names of the churches: Victory Bible ...

Robert Samuelson has a gem of a column . He oddly starts talking about the virtues of the comma, but then riffs to a larger theme about the increased speed by which we now live our lives. I'll let you read the ode to the comma on your own. Here is what Samuelson has to say about the speed of everyday life: It is true that Americans have always been in a hurry. In "Democracy in America" (1840), Alexis de Tocqueville has a famous passage noting the "feverish ardor" with which Americans pursue material gains and private pleasures. What's distinctive about our era, I think, is that new technologies and astonishing prosperity give us the chance to slacken the pace. Perish the thought. In some ways, it seems, we Americans have actually become more frantic. Evidence to support this hunch hasn't been hard to find. Exhibit A is a story a few months ago in The Post headlined " Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs?" We meet Megan, a 17-year-old high sc...

This is a quite interesting video by Father Matthew about the treatment of dead bodies in Italy for a religious purpose.

Religion is making a come-back in Europe, and the Wall Street Journal describes why: After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse. God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek ...

Pastor Bob Cornwall, pastor of First Christian Church of Lompoc, California, has a wonderful blog and is always worth reading. He is a progressive Disciples of Christ minister with an interest and passion in social justice, I just discovered that he also posts on the Christian Century blog , where he discusses a critical issue: how can a church be a welcoming church. In particular, he tells his own story of how a personal experience changed his view on welcoming gays and lesbians into his own church: When my congregation decided that being a place of welcome would be one of our core values, we had to figure out what this meant in practice. We had to ask if there were limits to welcome. For generations churches have wrestled with this question, and in many ways we’ve not evolved very much. The role of women and the challenges of segregation remain with us decades after the suffrage movements and the Civil Rights movement. Now homosexuality is the issue that vexes our congregation...

Well this is certainly interesting. The map gets redder as the percentage of religious adherants goes up. A very interesting bicoastal pattern, with the faithful in the middle. And not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation with politcal party performance as well. HT to the PZ Meyers .

The Religion News Service is reporting further declines in the membership of several mainline Christian denominations in the United States: Three mainline Protestant denominations--the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Church of the Brethren--have experienced steady decreases in U.S. membership rolls, continuing long-term trends, according to separate June reports. A "state of the church" report issued by the UMC said its U.S. membership fell to 7.9 million--a loss of nearly 6 percent--from 1995 to 2005. In Africa and Asia, however, Methodist numbers are growing, with 200 percent increases on each continent during that decade. UMC membership dropped about 1.4 percent in 2006, according to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. Active membership in the Presbyterian Church (USA) fell by more than 46,000, to 2.27 million in 2006, according to the church's Office of the General Assembly. Almost 1,000 fewer adults, and 230 fewer childre...

Economist and Episcopalian John Chilton has a very interesting post at Episcopal Cafe about why mainline churches have declined relative to more conservative churches. Like the true economist that he is, John looks at the data. John notes that at one time the growth of more conservative churches was indeed due to higher fertility rates, but then observes that other factors are now more important: The relative decline of mainline denominations could of course be due both to differences in fertility and in evangelism. My commenter pointed me to what he admitted was a somewhat dated paper here . From that tip I was able to find a more recent paper, “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the United States” by Michael Hout, Andrew Greeley and Melissa J. Wilde, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 107, No. 2. (Sep., 2001), pp. 468-500 [ JSTOR , subscription only]. Hout et al. have individual records on religious affiliation at birth, change in affiliation and fertility rates o...

Christian Wiman, a poet and the editor of Poetry has a wonderful essay on his "conversion" to Christianity from an agnostic life. He describes his decision to stop writing, his marriage to his wife, and a diagnosis of uncurable cancer during his first year of marriage, and then describes a conversion that took place in Church: Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately follo...

Ross Douthat is on a roll. As a follow-up to his article in the Atlantic Monthly, he asks the question: why is America more nation than Europe. Here is his response : Because we're geographically mobile and ethnically diverse, says Brink Lindsey . Because our families are stronger than Europe's, says Mary Eberstadt. My own preferred explanation - which is doubtless a small part of the pantomime - is theological rather than sociological: Christianity has thrived in the United States by adapting its theology to the habits and mores of the American people, in a way that religion in Europe hasn't managed to do. America is an Emersonian country, and its religious innovators have invented an Emersonian form of Christianity - which some might suggest isn't Christianity at all, of course - that's nicely tailored to the broader culture in which it swims. Call it gnosticism, or Moral Therapeutic Deism, or just plain Americanism - it means Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong fo...

Ross Douthat, a young conservative writer, has an interesting commentary in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly . He argues that Europe is becoming more religious at the same time that the United States is becoming more secular--to the detriment of both. Here are highlights: Nothing divides the United States from Europe like religion. America has its public piety and its multitude of thriving sects, Europe has its official secularism and its empty, museum-piece churches. Ninety percent of Americans say they believe in God, while only about 60 percent of Britons, French, and Germans say the same. American politics is riven by faith-based disputes that barely exist across the Atlantic, while European debates take place under a canopy of unbelief that’s unimaginable in the United States, where polls show that a Muslim or a homosexual has a better chance of being elected president than an acknowledged atheist. The aftermath of 9/11 has thrown this contrast into sharp relief and s...

Apparently Rev. Jim Strader's experiment in emerging church evangelism (which I posted about here ) was a great success. Here is his report : The conversation was even better. People were definitely copesetic with talking about God, the Church and what does and doesn't work for them. God is present in creation much more so than in dreary worship services. And yet, worship music can be great, if the language isn't so dreary, or dreadfully masculine. My friend Ralyn talked about how much she thoroughly enjoys visiting the African Methodist congregation downtown because their worship services are so jubilant and joyful. People dance and sing. She thinks that's cool -- and they invite her into the community, even if she is the only White person in the congregation. Jeffrey questioned why so many Christian communities were so uninviting. He's had a particularly difficult time finding a welcoming Church as someone who is away from home, studying at college, and trying to ...