ARE MORE AMERICANS NOW ‘MIXING AND MATCHING’ TO FORM THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES?

Perhaps America really is becoming a cookie-cutter society. In his book, “Futurecast,” faith and religion expert George Barna claims that more Americans than ever are crafting their own religious experiences.

“We are a designer society,” he explains. “We want everything customized to our personal needs — our clothing, our food, our education.” Apparently, Americans now also want to have their religions tailored to their wants and needs. In his book, Barna tracks changes among U.S. Christians (the focus of this particular literature) from 1991 until 2011.

Back in 2009, Barna was already discussing the mix-and-match nature of some Americans’ religious beliefs. The following comes from The Barna Group web site:

“Consequently, more and more people are engaged in hybrid faiths, mixing elements from different historical eras and divergent theological perspectives,” Barna stated. “In some ways, we are creating the ultimate ecumenical movement, where nothing is deemed right or wrong, and all ideas, beliefs and practices are assigned equal validity. Everyone is invited to join the dialogue, enjoy the ride, and feel connected to a far-reaching community of believers. Screening or critiquing what that community believes is deemed rude and inappropriate. Pragmatism and relativism, rather than any sort of absolutism, has gained momentum.”

While almost all of the indicators in the surveys Barna most recently analyzed showed religious beliefs and behaviors decreasing (a trend that meshes with the increase in atheism, albeit a small one, the nation has experience), there were two indicators that showed intriguing increases.

First, more people claim that they’ve accepted Jesus Christ as their savior and that they expect to go to heaven. Additionally, the proportion of people saying they haven’t been to church in the past six months outside of special occasions like weddings or funerals increased (24 percent back in 1991 as opposed to 37 percent today).

The first increase will empower believers, but the second will probably scare churches and pastors, alike. But Barna claims that it’s these people — the church leaders — who may actually be responsible for this decrease in church attendance.

“People say, ‘I believe in God. I believe the Bible is a good book. And then I believe whatever I want,’” he said. But these same people find themselves bored in church. He continues, “They look at church and wonder, ‘Jesus died for this?’”

As time goes on these people, though they believe in the Bible and in Christ, apparently don’t find the need to be tied down to a congregation or a denomination. Thus, Barna says that every subgroup in America – regardless of race, age, gender and region – is experiencing a disconnect when it comes to religious cohesion.

But beyond a lack of cohesion, there also appears to be a mix-and-match mentality taking form. In fact, some are even questioning if a “god” is needed at all in religion. As Cathy Lynn Grossmanwrites:

And it’s not only Christians sampling hopscotch spirituality. The Jewish magazine Moment has an “Ask the Rabbis” feature that consults 14 variations of Judaism, “and there are many,” said editor and publisher Nadine Epstein.

“The September edition of Moment asks ‘Can there be Judaism without God?’ And most say yes. It’s incredibly exciting. We live in an era where you pick and choose the part of the religion that makes sense to you. And you can connect through culture and history in a meaningful way without necessarily religiously practicing,” Epstein said.

In 2009, the Associated Press reported on a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study that indicated similar findings as well as a major growth in the number of Americans who reported having a religious of mystical experience:

Though the U.S. is an overwhelmingly Christian country, significant minorities say they hold beliefs of the sort found at Buddhist temples or New Age bookstores. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed overall and 22 percent of Christians say they believe in reincarnation, the idea that people will be reborn in this world again and again.

As for the significant numbers who visit more than one place of worship, it’s not just an occasional visit while on vacation or for special events like weddings and funerals.

It will be interesting to see how this trend along with the increase in non-believers plays out. In the end, though Americans may be blending their own religious traditions, there’s no telling exactly how this will take shape. Still, the concept, itself, is a fascinating one.

(h/t RNS, via Washington Post)

Jeremiah

In Jeremiah chapter 11 – God reveals that there is a conspiracy against him.  His former home town and extended family are angry with his prophecy and are conspiring against him.  Jeremiah cries out to God for judgement and justice.  God speaks at the conclusion of the chapter promising judgement, but only in His time.  Jeremiah begins chapter 12 by complaining about the ‘unfairness’ of the seeming prosperity of the wicked and difficulties of the righteous.  God reveals to Jeremiah that the difficulty he is currently facing is nothing compared to the problems that are coming.  God compared his current difficulties to ‘footmen’ but revealed that the problems that were coming were ‘horsemen’ and ‘floods’ in comparison.  Instead of patting Jeremiah on the head and saying “its okay”,  God told Jeremiah that if he couldn’t handle the minor difficulties now; how was he going to face real problems that were to come!  Wow, what a reminder for all of us.

Communicating with our Missionaries

I have made it a practice as Pastor to quarterly send an email update to all of our missionaries that our church supports. It does not cost us anything and by saving all of their email address’s in the address selector, you can process the email in a matter of moments.

I just bring the missionaries up to date on the happenings of the church, prayer requests, and encouragement.  In fact, it looks just like the letters we expect them to send us!  Each of our missionaries has mentioned how much it means to get that letter.  In fact, most have told me that we are the ONLY church that ever communicates with them.

…and of some, having compassion…

Visiting a very ill lady this week who has many questions about God, faith and the Bible.  She had not gone to church and is now in advanced stages of ALS.  She lives in a retirement community and had contacted three pastors or retired pastors to come and speak with her.  None responded.  Not one.

In Luke 10, Christ shares the story of the Good Samaritan.  The first who passed by the wounded victim was a Priest.  The second who passed by was a Levite.  The third, the Samaritan, had compassion!!  Let’s show the world the love of Jesus Christ!

Hawking: “Heaven is a fairy story”

Earlier this year, controversial pastor Rob Bell insinuated there was no physical place known as Hell. Now, prominent physicist Stephen Hawking says there is no Heaven, calling it a “fairy story.”

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail,” he told Britain’s The Guardian in an exclusive interview. “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

The Guardian details more of the interview:

In the interview, Hawking rejected the notion of life beyond death and emphasised the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives. In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: “We should seek the greatest value of our action.”

In answering another, he wrote of the beauty of science, such as the exquisite double helix of DNA in biology, or the fundamental equations of physics.

Hawking responded to questions posed by the Guardian and a reader in advance of a lecture tomorrow at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: “Why are we here?”

In the talk, he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. “Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in,” he said.

From www.theblaze.com

New book claims half of New Testament is a forgery

Did you know:

• At least 11 of the 27 New Testament books are forgeries.
• The New Testament books attributed to Jesus’ disciples could not have been written by them because they were illiterate.
• Many of the New Testament’s forgeries were manufactured by early Christian leaders trying to settle theological feuds.

Those are the claims coming from one biblical scholar in a new book, “Forged.” The author is Bart D. Ehrman, a Wheaton College graduate and current professor at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

“Bart D. Ehrman, the New York Times bestselling author of Jesus, Interrupted and God’s Problemreveals which books in the Bible’s New Testament were not passed down by Jesus’s disciples,” The Harper-Collins book description says, “but were instead forged by other hands—and why this centuries-hidden scandal is far more significant than many scholars are willing to admit.”

One of Ehrman’s major targets is the Apostle Paul, who he says didn’t write 2 Timothy. In all, he claims only seven of the 13 letters attributed to Paul were actually written by him. CNN explains:

Ehrman reserves most of his scrutiny for the writings of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament. He says that only about half of the New Testament letters attributed to Paul –7 of 13 – were actually written by him.

Paul’s remaining books are forgeries, Ehrman says. His proof: inconsistencies in the language, choice of words and blatant contradiction in doctrine.

For example, Ehrman says the book of Ephesians doesn’t conform to Paul’s distinctive Greek writing style. He says Paul wrote in short, pointed sentences while Ephesians is full of long Greek sentences (the opening sentence of thanksgiving in Ephesians unfurls a sentence that winds through 12 verses, he says).

“There’s nothing wrong with extremely long sentences in Greek; it just isn’t the way Paul wrote. It’s like Mark Twain and William Faulkner; they both wrote correctly, but you would never mistake the one for the other,” Ehrman writes.

The scholar also points to a famous passage in 1 Corinthians in which Paul is recorded as saying that women should be “silent” in churches and that “if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home.”

Only three chapters earlier, in the same book, Paul is urging women who pray and prophesy in church to cover their heads with veils, Ehrman says: “If they were allowed to speak in chapter 11, how could they be told not to speak in chapter 14?”

Bart Ehrman

But Ehrman‘s charges aren’t just limited to Paul:

… He [also] challenges the authenticity of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John. He says that none were written by Jesus’ disciplies, citing two reasons.

He says none of the earliest gospels revealed the names of its authors, and that their current names were later added by scribes.

Ehrman also says that two of Jesus’ original disciples, John and Peter, could not have written the books attributed to them in the New Testament because they were illiterate.

“According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, wereagrammatoi, a Greek word that literally means ‘unlettered,’ that is, ‘illiterate,’ ’’ he writes.

Prominent fellow biblical scholar Ben Witherington — who authors a popular blog on faith — takes umbrage with Ehrman’s thesis. Witherington offers a chapter-by-chapter critique of the book, agreeing on some level with some of Ehrman’s point about the culture of forgery in the ancient world, but ultimately offering a new name for the book: “Gullible Travels.”

Among the critiques Witherington lists, he says Ehrman doesn’t adequately understand ancient Jewish culture, that Ehrman thinks he can play “mind-reader,” and that he ignores counter-arguments:

• Bart grossly underestimates and seems ignorant of the vast number of roles scribes played in the ANE, in second temple Judaism, and probably in early Christianity, including composing documents for other persons.   He needs to go back and read Scribal Culture and do a rethink about the range of possibilities with the use of scribes.
• Bart seems to think he can play mind-reader when it comes to some of the writers of early Christian literature.  The proper question to ask is— How in the world do you know these documents were created as deliberate forgeries or falsifications, or fabrications when the author does not suggest this in the document, and we can’t interview him now?     Most of the time this conclusion is based on mirror-reading of the documents themselves looking for telltale signs of deceit sometimes more successfully than others.
• Time and again Bart fails to take into account major factors that count against his argument.   Let’s take the argument about Greek style for a minute.  Nowhere in this book does he really acknowledge that what we have in most of the so-called letters in the NT are actually discourses, rhetorical discourses  set in the framework of epistolary features since they were sent at a distance.  These discourses are oral texts, and they follow the rules of such rhetorical texts and their structures and furthermore, the copying of these texts by scribes follows procedures already well known from the practices of someone like Tiro with Cicero.   Yes indeed, scribes did write down speeches, and notes on speeches, and then reframed them in more eloquent prose.   You cannot for example conclude Paul didn’t write Ephesians on style grounds, just because it uses Asiatic style rhetoric and epideictic rhetoric at that.  It follows those conventions.  Of this sort of thing, Bart says nothing.

You can read more of Witherington’s critiques here.

As for Ehrman, who admits he “moved from being a committed church-going Christian to become an agnostic,” he claims he’s not trying to completely discredit the Bible, but rather show people that its authors weren’t perfect.

“I’m not saying people should throw it out or it’s not theologically fruitful,” Ehrman told CNN. “I’m saying that by realizing it contains so many forgeries, it shows that it’s a very human book, down to the fact that some authors lied about who they were.”

from www.theblaze.com

TEOTWAWKI: The End of the World As We Know It!

This catch phrase has been popping up a lot lately.  Some financial analysts are predicting the financial collapse of the United States due to its outrageous debt load.  Some are predicting a collapse due to the oil situation, rising fuel prices, and trouble in the middle east.  Many talk radio hosts and authors are convincing people to prepare for the worst, buy gold, stockpile food, etc.

With the way things are going – these predictions may not be wrong; in fact they are looking ever increasingly more probable.  As Christians, perhaps we need to be looking at the potential for a collapse in our American culture and economic system as we know.  Follow me on this:

1) We have prayed fervently for years for a Great Awakening or Revival to shake our land

2) We believe that the return of the Lord is at hand

3) It usually takes a crisis for people to turn from materialism and self interest and turn to their Creator

* If we really believe that Revival may and will come before the Lord comes – than perhaps we should be preparing ourselves as Christians for the potential of the next great movement in our own country.  Perhaps we should be gathering Gospel witnessing tools, stockpiling tracts, putting back Bibles, training people to disciple others, training people to witness to others, making sure we have answers for a world that is hurting, etc.

Putting back emergency supplies of food and batteries and water is wise.  Putting back supplies of Gospel literature and training is perhaps even more vital!!

Not letting the world define who you are

In light of the recent media spotlight on IFB churches (20/20 special from April 8, 2011) I believe it is time that we take a hard look at how we define ourselves to the world around us.  The Independent, Baptist churches have vigorously called themselves ‘Fundamental’ for the last half century.  This is in relation to the fact that they are very fundamental to the faith.  In the current culture, specifically in the 21st. century, the term ‘fundamentalist’ has been taken by the culture to mean: extremist, fanatical, and militant.

When Noah finally disembarked from the Ark, God set a rainbow in the sky as His promise to mankind to never again destroy the earth with a universal flood.  God gave us the rainbow.  Would you hang a rainbow flag in front of your home or church today?  Would you call your Children’s church the “Rainbow Class”?  No, of course not.  Why?  Because the Homosexual, same-sex union crowd has usurped the rainbow as their symbol.  God will deal with that, but we must refrain from using that symbol today because of the connotation.

In a similar way, perhaps we should use caution in using the term “fundamentalist” in our advertising and on our promotional materials.  We are not changing who we are, we are changing our description to a lost world around us.  I have chosen to use terms like: Bible preaching, Christ centered, traditional worship, etc.  We dare not become a stumbling block to the world around us, as if we continue to refer to ourselves as ‘fundamentalists’ than that’s just what we will become.

Patience in counseling!

A Pastor would never (at least should never) step into the pulpit and just share whatever comes to his mind.  Yet, we sometimes do this when we are counseling.  We listen intently while the parishioner explains their problem, then we quickly answer to the best of our knowledge and with the Scripture that comes to mind.  Perhaps it would be wise of us to tell that person “let me pray about this and study this out and I will get back to you”.

I have begun this practice in my own ministry and it has made a world of difference.

NC Pastor fired for agreeing with Rob Bell theory of ‘no hell’

DURHAM, N.C. (The Blaze/AP) — When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.

The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.

Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow’s Chapel in Henderson.

“I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don’t think that means an eternity of torment,” Holtz said. “But I can understand why people in my church aren’t ready to leave that behind. It‘s something I’m still grappling with myself.”

The debate over Bell’s new book “Love Wins” has quickly spread across the evangelical precincts of the Internet, in part because of an eye-catching promotional video posted on YouTube.

Read our original report on Bell’s book.

Bell, the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., lays out the premise of his book while the video cuts away to an artist’s hand mixing oil paints and pastels and applying them to a blank canvas.

He describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: “Reality check: He’s in hell.”

“Gandhi’s in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?” Bell asks in the video.

In the book, Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell.

Rob Bell, author of “Love Wins,” questions traditional views of Heaven and hell.

“This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear,” he writes in the book.

For many traditional Christians, though, Bell’s new book sounds a lot like the old theological position of universalism – a heresy for many churches, teaching that everyone, regardless of religious belief, will ultimately be saved by God. And that, they argue, dangerously misleads people about the reality of the Christian faith.

“I just felt like on every page he‘s trying to say ’It’s OK,’” said Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler at a forum last week on Bell’s book held at the Louisville institution. “And there’s a sense in which we desperately want to say that. But the question becomes, on what basis can we say that?”

Watch MSNBC host Martin Bashir grill Bell in an interview.

Bell argues that hell has assumed an outsize importance in Christian teaching, considering the word itself only appears in the New Testament about 12 times, by his count.

“For a 1st-century Jewish rabbi, where you go when you die wasn’t the most pressing question,” Bell told The Associated Press. “The question was how can you enter into the shalom and peace of God right now, this day.”

Bell denies he’s a universalist, and his exact beliefs on what happens to people after death are hard to pin down, but he argues that such speculation distracts people from an urgent point. In his telling, hell is something freely chosen that already exists on earth, in everything from war to abusive relationships.

The near-relish with which some Christians stress the torments of hell, Bell argues, keep many believers needlessly afraid of a loving God, and repel potential Christians who might otherwise be curious about the faith’s teachings.

Bell’s book released last week.

“The heart of the Christian story is that God is love,” he said. “But when you hear the word ‘Christian,‘ you don’t necessarily think ‘Oh, sure, those are the people who don‘t stop talking about God’s love.’ Some other things would come to mind.”

About the only thing everyone agrees on is that this is not a new debate in Christianity. It stretches to antiquity, when Christianity was a persecuted sect in the Roman Empire, and the third century theologian Origen developed a theory that contemporary critics charged would mean that everyone, even the devil himself, would ultimately be saved. Church leaders eventually condemned ideas they attributed to Origen, but he has had a lasting influence across the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.

Those traditions often disagree, even internally, on what awaits souls after death. The Catholic Church, which has a formal process for identifying souls in heaven through canonization, pointedly refrains from saying that anyone is without a doubt in hell. Protestants reject the concept of purgatory, in which sins can be atoned for after death, but disagree on other questions. The lack of consensus is enabled partly by ambiguities in the Bible.

Evangelical opposition to Bell is exemplified in a succinct tweet from prominent evangelical pastor John Piper: “Farewell, Rob Bell.”

Page Brooks, a professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, thinks Bell errs in a conception of a loving God that leaves out the divine attributes of justice and holiness.

“It’s love, but it’s a just love,” Brooks said. “God is love, but you have to understand you‘re a sinner and the only way to get around that is through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.”

Making his new belief public is both liberating and a little frightening for Holtz, even though his doubts about traditional doctrines on damnation began long before he heard about Rob Bell’s book.

A married Navy veteran with five children, Holtz spent years trying to reconcile his belief that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross redeemed the entire world with the idea that millions of people – including millions who had never even heard of Jesus – were suffering forever in hell.

“We do these somersaults to justify the monster god we believe in,” he said. “But confronting my own sinfulness, that’s when things started to topple for me. Am I really going to be saved just because I believe something, when all these good people in the world aren’t?”

Holtz plans to move to Tennessee, where he might plant a church.

Gray Southern, United Methodist district superintendent for the part of North Carolina that includes Henderson, declined to discuss Holtz’s departure in detail, but said there was more to it than the online post about Rob Bell’s book.

“That’s between the church and him,” Southern said.

Church members had also been unhappy with Internet posts about subjects like gay marriage and the mix of religion and patriotism, Holtz said, and the hell post was probably the last straw. Holtz and his family plan to move back to Tennessee, where he’ll start a job and maybe plant a church.

“So long as we believe there’s a dividing point in eternity, we’re going to think in terms of us and them,” he said. “But when you believe God has saved everyone, the point is, you’re saved. Live like it.”