Weekly Meanderings, 28 March 2015

Last updated on: March 28, 2015 at 6:19 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 28 March 2015 2015-03-28T06:19:18-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Has the sun set on Sunday School?

Many a prayer has been said over the fate of the vaunted American institution, whose struggles cut across denominational lines. Between 1997 and 2004, churches lost tens of thousands of Sunday school programs, according to data from the Barna Group, and more recent studies show that enrollment has fallen across denominations. From 2004 to 2010, for example, Sunday school attendance dropped nearly 40 percent among Evangelical Lutheran churches in America and almost 8 percent among Southern Baptist churches, prompting speculation that the problem may be more than just a decline in American religiosity.

Parents and kids, as we all know, are just too busy on weekends, with everything from professional-level sports training to eight-hour SAT prep classes (at age 12!). The institutional inertia that churches are famous for has made it difficult for them to adapt to the times. But experts say that many churches are also discovering they’re paying a far heavier price for past sex scandals than they had anticipated, and that Sunday school is the latest collateral damage. All of which raises a troubling question — at least among the clergy and the deeply devout — about whether Sunday school has outlived its usefulness.

Decades ago, religious education programs served as the only social function after a grueling week. But today, Sunday schools must make an affirmative case to their audience. And so churches have entered the innovation game, with everything from “Godly Play” to global programs. They forge on, like Moses wandering in the desert, stripteases and all.

Tom Izzo — on the unleashing of tournament success:

The calendar said March 1, but Tom Izzo knew better. It’s not March until the brackets come out.

So on the day that followed Feb. 28, Izzo set a lineup at Wisconsin that didn’t include his most important player. He benched the bruising Branden Dawson, explaining on his pregame radio show: “We’re going to challenge him a little bit and see how he reacts.”

Well, he reacted terribly. Dawson scored four points and grabbed zero defensive rebounds in 21 minutes. And the Spartans got drilled. At one point, they trailed 51-29.

Izzo was defiant afterward, saying: “I’m going to coach my team for now — not for the media, not for recruiting. I’m going to coach it for what’s right and what’s wrong.”

What seemed like madness actually was a glimpse into how Izzo rules Madness.

Dawn Staley — on the unleashing of attendance numbers:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina women’s basketball program has ended Tennessee’s stranglehold on the sport and reigns supreme over Connecticut.

No, the Gamecocks can’t touch the 17 national titles the Huskies and Lady Vols own between them, but South Carolina is No. 1 when it comes to fan support.

Although women’s college basketball is plagued by empty arenas, interest in Dawn Staley and the Gamecocks has increased exponentially — they averaged 12,540 fans in 14 home games this season.

Staley said the two go hand in hand and are a big reason for the Gamecocks’ turnaround. South Carolina (30-2) is the top seed of the NCAA tournament’s Greensboro Regional. It will take on Savannah State (21-10) in an opening-round game Friday.

The Gamecocks could take on Syracuse or Nebraska on Sunday.

The atmosphere change is evident to everyone, particularly Gamecocks opponents.

“Great crowd, great atmosphere,” Texas A&M coach Gary Blair said. “Aren’t you all proud about how far you have come? Think about it. Think about how far you have come.”

In Staley’s first season, 2008-09, South Carolina averaged 2,381 fans per game in 18,000-seat Colonial Life Arena. That number has multiplied nearly six times this season.

Tim Gombis — on the unleashing of redemptive kingdom power:

The disciples, like the rest of us, have well-worn patterns of responding to crises from within the realm of darkness and (self-) destruction, responses of fear and of failing to live into the reality of the kingdom. One of these responses to get out of the way and hope and pray that God will act. But God asserts his sovereign rule through humans whom he invites to embody his benevolent and life-giving rule through new creation oriented patterns of life. Mark narrates here how Jesus expects his disciples to begin to embody God’s rule by drawing on the power available to them.

HT: TG

France is a “fecund woman”:

Since the early 2000s France has consistently topped European rankings. After two decades of decline, in the 1970s-80s, the fertility rate started picking up again in the late 1990s. Since then the country has registered scores just short of the mythical threshold of 2.1 children per woman, which would secure a steady population. Its fertility rate in 2014 was 2.01. “For the economy Germany is the strong man of Europe, but when it comes to demography France is our fecund woman,” says demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences and emeritus professor of Brussels Free University….

There is nothing straightforward or natural about “the family”. It is a very complex world based on social norms, what the American sociologist Ronald Rindfuss calls the “family package”. “In Japan, for instance, this package involves many constraints,” says Ined demographer Laurent Toulemon. “A woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible: one doesn’t have to get married or have children. Norms are more open and families more diverse.”

Kirsten Powers, who runs over the lack of reporting about Christian persecutions:

Christians in the Middle East and Africa are being slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped, beheaded, and forced to flee the birthplace of Christianity. One would think this horror might be consuming the pulpits and pews of American churches. Not so. The silence has been nearly deafening.

As Egypt’s Copts have battled the worst attacks on the Christian minority since the 14th century, the bad news for Christians in the region keeps coming. On Sunday,Taliban suicide bombers killed at least 85 worshippers at All Saints’ church, which has stood since 1883 in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan. Christians were also the target of Islamic fanatics in the attack on a shopping center in Nairobi, Kenya, this week that killed more than 70 people. The Associated Press reported that the Somali Islamic militant group al-Shabab “confirmed witness accounts that gunmen separated Muslims from other people and let the Muslims go free.” The captives were asked questions about Islam. If they couldn’t answer, they were shot.

Candida Moss, who runs a bit roughshod over the history of hell in her Daily Beast article, gets to a new book on the rhetorical function of hell:

The answer may lie in the roots of stories about hell in early Christianity. In her book Educating Early Christians through the Rhetoric of Hell, Professor Meghan Henning of the University of Dayton argues that whole question “Does hell exist?” is a post-Enlightenment one. The ancient authors who first dreamed up a torturous afterlife were more interested in using hell to turn people into ideal citizens than in describing the layout of an actual place. In other words, hell is more about pedagogy for the present than it is about the fate of the soul in the future. To ancient Christians the questions “Who should be in hell?” and “Why should they be there?” was more important than “Is this a real place?”

Henning told me, “This is very different from the way that hell functions rhetorically today. … [Today hell is used] to offer some black-and-white pronouncement that a person is once and for all ‘saved’ or ‘not’ based upon their confessional status. This usually is the result of importing ancient images into the contemporary context without any reflection on the differences between the ancient world and our own.”

When I asked Dr. Henning if hell has a place in the modern world, she answered: “If we want to return to the spirit of ancient Christian understandings of hell we have to think more seriously about our behaviors, and how they impact other people. …. [But] as Christians, we also have to ask ourselves if hell is the best pedagogical tool we have at our disposal.”

Certainly, the immorality and barbarism of hell isn’t lost on modern Christians. Modern Catholic teaching stresses that hell is primarily a place of separation from God. It’s a lot fluffier and there’s good Biblical basis for this, but modern hell lacks the persuasive punch of medieval hell. After all, for atheists, eternal separation from God just seems like more of the same.

Jewish prof in a state “haunted by Christ” — worth your reading to discern sensitivity:

I teach Jewish history in North Carolina, a land haunted by Jesus Christ.

It is a land where the present is the biblical past. It is a land where the Second Coming is apparently coming any moment now. It is a land where devout Christians are eager to share the good news. It is a land where the Jews are a conundrum, ghostly incarnations of an old covenant, the original chosen people whose “history” ended on the cross and in the apocalyptic fires of Roman carnage.

When the Southern Baptist meets the Jew, the Southern Baptist seeks to understand this apparition from “Isra-El”: why he has not accepted the Gospel and achieved salvation in the universal heavenly kingdom of The Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

As a Jew by descent and education (but with little faith in an Almighty who seems to be perpetually out to lunch), I am a constant object of scrutiny: in the classroom, on the street and in the steam room at the YMCA. And being from Canada further complicates matters; I’m a “Canuck” in a land of “Crackers.”

The following journal entries document my unexpected encounters in Wilmington, North Carolina, those of a Canadian Jewish emissary teaching history in a sweltering Southern outpost of Christendom.

What your junk drawer might reveal — Linton Weeks:

The Great American Junk Drawer can be an accidental time capsule, a haphazard scrap heap, a curious box of memories and meaninglessness. It can also serve as a Rorschachian reflection of your life.

You know what we’re talking about: The drawer of detritus. The has-been bin. That roll-out repository where you toss your odds and ends. Sometimes very odd odds and ends. Sometimes whatnot never to be seen again.

Various places on the Internet, such as The Junk Drawer Project and House Beautiful, showcase people’s messes and miscellanies. We found a few images of junk drawers onFlickr. And if you don’t have enough junk of your own, you can purchase a Junk Drawer Starter Kit on Ebay.

You can tell a lot about a person or a family from the household junk drawer. “I snoop through people’s drawers, pantries, closets and garages as part of my research,” saysKit Yarrow, a consumer psychologist at Golden Gate University, “and I can say without hesitation that the junk drawer is the most revealing place I can look.”

Text or talk?

Most Americans would rather type it than say it, according to a new report that shows how tied to texting U.S. society has become.

U.S. smartphone users are sending and receiving five times as many texts compared with the number of phone calls each day, according to the International Smartphone Mobility Report by mobile data tracking firm Infomate. In total, Americans spend about 26 minutes a day texting. That compares to spending about six minutes a day on voice calls.

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