Weekly Meanderings, 8 June 2019

Last updated on: June 8, 2019 at 6:23 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 8 June 2019 2019-06-08T06:23:58-05:00 Scot McKnight

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A huge congratulations this morning to our niece, Katie Norman, and Keegan Johnson, who will marry today!

One of my favorite Northern students, Phil Jackson:

When God gives us a vision for the future, He rarely gives us a play by play rule book with specific details concerning how we should get there. In fact, He usually just gives us a “word,” or a “knowing” in our soul about the direction He wants our lives to go in. For Phil Jackson, he had no idea that God would call him to be a director of a nonprofit one day. He was perfectly content with the ministry work he was doing with youth and millennials at his church. Then one day, God revealed to him that he was going to open up a performing and creative arts community center for youth on the Westside of Chicago. Now how was Phil going to accomplish that??? Well, that was a journey.

Prior to receiving this vision, Phil was known for his anointed ability to connect with youth and draw them closer to God. In 2001, Phil traveled all over the United States working with Compassion International to train other believers who worked in youth ministry. After serving with Compassion for a few years, he returned to Chicago and started a worship service for youth and millennials under Lawndale Christian Community Church called the “Hip Hop Church,” also known as the HOUSE. The church’s unique incorporation of hip hop and creative expression attracted young people from all over the city, helping them to develop deep, authentic relationships with God. The House had more success than Phil could ever imagine, but the youth who attended were seeking a place where they could go to throughout the week to engage in the arts. This prompted Phil to conduct a big community survey at his church, which confirmed that there was a significant need for a center of this kind in the North Lawndale area.

It sure seems to me Ryan Burge, a political scientist, has simplified this issue. His claim is that white Christians have shifted Right in their political views since the late 70s. Yes, partly true. But is it not the case that the parties have adjusted to gain white Christians? To say in the 70s more whites were Democrats is as true as saying the Republicans adjusted their platform to attract those white (southern) Christians. So, it’s not one or the other but both. The parties, in other words, are more polarized and ideologized.

(RNS) — Church growth is something that almost every pastor and priest in the United States is concerned with on a daily basis.

If churches want to continue to thrive in the decades to come, they have to be seen as an attractive place for unaffiliated people.

However, both Catholic and Protestant churches have undergone a dramatic shift in the last two decades that may undermine their ability to attract outsiders.

White Christians — white Catholics, white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants — have shifted to the right in their partisan affiliation and now primarily identify with the Republican Party.

This rightward drift has placed these churches far away from the two groups that they need to attract the most — young people in general and people of color — both of which have maintained a moderate political stance in recent years, according to data from the General Social Survey over the past four decades.

While the staggering political homogeneity of white Christianity may provide a sense of belonging to current adherents, it may increasingly turn away people who hold different political views.

Carl Trueman is right (and very Scrutonian): Brexit did not cause Brexit. What did? This is at work:

Some historical context is helpful for understanding the first point. Britain joined the E.U. (then the European Economic Community) in 1970. The name change is significant: The British people never voted for the political, legal, and cultural union which now exists. That is not to say that such a union is wrong, but it is to say that it has never had any popular mandate. During the intervening years, it became clear that the E.U. was going to take a form dictated to the people of Europe by their leaders, no matter what. Indeed, E.U. history offers a number of obvious applications of the wisdom of Robert the Bruce: If at first democracy lets you down, try, try, try again. Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a referendum, and Ireland did the same with the Treaties of Nice and Lisbon. In each case, both countries then held second referenda and the treaties were ratified.

The fact that the E.U. did not emerge from the democratic desire of Europe’s various peoples or their cultural commonalities is a problem. The union can be no stronger than the cultural ties between its constituent peoples; and they are not strong. The oft-trumpeted model of the United States simply does not apply. Europeans do not share a common language, and their common history is one of conflict, not unity in the face of a common foe.

This has an impact at a basic level. If a truck driver in Florida loses his job, it would not be odd for him to move to California to find employment. But if a carpenter in Cardiff loses his job, he is unlikely to head to Budapest—or even Paris—to find work. Indeed, even London might be a stretch for a patriotic Welshman. The sense of a common history, a common culture, a common space, and a common future are simply not there; and such things cannot be confected by bureaucrats.

By this account, Brexit did not cause Brexit. Rather, Brexit is a function of the European political classes’ failure to persuade ordinary people of the desirability, or even the plausibility, of the project—even though they have had nearly fifty years to do so. The fault for Brexit lies with them. As Trump did not divide the U.S. but emerged from its deep divisions, so Brexit is not the cause of Britain’s evident polarization but simply its latest and most politically dramatic symptom.

A real Nessie? With some DNA?

A scientific study of the Loch Ness in Scotland has found that its famed monster, Nessie, “might” be real, according to reports.

The leader of the team from New Zealand’s University of Otago, Professor Neil Gemmell, said they took a number of water samples, which contained DNA from the animals that have lived in the Loch Ness.

“We’ve tested each one of the main monster hypotheses and three of them we can probably say aren’t right and one might be,” said Gemmell. The results were “surprising,” he told Yahoo UK.

David Swartz with David King:

Does World Vision currently fit better in the religious right or the evangelical left? What about in the 1970s or the 1950s? Or is this just a bad question?

Like other faith-based humanitarian agencies, World Vision had to make sense of its religious identity as it grew, shifted operations, and adopted new funding streams. So, officially, World Vision defines itself as a Christian organization, but in the U.S., I still label it as evangelical. Its history and current context as well its vernacular and organizational networks demonstrate that its operates out of an evangelical ethos. To be clear, World Vision International is a federated organization that operates in almost 100 countries. Representatives from the various countries and regions come together to govern the larger World Vision International (WVI), but funding, program initiatives, and governance of each office is distinct, and World Vision offices can look very different depending on the political and cultural context of each country. WVUS is by far the largest, and still remains extremely influential within WVI, but it represents no more than half of WVI’s annual revenue and does not nor cannot dictate policy for WVI. World Vision’s religious makeup is quite different in different countries. In some Latin American countries or the Philippines, that might mean a predominantly Catholic staff. In Eastern Europe, a majority may be Orthodox. In some African country offices, the staff is overwhelmingly Pentecostal. In some more secularized western countries such as Australia or the U.K., the faith component may be less explicit. This diversity and global context has an impact on World Vision U.S. too. WVUS is not only responding to its context in America, but it is in touch with the broader diversity of World Vision internationally as it works among other humanitarian organizations and among local communities.

So to try to answer your question (it’s not a bad one, just complicated), I want to argue that while evangelicals rarely agreed upon a single vision for their movement, they invested the term “evangelicalism” with various meanings through defining, maintaining, and transgressing a number of definitional boundaries. The power of the term for me is exactly in how individuals and organizations have continued to debate what it means and how it effects organizations’ beliefs and practices. Boundary disputes often led to internal squabbles as to who counted as an evangelical, but they also led evangelicals to define themselves in contrast to others across the theological spectrum, from fundamentalists and the Protestant mainline to Catholics and secularists.

In the 1950s, under their founder Bob Pierce, they would have clearly fit as a conservative evangelical agency. Pierce would use both evangelical and fundamentalist labels to describe himself. At the same time, however, he was chastised by the NAE for “cooperative evangelism” – working with those outside the firm boundaries of American evangelicalism in his ministry abroad.

By the 1970s, if politics and theology further divided evangelicals at home, World Vision attempted to position itself above the fray. Its second president, Stan Mooneyham grew to deplore his fellow evangelicals’ penchant for rigid categories. He argued that the world was gray: “one man’s evangelical may be another man’s liberal.” After spending most of his year in war-torn Southeast Asia, Mooneyham found typical American evangelical disputes petty. While American evangelicals remained World Vision’s base (their donors, staff, and networks were firmly rooted in the movement), the more time they spent outside the West, the more they recognized that the global outlook of American evangelicalism was not adequate to make sense of what they were experiencing. Evangelicals’ debates over God and country said more about domestic debates at home than they did the role of faith in action abroad.

Among the movement’s leaders, World Vision sought to position itself as the mainstream within a new global evangelicalism. After the 1974 Lausanne Congress, it believed it found relative support across the theological spectrum, avoiding the developing “culture wars” by resisting labels as a part of the evangelical left (Ron Sider, Jim Wallis) as well from the developing Christian Right (Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson). They felt they could achieve consensus around evangelicals’ willingness to support individual children in need.

Yet, World Vision’s success is even more evident at the popular level beyond labels. I think WVUS would like to think that a question of religious right or left – even in the age of Trump – is one that they can sidestep. They would clearly not follow the same outright political tactics that Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse has used in recent years (interesting point: World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse were both founded by the same man, Bob Pierce, which I develop in the book). At the same time, I believe World Vision for instance would not hesitate to advocate for the marginalized against political viewpoints that seek to shut down borders to refugees and immigrants. World Vision’s donor constituency still overwhelming identifies as broadly evangelical, but the popular reception of the organization’s message continues to offer many American Christians a way to participate in a trusted brand of religious humanitarianism.

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