Category Archives: Religion and theology

Is the Crystal Cathedral about to shatter?

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Maybe, if the AP story has it right:

The church is in financial turmoil: It plans to sell more than $65 million worth of its Orange County property to pay off debt. Revenue dropped by nearly $5 million last year, according to a recent letter from the elder Schuller to elite donors. In the letter, he implored the Eagle’s Club members—who supply 30 percent of the church’s revenue—for donations and hinted that the show might go off the air without their support.

Robert H. Schuller, who is of course the church’s founder, handed over the senior position at the Crystal Cathedral to his son Robert A. Schuller a few years ago; after a while, though, it appears he decided he didn’t like what his son was doing, because last fall he removed his son from the television broadcast.  After that, the younger Schuller’s resignation as senior pastor (which was announced last November 29) was inevitable, merely a matter of time.  The resulting upheaval, of course, has badly damaged the organization.  I was particularly struck by this comment:

Melody Mook, a 58-year-old medical transcriptionist from El Paso, Texas, said she stopped her $25 monthly donation and is looking elsewhere for her spiritual needs. She said she dislikes the guest pastors.  “I feel hurt and confused, and I’m not sure that I want to sit and watch when I know there’s problems beneath the surface,” she said. “You feel like you’re in somebody else’s church every Sunday.”

I read that and I have to wonder, didn’t she realize it’s been “somebody else’s church” the whole time?  She lives in El Paso, for crying out loud—she’s not a part of that congregation, and never has been.I have mixed feelings about this situation.  On the one hand, this could have and should have been avoided; after all, it’s not as if no one saw it coming.  The transfer of power from elder to younger Schuller has been planned since 1997 or so, and for that whole time, people familiar with the situation have been saying it wasn’t going to work.  I remember being a part of a conversation in the summer of 1998 among folks from various parts of the Reformed Church in America in which people expressed two main concerns:  one, that Robert A. Schuller didn’t have the gifts for the position to which his father wanted him to succeed; and two, that Robert H. Schuller would never really be willing to let anyone else run the show independently, not even his son.  As a consequence, I doubt many close observers of the situation are surprised at how the transfer of authority has played out.  I realize there was no way that the RCA’s Classis of California was going to tell the elder Schuller “no,” but they should have.On the other hand, maybe it would be for the best if the Crystal Cathedral did shut down.  It’s generated a lot of money and a lot of publicity over the years, but to what real benefit to the kingdom of God?  Maybe it would be better to shut the doors, let the property revert to the Classis of California, and let the classis and the Synod of the Far West figure out how best to use it.  I know there’s been some discussion in the past about starting a new denominational seminary in the West; the campus could be used for that purpose, and you could probably cover a lot of the expenses of starting and running a new school by renting out the great glass sanctuary itself to some other church for Sunday services.  Or maybe it would be better just to sell the whole thing and use the money to fund church plants all over southern California.  I don’t know, but there would be lots of options.The bottom line here, I think, is that this is what happens when you build a church on a personality and a media strategy rather than on the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If the driving force in a church is anything other than the gospel, and if the congregation’s chief loyalty is to anyone but Jesus, that church is built on the sand, and it cannot and will not endure.Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.—Matthew 7:24-27 (ESV)

Would the real issue please stand up?

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Lots more to blog about from the Worship Symposium, and I’ll get back to that in a more serious way tomorrow; but I wanted to note separately a comment Craig Barnes made by the by in his workshop on Saturday to this effect:  “The reason Presbyterians are so hung up on talking about sex is that it enables them to avoid talking about the fact that the [PCUSA] is dying. . . .  Presbyterians would rather talk about sex than death.”It’s an interesting point, and I have a sinking feeling he’s more or less right.  I’m not one who thinks we can just pretend our intradenominational disputes over sexual ethics aren’t there, or aren’t significant, because they are—but I have tended to think that if we could somehow just agree to put everything on hold for a while and put our energies instead into revitalizing older churches and planting new ones, as my other denomination (the Reformed Church in America) is doing, that the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be a lot better off, and in a much healthier position to have (and survive) the debate.  If the Rev. Dr. Barnes is right, though, I’m not so sure; if he’s right, we’d just find something else to sabotage ourselves.  Which suggests that some other approach is in order.  I just wish I had an idea what.

The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit

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Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


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The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan’s workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit.  Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn’t expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did.  It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.I’ll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it’s the Spirit’s ongoing work that constitutes the church.  That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.

The importance of friendship in ministry

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The Worship Symposium began today at Calvin; this year, I started off by taking a seminar on “Developing Pastoral Excellence,” which turned out to be interesting in an unexpected way.  The presenter, the Rev. David Wood, is the director of Transition into Ministry, a program funded by the Lilly Foundation which seeks to aid and support pastors in the transition from the education process into the early years of their first call.  As such, he’s been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good pastor and what is necessary for pastors to minister well; in so doing, in looking at all the list that various authors have generated of what makes an excellent pastor, he noticed “the sound of something missing”:  he argued that an essential and unconsidered component of pastoral excellence is friendship.In brief, his argument runs like this.  To be a good pastor, one must be a person of character and integrity and moral habit; as Aristotle (whom he quoted repeatedly) says, “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”  To live in this way requires sustained moral effort; and to sustain moral effort, the Rev. Wood contends (following Aristotle), we need friends of character—deep, strong friendships with godly people whom we can trust implicitly.This is true for a number of reasons.  For one, central to our work as pastors is our ability to maintain a proper balance of intimacy and distance with the people in our congregations, something we can’t do if we’re starved for intimacy ourselves.  For another, this requires a degre of self-knowledge which we can’t manage on our own—we need people who know us well to reflect us back to ourselves, so that we can see them through their eyes.  For a third, we need support, reinforcement, encouragement, and sometimes a good swift kick or two from others if we’re to live lives of excellence of character—none of us have the resources in ourselves to do that alone.And fourth, we need friends to protect us from boredom.  The Rev. Wood argues that when you see a pastor in moral collapse, you’re probably seeing someone who was bored with their life.  It’s easy to grow bored with the things that matter most to us if we have no one with whom to share them; it’s easy to forget why they matter.  We need others to help us remember, and to help us stay excited about and invested in them.  As long as we stay interested in what we’re called to be doing, we stay energized about doing it, and invested in it.  When we get bored, we go looking for trouble—and usually find it.

An unexamined faith is . . . what?

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In my previous post, commenting on James Hitchcock’s Touchstone editorial “Subject to Change,” I discussed the main body of his argument, but I didn’t address his closing comment, which might be the most interesting thing he has to say:

One of the oldest and deepest assumptions of Western civilization is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and it is a perplexing theological conundrum to what extent real faith exists if the possibility of rejecting it does not exist also.

This is in one way a logical conclusion to his piece, since it does connect directly to the burden of his argument; this is really the core question underlying the issue he raises.  Put like this, however, this closing paragraph is also an opening paragraph to an article (or a book) not yet written, as it opens out onto a whole new field of discussion.  For my part, I tend to think this is a question without a definitive answer—that it really depends on the person; it does seem clear, though, that an unexamined or unchallenged faith, if not necessarily less real, is at least far less robust than a faith that has had to confront and address the possibility of unbelief.  As well, those whose faith is never questioned are not likely to learn to question and evaluate themselves, and thus their faith will probably tend to be shallower, and to engage life in a more superficial fashion.  I don’t think we can look down on those whose faith is sheltered, but we can say that it’s an open question whether they’ve put their roots deep enough to survive the storms if and when they come.My brothers and sisters, consider it entirely as joy when you face trials of many kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfast endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.—James 1:2-4

Modernity as universal cultural acid

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James Hitchcock has a truly remarkable editorial in the latest Touchstone which asks a penetrating question:  can traditional societies survive the power of modernity?  He writes,

A closed traditional society finds it almost impossible to effect an orderly and controlled transition to modernity. Religion dominates all aspects of life to the extent that no distinction is made between matters of faith and mere custom. . . .Thus, it proves psychologically impossible to discard those things in traditional society that have outlived their legitimacy without thereby setting off global change. The changing culture fosters a half-conscious conviction that truth lies roughly in asserting the opposite of what one previously believed. Changes cannot be evaluated rationally, because people are carried along by a euphoric sense of having liberated themselves from long-standing, narrow oppressiveness.Modern society offers an opportunity to exercise freedom in the fullest sense, an exercise that exposes the facts that what passes for deep conviction may be for many people merely a brittle social conformity, and what passes for morality may be the mere absence of opportunities for sin.Muslims who see the United States as the Great Satan reject the good of political liberty along with the poisonous moral licentiousness that such liberty permits. They perceive the ambiguity of modernity itself, most of which either originated in the United States or has been propagated through American influence.But for that very reason the antibodies to modern cultural viruses also exist most robustly in the United States, which is practically the only society in the Western world where moral traditionalists have an effective voice in public affairs.Religious belief is stronger in America than anywhere else in the West partly because believers have had to find ways of living their faith without the kind of social supports that, historically, were provided in countries with established churches.

This is an interesting explanation for America’s unusual religious culture, and one that makes a great deal of sense; but if he’s right to suggest that “the forces of modernity—political, economic, and cultural—really are irresistible and that sooner or later almost every society in the world will have to face them,” then the implications of his argument must be faced as well, because they are of great significance.  As he says,

If that assumption is correct, it is better to experience modernity sooner rather than later, in order to make use of what is good in it and to learn to cope with what is bad. Simple quarantine is no longer possible. . . .Both for societies and for individuals, our cultural situation is tragic in the classical sense, because it requires decisions none of which are free of possible bad consequences. Maintaining a rigorously closed society may protect generations of people from the worst evils of modernity, even as it virtually guarantees that later generations will be infected all the more virulently. But alternatively, allowing people a good measure of freedom inevitably leads to abuse.

While, from a Christian perspective, one may well call the consequences of this situation for the church tragic, there is a silver lining as well:  if Hitchcock’s overall thesis is correct, then that applies not only to Christian societies but also to Muslim societies as well.  This suggests that while traditionalist Islamic societies will no doubt succeed in resisting modernity for some time—which is, I believe, the driving concern behind the rise of Islamism in its various forms, including its most virulent strain, jihadism—they cannot resist forever; eventually, the Islamic world will see its own version of Quebec’s “Silent Revolution,” and the collapse of radical Islam, leaving much of the Islamic world looking much like the once-Christian nations of western Europe.  This offers hope that, in our conflict with militant Islam as with the Cold War against global communism, if we will stand strong and not surrender, we will see a Berlin Wall moment.

Thought on worship and idolatry

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Human beings have an instinctive tendency to idolatry.  That might seem a strange thing to say in the West, where we don’t have big statues standing around for people to bow down to, but it’s true.  For one thing, we were made to worship, and have a bent that way; if we don’t consciously worship God (or some other god), we will usually find ourselves coming unconsciously to worship something else.This might sound like a strange thing to say, but take a look around. Take a look, not at people’s formal religious affiliations, but at where they put their money, their time, and their trust, and what do you see? You see entertainment; you see possessions; you see, perhaps, investments; with some people, you see their ambitions, whether social, political, or economic; you see relationships, certainly; and you see a lot of people who put most if not all of their money, time, and trust, quite frankly, in themselves. Now, some of these are purely good things—for example, if I didn’t spend money and time on my wife and kids, I’d get a lot of questions, not least from them—and none of them are evil; but the pattern is another matter. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart,” and it’s even truer that where your trust is, there is your heart; we might say, going further, that where your trust and treasure are together, there is your true worship, and the true focus of your attention.Worship isn’t just about going and participating in a formal service somewhere, although that’s what we associate with the word; worship is about giving honor, and according someone (or something) a place of particular importance in our lives.  The word “worship,” in its older English form, was “worthship”; it meant to ascribe worth to something, to see that thing as having worth, as being important, and to treat it accordingly. Now, the word “worship” has come to have a more specific meaning, a formally religious one, but that old meaning is still at the core of it—it means to treat something or someone as of greatest worth, and to behave accordingly.This is perfectly natural; indeed, we might say it’s necessary, or even inevitable.  The problem is, in our pride, we resist according that place to God, because doing so means giving up control—or, at least, the illusion of control—and so we have the tendency to turn instead to things, or to the self, to find security and peace and meaning in life instead of turning to God.  That way, by giving pride of place to nothing greater than the self, we remain free from being told what to do (as long as circumstances permit, anyway).  The problem is, in so doing, we put our trust and our hope in things which simply cannot bear the weight, and so—sooner or later—they fail us.(Partially excerpted from “Can You Do This?”)

Listen to the dream

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My children are in school today; our school district is using holidays as snow days, which doesn’t exactly seem kosher to me. So, as a tribute but also as a bit of a protest, I thought I’d post Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech this morning; this is the whole thing, not just the famous peroration, and if you’ve never heard it, it’s more than worth the time to listen. For that matter, even if you have heard it, it’s still more than worth the time.

Thanks, Hap

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The last couple weeks have been pretty crazy; I’m hoping that things will clear out a bit for the next couple.  We had a big meeting today at the church which took a lot of time and mental energy for preparation, and which I think went fairly well; we’re dealing with the big questions of identity and vision, working towards developing a ministry plan for the next 3-5 years, so there’s a lot on the line here, but I think we made a good start on it.  We just need to keep praying and thinking and trust God to lead us.If the pace does slow a little, one thing I want to do is catch back up with various blogs.  Hap, for instance, has been doing some interesting work on Psalm 119, working through the acrostic; and most recently, she has a remarkable post up titled “healing, community, and the poverty of availability.”  It’s a valuable rumination on the cost of being available to others, and why even ministry must be held in balance with the rest of life; as such, after a week like this, it’s just what I needed to read.  I commend it to your careful consideration.

Economics in its proper place

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A while back, I put up a post riffing on Colossians 2 and asking, “What are the spirits our society accepts as the elemental powers that rule human destiny?”  I didn’t have a lot of answers to that question, but the estimable Doug Hagler had a good one:  “ECONOMICS.”  In support of that, he offered a very interesting point, which hadn’t occurred to me before (emphasis mine):

Everyone treats economics as a science, which in our culture, means a truth-discerning and truth-telling method, when it is in fact a value system of subjective measurement.

I posted again, noting his penetrating observation and interacting with it a little more; and then a little while later, I ran across Kent Van Til’s article in Perspectives titled “Not Too Much Sovereignty for Economics, Please:  Abraham Kuyper and Mainstream Economics.”  Due to technical difficulties, I didn’t manage to get it posted at the time, and other things intervened.  I did want to come back to it, though, because it’s a remarkable piece—particularly when considered in conjunction with Doug’s argument, because Dr. Van Til works with the idea that economists are primarily, not scientists, but storytellers offering an explanatory story of the world.  As he notes, the promises they make for their story tend to go beyond what they can actually keep:

In spite of their role as writers of fiction . . . economists pretend to be physicists who deal only with empirical data.  They also mainly talk about what has already happened because they aren’t necessarily great predictors—if they were, they’d all be rich.

Dr. Van Til’s analysis is of particular interest when he applies it to rational choice theory, pointing out that people cannot be reduced to “rationality” (and especially to one particular definition of what it means to be rational) and “efficiency.”  As he argues, such a reductionistic understanding of human beings can only lead to injustice if left unchallenged; thus it is critically important to see ourselves as more than homo economicus, but with Abraham Kuyper to insist that

economics is not the only sphere of life, nor the only explanatory model of human action.  The attempt by one sphere to suppress or dominate all the others must be resisted.

As such, Dr. Van Til writes,

We must urge that humans are more than individuals who rationally satisfy their preferences.  We must insist that there really are sins and evils, not merely sub-optimal conditions or disequilibria.  We must contend that all goods are not reducible to the one goal of utility.  We must contest the notion that the ultimate meaning of the good is only a composite economic good for many individuals.  And we must say that all grand narratives are ultimately foolish unless their denouement is found in Christ.  That is simply to repeat after our Master that it makes no sense for us to gain the whole world but lose our souls.