LOSING OUR RELIGION

One academic Christian friend stood in front of a group and said “I stopped believing God exists several times last week. That apparently had little or no impact on God existing”. Have you seen this week’s headlines about the slipping number of people who consider themselves Christian in our country? Bishop Warner Brown mentioned it in his message to the Church of the Joyful Healer last week.

Hmmm … Since church/synagogue/house of worship in the USA hovers at between 25 and 35 percent most of the time, when I hear that those who call themselves Christian has dropped from 86% to 75%, I think we may not be getting clear information from the poll. I suspect rather, the use of the word “Christian” no longer has the same meaning it once had, like in the South, where a “good Christian” used to mean someone who doesn’t cause much trouble. People used to call themselves Christian with little meaning to the word other than perhaps a relative was buried by a pastor or priest. Maybe it is good for the country to support people being more reflective on how they connect themselves.

But specifically, when I was appointed to start a church in northern Humboldt County in 1998, in my research I only found one other place in the country that had a lower percentage of people who saw themselves in alignment with traditional Christian faith perspectives than here! Yet our church has grown to have almost 180 people a week in worship, sharing joy over the love of God in a Christian church. Hmmmm …

I suspect that as churches in the USA rediscover the radical and hopeful faith that was at the heart of Christianity in its inception, the church will grow again, and impressively. As long as the aberrant and damaging fundamentalist perspective gets the press and throws its weight around neighborhoods, churches will be on the defensive, and should be.

I don’t expect our more open and positive church family to grow every year in number, but usually it does.

What is more important is that the church is growing in relationships and in usefulness to the communities around it. I just spoke to someone in the tick-borne disease support group that meets in our building on Friday. She loves our church even while being a member of a very different religious group. It is never about numbers! It is about the people we bless and the life we find together in faith.

Do well.

ABORTION/STEM CELL DEBATES

Here are topics and notes that might help you with people concerned either about the abortion/stem cell debates, or with moms in crisis pregnancies:

We are taught to take artificial positions on abortion, as if pro-choice isn’t pro-life and vice versa. This is an asinine game of hatred-brewing that damages our ability to hear each other and even hear the Spirit speak to us. Fund raisers and lobbyists nourish this dichotomy, and if we were further removed from the debate, we would find them and their extreme positions absurd and hilarious. But now that President Obama has launched the American stem cell sciences again, the issue is more tender for our Christian fundamentalist friends.

What matters in our message? You are my friend, whatever your opinion about this or almost any issue. We are called by Jesus to be one. I offer you my hand.

What You Might Expect Me to Say about Abortion: Everyone wants happy, healthy babies to be born into ready, happy, and healthy families. And you probably already know, I love kids and smile from the inside out when I see healthy families! While we can disagree on particulars, it is artificial and nonsense to believe that people who view the abortion debate differently than us don’t want that just like we do.

But that Isn’t the Whole Story, Is It? Crisis pregnancies happen in virtually every community in the world every day and more so in areas where birth control and abortion are hard to access. And a desperate mom does not need judgment or theoretical debate or pressure. She needs the same access as any other mom could have to quality medical care!

The religious community is divided into two broad camps, led by the mainline Protestant and Jewish communities on one hand, the Catholic and fundamentalist Christian communities on the other: one that focuses on compassion to the expectant mother and the other on compassion to the baby she carries. The United Methodist Social Principles speak of the “tragic conflict of life with life” but still insist the decision on abortion is a private one between a woman and a skilled care provider.

The Jewish point of view on the beginning of fully actual human life is that it begins at birth. “God … breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. In Exodus 21 a forced loss of pregnancy is worked into a legal discussion about when the community of God in the fragile early years of Israel and its wanderings should use capital punishment, since there were no prisons. A hypothetical situation is raised: two men fight, and a pregnant woman steps in to stop them. She is struck and lives, but loses her child. Is this time to pay “life for life”? The clear answer is No. The child was not yet a born, breathing baby. A fine should be paid. It is a real and tragic loss. But it is not fully actual life in the same sense of a born child.

Anti-abortion Bible readers don’t focus on these statements of principle, but fear that such a reading will lead us to under value life itself, especially that of the vulnerable. Their Biblical support may be a rigid reading of poetic lines in psalms and prayers, like Psalm 139, “You knew me in my mother’s womb”, but their concern is for the belief in all life as sacred. Not a bad platform now, is it? Also the anti abortion teachings find passion in the Bible’s condemnation of people who “offer their children in the fire” to the god Moloch, a hideous child sacrifice ritual with commonalities in many cultures. But of course, these are born children. In my contacts with the pro-choice community, I have never met a soul who would not risk their lives to save a born child, so the child sacrifice analogy seems to me to be irrelevant to the concerns of either side.

It is sure hard, though, to find common ground when some view the thoughtful choices of others as murder.

Don’t Lie to Yourself. As pro-life as we may view ourselves, unless we believe a mother and a doctor choosing to have or assist an abortion should be tried as murderers, we are functionally on the “pro-choice” side. And you have many friends who have had an abortion. Most of them don’t strike you or me as death row candidates.

Our real tasks are these: First, to work to make birth control options viable for anyone, yes even of young people. Our thoughts about sex among the young should not cloud our commitment to provide them safety and protection. And in many places, this means confronting an anti-condom culture among men in certain “macho” sub-cultures.

Second, we must raise the issues of compassion for the mother as well as the child. A teenager saw anti abortion leaflets showing a sonogram of an embryo six weeks from conception. His response? “Where is the mother?” he asked. He pointed out that the photo gives no sense of the needs or situation of the mother whose body this embryo was in!

Third, we must say an absolute NO to those who would have us hate each other for seeing this issue differently. Most pro-life and pro-choice people have great swaths of their reasoning and purposes in common, and no lobby or demagogue should be allowed to obfuscate that fact. My position is clearly mother-centric, but in our church we have several members who lean on the anti abortion side. We talk. We challenge each other. But we don’t deny each other the right to come to conclusions and work for positions that we each feel compelled to.

And last, and most important, we are called to be agents of healing and grace for those who have tough choices to make. Moms and Dads need a bigger community on their side and laws that support family health. And women in painful conflicts should have as many options as possible available to them so they can choose the best ways to move forward into life making and life building and life sharing. And we need to be there for them and with them.

Stem cells are usually most available through the destruction of embryonic tissue. This means that we need to be clearer about how we see abortion before we can understand and take reasoned positions on research and curative work with stem cells. Balancing our hopes for healing therapies from stem cell research with our concerns about the unborn will help us see what “pro-life” really means.

Do well

RAISING KIDS #1 - Going to Church

A little guy was completely out of control one morning in church. Finally his dad picked him up and walked out in frustration. The little one cried that he didn’t want to leave, but dad kept walking. Finally near the door the little guy called out “Goodbye everybody. Pray for me.”

How to bring our kids to church is an issue at every stage of development.

What you might expect me to say about kids in church: It is one of the greatest gifts you can give them to grow up in a church and faith family.

But that isn’t the whole story is it?

… When they are young they can be distracting when they cry or fuss or spit up or yell or play loudly or grab or … or … And most of that distraction is quadrupled for the parents trying to pray or hear a message.

… As they get older they can act out home frustrations knowing you are vulnerable in a group, or they can have trouble with doing the group activities or even wanting to leave home and get dressed.

… As they get to pre-teen stage, they can think church is awful and come up with vicious interpretations of church and faith, or have issues of “coolness” or independence that can make it almost impossible to get them to come. I have seen kids love me one year, “hate” me the next, use me for a job reference the next, and tell me I have been one of the best influences in their life in the next!

What to do?

Frankly, for younger children, the best thing a family can do is keep the habit. Be there except for sickness and out of town weekends if you can. Even when it is unsatisfying, it is the gift of teaching the ritual to the child. None of us are good at something if we do it seldom enough. Frequency is the way to proficiency in anything. Families with more than one adult can shift management of the details back and forth a bit, but that is a reminder to love on the many single parents among us!

As a child gets into elementary levels, it is a real favor for them to get to know the church family as individuals. If they can remember they are coming to see “Pat, Tim, Judy, Mary, Shante, Juan, Sarah or Mike” rather than just the amalgam of those people in a big blob it can greatly add to their social skill set, since church is one of the rare opportunities for a child to mix with folk of diverse ages. Churched kids are, on average, socially ahead of others in the skill of multigenerational socialization, a vital capacity for grown up life. This makes coffee hour and an occasional special church event like the campout real useful, even vital.

Here’s a note that will save you a lot of grief with some kids: At elementary grade levels, kids need to learn that church behavior isn’t courteous because it’s church. If they think all the social graces they have to learn there are because of church or faith they can resent church or faith for requiring those social graces of them!!! They need to be taught that these graces are human graces, and are required of them any time they are in group settings. Church doesn’t need to be blamed for this. They would have to use the same social skills in a club or a family reunion.

And at elementary grade age, they need to be expected to participate in church attendance just like the easy expectation of eating family meals together and visiting cousins together.

If and when church attendance becomes a struggle, which it often does in the early to mid pre-teens, I recommend a graduated pattern of adjustments. First, remember that the kids most likely to attend church as adults have parents that are faithful to their church whether the child goes or not. In other words, when you go even when your teen is not going, they finally see how much it really matters to you. That rubs off.

If the resistance gets thick I recommend that you first make church rituals more obviously useful to your growing kid. I have seen several families wisely develop a two or three-part ritual on church day, like always doing a family out-to-eat on Sunday after church. If you miss one you miss the other. Other possibilities are starting or ending play time with other kids at church, or always doing a movie out or biking or other hobby right after church. This is just good use of precious family time, but it makes the point that this is a central part of us being family.

Do I encourage parents to debate church beliefs with a hostile teen? Not much, if at all. Church is our extended family. Many adults go without buying all of its beliefs, but we do good for ourselves and for the world as a church, so we are here and committed. The habit teaches more than the cognition, I think.

Did my kids have options not to come to church? Yes, but not often. I let them know I thought the family deserved their participation. And the youth program was a part of that family. And so were all those folk who they have come to know here. We weren’t rigid, yet as awkward as it can be for the “preacher’s kids” to feel free to define themselves, both my kids accepted church as a given for most of their youth. And they are still among you and thriving as a result of that connection.

Did we debate beliefs when they were in “rejectionist” mode? Not much. I never suggested they needed to accept church belief to attend. The same is true for many adults who attend church. They do so out of something bigger than their momentary cognitive assent to certain beliefs.

Don’t lie to yourself: church is best when it is a habit, but something inside us will try to break that. Keeping it for yourself is the greatest gift you can give yourself, even if your kids/parents or significant other don’t come along. And they are most likely to “get it” seeing you keep the habit no matter what.

Do well.