• Obama and Notre Dame
• 1960s Religious Culture Shock Grows
• 'Christian America' a Heresy; Refrain from Baptizing the Country
• Suk-Chung Yu on Asian Endowment Board
• July 4: Being Saved
• Greener Appointment Pastures; John Wesley on Itineracy
• Church Segregation; Non-Sabbath-Keeping
• Africa and the U.S.; Urgency's Blessing
  
• Calvin: Through It All, Living God's Grace

President Obama faced protestors when he gave the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17. Not only does the President profess choice in reproductive freedom, a position opposite from Roman Catholic doctrine. But Notre Dame gave him an award - contrary to Catholic policy that people who oppose major policy should not be given awards.

Sixty of 290 active Catholic bishops denounced the university and its president, Father John Jenkins. American Catholics have struggled over the centuries to balance desire to assimilate into society with fear of losing their faith in the nation's melting pot. This latest controversy points to assimilation winning.

Beginning in the 1800s, American Catholics insulated themselves by building an alternative universe of schools to educate their children, hospitals to care for their sick, and cemeteries to bury their dead. Yet they also wanted to be as red, white, and blue as any Connecticut Yankee. They fought in wars, worked in factories, and turned out college graduates to join the nation's elite, finally arriving with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Notre Dame began with Eisenhower inviting Presidents to deliver commencement addresses.

Another recent example of assimilation winning: A Miami Herald poll showed 78% of Miami Catholics still having a favorable impression of priest Alberto Cutie, after revelations that he has had a girlfriend of two years. "What worries me most is how God views me," he said. "The institution, the church, is something else."

[By David Gibson, Washington Post, May 17, 2009. Gibson, a Catholic, is author of The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism.]

Robert Putnam - author of Bowling Alone (2000), on America's retreat into individualism and away from social involvement -- will have a new book in 2010 entitled American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives. In it he will contend that church-goers are happier and friendlier than non-church-goers.

But church-goers are becoming fewer. A shock to American religion came in the 1960s. The sex and drugs culture became an alternative to religion for Baby Boomers, Putnam says, and brought a "very rapid change in morals and customs." That was the big shock, and one aftershock was the rise of the religious right in reaction to that change. But then came a second aftershock: In the 1990s young people said, in effect, that if the religious right is religion, "I'm not interested." Thus, Americans in their 20s in 2009 are even more secular than the Baby Boomers were in their 20s. Putnam says a polarization has resulted: "There are fewer liberals in the pews, and fewer unchurched conservatives."

The political implications are huge: Democrats must appeal to secular Americans while not alienating the church-goers, and Republicans have just the opposite problem.

[Future book reviewed in a column by Michael Gerson, Washington Post, May 9, 2009.]

Creating a "Christian America" has always been a heresy, a historical error, and a blunder. A heresy because no human kingdom, however, admirable, can be properly identified with the Kingdom of God. A historical error because the federal government has been wisely nonsectarian from its beginning - its laws informed by religious values while establishing no single, official religious tradition. A blunder because the conflation of faith and ideology can politicize, nationalize and thus diminish the appeal of faith itself.

The decline of the Protestant mainline is not a development I choose to cheer, because it has often represented the best of liberal idealism, particularly during the civil rights era.

[Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President Reagan, Washington Post, April 17, 2009.]

Refrain from Baptizing the Culture

Can there ever be such a thing as a "Christian America"? Our discipleship and our citizenship are always in conflict and often in direct contradiction. At some points in history, Christians have died rather than bow to political demands that would compromise their faith. At other times, Christians have meekly conformed in order to show loyalty to the larger culture.

Americans have the tendency to try to baptize the culture. Think of the Social Gospel movement, which fought for just labor conditions, women's suffrage, and prohibition [of alcohol]. But we shouldn't think the goal of Christian discipleship is to baptize the culture. Where in the New Testament does it say that the body of Christ can ever be society writ large? Jesus did not reconcile the world to himself by conquering Rome.

The most compelling Christian witness is found in a community faithful to the gospel command to love God and neighbor. The world might reject the Christian faith, but the church doesn't exist to please the world; it exists to please God. If the power of the gospel is real, people will be drawn to it.

[The Rev. Andrew Thompson, United Methodist Reporter, May 8, 2009.]

The Rev. Suk-Chong Yu - district superintendent for the Nevada-Sierra District from 1999 to 2006 - has been named to the Endowment Fund Committee of the National Federation of Asian American United Methodists.

His call to ministry came when Korea, his home country, was undergoing reconstruction after the Korean War, and he realized that rebuilding the devastated country needed spiritual strength of people rather than military build-up. This realization was strongly influenced by his mother, a local pastor, and his Methodist pastor father who was taken by the Communists and never returned home.

In 1968 he came to the United States as a United Methodist Crusade Scholar. He returned to Korea as a professor and an editor of a Christian journal. He returned to United States as a pastor in Washington state, and later California-Nevada, where he was appointed to Korean UMC in San Francisco from 1988-1999.

[Journal of the Endowment Fund, National Federation of Asian American United Methodists, Spring 2009.]

When the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Congregationalist Church was the largest denomination in the colonies. In the southern colonies, the largest denomination was the Church of England. Only 2 percent of colonial Americans were Methodists. However, by 1850 Methodists numbered 34 percent of the U.S. population. Episcopalians had dropped from 27 percent to 4 percent since 1776. The driving dynamic of Methodism in that era was bringing new people to experiential faith in Jesus Christ as Savior from their sins.

What happened to the Congregationalists and Anglicans in colonial America can happen to United Methodism in the 21st-century U.S. Mine is no nostalgic call to go back to the language of the frontier or the fabric of the revival meeting. However, it is to follow the wisdom of Isaac, to "re-dig the wells of our fathers." Sin is real. Our condition remains precarious. Our souls are on trial along with our jobs and savings. The context has changed; the text has not! We still need the experience of saving grace.

[Dr. Donald W. Haynes, United Methodist Reporter, Oct. 17, 2008.]

What is a sufficient call to a new place? A probability of doing more good by going thither than by staying longer where we are…This preacher has one talent and that another. No one whom I ever yet knew has all the talents which are needful for beginning, continuing and perfecting the work of grace in a whole congregation.

[John Wesley, founder of Methodism, on why he liked the itineracy system for ordained ministers.]

In many ways a pall remains over much of today's church with regard to how it has dealt with the race problem in America. In their 2001 book, Divided by Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith developed a theory as to why churches are racially exclusive despite Christian ideals about inclusiveness: Americans choose where and with whom to worship; race is one of the most important grounds on which they choose; so the more choice they have, their religious institutions will be segregated. Churches are more segregated than schools, workplaces or neighborhoods. The least segregated sector of American society is also the least governed by options: the military. Because U.S. Protestants offer the largest number of churches from which people may choose, their churches remain the most segregated.

[Rev. C. Anthony Hunt, a district superintendent of the Baltimore-Washington conference, Leading Ideas, Lewis Center for Leadership, 2009.]

Pharisee at Sabbath-Keeping

I confess am a Pharisee [at helping people keep the Sabbath (i.e., Sundays) free of work]. I pray for the forgiveness of God and verbally ask the forgiveness of the [fast-food] Hardee's drive-through lady each Sunday as I buy coffee on my way to church. I know I am complicit: On the one hand, I do wish - with my head and heart - that all people had Sunday free. That said, I do nothing, nothing to lift a finger to make that happen, by even so little an act of self-sacrifice as making my own coffee on a busy Sunday morning, much less by not eating a [restaurant] Sunday lunch or dinner.

[The Rev. Thomas Steagald of First UMC, Stanley NC, on his personal web blog, 2009.]

Africa and the U.S. - A Contrast

The United Methodist Church in Africa is growing, and the UMC in the U.S. is declining. Many Africans live difficult lives, with poverty and disease all too common. They are grasping for something that provides hope, and the Christian faith provides it. In addition, the UMC often brings aid in many forms through United Methodist Volunteers in Mission and the general agencies. Isolated villages often have no electricity, so village life slows after dark. There are few entertainment outlets. When a church starts, complete with preaching and music, there is something to do.

In the U.S., church has lots of competition. When the sun goes down, vast options remain in sports, recreation, entertainment, and the media. Most Americans are not struggling with poverty and disease. Hope is not in short supply, so church is not as compelling. If the U.S. tends toward more socialism as Europe has, will church attendance decline still more as Europe's has? Some people interpret that European governments replace the need for God and the church for many. Even so, those who are doing well still have basic spiritual needs. The challenge is to find a more effective way to communicate that reality.

[John H. Southwick, Background Data for Mission, General Board of Global Ministries, December 2008.]

Urgency's Blessing

John Kotter, Harvard business professor, says most change efforts that fail do so for a lack of true urgency -- contrasted with false urgency. False urgency is frenetic, panicked and energy-sapping. True urgency is steady, unrelenting, and powerful. It is intense, but not body- and soul-destroying. Is the pastor of a church feeling urgency from lessening worship attendance and finances, or from increasing conflict? Great! Are the key leaders? Wonderful! How about the average person in a pew who attends church once or twice a month? Until urgency is felt throughout the entire congregation, very little shifts. Pastors and lay leaders sometimes think they are serving the congregation by shielding them from problems and feel it's their duty to put on a happy face. Jesus and the early church felt a gut-level urgency. Look around at the congregations that are thriving, that are spiritually alive, that are venues of hope, healing and transformation and you will find a sense of urgency about people giving themselves to worthy work and moving forward to serve in new ways. Crises present a congregation with opportunities to revisit and re-anchor itself in its mission as a church.

[Dan Smith and Mary Huycke, CourageousSpace newsletter, February 2009, CourageousSpace.com.]

John Calvin, the second greatest Reformation theologian, was born 500 years ago [July 10, 1509] in France. Calvin's assessment of the human dilemma - caught between being created in God's image and also fallen in the image of humanity and its sin - explains so much about who we are and how we behave. Unlike John Wesley, Calvin believed that salvation was only for those whom God chooses, but, like Wesley, he taught that there is much we all can do in the world to advance God's will. "If we throw our trust on God, admitting that we have done all we can and the rest is in God's hands, then we can be less worried about the results," says Evans Presley-McGowan, a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary (SFTS) in San Anselmo.

Every arena of life, especially helping people at the margins of life, "is to be reformed and changed so that it comes more closely into alignment with God," says SFTS professor Gregory Love. Calvin's great work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, follows the four divisions of the Apostles' Creed: knowledge of God, knowledge of Christ, receiving grace through the Holy Spirit, and teaching, through the church, the availability of grace. James Goodloe of the Foundation for Reformed Theology in Richmond, Va., says the Institutes are "a coherent and expansive articulation of the gospel that not only addressed the concerns of Calvin's day but did so with a clarity and incisiveness that continues to inform us." The 2009 legacy: 75 million members of Reformed churches around the world.

[Adapted from Chimes, SFTS magazine, Winter 2009.]