The Manhattan Declaration is a 4,732-word statement signed by a movement of Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical Christian leaders who are collaborating around moral issues of great concern. Its signers affirm the sanctity of human life, marriage as defined by the union of one man and one woman, and religious liberty and freedom of conscience. The Manhattan Declaration endorses civil disobedience under certain circumstances.

The original 148 signatories include 14 Roman Catholic bishops, 2 Eastern Orthodox bishops, 20 presidents and 19 faculty members from seminaries and college—including our own Russell Moore—46 leaders of various ministries, 22 pastors, 10 magazine editors and publishers (including First Things editor Joseph Bottum), and various other luminaries.

First Things has posted the text here. You can sign the declaration here.

(Thanks to Touchstone magazine for the information on the signers.)

Townhall.com ought to be one of my favorite websites, but I rarely hit a link from my reader.

Why? (more…)

Nearly 25 years ago I made a discovery that would change my life profoundly, especially as it relates to the worship of God. While visiting Prague in 1976 I had purchased a copy of a Czech hymnal published in 1900 that contains the 150 Psalms in metre and some 350 hymns. But it was not until the mid-1980s that I discovered the true significance of this little volume. At that time I discovered the tunes of the Genevan Psalter, the metrical psalter completed in 1562 and used in Calvin’s Geneva. From thence its use spread to the Netherlands, Hungary, South Africa and elsewhere, having a huge influence in the Reformed churches in those countries. Imagine my surprise to discover that I had long possessed evidence that these were sung by Czech Christians as well, and in the very church of pre-reformer Jan Hus!

Apart from a few tunes, however, the Genevan melodies did not catch on to the same extent in the English-speaking world. This is largely because of some of the distinctive characteristics of the English language, including the relative paucity of feminine endings, or unstressed final syllables. Hence English-language metrical psalters, such as the Scottish Psalter of 1650, tended to render all the psalms in a very few uniform metres, such as common metre (86 86 iambic), long metre (88 88 iambic) and short metre (66 86 iambic).

The Genevan tunes, by contrast, conformed to a variety of metrical patterns, some of which would strike us as rather eccentric. This made them more like the German chorales that were being composed in the Lutheran territories at the same time. The syncopated rhythms were such that Queen Elizabeth I is said to have referred to them derogatorily as “Genevan jigs.” Following centuries-old practice, they were written in the traditional ecclesiastical modes of the western church.

Following my discovery of this rich liturgical resource, I was hooked and began to write my own versifications of the Psalms to be sung to these tunes. Somewhat later I began to compose arrangements for the tunes. Ten years ago I posted a website devoted to the Genevan Psalter and to the recovery of psalm-singing in evangelical churches. Since then I have been adding to this website, including an introductory essay, a blog, a sample liturgy, numerous links to other psalm-related material and, of course, the texts themselves.

This is a labour of love that has been a part of my life for nearly a quarter century, and I expect that it will occupy my retirement years when the time comes. My prayer is that it may spark in Christians around the world a renewed love for singing the psalms. I will have more to say in future on the place of the psalms in the church’s liturgy.

“Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” (Psalm 150:6)

Gospel deficiency is the major crisis of the evangelical church. The good news has been replaced by many things, most often a therapeutic, self-help approach to biblical application. The result is a Church that, ironically enough, preaches works, not grace, and a growing number of Christians who neither understand the gospel nor revel in its scandal.

There are lots of good reasons to reclaim the centrality of the good news of Jesus in our preaching and teaching and writing and blogging, and I’ve come up with four basic arguments for (what I’m calling) The Gospel Imperative, but perhaps defining our terms is in order. It’s no good going on about making the gospel the center of our worship and discipleship if we are not on the same page for what the gospel actually is.

Like many others, I affirm that the gospel is big. I favor a robust gospel, a good news proclamation with many facets and ramifications. It is everywhere in the shadows and in the light of the Old Testament Israelites’ desert wandering, and it encompasses the brilliant kingdom landscape of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It is in God’s gracious covering of the freshly fallen Adam and Eve (and in the cursing of the serpent) in Genesis, and it is in the awesome return of the tattooed, sword-wielding Jesus 65 books later in Revelation. I agree with Tim Keller, who argues that the gospel is “both one and more than that.” It is certainly “more than that.” But it is also “one,” which is why a nutshell like “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23) can work well.

While acknowledging that the gospel is about the inbreaking kingdom of God setting a fallen world back to rights, the gospel I am speaking about here is the “essential” gospel, which is the news that Jesus has died to make atonement and risen bodily to establish his Lordship and has thereby murdered sin and conquered death.

Pretty powerful stuff, ain’t it? And yet many of our churches consider this news, which eternal angels still long to gaze into, merely introductory stuff.
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This is the first time in its nearly three-week history that I will be silent on Evangel. I invite my friends here to do the same.

The reason is the same as it always is.

I decided to read Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish.

When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Andrew Sullivan, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that he tells about his life.

There are so many fabrications and delusions on his blog, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it – and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality he has previously provided – is a bewildering task. He is a deeply disturbed person which makes his work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read.

And the fact that he is now writing for a mainstream publication and is obsessed with destroying a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to him, and to his family, and to the innocent people he has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

Since my blog writing has tried always to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Sullivan’s unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning – specifically his fantastic story regarding Sarah Palin’s  fifth pregnancy -  we feel it’s vital that we grapple with his new jag as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything else.

God speed gentle reader, God speed.

The editorial I referenced in a recent post is now available online. It is Philip Yancey’s last CT column (for the foreseeable future anyway), after 26 years of writing for the magazine.

The piece is short but potent. A taste of “O, Evangelicos!”:

As I survey evangelicalism I see much good, but also much room for improvement. Our history includes disunity—how many different denominations do this magazine’s readers represent?—and a past that includes lapses in ethics and judgment. We have brought energy to faith, but also division. We celebrate the transformation of individuals, but often fall short in our larger goal of transforming society.

It saddens me to hear the media’s caricature of evangelicals as right-wing zealots. The word means “good news,” and I have seen that message broadcast in creative, practical ways in over 50 countries. But I can see where the media get their stereotypes. I have a folder of scorching e-mails circulated by evangelicals during the 2008 presidential election, and a more recent collection fanning fears over proposals for health-care reform. These supplement a larger folder on gay issues. Evangelicals haven’t always found a way to combine loving acts with a loving spirit.

In one encouraging trend, the fundamentalist-social gospel divide that marked the church a century ago has long since disappeared. Now evangelical organizations lead the way in such efforts as relief and development, microcredit, HIV/AIDS ministries, and outreach to sex workers. I have visited thriving ministries among the garbage dump communities outside Manila, Cairo, and Guatemala City. Evangelicals have taken seriously Jesus’ call to care for “the least of these.”

I recently heard from a friend who visited a barrio in São Paulo, Brazil. He grew nervous as he noticed the foot soldiers of drug lords standing guard holding automatic weapons. They were glowering at him, a gringo invading their turf. “Then the chief drug lord of that neighborhood noticed my T-shirt, which had the logo of a local Pentecostal church. He broke out in a big smile: ‘O, evangelicos!’ he called out, giving us hugs. Over the years, that church had cared for the children of the barrio, and now we were joyfully welcomed.”

Some of my friends believe we should abandon the word evangelical. I do not. I simply yearn for us to live up to the meaning of our name.

Read the whole thing.

. . . is somewhat inevitable in the customer-driven church. Isn’t it?

This was in a recent email newsletter sent by a church from my past:

“While you only need to be baptized once, if you’d like to reaffirm your commitment to God we encourage you to participate in baptism again.”

This church, which I resigned from several years ago with resolve but regrets, is still near and dear to my heart, but this is, frankly, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in an invitation. It doesn’t even make sense. (But you don’t need me to tell you that.) You only need to do it once. But if you want to reaffirm, you should do it again. I was not surprised to read this, but greatly saddened.

Today I saw on Twitter someone announcing that hundreds of requests for baptism were coming in . . . for this Sunday.

I think baptizing hundreds of people is great. What a blessing! God grant me the blessing of baptizing hundreds in my lifetime, let alone one Sunday!
But while I don’t see baptism classes or extensive counseling in the Scriptures precipitating baptism, and while there is much spiritually to admire in so-called “spontaneous baptisms,” I don’t feel it’s being inordinately cynical to wonder how even a megachurch will sort through the hundreds of needs attendant in hundreds of baptism requests. Not all of those people will really need to be baptized. But will the church do its due diligence in figuring that out?

A blogger shared this year that he was baptized for the sixth time. Or maybe it was the seventh. (I forget, but it was more than four.) This time, I remember him saying, it was “for hope.” I wonder if “faith” and “love” were already covered in previous dunkings.

Last year a young man approached me about re-baptism. I knew I was going to have to be tender with him when his reasoning began, “I’ve been listening to a lot of praise and worship music lately . . .”
He was a believer and had been baptized, and I explained to him he did not need to be re-baptized. I love this guy, which was why I wouldn’t baptize him. I didn’t want to reinforce the idea that his faith was contingent upon his feelings. The sacrament of baptism is not seasonal. Christ died and rose once.

I have re-baptized candidates when by conscience and conviction they do not believe their first baptism was valid, typically because they are now credo-baptists but were born into either a paedo-baptizing tradition, whether Catholic or Protestant. But I counsel substantively with them beforehand. I generally try to convince them they don’t need it. Baptism is not “re-dedication,” which my Baptist heritage is very fond of.

This new movement of mass baptisms, if it is a move of the Lord, is wonderful. Time will tell if the number of professing Christians in the West is truly rising, if the fruit of these churches reporting hundreds of baptisms on any given Sunday are producing growing disciples. But it is not out of order to have grave concerns about the way the baptisms are offered, taught, and administered. Precisely because people’s hearts are precious. A lot of the mass baptism hoopla does look like re-dedication turned to eleven. It makes for good press, good buzz. But I don’t know if it makes for good baptisms. Or solid believers.

I think — I think — the good press of hundreds and thousands of baptisms solicited in this manner is part of what makes the un-clued-in think everything’s hunky dory in the evangelical church. I will not rejoice to be right about this.

I have recently noticed the uncanny physical (though by no means ideological) resemblance between these two Baptist preachers, John Piper, of Desiring God Ministries, and the late Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian medicare and the first leader of Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party. Coincidence? Judge for yourself.

Rev. John Piper

Rev. Tommy Douglas

Enemy soldiers should be held in prisoner of war camps. If they are spies or have done something that merits the death penalty, they should be tried in military courts. They should not be tortured and they should be treated with human dignity.

These seem like safe assumptions, but the Obama administration has decided that the New York terrorist attacks were not acts of war, but crimes. As a result, the terrorists will be tried in civilian courts. (more…)

From Frank Lockwood, religion editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

“He’s going to exorcise a demon now,” I whispered to the managing editor of the New York Times, adding, “This is somewhat unusual.”

Read more . . .

Over on the First Thoughts blog we’ve recently begun running weekly sermon reviews. We welcome contributions to this feature from writers everywhere, and are interested in reports from all demoninations and faiths.The pieces should run no more than 800-1000 words, include photos of the place of worship, and information to enable fact-checking (e.g., church website links, phone numbers). The objective is for these pieces to capture the moment we’re living in their sermons. We want reviews that capture not only the words, but also the setting and emotions of the experience.

Please email your submissions—as soon after the sermon as possible—to kelly@firstthings.com

When talking to a fellow who bemoaned how bad his employer was (not Biola), I asked if he was going to let the boss know or going to resign . . . but it appeared he had no such intention. It wasn’t that he was looking and had to keep his job in the short term. He was content to keep doing something and supporting a thing he loathed merely for money.

This man risks losing his soul and gaining a cubicle. (more…)

I’ve uploaded a little file which mined out some data from a site called ARDA simply to stake out some signposts for the major bru-ha-ha about the reported death of Evangelicalism.

It’s a ZIP file, but inside the file is an old-school .xls file with two tabs — one listing the net change in congragations and adherents between 1980 and 2000, and the other traking the net changes between 1990 and 2000. As you look at the files, remember that it is net change and not “total number”. The next study is due in 2010, and the analysis of that data, I am sure will be of great interest.
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Darrell Bock reviews Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted. I especially liked this paragraph, which captures very well my own concern about what I’ve read by Ehrman:

I think what is most bothersome in this book is the way it sets up discussions. It pursues a topic for several pages, often noting in one or two quick and embedded sentences that the point is not as devastating as the impression given by the rhetoric of the whole section. Such qualification involves a quick almost aside that qualifies things so the author has cover. But it becomes a faint cry in light of the more skeptical thrust of the whole work. The result is to launch a discussion in a direction that implies more than the evidence really gives, leaving a greater impression about what is said than the author claims in the qualification. More than that, by excluding other key factors, the discussion leaves the impression of making a point clear that actually is not as cut and dried as the presentation suggests.

It does strike me as a rhetorically-successful but intellectually-illegitimate methodology. It even seems a little intellectually dishonest, because it shows that he does know that his point doesn’t show as much as he’s using it to show, but he goes ahead and emphasizes it well beyond its significance in order to maximize the effect among those whose trust in the text might therefore be undermined.

My recent reading of the Progressive Revival blog provides a good opportunity to explain my own identity as a progressive Christian. Of course I must immediately point out that what the larger society deems progress may not necessarily be genuinely progressive, which raises the central issue of what makes for progress. How do we know it when we see it? How do we know what to work for?

The followers of the various ideologies have their own definitions. Marx famously believed in the inevitability of a global movement towards the classless society. History moves in a single direction through the mechanism of the class struggle.

Nationalism believes that the liberation of the nation from foreign control (however the words nation and foreign be defined) is a progressive development.

Liberalism has moved through more than one stage beginning with Thomas Hobbes and culminating in its most recent manifestation in North America. The eschatological vision of liberalism may be less obvious than in Marxism, but it can be said to consist of a society in which everyone acquires equally a maximum degree of personal autonomy, by means of either a small government getting out of the way or, more recently, an expansive government actively intervening to increase the range of personal options available to all.

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At Front Porch Republic (one of my favorite blogs), Orthodox convert Jason Peters took some swipes at “a place called ‘Bible Harvest Chapel,’ which is a kind of movie theater retrofitted to a former big box electronics store.” Peters wasn’t too impressed by the “First Church of the Sprawl” but a commenter pointed out what he might be missing:

So I would suggest that you don’t let these “grocery store” Christians bother you. Some of them are from broken homes and broken hearts. Their children are oft raised by their mothers. Most of them are without benefit of a college education, many are hillwilliams, poor blacks, drug addicts and alcoholics and wouldn’t fit in the company of more affluent folks, at least some affluent folks. I know this because these people are friends of mine. They are people that every once in a while, I’ve been privileged to help and people who have taught me more about being a Christian than any priest, preacher, or theologian. They may roll in the aisle, they may (God forbid) raise their hand in praise of the Almighty, they may shout “Praise Jesus”, but please remember that every one of them truly believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Word, and the Savior of mankind. Not too bad for “grocery store” Christians!

(Via: Rod Dreher)

There’s a curious and discouraging article in the November 20th Entertainment Weekly magazine about producers’ efforts to “sell” the upcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Christians (by way of their pastors).

[T]he adaptation of . . . McCarthy’s acclaimed novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling through a bleak wasteland is getting the full pitch to Christian audiences . . . Plans include 15 advance screenings for church leaders nationwide, a website featuring free sermon and discussion guides, and a special trailer with extra scenes underscoring the film’s moral message.

This is a relatively new phenomenon, but it has been successful in the past. The most notable film-to-pulpit crossover is undoubtedly The Passion of the Christ, which held advance screenings for ministers and church groups and later supplied resources for pastor use in sermons and group use in Bible studies. The teams that produced Facing the Giants and Fireproof followed suit, although their crossover into pulpit “advertising” was probably considered more acceptable as the movies were made within the Christian subculture pretty much for the Christian subculture. (Hollywood had lesser success but still some crossovers made with the Narnia adaptations and Evan Almighty.)

But The Road has no explicit Christian content. It may very well be the best film of all the films ever marketed for pulpit use, but elements reminiscent of Christian themes are the feeblest excuse for church marketing yet. The money quote from the EW article:

“There are pastors who might not be able to recommend [the film], but would preach about it. I’ve got a pastor right here in Dallas who’s doing a sermon series on the end of the world, and I’m hoping that he’ll incorporate some of the metaphors from this film into his sermons.”

Ah, Dallas: the epicenter of evangelical awesomeness. ;-)

Cutting to the chase: The Road will probably be a good movie. Pastors can reference films (and other artifacts of popular arts and culture) till the cows come home. But this is not about helping pastors preach. This is about getting pastors to help impact a film’s box office. None of these guys have impacting evangelical communities as their motivation: they want evangelical communities to impact their bottom lines. We are a market share, a consumer base.

Resist.

Any pastor who affords preaching time to help pitch a film because of some preferential treatment and free swag is a sell-out. If that’s you, I hope you have a congregation that cares and calls you out.

Let me say that I think Patrol is an interesting site full of well written articles. I don’t ever want to dismiss people’s experiences or ideas because of their (relatively) young age just as I despise people who think they can explain me, because I am over forty.

I also agree with Matt Anderson that just because a complaint is old does not mean it is old to the person making it. If you have endure someone who thinks God is a Republican, saying it may matter. I just wish we could all be historically grounded enough to know our worries are not new. As I pointed out, if I were in a relationship with someone having the “same old” problems, I would have a moral obligation to hear them in a new way, but for the rest of humanity time is limited and so I try to search for new takes, new criticisms, and bold prophetic writing. (more…)

A real Christian life is one infused with the qualities of Christ himself. But we have replaced submission, service, and sacrifice with salesmanship, self-help, and success.
Here is an excerpt from a challenging article written by someone who may surprise you. Read it first, and I will tell you who wrote it after.
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In a comment to Matt’s post, Michael Spencer says:

I don’t believe I, or any other post-evangelical, is saving or perpetuating evangelicalism. I’d gladly go out any number of doors were those doors available to me.

Post evangelicals like Patrol and myself are endeavoring to help evangelicalism hear the voice of the de-churched, discouraged, unplugged and estranged in its midst. Hearing those voices is important. As irritating as it can be, there is something that needs to be heard. Post-evangelicals are not feigning some kind of authority to remake evangelicalism or to blame someone for the demise of evangelicalism. The other shoe has dropped. The collapse is happening. There are churches that will thrive and there are churches that will never know anything happened. But there will be a quiet departure of millions of former evangelicals to something- or nothing- else.

That’s all there is to say, and I don’t pretend it is anything earth-shaking. For me and many like me, we’re living in another reality than what is typically discussed among more hopeful evangelicals.

The idea that collapse of evangelicalism is currently underway is more wishful thinking on the part of “post-evangelicals” than anything that can be backed up with evidence. For some reason it has become a staple of online commentary to translate one’s feeling of “I don’t like X” to “X is dying.” It’s usually found in political discussions (e.g., conservatism is dying; the Democratic Party is dying) but has been making its way into the religious sphere.

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