Book Review: Rick & Bubba’s Guide to the Almost Nearly Perfect Marriage

Rick and Bubba are the co-hosts of a nationally syndicated comedic radio program in the US called “Rick and Bubba’s Radio Show.  If you are a fan of that program then you will likely find their Guide to the Almost Nearly Perfect Marriage a stitch.  It is filled with 45 short stories full of home-spun humour.

The Guide is the fifth book of ‘wisdom’ from Rick and Bubba and has a pretty formulaic approach.  Two or three sassy sardonic stories written for amusement and then a heartwarming tale that brings some ‘biblical teaching’ to light.  When put together however it reads in an uneven way that makes it difficult to know when you should take them seriously.  It is not the kind of book that can be read at lenght since guy humour of this kind gets old quick.  It can only be read in short doses.

The biblical wisdom is light and fluffy and frankly hard to take seriously when it is surrounded by sarcastic stories where this same wisdom is not being followed very closely.  I know I am being a little harsh here but since I don’t think, “taking your wife to a sporting goods store,” is an ideal date night (p. 180) I can tell this book hasn’t been written for me.

A book full of funny stories? Sort of.  A book full of guidance for marriage? Definitely not.

An Endangered Species: The Casual Church Attender

Canadians are usually quite good at finding differences between themselves and their southern neighbours. Our congregation (the Tintern Church of Christ) has played host to a mission team from the Pleasant Valley Church of Christ in Little Rock Arkansas for three years, and most recently a group of teens from the Northeast Church of Christ in Kingsport Tennesee.  Each year the week is full of playful jibes and curious questions about Canadian customs and American behaviours. Both groups revel in finding the differences between our two countries: geographically close but culturally miles apart.

Canadian church leaders however do not make a regular practice of noticing or understanding the differences between the Canadian church experience and that of our sister congregations in the US.  While similarities exist, particularly between the Northern states and Canada, church growth and evangelism literature typically addresses the needs of the Southern churches (by nature of their larger size) and do not address the unique Canadian cultural experience.  Most writers within our brotherhood and those from other church fellowships as well seem to operate on the assumption that what’s good for the “Canadian” goose is good for the “American” gander but the needs of the churches in the two countries are very different.

Recent research shows that the Canadian Evangelical experience is different than that of the United States, especially when it comes to the attendance patterns of young adults. Reginald Bibby is a Canadian ethnographer who is the authority on the statistical study of church and faith in Canada.  In his book, The Emerging Millennials: How Canada’s Newest Generation is Responding to Change and Choice, he reveals that over the past twenty-seven years the proportion of weekly worship attenders among teens and young adults (ages 13-19) has remained relatively stable, hovering around 21%.  The big change has been in casual attenders.  In 1984 49% of responders to Bibby’s study said they attended a worship service occasionally (once or more a month but less than weekly).  That number has fallen to 32% in 2008 while those who said that they never attend worship services has risen from 28% in 1984 to 47%  in 2008.  (Bibby, The Emerging Millennials, p. 178)

What does this mean?  It means that in Canada there are fewer and fewer teens who are casual attenders at worship services.  I think most leaders within churches of Christ in Canada would agree that the number of regular attenders have remained relatively stable but casual attenders are vanishing. What about in the United States? Have they found the same trend there?

Weekly church attendance for teens in the United States has remained relatively static since 1990.   The percentage of Twelfth Grade students who attend weekly worship services has remained around 30% for the past 20 years. (Child Trends (2011). Religious Service Attendance)  Christian Smith is a researcher in the United States who has studied the intersection of faith, religion and youth culture for almost 30 years.  He reports in the Journal For the Scientific Study of Religion that from 1976 – 1996 the percentage of twelfth grade students who were regular worship attenders fell slightly from 40% to 32% while casual attenders rose from 47% to 51%.  Twelfth grade students who never attend worship services rose from 12% to 16% during the same time frame.  (Journal For The Scientific Study of Religion (1996). Mapping American Adolescent Religious Participation) Later, in his book, Soul Searching he reports in 2003 that 25% of teens ages 13-17 attend worship services once a week or more.  45% of teens attend worship casually while only 29% report that they never attend a worship service (from the National Survey of Youth and Religion 2002-3).  More teens in the United States are casual or regular attenders than in Canada and subsequently there are far fewer teens who report never attending church.

Casual church attenders in Canada are becoming extinct while they remain a large proportion of teen populations in the US. This distinction becomes significant when you consider large scale approaches to evangelism.  An evangelistic strategy that appeals to a casual church attender is going to have far less traction in Canada (and the Northern US) than it will in the south.  In Canada there are far fewer casual attenders to appeal to.  Whether your approach is more relevant sermon topics, more vibrant worship, a more active children’s ministry or any other attractional growth model, they assume that there are people out there that will be interested in a better sermon, better kids classes, better young married’s ministry.  The statistics are telling us that in Canada there are fewer and fewer people out there to be appealed to.  Almost 50% of young people in Canada never attend a worship service anywhere.  An appeal to them that draws on positive experiences of the past will get nowhere.

Whether you are convinced by the statistics or not, I think we can all agree that in order to be evangelistically successful we need to know our immediate context better than we presently do.  For those of us who live in Canada, we need to be aware of our country’s unique cultural perspective.  Wherever you live, your church family needs to be familiar with the needs in your specific community and the potential partners in ministry that are already there.  A propositional approach to evangelism trades on the assumption that basic foundational principles of Biblical authority, and Christian theology are in place.  I think we all know that in Canada that isn’t true.

An evangelistic approach that is based on service to our community has the greatest chance of reaching people for Jesus because it is the clearest demonstration of God’s nature we can give to a generation of people who have little or no Biblical literacy.  Serving the needs of others, without any expectation of getting some benefit in response is the most Christ-like think we can do.  Selfless service does not produce immediate results, but it begins a relationship that can one day produce a space where the gospel can be shared.

More attractive and more efficient presentations of Gospel truth will come and go but in a country of increasing religious polarity, our communities need servant hands and servant hearts to act out the gospel, before they will be willing or able to hear someone present it.

Why Are Young Christians Leaving The Church?

In preparation for a presentation I was doing at Great Lakes Lectures I read a great book recently.  You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith (published by Baker Books)  is written by David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, a research group in the US that studies the intersection between faith and culture.  Kinnaman says that studies by the Barna Group show that more than half of all Christian teens and twenty-somethings leave active involvement in church and don’t come back. Why are young adults leaving the church and rethinking their faith?

In studies conducted from 1997 – 2010 the Barna group have found a 43% drop off between the teen years and early adult years in terms of church engagement (p. 22). Sixty percent of teens ages 13-17 participate in worship, youth groups, small groups or Sunday school but that number falls to less than forty percent of young adults ages 18-29. “The problem is not that this generation has been less churched than children and teens before them,“ says Kinnaman.  Eighty percent of these same young adults, “remember attending Sunday school or some other religious training consistently before the age of twelve, though their participation in the teen years was less frequent.  Seventy percent of Americans recall going to Sunday school at least once a month (p. 23).  While Canadian authors like Reginald Bibby might say that the figures in Canada are different, Kinnaman’s conclusions ring true: Teenagers are some of the most religiously active people, and twenty-somethings are the least religiously active.  Why?

Skeptics might suggest that this has always been the case. “People wander away from church in their twenties and come back in their thirties when they have children.”  Kinnaman warns however that there are a number of variables that make this generation’s rejection of church something different.  Young adults (called Mosaics in sociological research) are adapting to a radical shift in the cultural, technological landscape but the truth is we all are.  None of us are untouched by the arrival of the Internet, mobile computing and the digital age.  The difference is that this generation of young adults is growing up in a radically different environment than any of us did.  Mosaics are forming values and habits in a world where the way relationships are formed and the way wisdom is evaluated is radically different.  “It’s not that [Mosaics] aren’t listening; it’s that they can’t understand what we are saying.” (p. 39)

Kinnaman summarizes that young adults who drop out of involvement with church fall into three different groups: Nomads (adults who still describe themselves as Christian but are spiritually experimenting), Prodigals (those who leave the faith and self-describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or an adherent to some other faith), and Exiles (those who describe themselves as Christian but can’t see how their faith connects with the practices of their current church family).

Nomads make up 40% (p. 63) of young adult drop-outs.  They are not angry or hostile toward faith.  In fact, a quarter of this group say they may be willing to return to church life later, but it is not particularly urgent right now. While Nomads drop in and out of church services and bounce from active to inactive status, the Prodigal is holding fast to a Read more »

Volunteering Resources

In connection with our sermon this weekend here are a couple of websites that are quite helpful / insightful.

What Kind of Volunteer are you? (Globe and Mail)
Are you a Type A, Rookie, or a Groupie Volunteer. Take this quiz and find out what kind of volunteer roles you are best suited for. This website will give you advice and volunteer opportunities.

Get Involved! (http://www.getinvolved.ca)
Follow up the quiz above with this site and find opportunities all over Canada for someone with your specific volunteer profile.

Relearning the Gospel

Martin Luther, in his Lecture on Galatians says,  “The truth of the gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine. Most necessary is that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually.” Luther was well known for theatrically overstated opinions.  I find this writing style encouraging, and tend to emulate it!  What I think is cool is that Luther is saying that the Gospel is something that we often forget and need to be constantly reminded of.  The Gospel is not just the basics of Christianity that you learn once, master, and then move on.  A believer returns again and again to the truth of the gospel.  It never gets old.

You are never done learning about the Gospel.  It is a topic that will continually tap out our capacity to comprehend.  You will never fully understand who Jesus is, what he has done and how Jesus changes our priorities for everything.  Understanding Jesus as the anointed Messiah, son of God and Lord changes everything!

In light of that fact: you don’t have marriage problems, money problems, and health problems. You have Gospel problems that have implications to your marriage, your money, your health and so on. Do you understand what I’m trying to say here?

The Gospel is that Jesus Christ is the anointed one, the Messiah who takes away the sin of the world.  Jesus, at great cost to himself took your sins and mine and paid the penalty for all of them and suffered the penalty of death.  He then overcame death and now reigns as King over everything.  In doing so he granted his perfect sinless life to us, so that God would find satisfaction in Him.  We are invited to embrace this salvation, be baptized into a newness of life and live in submission to the rule of Christ in our lives.  So here is what it looks like:

Your marriage problems are problems, I don’t want to diminish the reality of the struggles we all have but they are fundamentally an outworking of a failure to understand or apply the gospel.  Let’s say you keep having the same fight with your spouse. (hypothetically of course)  She says that you don’t consult her when planning events.  You just commit to projects or commit to other people without ever considering her wishes or if she is able to accommodate these new demands.  At that moment, when you are saying, ‘yes’ to these other people you are revealing something about what is ultimately most important to you.  At that moment, other people’s approval is what is giving you identity. Other people’s approval is giving you ultimate fulfillment.  Since other people’s approval is the most important thing to you, you will sacrifice everything in order to earn that: your health, marriage, family, money, everything!

The gospel on the other hand gives you an identity as a person loved by God who serves God not to earn standing with God but as a response to God’s service to us.  As I embrace the meaning of the gospel in my marriage I will respond to requests for my time differently, for now I do not earn God’s approval, nor do I earn my own value.  Instead I respond in light of the fact that I have been redeemed.  In light of the Gospel I will come to an identity as a ministering person that has responsible limits to what I can physically do.  I will still say yes to some things and no to others, but the gospel causes me to dethrone my approval idol and put Jesus in it’s place.

I know this to be true but I need to be reminded of it every day.

Our Inheritance

I was reading the parable of the Prodigal Son this week (Luke 15: 11 – 32) and the greatest insult of the younger son’s request  is what is implied by the request. To ask for your inheritance now is wishing your father was dead. ‘I wish you were dead so I could get on with spending your money. Your being alive is really getting in my way.’

I would never do this. I can honestly say that I would take a bullet for my father; two even! I have seen in his garage; I have seen my inheritance: Two (possibly three) engine blocks with the related parts attached and otherwise, a 1940 something hot rod with french doors (very classy), enough ladders to reach from here paradise (and one that could easily send you there), at least a couple outboard motors, outboard engine bracket, recently re-upholstered boat seats, one-piece stainless steel deck railing, and that is just what is on top! I know that I will likely be serving as his executor one day. I have seen the ‘promised land’ and I am not ready for it. I’ve got my boy’s ‘inheritance’ in my garage to clean up.

I will need to be free of the obligations of a young family, gainful employment, etc. before I can tackle that mess so, here’s to long life Dad! We are both going to need it. (By the way Dad, that Mitre saw, is it still in the corner? Never mind, I’ll talk to you later about it 

Speaking of inheritance, the Levites had an interesting arrangement. If you read in the book of Numbers (18: 8 ) you see how the Levites were to serve in the temple. They would not receive land in Israel but would instead be dependent on the tithe being brought by the other 11 tribes.

A Levite father would leave no land to his Levite son, no land, no crops, no livestock. Instead a Levite would leave his son a legacy of ministry; No security, except in the Lord. Later in Israel’s history we read of the Levites keeping herds and working the land. Both their trust in God to provide, and the nation’s faithful offerings were no longer there. In restoring the nation of Israel after the Babylonian exile, Nehemiah and established four treasurers to ensure that Levites would receive their tithe. (Neh. 13: 10 – 14)

Asaph, a Levite, writes in Psalm 73, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26). We also read in other Psalms,

“You are my portion, O LORD; I have promised to obey your words.”

Psalm 119: 57

I cry to you, O LORD; I say, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.”

Psalm 142:5

Portion here means, personal division, or part you are entitled to. It is translated, my heritage (GWT), my inheritance (BBE), my satisfaction (The Message), my choice (CEV). Rather than an inheritance that is granted once, and handed down through the generations, a Levite trusted God to provide his inheritance each year. It might appear that the Levites get the short end of the stick but Asaph sees it differently. Not only does God provide them each year with their inheritance, He is their inheritance.

May we trust Him to be our inheritance.

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

2 Pet. 1: 3

King Jesus

As a minister my greatest challenge is to convince the people that I love and serve that the biggest problem in their life (whether they will believe it or not) is a theological one. Our biggest challenge in life is not our suffering, or how to cope when things don’t go right. Our biggest problem is our sin.

Our greatest challenge is the way we naturally put God’s stuff in the highest place of honour, in place of God. We elevate the gifts above the giver. John Calvin once said, “our hearts are idol factories,” and I think he is right. Every object good or bad seems to have a sick way of weasling its way into our heart and becoming ultimate. The problem is that these things can never foot the bill; they never cease to fail. Ask the average person, “what is the meaning of your cell phone and what sense of identity or value does it mediate to you?” and they will look at you like you’re nuts. But if you ask, “how would you feel if you lost your cell phone?” and it will come pouring out: the idol of knowledge, the need for the appearance of wealth, the addiction to constant connection or amusement or distraction. It turns out that a cell phone is no longer a thing, it is a source of identity. We don’t just use a cell phone, it uses us! Our identity is produced by it.

With this in mind, I think there is a good reason that God’s salvation is described in the Bible as a kingdom. Think about it! The Bible never talks about salvation like it’s a deal you work out with God! The Gospel is not a plea bargain that Jesus brokered on the cross. On the one hand it is crowned with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor 15:1-9)  but that’s not it. The first century church considered the Gospel to be the story of Jesus coming as the anointed Messiah (the Christ). God’s salvation is not just about you and Read more »

A Once and For All Faith?

Within my tribe (Churches of Christ) and within other groups as well, there is a danger in reading  Jude verse 3 with an air of finality:

“Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.”

It is a mistake to read words like ‘faith,’ and ’salvation,’ as things that are given to us in a box never to be opened.  Receive the box, cherish the box and then pass on the box to the next generation. No reflection is necessary, no discernment is possible.  The box must be left shut. It leads to an imagination where we see ourselves as stewards of the truth and fail to see ourselves as engaging the truth and being transformed by the truth.  The truth is however that no one generation can sort out salvation in such a way as to leave the next generation with nothing to do.  The Gospel truth is not a fortune which has been collected or distilled that will be handed down to a future generation to hold together and keep from falling apart.

God’s word is true and His salvation is through Jesus Christ, eternal and unchanging. The Christian faith however is lived in a culture that is constantly changing. We are constantly contextualizing this faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.  God is eternal and unchanging but we aren’t.  No matter what you do, you will be a year older next year.  By God’s grace you will be a year wiser.  Will that change how you see things?  I hope so! Will you grow in the knowledge and the grace of our Lord?  Peter seemed to think you should. (2 Pet 3:18)

N.T. Wright wrote in the forward of Scot McKnight’s new book, The King Jesus Gospel, “Part of the genius of genuine Christianity is that each generation has to think it through afresh…”  We are constantly struggling with our comprehension of our glorious God.  Later Wright adds, “The Christian faith is kaleidoscopic, and most of us are colour-blind.  It is multidimensional, and most of us manage to hold at most two dimensions in our heads at any one time.  It is symphonic, and we can [only] whistle one of the tunes.”

Each generation faithfully hands down the challenge of authentically living the Gospel in their place and time to the next generation.  It is not lost in the hand-off from one faithful generation to the other.  It is lost when one generation, present or past, feels they have fully apprehended it.

Pictures of Egypt

Exile is an powerful metaphor for discontinuous change. Not a simple adaptive challenge like buying a bigger pair of pants because all your clothes shrank (go figure). Exile is finding yourself in a unfamiliar place where what used to work doesn’t work anymore.

Christians find themselves in exile these days. We are doing what we’ve always done better than we’ve ever done it and it seems to matter less and less. We want to go back to Egypt (the church life of the 1960’s, 70’s, … pick your decade) but we are only remembering the good, ignoring the bad. It’s just like the Israelites on the way to the promise land. They complained about the struggle of the wilderness remembering fondly the food from Egypt while forgetting the suffering and bondage. God’s provision in the now is forgotten and the comforts of yesterday are all we can think about. Sarah Groves captures this willful sentiment in this song perfectly.

Painting Pictures of Egypt

by Sarah Groves

I don’t want to leave here
I don’t want to stay
It feels like pinching to me either way
The places I long for the most
Are the places where I’ve been
They are calling after me like a long lost friend

It’s not about losing faith
It’s not about trust
It’s all about comfortable
When you move so much
The place I was wasn’t perfect
But I had found a way to live
It wasn’t milk or honey
But then neither is this

CHORUS:
I’ve been painting pictures of Egypt
Leaving out what it lacked
The future seems so hard
And I want to go back
But the places that used to fit me
Cannot hold the things I”ve learned
And those roads closed off to me
While my back was turned

The past is so tangible
I know it by heart
Familiar things are never easy to discard
I was dying for some freedom
But now I hesitate to go
Caught between the promise
And the things I know

BRIDGE:
If it comes too quick
I may not recognize it
Is that the reason behind all this time and sand?
If it comes too quick
I may not appreciate it
Is that the reason behind all this time and sand?

Perception

I saw this image on line.  For those of my readers who are from my tribe (CofC) we best fit here among the evangelicals.