Dobson notices the Christian Alliance for Progress

Apparently word of the Christian Alliance for Progress finally filtered its way to Dobson's Family News in Focus. In their June 23rd news item "The Christian Left is Getting Organized" they state:

The Christian Alliance for Progress is aligned with the political left and its leaders make it clear the goal is to counteract the strong conservative and pro-life views of most Christian organizations.

"Most Christian organizations"? Perhaps what they truly mean are organizations composed of people only they consider Christians?

And which of the CAFP's six issues do they focus on? Economic justice? Nope. Responsible environmental stewardship? Nyet. Seeking peace? Nada. Equality for gays and lesbians? Nunka. Obviously they'd quote a representative who states:

"I'm not willing to extend rights to a fetus that would trump the rights of a desperate woman," he said. "I don't think our organization is either."

Kudos to Family News in Focus for presenting a typically unbalanced view of the CAFP's agenda in this "news" article. We've come to expect no less from them.

God's blessings?

I experienced a strange confluence of events between yesterday and today. Last night my wife and I watched HBO's The Girl In The Cafe which is ostensibly a very moving romance but develops into a consciousness-raising piece about world hunger on the eve of the G8 Summit. It started me thinking last night about why I hardly ever hear about hunger in my church. I do hear a lot about the Big Two (homosexuality and abortion) but I could count on one or two fingers the number of times I've heard about hunger as an important issue for Christians. I began asking myself why the Big Two are more important to conservative Christians. I'm still not sure although I do believe I have had a little more light shed after this morning.

Sunday School today developed into a discussion of "God's Blessings". And if you hang around conservative Christians for very long you'll recognize that as code for "material blessings". People were wondering in class why the wicked prosper (materially of course) while some of the most faithful Christians struggle to pay bills. The answer was that while we may not know why the poor are poor we can be sure that it is all part of God's great plan which we can't clearly see right now. I had to stop and catch my breath for a moment, especially in light of the movie I watched last night.

Are we really comfortable saying that God chooses to "bless" some with riches and others with aching, crippling poverty? That this is somehow part of God's plan?

And then it dawned on me. If God truly blesses some with material wealth and leaves others in poverty as part of God's master plan then why would there be any urgency to help the poor and the hungry? It only makes sense. If people are poor because God has chosen not to bless them then who are we to get involved? There's a perfectly good, spiritual reason why they are starving when they go to sleep at night. God has his reasons for this right? After all Matthew 26:11 clearly states "The poor you will always have with you..."

Allow me to say quite clearly that this line of thinking is not only crap but it is so far from Christian it is frightening.

"When did you become a Christian?"

When did you become a Christian?"

That's a question I've been asked several times in my life. For a long time my answer was very simple: November 13, 1983. I was 15 years-old and went to a Petra concert with some friends. At the end of the concert one of the band members gave the invitation. He talked about God's love for us, our sin, how Jesus died on the Cross for our sins and how we had to receive Him. He led us in the Sinner's Prayer ("all heads bowed and all eyes closed") and asked us to raise our hands if we had accepted Christ. I raised my hand. And for probably two decades that was when I became a Christian. As far as I was concerned the deal was sealed that day. And it was a momentous day - my life definitely took a different turn after the concert. So there's the answer. Case closed.

When did you become a Christian?

I had a friend in high school who believed that you could not become a Christian unless you were baptized by immersion. To him it did not matter that I had prayed the Sinner's Prayer or raised my hand. It did not matter that I had repented and changed the direction my life was going. This got me thinking and reading the Bible on the matter and when I was 19 I asked the minister of the church I was going to if I could be baptized by immersion. I knew that I was saved but I also believed this was the right thing to do. So I was immersed in church in front of the whole congregation including my future wife. If I wasn't a Christian before I certainly was then.

When did you become a Christian?

But actually I had been baptized much, much earlier than that. The church my parents went to believed in baptizing infants. I was presented to the minister by my parents, the congregation was there supporting us and the minister sprinkled water on my little head and baptized me in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Looking back I'm not sure what this meant. Obviously at the time it meant nothing to me but it meant a lot to my parents and to our church. Can I really say that this was ephemeral and unimportant? Is it possible that this set in motion a chain of events that brought me here today, writing this? Did God somehow set a seal on me for the future? I don't know. Some church traditions teach that I became a Christian when I was baptized as an infant. So maybe this is the true answer?

When did you become a Christian?

When I was in 7th grade I began to go through confirmation classes. These lasted two years and basically taught us the Bible, taught us about our church and its history and prepared us to become church members. In 8th grade I was confirmed. We wore white robes, we knelt down in front of the church and our minister prayed over us while he laid his hands on our heads. I can remember shaking and feeling like I could cry at the time. I was 13 years old. At the end of the service I was accepted by the congregation as a member. I got a gold ring from my parents to commemorate the event. I even began to receive offering envelopes since I was now officially a member of the church. Is this when I became a Christian? My parents seemed to think so. Years later when I talked to my mom about being "born again" and how I had become a Christian at age 15 my mom's reply was "But you were already confirmed Paul." In her mind it was all taken care of then. Maybe it was? I have dismissed my confirmation in the past because it was just a silly church tradition. But was it really unimportant?

More to come...

Altar Call

The church I attend has an altar call. Every Sunday. Without fail. For those of you who are not familiar with an altar call let me paint the picture for you.

Our church is organized with a couple hundred chairs forming three aisles. The three aisles lead up to "The Stairs" which lead up to the stage. On the stage is where the band plays, the singers sings and where our pastor preaches. In every sermon (did I mention every sermon?) our pastor develops his message toward The Invitation. When he gets to The Invitation he walks off the stage, down The Stairs and stands at the bottom, facing the audience. He invites people to come to kneel on The Stairs, pray for salvation, forgiveness, pray for each other, etc. Once he's delivered The Invitation he moves off to the side, the band and singers come back out and sing and people inevitably move toward The Stairs, kneel on them and begin praying.

That's The Invitation - also known as an altar call. I believe the altar call is basically a conservative Christian invention. The mainline liberal church I grew up in never had this. We would probably have called the police if someone had left their pew (we had pews not padded chairs) and came forward in church.

The whole concept of the altar call makes me uneasy. There are several reasons, some Scriptural, some merely my preferences. To get the Scriptural concern out of the way: "altar calls" are not found anywhere in the Bible. They actually appears to be a relatively recent development (late 1700's to early 1800's or so) in church history.

A bigger concern is that the altar call lends itself to impersonal, "numbers-based" evangelism. I talked about this last week so I won't spend any more time on that other than to point out an interesting internet find: a CD actually entitled How To Give Aggressive Altar Calls. I cannot fathom the mindset involved in this. However I may be overreacting because it did receive such glowing praise as "In the first 2 Sundays we had over 70 people walk to the front." "I want to thank you for the CD on the aggressive altar call. I added that to my service a few weeks before Easter this year and I saw instant results." "Like in Major League Baseball, your pitching staff can have eight great innings and still lose the game, because of a terrible 'closer'." No more needs to be said on this matter.

The altar call also is associated in my mind with emotional decison-making. I want to spend some time on the role of emotions in worship at a later date but overall I'm suspicious of attempts to deliberately stir emotions during worship and even more suspicious of attempts to get people to make decisions when their emotions are strong. Case in point: even Britney Spears went forward during an altar call. "The 22-year-old singer and her mother hugged one another and cried 'as they got caught up in the highly charged ceremony,' the paper reported."

Finally, one of my major concerns about the altar call is how it apparently has to happen at the end of every sermon. This forces ministers to funnel their message toward the same ending every time. Every sermon ultimately leads up to a discussion of salvation and the need for Christ. This is not a bad thing but for every sermon? It seems not only unnecessary but also unhealthy.

Shouldn't sermons address the needs of mature, growing Christians and not just the unchurched or the recently-churched? It's been over 20 years since I "received Christ" and while I daily marvel at the wonders of God's salvation I'm also ready to hear about deeper matters in church. I know other Christians also want to grow in their faith and I assume pastors have the spiritual maturity to lead us deeper and farther in our journey. Why aren't more sermons meeting this need?

I am sometimes ashamed

Today's sermon was on Romans 1:16 which features the apostle Paul's famous statement "I am not ashamed of the gospel". In the sermon, our pastor (we'll call him PJ) used the text to make some points about witnessing to non-Christians. PJ made the statement today that when Christians are out "among nonbelievers" it should be with a "strategic purpose" - to influence them for Christ. This hit a very sour note as witnessing has always been an issue for me that is fraught with ambivalence and bad experiences.

I can remember being a teenager around 16 or 17 and at that time I was going to a mainline Protestant Church on Sundays and the rest of the time I was listening to conservative Christian radio, reading conservative Christian books and pamphlets and attending a conservative Christian Bible study. I became convicted that I wasn't doing enough to save the lost. To my adolescent, egocentric mind, there were hordes of unsaved people around me and I was their One True Hope. I would drive out to the mall or to a department store, usually with tracts in hand, and begin to observe people passing me by. I was trying to muster up the courage to say something, say anything that might save these poor people. I remember one lady in particular looked right at me and I knew that she was the One. The person I was sent to save that night. And yet I couldn't say anything to her. I just smiled nervously and she walked on by me. I went home humiliated, ashamed and convicted that I'd basically sent this woman to hell due to my lack of boldness. And yet, I didn't really want to get to know this woman - to meet her, spend time with her, involve myself. I just wanted to witness to her.

In college I had the interesting experience of being involved with Campus Crusade for Christ for awhile. This organization was focused on witnessing and evangelism. We'd set up tables outside the cafeteria and have people sign up for something innocuous then we'd "call on them" later in groups of two and proselytize, usually in their dorm room. The conversation was always directed, driven, manipulated so we could present to them the Four Spiritual Laws and lead them to the Sinner's Prayer. I met a lot of people that year but I didn't really "meet" anyone personally. They were the spiritual equivalent of enemies stenciled on the side of the Red Baron's airplane.

The sad thing is how far divorced this was from how Christ influenced others. Nowhere in the Bible do we read of Christ handing out tracts or manipulating others in a salesman-like fashion. He was generally interested and involved in people's lives.

The number one complaint I hear about Christians is hypocrisy. The number two complaint is Christians "hitting someone over the head with the Bible" or "shoving their faith down someone's throat." So I cringe when I hear PJ preaching today about the need to not be ashamed of the Gospel, to be bold, to have a "strategic purpose" when interacting with non-Christians. I cringe because there might have been a non-Christian in the audience today. If it were me I would be hesitant about coming back. I cringe because conservative Christianity apparently hasn't moved beyond the "score kills for Christ" mentality. My Sunday school teacher handed out laminated cards today on how to witness. The first section was entitled "The Opening" and the last section was entitled "The Close". Those could have been found on any used car salesman's training manual.

So am I ashamed of the Gospel? Together with the apostle Paul I can say that I am not. I'm mature enough as a person and as a Christian that I don't shy away from acknowledging my faith to others. I'm pleased to tell them about my faith if they want to know. But I am sometimes ashamed of Christians. I'm ashamed at times because I know there are stereotypes that come with being a Christian in our society. Bible-thumping stereotypes. Impersonal, aggressive evangelism stereotypes. And increasingly, stereotypes that we Christians are grasping for more and more political power. I can't blame some non-Christians for wanting little to do with us. We need to seriously rethink our relationship to nonbelievers.

Christ's example of loving servanthood and living sacrificially might be a good place to start.

Kind words

Recently I have been fortunate enough to have some kind words mentioned about my Humble Blog. Ken at PopeHat gave me a nice write up in his blog. Ken posts frequently at Octopus Overlords in addition to PopeHat and appears to be a generally nice guy for an attorney! Thanks for the kind words!

I was also very fortunate to have Bob at I am a Christian Too write some nice things about me. I found I am a Christian Too one night and read through most of his posts in one sitting. I'd finally found someone struggling with similar dissatisfactions and aspirations. I began my Disambiguation blog later that night. And that's a good thing because if you were one of the two people who read my original blog you would have been treated to seven posts over seven months about my desire to lose weight while gorging myself on Klondike Bars. So thanks to Bob for the kick in the right direction. And I still love me some Klondike Bars.