The Changing Face of Christianity

Strapped for time available for posting material here, I humbly submit my first seminary paper. The prompt was “Drawing on your readings and class discussion, how is the face of Christianity changing? Describe the changes and what has contributed to those changes, and then analyze how this may affect the church as a whole.” Bear with me, as I have opted to not remove the parenthetical citations.; if you have questions about the context in the articles from which I drew my quotes, don’t hesitate to ask :)

The Changing Face of Christianity

Russell Duren

IN581: Theology of Mission & Evangelism

University of Dubuque Theological Seminary

March 3, 2008

Without a doubt, the face of Christianity is changing. Worldwide, Christians comprise a dynamic and diverse group of people. Because of this makeup, change -or the call for change, at the very least- should come as no surprise. So, although one could make the case that this state of constant transition might be called business as usual in Christianity, the possible changes themselves that lie on the horizon are quite remarkable. Global Christianity stands on the verge of deep shifts in demographics, in a revival of the missio Dei and the Gospel’s relation to the surrounding culture, and in the influence exerted on the church by technology. Though the effects of these changes remain largely unseen, no collection of circumstances in recent history holds as much promise for the Bride of Christ to respond in a unified and world-changing manner. Before exploring the church’s expanded possibilities for taking Christ to the world, an examination of the conditions setting the stage is in order.

dbq.edu

I’m now a student at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. I’m easing my way in, via their M.Div. Online program. I’m very happy that PC(USA) has stepped forward with utilizing technology in preparing pastors. It’s not a degree mill, trust me. This is just me taking one class per semester until the time is right to move to Dubuque and do the bulk of my coursework in residence.

The class I’m taking is “Theology of Mission and Evangelism.” Very excited. Here’s why:

This course begins a series of 3 courses on the contextual nature of the Church’s life in mission and evangelism. It seeks to rethink Mission and Evangelism, seeing them both as part of the essence of the Church and of every local congregation. Beginning with the Triune God as a missionary God this course will focus on changing paradigms of mission and its influence on how we do evangelism in today’s post-modern, post-Christendom, pluralistic society. Thus, evangelism and mission are grounded in a missiological ecclesiology. This required course is part I of the Evangelism/Mission/Contextual Theology sequence.

4 of the 6 books assigned for this class have arrived (alpha by author).

• Logic of Evangelism, by William J. Abraham
• A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey, Brian McLaren
• The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin
• Reader’s Guide To Transforming Mission, by Stan Nussbaum
• Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel beyond the West, by Lamin Sanneh
• Mission After Christendom, by David Smith
• The New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone, by Samuel Escobar

Looks like a provocative selection.

Also, this is turning out to be a really affordable semester. Tuition was $1,485, books were $100, and there were some miscellaneous fees, to total about $1,600. Two ecclesiastical entities I’m tied to kicked in $1,350; and an awesome family from my church contributed $100. So, this class only cost me about $150. What a great way to start off, especially considering I had originally budgeted to spend up to $900 out of pocket.

So… yeah… seminary. I’m excited.

Forthcoming posts:

• New pastor
• Snow
• Swamped @ work

Good night!

Following the Star

We talk a lot about the “true meaning of Christmas,” don’t we? Often, I’m pretty proud that I’ve got it all figured out… but is this really reflected in my actions? Is the spiritual season of Advent really something really has any effect on my relationship with my Creator? Questions like these have been bugging me recently, and I encourage you to ask yourself as well.

I’m still no all-star when it comes to thinking and praying about what it really means that Jesus Christ came down to us. But I’ve found a resource that I’d like to share that has really helped:

Following the Star is an online devotional guide, just for Advent. It’s updated daily, with new contemplative music and new scriptures and devotional questions to help you ponder what Advent is all about… It works based on a series of pages that lead you to pause and reflect, listen to scripture, think about your world with the help of a devotional passage, pray for God’s guidance in applying his Truth, and then go into the world just waiting for you to bring God’s love.

Try it. See if it doesn’t have an impact.

(and it continues on past Advent too, @ d365.org)

Thanksgiving Break

Thanksgiving vacation in Monterey has been great. Although this town is like Durango in the transient nature of its young inhabitants, I’ve been pleasantly surprised in how many people from the old days I’ve run into while here. A couple brief conversations with my closest friend Chris, and a longer hangout on the schedule for tomorrow. Great times with my brother-in-law Pat, wondering what it would be like to be Indiana Jones and halfheartedly plotting to drop off “the grid”. A pipe-smoking session with Uncle George, learning about his seminary days and hearing his stories of traveling to Brazil and moving around among parishes.

Went to church a couple times today. First, we caught a service at Shoreline, where I used to work. It’s definitely changed. They’ve built an impressive facility in an old warehouse. I’m really excited for Pastor Howie getting to see his dreams come to fruition. He started from scratch over a decade ago, and now the church has a thriving body of believers. What I admire most about Shoreline is its dedicated core of volunteers that keep at least some portion of virtually every component of the church running smoothly. They’ve got to be sold on the vision Howie’s casted. Major kudos there. Like I said before though, a lot has changed since I was there, as things do. The new facility, while impressive, didn’t quite resonate with me. The sanctuary is very spacious, and has who-knows-how-many thousands of dollars of technology, but it didn’t feel like a church. There were no Christian symbols anywhere. Really, this isn’t a rant… I’m a firm believer that you can’t make everyone happy. I just need my worship space to have some worship aids that push me towards an encounter with God. Anyway, the service was so-so for me, but I’m sure it’s great for the people it reaches. No faith community has a monopoly on how to reach and serve everyone.

This evening Anina and I went to a new house-church, Stone Harbor. It was planted by a respected colleague named Johnny Potter, and another humble Christ-follower named Tom Green. Johnny has this amazing quiet wisdom that makes him such a natural shepherd. Without any discussion, Anina and I both knew he was the one we each wanted to perform our weding (and he did). Johnny pastored at Shoreline almost from day one, but has felt called to start Stone Harbor very recently. The gathering is about 60 people that meet in the Potter home. Really cozy in there, hahaha. It was so organic and no-frills. Quite a contrast to how I felt while I experienced a Shoreline service. Fairly typical layout, with worship songs up front, followed by a brief and easy-to-take-notes-on message, then closed of with a time of singing and praying. After things ended, I was so amazed to see clusters of people spontaneously forming and praying for each other. The norm was for people to socialize for a few minutes, almost inevitably followed by a short but sincere couple minutes of praying for each other. But it was so low-pressure. Like, you know how sometimes people can be praying, and you feel odd if you’re not doing it too? Yeah, not like that at all. It was just what these believers wanted to do with each other. No pressure. Wow.

Originally this post was titled, “The Way It Should Be”. But I realized that I couldn’t use that if I really believe that nobody has the market cornered on ecclesiology. But I’ll tell you what… if I lived in Monterey, I would make my home at Stone Harbor. It was so refreshing.

A couple more days of vacation, and then back to work. More details to come…

The Wait Is Over

Wow, I’m so relieved. Our church just called a new pastor yesterday, which means I have a new boss. The Rev. Dr. William Mangrum. This guy and I get along so well together, too. It’s crazy.

Side note: In thinking about how to describe him, I almost just spouted off a bunch of labels. Emergent Village, Rob Bell fan, etc. Bad, Russell, bad!

Bill and I both love reading. He’s got a head-start on me though. One of the biggest logistical problems for bringing him here is what to do with his 15,000 books. I’m really excited to have a superior that is so well-read, and that can introduce me to new authors and titles that will challenge me in all aspects of life… personal theology, ministry practices, etc.

Student Ministry Blog

After too much red tape (and too many HTML headaches) to get a youth ministry page posted within my church’s website, I decided to just let WordPress help out. Got the “Why didn’t I think of that before?!?” idea from a colleague of mine who also uses a blog format for his youth ministry page.

It’s here: http://1stpresdurangoyouth.wordpress.com

Head over. Check it out.

• What could be done to make it more functional, specifically for use as a youth ministry communication tool?
• If you’re in youth ministry and use a blog for getting info out to your students, what lessons have you learned?
• Thinking about adding a Flickr widget for ministry photos… potential privacy issues? How did you address them?
• Have you been able to make it foster anything near the community that the social networking sites promote?
• What cues can a blog take from the standard youth ministry webpage?

Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptaptap

Windows Media Player allows me to bump up the playback speed of my music. LP players had this, so I don’t know why I never thought to look for it in my media software.

So… that being said…

A Fire Inside + Ctrl-Shift-G (Fast Playback Speed) = Great sermon-writing music.

(The taptaptaptaptap is my feet, btw…)

Checked out

Tuesday, August 7:

My brain has officially checked out for the next 6 days. :)

I’m done! I survived today, a day that spanned the gap between being out of town with work for 2 weeks and heading out to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara for a much-needed vacation.

As far as traveling for work the past couple weeks…

I’ve been to Indiana, for an event called the Presbyterian Youth Triennium, which entailed rushing 15 sr. high students through 2 different half-hour layovers in major airports, only to show up at Purdue University to be melded into and herded around in a crowd of 5000 people. (Maybe I’m using a bit of overstatement… overall, it was a great experience.) Stressful from a leader standpoint, but positive nonetheless.

Upon returning from Purdue, I had a couple days in the office to basically sit in meetings and hear about what I had missed. Not that I could do anything about it; there’s just a set of stuff that has to be covered. The couple days in the office were about catching up. Then I took a couple days off, for a combination of resting from what I just finished as well as preparing for what was coming up. So for Thursday and Friday, I was focusing on what lay ahead. For the upcoming week, I was headed off to speak at a great camp that the kids from our church go to (Sonlight Christian Camp). Thursday consisted of getting the thematic skeleton laid out for how to address the week’s big idea. Honestly, I had had this on the back burner since January, but it really never got much thought because all the day-to-day pragmatics took priority. On Friday, I got the chance to attach some specific ideas and references and whatnot to the skeleton.

An aside techie note: For this speaking engagement, I tried out a new idea-mapping program, Compendium Open Learn. I’d recommend it; Open Learn is a great hybrid between left-brain outlining and right-brain visualization.

Wednesday, August 8:

So when I showed up at camp, I had a basic idea of what each day should consist of. Each day entailed a couple hours of making speaking notes, putting together a powerpoint, double-checking scripture references, etc. The week turned out to be great. I left with the impression that the biggest ideas I wanted to drive home really stuck with them. Thanks be to God! The content of the talks merits its own post later.

Mentioning powerpoint made me think of a post I read recently over at Out of Ur. It’s well-written, and makes me double-check myself to make sure I’m not using technology in a manipulative fashion (which is especially easy to do with media-inundated sr. high students).

This morning we left the house at 5:00am, to fly out to Los Angeles. Got out of Durango pretty smoothly. Saw some friends from church on our flight out. I love small towns. 14k people and you’re almost guaranteed to see someone you know at 6:30 in the morning at the airport. Anyway, the flights were pretty uneventful, which I guess is the ideal. Sitting on the runway at Salt Lake City, there was some super weird new-agey music that it seemed only Anina and I could hear. I was listening everywhere to try to track down its source. But I just looked goofy standing up, or putting my ear against the window, or feeling the vents for vibrations, because no one else could hear it. Turns out that somehow my armrest headphone jack was specially equipped to become a speaker instead of a jack. My armrest was emitting the offending tunes! It was definitely funny to witness, but basically, you just had to be there.

On the bus leaving LAX, I couldn’t help but overhear a fellow passenger calling home to let someone know he landed safely: “Oh honey you wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is here… 70 degrees, clear blue skies…” If by blue you mean gray, yeah sure, I’ll buy that. I’m not bashing LA’s smog or that guy’s definition of blue, but it’s just funny… it’s muddy gray here overhead compared to places like Durango.

I love being on vacation!

Interesting Aspect of the Facebook / MySpace Dichotomy

Came across an article about trends of class differences common in the main user groups of Facebook and MySpace. Seems like the easiest route would be to somehow convince each site to compile and release a report on their demographic breakdowns.

But no, that would be too easy… So I respect the author for making a great effort to do the bulk of her research through interviews, both formal and informal. I’m no expert on research methodology, but the author’s process seems pretty sound:

I have done formal interviews in California, Washington, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. When I do this, I do not capture parents’ income but I do get parents’ education level and job. In each of these communities, I have spent time roaming the streets and talking informally with people of all ages. I have analyzed profiles from all 50 states (and DC and Puerto Rico). I use the high school data from these profiles and juxtapose them with federal information on high school voucher numbers to get a sense of the SES of the school. I have spent time in cities, suburbs, small towns, and some rural regions.

She also acknowledges possible weaknesses of not spending much time in rural areas or the Deep South.

The essay opens with a history of the rise of the two sites. Also discussed are the roots of bad blood between each site’s loyalists.

Next up is an exploration of socioeconomic trends among Facebookers contrasted with MySpacers. “Look and feel” factor in immensely. Facebook users tend to be

very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.”

Loyal MySpace users, on the other hand, interpret what the Facebookers criticize to in fact be

“glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued.

So those are just a few things to get your gears turning. The author also points out interesting divisions in the sites’ user bases that surface within the military…

All things considered, it doesn’t seem like the author tries to stretch the facts to make a point… I think she’s on to a pretty intuitive but not-often-expressed difference. I’ve read the article once at this point, and just had some basic reactions. I plan on going back over it a few times. You should too:

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

[HT]: CPYU, “Articles & Research” section

Tech Tweaking

Spent a while chatting with Matt about all the various apps we use on our computers. Calendars, RSS aggregators, blog publishers, etc.

A little update on the new apps/innovations I’m pretty sure I’ll be sticking with:

No longer is my Firefox homepage my MySpace login screen. (I’m really feeling like I’m over MySpace, anyway. Seems like I just use it for work purposes. That’s another post…) Now, iGoogle greets me when I open my browser. Basically, it allows people to consolidate various Google features they use, ranging from web search to email, into a personalized home page. Just an ideal portal site for those of us that use 2 or more Google services…

I’ve been in the process of switching over all my digital scheduling to Google Calendar (I also use the basic large paper desk calendar, but I do need something that I can check from anywhere). I like GCalendar a lot so far. Google seems to come up with intuitive interfaces pretty well. A clean, straightforward design, with just the right mix of common display options (day, week, month, 5-day, agenda).

Continuing on the Google thing, I just started moving all my RSS feeds over to Google Reader tonight. I had been using Sage, and it’s not bad at all. I’m a minimalist in a lot of things, and my reading list is definitely one of those. I have enough actual content to read; I don’t need to spend too much time reading the list describing the content. Two main benefits arising from letting Google handle my feeds… tags (which can be both simple and helpful, used correctly)… and seamless login- because I’m usually already logged into Google from checking my mail as soon as I open Firefox (although login was a non-issue with Sage because it wasn’t account-based anyway). I do think I’ll enjoy the easy level share-ability, with one-click emailing whenever I come across cool posts.

I’m typing this post within Windows Live Writer. I’m usually at least in a weak wifi zone (or on my work desktop), so any blogging I do can be instantly posted. I think I’ve maybe done a total of 2 posts offline in MS Word, and then pasted them into WordPress. But my problem is this: I’m an impulse reader. When I’m working on a post using WordPress’ interface in Firefox, it’s highly likely that a tangent idea will cross my mind, and off I go. The post is relegated to Draftville, to be postponed and procrastinated on. Well my hope for using Live Writer is to cut out those distractions (or at least maybe switching over to Firefox from this app instead of just typing the tangent into my Google search bar will be enough of an interruption that I’ll just get in the habit of finishing posts as quick as intellectually responsible). EDIT: Now that I’ve posted this post, I like that it looks exactly like what was displayed in Live Writer before posting. Formatting and other stuff didn’t always transfer over nicely from MS Word. But I was easily able to set up Live Writer to only let me tweak things that are already in the WordPress interface. w00t!