Blue Raja

"The Scriptures are inviting us to take our faith seriously enough to actually care whether the things we read make sense in real life. By accepting that invitation, you will enter the world of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, Edwards, and all those who’ve learned that any belief worth having (certainly any relationship worth living and dying for) must survive the titanic struggle of life: the struggle with God Himself. "

I recommend the entire post, at Soylent Green, Blue Raja's blog.

A glass of wine to dull the pain

"Simon Doonan, the style director for Barneys, wrote an article on how to wear high heels. He suggested a glass of wine to dull the pain and practicing a few days before the event."

From the comments to a post on The Thoughtful Dresser. I love high heels, but have been unable to wear them with any comfort for several years now. It's mildly comforting to know that even fashionable women suffer in high heels.

Not that I'm wishing them pain, you know. Hey, I would love to be able to do everything I could do when I was in my twenties again, like wearing high heels. I didn't take advantage at the time, thinking that those abilities would never disappear. In fact, I didn't even think of them as abilities. I just took it all for granted. Sigh.

Well, actually, in my twenties I wore mostly sandals and sneakers. I wore heels in my thirties and forties. But the point is, I thought I would be able to wear them forever - that the only impediment to wearing whatever shoes I liked would be money, not actual physical pain. Is there anything in your life that you are just now finding out that you have been heedlessly taking for granted? Something you didn't even notice until it was gone?

Just beyond the scrim of the senses

"What atheists don't seem to realize is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?"

Excerpted from an article by Charlotte Allen.

Atheism is for smart people. That’s both its strength and its weakness. It’s a trait they share with the Libertarian Party, by the way . . .

. . . which probably has a fair number of atheists among its adherents. I’m not sure you could be mentally retarded and also be an atheist. There’s no sense of responsibility for making “the least of us” part of the secret.

Very interesting article.

"Intelligence is really important, but it's not as important as self-control."

Social science and the key to success - from a really interesting article on experiments with 4-year-olds in the 1960s. Years later the researchers noticed that kids who had been able to wait a few minutes to eat a marshmallow scored an average of 210 points higher on the SATs than kids who had been able to wait only a few seconds.

Train your kids to resist Peeps, and watch their grades improve!

Bringing out the best in you, part 5

After the visit

Since I hadn’t filled out a visitor’s card, the church had no way of contacting me after the service. I looked at the church’s website after the visit, though, and learned more about Living Faith. It seems to be at the hub of an incredible amount of activity.

I read that Lamont and Constance McLean had built up the church from an original ten people who met in their home in 1985 to its present incarnation as an institution with more than 4,000 members. The church runs a Bible college, a television program, an elementary school, and a Wellness Center. One of their ministries, Entrepreneurs for Christ, is a series of classes, workshops, and seminars for people who own or would like to own a business. John DiLulio, the man who headed George Bush’s faith-based initiative program for a few years, had praised Lamont McLean and Living Faith for their work fighting poverty.

Attending Living Faith reminded me of one of the great divides among contemporary churches: the prosperity gospel church versus the non-prosperity gospel type. Prosperity gospel proponents believe that Christians should do well in addition to doing good – that God’s plan for His children is to reward them materially, in this world, here and now. Most prosperity gospel preachers are especially strong on tithing, often preaching a direct relationship between what you give to God (by giving to their church) and how your own finances increase as a result.

The prosperity gospel has been popular in this country for a long time, which is not surprising. After all, there are verses in the Bible that state pretty clearly that believers are rewarded for following God, and not just in terms of spiritual contentment, but with things like land, children, sheep, wealth, and health. Folks who concentrate on those verses say that anyone who doesn’t believe God will reward His faithful followers just isn’t taking Him at His word.

Folks opposed to the preaching of the prosperity gospel point out that Christians follow a leader who is rather famous for having no place to rest his head, and who advised the wealthy young ruler to sell all that he had and give to the poor. Then there’s that verse about a rich man getting into heaven being as likely as a camel going through the eye of a needle.

I know which side of this issue I’m on, but I also see how attractive the other side can seem. Churches that preach prosperity also usually seem to fall into a larger group, the self-improvement churches. That is, their primary vision of church is a place you go for self-improvement. Prosperity may be one part of that, but the self-improvement vision also includes things like banishing depression and self-doubt, having a great marriage, raising children who don’t do drugs, and so on. And who doesn’t want those things? Churches that focus on self-improvement are often successful, in terms of attracting members, and they can help people. The most famous American version of the self-improvement gospel is probably Norman Vincent Peale’s.

The downside of the happiness/self-improvement gospel, of course, is that someone who attends that type of church and experiences any one of a number of ordinary human experiences and emotions, such as grief, depression, doubt, or even just boredom can be made to feel guilty or substandard – if I had more/better/the right kind of faith, I wouldn’t feel this way! What is wrong with me?

Several months later I checked the church website again and was shocked to learn that Pastor Lamont had died of complications of a bone marrow disease just three months after my visit. His widow was now senior pastor, and the church had grown to 7,700 members.

I was very sorry I had never heard Pastor McLean speak; clearly he was a remarkable and gifted man. I would like to return to the church after my year of church visiting ends; perhaps I will have the opportunity to hear Connie McLean preach.

Bringing out the best in you, part 4

Next up is today’s preacher. If he introduced himself, I didn’t catch his name, but the congregation greets him with a standing ovation. He tells a funny anecdote about himself, and then launches into his sermon, which is on the topic of humility. He asks us to read six or seven Bible verses on humility, and says a little bit about each. An exhortation to humility seems like fine advice for me at the start of my year of church visiting.

The lady who had opened the service next takes the stage and announces the offering. She is all business about this, putting people on notice that tithing is not negotiable. She advises people to write their member ID numbers on their offering envelopes. Ushers go through the aisles efficiently, passing around white plastic buckets. After everything has been collected and brought toward the front, we are instructed to stretch forth our hands toward the offering and pray that our money would be returned to us a hundredfold.

A hundredfold! Maybe I should have put in more money.


After the offering the preacher issues an altar call; we bow our heads and anyone who wants to join the church or make a new start in life is urged to come forward. Five or six people walk to the front, we pray for them, and they are escorted out to another area. The service ends rapidly after that. There is no coffee hour. In the lobby, people are buying church items, such as videotapes. There is even an express line for people who want only a copy of today’s service. (How in the world have they managed to create them so quickly?) Everyone exits the parking lot quickly, guided again by the attendants. In fact, I’m out of the parking lot and back onto the highway less than ten minutes after the service ended. This church exhibits lots of efficiencies in moving people in and out and through the service!

Bringing out the best in you, part 3

The people who have been standing in the area in front of the stage take their seats. Announcements follow. Here’s a surprise – the announcements have been prerecorded, and are playing on all the television screens! Upcoming events include a play open to women only, “Total Women Expressed,” and events for men, such as a golf league and a motorcycle club.

After the announcements, the speaker asks first-time visitors to raise their hands and be recognized. Immediately, I chicken out! I should have thought of this ahead of time and decided what to do about filling out those visitor cards, since I plan on being a first-time visitor approximately 51 more times this year. There seem to be at least ten or twelve visitors (plus me, churlishly refusing to be recognized.)

By this time the auditorium is a little less than half full; I estimate there are about 400-500 people present. (I should mention right now that my crowd estimation capabilities are not the world’s best. I think I got better at this as the year went on, but these numbers are very, very approximate.)

The next event is the dance ministry. Seven women and one adorable little girl participate, although the little girl leaves the stage after the first few minutes. The dancers wear white tunics and those big, flowy pants that modern dancers favor. The song is an upbeat message about becoming your best self.

After the dancers exit, a man takes the stage and announces that “your dad” will be preaching next Wednesday night. This arouses very enthusiastic clapping and shouting. It seems he is referring to Lamont McLean, who co-pastors the church with his wife, Constance. On the morning I visited. Pastor McLean had been out for a while, ill.

Bringing out the best in you, part 2

As I turn into the parking lot, I see that this is going to be one of the largest churches I’ve ever attended. Parking lot attendants wearing bright orange vests are directing traffic. The next thing I notice, as I walk through the entrance, is that this is a mostly African-American congregation. I haven’t attended many black church services, so already this is something a little new to me, on two counts - a big church, and a black church.


There seem to be a tremendous number of ushers and greeters; every few feet someone directs me toward the sanctuary. The very first greeter I encounter, a woman standing just outside the entrance, hands me a brochure, says hello, and hugs me. I don’t know what the greetings will be like in the other churches I visit this year, but I doubt they will be warmer than this.


Inside the sanctuary, I find more guides, who direct me to a seat. Guiding people to seats seems like a good idea, because the very large meeting space is less than half full. Left to themselves, people inevitably fill up a church sanctuary from the back, leaving uncomfortable open gaps in the front, and forcing latecomers to walk past everyone else. The ushers at Living Faith very efficiently avoid those problems.

A choir is already singing enthusiastically on the stage in the center of the auditorium, and several dozen people are standing in an open area in front of the stage, clapping and singing along. The words “Jesus is Lord” are proclaimed in gigantic letters across the back wall. A few potted plants sit on the stage, and lots of television lights beam overhead.

Most of the people in the seats are not singing, although many are standing and some are swaying or clapping along with the music. Off to the right, the band includes several electric guitars, a saxophone, two keyboards, and a drum set-up. Four cameras on tripods are manned by operators on raised platforms in the middle of the seating area, and many television screens hang throughout the auditorium, so that you can watch the choir on the stage, or glance up and watch it on a screen.

I have arrived at the advertised 11:30 starting time, for the third of three services that morning. Around 11:45 the choir stops, and a distinguished-looking older woman takes the stage and says repeatedly, with quiet authority, “God is in this place.”

Bringing out the best in you, part 1

April 27, 2007

Living Faith Christian Center is located in what was formerly the South Jersey Expo Center, in Pennsauken. Three Sunday services accommodate the more than 4,000 members of this nondenominational congregation, according to the church's website.

However, I hadn’t looked at the church website before attending. This was my first visit, and I hadn’t yet settled on a method for doing this project. All I did was check the listing in the yellow pages of the phone book, get driving directions online, and jump into the car. Living Faith Christian Center’s slogan was featured on its ad in the phone book: “A Ministry Bringing Out the Best in You.” OK, I thought, I need that. Events in my life lately seem to have been bringing out the worst in me. Living Faith, here I come!

The inmates are running the asylum

"People are now making their culture instead of consuming it. All these new devices and venues have been nothing but empowering, liberating. We’re our own and one another’s pundits and publishers, storytellers and networks. The audience has rebelled, risen up, and thrown off its chains of passivity. The inmates are running the asylum. And the resultant anarchy is creating a rich, deep layer of life, as fertile and self-organizing as soil."

This post by Annie Gottlieb, at her new group blog, Ambiance, generated lots of comments about whether or not we are losing a common culture. It made me think about how churches have in some ways lost a common culture - or maybe they never had one, really? What I mean is, sometimes the differences between churches are so great that it's as though folks are speaking a different language - most of the references, the assumptions, the catch-phrases, the practices of one group are unknown to the other group.

Good-bye pipe organ; hello praise band

The trustees of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary have approved the creation of a new school, the School of Church Ministries. The new school is the result of work by a task force that recommended combining the School of Church Music and Worship with the School of Leadership and Church Ministry to form one program that trains ministers to serve in multiple roles.

According to Paul Richardson, professor of music at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, combining classical music training with theology studies in a seminary setting is primarily a Southern Baptist innovation. Music programs at Southern Baptist seminaries were often unsurpassed in size and scope; only three schools accredited by the Association of Theological Schools offer doctorates in music, and all are Southern Baptist seminaries.

The Rev. Al Mohler, president of the seminary, noted that the restructuring comes in the wake of a “substantial drop in the number of music students at the graduate level in Southern Baptist Convention seminaries.” The music school, founded in 1944, is “not economically viable” today. He said that a reduction in the size of music faculty from 11 to four full-time positions will take place by attrition.

In the 1980s and 1990s, enrollments in schools of church music reached record numbers. At the same time, trends in worship styles began to change, shifting away from hymnals, choirs, organs, and classical music toward more casual liturgies and popular music.

I have visited lots of churches over the past few years, and have seen many praise bands, as well as traditional choir/pipe organ type of services. The odd thing is, to me the praise bands look dated - they remind me of my early Jesus people days. And very often their members have grey hair. I'm not so sure they attract young people so much as they appeal to Boomers. (Of course, every type of music likely has adherents of all ages.)

And I would never make an argument in favor of training people for jobs that don't exist.

“[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”

Review of Terry Eagleton's book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, in which he asks “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?”

Sunday sonnet

After the praying, after the hymn-singing,
After the sermon’s trenchant commentary
On the world’s ills, which make ours secondary,
After communion, after the hand-wringing,
And after peace descends upon us, bringing
Our eyes up to regard the sanctuary
And how the light swords through it, and how, scary
In their sheer numbers, motes of dust ride, clinging –
There is, as doctors say about some pain,
Discomfort knowing that despite your prayers,
Your listening and rejoicing, your small part
In this communal stab at coming clean,
There is one stubborn remnant of your cares
Intact. There is still murder in your heart.

Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets

I love this poem. I particularly admire how the word motes floats right into the middle of the meditation, suspended in its own clause, as the worshipper looks up and see a terrifying number of dust motes in the light that "swords through" the sanctuary - and by the way, you do often see a tremendous number of motes in the colored light coming through stained glass windows, don't you?

I also love how the "communal stab at coming clean" plays off the idea of those swords of illumination.

And, of course, there is that last sentence.

An old-growth forest five miles from Camden, NJ

I live five miles from Camden, one of the poorest cities in the United States. Incredibly, I also live only five minutes from one of the few remaining old-growth forests on the East Coast.

And I wanted to see if I could figure out how to upload photos to the blog. So here's a picture I took about a week ago, in Saddler's Woods, a bit of bona fide old-growth forest that happens to be in the midst of one of the most densely populated urban regions of the US. Amazing!

Visiting a different church every Sunday for a year, Part 3

I had read the reports of the Mystery Worshippers on Ship of Fools, the online magazine "of Christian unrest." In their own words, “Ship of Fools has an intrepid team of Mystery Worshippers travelling incognito in the British aisles and beyond, reporting on the comfort of the pews, the warmth of the welcome and the length of the sermon. The only clue they have been there at all is the Mystery Worshipper calling card, dropped discreetly into the collection plate.” I loved the idea of stepping back and taking a broad look at what’s on offer in this faith of ours, from down in the pews.

What would I be looking for in each church? I thought I would try to imitate the Mystery Worshippers to some extent: note the opening words of each service, describe the buildings, summarize the sermons. Which churches should I visit? I picked up the phone book and discovered that there were more than 400 churches listed just in our area. Good Lord! (I write that with due reverence.)

I picked ten churches that would probably be different than the ones I was used to, wrote their names on strips of paper, shuffled the strips of paper together, and picked one. My year of visiting churches had begun.

Visiting a different church every Sunday for a year, Part 2

In the early 1980s Neil and I and our three children had moved from southern Illinois to New Jersey, where Neil earned a divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. We joined the Presbyterian Church (USA), and for the next twenty-some years I was a member of the churches my husband pastored. I attended interfaith services now and then, and went to other churches for weddings or special events, but had rarely attended a different church on an ordinary Sunday morning. So in a way I had been a church insider for several decades, and I now suddenly found that I could be a church outsider – just another person sitting in the pews, not even a member. The idea pleased me.

I do not mean to imply for one second that being a pastor’s wife was some sort of terrible burden. On the contrary, the one nondenominational congregation and the three Presbyterian congregations my husband had served were alike in that they tried very hard NOT to impose expectations or unwritten duties on me. I wasn’t expected to play the piano, teach Sunday School, run the nursery, manage the Thanksgiving food drive, sing in the choir, organize rummage sales, host women’s Bible studies, entertain visiting missionaries, dress soberly, or decorate the fellowship hall for church dinners. The churches Neil pastored made it clear that they had hired him, not me. I was free to participate in whatever church activities I chose, just like any other member. I did end up doing some of those things, but certainly did no more than any other active church member, and far less than many others in the congregation. In this, as in all things, I was a very ordinary pastor’s wife.

The congregations were also ordinary in that they were generally kind and forgiving and tolerant, with a few (a very few) exceptions. The stereotype of the gossipy, backbiting, nosy church member didn’t seem to be a reflection of reality as I knew it.

Of course, each congregation had its own set of problems, and its own peculiar constellation of personalities that sometimes rubbed against one another in unhappy ways – what group of human beings doesn’t experience that? From what I knew of other worlds (academia and business), the imperfections of church members seemed about the same as the imperfections of any other group of people trying to get through life together. I was much more often impressed by acts of kindness and love than by acts of pettiness or meanness among the people I had known in these churches.

However, in spite of the fact that I liked these churches, I wanted to see other ones, and now had the perfect opportunity to visit other churches to my heart’s content. Perhaps I wouldn’t like being a stranger every Sunday. Going to a new church every week would be inviting discomfort into my life – but who wants to be comfortably Christian, anyway?

Visiting a different church every Sunday for a year, Part 1

After more than 30 years of being a pastor’s wife, I found myself “out of a job” at the end of 2006. My husband, who had pastored nondenominational and Protestant churches since early adulthood, converted to Roman Catholicism, becoming a layperson. At the time we were living in a lovely old manse attached to a large Presbyterian church in Philadelphia. Although the neighborhood had declined since the church had experienced its high point in membership in the late fifties, the small congregation that remained was loving, kind, and had been incredibly generous to us during the three years that we had been there. They accepted Neil’s resignation with bewilderment and with good wishes for our family, and we moved to an apartment in New Jersey. For the first time in more than thirty years, I was no longer expected to attend my husband’s church on Sunday mornings.

This presented me with a chance to do something I had often thought about over the years. I wanted to drop in on other church services, and see what other folks were doing on Sunday mornings.

I had been baptized in a Lutheran church and confirmed in a Congregational church. I had been part of Jesus people gatherings in the early seventies, had attended Pentecostal churches and para-church groups, and had been a member of a nondenominational student-based church. Most of my church life, though, had occurred in the context of one mainline Protestant denomination.

I wanted to see more!

A fugitive pleiades

I walk directly at the birds -- a general apprehension, a rally, a scutter ahead, and the birds are gone. Standing on the beach, fresh claw marks at my feet, I watch the lovely sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into a fugitive pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions; I watch the spiraling flight, the momentary tilts of the white bellies, the alternate shows of the clustered, grayish backs.

From Henry Beston's account of his year living on Cape Cod in 1928, The Outermost House

Test - first post

Just testing posting skills. And trying out fonts.

And wondering what to do for my second post!