There is a very, very fine line between effective children's ministry... and pure, unmitigated terror.

Photo here.

If you have never checked out Brant Hansen's blog, please do - funniest religious blog I know.

What does it feel like to be alive?

Living, you stand under a waterfall. . . . The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulder and arms. . . . . It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

From Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. A great read. The best review is from the Chicago Tribune: ".it more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood."

Yes.

Photo courtesy Flickruser big-ashb.

{God} tends to thicken things rather than render them self-evident

Religious fundamentalism is the neurotic anxiety that without a Meaning of meanings, there is no meaning at all. It is simply the flip side of nihilism. Underlying this assumption is the house-of-cards view of life: flick away the one at the bottom, and the whole fragile structure comes fluttering down. Someone who thinks this way is simply the prisoner of a metaphor. In fact, a great many believers reject this view. No sensitive, intelligent religious believer imagines that non-believers are bound to be mired in total absurdity. Nor are they bound to believe that because there is a God, the meaning of life becomes luminously clear. On the contrary, some of those with religious faith believe that God's presence makes the world more mysteriously unfathomable, not less. If he does have a purpose, it is remarkably impenetrable. God is not in that sense the answer to a problem. He tends to thicken things rather than render them self-evident.

From Terry Eagleton's The Meaning of Life

Love this paragraph. I'm often amazed at how people think that religious belief makes everything easier, and that this is its appeal. For me, religion generally makes stuff harder. It would seem rather easy to account for things like tsunamis and the Holocaust and the suffering of children and animals if you suppose there is no God. The really tough thing is accounting for stuff like that if you posit a loving God.

Plus, that whole house-of-cards idea, although most people who accept that type of metaphor would argue that the underlying support is not a flimsy card but rather an invincible Rock. But all too often their supposed basic principle without which everything else falls is something like the One True Church Which Has Never Been Wrong or the The Inerrant Scriptures Which Contain No Contradictions, Errors, or Flubs. These ideas are just so obviously easy to refute that you have to almost admire as well as pity the incredible intellectual contortions they undergo in order to stick with those views.

Next up in the Church Visiting series

Giving the children’s bread to dogs
In Lancaster, PA, with no car available, I stay home and watch a religious television program, Stand Up for Jesus with Pastor Buddy Flosser. I send away for a prayer cloth.

Reach out to the least, the last, and the lost
I attend the First United Methodist Church of Collingswood, NJ, where I hear a sermon on the need to minister to others.

Find us, and ye shall seek
I attend the Unitarian Universalist Church of Cherry Hill, NJ, where I participate in a water ceremony and learn how mean and narrow-minded denominational Christians are.

We use and defend the King James Bible
I attend the Bible for Today Baptist Church in Collingswood, NJ, where the service is held in the pastor’s living room and simultaneously webcast on the Internet. I learn that the King James Bible is the only version that contains the accurate Word of God, hear some great gospel piano, have my photograph taken by the pastor’s wife, and am given a book of poetry written by the pastor’s wife’s mother.

Photo courtesy Flickruser seir+seir+seir

If I could hie to Kolob

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
August 19, 2007

I didn’t have time to do my usual cursory research into another denomination this week, so I decided to give the Mormons another go, having failed to attend a complete service the first time I tried, about a month ago. I’m sorry to report that again I failed.

Once more I tried to find information about the meeting times on the Internet. Once more, no luck. It seemed to me that last time I had arrived about a half hour into the service, so I thought 9:30 might be a good time to show up.

13 things that do not make sense

I' m not really a science geek, but I just love articles like this one, from New Scientist.

The first thing in the article that does not make sense, the placebo effect, is always interesting. The homeopathy thing is really interesting, too - if true. 

Now if science could just explain why people continue to try arguing with people who aren't interested in listening to anyone else . . . . . .


Photo courtesy Flickruser kaibara87

I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds, part three

I returned to Fox’s Journal after my visit to the Haddonfield Friends Meeting. What an age his was! Everywhere he travels in England, people are holding meetings (often in fields as well as indoors), disputing about religious ideas, and getting all riled up about religion in general. In fact, it reminds me of the kind of thing we read about today in Islamic countries, wherein crowds of people seem ready to drop everything and participate in religious demonstrations on a moment’s notice.

Fox is struck blind every so often, a condition he passes over with amazing nonchalance – he seems to regard it as one of the occupational hazards of a wandering prophet. He is given messages to reform the three great professions: medicine, the law, and divinity. He sees the light of God in all people. He is called to bring the adherents of all sects and religions to the truth.

I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds, part two

The Haddonfield Friends meetinghouse is a brick building in a quiet, shady residential neighborhood, with a very pleasant cemetery across the road, featuring lovely old trees and small, inconspicuous gravestones. The church operates a private school for grades pre-kindergarten through eighth grade; private schools run by Quakers are very popular in this area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They have terrific reputations for academic excellence, and are usually quite expensive.

There are about twenty or so cars in the parking lot when I arrive. I notice that quite a few have bumper stickers (which is noticeable only because bumper stickers seem to have gone out of fashion in the last decade or so). These are Obama 08 stickers, and there are a couple that read “Thou shalt not kill” and “End the war.” Those certainly seem like good Quaker sentiments.

I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds, part one

Haddonfield Friends Meeting
Haddonfield, NJ
August 12, 2007

What did I know about Quakers before attending this meeting? Unless eating lots of Quaker Oats oatmeal counts for something, not a lot. Most of what I did know was rather haphazard. I knew that George Fox was the group’s founder. I knew that the term Quaker had been applied to them derisively, because early members of the group shivered or “quaked” during meetings. I knew that Quakers had been among the important leaders in the Abolitionist movement in the US and England, that they are pacifists, and that their worship meetings consist mostly of stretches of silence, broken by people standing up and speaking as they are led of God – no sermon and no preacher. I knew that they believed in plain dress and, historically, addressed each other using the antiquated terms thee and thou.

Nostalgia

In the dumbest movie they can play it on us with a sunrise and a passage of adagio Vivaldi --
all the reason more to love it and to loathe it, this always barely choked-back luscious flood,
this turbulence in breast and breath that indicates a purity residing somewhere in us,
redeeming with its easy access the thousand lapses of memory shed in the most innocuous day
and canceling our rue for all the greater consciousness we didn’t have for past, lost presents.
Its illusion is that we’ll retain this new, however hammy past more thoroughly than all before,
its reality that though we know by heart its shabby ruses, know we’ll misplace it yet again,
it’s what we have, a stage light flickering to flood, chintz and gaud, and we don’t care.

C.K. Williams

Who doesn’t love a big dose of nostalgia, even though some other part of us simultaneously tries to resist its allure? Williams’ description – “this always barely choked-back luscious flood” – is so apt. Try as we will to seize the day, be here now, be mindful of the present, we know we’re constantly losing our past – the “lost presents” – every hour and every minute. Life – it’s all we have, and it’s always slipping away from us. So, even though “we know we’ll misplace it yet again . . . we don’t care.” This little poem is so good.

God always gets left off the hook. Always, always, always.

The Slapdash Godliness of a Good Girl is an interesting blog, written by a young woman who says "I may be in the process of de-converting from my once-strong Christian faith."

I'm not sure where she is now in her journey, as she hasn't posted for some time, but I will never forget the post in which she compares God to an abusive husband/boyfriend, "The blindness of the abused."

Though I speak in the tongues of men and angels

After posting about the worship service at Kingsway Church in Cherry Hill, I thought a bit more about my personal history with Assemblies of God churches and with pentecostalism in general. In the early 1970s, when our little group of enthusiastic and ill-informed Jesus people were trying to learn more about Christianity, we were welcomed warmly and kindly by several small pentecostal churches in the area - southern Illinois. To understand how odd this was, you'd have to realize that southern Illinois is very southern. It has much more in common with nearby Kentucky and with the Missouri Ozarks than with Chicago. The members of these local, mostly independent churches were sometimes mocked even by other southern Illinoisans as hillbillies and rednecks. Most members of these churches had only a high school education (or less), and many were coal miners.

And into their churches we wandered - a group of long-haired hippies from the local university, who wanted to know more about Jesus.