Listening to the Faith of Millennials - The Banner

The importance of living out an authentic faith, one that is rich and full and not tarnished by false claims and advertising slogans, was a theme that the young people spoke about during the discussion held at the Grand Rapids, Mich., office of the CRC.

Sponsored by the Great Lakes Coaching Group of Christian Reformed Home Missions, the panel was held to get a sense of how young people view the church and how the church might be able to serve their needs, said Stanley Koster, coordinator of the coaching group.

Conducted by the Barna Group and the Cornerstone Knowledge Network, the study found that millennials are highly skeptical of the traditional church and yet are hungry for transcendence.

In addition, according to the study, this group looks for people who live out, instead of simply speak about, their Christianity. In addition, they don’t see church buildings, especially soaring cathedrals, as being central to their faith.

When they do think about church structures, says the study, they like ones that are simple, honor nature, and offer space for reflection and prayer.

The importance of living out an authentic faith, one that is rich and full and not tarnished by false claims and advertising slogans, was a theme that the young people spoke about during the discussion held at the Grand Rapids, Mich., office of the CRC.

The full article is available here

What I Would Change About Our Immigration Conversation - CRC Network

So much of the conversation about immigration during this election season has not been based on facts or on the biblical value of philoxenia.

There has been much talk about immigrants—and not enough listening to immigrants themselves.

How does the immigration conversation need to change?

Four immigrants will speak up from their experience this month on Do Justice. Sign up to receive the posts in your inbox here.

Let’s change the conversation about immigrants. #BlessingNotBurden

Check out the posts that have gone up so far:

Diversity is Our Greatest Strength: Sarahi

Immigrants come with Skills, Drives, and Passion: Berniz

A Fork in the Road: Civil Religion or Christianity? Nate Pyle

Civil religion offers a seductive religious counterfeit to Christianity.

I believe we are coming to a fork in the road where the Civil Religion of America will distinguish itself from biblical Christianity. In one direction it will be Country and god; in the other Jesus and Church.

With the Constitution as the sacred text, the founding fathers its saints, and common sense individualism its sanctified goal for humanity, our civil religion offers a seductive religious counterfeit to Christianity. When it comes to American politics, one needs an immense amount of discernment to distinguish between religious sounding talk and actual Christian talk.

This is why Jerry Falwell Jr, in December 2015, saying, “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them," is so concerning.

Notice, his statement talks of preemptive violence that “ends those Muslims before they walked in.” Let’s be clear, this is not the way of Jesus. In the Kingdom of God, violence does not defeat violence. The cross of Jesus unmasks the false power of violence to bring about peace by defeating evil in a show of weakness. We may be allured by the promises of power; hopeful in the force of military general. But do not be mistaken, this is not Christianity.

If it was just one instance where one person said one wacky thing, then okay. But Falwell’s statement was met with cheers!

Not only that, but we have Donald Trump, who says his favorite book is the Bible, saying we should discriminate against Muslims, keep them out of the country whose First Amendment is the freedom of religion, and give them special I.D.’s. It’d be nice to chalk those comments up to a xenophobic outlier, but it’s hard to make the case that he’s an outlier when he is the GOP's presidential candidate. Thousands upon thousands of people support him, meaning they believe Trump is speaking for them. He is saying what they believe. That should frighten the hell out of us!

But again, we don’t just have the glorification of guns, and we don’t just have a crotchety old man spouting off hatred for a major religion. We also have the active demonization of a people who are fleeing terrorism. Governors across the nation have worked to block refugees from coming to their states out of fear. As Christians called to help the widow and orphan, to welcome the stranger, and to love our neighbor as ourself, blocking refugees in the name of security isn’t a cut and dry answer. We cannot simply abandon these clear teachings of Jesus because we are scared.

Civil religion is not interested in the stranger. It is not interested in love of neighbor. Civil religion is interested only in love of country; which, as a utilitarian faith, must serve the individual. Christianity seeks to love the world, and in doing so, point to the one who so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

I do not want to stand idly by as the lines between civil religion and Christianity are blurred. I believe we are in a moment where Christians have to stand and proclaim with whole-hearted conviction that Jesus is Lord. Not Caesar.

The full article is available here

Responsive Call To Worship: Lives Of Service (based on 2 Corinthians 5:20)

based on Worship Connection
by Nancy C Townley

Reader: God, guide our lives in service to your world.
All: Make us ambassadors of hope and promise.

Reader: God, open our eyes.
All: Help us to see your world as you see it.

Reader: Open our hearts and our spirits to follow your path.
All: Help us to be people who bring good news to those bound by the chains of injustice.

Reader: Come, let us worship God, who sets things right; who makes all things new.
All: Let us praise God with joyful hearts.

Christians Need To Be Honest About Bible's Contradictions - Chuck Queen in Patheos

We must always give first priority and more authority to those texts that teach us about Jesus and what Jesus taught, believed, and did, than other scriptures.

Christian leaders and churches need to admit that we have done a poor job in teaching parishioners how to read biblical texts critically. Perhaps Christians wouldn’t believe and do such silly things if they had been taught to read the Bible critically before trying to appropriate it spiritually.

The only constructive way forward is to be honest with the text and admit that the Bible gives different portrayals and images of God that cannot simply be ignored or rationalized away. When you get right down to it, no Christian, even the most conservative Christian, believes the Bible equally. Some parts of the Bible are focused on, and other parts of the Bible are ignored or dismissed in some way.

However, we must always give preference to the Gospels – to the stories about Jesus and the stories Jesus told. We must always give first priority and more authority to those texts that teach us about Jesus and what Jesus taught, believed, and did, than other scriptures.

Of course we also have to read the Gospel texts critically as well. That means acknowledging that the Gospel writers sometimes embellished and altered the stories that were passed down to them. And undoubtedly the oral stories were altered and changed as they were passed along decades before they were ever written down, collected, and utilized as a source for the composition of our canonical Gospels.

Reading the Bible honestly and critically helps us to realize that the Bible didn’t float down from heaven on the wings of angels. The Bible came to us through a very human and fallible process. It also provides some boundaries and parameters for making spiritual application of these texts to our lives and faith communities.

The full article is available here

Stages of Faith - Dr James Fowler

"Although the growing understanding of God can be traced through the Bible, some remain fixated on certain aspects of God. This is because they never progress beyond certain stages."

- Dr James Fowler, Stages of Faith Development

Real Worship - The Rev. J. Gary Brinn in Constructive Faith

What we do in our faith community only matters if it changes what we do everywhere else. Mouths without hands is empty praise.

God is a powerful force of creativity, compassion, and love in the universe. Our praise or worship is an attempt to align ourselves with that powerful force because it is both our source and our end.

This is all well and good as an abstraction, but what does that look like in our lives? Is it only about interior faith and exterior avoidance of sin? Or is there something more?

For those of us in the Christian tradition, the construct of a God with agency and a passive creation changed radically with the arrival of Jesus, the Hebrew prophet and teacher. We Christians believe that, - in Jesus - the world had a direct experience of the divine.  God was in fact instead a force for healing and justice rather than being other-worldly or a warrior-king. 

If our purpose in praising and worshiping God is to align ourselves with the original force of creativity and compassion - of love and growth, of the ordinary miracles of today - then we should know that this is neither interior and nor static. It is not “give my heart to Jesus.” God does not only need your heart. God needs your hands.

The trajectory of our faith - our growing understanding of God and the event of God’s anointed in the person of Jesus - demands that we no longer be passive lumps waiting for divine intervention. We are the divine intervention. This is how God chose to act in the world, through the beautifully imperfect flesh and blood of humanity. That is how God acted in Jesus. It is how God acts today.

What we do in our faith community only matters if it changes what we do everywhere else. Mouths without hands is empty praise.

The full article is available here

Reflection and Renewal: Be Willing To Be Continually Made New (based on 1 Corinthians 10:13)

based on "Prayer of Confession" by Beth Merrill Neel 

God, we don’t always live out what we claim to believe. We turn away from you, from our neighbors, and from our true selves. We dim your light within us with our pride, our self-righteousness, and our need for control.

Forgive us.

Help us to remember that your love for us is endless, and that you've told us to love others in that same manner.

Help us to have open ears, eyes, and hearts to notice how you call us - again and again - back to love, back to grace, back to your light.

Give us the courage to be willing to be continually made new so that we can fully love you and all of your creation.

Trinitarian Revolution - Richard Rohr

Responsive Call To Worship: God Invites Us To Connection (based on Matthew 6:33)

Reader: Our good and gracious God invites us to come and find connection ...
All: ... may our hearts be open.

Reader: Lord, as we gather now ...
All: ... let us seek you.

Reader: As you knock ...
All: ... may we open the door to you.

Reader: As you make yourself known to us ...
All: ... may we praise you.

Reflection and Renewal: Help Us To Be Tuned In (based on Matthew 6:6)

God, even though we want to have connection with you, the idea of praying can seem weird and uncomfortable a lot of the time.

Sometimes we feel guilty because we don’t think we’re good enough at praying or we don’t it as often as we think we should.  Our understanding of prayer remains limited and we remain stuck.

And sometimes when we pray, we are shallow; treating you like some kind of a vending machine. We can be quick to ask for all kinds of thing, but not nearly as quick to utilize prayer as a time of listening and reflection; as a way to reorient ourselves towards how you’ve asked us to live; loving you and loving others.

And sometimes, we can be so focused on asking for what we want that we miss opportunities to be the answer to other’s prayers.

So God, help us to appreciate the fullness of your love and to remain aware of how you continually move around us, within us, and through us to your world.

Help our eyes to see and our eyes to hear.

Amen

Responsive Benediction: Being The Hands and Feet of God To The World (based on 1 Corinthians 12:27)

Reader: As we go now, to be God's presence in the world ...
All: We will open our minds to understand the needs around us.

Reader: As we go now, to be Christ's servants in the world ...
All: We will open our hands to share with all.

Reader: As we go now, to be the Spirit's hope for the world ...
All: We will open our hearts to welcome those who have no one to care for them.

Benediction: God Continues To Create, Speak, Guide, and Breathe New Life (based on Genesis 1:27)

Since we believe that God speaks to us in all sorts of ways, may we listen carefully for that still, small voice that brings words of hope and love.  

Since we believe that God uses things in our everyday lives to guide us, may we be receptive to those nudges.

In our everyday lives, may we put that divine guidance into action so that we can help to bring out the best in everyone and everything.

Responsive Call To Worship: God The Creative Spark (based on Genesis 1:31)

Reader: God is the creative spark of new life.
All: We will seek God in this new day.

Reader: What God creates is good.
All: We will rejoice and be glad.

Reader: God, architect of life and wholeness ...
All: ... open our eyes to your ever-surrounding presence.

Reader: Spirit, creator of awe and beauty ...
All: ... open our souls to your stirring.

Reader: Jesus, through whom everything came into existence ...
All: ... open our hearts to your grace and love.

Richard Rohr - The Divine Dance

Father Richard Rohr on embracing Perichoresis instead of "Mere Monotheism."

Call To Worship: Communion Service (based on Isaiah 40:3)

From far out in the wasteland that we find ourselves in, we cry to you God.  We hunger for Jesus, the bread of life, and we thirst for God's Spirit.

God please hear us! Pay attention to our cries for help! Help us to remember that even though we may feel lost and far from home, there is mercy and grace with you.

Our trust in you is the hope that we're hanging on to and we're taking you at your word God. So we're waiting on you God, seeking.

Benediction: May The Triune God Be With Us (based on John 14:16)

May the grace of Jesus, the love of God,  and the presence of the Spirit be with us all; now and forevermore.

Call To Worship: God Welcomes All (based on Luke 7:36-50)

adapted from Call to Worship: Luke 7: 36-50
by Pastor Seth A. Normington

God, you welcome all of us as honored guests.  You welcome us all - even though we don’t always get things right, even though we don't always show love like you do. You forgive our failures and give us a seat at your table.

For this amazing gift, we give you worship and praise.

Why Worship? The Rev. J. Gary Brinn in Constructive Faith

We worship God because we are toward God and toward God- as-experienced-in others. Moments of communal worship are moments of doubling, of tripling, of giving and receiving; a threefold relationship of self, other, and God.

As many studies have shown, communal worship is in decline. Many of those who were raised in the church no longer regularly attend what the church offers as worship services.

Yet many of those who no longer attend still seek for meaning and still have spiritual lives. It's just that our worship services often tend to fail to both emphasize a communal experience of God and to connect attendees to something larger than their individualism. 

This perhaps isn't surprising - given that we have worked on the how of worship often without ever addressing the why. The failure is ours as the church.

It's inarguably true that experiencing moments of transcendence and being a part of efforts that make a difference in the world can happen in places other in than in church services; perhaps even in better and more authentic forms.

So then why do we gather together to worship?

We do not praise God to bargain with God, so that isn't the reason.

We do not praise God for God's own sake, so that also isn't the reason. 

Praising God should driven by our humanness and our hardwiring for connection and community because we are oriented for that interrelation with God in our being.  Praise is just one mood of this relatedness.

Our thriving as humans depends on our interconnectedness. We are not simply animals designed to rut and reproduce, because we have this x in the equation; our souls. We see evidence of this mysterious x in art, in sacrificial love, and in that part of us that soars toward God and toward the other (the other beyond one's own family/tribe, for even thieves take care of their own).

And so we act out our praise of God - and of the way in which we are hardwired toward connection God - in community, in acts of communal worship which are moments of doubling, of tripling, of giving and receiving; a threefold relationship of self, other, and God. This is why no worship that is about meeting my individual needs will ever be real worship.  

Worship can involve transcendence, can speak to changing the world, can give you the tools to get through next week, and can give you comfort when you need comfort and challenge you when you are stuck, but it does so properly only when it aligns with being toward God and toward God-as-experienced-in the other.

The full article is available here

Benediction: The Values of God's Way Of Life (based on Matthew 5:17-19)

May we embrace the values of God’s way of life; values of love, justice, and truth.  May we live out these values with the guidance of our faithful, loving, and empowering God.

Worship Words: Too Important to Neglect - Joan Huyser-Honig in Calvin Institute of Christian Worship

Our words form us whether or not we pay attention to how they are doing so.  The church is starving for a richer picture of the God we worship. 

God speaks through Balaam's donkey and speaks through flawed humans.  So is using worship cliches or cliche practices that much of a problem, as long as we're sincere?

The answer = when your congregation's worship language includes only a couple names for or aspects of God, then worshipers receive an imbalanced understanding of God.

Worship language deserves far more attention than it gets in the average congregation.

Ron writes, "Christians frequently talk about salvation as 'inviting Jesus into my heart," as if the day you got saved, you made a bargain with God.  That's such an incomplete understanding of salvation and especially dangerous in our consumer culture."

Debra writes, "Our words form us whether or not we pay attention to how they are doing so.  Just as children quickly learn to speak with the vocabulary, tones, and inflections of their parents, so we learn to 'speak' our spiritual lives with the words and tones, with the emotional and theological range, of what we experience at worship.

"The [church] is starving for a richer picture of the [God] we worship," Debra writes.

To discuss how songs picture God, Worship Words quotes Lester Ruth's research on Trinitarian language in contemporary worship music. Ruth, who teaches worship and liturgy at Asbury Theological Seminary, used Christian Copyright Licensing Information (CCLI) top 25 song data from 1989-2004. (Many songs stayed so popular that only 72 songs made the list during that time).

None of the songs named the Trinity or God's triune nature. Just 3 songs mentioned all three persons of the Trinity.  Most named only Jesus.

This research demonstrates the difference between how God is spoken of in contemporary worship song and how the Bible speaks of God.

The full article is available here.

Responsive Benediction: God Breathes Life (based on Genesis 1:27)

Reader: We believe God still creates ...
All:  ... so may we continue to be made new.

Reader:  We believe God still speaks,
All:  ... so may we listen carefully.

Reader: We believe God still guides ...
All:  ... so may we walk in God’s way.

Reader: We believe God still breathes life into being ...
All: ... so may we be light and life to God’s world.

Downward Mobility & The Way of Jesus - Henri J Nouwen

Call To Worship: God's Goodness (based on Psalm 66)

God, we gather together to remember your goodness and to give you thanks. Countless generations have experienced your loving guidance and blessing.

God, we gather together to rejoice in how we experience you here and now. We celebrate and give thanks for God’s continuing grace and mercy.

God, we gather together in hope and faith, waiting and expecting. Help us to find you in all of life.

Hear us as we offer our thanks and praise for your steadfast love, mercy and grace poured out to each generation.

Saint Goes Stage Diving - Ship of Fools

A processing, unsecured statue crashes to the floor in a Toronto church – to the congregation's shrieks of dismay.

More entertaining, though, is what happens next.

A freshly-decapitated St George is lifted up and placed in full view of the congregation... as a warning? Meanwhile the hapless bearers slink off to the vestry.