Slacktivist says it like it is

It occurs to me that I've been essentially neglecting any writing about the Discourse of Decline recently - and just on time, Fred Clark (a smarter man than I) delivers:

Everybody knows that evangelical churches are more theologically conservative and orthodox. And everybody knows that mainline Protestant denominations are liberal and heterodox....

It goes something like this:

1: Find the most liberal theologians you can from mainline Protestant denominations — Tillich! Spong! — and then sketch caricatures of them that make them seem as outrageously liberal as possible.

2. Make these caricatures the avatars for mainline Protestant churches, always suggesting that they are typical, hugely popular and influential.

3. Cite this outrageous theological liberalism as the cause of mainline “decline.”

4. Contrast this mainline liberalism with the orthodoxy of evangelical churches.

5. Cite evangelical orthodoxy as the cause of the rapid growth of evangelicalism.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat. For years and years and years.

This is propaganda. It’s the shell-game that we evangelicals have been playing for decades now. And it’s a shifty, dishonest trick.

Fred, you nailed it.

On the merits of liturgy

This was me, six weeks ago, "in which religion is a relationship too":

But ever since I came back, I've discovered that I can find God in that "religion." That I was moved to share the Eucharist, Elevation and Fraction and queueing up and all. That those creeds and sacraments move me. That they are sacraments; in them everything is brought together and I... relate.

On Miss Rumphius, and my backyard

Sarah Bessey is a smarter person than I, and if I don't comment there it's because I regularly find nothing that feels worth adding. On impulse today, though, I clicked over there from Slacktivist, and stumbled upon "In which I share 10 books for tinies," to which I nodded through the list until I got to the honorable mentions:

Honourable Mentions: The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier, Sleepy Bears by Mem Fox, Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and of course, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney.

And I stopped nodding there, because that last title took me back.

On regular writing

"What do you mean by 'regulate'?" Therapist asked. That was, at least, where I left off these thoughts.

Let's start off with the big issue: framing my life and work in terms of "discipline" and "goals" feels futile, because I have neither.

"Goals" imply achievable things; "setting goals" involves dreaming about what could be, looking at what was plausible, and planning how to achieve them, and doing them. For the longest time nothing was plausible; I had vague wouldn't-it-be-nice ideas, but no way to get there from here, even if I was the sort of person who could - and I'm still not. Building worlds without me was as much as I could manage. My goal was "the status quo," because hope was always and consistently the first step on the road to disappointment.

Smarter folks than I

Not so long ago, I wrote about my realization that faith is trust, not assertion. That I was in a really toxic behaviorist headspace, because "faith" to me meant assertion; "faith" was a work in its own right, and that work was faith, because without it it was dead, and what the Epistles were saying had absolutely no connection to what was going on on the ground, and that contradiction heightened to collapse.

I'd never thought to look outside myself that way, because I was confessing, not critiquing. And I'm still not really in any position to look outside myself that way, because I'm not sure whether I can without envy.

So I'm going to let Morgan Guyton, who's made a similar observation, say it better than I:

But what is this faith that we receive from God? Many Christians have been taught that faith means simply “believing in things you cannot prove.” Under this definition, “faith” very quickly turns into a set of propositional statements about Jesus that we’re supposed to accept without proof: born of a virgin, died on the cross for our sins, raised from the dead, coming again at the end of time, etc. To have faith comes to mean simply that you agree with whatever the Bible says about Jesus. I don’t think this is unimportant, but is it really what the Bible is talking about when it says the word faith?

Here’s the problem with this definition of faith: it’s really a work even though it’s not supposed to be....

Seriously, give the man a read. Everything he says is like that.

He is the first of those that this blog will tag as "smarter folks than I."