The dechurching elephant in the room
Youth sports.
Growing up, I remember that my parents’ rule for me playing youth sports was that I couldn’t play in any league that required practices or games on Sunday. And, at the time, that ruled out most youth sports in Lincoln. So I played flag football for two years, I think, and I did a year of micro soccer and that was about it, aside from the hockey league our church ran for a short time. We were in an extremely conservative fundamentalist congregation and yet even in a church like that, our family was weird. There may have been others with similar rules, but I don’t recall knowing anyone else with kids who wanted to be in youth sports who had such a rule. Even in fundamentalism, youth sports were a kind of untouchable element of life for many.
So: Shift away from general ideas about “being too busy.” Instead focus on a specific category—families who make it to church when their kids’ youth sports events don’t get in the way. If I said there are more people who dechurch for reasons such as prioritizing sports ahead of church than there are who leave over corruption, would that seem more plausible to you? If I suggested it to your pastor, would it seem plausible to him? (The answer is “YES, OF COURSE IT WOULD.”)
Jake Meador, The Slow Exit
Why schisms persist
Rarely if ever in the course of doctrinal controversy did anyone say something like this: “You’re right-I lack the Holy Spirit’s guidance in my reading of scripture, and I see that you have it in yours. I admit I was mistaken, so I’ll trust you instead.”
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Religious minimalism
“So much of our religious anxiety is really about having to figure out how we can avoid doing the things we know we must, while still being obedient to God. We become religious minimalists, giving God only as much as we need to do to appease him, while keeping as much as we can for ourselves. This, as opposed to desiring as God himself desires. This, as opposed to living in reality.”
Rod Dreher, Reconciling With the Really Real
Learning the spiritual life
In the traditions of ancient China, the western spiritual seeker can learn the basics of spiritual life which the churches failed to teach him: how to be free of compulsive thinking and acquire stillness of thoughts, how to cut off desires and addictions, and how to conquer negative emotions.”
Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao. I probably quote Christ the Eternal Tao too much, but I find it that paragraph too penetrating not to repeat it.
Reason in a materialist world
Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.
C. S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
Hard times
There was a time when Lutherans would not have invited a Catholic archbishop to this kind of event, said Cordileone. There was a time when it was rare for Catholics to cooperate with evangelicals and other believers seeking common ground on moral and social issues.
“To tell you the truth, I actually long for the good old days when we used to have the luxury to fight with each other over doctrinal issues,” said Cordileone, drawing laughter. “But right now, the ship is going down. … The crew cannot afford to stand on the bridge and discuss the best kind of navigation equipment to use — when the ship is going down.”
The “ship,” he stressed, is not the church — “It’s our civilization.” If clergy cannot work together to defend ancient doctrines on marriage and family, while also striving to convince their own flocks to live by them, then “our civilization is … hanging by a thread.”
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone via Terry Mattingly
Human telos
Our belief is that man is created to be in communion and union with God, and that if he rejects this communion, he will not become a human being in the authentic understanding. Apart from God a “normal man” cannot exist. The state of the man who has cut himself off from God is abnormal. Thus, the meaning of our belief in the “Image” is that God is the center of man’s existence. In other words, the divine element is what defines our humanity.
Metropolitan Saba of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America.
What are we here for? What’s the point? What is the purpose of worship? Interestingly, Wright’s answer is the same for both questions: “What we’re ‘here for’ is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made.”
James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love
Myth & Cosmology
“So are you saying that mythology and cosmology are the same?”
“I use the words interchangeably in my writing,” he says. “Myths are a kind of cosmology in that both words express an outlook on, or a view of, the world. They are not just tales about the gods.”
Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less
What is “religion”?
[T]wo rival conceptions of religion[:] Is religion an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, which is how many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-1960s?
Matthew Walther, William Friedkin’s Movie ‘The Exorcist’ Understands Old-Time Catholicism
Far more important …
Inner watchfulness is a primary element of our life in Christ, and far more important than following outward events. Our Lord makes this abundantly clear when He says that His second advent will be apparent to all. Our foremost need, then, is to keep watch over ourselves all the time.
Dynamis devotional for August 18, 2023 (from Orthodox Christian Prison Ministry).
A ready listener
I heard, particularly when I was a Protestant, complaints that “I never heard the Gospel until” [I visited my present church], although I knew that substantially the same Gospel was preached at the Church they left as in the one they now attend.
We all hear important truths many times in our lives, but it is only when we are ready for them that they penetrate.”
Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos
The perennial delusion
Despite sociological evidence to the contrary, it remains to all appearances virtually axiomatic that the acquisition of consumer goods is the presumptive means to human happiness-and the more and better the goods, the better one’s life and the happier one will be.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 