Excellent Indian Ocean tsunami documentary

As you recall, a massive earthquake offshore Indonesia on Dec. 26, 2004, caused enormous tsunami waves against Indian Ocean shores all the way to Africa. The exact death toll is not known. The estimate is that in a matter of hours, 250,000 died, 167,000 of them in Indonesia alone. Youtube has an outstanding documentary of the disaster in eight parts, about 80 minutes altogether, and worth every minute of viewing. It uses extensive home video of the scenes before, during and after the waves struck and compelling interviews with survivors, including a woman who was swept far out to sea but incredibly survived. None of her entire, extended family did. Here is part one:

Bibles and bars

Yogi Berra is reputed to have said about a couple of events, "It's too coincidental to be a coincidence." So how coincidental that two days before we sponsor "Connect: A Meetup for Spiritual People" at Fairview's Detour Sports Grill, there is a front-page story in today's Tennessean, "Churches take their message to taverns."

Every Monday night, Uncle Charlie’s bar in Cheyenne, Wyo., hosts “Bibles and Beer,” a discussion that routinely pulls in people of all faiths — and an atheist. 

As many as 45 people have shown up, some toting Bibles. Some might have a drink; others stick to water. Some talk; others mostly listen. There are only a few ground rules: Avoid debate and stick to the text to be discussed that week. 

“There really is not a focus on drinking,” insists the Rev. Rodger McDaniel, a Presbyterian minister who organized the weekly gathering more than a year ago. “But at the same time, it is a much more relaxed atmosphere than in a church basement. If I put this on in my church, I don’t think we would have five or six people.” 

Across the country, faith is becoming bar talk. The trend combines the traditional religious charge to go where the people are with the reality that a lot of them are in bars. Organizers include those from mainline churches, those building churches and bar owners and brewers. Some are trying to push the model nationally, taking an ageless yearning for meaning and purpose to places where people often go to try to wash their worries away. 

“It is good to bring the word to wherever God is, and God is everywhere, and people are everywhere, too,” says Joe Beene, owner of the Drunk Monkey Tavern in the Tulsa suburb of Glenpool, Okla. Last year, Beene began live streaming Sunday morning services from Tulsa’s Celebration Church into his bar. “The people who come in here on Sunday mornings are people who want to hear the word but won’t go to church.”

More at the link. The last thing Jesus told his apostles to do before he returned to the Father was, "Go!" And the apostles went - over almost all of the Roman-ruled world at the time. They did not hang a sign outside the Upper Room saying, "Holy Spirit comes here weekly, join us."

According to the Tennessean's June 18 edition, about half of Nashville-area people are not affiliated with any church, and a large number of them self-identify as Christian. For too long, churches have been like Little Bo Peep, thinking, "Leave them alone and they'll come home." But that's not happening.

Meanwhile, the oldline churches intensify fiddling while Rome burns around them. I already wrote about the United Methodists' death throes. This morning an Episcopalian friend sent me the link to a WSJ op-ed, "What Ails the Episcopalians."

Its numbers and coffers shrinking, the church votes for pet funerals but offers little to the traditional faithful.

Far be it from this United Methodist to point out a speck in the Anglicans' eyes while ignoring the plank in our own. But it just goes to show how widespread the problem is.

This is a good summary, too.

 

 (Text's author unknown.)

 

Scopes "Monkey" Trial was a setup from the beginning

This month marks the anniversary of the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925. John Scopes was charged and tried with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which forbade the teaching of evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. The Butler Act had been signed into law earlier that year by Governor Austin Peay, one of the most pro-education governors Tennessee has ever had. Austin Peay Normal School, later Austin Peay State University, was named after him for that reason. The newspapers recorded that Governor Peay thought the Butler Act was ridiculous. He publicly commented, “Nobody believes that it is going to be an active statute.”

The Butler Act came to the attention of the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which decided to challenge the act in court on First Amendment grounds. The ACLU issued a press release stating that intention. A few days later they were contacted by Mr. George Rappelyea, a civic booster in Dayton and an adherent of evolution theory. The result was the famous Scopes Trial, argued by two of the most famous figures of American law: William Jennings Bryan, defending the Butler Act, and Clarence Darrow, defending Mr. Scopes.

The Hollywood movie about the trial, “Inherit the Wind,” presented the enlightened forces of progress and virtue, portrayed by Darrow and Scopes, heroically resisting the harsh, repressive ignorance of Christian fundamentalism, portrayed by Bryan and the people of the town. Naturally, Hollywood got it completely wrong.

 

In fact, the trial was a fund-raiser for the town of Dayton. After being promised the ACLU’s support, Mr. Rappelyea contacted Dayton’s town fathers to meet him in F. E. Robinson’s drugstore where he explained his idea about a big trial. They all agreed it sounded like a good way to put Dayton on the map and make some tourist money. Mr. Scopes was not even a regular teacher, but a substitute. (In fact, he wasn’t even present at the school on the specific day cited in the indictment.) Mr. Scopes was summoned to the drugstore and asked to be the patsy. Everyone already knew Scopes was teaching evolution because every science teacher in town taught it, causing no religious turmoil there. Whatever the good Christians of Dayton were, they weren’t the mindless fundamentalists Hollywood later made them out to be. 

At first Scopes hesitated to join the case, but Rappelyea described a grand trial to bring fame and fortune to the small town. He said, “Let’s take this thing to court and test the legality of it. I will swear out warrant and have you arrested. That will make a big sensation. Why not bring a lot of doctors and preachers here? Let’s get H. G. Wells and a lot of big fellows.” With Scopes’ agreement, Rappelyea wired the ACLU that the stage was set for the drama to open.

The trial was, of course, every bit the circus the town leaders hoped. Newsmen descended from all over the country. The courtroom was so sweltering the judge moved the trial onto the town quadrangle, which simply made more room for more people to come and spend their money. Finally, Scopes was found guilty as charged and fined a hundred dollars by the judge, which was paid by the town’s leaders.

 

Darrow appealed Scopes’ conviction to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which threw out the conviction in 1927. However, the court overturned the conviction not on the merits of the case, but on the technicality that only a jury, not a judge, could set any fine more than fifty dollars. The Butler Act actually survived because the court made no ruling on the act’s constitutionality. It was not until the 1968 that the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to prohibit the teaching of evolution in public schools.

When the fall semester of 1925 began in Dayton, the teachers there went right on teaching evolution, and the good people of Dayton were as equally unperturbed by it as before, having laughed all summer all the way to the bank.

Beyond Label or Category

Beyond Label or Category « United Methodeviations:

I sat with a table of clergy and laity leaders talking about reaching “young people.” In frustration, I asked them to define for me who these “young people” are and what they are like. It became apparent that the “young people” we want to reach are a generic, bland hash of upper-middle-class, calm, well-behaved “newer” versions of ourselves. The expectation is that “young people” will either share, or quickly adopt, our values, that they will enjoy what we enjoy, think what we think, and not question or challenge the way things are. Oh, and they will all nicely and cleanly fit simple categories — easy to label and control. This conversation is a glimpse into a huge problem we face — trying to reach and relate to people we don’t know or understand at all.

There's more - read the whole thing.

The Aghast Chorus Grows

I wondered in my first (and until now, only) post on the Supreme Court's ruling on Obamacare why conservatives were not aghast at the radical expansion by the Court of Congress' taxation power.

The point I don't see other commentators getting is this: the ruling means that Congress now has unlimited power to tax. Congress now has the power to tax absolutely any activity or inactivity by individuals.

Now law Professor William Jacobson cites several commentators who say the same, for example, the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

[E]ven the five votes limiting Congress under the Commerce Clause pale against the Chief Justice’s infinitely elastic and dangerous interpretation of the taxing power. Nancy Pelosi famously said we need to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it. It turns out we also needed John Roberts to write his appendix.

Tax law Prof. Paul Caron, writer of TaxProf Blog, has more, including a link to this observation by John Yoo, professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law:

Some conservatives see a silver lining in the ObamaCare ruling. But it's exactly the big-government disaster it appears to be. 

Worse still, Justice Roberts's opinion provides a constitutional road map for architects of the next great expansion of the welfare state. Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts's tortured reasoning in Sebelius, the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress's power to tax.

Which is exactly what I said Thursday:

So does the Congress have the authority to make us eat broccoli, as one justice asked the solicitor general during the hearing? Now we know the answer: without question the Congress now enjoys the power to make us buy broccoli, whether we eat it or not. Don't buy it? Pay a special tax. 

Congress has the power now to make everyone drive a white car - or pay a special tax if they don't.

Ilya Somin, associate professor of law at George Mason University Law School, who wrote an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down the law, wrote in The New York Daily News:

Today’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding the individual health insurance mandate shows that the Supreme Court takes constitutional limits on federal power seriously - but not seriously enough. As a result, Congress now has the power to impose a mandate to do almost anything, so long as it is structured as so-called “tax.” 

That ruling both misreads the Constitution and gives Congress a dangerous new power. ... 

Pretty much any other mandate could be magically converted into a tax by the same sleight of hand - so long as the penalty for violating it is a fine similar to the one that enforces the individual mandate. The danger here is not just theoretical. Numerous interest groups could potentially lobby Congress to enact a law requiring people to buy their products, just as the health insurance industry did.

And because of this state of affairs, the last shred of national sovereignty passed on Thursday from the hands of the people of the United States to the desks of the Congress and by extension the executive. We are now subjects, no longer citizens. 


 

England braces for "circumcision tourism"

The Telegraph:

In what has been described as a landmark decision, a court in the city of Cologne said circumcision violated a child's "fundamental right to bodily integrity" and that this right outweighed the rights of the parents. ... Jewish groups [protesting the decision] were supported by leaders of Germany's large Muslim population "I feel the decision is discriminatory and counters efforts to promote integration," said Ali Demir, chairman of the Islamic Religious Community in Germany. "This is a harmless procedure that has thousands of years of tradition and a high symbolic value. "We will end up with circumcision tourism to neighbouring countries," he added.

Here is one of the most interesting things in the article.

The court case revolved around a four-year-old Muslim boy who was circumcised at the request of his parents but was later admitted to hospital with bleeding. The doctor was charged and tried for grievous bodily harm but was acquitted on the grounds he had parental consent. Prosecutors appealed against the decision but the doctor was again acquitted, this time owing to the imprecise nature of the law.

Get that? The first trial ended in acquittal, so the prosecution got to try him again. "Double jeopardy" ain't a game hosted by Alex Trebek; it's a living legal principle in most of Europe.

Syrian Christians under the gun

I wrote earlier this month that if the so-called freedom fighters attacking Assad's regime gain victory, "expect a bloodbath of non-Sunnis, especially the Alawites and Christians." Now the New York Times understands that, too.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Earlier this month, reports came from the Syrian city of Qusayr of an ominous warning to the town’s Christians: Either join the Sunni-led opposition against Bashar al-Assad or leave. Soon after, thousands of Christians fled the town.

After decades of protection by a secular-leaning dictatorship, the Qusayr ultimatum warned of a dark future for Syria’s Christian community. As the 15-month conflict rages with no end in sight, Syria’s many minorities have come face to face with the emerging threat posed by radical Sunni Islamists. These elements have established themselves as a key factor in Syria’s future, backed by immense political and economic support from the Arab world and indifference from the West.

Throughout the years, Christians, like many other minorities in the region, have lent their support to those regimes that have guaranteed their security and religious freedom. In Iraq, Christians rose to the highest levels of society under Saddam Hussein’s regime, while in Egypt, Coptic Christians were protected from ultraconservative Salafists under Hosni Mubarak. As secular leaders from the secretive Alawite sect, the Assad dynasty largely preserved Christian life, protecting Syria’s minorities from what was perceived as a collective threat from the country’s Sunni majority.

Watching their once-shielding dictators fall like dominos across the region, Christians have suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of history. Faced by a rising tide of radical Sunni Islam, Christians in Iraq and Egypt have fled by the thousands. In Syria, concern over Christian repression has fallen on deaf ears, drowned out by popular support for the country’s opposition in the face of the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown.

This March, months before the Qusayr ultimatum, Islamist militants from the opposition’s Faruq Brigade had gone door to door in Hamidiya and Bustan al-Diwan neighborhoods of Homs, expelling local Christians. Following the raids, some 90 percent of Christians reportedly fled the city for government-controlled areas, neighboring countries or a stretch of land near the Lebanese border called the Valley of Christians (Wadi al-Nasarah). Of the more than 80,000 Christians who lived in Homs prior to the uprising, approximately 400 remain today.

The cleansing of Homs’ Christian neighborhoods occurred as the Syrian military bombarded the Sunni opposition stronghold of Baba Amr, naturally focusing the international media on stories of children maimed by Assad’s artillery shells and sniper bullets. At the United Nations, Assad’s opponents could not afford to highlight Christian persecution in Homs, as they risked catering to a Russian-led campaign to preserve the dictator’s rule by de-legitimizing the Syrian rebels for their atrocities.

As rebel forces continue to chip away at Assad’s control over the country, Syria’s Christians continue to be expelled or held at the mercy of an increasingly extremist Sunni opposition.

For the newest generation of Sunni jihadists, Syria has become the latest front in the struggle to wrest control of the region from rival religious sects and foreign occupation. Many of these fighters hail from the vast reaches of North Africa and the Gulf, arriving in Syria with weapons, funds and a radical ideology.

Inside Syria, the reluctance of the international community to thwart Assad’s onslaught has left the Sunni population with feelings of isolation and abandonment, driving large swathes of youth into the arms of radical clerics. This uncompromising ideology leaves little place in Syria’s future for the country’s many minorities — including Christians.

Saving Syria’s Christian community is coherent with Western strategic interests. If the experiences of Iraq and Egypt are any indication, religious intolerance breeds insecurity and volatility. The Syrian case is no different. Assad’s opponents on both sides of the Atlantic must prevent radical Islamists from embedding themselves in the Syrian opposition and should adopt a firm stance against their patrons in the Gulf.

As Kamal Jumblatt, the former leader of Lebanon’s Druze minority, once said, “In the Middle East there is space for all men, just not their ambitions.” Jumblatt himself was eventually assassinated at the hands of Hafez al-Assad, but his words ring true to this day.

The ousting of the Assad regime has become a global moral obligation, but so has the duty to ensure that Syria’s future holds a place for all minorities.

Consider that last sentence. Because absolutely no nation is both willing and able to accomplish the entire sentence, the whole sentence is made false. There is no moral obligation to oust Assad's regime only to see it replaced by another, Sunni-Islamist regime that will likely be even more ruthless and bloody.

I say again: Stay out of Syria!

Why neither Left nor Right should be happy about Obamacare ruling

Congress now has the Constitutional authority to make you buy a firearm and ammunition.

There is something important that I have not seen mentioned by any commentator, Left or Right, on the US Supreme Court's ruling today that upheld Obamacare lock, stock and barrel. And it is the centrally bad part of the Court's majority ruling.

Obamacare's "individual mandate" means that if you don't buy government-approved health insurance, then you are penalized by being required to pay a special tax enacted purely for that reason.

By classifying Obamacare's individual mandate as a form of Constitutionally permissible tax, the Court has emplaced in Constitutional law the power of the present or any future Congress to enact any kind of mandate whatsoever on individuals as long as Congress characterizes penalties for non-compliance as a tax.

That means that the Congress now has the Constitutional power to tax absolutely any activity or inactivity by individuals. Congress now has unlimited power to tax.

So does the Congress have the authority to make us eat broccoli, as one justice asked the solicitor general during the hearing? Now we know the answer: without question the Congress now enjoys the power to make us buy broccoli, whether we eat it or not. Don't buy it? Pay a special tax.

Congress has the power now to make everyone drive a white car - or pay a special tax if they don't.

And before the Left gets all giddy with elation at this ruling, consider that any Republican Congress will also enjoy - and take advantage of - this power. So yes, Congress now has the Constitutional power to require every able-bodied, sound of mind adult (male or female) to purchase a firearm and ammunition - or pay they don't, just fork over $1,000 to the IRS and have a nice day.

Mark today's date on your calendars. June 28, 2012 is the day that the sovereignty of the American people vanished. This is the day we became subjects rather than citizens. As Daniel Webster argued before the court of Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland, "An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy." And in his decision, Marshall agreed.

Today was the day our freedom was destroyed. As of today, absolutely nothing we do or don't do is beyond the power of Congress to dictate.

Update: Seems it is starting to sink in that because of the Court's ruling, there are now no limits to Congress doing whatever it wants as long it justifies under its now-limitless taxation authority. See the commentary on The TaxProf Blog.

Then there's this: "Maybe the most depressing aspect of the decision is the way it seems to endorse using the tax law as the Swiss Army Knife of public policy. Things that Congress can’t enact any other way are now possible if they can somehow be crammed into the tax law" (boldface original).

How puny are the works of Man!

Wildfires loom over the Air Force Academy's stadium.

Ich bin What? - NYTimes.com

Ich bin What? - NYTimes.com:

Contrary to popular myth, President Kennedy did not actually say (unintentionally), "I am a jelly doughnut" when he uttered his famous line in Berlin, "Ich bin ein Berliner."

Ja, there is a variety of jelly-filled doughnut known as a berliner. But despite the legend, the Berliners (note difference in case between "berliner" and "Berliner" - it is significant in German) who gathered to hear Kennedy that day in 1963 did not understand him to mean that, despite his use of the definite article, "ein." True, in hoch Deutsch, or "proper" German, the definite article is omitted before proper nouns. For example, I learned when I lived in Germany to say, "Ich bin Amerikanische offizier," not "ein Amerikanische offizier."

But that's the "King's German," so to speak. In fact, the city's residents in that day colloquially spoke so that to omit the definite article was to say one was a native-born Berliner, and to include it meant a non-native resident, or to be in solidarity with the people of the city.

Turns out that JFK's utterance of the phrase was accidentally correct, not accidentally wrong.

Stay out of Syria!

Blackfive has an excellent post entitled simply, "THERE IS NO US NATIONAL SECURITY INTEREST IN A SYRIAN INTERVENTION." Which is exactly right. As I have mentioned before, the Syrian rebels are not Jeffersonian wanna-bes and the Syrian rebellion is not about freedom. Walter Russell Mead cuts to the heart of the matter about The Real News From Syria:

[R]adical and Salafist sheikhs and organizations in the Gulf are getting into the weapons delivery act. For many jihadis, the fight against Assad is first and foremost a struggle against Alawite “heretics”, and the goal is to build a radical Islamic state on the ruins of Ba’athist, secular Syria.

If the rebels win, expect a bloodbath of non-Sunnis, especially the Alawites and Christians. Now over to Blackfive:

Now the backstory, so you at least understand why this presents a possibility of NATO, and thus the US, being pulled into such an intervention (possibly willingly, I’ll get to that later).  It comes from Andrew McCarty at PJ Media:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a Sunni Islamic supremacist with longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Sunni supremacist organization. The Brotherhood isleading the mujahideen (called the “opposition” or the “rebels” by the mainstream media) that seeks to oust the Assad regime in Syria — dominated by the Alawites, a minority Shiite sect. Unsurprisingly, then, Turkey’s government has taken a very active role in abetting the Brotherhood’s operations against the Syrian regime, which have also been joined by al-Qaeda and other Sunni militants. 

On Friday, a Turkish air force jet entered Syrian air space, and Assad regime forces shot it down. Turkey claims the jet “mistakenly” cruised over Syria, and that, by the time it was taken down, it was in international air space over the Mediterranean. One need carry no brief for Assad to conclude that, given the interventionist drum-beat for no-fly zones and direct military and logistical aid to the “opposition,” Syria rationally took the presence of a Turkish military aircraft in its air space as a provocation. Turkey insists it was not “spying” — that this was just an accident to which Syria overreacted. That would be a good argument if the regime were not under siege and if the Syrian and Turkish governments had not been exchanging hostile words (mostly, threats from Erdogan) for months. That, of course, is not the case.

Confused?  Well don’t be.  This is just another chapter in the eternal war between the Sunnis and Shiites and between the religious and secular.

But the movement of forces on the ground or in the air are not the real point. This is:

Point: This is not a NATO or US fight.  This is something that we should stay as far from as we can.  

Politics, however, will be integral to any decision made at this point, at least in the US. Domestic electoral politics.  What scares me is the possibility the Obama administration may conclude it is a good idea politically to use NATO to “change the subject” and make Obama a “war time President” hoping the advantages of that situation will make the difference in November.  And it wouldn’t be a unilateral decision, but instead receive bi-partisan support as Sen. McCain and other GOP members have been outspoken in their desire to intervene. 

Call me paranoid but I find nothing in my analysis that’s at all infeasible or improbable.  In fact, having watched this administration at work, I consider it to be a completely possible scenario.

Fortunately, NATO is toothless and broke. But Blackfive is right: this is completely plausible. However, I would rate it as unlikely for the following two reasons.

1. The NATO nations, except Canada (!), are broke. With the very possible imminent collapse of the Euro, NATO nations have every incentive to avoid expeditionary expenditures. I this reason alone obviates the possibility of Chapter 5 being successfully invoked by Turkey.

2. Angela Merkel and most of the rest of NATO's heads of state are more than aware of the basic facts of the Sunni/al-Qaeda grab for power in Syria, and are not going to bring down Assad to bring up the Islamists. They are also well aware that the bloody aftermath in Libya is not even an opening act for that would follow in Syria if the "resistance" topples Assad. NATO's countries are also much closer, literally and figuratively, to Russia; the weight of the Russian Bear's opposition will press much more heavily on Eur-NATO than us.

I would add that NATO's Euro nations have almost no strategic "throw" to bring effective forces against Assad. At the minimum they would have to rail through Turkey while also forming naval forces off Syria (where only two Russian cruisers would form a no-cross line that not one Eur-NATO head of state would dare cross).

As bloody and tyrannical as Assad is, it will not be an improvement to see Assad replaced by Sunnis in Syria. We must stay out of Syria, militarily. (This is all more the reason for the United States to quit NATO's military pact.)  

 

Complaining of kindness

A Christian blogging under the name of Eutychus recounts how tremendously upset the Roman-era authorities were because of the ministries of the early Christians.

When famine struck Armenia during the reign of Maximus, Christians lent assistance to the poor regardless of religious affiliation. Eusebius, the great 4th century ecclesiastical historian, tells us that as a result of the Christian's good example many pagans made inquiry "about a religion whose disciples are capable of such interested devotion." Julian the Apostate, who detested Christianity, complained of Christian kindness toward the poor:

"These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them to their agape, they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes."

The early church institutionalized the care of widows and orphans and saw after the needs of the sick, especially during epidemics. During the pestilences that struck Carthage and Alexandria, Christians earned respect and admiration for the bravery with which they consoled the dying and buried the dead, at a time when the pagans abandoned even their friends to their terrible fate.

The third century bishop and church father Saint Cyprian rebuked the pagan population for not helping the victims of the plague, preferring instead to plunder them. This exhortation of St Cyprian was all the more curious when one considers that this was a time of intermittent persecution of Christians. Meaning the bishop was asking followers to help the very people who had at times persecuted them. "If we are the children of God...let us prove it by our acts, by blessing those who curse us, and doing good to those who persecute us."  ... 

When we are born, we are self centered narcissists, we believe the world revolves around us. Left to our own devices we will remain that way. Thank God, he has not left us to our own devices. 

The Top Ten Reasons to Be a Methodist

From Alan Bevere's site, link at bottom.

 

From my teacher and friend, Ben Witherington:

___

(with apologies to and adaptation from Robin Williams Top Ten Reasons to be an Episcopalian).

10. No snake handling (a real sales feature in Kentucky).

9. You can believe in dinosaurs.

8. Male and female God created them, male and female we ordain them.

7. You don't have to check your brains at the door.

6. Even cross and flame boxer shorts are not considered a tacky Christmas gift for clergy in the UMC.

5. The church year is color coded, to make it easier to follow.

4. No alcoholic has to worry about communion causing a relapse.

3. You don't have to know how to swim to get baptized.

2. All are welcome to come as they are, but none are allowed to stay as they are— 'you must be born again and justified'!

1. We have the best hymns— hands down, even if your hands are up while singing them.

Prominent atheist blogger converts to Catholicism

Prominent atheist blogger converts to Catholicism – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs:

Libresco says one of the most common questions she has received is how she'll deal with atheists now. 

“The great thing about a lot of the atheist and skeptic community is that people talk more critically about ideas and want to see proof provided,” Libresco said. “That kind of analytical thinking is completely useful and the Catholic Church doesn’t need to and should not be afraid of because if you’ve got the facts on your side, you hope they win.” 

Libresco is just switching the side she thinks the facts are on.

God wins in the end.

Four words

"Go and make disciples."

Seems clear.

Science Daily: "Belief in Hell, According to International Data, Is Associated With Reduced Crime"

ScienceDaily (June 19, 2012) — Religions are thought to serve as bulwarks against unethical behaviors. However, when it comes to predicting criminal behavior, the specific religious beliefs one holds is the determining factor, says a University of Oregon psychologist. 

The study, appearing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, found that criminal activity is higher in societies where people's religious beliefs contain a strong punitive component than in places where religious beliefs are more benevolent. A country where many more people believe in heaven than in hell, for example, is likely to have a much higher crime rate than one where these beliefs are about equal. The finding surfaced from a comprehensive analysis of 26 years of data involving 143,197 people in 67 countries. 

"The key finding is that, controlling for each other, a nation's rate of belief in hell predicts lower crime rates, but the nation's rate of belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates, and these are strong effects," said Azim F. Shariff, professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Morality Lab at the UO. "I think it's an important clue about the differential effects of supernatural punishment and supernatural benevolence. The finding is consistent with controlled research we've done in the lab, but here shows a powerful 'real world' effect on something that really affects people -- crime." 

Last year, in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Shariff reported that undergraduate students were more likely to cheat when they believe in a forgiving God than a punishing God. 

Religious belief generally has been viewed as "a monolithic construct," Shariff said. "Once you split religion into different constructs, you begin to see different relationships. In this study, we found two differences that go in opposite directions. If you look at overall religious belief, these separate directions are washed out and you don't see anything. There's no hint of a relationship." 

The new findings, he added, fit into a growing body of evidence that supernatural punishment had emerged as a very effective cultural innovation to get people to act more ethically with each other. In 2003, he said, Harvard University researchers Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary had found that gross domestic product was higher in developed countries when people believed in hell more than they did in heaven. 

"Supernatural punishment across nations seems to predict lower crime rates," Shariff said. "At this stage, we can only speculate about mechanisms, but it's possible that people who don't believe in the possibility of punishment in the afterlife feel like they can get away with unethical behavior. There is less of a divine deterrent." 

He added, however, that these are correlational data, and so caution should be taken with the conclusions. Though Shariff and study co-author Mijke Rhemtulla of the Center for Research Methods and Data Analysis at the University of Kansas tried to account for obvious alternative explanations, more research is needed to explore other interpretations for the findings. 

"This research provides new insights into the potential influences of cultural and religious beliefs on key outcomes at a societal level," said Kimberly Andrews Espy, vice president for research and innovation. "Although these findings may be controversial, dissecting the associations between specific belief systems and epidemiologic behaviors is an important first step for social scientists to disentangle the complex web of factors that motivate human behavior."

Link.

Naturally, that there is any substance behind beliefs in heaven or hell is not something that the scientists are willing even to entertain. Nor do they seem cognizant that the concepts of heavenly reward or hellish punishment are very limited among the world's religions. The Eastern Mystic religions have no such categories, nor did African nature religions. Nor did Meso- and South American native religions. In the Mayan religion, for example,

... the afterlife consisted primarily of a dangerous voyage of the soul through the underworld, which was populated by sinister gods and represented by the jaguar, symbol of night. The majority of Maya, including the rulers, went to this underworld. Heaven was reserved for those who had been sacrificed or died in childbirth.

Mayans did not connect their fate in the afterlife to morality or lawfulness while living.

I am skeptical of this study mainly because of its apparent religious homogenization across the 67 countries and because there are hugely significant differences between how different religions describe, define or prescribe moral or even legal behavior. Unquestionably, Canada and Saudi Arabia have widely differing teachings on those subject, yet both countries' dominant religion teach of heaven and hell as a consequence of earthly conduct. Sorry, it sounds lie another case of "I know what I want to prove, now let me generate the data to prove it."

Watch how you say what you say

A display window inside the student activity building at Tennessee Tech University.  I snapped the photos when my wife and I took our daughter to orientation there. 

I have to wonder whether this shows that racial sensitivity has improved or not. I could argue both ways.

Jesus drove people away

Timothy Dalrymple:

... Surely Jesus gave “the FULL gospel,” right? And yet Jesus “lost” followers by droves. I agree with Kierkegaard on this: when you give the full gospel, you will drive people away. Narrow is the way and few will walk upon it. When confronted with the full gospel, not only in its attractiveness but also in its offensiveness and its challenge, in the way it calls us to die to ourselves and then take up the cross daily, we’re more likely to thin the flock than to fill it. Thousands followed Jesus when they thought he might serve their worldly interests; when the teaching grew hard, and the sacrifice he required became clear, only the twelve remained — “and one of you is a devil.” Jesus was not exactly concerned with dwindling numbers. He wanted true followers. Consider that. The greatest preacher in the history of Christianity drove them away by the thousands.

John chapter 6:

61 Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! 63 The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit[e] and life. 64 Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. 65 He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.” 

66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. 

67 “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. 

68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” 

70 Then Jesus replied, “Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one of you is a devil!” 71 (He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve, was later to betray him.)

Do you see the "dog that did not bark?" When " many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him," Jesus did not go running after them to beg them to reconsider or offer to tone things down if they'd come back. Instead, he turned to the Twelve and basically asked them what they were still doing here! I have a nagging suspicion that when we try to make following Jesus appealing to the masses, we are not being faithful to Jesus' example. But I don't like that, either.

Syria rebellion is not about freedom

As usual, Walter Russell Mead cuts to the heart of the matter about The Real News From Syria:

[R]adical and Salafist sheikhs and organizations in the Gulf are getting into the weapons delivery act. For many jihadis, the fight against Assad is first and foremost a struggle against Alawite “heretics”, and the goal is to build a radical Islamic state on the ruins of Ba’athist, secular Syria.

If the rebels win, expect a bloodbath of non-Sunnis, especially the Alawites and Christians.

"Possibly the Worst Church Website in the World"

Possibly the Worst Church Website in the World: 

Who says Flash is dead?

Yes, it is truly a dreadful website, whether of a church or anything else.

The end of the doofus family man?

The scorn and disdain of which Hollywood and the entertainment industry had held the family man may be finally coming to an end. Though the trope still has a long way to do before it's buried, as Glenn points out,

... with the number of stay-at-home dads doubling over the last decade, their purchasing power will influence advertisers. When women did all the shopping, it was easy to diss men.

We can see this evolution even in the ads of the same company - pcmatic.com. Exhibit A - remember this ad of the helpless, frustrated husband whose independent, assertive wife saves him from his own stupidity? Whether the company got a lot of protests I don't know, but the present ad featuring the same character morphs him into a wise, mentoring dad who patiently helps his daughter. Is this the harbinger of a new trend? Slate thinks so.

Is college worth the price?

Not worth the debt - NYPOST.com

For students, piece of advice No. 1 is: Don’t go into debt. When I went to law school, back in the ’80s, I turned down free rides at a couple of excellent schools to go to Yale Law School, even though it meant taking on a lot of student-loan debt. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone to do the same thing today, even to go to Yale Law, the undisputed king of the law-school rankings — and I’m positive I wouldn’t make a similar tradeoff for many other places, even Harvard Law.

True for undergrad schools, too. As anyone who has helped son or daughter with a college search recently, as I have in the last year (daughter graduated from high school last Friday), sticker shock is endemic.Georgia Tech runs more than $40,000 for non-Georgia residents; their idea of financial aid was for me to borrow $37,400 of it. When I called the financial-aid office to plead, the nice lady I talked to said that they do not give financial aid to non-Georgia applicants (though she did not put it quite so baldly).

Wake Forest offered us $46,000 per year in scholarships and grants. Sound like a lot? It is a lot - but it still would have left us with almost $13,000 to come up with. Sorry, I am too old to take on that kind of debt times four years.

Wake Forest (my alma mater, btw) underscores the real reason there is a higher-education bubble: I cannot see how a baccalaureate degree from the school could possibly be worth almost a quarter-million dollars. Not all bachelor degrees are created equal. Wake is very much a liberal-arts school, probably one of the best such schools in the world.

And good luck getting a job to pay off the commensurate student debt with that degree in medieval German literature.

Wake's law school and business school have proven excellent investments for later return - but as even law professor Glenn Reynolds points out in the Post piece, law schools have been fudging their criteria for post-graduation success for some time and a JD degree pretty much guarantees nothing any more. As one partner-track attorney told me recently, a job-seeking, newly-minted attorney needs to have a diploma from one of the top ten (not ten percent, ten) law schools in the country, and (not or) have graduated in the top fourth of his/her class, to even be considered for interview by most law firms. Don't have that? So sorry.

College payments have to be evaluated the same way as any other spending, by present value and eventual worth. Fewer and fewer top-tier schools can pass that test.

Hymn for Memorial Day

The traditional hymn of both the Royal Navy and the US Navy was originally penned as, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save." I posted the history of the hymn and its subsequent versions here. Here is the version we will use this Sunday. Verse 2 and 5 are my authorship.

USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, photo by Donald Sensing

Arlington National Cemetery, Memorial Day 2007.
A young woman weeps for her slain fiance.

The U.S. Marine Memorial, Washington D.C.

US Air Force F-15 fighters' "missing man" formation, in which the lead pilot
 ascends heavenward to memorialize comrades who died.

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis, Mo., noontime Memorial Day 2009,
 photo by Donald Sensing

Litany for Memorial Day

These are Power Point slides saved as JPGs. Each background image was set at 50 percent transparency. The text is from The Book of Worship for United States Forces (1974).

Arlington National Cemetery

National Cemetery of the Pacific (the Punchbowl), photo by Donald Sensing

Here is a blank slide. 

Tomb of the Unknowns, Arlington National Cemetery

Death throes of the Blue Model church

If you want to see a microcosm of the decaying and death of Blue Model organizations, California is a good example for government and The United Methodist Church for religious bodies. Every four years the United Methodist Church convenes its General Conference, the only body that can set the denomination's doctrines and denomination-wide legislation. The GC meets for two weeks and adjourned last week in Tampa, Fla. Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, who attended, sums up the two-week fiasco rather well:

General Conference in Tampa made history as the most expensive ($1,500 per minute!), least productive, most fatuous assemblage in the history of Methodism. Sunday evening’s “A Celebration of Ministry” fiasco was a metaphor for our nearly two weeks at church expense: four hours of belabored supplication by the General Commission on Status and Role of Women, five Ethnic National Plans, Strengthening the Black Church for the 21st Century, United Methodist Men, Girl Scouts, Africa University and a number of other agencies I can’t remember. A subtheme of that long night: even though we can’t cite specific fruit, please don’t force us to change or to expend less on ourselves. 

Even after suffering this abuse, General Conference succumbed to the agencies’ pleadings. In a post-GC blog, Mike Slaughter (who with Adam Hamilton eloquently—and futilely—warned GC that we must change or face certain death) told the truth: “Our denominational systems continue to resist change by protecting archaic structures. From our seminaries to boards and agencies, institutional preservation was a strong resistant influence throughout GC. Entrenched organizational bureaucracies resist accountability …”

I did not attend myself, but one delegate, whom I know, said that more than anything else, this General Conference was about money. That is practically the hallmark of the death paroxysms of Blue Model organizations: who gets how much of a shrinking monetary base. And whatever else it may be, the UMC is one of the bluest of the Blue Model organizations out there.

Probably a review of what the Blue Model is would be useful here. Scholar Walter Russell Mead describes the Blue Model as "The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal." The problem is that these things,

... don’t work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we’ve inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them. 

In the old system, both blue collar and white collar workers hold stable jobs, a professional career civil service administers a growing state, with living standards for all social classes steadily rising while the gaps between the classes remain fairly stable, and with an increasing ‘social dividend’ being paid out in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks and so on. Graduate from high school and you were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that gave you a comfortable lower middle class lifestyle; graduate from college and you would be better paid and equally secure. 

Life would just go on getting better. From generation to generation we would live a life of incremental improvements — the details of life would keep getting better but the broad outlines of our society would stay the same. The advanced industrial democracies of had in fact reached the ‘end of history’: this is what ‘developed’ human society looked like and there would be no more radical changes because the picture had fully developed. The blue model rested on the post-Second World War industrial and economic system. The ‘commanding heights’ of American business were controlled by a small number of monopolistic and oligopolistic firms. ... 

The stable economic structure allowed a stable division of the pie. Workers (much more heavily unionized then than now) got steady raises and stable jobs. The government got a stable flow of tax revenues. Shareholders got reasonably steady dividends.

Peter Skurkiss of The Buckeye Institute assesses that the Blue Model is in its death throes:

Simply put, the blue model is unsustainable. The compensation, the benefits, and privileges that were afforded to government workers was possible only with an unusually healthy and robust private sector which itself was made possible by the lack of serious foreign competition. That world no longer exists, nor is it ever likely to again. Governors like John Kasich (Ohio) and Scott Walker (Wisconsin) recognize this fact faster than others, but in the end, all states will have to conform to the new reality.

And not just states and governments or corporations at every level. Blue Model institutional churches are going to be swept away by the new reality as well. And so with the United Methodist Church. Here are the portents that bode ill for the UMC, but these portents are true for most any Blue Model organization.

One
The focal point of dissension within Blue Model organizations is money - who gets it and how much. Beside this question, all others pale. The problem for the UMC is that the General Conference is delegated by a huge majority by men and women who grew up under the Blue Model in its heyday and whose personal influence is derived from expertise in navigating Blue Model sub-institutions.

More than anything else, what brings down Blue Model organizations is that the money stream starts drying up. This is what has happened in the UMC. Personal giving among Methodist church members has declined markedly. Much of the decline can be attributed to the ongoing recession, yes, but not all. Besides, charitable giving is as much a matter of habit as devotion. Even households that have recuperated from the recession have not, on the whole, returned to the prior level of giving, mainly because it is no longer a habit.

And so it was that the General Conference was a two-week scramble by the countless special-interest groups of the church to protect their slice of the pie, without, apparently, much caring that the pie is getting ever smaller. If it is true, as Charles de Gaulle observed, that graveyards are full of indispensable men, it is truer that the UMC is more full of boards and agencies whose special-interest constituents would count it as the Apocalypse come in power if they were more than token downsized. As Bishop Willimon puts it, " The Methodist Federation for Social Action received new life, the [General] Board of Church and Society went home unscathed by reform" and pretty much every other entity of the church maintained an even strain.

What all this means is that the main activity of the two weeks of Conferencing was lobbying by countless entities large and small to protect their share of the general budget. This is exactly why Southern Methodist University Prof. Maria Dixon Hall, a delegate to the Conference, wrote that the UMC is "facing slow, agonizing, organizational death."

Again, winning the battle and losing the war became the strategy of the day. The minority point was clear: if we don’t like what you do or we don’t feel like you gave us enough deference, we will shut it down regardless of whom it hurts. Funny, whether it’s Grover Norquist and the Tea Party or the Methodist Federation for Social Action, the rhetoric of organizational hostage-taking has the same effect—polarization, distrust and, in the end, slow, agonizing, organizational death. 

One of my students in Organizational Communication could look at this mess called GC2012 and diagnose the problem immediately: An 18th Century structure cannot sustain a 21st century global organization. We must be willing to let go of the non-essentials to get back to the first fruits and ideals of why we are a People called Methodist.

Two
A second mark of a Blue Model organization in its death throes is that the Old Guard tries to tighten its grip on its power while the Young Turks demand they relinquish.

In the UMC, the Old Guard are the boards and agencies and the spin-off movements and various constituencies of the church. These are 100 percent American and almost all white. The Young Turks are non-U.S. Methodists, mainly Africans, whose numbers are growing rapidly at the same time that domestic American Methodists continue to dwindle. In 2008, 30 percent of delegates came from outside the United States; this year it was 41 percent. No one doubts that in 2020, foreign Methodist delegates will be the majority and that may well happen only four years from now.

Yet U.S. Methodists paid for 99 percent of the Conference's costs despite insistence from foreign delegations that they pay a larger share. To these requests, the US-based UMC said no, even to the Norwegian delegation!

Money is power, they say, and so we see the real meaning of the Golden Rule:



The American wing of the UMC has passed its peak of influence. Money will not buy it back. As Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, puts it, "United Methodists Transition from Liberal to Global."

Unlike the other traditionally liberal-led Mainline denominations, United Methodism is fully global in membership. ... There are 7.5 million United Methodists in the U.S. and 4.5 million overseas, almost all in Africa, mostly in the Congo. With the U.S. church losing about 100,000 members a year (down from 11 million 44 years ago) and the African church gaining over 200,000 a year, the denomination likely will become a majority non-U.S. church in about 10 years or less. ... 

With over 4 million and soon to be 5 million members, the African churches are now too large to ignore. A few liberal activists, in their blogs, complained about Africans from impoverished countries who don't contribute dollars into the denomination now having so much power. But disenfranchising the poor is not a successful battle cry for progressives. Some U.S. liberals quietly try to paint the Africans as primitives who reject enlightened Western liberalism. ... 

Inevitably the growing African membership will alter these preoccupations with American leftist themes. They believe the church's role is primarily evangelistic, not political.

This is the same type of competition and foreign pressure that led to the decay of the political Blue Model. Back to Prof. Mead:

The blue model began to decay in the seventies. Foreign producers began to erode the market share of lazy, sclerotic American firms – like the Big Three automakers. The growth of offshore financial markets forced the financial services industry to become more flexible as both borrowers and lenders were increasingly able to work around the regulations and the oligopolies of the domestic market. ... These days, private sector blue companies can only survive with vast and continuing government support.

But there is no such equivalent entity to prop up the Blue Model UMC. And so the structure will crash. As economist Herbert Stein said 40-plus years ago, "When something can't go on forever, it won't."

I do not mean that the UMC will disappear, although there is still significant shrinkage of the domestic American church yet to come. I mean that the main indicator of the Blue Model Church's demise is plain: The inability of existing organization to help the UMC prosper.

Like other Blue Model entities, the UMC is organized vertically, itself a consequence of America's victory in World War II, which taught the country that organizations with clear boundaries of authority and defined responsibilities are the keys to success. The defining characteristic of Blue Model organizations is a vertical chain of command and layers of supervision. And so the UMC is organized to the hilt: Bishops preside over Conferences (which is what Methodists call dioceses; each year every Conference has a convention, called an Annual Conference, and every four years the general church holds the General Conference. It took me years to understand all this.) Geographical conferences are further divided into districts, each with a superintendent, who exercises supervision of individual pastors. In turn, Conferences (dioceses) are organized into several Jurisdictions, each with its own set of jurisdictional agencies, and the denomination operates 13 general (churchwide) boards and agencies.

The result is practically a textbook example of a vertically-integrated organization, "An organization whose members look up to bosses instead of out to customers. Loyalty and commitment is given to functional fiefdoms, not the overall corporation and its goals." The Old Guard's loyalty, as Mr. Tooley, Bishop Willimon and Prof. Hall point out, is mainly to the "functional fiefdoms" of the Blue Model church and not to either the structures or goals of the emerging UMC in Africa and elsewhere. Yet, once again, the emerging UMC is really emerging while the Blue Model UMC is declining.

This situation is aggravated by an ecclesial equivalent of the dysfunction of government's Blue Model. Prof. Mead puts it thus: "they are poorly equipped to respond nimbly to the fast-changing conditions of America today." And so with the vertical, Blue Model structure of the UMC. American society is rapidly moving to a new model (of sorts) of horizontal organizations, often of self-organized networks that arise as needed as can pass away just as quickly. This is multi-modal and multi-nodal - flexible of purpose and structure and oriented toward purpose and process more than place or personnel. This is 180 degrees out from the way the UMC works now.

Conclusion
Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, "It's easy for forecast the future, especially in retrospect." One thing is for sure: there are many more tears to be shed and agonies to be endured before the nature of UMC of the 21st century is evident. For the next three or four General Conferences (extending to 2028), the Blue Model devotees will try to hang on. Mead:

[C]ulturally and intellectually, bureaucrats and politicians [read: the UMC's general boards and agencies] often remain blue. That is, they think instinctively in the old ways, come up with blue solutions to non-blue problems, and often fail to grasp either the constraints or the opportunities of the new era.

But this will fail because the Blue Model's center is the American branch of the church. And the center cannot hold. Here are some consequences of the breakdown of the Blue Model UMC that are already evident and will become stronger in the coming years:

1. The great majority of the shrinking domestic base of Methodist lay people are not personally invested  in propping up the Blue Model Methodist Establishment -- and so they won't. Their own Blue Model organizations (unions, job security and guaranteed pensions, etc.) have already gone a-glimmering. Lay people increasingly will see no benefit to themselves from maintaining a Blue Model church. Their concerns are almost exclusively related to the local church and its mission and ministries and not to the activities of general boards, denominational ministries or even the "connectional system," a term that not one lay person in 20 can define.
    
2. Lay people and pastors more and more will not accept the bureaucratic inertia and plodding deliberatism of the Blue Model -- and again, will not pay for it. The hierarchical structures of the church must rediscover what servant ministry means and devote themselves to helping local churches and pastors succeed rather than, in usual Blue Model style, issue edicts from Sinai's peak that must be obeyed. Flexibility and responsiveness by church leaders and agencies to the needs of local churches will be key. From bishops down through Conference offices and superintendents, it must become an embedded value that their purpose is to empower, assist and support local churches. The line of support's direction must run down, not up the chain of command, but this is, frankly, exactly opposite of what we have today.
    
3. Church leaders at all levels will become increasingly frustrated by the glacial inability of the General Conference to accomplish anything meaningful regarding to structure and revisions of UMC's Book of Discipline (the canon law of the church). This will strengthen the already-evident movement among lay people toward congregationalism in the church instead of traditional Methodist connectionalism. Churches will increasingly see themselves as franchise operators rather than subordinate offices, and will begin to take increasing liberties with the directive documents of the Church.
    
4. We are long past the day when Methodism as a “brand” was uniquely attractive. It is very naive to expect that the laity or pastors will somehow become more devoted to the Church's connectional system and the work of general boards and agencies than they are now. The great majority of our people attend our churches because of personal relationships and the particular church’s programs and internal ministries, not because the sign says Methodist.
    
5. The growing influence of the foreign Methodists will become the focal point of dissent among American Methodists over the future of the general church. Largely because of Africa's delegations, the routine quadrennial attempt by the gay lobby (eleventh in a row) at the General Conference to liberalize the church's stance on homosexuality was crushed by 61-39 percent, a larger margin than four years ago. Already there is a move by the liberal wing of the church to form a domestic-church-only Conference, but this would essentially schism the Church and leave the General Conference even more directionless than it is now.

Beyond that my crystal ball is cloudy. One thing is for sure - Bob Dylan had it right: "The times, they are a-changing."  

Update: Rev. Andy Langford's assessments are similar to mine: "Rearranging the deckchairs of a sinking ship, General Conference tossed the paying passengers overboard and saved the lives of the crew."

New policy of the Tennessee Conference on Pastoral Appointments

This is the text of the email I sent to everyone of our congregation on May 16.

I received a document this week via email from the Columbia District Superintendent with instructions to "familiarize your administrative boards and SPRC committees" with it. There seems little point, in my opinion, of sending it to those folks and not to the congregation at large. I have pasted the text below. If you have questions, I will be glad to receive them and pass them to the district superintendent, but I personally do not want to try to interpret this policy on his behalf. I am informed that this policy is in effect now.

As Kevin Carroll announced a couple of Sundays ago, I have been officially notified that I will be reappointed to serve as Westview's pastor for the coming year. Cathy, Elizabeth and I are blessed to be here and are very grateful for continuing service among you all. Thank you all for your support and friendship of the past two years; we hope to enjoy a long tenure of service here to God and our church.

Here is the verbatim text of the policy:
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Guidelines for Right-Sizing Church Appointments

The history and doctrine of The United Methodist Church give evidence to our connectional ministries. Every local church is related to every other local church in the connection. From the earliest days of our existence we have sought to work together in mission and ministry around the world.

In order to help churches that are struggling to pay their pastor’s salary, their apportionments, and other obligations, the Bishop and Cabinet of the Tennessee Conference have instituted the following guidelines for the appointment of pastors to churches and for realigning churches.

1) Churches that are financially able to pay 100% of their apportionments, pay their pastor(s) a salary and benefits that meets or exceeds the conference equitable compensation guidelines and support their local ministry will be considered for a full-time pastor(s).

2) Churches that request more than one pastor (an Associate Pastor or Deacon) but have not paid their apportionments or paid the Pastor’s Salary and benefits in full in the current or preceding year will not be considered for multiple pastors until the church has shown at least three years of full payment of apportionments and pastor’s salary and benefits.

3) Churches that have paid less than 100% of apportionments in at least one year of the previous ten years may be subject to a reconfiguration of pastoral appointment.

a) In consultation with the District Superintendent, the church may reduce its salary and benefits for the pastor and be appointed a pastor who will serve two or more churches. This will give the pastor a bigger responsibility, more people to serve, and hopefully a more stable ministry setting. It will give the church less salary obligations, less of the pastor’s time, and a higher expectation to pay its apportionments in full. It will also require the laity of the congregation to assume more responsibility for the ministry of the church.  

b) In some cases an ordained elder may be appointed to a charge or parish ministry consisting of several churches and multiple clergy. They may consist of some combination of the following: ordained elder, commissioned elder, deacon, local pastor, supply pastor, lay speaker. The ordained elder in charge will make assignments for pastoral care, preaching, and administration of the sacraments, and will give supervision to the clergy and the churches in the parish ministry. 

4) In a select number of cases (to be approved by the Cabinet and the Commission on Equitable Compensation) churches or charges will be considered for equitable compensation with a portion of the salary paid by the Annual Conference. But in every case the expectation will be that the church will pay its apportionments in full each year that it is on equitable compensation. If it fails to do so, it is subject to losing its salary supplement by the conference, and the church being in a reconfigured mode (see 3a and 3b above).

5) In a few cases (to be approved by the Cabinet) a church may be approved for missional support for a given period of time to enable ministry in a setting that is greatly needed but would otherwise be impossible to provide.

6) In a church in which the apportionments or salary(ies) were not paid in full for the current year, the pastor(s) shall not receive nor accept a salary raise for the ensuing year. It is imperative that the salaries of the connectional church and the missional efforts of the denomination be met as well as the salary of the local pastor and the ministry and missions in the local setting.

The cooperation of everyone will assure that the ministry of the local church, the annual conference, and The United Methodist Church remains strong and faithful to the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is our intent to respond to the Call to Action by the Council of Bishops in a way that fosters a new path of accountability and faithfulness. This accountability will also strengthen our ability to “make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”