WEEKLY COMMENTARY: What Are YOU Looking For At Central Presbyterian Church?

How and where people worship is constantly changing.  Denominations may begin with a fervent few, rise to prominence, then decline.  Others re-invent themselves.   And always there are new denominations springing up.  Over time, church-going seems to mirror in many ways the shifting tastes and needs of evolving populations and cultures.

A Gallop Poll survey in 2012, about how Americans feel about religion, offered some glimpses into our nation's spiritual life.  Gallup asked 320,000 people how religious they considered themselves to be, and how often they attended religious services.  Overall, some 40% of adults considered themselves "very religious," and 29% "moderately" religious, while 31% said they were "non-religious".  Religiousness is "distributed quite unequally across various sub-groups and segments of the U.S. population," says Gallup.

Experts believe that nowhere was "denominational churn" as pronounced historically as in New England.  Over four hundred years ago, religious refugees fled to there, only to establish virtual theocracies.  Later came the Unitarians and other theists, gospel skeptics whose open-mindedness helped frame the U.S. Constitution.  Next up were the personal-savior preachers of the first and second "great awakenings" who fostered a 19th Century populist Christianity.  Then it was on to the Transcendentalists with their celebration of nature and community.

It is said that today's New England is still a religious incubator.  It seems to be in the forefront of the "un-churched" trend.  That is, the growing group who see themselves as spiritually-minded, but not denominational.  New England is seeing a mushrooming of non-mainstream churches, says Gallup.  But, others see a desire for a "hands-on, make-a-difference" type of faith.

One Gallup analyst noted that children today often push away from the familiar and traditional, as they grow up.  But later they will embrace those same traditional qualities as they mature.  Does that mean that church-based religion could become more important in the U.S. in the years to come, as baby boomers age and the number of Americans 65 and older nearly doubles?  According to Gallup, Americans are least religious at age 23, and increasingly religious as they approach age 80.

Through the many decades of change, does there not remain a natural yearning that never goes away ---- a hunger for communication with something beyond ourselves, and for community with other people seeking the same thing?  So, in one sense, all along we have been seeking some special relationships ----- perhaps, one with God, and multiple relationships with like-minded seekers ----- we just hadn't realized this!

In every era, churches have changed outwardly, but perhaps not in their essential purpose.  That's important because when we least expect it, we may suddenly wonder why we are here on earth, and where we are going?  Church can give us a way to work that out.  Maybe church ------- not the building, but the essence of church, can help us understand the real purpose of our lives.

Some say that what's emerging is simply a religious shift in the way faith is practiced.  They see adherents flocking to churches where the difference faith makes is concrete and visible.  Where broadly engaged mission activity invites all to participate.  Where connections fostered in the faith community enable one to nurture the self-discovery of our personal beliefs and faith. People feel that this kind of church connection will keep them on the right path.

On Sunday mornings at CPC, a church with about 700 members, we may see less than 200 worshipers in the 10:00 a.m. Worship Service, but activity in the name of God is thriving in other ways.  There is a lively children's Sunday School taught by members of the congregation.  On Tuesday evenings, CPC hosts 40 youth from inner-city Elizabeth, together with over 60 High School student tutors from Summit and surrounding towns, to spend time together coaching and mentoring.  CPC has a visitation team organized for regular visits each week to CPC member patients (if any) in two local hospitals.  And, there are other groups and individuals called to regularly serve those who are most at risk in our society, the young and the very old.  There is much more!

When one looks at these metrics, CPC is a church that is very alive because it offers so many participation opportunities ---- and new opportunities are discovered and acted upon continually.  Merely counting Worship attendance alone does not fully tell our story.  While the trend of Worship attendance at many Protestant churches does seem to be decreasing, it has done this before, but eventually it recovered.   Look to the "Great Awakenings" of the 19th Century, and the surge of CPC church attendance in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's.

How can CPC help you find more depth in your spiritual life?  It could be the good, old-fashioned way of helping get you better acquainted with the Gospel and the meaning of Discipleship.  Or, it might be through new personal relationships with peers who seek similar growth opportunities, that makes the difference.  For example, consider becoming a participant in one of CPC's hands-on-mission activities.

No two of us will answer these questions in the same way.  But, CPC continues to offer many of the kinds of involvement opportunities that would help each of us find greater spiritual fulfillment.

I am suggesting that if church organizations maintain their historic range of spiritual activities, then there is a good possibility of restoring increased emphasis on traditional Scriptural and in-church Worship.  I wonder if those crying out in alarm at the "head-count" trends they see today, are not jumping to conclusions prematurely?

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These thoughts are brought to you by  CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage you to pursue some personal spiritual growth this summer at CPC.

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WEEKLY COMMENTARY: How Should We Define Sin?

When I was growing up, I would hear adults speak of "sin".  I was taught that it meant doing a "bad" thing or failing to do an appropriate "good" thing.  I was told sin should definitely be avoided.  It was characterized as a regrettable action taken or not taken by someone.  But. it also seemed to have something to do with God.  However, it seemed to me as I heard people use the word, that a sin could be just any offense against religious or moral law.  Often it seemed to be simply the treatment of other people unfairly or cruelly.

In my middle-age years, I became curious for a more precise definition of "sin".  I came across the writings of Rev. Timothy Keller.  He is the Senior Pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he founded in 1989, and which today has nearly six thousand regular attendees at five weekly services.

Pastor Keller writes, "Most people think of SIN primarily as simply 'breaking divine rules'.  But SIN is not just doing bad things.  SIN is taking what we prize as a good, some self-beneficial thing, and making it into the ultimate thing.  It is seeking to establish our sense of self by making something else more central to our life's significance, purpose and happiness, than our relationship to God.

Pastor Keller believes that our need for self-worth is so powerful that on whatever we base our identity and self-value, we essentially end up "deifying" it.  We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think of ourselves as highly non-religious.  Many look to their work and career for their cosmic  significance.  We want to be rid of our feeling of nothingness ----- we want to know that our existence will not have been in vain.

He continues ----- "There are an infinite number of personal identity bases.  Some people get their sense of "self" from gaining and wielding power, others from human approval, others from self-discipline and control.  But everyone is building their identity on something !"

This leads Pastor Keller to cite the Christian doctrine of "Original Sin" ----- humanity's inherent character-defect of pride and self-centeredness.  "The Bible explains again and again," he says, "that people's hearts are inescapably drawn toward selfishness and pride.  The Bible tells us how we should live as God's people.  But it also says, "you can't and you won't."

"Human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love, says Pastor Keller.  For example, if our highest goal in life is the good of our family, we will tend to care less for other families.  If our ultimate goal in life is just our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power influences ahead of such interests in others.  If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic.  Thus, only if God is our ultimate goodness and life-center, will we find that our heart can be drawn out not only to other people in other families, races, and classes, but to much of the world in general.

Pastor Keller believes it is far harder than we think to have a self-identity that doesn't lead to the exclusion of some other people.  There is a real culture war taking place, he says, inside our own disoriented hearts, wracked by desires for things that in effect control us.  Things that lead us to feel superior and exclude certain other  people.

Everybody has to live for something.  Whatever that something might be, it will become the "Lord of your life", whether you think of it that way or not.  Jesus is the only lord, if you receive him, who will fulfill you completely, and if you fail him, will forgive you for eternity.

Pastor Keller concludes by declaring that "SIN" is not simply doing bad things.  It is putting what you call the "good" things in the place of God.  So, the only solution is not just to change our behavior, but to re-orient and re-center our entire heart and life directly on GOD.  

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These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage you to pursue some spiritual growth this summer at CPC.

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WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Why Don't New Facts Necessarily Change a Contrary Belief Which Is Already Strongly- Held?

A bulletin board exhibit entitled "The History of Hand Washing" once on display at Overlook Hospital, illustrates how difficult it can be to change strongly-held social beliefs.  It is a story about Dr. Ignaz Semmelwies.

Moral attitudes are especially difficult to change because the attached emotions largely define WHO  WE  ARE.  Certain beliefs thus become so important to us that they become an essential part of our identity. 

Dr. Semmelwies was the Chief Resident in surgery at the Vienna General Hospital in 1847.  At the time, the theory of diseases was highly influenced by ideas of an imbalance of the "basic four humors" in the body, for which the main treatment was blood lettings.

At the Vienna General Hospital there were two OBGYN clinics.  Clinic #1 was a broad-ranging teaching service for medical students.  Clinic #2 was exclusively for the instruction of midwives.  At the time, the staff were quite puzzled about a persistent difference in the mortality rates of the two clinics.

A good friend of Dr. Semmelwies died after accidentally being poked with a student's scalpel while performing a postmortem exam.  The autopsy of the deceased friend showed a pathology similar to women in Clinic #1 who were dying of puerperal fever.  The latter is an infection of a woman's placenta following  delivery or abortion, sometimes causing death by the infection passing into the blood stream.

Dr. Semmelwies proposed that there could be a connection between contamination from cadavers and the deadly puerperal fever.  He concluded that he and the medical students carried "cadaverous particles" on their hands from the autopsy room to the patients in OBGYN Clinic #1, causing puerperal fever and the higher incidence of patient deaths, than in Clinic #2.  He believed this explained why the student midwives in Clinic #2 (who were not engaged in autopsies and had no contact with the corpses) saw no mortality.

Dr. Semmelwies instituted a policy of requiring use of a solution of calcium hypochlorite for washing hands between autopsy work and the examination of patients in Clinic #1.  Mortality rates then dropped dramatically in Clinic #1.

Regardless of these facts, many doctors in Vienna were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands.  They felt that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.  As a result, Dr. Semmelwies' ideas were rejected by by the medical community.  Perfectly reasonable hand-washing proposals were ridiculed and rejected by Dr. Semmelwies' contemporaries in the 1840's.  The ideas of Dr. Semmelwies were said to be in conflict with established medical opinions, regardless of being consistent with scientific facts.

It was years after his death that Dr. Semmelwies' hand-washing requirement earned widespread acceptance, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease.  Pasteur's experiments demonstrated that organisms such as bacteria were responsible for souring wine, beer and even milk.  Today the process he invented for removing bacteria by boiling and then cooling a liquid (pasteurization) is not in dispute, but it took decades for acceptance.  Today, Dr. Semmelwies is recognized in medical circles as a pioneer in antiseptic policy.

According to the Overlook Hospital exhibit, "Semmelwies Reflex" is a term applied today to a certain type of human behavior characterized by reflex-like rejection of new knowledge when it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms.

For example, when the subject of climate change comes up in conversation today, some people deny the scientific findings which many other people have accepted as true.  Likewise, if we think humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, can we accept as fact the theory of Evolution?  To believe in Evolution requires some rejection of literal Bible teaching, which in turn could cause some believers to fear that they are compromising their deeply-held religious belief system ----- perhaps weakening their long-held belief in God and His power over us.  Furthermore, some might fear that such rejection of literal Bible teaching would alienate them from their particular social, political or religious group and it's values.  Many times it is just that doubters feel that it is actually their established identity and unique sense of self that are being challenged by the new information, not just the truth of the newly proposed facts.

We tend to side with people who share our identity.  However, if a member of our identity group makes a major change in his or her identity beliefs, we might react negatively by calling them a "flip-flopper".  It is as thought those who change their minds by accepting new "facts" are in some way being unfaithful to their group.  This can further discourage one from accepting any new facts as "true".

However, people change their minds all the time.  But when the identity stakes are high, achieving that change of mind may be hard to accomplish.  That's why just marshaling objective data and making rational arguments sometimes will not necessarily bring the adoption of new beliefs.

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These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage in you some spiritual growth this summer.

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WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Have Church Efforts To Care For Others Replaced Our Focus On Traditional Scriptural Grounding and Bible

In the Twentieth Century, American Christians seemed divided between the liberal Mainline churches that stressed caring for others and social outreach, and the fundamentalist churches that emphasized personal salvation through Bible-study based faith.

Should a Christian follow traditional evangelism, which took pains to save people's souls, even if it did nothing about the systems locking then into debilitating poverty?  But to some, the price for emphasizing the caring for others and doing social outreach would be the weakening of one's sound Scriptural grounding and knowledge, and thus the lessening of one's zeal for saving souls.  On the other hand, in the world then and now, we see so much poverty and painful need all around us.  Can we really turn a blind eye?  But today, how can we possibly go in both directions at once? 

Some have argued that Christians should only do social outreach and caring for others as the means of advancing the faith.  That is, we should do mercy and outreach only because it helps  us bring people to faith in Christ.  But, this does not seem to fit in with Jesus' charge not to give to needy people only to get something in return (Luke 6: 32 - 35).  "Doing" social outreach can indeed draw people to listen to the message of the Gospel, but to consider that deeds of mercy and caring are identical to Gospel proclamation is not correct.

So, perhaps there is more than one technique for obtaining Scripture grounding.  Traditionally, it was done by "preaching" Scripture, paraphrasing Bible stories and otherwise teaching Scripture by word of mouth.

But, sometimes people's ears are "closed" to such words.  Either they do not believe the words, or they can't muster the desire to live by them.  Sometimes instead, what really moves and excites people is real-life examples that exemplify the Scripture teachings ---- actions taken in everyday life that are selfless efforts to help other human beings.  Think about the Good Samaritan parable !  We quote that story to this day, even though not a word of Scripture was reported to have been said !

Let's look for a link between Bible Study and the example we project as practicing Christians, as mirrored in our actions toward others.

Imagine an eloquent Christian preacher who every Sunday delivers compelling sermons.  But one of his parishioners learns that the minister verbally abuses and browbeats his wife daily.  After the parishioner discovers this, for him the sermons are completely unpersuasive.  Are you surprised?  The preacher's deeds contradict his words, and so the preacher's words have no power.

Imagine instead, a new minister whose public oratory is quite mediocre.  However, as time goes on, the parishioners come to see that he is a man of sterling character, wisdom, humility and love.

Soon, because of the quality of how he lives his life, his church members find that they are hanging on every word of his preaching.  His deeds and behavior support his words.

Deeds of mercy and caring should be done out of love, not simply by rote ---- not simply by going through the motions of social outreach.  Indeed, at the same time there is no better way for Christians to lay a foundation for their Scriptural understanding and belief than by doing social outreach.  Why?  I suggest that active social outreach is a helpful antidote to our natural tendency to think first about serving ourselves, about which Scripture has plenty to say !

Deeds of caring and mercy can take many forms.  A person can serve in a soup kitchen for the homeless, visit and encourage hospital patients, collect used clothing for the poor or bring meals to the handicapped.  Or, it can be as simple as helping neighbors with their children's educational needs, or with finding a job, or helping them learn English as a second language.

If we wish to share our faith with needy people, and we do nothing about the painful conditions in which they live (whether they be rich or poor), we fail to really show Christ's beauty.  But, we must find a balance between seeking Scriptural understanding and belief, and "doing" social outreach.  We must not separate these two things from each other.  The problem is that both goals use up a person's available time.  How will each of us intentionally find the proper personal balance?

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These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage your personal spiritual growth this summer at CPC.

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WEEKLY COMMENTARY: We May Bring Some Blindness To Our Understanding Of The Bible

Consider the origins Biblical Scripture.  Some of it is more than 2,000 years old, was written in various languages by authors who may not have compared notes very carefully, and has been translated for us by people of different cultures and different eras.  Should we be surprised that Bible text is sometimes confusing?

Nevertheless, many of us believe that Scripture is divinely inspired and contains very important guidance and truth on how we should live our lives.

But, there are some "outside" factors which may color a reader's interpretation of the Bible.  Let's examine four such "outside" factors, and then try to keep them in perspective when we read the Bible.

1.)  Failing to distinguish between the Bible's major themes and message, and its less important ideas.

Some people say, for example, that they cannot accept how the Bible portrays gender roles ---- men routinely dominant over women.  So, if they are not sure about gender roles, they are not sure about many other things the Bible tells them.  However, Christians do seem to agree that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day of his crucifixion.  Are the doubters saying that because they do not like what the Bible says about gender roles, let's say, that it is false that Jesus was raised from the dead?

If Jesus is the Son of God, then we must take his teachings seriously.  If he is not

whom he says he is, then why should we care what the Bible says about anything else?  In short, people should not worry about such things as gender roles as reflected in the Bible, until they have decided whether they believe that Jesus' teachings are central to our faith.

2.)  Forgetting that the New Testament is actually all about Jesus.

If you think the Bible"s purpose is just for your benefit ---- what you must do and how you must live ---- then you do not need Jesus.  All you need are the rules Jesus has given us.  Actually, there are just two ways to read the Bible:

     a.) You can read the New Testament as if it is all about you and what you must do to please God and be a good person.

     OR

    b.) You can read the New Testament as if it is all about Jesus and what he has done for us, and wants us to do for him.

3.)  Jumping to conclusions that may be false, about what a Bible passage is actually teaching.

Be patient with the text.  Many of the things people find offensive can be cleared up with a decent commentary reference book that puts the issue into historical context.  The Bible text may not be teaching what you at first thought it did.

4.)  The culture in which one grows up may uniquely shape how we "hear" what the Bible teaches. 

This can often be the source of some misunderstanding.  Perhaps one is offended by certain biblical texts because of an un-examined assumption of the superiority of one's own cultural moment.  The Disciples traveling on the road to Emmaus misunderstood the prophesies about the Messiah because as Jews they were thinking of the redemption of Israel, and not the redemption of the world.  It is so easy to mistakenly read a Bible passage through one's cultural "blinders" and therefore misunderstand what the text really teaches.

Some people may say a passage is regressive and offensive because it creates a conflict with principles in their particular culture.  But other cultures may treat the same passage as perfectly acceptable.  For example, in some cultures, what the Bible says about sex is a problem, but there are no issues about what it says about forgiveness.  In other cultures, there may be acceptance of what the Bible says about sex, but what the Bible says about forgiveness is considered ridiculous.  Why should one set of cultural sensibilities prevail over everyone else's?

So, here's a suggestion.  Might there be value in reading and re-reading, discussing and pondering, a Scriptural passage over and over, in the hope of weakening our reader's "blinders".  Through the use of such "cultural humility," gradually the truer meaning of the Scriptural teaching may become more clear.  For many Bible students, part of the thrill of reading and studying Scripture is precisely the wrestling with the text, and pondering the questions it leaves with us.

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These thoughts are brought to you by Central's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage some personal spiritual growth this summer at Central Church.

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