7 tips to choose a church

1.  avoid Calvinist churches and those that like to pretend evolution is God's method of creation.
2. avoid churches with no active community outreach (and I mean outreach, not in-drag) or evangelistic training and action
3. avoid churches that don't educate kids and youth in the Bible's total picture, its grand narrative and the wonderful theology and picture of reality it teaches
4. avoid churches where the financial statements are not public
5. ensure both sexes, suitably qualified, are involved in church governance
6. check that it has a membership of which at least 30% are active in volunteering in the church
7. check that it has a strategy to connect with new-comers, engage them in the church life and integrate them as disciples of Christ.
   

Death, the World, and Everything

One of the most common fall-back positions for Christians who hold to either a theistic-evolutionary view of origins (that is they think the Bible has one truth and the popular materialist conception of evolution has another truth about the very same thing) or who agree that long ages preceded Adam, as per that same materialist conception of reality, relies on death being an integral component of the creation.

 

The scriptures are quite clear that Adam's rejection of God brought with it death: reject the giver of life and death would inevitably follow, as per God's prediction: they would know good and evil, and evil maximally is death. Thus it is termed 'the last enemy' in scripture.

 

To get out of the implication of Genesis 1-3 that Adam brought death in toto: that is all death everywhere, it is claimed that the Fall brought spiritual death, death that affected only mankind. In this evasion, death would have always been a part of the cosmos, but restricted to all living beings except mankind.

 

But I think this cannot stand in the light of Romans 5:12, which reads:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned

Before sin there was no 'death in the world, the material cosmos'.

 

Sin entered into the cosmos: the created world, in global terms; death came by sin, so the only way death entered the world was by sin.

 

For a 'long-ager' there could be no death (of any type, as Paul is making a global reference to 'cosmos') before sin and therefore no death of any life within that same material cosmos. So how could evolution work, noting Steve Jobs who called death: "death is very likely the single best invention of life; it is life's change agent" at, I think, his Stanford University 2005 commencement address.

I can only guess that his family, and indeed he, himself, are applauding his death still.

Yet another flyer from the local plumber!

Every couple of weeks I receive in my mail box an attractive advertising flyer from a local trades firm: plumber, carpenter, bricklayer, electrician, etc.

Good for them. If you don't advertise, no one knows about you.

I also could expect something from the local church at Christmas, sometimes at Easter as well. Not so anymore, and not even anything at all during the Covid circus that obsessed the Western world in recent years...oh, except for some fringe cults that kept at it, remarkably.

But why?

Why not do a letterbox drop a couple of times a year publicising the programs that might appeal to the demographic of your catchment area? These might be suitable 'community connection' programs to  introduce people to your church and perhaps open the way for involvement with its core mission.

At least they would make your church known and build what marketers are always after: 'mind-share'. So your 'brand' becomes a known thing.

What if you are 18?

My observation of church life, over many churches in several countries over many years indicates wonderful programs for children; often effective and inviting activities for young people: youth at high school. These are of varying quality but the better include social activities, simple entertainment, camp fire cook outs and systematic introduction to the documents of our faith. The Bible, obviously and its instruction about reality and our place in it.

Then you turn 18, and it all stops, like a car hitting a cliff. Why?

In one denomination we developed a program called "20 plus". It was for anyone who'd left high school, but the name seemed good. It attracted people up to about the age of 24 or so and being across the region, led to lots of new people to meet, and maybe even to find a future spouse.

One feature of the house-parties we held was a venue we used which had single rooms with en-suite shower and toilet. That set the standard for what church conferences and 're-groups' should be. No bunking down in barracks like in the army thanks.

From 18 to about 24 these days one is finding one's feet in life and dealing with some major transitions from adolescence to what amounts to yet more adolescence. We no longer grow-up quickly, but remain dependent children for far too long.

Still, a ministry even across a group of churches that provides for the spiritual formation of this age group is essential in a society that is increasingly paganised. My only caveat is that it must appeal to both women and men, without deprecating the typical characteristics of each sex within their normal wide bands, while encouraging formation of godly men and women.

Escaping Sin

What does one make of the sudden flood of Neo-paganism that has seized the Western World and particularly the Anglosphere?

Sin.

The perpetual mission of mankind is to deal with the effects of sin. Or, in other words, the 'problem of evil'. Without recourse to Christ, the creator, who is the source of the resolution of the existential disjunct between experience and real desire, the pagan route is ultimately and ironically thanophilic. A retreat into the cul-de-sac of perdition.

Christians are often told that the 'problem of evil' is particularly our problem. But it is not; it is a universal problem and is revealed as such by every visit to the doctor or dentist, every phone call to avert loneliness and every move to seek companionship, comfort and peace from the moment of birth.

Writ large, it is in every pagan maneuver to adjust to the deeply etched discontents of life.

In the case of paganism in its various forms, it has a number of strategies. These range from removal to an imaginary world and denying the problem; to disregard of it by embracing it in paganism's many forms: thus, seeking to succor the effects of sin, of evil's mark, by falling in line with it in varieties of active monism; seeing the self as absorbed in the continuity of reality without being distinct from it and pretending that this resolves the great disjunct between who we are and who we are made to be.

The two avenues out of the sin-trap are via Christ, who deals with the separation from God without erasing our 'imageness'; and paganism, which has to deny that imageness to achieve its prescription.