Summit Ministries

Todd Hunter has been through just about every expression of American evangelicalism that exists and has come to rest in the Anglican Mission in America (AMIA). His journey has included stops at Calvary Chapel, Vineyard, Allelon, the Alpha Course, and the Emergent Village.

In the latest issue of Christianity Today, Todd was asked about his time with the emergent church movement ("The Unlikely Anglican," interview by David Neff). In his answer, he offers two critiques of the emergent church movement that I found helpful and unique. In his own words: 

First, the emergents are so sensitive to issues of community, relationship, egalitarianism, and being non-utilitarian in their relationships, that evangelism has simply become a synonym for manipulation - a foul ball relationally. If you and I were work colleagues and I built a relationship in which I could influence your journey toward Christ, that would be considered wrong in these circles. I cannot be friends with you if I intend to lead you to Christ.

I find that a very interesting point, though of course we are talking here of those fully within the emergent movement (not those who are placed into that camp wrongly because they are just trying new things...). It is the full embrace of postmodern epistemology by emergents that creates this dilemma - how can one try to lead someone to embrace their faith when there are no grounds from which to be certain of it? Further, influencing another to embrace Christianity smacks of the marginalization of other faiths which, according to postmoderns, was one of the more destructive aspects of a Christianity shaped by modernism.

Second, after 10 or 12 years of the emerging church, you have to ask where anything has been built. Evangelism has been so muted and the normal building of structures and processes hasn't moved forward because there's no positive, godly imagination for doing either evangelism or leadership. Such things are by definition utilitarian, and so they were made especially difficult.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/ipsmice/

This past Saturday, I sat in for David Wheaton as host of The Christian Worldview. Joined by two terrific guests, Ben Williams and Michael Craven, we discussed our culture's fascination with celebrity and the collapse of traditional marriage.

If you missed the show, you can listen here.

Tomorrow (7/11), I will be filling in for David Wheaton on his two-hour call-in radio show "The Christian Worldview." (David has a pretty good excuse for missing his own show: he's on his honeymoon to Scotland)

In the lineup tomorrow are two timely topics and two great guests. During the first hour, we'll review what we can learn about our culture from the last two weeks of celebrity veneration surrounding the death of Michael Jackson and the resulting media frenzy. I will be joined by Ben Williams, the director of the Bryan College Worldview Team and the director of our Summit conferences in Tennessee and Virginia. Ben has his finger on the pulse of the entertainment world and its impact on our culture. 

(By the way, we'll also discuss the world of "Christian entertainment").

In the second hour, I will be joined by Michael Craven, who is an author, speaker, and the president of the Center for Christ and Culture. Michael and I will discuss the astounding cover article on marriage from this week's TIME magazine. The recent public failures of Mark Sanford, John and Kate, and John Edwards, as well as the big push in state after state to legalize gay marriage, has put the marriage issue back on the cultural forefront (where it should be). Michael Craven is a published expert on Marriage, Family, and Society.

The Christian Worldview is nationally broadcast to hundreds of stations (and online). To find out where to listen, click here.

Time magazine's cover story this week, even amidst the mass hysteria about Michael Jackson, was about marriage ("Is There Hope for the American Marriage" by Caitlin Flanagan). Very well written, it argues that the destruction of marriage is having a brutal impact economically and socially on culture at large. Of course, we need only look across the Atlantic to see how the degradation of marriage is turning out to be the suicide of Europe.

What is most interesting is that Flanagan traces the marriage crisis to the core definition of marriage itself, concluding that marriage can only survive if it is not about meeting our personal needs for sex or love but if it is about producing and preserving the next generation. Further, Flanagan cites extensive evidence, as well as quotes from our last four Presidents (including Obama, ironically), that the next generation is always cared for best when both parents are in the home!

What makes the article most astounding, however, is not what it says but what it does not say. As Flanagan attacks the pop-narcissism of easy divorce and sexual infidelity as resulting from a fundamentally bad definition of marriage, it also point by point destroys, albeit indirectly, each of the major arguments for same-sex marriage! Of course, this elephant in the room is not addressed directly in the article.

It is well worth the read, and you can find the article here.  But, don't stop there.

Also this week, Christianity Today offered an feature article on the same-sex marriage issue ("Is the Gay Marriage Debate Over?" by Mark Galli). Read this with the Time article and you will see how the arguments made in the Time article apply to same-sex marriage, too. 

The most helpful thing about Galli's article is that he reminds us that gay marriage is not what will kill marriage. It is a symptom of what is already killing marriage. He writes: 

We cannot very well argue for the sanc tity of marriage as a crucial social institu tion while we blithely go about divorcing and approving of remarriage at a rate that destabilizes marriage. We cannot say that an institution, like the state, has a perfect right to insist on certain values and behavior from its citizens while we refuse to submit to denominational or local church author ity. We cannot tell gay couples that mar riage is about something much larger than self-fulfillment when we, like the rest of heterosexual culture, delay marriage until we can experience life, and delay having children until we can enjoy each other for a few years.

In short, we have been perfect hypocrites on this issue. Until we admit that and take steps to amend our ways, our cries of alarm about gay marriage will echo off into oblivion.

This does not mean we should stop fighting initiatives that would legalize gay marriage. Gay marriage is simply a bad idea, whether one is religious or not. But it's bad not only because of what it will do to the social fabric, but because of what it signals has already hap pened to our social fabric. We are a culture of radical individualists, and gay marriage does nothing but put an exclamation point on that fact. We should fight it, because it will only make a bad situation worse.

Galli's article has been posted by a blogger here.

Each day this week, I will join Greg Wheatley on Moody Radio's Prime Time America for a 6 minute segment. PTA is Moody's daily afternoon drive time show. My feature will air during the first hour, beginning at 3pm MST (5pm EST). You can listen here.

My good friend T.M. Moore posted an interesting comment on the recent American Idol finale. I have quoted the short article, in its entirety, below. You can find it, and more resources from T.M. here.

For the sixth time in eight seasons, a professing Christian has been elected the newest "American Idol." I know I should be glad about this. After all, pop culture is a legitimate field of endeavor - within certain limits - and if someone has to be recognized by all the pop afficionados in the land, it may as well be a Christian. I guess. I just wish that something Christian would show up in a more significant area of endeavor. Like some Christian lawyer winning a case before the Supreme Court by citing Biblical precedent and demonstrating the fallacy of progressive law. Or some Christian businessman pioneering an endeavor to create new jobs for the increasing ranks of the jobless. Or some Christian preacher casting off all restraints and emulating his colonial predecessors in the pulpit by holding forth consistently on Biblical issues with respect to politics, morality, culture, and the good society. Or a Christian President, I don't know, acting in some manner consistent with his profession of faith. That would really be good news. Instead, we have another Christian American Idol. Does that language strike anyone besides me as strange? After all, it takes a lot of time and effort, not only to become a pop idol, but to follow "American Idol" through to the final night and elect your fellow believer to the pantheon of pop idols. Surely there are other endeavors as worthy - perhaps more worthy - than this? It's worth a thought anyway.

On Tuesday May 12, High Country Home Educators is hosting a one-day Family Worldview Conference in partnership with Summit Ministries and Axis. This conference, which will feature specialized sessions for parents, teenagers, and pre-teens, will help you equip your families to think Biblically in a non-Christian culture.

Only 20% of teens who are highly churched will still be spiritually active by age 29, according to a Barna.org study. Only 9% of Americans have a Biblical Christian worldview, according to another recent Barna.org study. This includes homeschool students. Are you interested in encouraging your homeschool families to prepare their college-bound students for the ideas they will face in college? Do you desire to help your homeschool families teach their children how to be like Paul in the marketplace in Athens, quoting the poets of their society to bring people toward Christ? Maybe we can help…

The goals of this one day event include:

1. To demonstrate the reality that ideas have consequences – especially ideas from popular culture.

2. To teach parents and their students about the concept of a worldview and the importance of understanding the worldviews that are present in our culture.

3. To convince parents and their students of the necessity of critical thinking through instruction, interaction and modeling between the AXiS team members and your students.

John Stonestreet, Executive Director of Summit Ministries will conduct sessions for parents. John is a highly sought after speaker at Homeschool Conventions around the country, and his sessions will include (1) "Why Students Walk Away from Their Faith (and what we can do about it);" (2) "Why a Worldview Education is Absolutely Crucial;" and (3) "The World of Worldviews: Making Sense of Your World."

AXiS will be teaching the students. The Axis style of communication implements an energetic team approach. Each session will be led by one teacher who will be supported by 3-6 team members comprised of alumni from the Focus on the Family Institute and Summit Ministries staff members. The team will perform skits, facilitate small groups, and present current popular culture examples. This engaging, high-energy presentation will be enjoyable for your students and equip them with information that will impact the rest of their lives.

This event is sponsored by the High Country Home Educators Support Group in Colorado Springs and will be held on Tuesday, May 12th at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. It is open to the public, but you must register here.

Please spread the word about this very important event.

To learn more about AXiS, please visit the Axis website.

Plato once quoted Socrates as saying that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” We suggest that “the unexamined faith is not worth believing.” We would love to help you encourage your families and their students to take their thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5) and to live out an examined faith in Jesus Christ.

One of the defining moments in my personal journey was a class I took in seminary from Dr. John Woodbridge on the history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism in America. As someone frustrated with and running from my own pseudo-fundamentalist heritage, the class helped me place my own limited experiences, as well as pace my grumpiness with it.

The class both clarified my complaints and chastened them, as I realized where I had come from in a larger ecclesiological sense. With a childhood in a church and school which followed the lead of Jerry Falwell (first as an independent fundamental Baptist church then as a more mainstream Baptist church), college years in first a liberal Mennonite college and then at a school named after the greatest enigma in fundamentalism (William Jennings Bryan), seminary at Reformed Theological and eventually Trinity Evangelical, my church makeup was plenty diverse but my understanding of where these various streams of evangelicalism had come from was thoroughly anemic.

I learned from Dr. Woodbridge how many silly assumptions I had because I was operating from my limited experience without any understanding of real history. In my view, this is epidemic in the American evangelical church - we have what my friend Debbie Brezina calls evangelical Alzheimer's. Personally, I went through a Christian school, Christian college, and nearly halfway through seminary without having to learn church history. The little I did get was truncated or strangely juxtaposed together.

I tend to think this overall lack of church history is one reason why what has come to be known as emergent thought is so attractive. In so many ways, it is merely a rehashed liberalism, but so many don't realize it because they have no clue about the modernist/fundamentalist battles of the early 1900's. They literally think that Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren and Tony Jones are on to something new. Further, it is not uncommon for those in this crowd to toss around the "fundamentalist" label as the emergent equivalent of the scarlet letter while offering really bad definitions of it because, again, they don't know the history of the term.

Without a basic knowledge of recent church history, emergents seem "cutting edge." When understood within this history, they seem presumptuous, naive and arrogant. (I recently saw a "conversation" between one of these emergent leaders and a well-known evangelical leader. The emergent leader was waxing eloquent about the lack of compassion in evangelicalism, forgetting that his older counterpart had spent the last 50 years taking care of prisoners and their families. For what it's worth, I also think that the reactionary response of too many conservatives resembles the mistakes the second wave of fundamentalism made in the mid 20th century, but that's another blog topic.)

I bring up all of this because a friend and former professor from Bryan College has written a nice little history of fundamentalism in America while also dealing with some of the bad definitions of fundamentalism that are thrown around. Dennis Ingolfsland is a terrific scholar, especially in Jesus studies, whose blog is worth following. And, his entry from a few days ago on fundamentalism is especially terrific.

For more on the history of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, see George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture, or see the summary chapter in James Davidson Hunter's Culture Wars.

Summit Ministries is the feature of the latest "Discourse" podcast on Breakpoint. Breakpoint, founded by Chuck Colson, has recently spearheaded an initiative to link like-minded worldview ministries, and Summit Ministries has been a key part of this new network. The "Discourse" podcast is hosted by Stephen Reed. You can find the podcast here.