by Matthew Raley A church is not a business. A church is a town.

Many kinds of people live in a town, and they stay because, in their diverse ways, they are connected to the town's life. A doctor can live in the same town as a carpenter because both contribute to its vitality. A town has different sections in which people congregate at different times for different reasons. The variety of resources available -- available in an organic and free way -- is what makes the town feel lively.

A town doesn't have a mission, in the business sense. It has a culture. It doesn't  tell residents where to go, or what their priorities should be, or what skills they should have. Such a town would be oppressive. A town is attractive if the way of life it offers is strong, meaning there's energy and laughter and productivity. Businesses contribute mightily to that life, but ultimately they are nurtured by the town.

So with a church. It is a congregation of differences united in a life.

Churches often become oppressive because they drive out diversity, as if they were businesses working a plan. Seeking to be purposeful, such churches instead become destructive.

I think one of the toughest challenges of pastoral leadership is nurturing oneness in diversity.

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column this week that caught the problem.

He describes the traits that make a good business executive.  Three studies of strong executives, he says, have shown that "warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive."

Such findings swim upstream. Many leadership books emphasize that the CEO should be out relating to people, showing his or her human side. There is a glut of writing on team dynamics, on inspirational leadership, and on "vision," as if business people are temperamentally unsuited for their jobs.

There is also a deep-rooted aversion to business culture among professionals in literature, education, and the arts, who use business as a cuss word, and think the marketplace is inherently crass.

Brooks is onto the cultural animosity that makes the critique empty.

The personality types that make great business people are not strong on being reflective or expressive. "For this reason, people in the literary, academic and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success. That’s because the virtues that writers tend to admire — those involving self-expression and self-exploration — are not the ones that lead to corporate excellence."

What we have here, Brooks says, is one culture sniping at another. It's just, They should be more like us.

"Fortunately," he writes, "America is a big place. Literary culture has thrived in Boston, New York and on campuses. Political culture has thrived in Washington. Until recently, corporate culture has been free to thrive in such unlikely places as Bentonville, Omaha and Redmond." He wonders what a drive for control from Washington will do to the nation's life.

Churches should be big places -- even the numerically small churches. They should have little districts where the arts, social action, scholarship, and enterprise all thrive, and those districts should be open to traffic, so that people congregate at different times and for different reasons.

Like a town.

We all read 1 Corinthians 12 about the body and its diversity, and we all agree with it. But we tend to say, "Yeah, those people really need me," in blunt rejection of the text's point.

These days, churches seem to cater to specific interest groups. They gather a demographic -- Mosaics, say -- and they base their oneness on their shared cultural perspective, implicitly or explicitly criticizing all the others. This is an illusory oneness, and the illusion is ugly.

Actual oneness in Christ comes when people of diverse races, professions, and ages form a way of life together founded on his atoning death and resurrection. They form a culture based on love. They live together in a little town. I have seen that this oneness is attractive.

And, as a pastor, I have learned that I cannot nurture it by remaining a small man.

by Christopher Raley The man who smokes holds his thoughts with finger tips and rolls them like the rosary beads of morning. Every slip of action, every fault of line is a meditation for the great strength of always future.

Last week burdens clutter spaces of now like little shards of broken glass landscape the road. The man takes them in, one by one, slow fingers at his lips, and draws thoughts upon the debts at his feet.

Last week clouds clear blue and dying green to shine brighter a contrast that will grey and brown hills for summer. The road that climbs between the market and the church, the dark-trunked olive trees that shade the blinkless goat chewing— life is a frame for staring while time taps ashes to pavement.

Sometimes a car crosses the fault-line of past to horizon, and the man who smokes purses his lips and points his squint toward freedom.

I can do four presentations about my book that are suitable for many groups and settings. My biographical info and picture are on the About Matt page, and you can click here if you're interested in having me speak to your group. A Fresh Look at the Samaritan Woman

Meet the woman at the well as she really was. Peel away layers of misconceptions, generalizations, and assumptions about her. Discover why a woman hardened by abuse and competing religious agendas engaged with a Jewish rabbi named Jesus (John 4:1-42). A sermon or a workshop presentation in one session (45 min).

From St. Helena to Sychar

Tour Main Street in a place taken over by a new regime. See the impact of the diversity culture as it changes the town’s demographics, spiritual priorities, and moral compass. The changes in St. Helena, California are similar to those in Sychar (John 4:1-42), where Jesus met the Samaritan woman. Be refreshed by encountering the Savior who is bigger than any cultural regime. A single-session workshop presentation or a sermon (45 min). Works best with interaction.

Four Ways Jesus Spoke to Hostility

Discover the practical ways Jesus met the Samaritan woman’s antagonism (John 4:1-26). With each step, you’ll go beyond pat answers and cross the barriers people put up against the gospel every day. You’ll also see how Jesus’ methods will deepen your own spiritual life. A single-session workshop presentation or a sermon (45 min). Works best with interaction.

Can the Bible Speak to People Appropriately?

Some believers think the Bible can’t minister to people today unless we fix it, force it to behave. Others think Christians are duty-bound to be culturally offensive, lest they compromise the Bible. Is it possible that we don’t know the Bible well enough? Discover how Jesus used Scripture to open up a healing dialogue with a hostile listener. A sermon with detailed exposition and theological material, also suitable as a lecture (55 min).

I can also do a retreat or conference:

The Diversity Culture: Creating Conversations of Faith

Session 1: Barriers

A hard look at the cultural divide between evangelicals and the diversity culture, covering media narratives, identity formation, postmodern attitudes, and negative experiences.

Session 2: Truths

A theology from the Gospel of John for healing our relationships in the diversity culture. This theology is grounded in the doctrines of the Bible, the community of believers, and the resurrection of Christ as applied by John.

Session 3: Strategies

A close examination of how Jesus interacted so successfully with the Samaritan woman (John 4).

A series of retreat or conference presentations (1 hour each) that survey the content of the book. Though challenging, the sessions include many stories from personal experience, as well as media references that will engage listeners. The presentations can be tailored to any church audience, but would be especially helpful for training leaders.

by Matthew Raley Another link sent by conductor Kyle Wiley Pickett from the North State Symphony's program for this weekend. Here is Karl Bohm and the Vienna Symphony with the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in E flat.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FqZgxydYT0&feature=related]

by Matthew Raley My email command center refreshes the inevitable advertisements whenever I so much as breathe. So I find myself confronted with faces smoothed from wrinkles and thighs cured of cellulite -- all by the miracle of photoshop. When the screen isn't filled with skin, there are rows of teeth.

I understand the intent. I'm supposed to be repelled by the yellow teeth, and attracted to the white ones. And, lo, I am repelled by mouths full of yellow, though the sight of lips drawn back and gums glistening with you-know-what isn't exactly delightful.

But I have to admit that I'm not attracted to the white teeth either. For starters, they're just another photoshop fantasy. Also, when drawn-back lips reveal yellow, the implication is one of age, disease, perhaps odor. When the lips and gums show stark white, it's like my computer screen is growling at me. I don't know whether to laugh or run.

Furthermore, it's just a fact: some chemical compound stripped this person's teeth. And if the toxin is capable of that, what's it going to do to the liver?

Ultimately, what bothers me about the pictures of white teeth is that I'm looking at the newest pose of self-absorption. Face against mirror, lips stretched, looking up, looking down, evaluating the yellow. Do this pose once and you'll never be able to stop, because we're always wondering, "Am I hideous?"

Yesterday I finished unChristian: What A New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity ... and Why It Matters.

This is a serious book, a salutary contribution to the debate about evangelical problems. It is filled with careful analysis, rigorous comparisons of data, and balanced conclusions. The book is honest, the statistics illuminating, and the interviews well-selected, yielding an account of outsiders' perceptions that rings true.

David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons give, on the whole, sensible guidelines to change these perceptions. I do not find a compromise of the gospel in this book, or a wavering on moral standards. The most commonly repeated admonition is to listen to outsiders before correcting them. You should read unChristian and be instructed.

I only have one concern about this book. The frame it adopts is mistaken. On the back cover, scattered through the pages, and stated in the first sentence is the way the authors want us to interpret their data: "Christianity has an image problem."

Like members of any subculture, evangelicals are sensitive about how they look to outsiders. They feel like they cannot belong to the mainstream, like they can never be understood, like the ways of their group are an embarrassment. They scheme to prove the outsiders wrong, to show who they "really are," which involves getting the rest of the subculture to look right.

The seeker-sensitive movement was a particularly ruthless example. We were told that our churches were comprehensively embarrassing. We were told to look and sound different. If you didn't go along, then you didn't care about The Lost.

Kinnaman and Lyons are not peddling that old message. They go deeper into the issues, and their prescriptions for evangelicals are often aimed restoring simple godliness.

But I think they made a mistake in catering to the evangelical obsession with image. We've been gum-to-mirror evaluating the yellow for years. We've rinsed our teeth with chemicals over and over, asking each time, "Do we twinkle now?" Our smile has only become more frightening.

The long, hard look unChristian offers at what we are doing and saying is needed. But the most powerful impression I get from it is that evangelicals are self-absorbed. The root of their problem is their vanity. The spiritual change we need will not come from image-sensitivity, which can only motivate changes of systems, mission, and presentation.

We have to be new.

Such transformations require us to pull our faces off the mirror and gaze upon the image of the invisible God.

by Christopher Raley Oracle speaks in the living room while wind beats huddled houses with her fury. Thelonious: Again now tell us of peace you find in misery’s laughter, humiliation’s pride.

But can you speak beauty as bare-skin light of dawn unveils valley parchment its smear of sight? Or is yours only for laughter at the south road shining its golden rush between winter fields brown and fallow?

The river has a mischief too, its course slowly to bend and upset orchards carefully squared. Far hills like wrinkled canvass spread their jest below blue silk torn of edge and splotched by the white hand.

Are there any here you can voice through the urban angles of your ironic malice? The oracle has no need but a faint breath of harmony. For he too will rise east—and the fire-scarred land

where pines stretch charred bones for no song or shade, and manzanita are the frozen black frenzy of muttering old women who’ve only themselves left to hate.

For a long time, evangelicals have seen big media as a key to cultural influence. Such icon-creating events as Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, the nomination of Sarah Palin for vice-president, and the current fracas over Miss California's views on gay marriage have enticed evangelicals into believing that media attention is a significant opportunity. Such attention is an opportunity -- to get eaten alive. In all three of these instances, the principals have become part of the tabloid culture.

The old culture of journalism, back when journalists were collectively known as "the press," had a liberal arts sanctity about it. Objectivity was the gold standard, and certain subjects were beneath notice. The New York Times was in every sense the gray lady: All the news that's fit to print.

The news that wasn't fit to print got picked up by the National Enquirer.

Over the last 25 years, old-school journalism has been eroded by the tabloid aesthetic. Low-brow shows like Entertainment Tonight gave rise to a new style of reporting perfected by, among others, Bill O'Reilly on Inside Edition, a tabloid show that would report in sensationalistic style on anything. The news departments of the major networks held their collective noses, but they also catered more and more to tabloid aesthetic in their magazine shows, adding music to their reports and using edgy graphics.

A large part of the hostility between the old networks and Fox News has to do with Fox's wholehearted embrace of tabloid culture. The red graphics, the blonds, and of course the tabloid reporters themselves: Bill and Geraldo.

We now have a fully assimilated tabloid culture in mainstream journalism, with bloggers, entertainers, and "personalities" operating as authority figures. Old-school journalism is hopelessly compromised.

In this new media culture, political figures have to treat the tabloid appetites carefully. They can use the entertainment reporters, the bloggers, and the "personalities" to soften their images. (Think of Barack Obama's deft use of Oprah.) But if they step too far into the tabloid zone, they become embarrassing.

Sarah Palin aspires to lead Republicans. But she failed the critical test of old journalism, the one-on-one interview with a heavy. Charles Gibson annihilated her. She thought to rescue herself by performing well on Saturday Night Live, deliberately stepping into the entertainment world, the tabloid aesthetic's all-you-can-eat buffet. She succeeded there.

Today, she and her family are owned by tabloid culture. It's Bristol and her ex-fiancé from now on.

(Rule: if you have gravitas, you can do an SNL turn. If you don't, run away.)

Mel Gibson wanted to a make a deeply Catholic art film. But he filled it with his signature stomach-turning violence. Tabloid culture continued to own him, and he ended up with a DUI ornamented by anti-Semitic ramblings.

Over to you, Miss California.

Was Carrie Prejean asked an unfair question? Maybe. Was the blogger who asked it cruel and crude? Yeah. Has the leaking of old photos been cruel and crude? Certainly.

But this was a beauty contest, people! There is no pageantry more suited to tabloid culture than a beauty contest, a wrestling match of vanity. And in tabloid culture there is no such thing as a fair fight, or a low blow, or a civilized discussion. There is only one way to end a tabloid event: the walk of shame.

If you're going to take a stand on conviction, you can't do it in the mud.

When are evangelicals going to get it through their heads? Media grandstanding is nothing more than trotting into the Colosseum, smiling, inviting the lions out, and praying the Lord will use the spectacle for his glory.

It's not martyrdom. It's folly.

by Matthew Raley The North State Symphony is performing, among other things, the Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky, on May16-17. Here are videos of Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra sent out by our conductor, Kyle Wiley Pickett.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=IT&hl=it&v=-PPAs3vHM3g&fmt=18]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=IT&hl=it&v=8RleBCfNld0&fmt=18]

by Christopher Raley It’s hard to resist him in the tiled shower where water beats closing crease of mouth (and storm beats doors of the house) and etchings are hieroglyph of memory.

It’s hard to ignore his empty desk and absent tools of pastime tagged and marked, or his laugh at the table, a deaf old man who echoes off tiles and shuttered windows.

Or it’s his bitterness growling in rain gutters while the headlands all are dark like primitive man, and wind beats gloomed houses and square, and rain is a bestial hand risen from the ocean.

Tomorrow we will see his ghost in the forest where we walk and keep an eye on the water for a shadow of storm.

by Matthew Raley To my frustration, the default mode of pastors when teaching the New Testament is, "We have to cross a huge gap of time and culture to understand the 1st century."

The Bible is indeed a foreign book, and studying it does require effort. Its foreign nature derives from a national Jewish narrative stretching back to Abraham, which imposes Hebrew patterns of thought on us even in translation. So, fine: there's a gap.

But to imagine that the cultural environment in which Christ walked, at the end of that narrative, is on the far side of a chasm, that the New Testament world is culturally alien to our own, is to misunderstand both then and now. It is to remain in a Victorian point of view.

Consider this characterization of Roman religious life from Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume I, Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates & Co., n.d., p 74):

The superstition of the people was not embittered by any mixture of theological rancor; not was it confined by the chains of any speculative system. The devout polytheist, though fondly attached to his national rites, admitted with implicit faith the different religions of the earth.

Pick apart those ideas, and you find a description of spirituality today. Spirituality is story not doctrine. I shun speculative systems as so many "chains" that bind people in "rancor." There are many gods, and the ones I follow may not belong to you. But there is a reality to them all.

Or this (p 75): "Such was the mild spirit of antiquity, that the nations were less attentive to the difference, than to the resemblance, of their religious worship." There was, Gibbon says, a tolerance of all traditions. That is certainly the ethic today.

To be sure, Gibbon was grinding an ax with regard to Christianity, and his care to present the Roman world as civilized and ironic -- rather like himself -- was motivated by that agenda. In my 19th century edition of the Decline and Fall, the editor scores Gibbon for exaggerating polytheistic tolerance in a lengthy footnote in minuscule print (pp 509-510).

Still, Gibbon's description of 1st century society as spiritually open agrees with the book of Acts. Luke famously says that the Athenians "would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new." So they heard from Paul and, after due amusement at the idea of resurrection, said they would hear him again (17.16-34).

Here is the town clerk calming an anti-Christian riot in Ephesus (19.35-37):

Men of Ephesus, who is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky? Seeing then that these things cannot be denied, you ought to be quiet and do nothing rash. For you have brought these men here who are neither sacrilegious not blasphemers of our goddess.

It worked.

My new book, The Diversity Culture, is based on the fact that our American culture is very like the 1st century. In particular it is like the Samaritan culture with which Jesus interacted in John 4.

Sychar was at the junction of trade routes, and had been for centuries. By the time Jesus sat at its well, the ethnicity of its inhabitants was profoundly mixed, even untraceable. The Samaritans had gone back and forth between polytheism and Judaism several times. And the woman Jesus met at that well was evidence that the family as an institution had broken down.

The similarities between Samaria and America are important.

I do not believe that American evangelicals have seen the height of Christianity's glory. The Victorian culture that did not survive the industrial age was historically Christianity's dusk. The story of the 19th century was one of Christendom sinking into unbelief while retaining the cultural habits of faith. That was truly a time far removed from the 1st century.

We are now entering an age of renewed opportunity.

Our contemporary culture of openness and the ancient culture in which Christ's message first thrived are strikingly similar. We are in a time of absolute spiritual darkness. The claim that there is one God will be as countercultural now as it was to ancient polytheism.

But if we can recover the ways Christ spoke his exclusive claims into cultural diversity, we will see him speak afresh. And we can recover them, because we are closer to the New Testament environment than we've been for centuries.

by Matthew Raley [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2XTNgA72w]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmf4Z9HsnFQ&feature=related]

I have written elsewhere about the entertaining contrasts between Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin. In the first video, the contrasts are amplified as the pair converses about Arnold Schoenberg's Fantasie, Op 47. In the second, we see another example of the duo's partnership.

In one sense, I don't know why I post these. People usually hate Schoenberg. Added to this is the fact that the discussion between Gould and Mehunin is at a high technical level.

But, dog-GON-it!, they're saying some important things about real musical problems, especially after Gould says, "All cards on the table, you really don't like the Schoenberg." And the playing is quite good, demonstrating that Menuhin retained even post-war a powerful tone and intonation when he was "on."

So, if you've never heard anything by Schoenberg, take this in.

By the way, my 3-year-old Malcolm sat silently on my lap through the entire 10-minute performance, transfixed. (No jokes there in back!)

by Christopher Raley Dizzy is the road at night in hit of wind and red tail lights trailing gone around the bend where sudden are come head lights of blind, and front-end bears down hard on the curve.

Michael says he hates night and squint anxiety. He can't abide the rain-drop smear and ugly grimace of wiper blade's swipe too soon on the pane. Muscle tension searches dark for signs spawning exit.

I told him: Once we rose above the valley floor and flew where hills step to mountains who graduate angles of mystery neither height nor depth over comes.

I looked upon the glimpses of that fickle road, sometimes north, sometimes south, and saw the hope of miles. Welcome to darkness, Michael. You're only ever going west.

A couple of years ago, browsing through a used bookstore in St. Helena, CA, I discovered a paperback edition of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic, Democracy In America. The volume was flawless, the spine and the covers uncreased, the pages without a mark or fold. I bought it, only to discover that the book had a story to tell beyond Tocqueville's. St. Helena is a fascinating artifact in itself, one that dramatizes the problem I write about in my forthcoming book, The Diversity Culture.

The town's Main Street might have been the set for Bedford Falls, and you half expect to bump into George Bailey outside the Building and Loan. It was an all-American, white, Christian town, its economy agricultural and its ways rural and bourgeois.

St. Helena is anything but that now.

While its economy remains heavily agricultural, one has to specify that the crop is grapes and the product wine. The storefronts that once held dry goods, hardware, and clothing at middle-class prices now display oils and soaps, Cartier fountain pens, designer jeans, and prints of John Lennon drawings. The old movie theater that once would have shown It's a Wonderful Life now shows indie flicks.

Ethnically, there are Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Latinos, Blacks, and a healthy number of people whose background can't be determined at a glance. Sexually, there are gay and lesbian couples, and the number of married tourists spending the weekend is declining.

The spirituality of the town is Eastern. There are evidences of Buddhism and Hinduism, often in the forms of those systems' gods themselves. And the politics of St. Helena . . . well, the town's in the orbit of San Francisco.

Such was the context in which I opened my new literary treasure to find something I'd overlooked -- an inscription inside the front cover.

Uncle Jack has given this copy of Tocqueville to Kyle (my guess at the handwriting), addressing him pointedly as "Sir" and referring to his new "career defending America." The choice of Tocqueville tells us a great deal about Uncle Jack, as does his ebullient patriotism: democracy is "in Americans' souls," and it "empowers all great Americans onward to greatness."

Uncle Jack is a red-blooded, conservative, Fox News guy, busting his buttons about his nephew's joining up.

July 19, 2003 is well into the period when post-invasion Iraq was looking muddled, with WMD nowhere to be found and security almost as rare. But the invasion was still seen as a military success, and the 9-11 mindset remained strong.

So who sold Uncle Jack's gift, unread, the cover not even bent back, to that bookstore? Was it a disillusioned Kyle, rejecting the cause he had joined? Or was it a bereaved parent or spouse, embittered by too steep a sacrifice?

Either way, the gift given with pride seems to have been rejected viscerally. Uncle Jack would've felt right at home in old St. Helena. But the rejection of Democracy in America belongs to the new.

With America polarized about politics, sexual morality, war, and religion, any discussion about Jesus Christ is threatened by hot emotions. Evangelicals now are wondering how to navigate the hostility between left and right, the points of view of interest groups, and the intersections of church and state.

If Uncle Jack is an evangelical, he is probably trying to "reach" his St. Helena relatives, fumbling for some way to get his spiritual views across, and finding it hard even to get a response. If any dialogues about Christ do take place they do not go well, ending somewhere in "Bush lied, people died" territory.

The Diversity Culture is about a recovery of confidence that the Gospel can be heard powerfully in this atmosphere. It gives a tour of the barriers between evangelicals and other Americans. It develops a theology for reaching diverse groups. And it gives practical help for dialogue.

I wrote this book because I've lived at the intersections between evangelicals and the diversity culture my whole life. I graduated from public schools and a secular university. As readers of this blog know, I am committed to the arts. I am, in some ways, more at home in the diversity culture than among evangelicals. But I have also learned how needful the gospel is on the diversity culture's own terms. And I've learned how potent the message of Jesus Christ is when I give it as he did.

Main Street in St. Helena, changed though it certainly is, offers more opportunities for the gospel than ever.

by Matthew Raley [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUozVQVt1xI&feature=related]

This is the "Dance of the Goblins," played with jaw-dropping casualness.

by Matthew Raley It transpired in the media during Holy Week that evangelicalism, like Lazarus, is bound for the grave despite the earnest prayers of believers for healing. That this came to light is not cause for dismay.

The week began with a cover story by Newsweek's editor Jon Meacham, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Meacham gives a detailed analysis of data from, among other sources, the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey showing that the percentage of self-identified Christians has dropped by 10% over the last 20 years, and that the percentage of the religiously unaffiliated has doubled.

Meacham's thesis, that the decline of Christianity means the end of the religious right's "Christian nation" concept, is undeniable. His assessment that Christianity can benefit from a religious free market is, I think, also undeniable. Here's a quote:

The Founders' insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world. Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests. American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.

One evangelical leader Meacham quotes extensively, Al Mohler, agreed with this assessment, while emphasizing that Christianity formed the soil in which such freedom grew. Mohler gave an endorsement to the article in comments on his blog, saying,

Mr. Meacham also suggests that this new situation is perhaps healthy for the church.  To this extent I agree -- the church gains a necessary knowledge any time the distinction between the church and the world is made more evident.  Our first concern is and must be the Gospel.  It is good that non-Christians know that they are not Christians and that Christians be reminded of that fact that what sinners need is the Gospel of Christ, not merely the lingering morality of the Christian memory.

This dialogue was provocative enough.

Then, on Good Friday, came an article in London's Daily Telegraph. The English paper, it seems, scooped the American press on a month-old speech by James Dobson. Upon leaving the board of Focus on the Family, Dobson talked to his staff about the political defeats sustained by the movement he has led for so many years. According to the Telegraph,

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.

“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

The article gave reactions from grass-roots evangelicals.

“Conservatives became so obsessed with the political process we have forgotten the gospel,” said Steve Deace, an evangelical radio talk show host in Iowa who broadcast a recording of Mr Dobson’s address, which he said had appeared on Focus on the Family’s website before disappearing.

Mr Deace added: “All that time spent trying to sit at the top table is not time well spent. Republicans say one thing and do another.”

Dobson claims to have been misquoted, though in an interview with Sean Hannity, he merely adds that he is not giving up the fight. He still acknowledges that the religious right lost in the recent elections, and he says nothing to persuade me that there is a prospect for winning politically in the future. Indeed, I found his political appraisals incoherent.

It is tempting to read these stories with a spirit of gloom. But giving in would be a mistake.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised by any of these media items. A week of bad PR has only brought to light what we have long known: Christianity is in trouble in America. Evangelicalism, as a cultural expression of faith in Christ, may well die in the sense that its institutions and ways will no longer be sustainable. I have been writing and preaching with a goal of preparing our church for this time.

But something new will emerge.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ remains the strongest force on earth. Al Mohler is right: when God's people see the distinction between the world and Christ's Kingdom sharply, they are ready to see the Gospel's power in new ways.

I am not convinced that we are in a dark time at all. To be sure, there will be ongoing cultural trauma, and much personal cost from the loss of the Judeo-Christian heritage. Still, I'm convinced that this cultural collapse has given us the biggest evangelistic opportunity in centuries. I wrote The Diversity Culture, to be released next month (excerpt in the blogroll), to show why I believe the opportunity is so large, and how we can take advantage of it by returning to the message and life of the Gospel.

America still has many people who have met the risen Christ, who know what He does, and who display Him faithfully. We have to remember why Lazarus went into that tomb: Jesus withheld healing so that he could give resurrection.

by Matthew Raley [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKYLnikeA8E]

Singing Schubert! Start your day right!

by Matthew Raley

I am gathering topics for Tough Questions 2009, the annual sermon series in which the community tells me what to preach. This year, the term "community" embraces the blogosphere.

In the comments to this post, leave any question about morality, politics, spirituality, or culture related to Christianity, and I will choose six to answer. The best questions are precisely worded, and come in complete English sentences. (Yes, that has been a problem.) For a collection of last year's topics, click here.

The series will begin August 9. If you're not anywhere close to the Evangelical Free Church of Orland, CA, or in any case have no inclination to go there, the audio will be available here at Tritone Life.

A stunning rendering of what happened on the morning of the third day.

The apologetical style I exhibited in recent sermons and developed in a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) is not designed to be aggressive. That is, my argument is not intended to close the sale with unbelievers, but to supply what is appropriate for a season. I think the stance of evangelists has been too rigid about procedure. There is a moment in which you become a Christian, the moment when you pray the sinner's prayer. When you pray the prayer you pass from darkness to light. The appeals of evangelists and the arguments of apologists have often been designed to drive a person to that moment.

Many Christians are rethinking this stance, wondering if important decisions are really settled by a single prayer. Two theological truths are relevant.

First, there is no middle ground between those who are in Christ and those who are not. The two heads of household in the world, Jesus and Satan, are at war, and a person is in one house or the other. "[The Father] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1.13-14)

The purpose of the sinner's prayer, to articulate a moment of transfer, is important.

Still, secondly, the Bible prescribes no spiritual pitocin for inducing the new birth. The sinner's prayer is not found in any conversion in the New Testament. Baptism declares a faith that already exists, and is not a means of belonging to Christ. The gospels show many individuals engaging with Jesus in a process of transfer (e.g. John 3.1-21; 7.45-52; 19.38-42) that is slower than the moment of praying the prayer. This process is under the direct management of the Holy Spirit (John 16.7-11).

While there is nothing inherently wrong with the sinner's prayer, then, it is only one possible means of coming to Christ, and I know many people who have shown the fruits of the new birth without it. Biblically, the radical change that moves a person into Christ's household has a process behind it. The change does not occur in a moment, but perhaps may become apparent in a moment.

The aggressive style of apologetics that claims positively to prove Christ's claims, and to disprove competing claims, has been too focused on The Moment of conversion, and not focused enough on the process in which people find themselves dealing with Christ.

I am trying to develop a style to bring clarity to that process, a style that frames choices instead of driving points. It involves several assumptions about audience.

For starters, I assume that no one needs me to drive them to Christ. Christ is driving them to Himself through his Holy Spirit. If the Spirit is at work in a person, then I need to assume the honesty of the person's intentions. If the Spirit is not motivating the person, then no argument from heaven or earth will work.

In other words, I am talking to people who are well and rightly motivated in their decision-making. They will be moved by words that are in harmony with the Spirit's voice (1 Corinthians 2).

Furthermore, I accept that someone investigating Christ is uncertain. He or she is weighing claims, and is trying to find the best basis for deciding between them. That uncertainty is not a spiritual problem, but is, in fact, the Spirit's goad. The evangelist who tries to force certitude before the individual has genuinely found it is making the disastrous error of being disrespectful. In accepting people's uncertainties, I am not compromising with "relativism," but am recognizing that their questioning is what God will use to draw them to himself.

Where the Spirit is involved, a person's doubts are an ally, not an adversary.

Finally, I recognize that there are many factors involved in making life decisions, and each of these factors has to be treated with its own ethic.

Intellectual factors are significant in such decisions, and these must be addressed with rigor. But people also make spiritual decisions in response to pain. It is not appropriate to intellectualize someone's pain, as if suffering can be "answered." Even further, people make life decisions out of their sense of who they are: can they see themselves on a particular course with a particular group? Facts and logic often have little to do with this issue, since it turns more on culture and experience.

To treat all of these factors appropriately and biblically is to treat the process of conversion with the respect it deserves.

In other words, there is a time to reason, and a time to react; a time to think, and a time to feel. There is a time to analyze and a time to synthesize.

In the process of life-change, there is a season for every kind of word.

by Matthew Raley The generalization that all religions teach the same basic truths retains a powerful hold on the liberal imagination. It feeds the hope that the world can find peace through understanding, that if religions could realize how much ground they share, then people from different cultures could come together.

But this hope for a corporate final salvation leaves the individual human heart in despair.

Last Friday, On Faith in the Washington Post published comments by Feisal Abdul Rauf about President Barack Obama's upcoming trip to Turkey. He provides a specimen of how a hope for common ground devolves into an impersonal set of ethics.

Imam Rauf's examples of common ground between Islam and America are pretty abstract. Both cultures, it seems believe in law.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Creator endowed man with these unalienable rights. The framers of the Constitution wrote that they were establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty.

In the same way, Islamic law believes that God has ordained political justice, economic justice, help for the weak and impoverished. These are very Islamic concepts. Many Muslims believe that what Americans receive from their government is in fact the very substance of what an Islamic state should provide. American beliefs in individual liberty and the dignity of the individual are Islamic principles as well.

These comparisons are shockingly facile. Concepts of justice do not become anything more than slogans until they are instantiated by real cultural transactions. It is precisely the cultural specifics that drive the Muslim and American worlds apart.

The Imam becomes more specific when citing President Obama.

Obama sent a shockwave through the Muslim World when at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5 he quoted a hadith -- "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." The president equated that tenet of Islam with Jesus' "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and the Jewish Torah commandment, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow."

There is indeed a broad and sometimes precise agreement about ethics among the world's religions and cultures. There is also agreement that the dynamics of right and wrong are built into the universe just as securely as its physical dynamics. C. S. Lewis, to name only the most prominent thinker, documented this agreement in his series of lectures, The Abolition of Man, in which he argued for the existence of a Tao, a moral law that is universal.

Imam Rauf and President Obama are correct when they find the golden rule articulated across cultural boundaries.

But their purpose goes beyond the diplomatic to embrace the liberal's final hope.

Christian liberals have long sought to reenergize ethics in the here-and-now, and deemphasize the "last things" of human history and eternal salvation. Or more precisely, they have adopted a new doctrine of the last things.

Here is the ultimate End, articulated by the Imam. President Obama

can emphasize the commonality of Western and Islamic values. He can say that if the United States lives up to the values in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and if Muslims can live up to the principles of Islamic law, then we will find we have fewer points of conflict and more common ground.

Once this commonality can be established, Muslims no longer will fear Western domination and the West no longer will fear Islamic expansion. Then, the phony "Clash of Civilizations" can be put to rest.

The liberal imagination, whether Christian or Muslim, sees world peace as the End of History, the ultimate goal of religion. Their path is to spotlight common ground and ease sharp differences into the shadows.

Where does this leave biblical Christianity?

The Jesus of the Gospel of John speaks to individual despair, the death and darkness of sin in each human soul. His cure for this despair is not an abstract system of ethics, which serves only to mark sin and not to redeem the sinner. His cure for darkness and death is his own historical death and resurrection.

The world will be reunified in Christ's household of the redeemed.

This is the preeminent difference Christianity has with other religions. To follow the vision of liberalism, we must silence Jesus' claims about individual redemption while keeping his ethics. The Imam can easily live with that. President Obama can easily live with it.

But the human soul, taunted by an abstract law it has never kept nor can keep, will remain dead.