But it didn’t.

The previous church that we attended closed because of divisiveness in the Elders Board. In my own life I have seen several churches struggle or fail because of church division. I never want to be the source of division like that. The Apostle Paul didn’t like division either. His command in Ephesians 4:3 really jumped out at me, as I was reading it, and I have kept coming back to it time after time.

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

Make every effort. That didn’t mean trying to resolve things once and then giving up. It meant trying and trying and trying again. It meant keeping on trying until there was no other option, and then trying some more.

Every effort.

Well, somehow through all that trying we managed to resolve the issue. For me, it meant saying that being a part of this particular church community was and is more important to me than being right. Being right is not always the most important thing, especially if it divides churches.

How would our churches be different if we “make every effort”? How would church history have looked? Would the Catholic and Orthodox churches still be one? Would the North American church be splintered into so many denominations?

What about truth you ask? Surely that is important?

I like what Rupertinius Meldenius (previously attributed to Saint Augustine) had to say about that:

In essentials, unity, in non-essentials diversity, in all things charity.

Perhaps that can be our guiding principles for when we need to stand up for truth. Perhaps that would quell some of the “Worship Wars” that affect so many of our churches, maybe end some of our squabbles that in the grand scheme of things really aren’t that important.

If the Pope today can recite the Nicene Creed without the Filioque clause when in the presence of the Orthodox Patriarch, then maybe that maybe that difference wasn’t so great after all.

Sometimes being right is wrong. Not only if divides churches, but also if it ruins relationships, or breaks up marriages.

It is in the context of “make every effort” that Paul says in Ephesians 5:25

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

This was a self-sacrificial love. A love that says I don’t put me first. A love that says I don’t have to be right even when I am!

Their was a comic in our newpaper recently where a young woman is interviewing a man for a possible dating relationship. She asks him, “What would you do if you found irrefutable proof that you were right in our disagreement?” He replied, “I would ask your forgiveness for doubting you in the first place.” Or in other words, I am a guy who doesn’t have to be right, even when I am.

So here is what I would like to ask our readers: What has “make every effort” meant to you? Can you think of times where you have “made every effort” and had it result in a positive outcome in your church or relationship? Have you seen the converse happen as well? I look forward to your responses.

Just to set the record straight, in 46 years in the church I have had just one experience with the demonic.  Only one.  I am not the type to see a demon behind every bush.  But I have had one experience that I think can help us understand how Jesus knew when people needed healing or needed a demon cast out of them.

I was attending seminary, just a few blocks from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada.  My good friend Mitch, a fellow seminarian, and friend for many years, invited me to visit the church that he was attending.  It was located right in the middle of this poor neighborhood.

We went to visit the following Sunday.  What followed was one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me.   As I sat down in my seat, I began to feel this overwhelming sense of evil in the church, like nothing I had ever felt before.  I said to myself, “What is going on here?  What am I responding to here?  Is it the music?  Is it the atmosphere?  What is causing me to sense this evil here?”

As much as I tried I could not figure it out.  But I knew that something was definitely wrong.  So I asked my friend Mitch to come outside with me for a bit.  Once we were outside I told his what was going on.  We prayed and asked God to protect the church from whatever was disturbing the service.  When we went back in, the sense of evil was gone.

After the service, Mitch said that we really needed to talk to Pastor about the issue.  I was quite resistant.  “What is the Pastor going to think when someone walks into his church and tells him, Hey Pastor, I know you don’t know me, but I felt an overwhelming sense of evil during the service?”  Mitch assured me that this was a Pastor who was quite knowledgeble in this area, and that he would vouch for me.

So we went in to see the Pastor, and after introductions I told him the story of what had happened.   Immediately after I finished, the Pastor turned to Mitch and asked.  “How far was Mike sitting from J. T. [not the real initials]?”  Mitch said, “He was one row behind us, and three seats over.”

I was flabbergasted, not only was the Pastor not surprised at what I had told him, but he was able to immediatly identify the probable source of what I was experiencing!  The Pastor then thanked me for drawing this to his attention.  According to the Pastor, J.T. had been dabbling in the occult, and the Pastor was afraid that he had brought a demonic influence with him into the church.  The Pastor then went on to tell me that he believed that God had given me the gift of discernment, and he encouraged me to look for a church where this gift could be utilized.  This was my first real experience of a charismatic church, and I was a bit uncomfortable with the whole idea, so rightly or wrongly, I never followed up on his suggestion.

Two weeks later I was told, J.T. manifested a demon during the morning service.  He was taken out to another room, where he was prayed for and the demon was dealt with.

One incident in forty-six years.  It hardly makes me an expert on the subject does it?  Yet here is the lesson I was able to take from the situation.  A spiritual issue is discerned spiritually. I have been in many other situations where people have not been in their “right mind”, yet this was the only time were there seemed to be a demonic link.  Yet the discernment that I had in this situation could not even come close to compare to the discernment that Jesus had when he walked this earth, and spoke directly to the situations that people were facing.

But what if we are not gifted with that discernment.  Petra had an interesting comment in the previous post:

<i>I think this is a topic where great care and distinction are important. We have to distinguish between conditions that are a) medical/chemical b) psychological c) demonic in origin. Some conditions may be a mixed bag, but first you have to try to treat them according to a) and b), before you can conclude that it may be c), after all.</i>

Later in his comment he adds a fourth category:  spiritual but not demonic.

Is he correct in his conclusions?  Do we need to treat for the non-demonic potential causes before we look at demonic causes?  Or are there times, like my story above, where the demonic needs to be dealt with first?  I will throw in another thought as well.  For those of us who believe that God heals people, could items a, b, and c all be dealt with spiritually?

I would be interested in reading your responses.

When I was growing up, my Grandmother, who lived just a couple of miles away, suffered from Schizophrenia. It would manifest itself most when people, usually family, would come to visit.  If she misplaced something, she would accuse whoever had visited last of stealing it from her.  The incident I remember most clearly was being accused of stealing her piano music to support my non-existant drug habit.  Bet you didn’t know that there is a black market for sheet music!  It seems pretty comical now, but back then it was anything but. Eventually my parents started cutting back on our visits, as they were just too difficult.

The Schizophrenia that my Grandmother experienced was related to the interaction of dopamine with the dopamine receptors in the brain.  I don’t claim to understand all the science behind it, but drugs that act to inhibit this interaction are very effective for those who suffer from this particular malady.

This story hits a little closer to home however.  This dopamine condition in the brain is hereditary.  Guess who was the genetic recipient?  Me!

The way domanine effected me was outwardly quite evident.  Some of the things that I experienced growing included suffering from school yard taunts, being mocked by a teacher , and denied any part in a Sunday School play (until my parents intervened).  Later in life, if my condition became evident in a job interview, it would always ensure I did not get the job.  Upon graduation from seminary, one district superintendent told me that if a church received 100 resumes for a pastoral position, my application would go to the bottom of the pile.  Over the years, and especially in my younger years, I saw a parade of psychiatrists, psychologists, hypnotherapists, and speech therapists!  Speech therapists?  Yes, you see the way that the dopamine condition affects me was not the same way it affected my Grandmother!  For whatever reason the dopamine problem that I have in my brain did  NOT give me Schizophrenia, instead, I suffered from a severe stutter.  The two conditions are in my case definitely related and have a hereditary genetic relationship.  Although I have never taken them, the anti-psychotic drugs that are used on Schizophrenia patients also work on many adult stutterers as the drugs deal with the dopamine conditions that exist in the brain.

Now here is the interesting part and how it ties back into what Michael Spencer has been talking about.   I have heard or read many people speculating about the relationship between mental illness and demon possession.  Yet in my forty-six years on this earth, including several years in pentecostal and charismatic circles, I have never had a suggestion made to me that there might be a demonic cause to my stuttering.  No one.  Not even hinted at.

Why is this?    Probably because the most common form of stuttering, developmental stuttering, occurs among younger children, who grow out of it, and it is seen as a normal developmental process.  Even among adults who stutter, the individuals are seen as normal rational non-delusional people who have a bit of a disability.

So my question then is, if no one is trying to make a connection between my stutter and demon possession, then how can anyone make the connection between Schizophrenia and demon possession, especially since they are so closely related genetic mental issues?  My Grandmother’s illness and my own difficulties are so tied together that to say that there was demonic influence causing her problem becomes totally ridiculous unless you are willing to claim the same for me.

Furthermore, dopamine naturally decreases with age.  My Grandmother became a fairly pleasant lady in the years before she died.  My stutter has all but disappeared aided by a strict regimen of no caffeine (a stimulator of the dopamine receptors.)  If Schizophrenia had a demonic cause, then we would not see so many patients have natural reductions in their illness as they aged.

So my plea is this:  Please think twice being trying to make a connection between mental illness and demonic influence, because in the case that I am most familiar with, that link just does not exist.   I look forward to reading your responses.

This post was originally published at Internet Monk.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
- Bob Dylan 1963

For years I have heard about the many changes that have been taking place within the Christian World. Churches and denominations growing, churches and denominations shrinking. We have had a pretty good idea of who has been growing, and who has been shrinking, but with birth rates, death rates and other factors, it has been pretty hard to pin down the source of the growth and decline. Have Evangelicals been growing? If so, has the growth come from the non religious, Catholics, Mainline Protestants, or other religions? What sort of outflows have they experienced that have offset the inputs? Is the back door larger or smaller than the front door? How are the Catholics, the Mainline Protestants, the non religious and others doing?

Well now we know.

A few days ago, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of a survey entitled Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S. This was followup to their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey that they released last year.

I have been busy in the last week doing a bit of reverse engineering on the numbers to represent the shifts in belief as best and as clearly as I can. Here is the resulting chart. You can click on it to see the full sized version.

What you are looking at is changes in American adults, from their childhoods to present day. As such it eliminates such factors as birthrate and death rate, and strictly looks at who is changing to what. We should note that immigration is a factor in this chart as present day Americans may have been born elsewhere, and so their childhood would have been in a different country. More on this later in the post.

The NONE group

The red color, or None, stands for those with no particular faith. The temptation is to think of this entire group as atheistic, but that is not the case. It is currently comprised of atheists (1.6% of total adult population up from 0.5%), agnostics (2.4% up from 0.2%), and those of no particular faith (12.1% up from 6.6%). I like to think of them as the “no God, don’t know, or don’t care group”. Of those who have no particular faith, roughly half of them (6.3%) would classify themselves as secular, and half (5.8%) would call themselves religious.

The “None” group, now makes up a total of 16.1% of American adults today, a huge increase from the 7.4% who were in this group in their childhood. The interesting paradox is that of those who were raised in this group half now have a religious affiliation, with 1.6% of American adults moving from None to Evangelical (yellow) and 1.0% moving to Mainline Protestant (orange) religious beliefs. Yet, while the None group has had significant outflows they have had much more significant inflows. 4.4% of American adults have switched into this group from Catholic (green). This is 11 times greater than the move from None to Catholic. 3.5% have moved to None from the Evangelicals, more than double the outflow, and 2.7% from Mainline Protestants, almost triple the outflow. There has also been an inflow of .8% of American adults to None from people who classified themselves simply as Protestant, without being willing or able to be more specific. This is represented by a blank space on the chart as we don’t know specifically from where these moves came.

One of my co-workers, who is an atheist, had this interesting question: “If 8.7% of Americans have switched from some type of religious belief to None is one generation, how many generations will it take for religion to be extinguished in America?” This question can’t really be answered, it assumes too much, that rates of change will remain constant, that all religious groups will have the same rate of loss, that help won’t come from other countries, and that God won’t intervene. But the fact that this sort of question has some sort of validity must be of concern to Christians everywhere.

CATHOLICS

Catholics (green) have the most to be concerned about. They are experiencing huge outflows of 4.4% to the None group, 2.8% to the Evangelicals, and a smaller amount of 1.6% to the Mainline Protestants. This is without any real significant moves to Catholic from any other religious group. In total, 10.0% of adult Americans have moved from Catholic to one of the other groups, and only 2.5% have moved to Catholic from these groups. From other surveys we know that most of this loss has occurred in the North East. While other surveys, like A.R.I.S have shown that Catholic numbers have not fallen significantly overall, this is because the one thing that has kept Catholic numbers from falling significantly overall has been Hispanic immigration in the American Southwest. If you were to visualize this on our chart, you would need to imagine that part of the green column that extends from the top to the bottom of the chart is in fact an input to American Catholicism from Catholicism in other countries.

EVANGELICALS

Evangelicals are at best currently treading water. Their inflows have been matched by outflows, albeit coming from different sources. Much to my surprise, Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants have in fact been swapping members, I had expected much more of a move from Mainline Protestants to Evangelicals. This has not been the case as 2.6% of Americans have moved from Evangelical to Mainline and 2.5% have moved back the other way. More on this later in the post.

Evangelicals have gained 2.8% in moves from the Catholics, and 1.6% in moves from the None group, but have also had 3.5% of their group move to the None group and 0.8% move to Catholics. These moves have largely offset each other as well.

A total of 1.1% has moved to the Historical Black Protestant group (blue), which I will discuss in greater detail when discussing this group. 1.1% have also moved to the “Other Religions” (purple) group which has only been replaced by 0.5% coming back the other way.

As an Evangelical, I find the moves to and from the None group and the Other group quite disconcerting. One of the attributes of being Evangelical is being willing to share the good news of Jesus Christ to the “lost”. With apologies to the Eastern Orthodox (who I grouped with others solely for numerical reasons), the target for Evangelicals is primarily the None and Other groups. Yet, twice as many Evangelicals are moving to these two other groups than are moving from these other groups into Evangelicalism. Clearly Evangelicals have failed mightily in their call to be Evangelical.

Treading water is a dangerous place for Evangelicals to be, because studies like A.R.I.S. show that they are an aging group facing a serious generational horizon, similar to that which has already been experienced by the Mainline Protestants. With a slow leaking away into the None and Other groups and a soon to be experienced generation decline, the Evangelical group looks to be quite different and smaller a generation from now. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it will require the next generation of evangelicals to have a focus and a vision that the current generation does not seem to possess.

HISTORICAL BLACK PROTESTANT

This is the first time that I had worked with numbers that has a separate classification for Historical Black Protestant. This group is made up of a Black Churches from a number of different backgrounds, the largest of which currently are Baptist at 4.4%, Pentecostal at 0.9% and Methodist at 0.6%. A significant majority of the Black Protestants could also quite easily be also classified as Evangelical, so it is not surprising that their largest influx, 1.1%, comes from the Evangelical group. All other inflows were 0.3% or less. From the data that I was able to obtain I was not able to determine the outflows from this group, but I believe them to be less than the inflows. At 6.9% in total they are a significant part of the American landscape, and it will be interesting to see what role they play in future American society.

MAINLINE PROTESTANT

As mentioned above the Mainline Protestant group has been holding up much better than I expected in terms of its inflows and outflows. Their inflows and outflows with Evangelicals have been virtually identical. They have gained twice as many from the Catholics (1.6%) as they have lost (0.8%). On the other hand they have had 2.7% move to the None group, and only gained 1.0% from that same group. They have also lost 1.1% to the Other group, but only had 0.4% coming back the other way.

It is clear then that the declines that the Mainline Protestants have experienced over the last 40 years have not largely been because of people switching to other groups. Instead it is because they have gone through a very large generational horizon. I recently read an older study that argued quite convincingly that most of the decline in the Mainline Protestant group could be attributed to the birthrate within that group. What we have seen here in this chart would tend to bear that out. While the worst of their declines may be behind them, like the Evangelicals they have significant work to do.

THE OTHERS

For those who are fans of the TV show “Lost”, this group does not refer to those who battled the Dharma initiative, although they too were called “The Others”. Instead this group is composed of those who did not fall within any of the other classification, and whose numbers were small enough that individually it did not make much sense to show the moves in and out, even if that were possible. When taken as a whole however we are able to look at the moves in and out. Both inflows and outflows occurred proportionally from across the religious spectrum. With the exception of the Black Protestants, inflows were in the range on 0.7% to 1.1% from the Non religious, Catholic and Protestant groups, and outflows were roughly about half that number.

This group is composed of the following:

Eastern Orthodox, currently at 0.6%, and unchanged from the childhood numbers. My apologies to Internet Monk contributor, Father Ernesto, for grouping his church family in this group.

Other Christian, not contained in any other classification, 0.3%, unchanged.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, currently at 0.7% and up 0.1% from the childhood numbers. This group had relatively large inflows and outflows, but ended up with very little change.

Mormons, 1.7%, down 0.1%.

Other religions, 4.7%, up 1.2%. It is this Other religion sub-classification that is of most interest here because it is the only one that has had significant change. When we look at the details within this sub-classification we see that of the other major world religions, only Buddhism had an increase of 0.3% of Americans The other increases (0.9%) came in other religions which were not specified, but were not among the world’s major religions. All we know is that half of this change came from Protestants. The Protestant sub-grouping was also not specified. This is an area in which I would like to know a little more about.

DID NOT KNOW / REFUSED

On the expanded chart, you will see a little white column that represents the 0.7% (childhood) to 0.8% (current) who could not or would not complete the survey.

CONCLUSION

There is a lot to digest here, and I am afraid that the tendency will be to jump to conclusions. Clearly some serious introspection needs to occur within the Christian community. Part of what will aid that introspection will be my next post where I will continue my analysis. The “Flux” survey includes what must be one of the largest series of exit interviews ever done, and I think this information is vital to where we need to be focusing some of our attention. Therefore, in my next post I will summarizing the reasons why all these changes have occurred.

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome.

I had previously posted that because of the busyness of life, both for myself and Joshua Hearne, that posting to Eclectic Christian is going to be quite limited for the next few months. However, I am going to be posting infrequently at Internet Monk and I will repost those items here.

A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,
“Hosanna to the Son of David!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Hosanna in the highest!” Matthew 21:8-9

22″What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?” Pilate asked. They all answered, “Crucify him!”
23″Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” Matthew 27:22-23

What a difference a week makes! In one week, the people have gone from shouting “Hosanna” to shouting “Crucify him!” Unfortunately, in almost every sermon I have heard on the topic, the pastor gets it wrong. (Not picking on any particular pastor here, I have heard this preached badly six or seven times.) The Pastor assumes that the crowd in Matthew 21 is the same as the crowd in Matthew 27. But this is not the case.

In Matthew 19 we find Jesus way north of Jerusalem, in Galilee, his home turf so to speak. This was where Jesus had grown up, based his ministry, and performed most of his miracles. Like most others he starts to make his way south to celebrate the passover in Jerusalem.

First he heads down to Judea, to the far side of the Jordan (possibly on the route that skirted Samaria.) He crosses back over the Jordan into Jericho, which we find him leaving in Matthew 20. He arrives at Bethpage and Bethany which he makes as his headquarters for Passover week (Matthew 21 & 26). Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims, and Jesus did what many others did who lived outside the immediate area, they slept in the towns surrounding Jerusalem, and then came into Jerusalem for the events of each day.

So when Jesus has his triumphal entry that we read about in Matthew 21, he is surrounded by his supporters from the north. They had also camped outside the city and were also coming in for the day.

In Jerusalem awaits the political elite, the leaders of the temple, who are quite happy with their lifestyle and the degree of autonomy that they have under Roman rule. Someone who might upset their applecart would need to be dealt with quickly.

So what does Jesus do? He drives the money changers and sellers from the temple, directly challenging the leadership of the temple. Then he heads back to Bethany for the night.

He comes back in the next morning, curses the fig tree on the way in, and then spends the day telling parables that insult the chief priests and pharisees. It is then that they decide to arrest him (Matthew 21:45-46). Note that the passage says that they were afraid to arrest him because of the crowd.

Christ continues to clash with the teachers of the law and the pharisees in Mattew 22 & 23. Jesus continues to teach in Matthew 24 & 25 and heads back to Bethany where we find him again in Mattew 26.

Meanwhile the chief priests and elders meet to plot against Jesus.

3Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of
the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, 4and they plotted to arrest Jesus in
some sly way and kill him. 5″But not during the Feast,” they said, “or there may
be a riot among the people.” Matthew 26: 3-5

Notice that the plot involved getting Jesus away from his followers. That is the ones who camped outside the city.

Jesus comes back into town to pray on the Mount of Olives at night. It is at the Garden of Gethsemene that he is arrested at night (Matthew 26:47). Jesus himself comments (verse 55) that he was in the temple all day, why didn’t they arrest him then? Why, because his supporters were all in the temple area during the day!

He is immediately taken before the sanhedrin for his first trial. Again, this was still in the middle of the night, and the sanhedrin had gathered for the express purpose of getting rid of Jesus.

Matthew 27 opens by saying that “early in the morning” he was taken before Pilate. It is when he is before Pilate that the crowd shouts “crucify him”.

This is not the same crowd that shouted “Hosanna”. The “Hosanna” crowd are still camped outside the city or making their way in. The “Crucify crowd” is made up of the priests, elders, and pharisees, and those that they have assembled, who wanted nothing to do with Jesus and just want him out of the way.

So why the change in the crowd? Two different crowds. The second crowd planted at a time when the first crowd could not be there.

So why does this matter?

What struck me about this story is that the chief priests, temple leaders, and pharisees represented what society would have considered to be among the most spiritual people in society. Yet these people were the ones that were most threatened by the new wave of the Spirit that had come in the form of Jesus Christ. It is a natural inclination to be suspicious of change, to be resistant to ideas that might threaten your place in society, and to be wary of a new religious movement.

Then I thought of us today in our churches. Are we suspicious, resistant, and wary of new things. Do we like things just the way they are? “If it ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.” Over the last couple of years I have heard a couple of astute church leaders suggest that if the congregation is quite happy with the status quo, then some faith stretching exercises are in order. What happens when a new Pastor comes into our church (I am speaking generically here) and suggests that significant change is necessary in order for the church to move beyond its plateaued state? Are we part of the crowd that shouts “Hosanna!”, or are we part of the crowd that shouts “Crucify him!”

Examine yourself, and make sure that you are responding with the right motivations. Making sure that you have the right reaction to change will have a major impact on the future ministry of your church.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.