Canadian Mennonite
Volume 11, No. 08
April 16, 2007
Letters
This section is a forum for discussion and discernment. Letters express the opinion of the writer only, not necessarily the position of Canadian Mennonite, the five area churches or Mennonite Church Canada. Letters should address issues rather than criticizing individuals and include contact information. We will send copies of letters referring to other parties to them to provide an opportunity to respond in a future issue if their views have not already been printed in an earlier letter.
Please send letters to be considered for publication to letters@canadianmennonite.org or to Canadian Mennonite, 490 Dutton Drive, Unit C5, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6H7, “Attn: Letter to the Editor.” Letters may be edited for length, style and adherence to editorial guidelines.
More ‘Living on the edge’ needed in Manitoba
When you hear the phrase “living on the edge,” do you think of behaviour that exhibits signs of being on the verge of a breakdown—or do you think of a life that is non-conformist, risky, fearless and committed to embracing new ideas and ways of doing things?
I think the latter was at least partly implied in this choice of theme for the annual session of Mennonite Church Manitoba held in February at Bethel Mennonite Church (“Manitoba delegates speak on church survey and camp concerns,” March 19, page 23). However, after attending the sessions and talking to other delegates, I really didn’t see much evidence of serious grappling with this theme.
The opening worship service set the rather incoherent tone for the sessions. Guest speaker Len Hjalmarson, a computer software entrepreneur and anti-institutional church activist, gave a lecture entitled “Understanding cultural shifts,” a barely audible hurried look at what constitutes postmodern culture. And although the reports by staff were presented in a creative way, there was no chance for questions or discussion of the various aspects of conference work.
We spent half the morning on Saturday talking about what some considered internal structural matters related to Camps with Meaning. Many felt ill-equipped to make decisions about who regional committee members should be accountable to, and thought the time could have been better spent talking about more critical issues—like our multicultural context, our endangered environment, and the control of technology in our lives.
The roundtable discussion format for the workshops provided a very good opportunity for discussion. However, many were frustrated that facilitators were directed to summarize the discussions of their workshop into two sentences to take back to the executive. This process resulted in somewhat watered down summaries that really didn’t reflect the conversation around those tables. Hopefully, the next time around, the delegates’ contributions will get more attention.
I should add, though, that one young first-time delegate remarked, “This is a lot more exciting than I thought it would be!”
Articles on High Church Mennonites praised
I want to express appreciation for the commissioned High Church Mennonite articles in your March 5 issue.
David Widdicombe was particularly insightful in his article, “Embracing people of the Book (of Common Prayer),” as he gently led us through the current trend of young people crossing denominational backgrounds, and more specifically as this pertains to Mennonites at St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg.
I also found Hippolyto Tshimanga’s interview with Leona Dueck Penner helpful. He obviously brings to his job a depth of understanding of two very different cultures on two different continents, and is able to sift through it all to articulate the important elements of commonality that allow these cultures to work together to bring the gospel to people. This is encouraging as it translates to other settings as well.
Will our children have faith?
Will our children have faith? That was the question posed by John Westerhof in a book of the same title in 1976. It’s a question that still challenges the church today.
In fact, there may be more cause for concern and alarm now. Recent studies on teenagers in the U.S. and Canada suggest that if teens have faith at all, it is a generic, shallow kind of belief—a faith that will not enable them to deal with the challenges of our increasingly secular age.
A recent U.S. National Study on Teenagers and Religion found that teens who belong to religious groups have extremely weak spiritual understandings about their faith; the majority do not even know the basics of what their religion teaches.
As reported by author Christian Smith in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, the study describes the belief system of many teens as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Its basic tenets are:
• God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal in life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be involved in my life, except when I need God to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.
A similar study has not been conducted in Canada, but I suspect that we might discover that things are not so different in this country.
How did church-going teens end up this way? The study suggests that the single most important influence and predictor of the spiritual lives of adolescents is their parents. Far from seeking their own spiritual paths, teenagers follow their parents’ footsteps when it comes to religion.
Our values, attitudes and beliefs about things like God, the divinity of Jesus, life after death, love, sexuality, values and ethics will be picked up by them. According to Reginald Bibby, the University of Lethbridge (Alta.) sociologist who has been surveying Canadian teenagers’ attitudes towards religion since the 1970s, “Teenagers will become eventually pretty much like the rest of us.”
Another major influence in causing teens to have a shallow faith has been the teaching they have received in some churches. Wendell Loewen, associate professor of youth, church and culture at Tabor College (a Mennonite Brethren college in Hillsboro, Kan.), suggests that many teens have been taught that “salvation is, in essence, a one-time transaction with God to escape damnation. Christians simply have to read the Bible more, pray more, and occasionally save souls.”
The result, he says, is a faith that is “virtually indistinguishable from its surrounding culture,” that is “primarily privatized,” and that “demonstrates a radical disconnect between belief and lifestyle.”
He goes on to say that what is needed today is a “biblical presentation of the church” as an “alternative culture that invites others to participate in the reality of God’s reign. Understanding this can help move students beyond a privatized faith toward a strong desire to influence the world.”
For Loewen, this reign is most helpfully illustrated by the image of the kingdom of God. By emphasizing the “reign of God,” he says teens will “better be able to see their way out of their individualized, privatized faith bubbles. They will be able to wrestle with tangible ways in which they can impact their world. This discovery can move students beyond an individual and personal faith emphasis toward one that seeks to tangibly impact the world.”
The message is clear: If the church doesn’t live and teach a holistic gospel to our children, they will end up with a watered down faith—one that simply promotes personal well-being and teaches teens to be nice to one another. It will be a faith that keeps God on retainer, just in case they run into trouble, but not one that promotes the importance of deepening the presence of God in their lives.
As churches and Christian schools, our goal must be to help youths care equally about evangelism and social action; inner peace with God and peacemaking; personal spirituality and community; abundant life and simple living; serving God and serving the poor; praying and doing justice. We must help them avoid becoming moralistic therapeutic deists. We should help them to learn to know the one who created them, and who watches over all of life—and help them deepen that relationship in such a way that they will constantly feel God’s presence as they commit themselves to serving God in all of life.
Outside the box
The real inconvenient truth
I was trapped in a dilemma: Keep our small car or take the leap to a seven-seater. Sentimental me opted for the latter rather than vote one of our kids off the island. But now I may be the cause of polar bear homelessness and the drowning of untold thousands in coastal lowlands. The world is in quite a stew over the weather. What are we to make—or do—about global warming?
Two recent documentaries present opposite views of the “facts.” An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s claim to Oscar fame, says humans cause global warming because of a fossil fuel addiction that sky-rockets carbon dioxide levels, heating the planet catastrophically. The Great Global Warming Swindle, aired by the BBC, dismisses this as the “pop science” of a new socialistic, anti-industrial colonialism, and declares the sun, of all things, as the culprit in this heated debate. And both, of course, accuse the other of skewing “facts” for dollars.
Let us think about this carefully as Christians, shall we?
Is it not shocking that human beings believe we are weather gods? The essence of the school of Gore is that we actually control the weather! This is an astounding claim and the fantasy of a renewed paganism that places humanity at the centre of all things. Having dismissed a sovereign Creator God from our worldview, and elevated ourselves in his place, we now find ourselves the only saviours from a doom and gloom apocalypse that would be laughed at if it came from the pulpit. The end of the world is the ironic message of secular humanist culture. Gore’s “turn-or-burn” sermon of fear catechizes the new religion of God-emptied western humanity. To disagree with Gore is worse than spitting in the face of the pope; it is blatant heresy.
On the other hand, The Swindle seems determined to keep up with business as usual. Since this is just the sun doing its thing, we ought not worry and get on with the industrial development of the Third World. While the god of Gore is a green middle-class man with his family in a Honda hybrid, the god of The Swindle is green too—with money and envy. Both breed a self-righteousness that distracts from the greater issues of justice, mercy and humility, which is what the Lord desires more than anything (Micah 6:8).
Is a tree-hugger more righteous than an oil-baron, if both know nothing of love, are idolaters and are only storing up treasures on Earth? Are we not called to a more radical witness as those who know Almighty God? to the humility of Job before a God who questions our speech? to the selflessness of the widow and her penny? to the embrace of the least? to the simplicity of he who had no place to lay his head? to the outlandish generosity of he who throws a banquet for any who will come? to take good news as far and wide as possible? to be children of God who lead creation in liberation (Romans 8:19-21)?
The solution to all this is deeply spiritual. A person who is a new creation in Christ is re-oriented—in the power of the Holy Spirit—as the trustee of the gifts of creation and money, and is finally free of idolatry of either. Who is our God? That is the real inconvenient truth we are scared to address.
New Order voice
Embracing pathetic change
Ah, incremental change. That’s very comforting for those of us who enjoy the benefits of the dominant levels of society. People, myself included, don’t want dramatic change.
For example, after I complained about the church’s best efforts at charity, a guy wrote and wondered, “Is nothing good enough for Aiden?” He was responding to my push for “Buy Nothing Christmas.”
“Do you ever worry that you’re going to alienate people and just make them deaf to your message by being critical about ‘incremental’ change?” he added.
I still don’t know how to respond to the question of what I’ll call radical action versus gradualism. Of course, I favour the former. But if I look at my life I see I embody the latter. So, like Plato and the gap between ideals and reality, like Paul Tillich and his polarities, and like the apostle Paul and his knowledge of what he should do and yet doesn’t, I’m torn.
On the one hand, radical change is exactly what followers of Jesus should be about. It’s called “repentance.” We recognize the error of our ways, we see our complicity in the structures of destruction—which could include social structures like racism, capitalism and homophobia—and we repent. As the preachers say, “Do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn” and walk the other way. Turn from the darkness into the light.
But on the other hand, what if I’ve turned my life around several times and feel a need to repent some more? The light, it seems, always fades, and the evening of rest, sloth and greed sets in. How many times can I have radical change? Is this psychosis? It certainly is discontentment.
Take food, for example. A few years ago I turned away from eating animals. It was a matter of compassion—a growing sense of being a kindred spirit with all animals—chickens, squirrels, dogs and pigs. (I recognize this is irrational to carnivores). But it was also a recognition of the way we raise animals for slaughter, the way we give them artificial supplements to grow faster and feed them waste products which cause health complications.
So, as it seemed then, I made a radical change in my diet: I became a vegetarian.
Now the latest challenge is to eat food that is grown locally. My friends are banding together for a 100-mile diet. For 100 days we only eat food produced within 100 miles. This requires another radical change. And I’m sure there’s going to be another radical shift after this experiment.
The preachers, especially the Anabaptists, call this process of change “sanctification.” We are “justified by faith,” and then, by the grace of God, we “work out our salvation.” Sanctification is the long process of becoming holy.
Holiness sounds lofty. But that’s because it’s been swept off Earth by apocalyptic doomsayers. Holiness is here, and we can taste it if we stick out our tongues, practise justice, exercise restraint. This is a steady movement towards the very source of life.
So I guess that’s a blessing for incrementalism. Which, if you have high ideals—like I do, has a pathetic ring to it. So I guess I embrace pathetic change. That’s part of seeking contentment and loving my neighbour as myself.