Our favorite Nigerian-British-Minnesotan author/speaker/thinker Jo Saxton returns to the show to talk about church and discipleship in an increasingly post-church world. If you’re in a community that doesn’t want church services at all, maybe tweaking your church service isn’t the right answer. But what is?? Jo describes experiments from Sheffield, England that she and others are now applying to the US. Plus, how denomination accurately predicts a pastor’s political affiliation, and Phil finds a story about space worms and can’t stop talking about it. Seriously. He can’t stop.
What did church leaders have to give up: our sense of excellence
Wary of Modern Society, Some Christians Choose a Life Apart
Longing to lead more religious lives—and wary of the wider culture—a growing number of traditional Christians are creating their own small communities
.. “Our goal in moving here was to form our children’s conscience and intellect in a particular way, without society taking that authority from us,”
.. In many ways, Clear Creek resembles the U.S. of a past era. Women wear long skirts and cover their heads during Mass—a practice most Catholics have abandoned since the reforms of Vatican II more than a half-century ago. Young men often ask permission from the fathers of women whom they want to court.
.. “There was just too much promiscuity; it’s permeated the whole society,” said Mr. Schmidgall, 25. “Maybe you teach them one thing at home, but you walk down the street and there’s signs with some provocative image or a woman.”
.. “We’re living in a post-Christian world,” Mr. Dreher said. “There needs to be some conscious separation from the mainstream to be able to hold on to the Christian faith.”
.. Many Christians, however, resist the idea of such stark separation, seeing it as an abandonment of their religious mission. “We have a mandate to spread the gospel,”
.. The families in Clear Creek see themselves as fundamentally different from breakaway religious groups like the Amish. There is no ban on technology or suspicion of outsiders.
.. “We wanted our children to grow up in a community of people that really value family, and value the Catholic faith and tradition,”
.. Life here, Mr. Pudewa said, isn’t “about running away from something. It’s about running to something.” To “inculcate wisdom and virtue in children,” he added, “you surround them with goodness and beauty.”
.. Separated from the wider world, she said, the church pastor became “spiritually abusive.” Women were treated like possessions, and gay people were demonized.
“We didn’t call it the Benedict Option—the phrase we used was ‘doctrine of separation,’ ” said Ms. Field, who left that church while in college. “But it was the same thing. This has been done.”
American Way of Life: a nation without limits: a threat?
In the 20th century, “our” side won because American industry and ingenuity produced not only superior military might but also a superior way of life based on consumption and choice—so at least Americans have been thoroughly conditioned to believe. A third assumption asserts that U.S. military power offers the most expeditious means of ensuring that universal freedom prevails—that the armed might of the United States, made manifest in the presence of airplanes, warships and fighting troops, serves as an irreplaceable facilitator or catalyst in moving history toward its foreordained destination. That the commitment of American armed might could actually backfire and make matters worse is a proposition that few authorities in Washington are willing to entertain.
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Not coincidentally, a Pakistani tribal elder talks about the effect that US drone attacks has on his community:
“Children stopped going to school, the women have become mental health patients, in my own house my four children, my daughter has mental problems, because of drones,” he said.
And the strikes are not fulfilling their aim, he argued.
“These drone attacks do not finish terrorists. When in one house two or three children and their mother or father are targeted by drone attacks, the whole household become terrorists against America,” he argued.
.. He said that American policy towards the Middle East is emblematic of a nation that does not believe it has limits.
In this view, America keeps making these catastrophic mistakes because we believe that wanting a certain outcome is enough to make it happen. We are rich enough, powerful enough, and, in our own minds, righteous enough that it should happen.
.. But come on, can we really say with a straight face that the hedonistic culture of the post-Christian West is no threat to their way of life? That they have nothing to fear from us, other than our drones and bombs?