Tag: Christianity

Family Christian Stores Files For Bankruptcy

Published on by nickcady4 Comments

America’s largest Christian retailer, Family Christian Stores, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

This doesn’t mean that they are closing down; they are doing this in order to save their company. They are going to restructure and try to stay in business.

Perhaps most interesting though, is that while Family Christian Stores is floundering, Lifeway Christian Bookstores is expanding.

What’s the difference between these two?  In short, I would put it this way: Lifeway has higher standards about what they sell and how they do business.

Earlier this year, when it came out that a certain big name pastor/author had committed rampant plagiarism, Lifeway immediately dropped his books from their shelves. Family Christian Stores, on the other hand specializes in cheesy Christian paraphernalia and selling whatever sells. I remember going into one of their stores once and being surprised to see a particular book on their shelves. My wife asked the manager why they sold that book – his response was very telling: he said he was ashamed to have that book on their shelves too, but corporate said that they had to, because they are first and foremost a business and people buy that product.

It would seem to me that the reason Family Christian Stores is struggling whereas Lifeway is flourishing must somehow be attributed to the fact that Christians actually have higher standards and are more discerning as to where they spend their money and what values they want their retailers to represent than Family Christians Stores gave them credit for.

 

The Eschatological Significance of the Christian Sunday

Published on by nickcady1 Comment

Following up on a previous post on why Christians worship on Sunday and the correlation between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday, I recently read something I found interesting.

While many people assume that Christianity just took the Jewish idea of Sabbath and moved it to Sunday, it turns out the reason for the Christian Sunday is deeply eschatological.

Check it out:

Jewish Sabbath

  • End (Saturday)
  • Rest from Creation
  • Happens after creation, within time: retrospective
  • Keeping of obligations
  • Preservation

Christian Sunday

  • Beginning (Sunday)
  • Commencement of the New Creation
  • Speaks to the aim of new creation: eternity = future-oriented
  • Celebrates that the obligations have been met by God through Christ
  • Resurrection

Christianity was not just a rebranding of Jewish practices, but an eschatological fulfillment of them.

The Christian Sunday is more than a day of rest for Christians, it is a day of new creation. In it, we remember not only to rest from our labor, but we are reminded that with the resurrection of Jesus, we stand at the dawn of eternity – and that one day soon, the Son will break over the horizon and usher in the New Day. In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we have witnessed the death of death and the birth of “the life that is truly life”.

Worship: Offering, Receiving and Shopping

Published on by nickcady3 Comments

Another thought-provoking comment from my studies on the history of Christian worship:

At some time in the Church’s history, attitudes seem to have moved from an earlier sense of going to worship in order to make an offering to God (worship, adoration) to a sense of attending in order to receive something (a blessing or some kind of credit). It appears that along with this shift came an increasingly passive role for worshippers, until it seemed that simply attending was almost all that was expected. Such a development is seriously demeaning. Everything done together in worship may (and should) be viewed as an act of offering a gift to God, who is the object of reverence and praise.

Seems pretty spot on to me. I shared this quote with one of the elders of White Fields Church and his comment was that he would go so far as to say that in our consumer culture, people have gotten so passive about “worship” that they not only come with the mentality and expectation primarily to receive, but they “shop” for where they can find the best bargain.

The part of the above quote which really sticks out to me is the word “demeaning”. I think the author is right. But how do we go about shifting this consumer culture in the minds of Christian people? That is the challenge.

Bad Church Statistics

Published on by nickcady1 Comment

I ran across this article this week about Bad Church Statistics and the lies that are commonly believed as a result. I’ve copied the 7 myths part below, which is the core of the article.

I don’t know about you, but I have heard almost all of these before. I guess the sky isn’t falling quite as bad as we’ve been told it is. But, as Winston Churchill said: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Myth #1. The divorce rate among Christians is as high as that of nonbelievers.

Reality: Christians have significantly lower divorce rates than the religiously unaffiliated. Further, the more regularly a Christian attends church, the less likely that person is to divorce.

Myth #2. Christian young people are leaving the Christian faith in record numbers.

Reality: It’s true that younger people are less affiliated with church than older people, but that’s the case in every generation since scholars began tracking it. We always need to help the next generation connect with church, but the overall percentage of Americans who affiliate with evangelical churches has remained rather stable for the last 30 years.

Myth #3. The majority of American evangelicals are poor and uneducated.

Reality: This quote from the Washington Post has some truth to it. The problematic term is “the majority of” which should be replaced with “many.” On average, evangelical Christians are less well educated than mainline Protestants, Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated. But evangelicals cover a wide spectrum from poorly educated to highly educated. Themajority, however, are not poor and uneducated.

Myth #4. The prayer life of American evangelicals is diminishing.

Reality: It turns out that evangelical prayer is on the increase. For example, 75% of evangelicals today pray on a daily basis, compared to 64% of those in the 1980s.

Myth #5. Evangelicals are less active in sharing their faith with others.

Reality: About half of all evangelicals report sharing their faith with non-believers, and rates of evangelism have held rather steady over the past several decades. This evangelism rate is more than double the rate of mainline Protestants and Catholics, and is higher than most other religions. We all have family and friends who seek a closer relationship with God, plus we know of entire people groups that have little exposure to the Gospel, so let’s keep ramping up our efforts.

Myth #6. Evangelicals preach one thing about sex outside marriage, but practice another.

Reality: Actually, evangelicals have relatively low rates of adultery, premarital sex and pornography usage, and these decrease with more frequent church attendance.

Myth #7. The more educated you become, the more likely you are to give up your faith.

Reality: Belief and practice grow stronger with increased education, evangelicals included.

Frontier Church and Beyond

Published on by nickcady1 Comment

I do my seminary studies in England, and I always find it interesting to read about American culture, politics, etc. from a British perspective.

This semester I’m taking a class on History of Christian Worship, and one part of this describes the development of different ways of “shaping Christian time” in worship.

Here’s an excerpt from my reading about the “Frontier Church model”:

Frontier or Revivalist Groups

This term is used by White to designate a type of Protestant worship widely recognised in North America which spread to the UK. As already indicated, it is a nineteenth-century form of the Service of the Word in which worship became simply equated with evangelism. Its roots were Puritan, Reformed and Methodist, and it was born out of a prevailing spirit of its Victorian times – didactic, stripped-down commonsensical. To meet the challenge of how to mediate Christian faith to the scattered and independent people moving west across the North American continent, evangelists developed a pragmatic, free-style, anti-tradition form. This kind of worship had one purpose and that was to make converts.

The service had a three-part form:

  • 􏰂the warm-up or preliminaries – easy-to-sing emotional hymns;
  • 􏰂 the Word – the sermon, preparing for;
  • 􏰂 the harvest – altar call, an emotional appeal for conversion.

Frontier-type worship is evident in evangelistic ‘crusades’ and in many independent church services and Pentecostal meetings.

Sound familiar?  This gives interesting perspective to the “common” way of doing church in America today.  I know that this is the MO of many mega-churches. However, the question is begged: where is the discipleship? I know of large churches which have no strategy for discipleship beyond their Sunday morning preaching times, which are focused on proclamation of the Gospel with a focus on evangelism.

On the other side of the spectrum, I was speaking this weekend with friends in Canada who told me that the services in their church are focused wholly on the people of God and are not at all evangelistic (something they regretted to admit).

This seems to be one of the big questions: Who and what is the church service designed for? Discipling believers, or preaching to unbelievers for conversion?  But what if everyone is converted already?  Do you just keep preaching the same invitation to receive salvation to the already saved, because there just might be 1 or 2 unsaved people?  Or is it then always an invitation to “re-committ”?  Where does the instruction of believers come in?  Is that really “church”?  BUT – if you never preach and invite people to respond to the call of the Gospel to commit themselves to following Jesus, then what happens when new people come? Is your service simply not for them?

Clearly every church is trying to find this balance. I find that teaching through the Bible systematically, like we do at White Fields, is one of the most effective ways of both instructing believers and giving calls to action and to repentance. I also believe that having Christian instruction outside of the Sunday morning gatherings is an important way of doing this too. One of the things I’d like to start at White Fields is something along this line, because after all, we are called to not only make converts unto Jesus Christ, but disciples of Jesus Christ, teaching them to observe all that He commanded us (Matthew 28:20).