Here’s a surprise:  “When asked about voting habits, belief in God or their feelings toward race and gender, Americans are notorious for answering what they think pollsters want to hear.  Church demographers say the same rings true for church attendance.” 

This tidbit comes from an article by Amy Green of the Religious News Service.  It turns out that more people identify themselves as Southern Baptists than actually are counted by that denomination, which claims to be the most numerous Protestant denomination in the United States.

Officially, there are 16.3 million Southern Baptists (as distinguished from other Baptist groups), and some reports indicate only 6 million attend worship on a typical Sunday.  “The reality is, the FBI couldn’t find half of those if they had to,” remarked one pastor.  Lest you think this is about ridiculing the Southern Baptists, rest assured, other denominations, and congregations within those denominations, have the same difficulty with counting, adding, and subtracting.

Some churches play fast and loose with their membership figures because, well, bigger is better.  In some denominations there is a financial assessment based on membership numbers, so in that case, it’s not entirely negative in the eyes of the congregation if the figures slide downward a bit.  Sometimes people join a church, however that occurs in a particular tradition, and are never heard from again.  Member or not? 

Others join one church, eventually disappear, and join another.  No one bothers to inform the first church.  Are they members of two churches, counted twice?  Apparently, the Roman Catholic Church never removes anyone from the membership rolls until they die, or submit a written request to be removed.  There are a lot of invisible Catholics among the 69 million names on the books in the U.S.

In the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a person can be a “participating” or “non-participating” member.  To be among the former, one simply must either show up for worship once during the year or make a financial contribution.  Every church in which I have served as a pastor, had membership levels far outdistancing the reality.  It seems that somewhere along the line, perhaps in the same year everywhere, attempts at precise record-keeping collapsed.  How many members are there in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)?  God only knows.

It’s kind of funny that among the first questions people ask in discussions about churches is, “How many members do you have?”  Rarely do you hear, “What is the focus of the ministry of your church?”  or “How is the spirit of Christ manifested among the people there?” or “What difference does it make that your church is there?”  Those kinds of questions might prove to be embarrassing.

But then, the New Testament doesn’t portray Jesus as saying “Make church members of all nations.”  I believe the word he used was “disciples,” which means “one who embraces and assists in spreading the teachings of another…an active adherent, as of a movement or a philosophy.”

How many of those do we have?

In The Christian Century magazine, there always are thought-provoking articles, interesting columns, and informative news reports.  There also are poems.   A poem in the current issue is relevant to Lent and the emphasis on prayer.  It is by Rodney Clapp, and I will share it with you here.

Lessons in prayer; from a dog

He assumes his still posture

two feet from the table.

He is not grabby,

his tongue is not hanging out,

he is quiet.

He wants to leap,

he wants to snap up

meat and blood.

You can tell.

But what he does is sit

as the gods

his masters and mistresses

fork steak and potatoes

into their mouths.

He is expectant

but not presumptuous.

He can wait.

He can live with disappointment.

He can abide frustration

and suffer suspense.

He watches

for signals,

he listens for calls

of his name from above.

At hints that

he may be gifted

with a morsel,

he intensifies his

already rapt concentration,

he looks his god

in the eye, but humbly,

sure of his innocence

in his need,

if his need only.

On the (often rare) occasions

when gifts are laid on his tongue,

he takes them whole,

then instantly resumes

the posture of attention,

beseeching, listening, alert,

the posture of hard-won faith

that will take no for an answer,

yet ever and again hopefully

return to the questioning.

The preacher at a church I used to attend once lamented during a Sunday morning sermon the pace of life in today’s world, and expressed a longing for a time he recalled from his youth.  “We went to church on Sunday, then returned home to a nice home-cooked meal, and afterwards went out and sat on the front porch.”  Does it sound idyllic?  Was it relaxing?  Did people have lower blood pressure? 

I don’t think the women in the congregation were convinced everything was so slow and easy “back in the day.”  The kitchen can be a busy, hot, tiring place.

Today I read about “Teen Mania Ministries” that rounded up busloads of youth and carted them up to Times Square in New York, where they chanted “Jesus!  Jesus!  Jesus!” and called for the “recreation” of “music, film, fashion, television, and other media to remove explicit language and imagery.”  One young person remarked that she was there, along with the others, “To make changes for our generation, to just stand up and say, ‘We’re tired of all the filth’…You know, music and songs that are constantly so negative --- just making us numb to the abuse of alcohol and drugs and sex and pornography and all that stuff.”

Fair enough.  That kind of witness is helpful, as long as they aren’t aiming for censorship and imposing one viewpoint on everyone else.  People, even youth, can make choices, after all.  And perhaps pursuing that angle would prove more productive.

But, another idea expressed by the same person caught my attention.  She suggested that “America saw happier, more wholesome times fifty years ago, when the problems were different, and in her view, less serious.”

Yikes!

Fifty years ago there was a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.  Public facilities posted signs regarding their availability, differentiating between “White” and “Colored.”   Communism was snaking around in Southeast Asia.  The Cold War was pretty frosty.  The proliferation of nuclear weapons was on the agenda.  (Oh, and Elvis Presley was swiveling his hips in provocative, “un-Christian” patterns.  I believe Milton Berle was dressing as a woman on television on one channel while Jackie Gleason was threatening his “Honeymooner” wife on another:  “One of these days, Alice!  To the MOON!”)

You don’t have to read very far into the scriptures to discover that human sinfulness has been evident for a long, long time, and that the effects have been “negative,” as our Maniacal Teen termed it.

There really is no point in longing for a romanticized period of time that never truly existed.  We have to deal with the here and now, and wrestle with the same age-old problems.

Bob Foster likens himself to Noah of Old Testament fame.

It seems Mr. Foster determined back in 1979 that the world was about to end.  So, he high-tailed it out into the Utah wilderness and carved out a dwelling for himself in a huge rock.  He calls his home, and the community that has grown there over the years as the world managed to hang on, Rockland Ranch.

Foster was a polygamist Mormon, excommunicated long ago.  He still has three wives, despite going through a divorce, and almost forty children.  Over the years he has chipped away at the rock enough to fashion 9 more “buildings,” which are naturally cool in the summer, warmed by wood stoves in the winter, and benefit from a nearby reservoir.

Maybe he originally made a miscalculation, but Foster cannot imagine “life as we know it” continuing any longer than ten more years.  Too many factors work against it:  “global warming, war, and all.”

So, he has his escape all arranged, out there among the rocks, along with the seventy-five or so others who have found their way to this refuge.   If the world ends, I’m not sure what those people think they will do, or why they even think they will survive.

Foster sees himself as a “religious” person, blending Christianity and Mormon teachings in his outlook.

He can do what he chooses, I suppose (although he once served 20 days of jail time for a polygamy conviction.  He described it as “hard time” – he had to wash the sheriff’s car.).  But, it occurs to me that people of faith aren’t instructed or encouraged to withdraw from the world, or culture, or society, no matter how depraved it may become.

I thought we were supposed to be witnesses to an alternative – a world, culture, or society imagined by God, reflecting God’s love and inclination to create new life.

With the season of Lent now upon us one of the issues confronting people of faith is fasting.   The association of fasting with Lent hearkens back to the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism.  As he emerged from the water of the Jordan River, Jesus saw the heavens opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove.  Then came God’s voice declaring, “You are my son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”  Next stop – the wilderness, to wrestle with what it all meant.  The wilderness was the setting for the Temptation Story.  Jesus spent the days in the wilderness in prayer and fasting.

Jesus was able to depart from the wilderness, and begin his ministry without having to fall back on the old excuse, “The devil made me do it!”  The fast undertaken by Jesus allowed him to empty himself to the extent that God so filled him, it was clear to him where his strength, inspiration, guidance, wisdom, and protection were to be found.

I personally never knew anyone who regularly engaged in the spiritual discipline of fasting.  History reports that Gandhi fasted.  Sometimes we may hear of others who face difficult or challenging choices, or who weigh their responses to some given set of circumstances, and include fasting in their spiritual work.  These fasts commonly involve forsaking food during the designated period of time.

Fasts can be declared, though, on other aspects of our lives.  When we eliminate behaviors or activities from our normal patterns, room is created for something else.  For instance, if time spent on the computer writing blogs is reduced or abolished, the writer may find that more fruitful endeavors can fill that time.  When people of faith recognize an inner focus on selfishness and find ways to declare a fast on such an approach to life and interactions with others, then more compassion and service can fill the void.

The idea of a Lenten fast is to get rid of whatever inhibits or detracts from the spiritual seeker’s relationship with God.  Throw out the junk, and let God fill the emptiness.

If one were to identify traits, practices, or behaviors for members of the faith community to unload onto the scrap pile through a fast, one might include:  our take it or leave it attitude toward the worship of God; our aversion to spiritual growth; our reluctance to tithe (that is, to give 10% of our gross income as an offering to God); our fear of change; our suspicion of others within our community of faith; our tendency to associate conventional cultural notions and norms with faithfulness; our thoughtlessness in what we say to or about others; our substitution of busyness for creative ministry – you get the idea.

Maybe the most frightening aspect of this type of fast is that it requires us honestly to own up to who we are in relation to our calling.

Today, Mary and I went to the Florida State Fair.  It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed it, especially when Mary had the opportunity to feed two giraffes.  She always has liked giraffes, and there was a “menagerie” exhibit that had wallabies, a zebra, a burro, some camels, and llamas, along with the giraffes.  For a buck you could get a bag of carrots to feed them. 

When we talked about it later, we recalled a television program we watched on PBS featuring Lynn Sherr of ABC News, who visited friends in Africa that keep a horde of giraffes on their property.  The giraffes come right up to the house and even stick their heads inside through open windows or the front door.  These folks are very chummy with the giraffes! 

Thinking of Lynn Sherr today reminded me of when I invited her to visit William Penn House during my tenure as Executive Director.  She was familiar to me mainly from her regular television reporting on Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns and National Conventions.  She also was a correspondent on the television newsmagazine 20/20.  One day I heard her on the other side of the microphone, interviewed on National Public Radio about her book Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words.  Immediately I began devising a plan to bring her to William Penn House. 

I called her office in New York and got her voice mail.  When she called me back I explained what I had in mind:  a lecture and book signing at William Penn House.  I knew Quakers were interested in Susan B. Anthony, and this would be an open event publicized primarily among the local Friends Meetings. 

Lynn Sherr was cordial when we spoke on the telephone.  She also, of course, was all business, and I soon sensed she might not especially be inclined to make a trip to Washington for what I had in mind.  But I didn’t want to let her wiggle off the hook, so when she made some vague comment about “maybe sometime” rather than simply saying no, I said, “when would be good for you?”  She exhaled audibly and said, “Well, call my publicist and set something up with her.”  So, that’s what I did.  I mean, she gave me the publicist’s telephone number. 

We arranged for a supply of the books to be shipped to me at WPH, we paid for Sherr’s transportation between Washington and New York (she told me there were rules, or maybe it was an ABC News policy, against journalists accepting honoraria), we rounded up the local Quakers, and had just a delightful evening beginning with a nice dinner prepared by some of the WPH Board members.   

All the books were sold and appropriately inscribed, we enjoyed anecdotes and insights about Susan B. Anthony, and William Penn House received a few dollars for our trouble.  Following the program I drove Lynn Sherr to her friend’s home near the Washington National Cathedral where she spent the night, and all was well. 

Our day today was pleasant, and so were the memories it invoked.

Now Congress is getting involved. 

Last week I mentioned the NFL’s aversion to churches hosting big-screen football-watching parties.  The idea was that large gatherings of folks in one place to watch the Big Game was detrimental to television ratings, and subsequently had a negative effect on advertising revenue potential based on those ratings. 

Sports bars are exempt from the prohibition of groups watching on televisions larger than 55 inches.  They sell the products of the largest Big Game advertiser.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, introduced a bill that would allow churches to be exempt from the copyright laws governing the public display of Big Game broadcasts.  He remarked, “In a time when our country is divided by war and anxious about a fluctuating economy, these types of events give people a reason to come together in the spirit of camaraderie.”  The House of Representatives is picking up sponsors for a similar bill.

The NFL is reviewing the matter.

Sen. Specter already let it be known he was looking into the “spying” by the New England Patriots.  They apparently videotaped some signals from their opponents, or taped practice sessions, or something, all against NFL rules.  In a maneuver worthy of the Nixon Administration, the tapes were destroyed once in the hands of the NFL.  Sen. Specter is demanding to know why.  He indicated he would lean on the NFL about the church issue as he investigates the scandal of the missing videotapes.

One wonders how life would be different if the Congress of the United States moved as quickly on matters of poverty, social injustice, and war as they are moving on the issue of churches watching football games. 

One wonders how life would be different if the church put up as much of a fuss about poverty, social injustice, and war as we have about the right to have a big party around our large-screen televisions.

When I saw the online mention of the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, it brought to mind my days as a student at East Carolina University.  One of my teachers was an advocate of Transcendental Meditation.  He was in the economics department, was a calm person who drove a Corvette, and lobbed slow-pitch questions on multiple-choice exams.  For instance, we once had to decide whether Congress actually repealed the “law” of supply and demand, or if another suggested choice applied.

I never really thought of the instructors as “professors” in the same light I would later consider my mentors at seminary, but some memorable ones popped up along the way.  On the disappointing side was my academic advisor in the business school, whose name I no longer recall.  That’s fair, though, because I had the distinct impression he neither remembered my name nor any prior conversations whenever I stopped by his office for another confusing interaction.  Some of us suspected that the head of the accounting department spent her evenings in pursuit of liquid courage, but then, perhaps she was weary, coming to the end of the line, unfortunate enough not to escape the campus scene prior to the upheaval and dismantling of everything sacred. 

Some of my teachers at ECU had distracting idiosyncrasies.  Of course, in those days at a Tobacco Road school, several of them smoked in class, as did numerous students.  My philosophy instructor, in a deadeningly tortuous 3:00 p.m. class in the Spring quarter, no less, forced us to spend the weeks pondering the question, “What is temperance?”

He personally didn’t display temperance in his fumbling with cigarettes and matches, and perhaps it was supposed to be an object lesson.  While we carefully tracked the number of times he articulated the word, “uh,” he lit his cigarette, inhaling thoughtfully as the match flamed longer than necessary.  Then he blew out the match, slowly shook it eight or ten times, blew on it some more, shook it again, all the while lost in philosophical rumination, before finally dropping the match on the floor and grinding it into total submission with his cowboy-booted foot. 

While fragrant spring flowers and bushes gracefully blossomed outside the classroom window attracting rejoicing bees, and every beautiful, great-to-be-young Friday afternoon seemed horribly wasted, I can report there were no fires in the building.

Another teacher spent the class time pensively rolling his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, rolling them back down, and then up again.  My tax accounting teacher advised that we apportion the yellow smudges from our highlighters on the few unimportant sections in the tax code book we used as our text, rather than follow the more traditional reverse practice.  It was a true lesson in minimizing expenses, the inspirational slogan of the business school.

A tragic case ensued concerning my freshman English teacher, Russell Christman.  It also was his first year at ECU and in North Carolina.  He was from Philadelphia, and he and I hit it off from the beginning.  He was appropriately impressed by my polished skills in the “funnel technique” of composition.  It was relentlessly pounded into me in high school honors English classes, and I had it covered:  write an introduction describing what you were going to say, make your points that say it, conclude by summarizing what you said.  Simple, straightforward, satisfying.  I remember writing for him one paper in particular that he held up as an example to the class.  It was a treatise from an 18 year-old mind on ethno-centric interpretation of human events.   He loved it.

A couple of years later, Russ went to Raleigh with some others to attend an event at N.C. State University.  Along the way, the car was involved in an accident.  While others were triaged at the scene and some were transported to the hospital, Russ refused to go, even to be examined.  He felt fine.  Within hours, Russ collapsed and died. 

Life, however, went on, albeit with an ugly hole rudely punched into the fabric.

Cristina McCabe is a 13 year-old girl who took a stand when she was in kindergarten that affected the lives of others and changed the way things were done at her church.  As a small child she noticed that only boys served on the altar of Our Lady of Good Counsel church in Virginia.  When she asked her mother why that was the case, there really was no good answer.

Subsequently, she and her classmates in kindergarten learned the story of Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to integrate the schools in Louisiana.  Cristina’s teacher asked the class what they would do, if they were brave like Ruby Bridges.  Cristina thought of the situation in her church and wrote, “If I were brave I would get a lot of girls to sign a petition and then we would sit on the altar and not leave until we could serve.”

While Cristina didn’t organize a “sit-in” on the altar, she did write a letter to the bishop expressing her desire to serve, letting him know she felt it was unjust to be excluded on the basis of her gender.  The bishop responded by saying he would prayerfully consider her concern.

Cristina’s family left the area for five years on a Peace Corps assignment, but learned through a friend that the bishop eventually changed the policy and allowed girls to serve.  Upon her family’s return, Cristina signed up to serve, and did so for the first time on her birthday.

“I could really feel God’s trust and love as I helped receive the gifts of bread and wine at the altar.  And I felt like an angel dressed in the white robe,” said Cristina.

To me, it’s remarkable that it was not until the 21^st Century that females were deemed worthy to serve at the altar in Cristina’s church tradition.  As I read scripture, it occurs to me that the faith is about life, freedom, relationship with God, and service in the name of God in order to be a blessing to others.

I don’t understand why we find so many ways to subvert the promises and blessings of the faith we claim is important to us.   Fortunately, people like Cristina come along and point out where we fall short. 

She was six years old at the time.

Fred Phelps and family, who I hear make up most of his “church” in Topeka, Kansas are at it again.  The fine folks of Westboro Baptist Church are the ones who show up at funerals for U. S. soldiers carrying signs and otherwise promote their judgment that God is killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because the U. S. “condones” homosexuality.  I’m not sure what that means, exactly, since gays and lesbians have fewer civil liberties than most others.  Perhaps the good Rev. Phelps and family equate condoning with “allowing to live.”

Anyway, now they have decided that God hates Reno, Nevada.  (God also hates Sweden, Canada, Ireland, and Mexico, in case you were wondering – details are on their official hate website.  You might consult it prior to booking your next international voyage.)   It seems some designated haters (all in the name of the Lord, of course) weren’t especially welcomed in Reno at a funeral service for a U. S. serviceman, so now the whole town has made The List.

Iraq must really be in trouble, because not only are we (or is it God?) killing armed fighters there, but unaccounted-for thousands more civilians have lost their lives since the U. S. invasion several years ago.   Kenya, Darfur, Sri Lanka, and other places have seen terrible violence and death, as well. 

It’s kind of difficult to promote the “God is love” angle of scripture when God is sweeping across the globe in a killing rampage.  At least we have the Phelps family to interpret for us what really is happening.

Personally, I find it astounding that God can love even those who attribute the worst in human behavior to God.  But, when I consider the teachings of Jesus, and I discover his willingness to suffer innocently for his convictions as he trusts completely in God’s ability to create life even in places suffocating with death, well, that’s what I come up with. 

God is better at it than I am.