B-E-D-L-A-M: The neo-heretics

[Kollyvas]

(THESE ARE THE FRUITS OF ecumenism AND A LACK OF A TRUE ORTHODOX WITNESS!--R)

http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/mod/ne ... le_id=7533

Christian mavericks find affirmation in ancient heresies
The Christian Science Monitor

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

When the Rev. John Buehrens gives his Easter sermon this Sunday, he'll borrow a page from an unlikely source: the Gospel of Judas. The gnostic text, unveiled by scholars with fanfare last week, portrays Jesus Christ as an enigmatic guru who venerates Judas, teaching him secret accounts of creation and approving his imminent betrayal.

Many Christians might find that offensive, or, like Mr. Buehrens of Unitarian First Parish in Needham, Mass., silly. But as an emblem of Christianity's long tradition of dissenting voices, the text is for him an inspiration nonetheless.

"An awful lot of what passes for orthodoxy today is something Jesus would have despised," Buehrens says, noting Christian support for "imperialism and militarism." As a challenge to orthodoxy in its time, he says, the Judas story is "a reminder that no single interpretation of the Christ event can exhaust the spiritual implications."

Across the country, observers say, the Gospel of Judas is striking a chord with progressive Christians. Not so much for its heretical theology, but as an ancient symbol of their modern mission to update what defines faithfulness. It's an approach that's winning approval from scholars, who say Christianity has always attracted diverse beliefs. But others worry that this revisionism misrepresents time-tested truths.

Modern theologians attracted to the Judas gospel are reminding today's dissenters that they follow a long, legitimate tradition. At last week's press conference, four academics used either "diverse" or "diversity" to describe what the text reveals about the beliefs and attitudes of the early church. If the church was so varied in its early days, they suggest, then contemporary Christians can perhaps accept the growing diversity of beliefs and lifestyles in their religious communities as well.

"The Christianity of the ancient world was even more diverse than it is today," says Bart Ehrman, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former fundamentalist Christian turned self-described "happy agnostic" - someone who claims it cannot be known if God exists. "My hope is that when people see how diverse Christianity was in its origins, [they] will be a little bit more tolerant of diversity in Christianity today."

That may be easier said than done. One reason: many of early Christianity's most steadfast figures rejected gnostic teachings as heresy - that is, false representations of Jesus' life and of God's nature. (Gnostic doctrines assert rival divine beings and emphasize salvation through secret knowledge.) Although heresy is seldom a matter of public debate in the 21st century, the problem of embracing all beliefs that purport to be "Christian" persists.

To think that noncanonical texts legitimizes diversity today "is to ignore the fact that that diversity was not accepted [in the early church]," says Ronald Simkins, director of the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion & Society at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. "It's a naive use of history."

Adjustments to Easter service

At the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Paul in Boston, the congregation has stripped Holy Week observances of traditional content that strikes members as offensive. On Palm Sunday last weekend, for instance, parishioners heard an adapted Passion narrative that removes biblical language seen as blaming Jews for Jesus' crucifixion. And the hundreds who observe Good Friday won't pray for those who haven't yet received "the Gospel of Christ" but for those untouched by "the grace of God" - a new gesture of respect for the Muslims who use the church for Friday worship.

The goal of these adjustments, says Cathedral Dean Jep Streit, is to reflect in practice who Jesus is and what he represents. And that message-refining process, he says, echoes the debate between orthodox believers and dissenters centuries ago.

"We have this give and take through the first two or three centuries [after Christ's birth], and it continues today, as it should," he says.

In Atlanta, the Rev. Chip Carson plans to proclaim Jesus' triumph over sin and death when he celebrates Easter at First Metropolitan Community Church of Atlanta, a church with predominantly homosexual membership. But he won't provide the traditional explanation, which says God required a sacrificial atonement for human sin, because he prefers a "love-based theology rather than a fear-based theology."

"Whoever is in power decides what's heresy," Carson says. "We don't tell people what to believe. We only encourage them to have closer contact with God."

Who defines what's Christian?
Yet the same standards hold from age to age, regardless of who's in charge, according to Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

"You can have disagreements about doctrinal interpretations of particular issues - that's why we have Catholics, and we have Presbyterians, and we have Baptists, and we have Methodists.... But if you deny the resurrection [or other core teachings], well, according to historic Christianity, you are beyond the pale."

For some the debate isn't about theology; it's about freedom of conscience.

The Rev. Jayne Oasin, a social justice officer for the Episcopal Church, USA., says that "to consider there to be only one truth is to me a form of oppression."

[Kollyvas]

(Yet SOME receive people from these para-churches by Chrismation?!--R)

http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/mod/ne ... le_id=7524

Rite of baptism trickles away
USA TODAY

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
Every month there's a cheering, weeping, air-horn-tooting celebration at First Assembly of God in North Little Rock, when the Rev. Rod Loy immerses new believers in the baptismal tank.
"This is a sign that someone understands the ideas of sin and Christ's sacrifice and willfully chooses to be a lifelong follower of Jesus," says the pastor. "So we celebrate it big."

For believers, baptism is modeled on their savior, who the Bible says waded into the water to consecrate himself to God.

They may be sprinkled, washed from a flowing pitcher or immersed, as faith rituals vary. But all forms point to beliefs: rebirth in faith, salvation from sin, acceptance of God's promises and charges.

For parents who bring a baby before their church, baptism is a pledge of their faith, a shield against evil, a wrapping of communal arms around a defenseless soul.

For Christians of all denominations, "even if they never darkened the door of a church any other time in their life ... there's a tendency to hold onto this life-cycle marker," says the Rev. Paul Sullins, a sociologist at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Yet, this Easter, the holy day of resurrection, statistics find Americans slowly drifting away from the ancient baptismal ritual.

The Catholic Church has more than doubled in size in the past half-century, but its rate of infant baptism steadily has fallen, Sullins says.

Methodists and Lutherans have seen both baptisms and their membership numbers slide for years.

Even Loy's denomination, the Assemblies of God, which has had a boom in membership since 1980, saw its annual baptism numbers peak in 1997, then inch downward.

The Southern Baptist Convention has seen a half-century decline in baptisms and stalled growth in membership.

In response, the Rev. Bobby Welch, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is leading a national campaign to reverse the trend.

Behind the drop, experts see pressures ranging from fewer babies since the postwar boom, to increased secularization and interfaith marriage, to more "seeker churches" that downplay tradition.

Among Catholics, Sullins says, the rate of baptisms has fallen faster than the rate of decline in births.

Baptism isn't the only source of new members. The church's U.S. numbers — up from 31.6 million in 1954 to 67.8 million last year — also have grown through immigration. And at Saturday's Easter vigil, the church will receive tens of thousands of adult converts.

The sociologist also links fewer infant baptisms to two trends involving marriage. Fewer Catholics are choosing to marry in the church, and Sullins says they may be less "attached to the sacraments." And, since a change in church law in 1983, Catholics who marry non-Catholics no longer must promise to baptize and rear their children as Catholics.

Intermarriage slows baptisms

Now the church requires only "a general recognition by the couple that the Catholic partner's faith will be respected."

"The more you see more inter-faith marriages or couples where one partner is lukewarm or hostile to organized religion, the more you will see baptism taper off," says the Rev. James Martin, associate editor of the Jesuit magazine America and author of My Life with the Saints

"I know friends who themselves are strongly Catholic but who married people inimical to the church, and it's hard to agree on what they should do with their baby. At the very least, it delays baptism. The more delayed, the less likely it is to happen at all," he says.

All the denominations that emphasize infant baptism, such as Catholics, Methodists and Lutherans, struggle with a contemporary culture that rejects the very idea that humanity is born into sin or that parents should steer children's spiritual development, says the Rev. Gayle Carlton Felton, author of the United Methodist Church's statement on baptism theology and practice, This Gift of Water.

Methodists "no longer literally believe that baptism removes the burden of sin that would send a child to hell," Felton says. But it's still essential because "it's God's claim on the child's life.

"Something real is happening in a baptism," Felton says. "For mainline liturgical churches, the actor here is God, claiming that child for his own. It doesn't matter if the child remembers it. God does."

Denominations that baptize only believers — older kids and adults who profess change of heart and want to witness this with an outward sign — also are seeing a decline.

The Southern Baptist Convention has seen its rate of baptism fall about 35% from 1972 to 1985, midway through a decade when the denomination was torn by dissension over an ultra-conservative leadership takeover.

Then the rate stalled for the next 20 years, even though Baptists are pledged to heed the Bible's "great commission" in Matthew 28:19-20: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. ..."

When religion columnist Terry Mattingly caught up with Welch's baptism campaign bus last fall, Welch told him just 40% of Southern Baptist Convention converts were truly unchurched before. "What that means is that we're not reaching the pagan pool. ... We're just rearranging the furniture inside the church."

Unlike the slow-growing Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God's number of adherents grew from nearly 1.8 million in 1980 to nearly 2.8 million in 2004. But the total number of baptisms by immersion in water or by the Holy Spirit — experiencing the gift of speaking in tongues, one of the denomination's distinctly Pentecostal beliefs — has hovered from around 175,000 to 200,000 yearly.

If baptism is the door into a faith, where did all those people go?

Like Welch, the Rev. George Wood, general secretary of the Assemblies of God, sees Christians play musical chairs, looking for the right fit in theology, worship style and ministry services. "At the church where I pastored years ago in Orange County, we had to grow 30% every year just to stay even with the mobility in the culture," Wood says. And, he adds, not all new or reborn faith takes root.

Today, some parents refuse to plant it at all.

There are now baptism-style ceremonies where God is never mentioned by parents seeking to initiate their children into a world of all faiths, says Ema Drouillard of San Francisco, who runs the website Ceremonyway.com.

She conducted such an event for Kirsten and Farnum Alston of Marin County, Calif., for their baby, Greer, in 1998. "We just wanted a larger spirit to guide our daughter, but we didn't want to get specific. I wanted all her bases covered," says Kirsten Alston. The couple grew up Presbyterian, but now "we just do Christianity L-I-T-E" for Greer, who "believes in angels and fairies, leprechauns and Santa Claus."

Non-traditional paths to God

Churches in the '90s began actively courting church-wary people. These "seeker" churches often de-emphasized strict theology and practice, and gave a less prominent role to baptisms.

"We focused so much on the personal decision, the big deal of turning your life over to Christ, that the public, external identification — baptism — was less important in practice," says the Rev. Brian McLaren, who co-founded the non-denominational Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Md.

Yet McLaren, who retired in January to write and lecture, sees change in the air, particularly when he looks at young church leaders such as the Rev. Rob Bell, 35, who Christianity Today once said "puts the hip in discipleship."

At Bell's non-denominational Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Mich., where 12,000 worshipers gather weekly in a former mall, they roll in a portable tank every few weeks so baptismal candidates can witness their conversion to the whole congregation. "We are baptizing more people than ever," because "people are desperate for something ancient and lasting and meaningful," Bell says.

Even if baptisms aren't rising in numbers, they're on the rise in significance, McLaren says.

Baptism is "a commitment to a lifelong spiritual practice, a discipleship, not a one-time event."

[Kollyvas]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/cust ... 9285.story

This Catholic church is born again
Parish livens services with music, multimedia

By Margaret Ramirez
Tribune religion reporter
Published April 14, 2006, 10:24 PM CDT

On Easter Sunday, two huge video screens will project praise hymns in this Catholic church as the rock 'n' roll choir leads the celebration of Jesus' resurrection. The priest will consecrate the Eucharist from a lowered altar that brings him closer to his people. Flowering dogwood branches will encircle the church's baptismal font, now an immersion pool in the center aisle surrounded by four gurgling fountains.

Holy Family Catholic Parish Community in Inverness is marking its own rebirth this weekend, opening a $1.4 million renovated sanctuary to its 12,000 parishioners that embraces many elements of the Protestant evangelical movement.

The changes might seem unusual to old-school Catholics. They have raised eyebrows among more orthodox leaders in the archdiocese. But the pastor and parishioners say they are carving the model for the future American Catholic Church.

In contrast to many other Catholic churches where attendance has dropped, Holy Family Parish is booming, even winning back Catholics who were attending Willow Creek, the nondenominational megachurch 3 miles away. Holy Family, with more than 3,700 families, is one of the largest congregations in the archdiocese.

The secret to the 22-year-old church's success has been replicating what growing churches are doing, but in a Catholic way. The result is an innovative congregation that bills itself as "an evangelical church in the Roman Catholic tradition."

"I think what happened to the Catholic Church is we became a little comfortable with ourselves and forgot some of what made us Catholic. We forgot what made us passionate," said Holy Family's pastor, Rev. Pat Brennan. "So I've just taken the best that I've seen of Catholic parishes and evangelical churches and put them together to make Holy Family. In doing that, I think we've rediscovered the heart of Catholicism."

Like several other parishioners, Mary Whiteside said she was on the verge of abandoning her Catholic faith when she found Holy Family. On her first visit, Whiteside said she was hooked by the music and the pastor's riveting homilies. Her husband, Phil, who was raised a Baptist, was so moved by Holy Family that he converted to Catholicism.

"Great things are happening in this church. We're just very alive," said Whiteside, who is on the parish leadership council. "We're sharing some elements of the evangelical church, but I don't think we're trading any part of our Catholic identity."

Holy Family was started two decades ago when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin became concerned about the large numbers of Catholics in the northern suburbs leaving their churches to become members of Willow Creek Community Church. In 1984, the former archbishop purchased 16 acres of farmland in Inverness and founded a new parish community, Holy Family.

"We were a different kind of Catholic Church from Day One, because of how we were founded," said Colin Collette, director of liturgical ministries.

Holy Family's first pastor, Rev. Medard Laz, was selected mainly for his financial expertise. In 1993 Brennan, former head of the archdiocesan office for evangelization, was named to succeed him. In his new role, Brennan saw several key ingredients that a parish had to focus on to serve the needs of today's Catholics: a family approach to evangelism, small faith communities, adult religious education, and use of multimedia.

At Holy Family, laypeople run the church, managing nearly 140 ministries and financial operations. During the week, small groups meet in parishioners' homes. And although many Catholic churches have been slow to use the Internet, Holy Family has an impressive Web page with photos, video from church services, music from the choir and streaming audio of Brennan's homilies.

"The way our kids are growing up with iPods," Brennan said, "you have to have these things if you want to keep them in church."

Many parishioners describe themselves as "cradle Catholics" who became bored with church. Maria Graft, who was raised Catholic, had been attending Willow Creek for two years, but eventually found herself missing the liturgy and sacraments of the Catholic Church.

"I remember the day I came back, I was overwhelmed," she said.

Even before the renovation, Holy Family stood apart from other Catholic churches and was designed to blend evangelical style with Catholic worship. From the outside, the church is a stone and glass structure, striking in its simplicity.

Inside, there are no stained glass windows, no candles, no statues of saints. The dominant feature is an enormous 16-foot acrylic cross that hangs from the ceiling over the altar with Jesus gazing downward, his hand outstretched to people.

Now with the renovation of the church, which included addition of the video screens and baptismal pool as well as improved lighting and sound system, parishioners say Holy Family is entering a new phase.

"We're playing in the big leagues now," said Graft, who sings in the choir. "We had to do these renovations, not necessarily to compete with other churches, but just to stay relevant and up to date. It's a turning point."

But tensions have risen with the current archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, who supports a more orthodox view of the Catholic liturgy than his predecessor. Parishioners say the most recent example of that tension is the dispute over kneelers.

In the church's original design, Holy Family never had kneelers, partly to replicate evangelical churches but also to provide more room between pews. But when the church presented renovation plans to the archdiocese last year, parishioners learned the plans would not be approved unless the church installed kneelers.

"I'm disappointed," said Rosemary Geisler. "That was a decision that should have been left up to the people, and instead it was forced on us."

The minor dispute has led some parishioners to worry about the type of priest who will be selected as pastor of Holy Name after Brennan's term ends in two years. Dolores Siok, who has been at Holy Family for 17 years, worries about what will happen if the new priest wants to take the church back to Catholic orthodoxy.

"Everyone is concerned about the possibility that we get a staunch pastor who wants to take us backward. We're just praying we get someone who shares our vision," she said. "Or else we'll just be back where we started with people leaving the church."

maramirez@tribune.com