Couldn't Help Noticing

Couldn’t have put it better

I was just happily reading and enjoying my legal thriller book by Reed Arvin (The Last Goodbye) when I came across the following perceptive comment:

Guilt. That, for the criminal lawyer, is the operative word. It's no accident that juries don't find defendants innocent. They say they're ‘not guilty’, because somewhere in the collective unconscious roams the knowledge that nobody is truly innocent or unstained. Those words just don't fit the human race.

First Impressions

My wife and I have had the opportunity to attend several different church gatherings (a.k.a. services) in the last few months. At one church we visited, we experienced these actual events in the following order:

1. We sat down in our seats about 10 minutes before the start. My wife, Abby, was in the aisle seat. A man came down the aisle and tapped her on the back and said exuberantly, “Hey!” As he walked around in front of her, his face sank and he said, “Sorry, thought that you were someone else”. He proceeded to walk down to the front. We thought it was odd that he didn't bother to introduce himself or say more to two obvious outsiders. We chalked it up to him possibly being shy, or maybe being a newcomer himself. We later found out that he was the pastor! Strike 1.

2. After a few announcements were given, the leader asked, “Could we have all the first-time visitors stand up? We want to give an appropriate [insert name of church] welcome.” The appropriate welcome was a round of applause. Needless to say, we didn't stand and we didn't feel welcomed. Strike 2.

3. Three offerings were collected in the span of 20 minutes. It is uncomfortable when everyone around you is giving money and you know that they know that you aren't. Repeat this three times and it doesn't make an outsider feel terribly secure. The worst was the second offering when the pastor proclaimed, “It is now time to take the Joash offering”. That is all he said, and all of a sudden music started playing and people started to walk around, chat with friends and mosey to the front of the auditorium to drop money in a box. We had no idea what was going on and, again, felt rather uncomfortable. Strike 3.

4. The guest speaker gave a 25-minute introduction about himself, sang a song and then—1 hour and 25 minutes into the service—said, “I need a short break and then I'll start my message.” Strike 4.

Generally, one only gets three strikes. We were being generous and gave them four, and then we exited during the pre-sermon break.

Abby and I are telling the experience not because we want to point out faults, but because we feel everybody could learn from it. This is how not to make a good first impression.

The main thing?

Well here's a good indication of how lost the Episcopal Church in the USA is. This is what the new Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, had to say in response to the question “What will be your focus as head of the U.S. church (sic)?”:

Our focus needs to be on feeding people who go to bed hungry, on providing primary education to girls and boys, on healing people with AIDS, on addressing tuberculosis and malaria, on sustainable development. That ought to be the primary focus.

If you want to read more of what she had to say to TIME magazine, you can do so here.

The influence of fathers

A Briefing reader sent in one of those pieces of sociological research that you know expresses a deep truth about families and fathers. It's just that you're not sure whether to entirely believe it, or exactly what to do with it.

It was a survey conducted in Switzerland (more than a decade ago) in conjunction with their regular census, and it looked at whether a person's religious convictions carried on into the next generation. In particular, it charted how the church attendance pattern of fathers and mothers influenced the subsequent attendance pattern of their children as they grew to adulthood.

Look at the following incomplete set of results, and (as Bart Simpson would say) set your faces to stun:

There are multiple reasons for these figures to be treated with caution. We aren't sure of the exact methodology, the religious or theological assumptions, the Swiss cultural factors that may have affected the result, and so on. But even factoring in a discount for uncertainty, these are startling figures about the influence of a father on the church attending patterns of his children.

Notice, for example, the extraordinary contrast between lines 3 and 5. A faithful, regularly attending mother with a non-attending husband will (on average) see only 2% of her children become regulars themselves; but a regular father with a non-attending wife will see 44% of his children become regulars at church. An even more bizarre reversal is seen between lines 2 and 6, where the an irregularly attending father is much more likely to see his children become regular church-goers if his wife doesn't attend—as if the mother's non-attendance in some way sparks a greater identification of the children with the father's faith.

What the figures would be like if only evangelical churches were surveyed would be interesting to speculate, where the gospel is preached and people are genuinely converted (as opposed to merely adopting the attendance patterns of their parents).

However, regardless of what these statistics really indicate about the way faith is formed, they do show one startling truth—the influence of fathers on the behaviour of their children. Fathers take note. Mothers, don't despair—pass this article on, with an appropriate jab of the elbow to the ribs.

(The figures were quoted in an article from Touchstone magazine.)

Christian advertising

The United Church of Canada has begun an interesting (and expensive) advertising campaign to try to engage people in spiritual issues. You can read the story here, and see the first stage of the ad campaign here. What do you think? Clever?

These sorts of campaigns often attract a lot of interest and attention. But some of the answers the United Church of Canada give to the questions raised in their campaign (e.g. this answer or this) do not really accord with the Bible's teaching.

How sad that they spend $10m prompting people to ask questions, and yet have such faithless answers to give them!