Another good Weedon tidbit. . .

 

 

It is worth your time. . . Thanks, old friend, for your good words!

 

Saving the church, losing religion. . .

Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco was one of the many places of worship I visited in choir tours in college.  It was and is an impressive structure.  Built in 1912, it is a grand space but, like many grand church spaces, it is not so packed with people.  Even as a cathedral it is not overflowing with members or attenders.  Until more recently.

Though fewer people joined the congregation or were showing up for worship, Grace did what other largely urban sites have done.  They began programs to bring people in.  The problem is that hardly any of those programs had much to do with Christianity.  The centerpiece of their programs is Grace Arts, a conglomeration of varies kinds of classes, artsy stuff, and musical events whose formal membership dwarfs that actual number of religious members.  So you can go to Grace and find everything from light shows and trapeze artists to drag queens and carnivals.  The rich and the famous are showing up along with so many others to do yoga in the main sanctuary and to enjoy musical events called sound baths, in which you enjoy candlelit musical events while snuggled into your sleeping bag.  With the other music you can enjoy tribute concerts to Sting, Queen, Taylor Swift, etc.  

Along with the ordinary trappings of Christianity, there are all sorts of other things going on under the stained glass windows, beneath the gothic architecture, and within the rich acoustical environment -- things that attract the spiritual but not religious and those who find church normally a turn off.  So you get a sense of community, a focus on joy, some kind of spirituality, and inner peace minus the heavy baggage of religious content of any kind.  They may be saving the building but killing the church -- or, to put it another way, saving the church while losing their religion.  Is that a cost too high to bear or is the price tag of keeping the doors open?

The folks at Grace Cathedral are not the only ones trying to sort the line between killing the religion while saving the church.  You see it everywhere.  Churches have become one stop shopping centers for nearly everything people might want to enrich their lives and they can enjoy it without someone trying to give witness to Jesus.  There are weight rooms and exercise centers, self-help schools and day care, entertainment and motivational centers, the offer of all kinds of new age or old school Eastern forms of meditation and spiritual care without the pesky problem of talking about Jesus.  Is it worth it to save the real estate while killing what that real estate was for?  You tell me.  In our search for income streams and support for maintenance projects, we just might have forgotten why we put in those pews and what it was that was supposed to happen therein.  But will Jesus be happy we kept the building going at the cost of the very integrity of the faith?  Maybe we should secure our money tables to the floor just in case.

Selling off parts of an identity. . .

 

Though it is not alone (Fisk University has tried various ways to sell or lease its own valuable art collection), Valparaiso has now successfully argued in an Indiana court that paintings donated to the university as part of an art museum on campus can be sold.  According to the judgment, the works are not "conservative" (Georgia O'Keeffe is a modernist and Childe Hassam is an impressionist).  Another painting, by Frederic Church, was not constrained by the donor in this way.  

Valpo has done the obligatory public hang wringing all the whole drooling at the idea of getting its hands on $20 million in cash to fund a cash strapped campus in need of maintenance and renovations.  In the end, the legacy will purchase some paint, new bathrooms, and air conditioning for one dorm.  Unanswered in all of this is the question of whether there will be any students to live in that dorm now that the soul of Valpo has also been sold.

Under the terms of the 1953 gift from Percy Sloan, donated in honor of his father, artist Junius R. Sloan, the university was constrained from selling or profiting from the art except to acquire more paintings or conserve the ones it has.  The gift included hundreds of paintings.  The school added to that collection from funds from the museum two landscapes: "Rust Red Hills" painted by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1930, and "The Silver Veil and the Golden Gate" created by Childe Hassam in 1914.  The third painting, 1849's "Mountain Landscape" by Frederic E. Church, was donated by Sloan and not included in the conservative argument.  Sloan's gift included money also and the stipulation that any artwork the school bought with the gifted funds had to be "of the general character known as conservative and of any period of American Art."  All of this hinged upon the meaning of that term.

In any case, Valparaiso placed the paintings in a storage facility last September and temporarily closed the museum in June.  The museum's director, nearly 100 years old, and a pro bono attorney have been fighting this move but have given up.  

So why does this matter?  Well, if you are a donor, pay attention.  The universities are in the market of finding loopholes to donations in order to release the funds to be spent where they desire even if that conflicts with the donor's wishes.  It can be said with some confidence that the Valpo donor had no intention of funding dorm renovations.  Second, the dire state of the university is all around us.  Wittenburg University has shut down all of its music programs while at the same time announcing new construction to house its growing sports program.  Schools are ready to sell anything and everything to fund them through another semester, another year.  But the real issue here is the sale of its core identity.

Valpo is a shell of its former identity.  I suspect that many would say the same thing about some or all of the Concordias operated by Missouri.  The mission that was the impetus for their formation has changed and some wonder if it remains in line with the mission of the Synod.  How much are people willing to sell to save the school?  What if that which is sold is the school's core identity?  What if you sacrifice the school's values in order to preserve the institution?  I fear that the money is a bigger issue than these questions and this may be why the world of church operated or affiliated educational institutions are in such a state.  Even mighty Notre Dame lives with its Roman Catholic identity more as legacy than forming principle for who that school is and what it does.  Is this all there is left?  I hope not.  But at the rate things are going, it may be too late to rescue these institutions from themselves.

Right to be happy. . .

The right to happiness is not merely an American one but has become the universal right acknowledged by all and demanded by all.  Long before it was enshrined in the founding documents of our American republic, we were moving from survival itself as the basic goal to a certain quality of life.  Even though I am not sure that the forming fathers of our democracy were really speaking of the same thing we mean when we say the right to the pursuit of happiness, that is how we all understand it now.  We should be free to do what we want.

That right to happiness has affected many things.  It has certainly formed a leg of support for the situation ethics in which the act is without essential morality except in the moment.  It has also affected how we see a host of other things -- from marriage to divorce to children to retirement.  We believe in the right to happiness and we believe we have a right to exercise it.  While this impacts many things, it has come to be a profound actor on how we judge divorce and remarriage. 

There was a time in which the universal understanding of divorce was that it precluded another marriage -- you go one shot at a happy marriage and if that evaded you, you did not get another.  At some point in time, we began to distinguish between guilty parties and innocent parties in the breakup of a marriage.  It did not take long before we decided that the innocent party deserved another chance at happiness and so could remarry.  Then it did not take long before we decided that even the guilty party deserved another chance at happiness and were okay to remarry -- so long as they admitted their responsibility and promised never to do it again.

Before you get angry with me about the legitimacy of specific instances, lets just take a moment to review how we got to the point today where so many of our folks in the pews have had multiple marriages and even the clergy have had multiple marriages.  We decided that every moral principle is conditioned by the right to happiness.  That right has become the right that trumps every other right.  We tell our children that they have a right to be happy even if that right means they don't want to marry but might cohabit and they don't want to have children.  We tell our children going through rough patches in marriage that they have a right to be happy even if that happiness hurts others -- like their children.  We tell everyone who has another sexual attraction or gender identity that their happiness is more important than anything else and then radically alter the nature of marriage to suit all who might want some kind of it.  Can you see where this is headed?  Do we want our children to be good or happy?  Does God want us to be holy or happy?  Do we want to be holy or happy?  Happiness is a cancer of an idea that changes the landscape of everything.  Do we realize how much making happiness the highest goal affects everything else?  Haven't we enshrined in every aspect of life the very issue that was created in Eden that caused this mess?

Boys to men. . .

No, this is not about boy bands from the past.  It is rather about the way that boys are raised to become men or, as we have found today, not raised to manhood.  I am not being sexist when I say that women struggle to turn boys to men.  They do well enough raising boys but they are missing the central ingredient -- example.  Boys learn best how to be men from men, by example -- that is what women cannot provide.  Obviously, men and women are different and the differences are not framed in good or bad as typically we frame things but as differences inherent to them and for the benefit of both.

I recall a meme showing a mom trying to teach her young boys to stand and use the toilet or urinal.  She holds a water bottle to imitate the way a man goes but it is forced and humorous -- as memes are meant to be.  The absence of fathers in so many homes is noteworthy for the lack of example to teach boys to become men.  This is not about how to use a urinal but rather how to love, lead, suffer, sacrifice, forgive, pray, and serve -- among other things.  These things come from men to boys so that those boys might become men.  Without example, the typical outcome is for boys to grow up in to boys.  But to remain boys is something women neither need nor want.

Competition and challenge may not be the prime ways that girls learn to become women but that is exactly how boys learn to become men.  Whether of physical or mental or of the will, boys learn from men to become men by competing and by being challenged.  Watching what to do, the boys either compete against each other or against themselves.  I can do that!  It is the cry of success learned from competition and defeat as much as by example and victory.  Through these the boy leaves the comfort of self and the things of self in order to venture into the unknown.  It works for physical feats like climbing trees or zip lining or bungee jumping but it also works for the selfless roles of husband, father, and civic leader.

Where manhood is valued and taught, family and community flourish.  What it also affects is faith.  St. Paul uses largely masculine examples for the growth and maturity in the faith:  fight the good fight of faith, walk worthy, be disciplined, be self-controlled, train for righteousness, suffering produces endurance and endurance hope, etc...  While they have appeal beyond men, St. Paul is directly appealing to men to become men.  This is the need of the marriage, the family, the community, but also the Church.  The sad reality is that when women step up, men step back.  That is not a good thing on any level.  Though some complain about it, different roles and different areas of serving is not sexism at all -- rather it is the acknowledgement of the obvious.  I wish that we had more common sense today but it seem we are willing to dispense with common wisdom in order to embrace extraordinary foolishness.  That is also true for the Church as well as for every other arena.  If we feminize the Church or even do something much less by de-emphasizing godly manhood, we will end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy and the Church will become almost exclusively for women and children.  Where manhood is valued and taught, family, community AND church flourish.