Finding Faith by Flory and Miller.

I took a break from doing heavy lifting with history books and read a 2008 book on dominant trends within current evangelicalism based on a study by two sociologists of religion, Richard Flory and Donald E. Miller. Their book is called Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation. They are specifically interested in finding the religious or spiritual trends among the under 40 crowd. To do so, they spent two years interviewing 100 people and visiting a dozen significant congregations around the country.

They build their analysis around 4 types of trends or styles that they see among evangelicalism: what they call Innovators, Appropriators, Resisters, and Reclaimers. The innovators are represented by people like Brian McLaren and Leonard Sweet, and, according to the authors, prefer smaller congregations with a high level of engagement with the larger community and social issues. The Appropriators are the large Mall type mega churches that offer hundreds of programming choices to the religious consumer. The Resisters are those who are critical of postmodernism and resistant to any accommodation to current cultural changes and who keep a strong focus on rational faith and careful exegesis of the scriptures and ultimately desire to move young people back to a rational, text-based faith. Finally the Reclaimers are those evangelicals who are leaving evangelical churches in order to associate with strongly liturgical churches such as the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Anglican. They are reclaiming the ancient traditions of worship of the early or Patristic church.

What do you think of these four types of response? Are there any responses that you might feel that they left out? Which response do you most identify with?

500-Year Rummage Sale

Ok, lets try to rewind this conversation again and refocus using Phyllis Tickle’s book, The Great Emergence. I heard about this book from Robert Grant, and then saw a series of reviews on Scot Mcknight’s blog, I tried to be satisfied with following Mcknight’s reviews but finally had to break down and buy it. I thought it was an excellent book, although I was a little dissatisfied with the last chapter. She tried to indicate Calvary Chaple and Vineyard as “emerging” or postmodern churches, which I really don’t buy into.

Which of you have the book already? Has anyone already finished it?

Her basic thesis is that about once every 500 years, the church holds a rummage sale and reorients itself to whatever current cultural condition it finds itself in. She believes were are approaching one of those 500-year junctures and that the rummage sale has begun. This is similar to what others such as Bob Mumford have said.

What do you think? Shall we read the book together?

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society - intro.

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Cambridge and Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989.

Here is a passage on page 9 that adjusted some of my own thinking:


“In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, so often quoted in the interests of religious agnosticism, the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.”

I move the rest of this post, Newbigin's bio and some introductory comments over to my blog http://c-far.blogspot.com/ for the sake of brevity. You can go there if you want to read the whole thing and come back here for comments.

ok -- my new copy of McLaren just arrived as I was writing this ...I'll hit it this week.