Elliot Ritzema

Category: Church

  • Christian Science Monitor on Pentecostalism

    The Christian Science Monitor published a three-part series on Pentecostalism in Central and South America earlier this month.

    I read the first in the series, on “Health and Wealth” theology in Guatemala. Unsurprisingly, it causes the same controversy there that it causes in the United States. Some criticize Health and Wealth churches for being manipulative and individualistic, and those who are part of the churches think they can do no wrong because they help their members to become entrepreneurs and escape poverty.

    I am no fan of the prosperity gospel, since I don’t think it is what Jesus (or Paul, or anyone else in the Bible) meant by “gospel.” I can’t recall them ever saying that if you give money to God, he will bless you financially. But I think that it is difficult to argue with prosperity gospellers when they’re getting results: they’re leaving poverty behind, they’re increasing in self-esteem, etc. Still I wonder: when people let faith affect their life, don’t good things generally happen? Here is a quote from the first article:

    Still, in many ways, elements of their faith lead to economic betterment, say scholars. Their strict moral code alone – which includes no drinking, gambling, or promiscuity – leads to behavior changes that play important roles in family economics. “If a group of people change their behavior, work harder, save money, don’t drink, show interest in education – all of which Pentecostalism encourages – from one generation to the next, the consequences are very simple: social mobility,” says Peter Berger, a noted sociologist and theologian at Boston University. “You begin to have a Protestant middle class.”

    Although I have not studied this movement in depth, I think that it is at least possible that prosperity gospellers have simply stumbled upon a way to improve your lot in life, whether you happen to be religious or not. If you have a strict moral code, and if you’re part of a community that gives you needed encouragement and opportunities, you’re likely to gain more social mobility.

    That’s not to say, of course, that people are wrong to give to the church. They’re just giving for the wrong reason: to get “blessed” financially. Rather, I think that Christians ought to give to the church because God a) cares about us (“Consider the lilies. . .”), b) wants to keep us from idols (I seem to remember something in the Bible about money and the root of all kinds of evil), and c) can take care of money better than we can.

    Anyway, these articles are informative and interesting, and I recommend reading them. For those interested in a critique of the exegetical foundations of the prosperity gospel, check out Gordon Fee’s booklet, The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels.

  • Mars Hill on a Wintry Night

    This past Sunday I went to Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Church in Grandville, MI (not to be confused with Mars Hill Church in Seattle, or Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, none of which are related).

    I read Bell’s book Velvet Elvis last year and found it to be an entertaining read. I’ve also listened to a few of his teachings online. He is quite informal in his speaking style, and conveys a great deal of excitement about what he is speaking about. He also devotes a lot of attention to the Jewish cultural background of the New Testament, and I must say that I have benefited from that.

    This Sunday, though, was an atypical Sunday. Not only was Bell not speaking (though he was there, introducing the speaker and playing a guitar as part of the band), but there was also a snowstorm that had started early in the afternoon and was raging by 6 p.m., when the evening service started. My dad and I walked in and were underwhelmed by the amount of people there. We sat down, and people continued to trickle in, but the seats were only about half full (this is highly unusual, as there were a couple of jokes made about how many people were there in the morning compared with the hard-core people who showed up for the evening). Even though nowhere close to all the seats were filled, I’d say there were easily more than 500 people there (it could have been closer to a thousand; I’m not so good at estimating crowd size).

    The service (or Gathering, as they are called at Mars Hill) was very simple: we sang a few songs, listened to a sermon (or teaching), sang a few more songs, and then it ended. The services take place “in the round,” with all of the seats arranged around an elevated platform in the middle. This works out very well for the teachings, I think. Though Rob Bell didn’t speak, Ed Dobson did, and he seemed at ease with moving around and directing his attention to the four sides of the audience.

    In my opinion, the way the room was organized didn’t work out as well for the worship. A few worship leaders are stationed on each side of the platform, but instead of facing out toward the people, they face inward, toward the platform. There are four screens above the platform, one facing in each direction, that display song lyrics and notes during the teaching. I suppose the worship leaders face inward in order to minimize the feeling that we are watching a band instead of worshiping. But since we all face those screens, it looks a little bit like we are all worshiping a big cube.

    (As an aside: I once went to a Russian Orthodox worship service in a church that had a fantastic choir, but you couldn’t see them. They were in a special balcony just above the rear door. So their beautiful sound filled the sanctuary, but when you looked up at the front all you could see was the altar. Maybe something like that could get rid of the worship-leaders-as-rock-band problem?)

    But the worship was good; we sang traditional Christmas songs with new, rocking arrangements. Ed Dobson was also a very engaging speaker, and I definitely benefited from his talk about peace. Afterwards, I heard from my aunt that he suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease. I was even more impressed with his speaking ability after that.

    On the negative side, I thought that on the whole it was a little too stripped down for my tastes. I tend to like a little more in the way of liturgy. Like prayer, for example. I’m not saying that they don’t pray at Mars Hill, since I looked at some of the things they have scheduled during the week, and prayer definitely seems to be a part of their life as a community. But I was uncomfortable with the fact that prayer was not part of this large group gathering. Maybe they have a good reason for that, but I don’t know what it is. Also, though Dobson was a very engaging speaker, I thought that he perhaps bit off more than he could get through in one talk. After all, peace is big in the Bible. I thought he spent a whole lot of time doing a word study of “shalom,” when perhaps he would have done better to narrow his scope a bit.

    But this is just nitpicking. Overall, it was a positive experience, and I worshiped God in that experience. I’ve never been part of a megachurch myself, but I find the way different large churches “do” church to be fascinating.

  • Happy (?) First Sunday of Advent!

    Two quotes on Advent from the always-reliable Wikipedia:

    Advent (from the Latin word advenio, meaning “to come”, “the coming of Christ our saviour”) is a holy season of the Christian church, the period of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, also known outside the Church as the season of Christmas.

    and

    From the 4th century, the season was kept as a period of fasting as strict as that of Lent (commencing in some localities on 11 November; this being the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, the fast became known as “St. Martin’s Fast,” “St. Martin’s Lent” or “the forty days of St. Martin”).

    Two resolutions: One, never again will I refer to this season as “the Christmas season.” Two, although I will probably not leap directly to keeping a 40-day fast, I will now proceed to think of the season of Advent as a time of penitential (yet still joyful) anticipation of Christmas Day.

  • Unused Churches To Become Museums

    I haven’t been posting much lately, and I probably won’t post today or tomorrow. I would like to post on the first chapter of The Way Of the (modern) World, but I’m not likely to get around to that until tomorrow or Thursday. I’ve still got to finish that book review that I didn’t write yesterday. Also, tomorrow evening I have to be at a lecture that philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff is giving at Regent, on Love and Justice. I have to record it for Regent Audio (and I may blog about it if I can stop worrying about the sound system long enough to pay attention).

    In the meantime, here is something that I wrote for the April Fool’s 2007 edition of the Et Cetera, Regent’s weekly newspaper. It’s a satire on what is going on currently in the Episcopal Church, and I thought I’d let you read it before it becomes too dated. Enjoy!

    Unused Churches to Become Museums

    The Episcopal Church in the USA (ECUSA) has recently decided that it will begin turning some of its older churches into museums.

    This decision comes in light of conservative Episcopal churches splitting away from the ECUSA because of theological differences. Churches such as Truro Church and The Falls Church, both of Northern Virginia, have buildings and land whose worth is estimated at $25 million.

    “That land belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia,” spokesperson James Hibblethorp said, “and we’re not going to let it go without a fight.”

    But if they do manage to keep the land and the buildings, why does the ECUSA want to turn these churches into museums, rather than have them function as places of worship?

    As the Presiding Bishop of the ECUSA said in an interview last fall, membership is not what it used to be: “It used to be larger percentagewise, but Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.”

    Since being well-educated and not wanting to go forth or multiply is part of what it means to be an Episcopalian these days, turning historic churches into museums seems like the next logical step.

    “If we’re able to win the fight and get these buildings and lands away from those who have broken away, we’ve got a nice collection of paintings that would fit quite nicely on the sides of the sanctuaries,” Hibblethorp said.

    “If we kept them as places of worship, we would probably run into trouble on a couple of counts,” he continued. “First, not many people would be likely to attend. And those are some big sanctuaries that currently hold lots of people who would probably not be interested in attending anymore if the ECUSA won this battle.

    “Second, if we continued to use them as places of worship, we would have to add minarets to the buildings and Japanese gardens with shrines on the grounds to be inclusive of people from other faith traditions. We’d likely run into a lot of construction costs if that happened.”

    Much better, then, to take advantage of the strong architectural tradition of the Episcopal church by charging people money to enter churches and browse around.

    But that’s not all: Hibblethorp also has plans to use the spaces for more than just marvels for visitors to ogle at.

    “Churches are also great concert venues,” says Hibblethorp. “Even if there is no worship going on, people will still be able to enjoy some nice music that will hopefully get them in touch with the divine in a very general and non-exclusive way.

    “Of course, many of the standard hymns and other works that have been played and sung throughout the centuries would be inappropriate to have in such a setting. But have you ever heard ‘We Are Family’ or ‘Over the Rainbow’ on a pipe organ?” Hibblethorp chuckles. “I’m a bit of a musician myself, and I’ve been working on an arrangement of Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ that will give you goosebumps.”

    Plans for using the ECUSA’s museum churches as dance clubs on weekend nights are also in the works. “You’ve never boogied until you’ve boogied in a church,” Hibblethorp notes.

  • Georgia Multiculturalism

    I have GOT to get used to this whole blogging thing. I’m slipping already.

    Anyway, I read this article in the New York Times online the other day, about a Baptist church adapting to the growing multiculturalism of its neighborhood. It’s encouraging to hear of this example, but I wonder how many other churches are dealing with this issue and end up circling the wagons, insisting on staying the same, and making themselves irrelevant (not that “relevance” is the highest virtue in churches. . . but if you’re not reaching out to your community no matter who they are, you’re not living out the gospel AND you’re being irrelevant).

    Funny; I never think of Georgia as being that multicultural, but in one week I read this story and also heard on NPR that they’re building one of the biggest Hindu temples of its kind in an Atlanta suburb. Here’s the story.

  • Crashing the Service

    A funny thing happened in church last Sunday morning. . .
    The pastor had just begun his sermon when there was a small bang, and then a louder bang coming from the back of the sanctuary. I was in the front, so I couldn’t hear or see clearly what had happened, but it sounded too big for it to be caused by a person. I thought, then, that perhaps a bookcase had fallen over or something. The pastor paused, and a few people in the back ran out to see what had happened. There was a bit of confusion, and people were obviously not going to pay attention, so the pastor continued to wait. Then one of the ushers came up to the front of the church and told the pastor what had really happened, and then he announced it to the rest of us:

    There had been a car accident outside the church, which was the first, smaller bang. The second, louder bang happened when one of the cars swerved and actually hit the church building. When this was announced, I was immediately curious to see how this could be so, since the church is set back about 20 feet from the street. But we continued the service (after several people, including a few nurses, went out to help the people involved), and so it wasn’t possible to check it out right away. At the end, though, I stepped outside, and sure enough, there was a car wedged in the corner where the front steps meet the main building. One person was slightly injured, and there was a hole in the church.

    That’s probably the most excitement I’ve experienced at church for a long time. I wonder whether that’s a bad thing, or a good thing.