I recently signed up for Thomas Nelson Publishers’ Book Review Blogging program, and the first book I’ve chosen is The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield. I chose to review The Faith of Barack Obama back before the election, but only now have been able to read and review the book. It’s interesting how perspective changes now that Obama has won the presidential election.
I approached The Faith of Barack Obama with a good bit of curiosity as to how the author would approach the subject. In the days leading up to the election we have been besieged with arguments over Obama’s faith – is he really a Christian? Didn’t he get raised as a Muslim? Isn’t that pastor of his church in Chicago kinda weird? The temptation is for each author’s perspective on Obama’s political views to color their observations about Obama’s faith. I was happy, then, (and feeling as if I was in quite unfamiliar territory!) to read TFOBO. Author Mansfield manages to draw a fair, compassionate picture of Obama’s faith as Mr. Obama has himself expressed it in books and interviews. In the short (150-page) volume, Mansfield acknowledges seeming inconsistencies between Obama’s faith claims and his political views – notably on the issue of abortion – but avoids drawing conclusions, leaving things for the reader to wrestle with in their own mind.
A chapter toward the end of the book seems out of place and suspiciously like filler material; that chapter examines other “faces of faith” in the political scene, giving thumbnail sketches of the faith of Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, and John McCain. All told, though, The Faith of Barack Obama is a fair journalistic look into the beliefs of our next president, and helpful reading.
[Buy The Faith of Barack Obama at Amazon.com.]
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Good stuff here, think that the link from JT's blog killed it at the moment, so I'll come back later.
When we visited Maranatha on Sunday, one of the inserts in their bulletin was a full page giving the testimonies of each of their elder candidates. That got me to wondering what sort of selection and vetting process different churches use for choosing elders.
In my experience at Noelridge, here’s what happened: the existing elder board suggested men to serve as elder apprentices. Those apprentices had to be approved by the congregation. Once approved, they met with the elders at all the regular meetings, etc for some period of time – a year, maybe two. At the point the elders were comfortable with their qualifications and thought them ready to become full elders, the elders would recommend the apprentices names to the congregation for approval.
Things that, to me, were notably absent: any sort of in-depth theological examination. Granted, there were some one-on-one theological discussions in various meetings over the apprenticeship period, but there was nothing formal. It was assumed that you agreed to the statement of faith, and that was good enough. While we agreed that Alex Strauch’s idea of interviewing elder candidates’ wives to get their input was a good idea, in practice I never saw it happen.
So here’s my question for you, be you a church leader or just a church member: what sort of selection and vetting processes are in place for elder candidates? Popular nomination and election? Any sort of congregational examination? I remember hearing about Rae’s study sessions before his PCA elder exam, so I know some of the answer I’ll get from him, but I’m interested in hearing from the rest of you all.
There was no post for week 6 last week since we were out of town for the weekend. So now we come to week 7. Yesterday we visited Maranatha Bible Church for the second time. I gave quite a bit of detail when we last visited, I’ll just note a few updates here.
First Impressions
- Took a slightly different route to get there this week and hit all the lights green… and it’s a quick little trip from our house. 6 or 7 minutes, max.
- The place was definitely fuller this week than last time we attended. We parked on the street a few houses down from the church.
- Having now visited twice, we look familiar enough to some of the Maranatha folks (especially the ones who we’ve faced off against in church softball) that you can tell they recognize us and are this close to saying something to us… but none did.
Music
The regular music leader was back this week. Just looking at her (a short, grandma-aged woman who reminded me a lot of one of my college calculus professors), you wouldn’t expect that she is an aggressive, guitar-playing music leader. But she is, and she was excellent. The closing song after the sermon was Victory in Jesus, and while I might’ve resisted the very last almost-end-and-then-do-a-slow-drum-fill-into-a-final-final-chorus thing, it was just so much fun I can’t really complain a bit.
Children’s Ministries
No real updates here. The girls had a good time.
Sermon
Pastor Aaron was trying to crank through two chapters of Isaiah (34 and 35) in the space of 45 minutes, and he did a great job. Very much enjoyed the sermon.
People/Observations
- Had a nice chat after the service with the youth pastor, Thad. He had been reading this blog earlier this week (Hi, Thad!) and said he enjoyed it. He told me he had read my “church search” posts on the other church we visited, and then went to read the one about Maranatha. And while I might’ve expected him to hope that I’d give a good review, what he told me was actually not that at all. “Please, find some bad stuff,” he said. “That way we can take it to people [here at Maranatha] and say, ‘Look, we need to work on this…’”. I thought that was pretty cool. Always thinking about improvement.
- Ran into a couple more folks that I knew from other places but was unaware that they attended Maranatha. That was neat.
- The service ended a bit early this week because they were holding their annual meeting directly after the service. They planned on electing two elder candidates and one deacon candidate.
All in all, it was an enjoyable Sunday morning. Good to be back in the house of the Lord after being out of town last weekend. Becky and I haven’t really discussed the church search any more since yesterday morning, so I’m not sure what our plans are going to be for next Sunday or following Sundays. Much prayer and discussion will be involved, I’m sure.
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Abraham Piper nails it in 22 words. And my comment didn't get flagged as spam!
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Andy is still a little weak on the Dora The Explorer lore.
Becky observed last night that my post yesterday on gay marriage was rather wordy and not as simple as she would’ve liked. So, I’m taking that as a challenge, and today I’m going to try to condense my arguments a bit. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments.
So, my list of assertions that lead my to my position on gay marriage:
1. While the Bible teaches that homosexual behavior is wrong, the Bible does not teach that the civil government should try to outlaw every sin.
Religious beliefs can disagree with government laws in one of three ways:
The law can require behavior that my religion tells me is a sin. For instance, pacifists who are drafted to serve in the military. Typically the US has allowed for conscientious objector status, allowing those people to take non-combat roles. Another example is the allowance in the Constitution to “affirm” rather than “swear” oaths of office, for those who believe they should not “swear”.
The law can outlaw a behavior that my religion tells me I must do. For instance, the law could instruct me not to share my faith with other people. In this case the Scriptures are quite clear – we must obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)
The law can allow a behavior that my religion says I must not do. And here the Scriptures are quieter. While certainly we know that God wants our rulers to be just and merciful, we don’t see anywhere that God says “your rulers should enact all of my laws as laws of the state.”
1 Tim 2:1-4 says this:
I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone— for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
Paul says that we pray for our rulers, with the goal or the hope being that we can live peaceful, quiet lives. And note that Paul doesn’t say to pray that our rulers would try to enforce God’s laws on everyone – Paul says to pray for peaceful, quiet lives, and that from that people might come to a knowledge of the truth.
2. If we’re not going to use Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, etc) principles to dictate the details of our laws, instead we should base the laws on socially-agreed-upon principles of freedom, asking “what is good for society as a whole?”.
Because, really, what other platform are we going to use?
3. Socially-agreed-upon principles change over time.
Just one example out of many: when the USA was founded, the only people allowed to vote were white, land-owning males. This was the socially-accepted norm. Over the past two hundred years, society has come to agree that anyone 18 years of age or older, and who is not mentally incompetent, regardless of gender, race, or land, should be allowed the vote.
Those changes didn’t come about because either people said “oh my, our voting rules are un-Christian, we need to make them more Christian” or because people said “oh my, our voting rules are too Christian, we need to make them more secular”. By and large, the changes came about because society’s views, both Christian and secular, changed.
4. If you’re with me this far, then we’ve gotten to this question: is “gay marriage” a reasonable freedom to allow? Something that will be beneficial for, or at least not harmful to, society as a whole?
And this is where the debate really engages. My position is this: yes, gay marriage is a reasonable freedom to allow, for the following reasons:
- We can embrace a civil-religious disconnection.
- State-sanctioned marriage is essentially a specific path through contract law. When you get married, you automatically get a LOT of legal advantages, things that would be difficult to attain otherwise. What good reason do we have to say that any two people shouldn’t be allowed to enter into a contract that way?
- Society’s views have changed, and we may as well acknowledge the change rather than pretend it didn’t happen.
From a strictly pragmatic Christian viewpoint, too, we need to pick which battles we want to fight. Yes, we want to see each person come to know Christ and become more like Christ. By fighting this semantic argument over civil “marriage”, we aren’t accomplishing anything other than alienating a large group of people who Christ calls us to love. We certainly aren’t helping ourselves gain an audience with them so we can share the Gospel. Real change comes from the inside out, as the heart changes.
5. The government must protect the rights of private groups to discriminate based on their beliefs.
Freedom of association (guaranteed in the First Amendment) implies freedom of disassociation. If a church doesn’t want to perform gay marriages, they shouldn’t be required to. If the Boy Scouts don’t want to allow gays as leaders, they shouldn’t be required to. If a religious organization doesn’t want to hire gays, they shouldn’t be required to.
OK, so I cut it down to 5 points, albeit with a lot of bullets and lists in between. Questions? Comments? Snide remarks? Let it rip in the comments.
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Gmail themes: nifty. Blogger themes that make the blog REALLY hard to read: not so much.
I’ve been working through the whole ‘gay marriage’ issue in my head for a while now, driven in good part by the discussion over on rmfo.net (you’ve gotta be a member to read it, sorry) surrounding California’s Proposition 8. The evangelically-popular, Dobsonian position is familiar to me, but has always seemed (like most Dobsonian political positions) to be harmful to the Kingdom; focusing on divisive politics rather than loving everyone and focusing on the heart issues. Today, though, Andrew Sullivan’s piece on TheAtlantic.com really solidified things for me; in other words, he said what I’ve been thinking – only much more clearly and concisely.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, here’s where he’s coming from: he’s a relatively conservative gay man. That in itself gives you some idea to which side of the debate he comes down on… but don’t let that bias you towards him without giving him a listen. He nails it.
[Many long for] a return to the days when civil marriage brought with it a whole bundle of collectively-shared, unchallenged, teleological, and largely Judeo-Christian, attributes. Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women’s role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life…
But that position, Sullivan says, is untenable.
If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis [(state)] with a telos [(purpose, goal)] guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own “objective disorder” to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require… [an] oppressive police state…
Exactly. My dad said much this same thing in a sermon he preached back before the election (which I still haven’t posted, sorry, Dad!) when he likened the Dobson-esque conservatives to the proverbial dog chasing a car. The problem for the dog is when it catches the car – what the heck do you do with it then?
Back to Mr. Sullivan:
That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. And that has a clear import for our current moment. The reason the marriage debate is so intense is because neither side seems able to accept that the word “marriage” requires a certain looseness of meaning if it is to remain as a universal, civil institution.
And then he nails it with an example that hadn’t occurred to me.
This is not that new. Catholics, for example, accept the word marriage to describe civil marriages that are second marriages, even though their own faith teaches them that those marriages don’t actually exist as such. But most Catholics are able to set theological beliefs to one side and accept a theological untruth as a civil fact. After all, a core, undebatable Catholic doctrine is that marriage is for life. Divorce is not the end of that marriage in the eyes of God. And yet Catholics can tolerate fellow citizens who are not Catholic calling their non-marriages marriages – because Catholics have already accepted a civil-religious distinction. They can wear both hats in the public square.
[Emphasis mine.]
I am convinced that this is the right position. Certainly, Christians need to be free to teach per their convictions on homosexuality, and need to be free to discriminate as to who they will marry, hire, and so on. (Sullivan argues specifically for those protections in his column.) But we need to accept, nay, support a broader, freer civil arrangement; an arrangement that allows for freedom for as many as possible to live as their conscience dictates in a way that is consistent with the peaceful, common good.
Putting that civil arrangement in place will provide a basis for the lively exchange of ideas that should be present in a free society. While it won’t look quite like what the Founders set up in the United State more than 200 years ago, it’ll be more what they intended. Let’s face it – we don’t live in 1780 anymore. We will do better if we adapt the principles of 1780 for the world of 2008 and move forward. For this topic that means embracing the civil/religious disconnect and supporting state-sanctioned civil marriage for both hetero- and homosexuals.