Daily Archives: March 8, 2007

For those of you not familiar with the story and Daniel 5, that’s “The Writing on the Wall”. And its there for all to see in the latest statistics of United States Christian denominations collected by the US National Council of Churches, and published in their Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches for 2007.

ENI reports that membership in the “old line mainline” (as Fr Neuhaus calls them) denominations are continuing to decline, while membership in Catholic, Mormon and Pentecostal churches continue to grow at figures of around 1-2% a year (the Baptist’s barely scrape in any recorded growth). Here’s the list of the top 10 – the red ones are growing, the blue ones are decreasing (Nb. the Episcopal Church doesn’t rank on this list — it only comes in at number 15).

1. The Catholic Church (69 135 254 members, an increase of 1.94 percent).
2. The Southern Baptist Convention (16 270 315 members, an increase of 0.02 percent).
3. The United Methodist Church (8 075 010 members, a decrease of 1.36 percent).
4. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (5 690 672 members, an increase of 1.63 percent).
5. The Church of God in Christ (5 499 875 members, no increase or decrease).
6. National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. (5 million members, no increase or decrease).
7. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (4 850 776 members, a decrease of 1.62 percent).
8. National Baptist Convention of America (3.5 million, no increase or decrease).
9. Presbyterian Church (USA) (3 098 842 members, a decrease of 2.84 percent).
10. Assemblies of God (2 830 861 members, an increase of 1.86 percent).

Here are the “also rans”, similarly coded:

11. African Methodist Episcopal Church, 2,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
12. National Missionary Baptist Convention of America, 2,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
13. Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., 2,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
14. The Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS), 2,440,864, reporting a decrease of .93 percent.
15. Episcopal Church, 2,247,819, reporting a decrease of 1.59 percent.
16. Churches of Christ, 1,639,495 members, reporting an increase of 9.30 percent (This increase reports the church’s growth since its last reported figures in 1999.)
17. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, 1,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
18. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, Inc., 1,500,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
19. The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 1,440,405 members, reporting an increase of .53 percent.
20. American Baptist Churches in the USA, 1,396,700, reporting a decrease of 1.97 percent.
21. United Church of Christ, 1,224,297, reporting a decrease of 3.28 percent.
22. Baptist Bible Fellowship International, 1,200,000, no increase or decrease reported.
23. Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, 1,071,615 members, no increase or decrease reported.
24. The Orthodox Church in America, 1,064,000 members, no increase or decrease reported.
25. Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1,046,006 members, reporting an increase of 1.56 percent.

I have made a new posting on my “Year of Grace” conversion retro-blog. By the start of January 2001 things were coming rapidly to a head, and God faced me with the biggest temptation of my life: He gave me a very, very good reason (excuse?) to remain a Lutheran. Read the whole story by clicking here.

Cardinal Ruini, fresh out of a job with the Italian bishops’ conference, returns to his vocation as a teacher of theology and philosophy in this address translated on Sandro Magister’s site. Here he confidently asserts that “the great objective of the pontificate of Benedict XVI” is nothing less than a “new encounter between faith and reason in our time.” he goes on to critique the “Critique of Pure Reason” of Immanuel Kant, saying:

The nucleus of this objection is the correspondence between mathematics, a creation of our intelligence, and the real structures of the physical world, a correspondence that is continually verified by the successes of science and technology, and which implies the deep intelligibility – as imperfect and incomplete as the understanding may be – of reality on the part of our reason.

This overturns the central point of the Kantian position, and inevitably brings back into question – because of the very dynamism of human intelligence, which does not give up in the face of certain open problems – the origin of this correspondence, and the “hypothesis” of a creating Intelligence, or God.

Nice to see Ruini and the Pope are on the same wavelength.

Stephen Crittenden has found another one for his collection of Catholic priests and religious chafing at the bit for their opportunity publically to bag “The Old Lady” (aka, Holy Mother Church): Fr John Dear, SJ. In this program (which I only finished listening to this morning on my MP3 player) I learn what a difference 6 years makes. I thought you had to be at least 50 to espouse the sort of Christianity Fr Dear does. I am turning 41, he’s 47. He began his theological education in 1982, I began in 1984. Fr Dear and I must therefore represent something of a turning point in the theological climate–he being one of the last converts of the social gospel, and I one of the new wave of converts to evangelical Catholicism.

Both of us are converts. He describes his conversion experience in Israel:

I’m reading the beatitudes and I see all these jets swoop down over the Sea of Galilee, and drop a whole bunch of bombs 50 miles away at Lebanon, and kill a whole bunch of people. And I made a solemn promise that I would spend the rest of my life working on the Sermon on the Mount, that this was the core theme of Christianity: Love your enemies, Blessed are the peacemakers. So I had like a second call within a call, and committed myself there where I’d actually witnessed warfare at the place where Jesus taught non-violence. And here I am, 25 years later, still trying to explore and practice the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.

When I heard this I was reminded of Kevin Rudd’s comment that “Christianity begins with a theology of social justice.” As Tony Abbot pointed out recently, that’s “just plain wrong”.

Christianity is not about a “core theme”. It is not about “an idea”. Contrary to Fr Dear’s statement, Jesus (“our guy”) did not suffer and die “for working for justice and peace.” He suffered and died to redeem the world from enslavement to sin. One is reminded of the immortal line from Benedict’s encyclical, Deus Caritas Est:

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life, the new horizon and a decisive direction.

Unfortunately Fr Dear does seem to have been converted to an idea rather than to the divine and human Person of Jesus Christ.

There is so much that mystifies one when listening to the rantings of clergy like Fr Dear. For instance, what is one to make of his assertion that

People actually think…that the Holy Spirit has moved on, we don’t need to focus on the Gospels, which is the heart of what’s missing here, and instead God now only speaks to the hierarchy and canon law and catechism, and so young seminarians over the last four, five years, in the United States, are being told to memorise canon law and catechism and that’s what they’re to preach as young priests. So literally, the people in the parishes around the United States are literally not hearing about the life of Jesus.

I’ll never get why “progressive” Catholics always try to play off the catechism against the scriptures? They obviously haven’t read it, otherwise they would know it is packed with scripture, especially from the Gospels. And maybe one day, Fr Dear and co. will wake up and understand that Canon law is also about liberation — the liberation of the faithful from the whims of certain bishops and clergy.

And what about the strange way he talks about the anonymous “them” throughout this interview–25 times in all, in contexts such as:

“they’re deliberately appointing people”
“they don’t talk about it”
“they mounted a campaign”
“they’re going after a bishop”
“they have clamped down on him”
“they’ve kicked him out to punish him”
“they succeeded”, etc.

Who are “they”? Is this just another case of John Allen’s “recipe for grumpiness” that identifies the Church with the “they” of the hierarchy, or is it some sort of ecclesiastical paranoia?

Anyway. I comfort myself in knowing that Fr Dear belongs to “the old generation”, and the times (as Fr Dear would properly sing to a guitar) “they are a’changing”.