Churches

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Greg Laurie goes Southern Baptist and newsrooms in Southern California are clueless

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I can’t say I’ve ever heard the Rev. Greg Laurie preach, but the evangelist is certainly a heavyweight in some circles. Which is why I was surprised to hear he was moving from life in a charismatic denomination to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise did a piece (which I found in the Orange County Register) on Laurie’s switcheroo nearly a month after Christianity Today reported on it. The writer of the Press-Enterprise piece might have done well to have googled Laurie’s name, as she would have found CT’s vastly better-reported piece.

As it was, this is what the newspaper reported on Monday:

Harvest Christian Fellowship will be joining the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant body with about 15 million members. The Rev. Greg Laurie, pastor and founder of the 15,000-member Harvest and its Harvest Crusades, announced the move in June.
Some theologians see this as Laurie’s official shift toward mainstream evangelicalism and worry that Riverside-based Harvest could be overshadowed by the denomination. Laurie has been seen as one of the biggest crusaders of Calvary Chapel, an association of evangelical Christian churches to which Harvest belongs. Calvary was born as a movement away from religious denominations.
But, in a statement, Laurie calls the new partnership an extension of the collaboration already taking place between Harvest and a network of evangelical churches that participate in the annual Harvest Crusades -- a Southern California Christian institution that’s drawn millions of people to stadiums and arenas around the world.

So far, so good -- although we could talk about whether the vague "evangelical" terms is the best way to describe the Calvary Chapel movement. Then:

Laurie, who has an office in Irvine, was not available for an interview last week, spokeswoman Laura McGowan said.
For Southern Baptist, which has been reported to be struggling with declining membership, this is a gain…

Yes, you read that right. it really did say, "For Southern Baptist" -- singular.


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When covering the Lutheran left, Minneapolis daily kindly omits sobering journalistic questions

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The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is an amalgamation of three other Lutheran denominations, formed 29 years ago. When mainstream American journalists talk about "Lutherans," this is usually the crowd they are talking about.

The ELCA is also, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports, a church confronting changing times. In other words, this body is part of the ever-evolving world of liberal Protestantism, the "Seven Sisters" of the old mainline.

The paper's story begins with a typical journalistic scene-setter, at least the kind that is used when journalists are fond of the group that is being profiled:

Redeemer Lutheran Church is not your typical Lutheran outpost. Summer means the bike store and coffee shop are humming, kids camp and Zumba classes are in gear, and the young adults renting its apartments are mentoring children in this north Minneapolis neighborhood.
It represents a new model for the Lutheran Church, which is transforming itself to attract younger and diverse members, be more relevant to neighbors below its steeples and shake its image as a Scandinavian bastion best known for hot dish, Jell-O and Ole and Lena.

Anyone who regularly listened to Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" stemwinders about life in and around Lake Woebegone, Minnesota, will recognize the stereotype, even if Keillor was actually raised in a Plymouth Brethren congregation.

The Minneapolis paper continues explaining, however, There is a dark cloud on the horizon:

Minnesota, with the largest number of Lutherans in the nation, will be instrumental in shaping the future of the faith. Time is of the essence: 37 percent of the churches in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -- the largest denomination in Minnesota and the U.S. -- now have fewer than 50 Sunday worshipers. ...
Membership at the ELCA plunged from 5.2 million in 1988 to about 3.7 million today. In Minnesota, numbers fell from 782,000 to about 679,000.


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Major news events among Episcopalians and American Anglicans: Still worth covering?

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It’s been more than 10 years since the conservative portions of various Episcopal dioceses began the Great Split-Off. That is, they left dioceses -- some of which had been around since the 18th century -- to form a new entity, the Anglican Church in North America, that billed itself as the truest representation of Anglicanism on the North American continent.

This didn’t go over too well with The Episcopal Church (TEC), as you may imagine, and many were the lawsuits filed by TEC leaders to keep their property, most of which they won. I covered churches in northern Virginia that lost everything in this battle. One church lost property they had already bought on which to build a new sanctuary. Another church lost millions of dollars in property that dated back to colonial times.

This was a big, big story year after year -- receiving major coverage from many major newspapers and wire services.

Take, 2007 for example. I was able to cover one of the ACNA’s formative sessions in Pittsburgh in 2008 and their inaugural assembly in 2009 in Bedford, Texas. As the two sides have drifted further apart and the Episcopal Church has continued losing membership, the secular media has almost stopped covering this story. Religion News Service is the one exception.

This is a shame, in that there’s still news going on.

The conservative Anglican journalist David Virtue, who has followed this story since the beginning, chronicled what happened at a recent gathering at Wheaton College near Chicago.

The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is planting one new church a week, Archbishop Foley Beach told delegates to the triennial gathering of some 1400 Anglicans, at Wheaton College, in the heartland of America's Bible belt. The ACNA also officially received The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina as the newest diocese with some 9,000 members -- the largest of 31 dioceses in the orthodox Anglican body. The diocese broke away from the Episcopal Church over the authority of Scripture and TEC's embrace of homosexuality and gay marriage in defiance of Lambeth resolution 1.10. ...


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So if pro-life Democrats huddle with top DNC boss, will it anger all those young Nones?

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So if pro-life Democrats huddle with top DNC boss, will it anger all those young Nones?

Does everyone remember that special U.S. House of Representatives election down in suburban Atlanta, the one that Democrats and Republicans poured millions of dollars into as a kind of referendum on President Donald Trump?

The winner, a Catholic conservative named Karen Handel, defeated a young aggressively secular outsider named Jon Ossoff.

That was a pretty big news story, right? And speaking of rather important national news stories, does anyone remember the provocative statement that Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez made a few weeks before that, when he proclaimed:

"Every Democrat, like every American ... should support a woman's right to make her own choices about her body and her health. This is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state." In fact, he added, "every candidate who runs as a Democrat" should affirm abortion rights.

So this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in) started with those two stories and attempted to connect the dots, building off my recent post that ran with this headline: "Who is Karen Handel, winner of that big Georgia race? Surprise! Press ignored a key angle."

The basic question: Would Handel, in a House district that Trump barely won, have been able to win if Democrats had been willing to run a candidate who was an old-fashioned, pro-life, culturally conservative, "Blue Dog" Democrat?

Ah, but would such a candidate be acceptable to the current DNC leadership in the age of Sen. Bernie Sanders and millions and millions of edgy, young, idealistic Democrats -- many of whom, according to researchers, would surely fall under the "Nones" umbrella? You remember the "Nones," as in the rising tide of religiously unaffiliated Americans? That's a big story, too.

So we have a big story linked to another big story linked to yet another big story. So one would assume that a Washington, D.C. meeting between the leaders of the group Democrats for Life with the aforementioned Perez, primarily to discuss the party's willingness to run pro-life candidates in House districts in places like Georgia, would attract quite a bit of news attention.


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This is not a joke: Ever-edgy Unitarian Universalists just elected their first woman president

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Anyone who knows me knows that I love jokes about religion. We are not talking about cruel or nasty humor. I'm talking about the kinds of jokes that offer insights into what makes certain religious groups tick, the characteristics that define them as who they are.

Like what? Catholic jokes? Too many to mention. Jewish humor? That's a truckload of books, including the vast world of Jewish mother humor.

You could do an entire book on jokes about religious believers at the gates of hell. Like this one, which I heard from an Episcopalian who briefly considered doing a book on Episcopal Church humor.

So three women arrive at the gates of hell -- a Southern Baptist, a Catholic and an Episcopalian. Satan asks each: What did you do to get sent here? The Baptist says: "I got drunk." Satan sends her into hell. The Catholic says: "I had an affair with my priests." In she goes. The Episcopalian says: "I ate all my dinner with my salad fork." Satan rings her up.

Light bulb jokes? That's another book. Let's start with my own flock. How many Orthodox Christians does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Light bulb? What is this LIGHT BULB? Alternative joke: Change? What is this CHANGE?

Then there is the unique niche for Unitarian Universalist humor. You know, like: What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Mormon? Answer: Someone who goes door to door for no particular reason. Leadership magazine once ran a cartoon (pre-WWW era, alas) with the caption, "Unitarian charismatics." It showed people with their hands in the air shouting, "Now I rrreeeeeeeallly don't know!" Garrison Keillor once quipped that early Unitarian missionaries tried to spread their faith among Native Americans by using liturgical dance.

So why, you ask, am I bringing this up?

Religion News Service ran a short story the other day that, at first glance, left your GetReligionistas shaking our heads in wonder. My first reaction was laughter, because it seemed so ironic that it might have been a joke. I couldn't believe that it was true.

The headline: "Unitarian Universalists elect first woman president."

Say what?!? In 2017? Was this satire?


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Hagia Sophia evolving into mosque? The Los Angeles Times omits crucial Christian voices

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This past Sunday, I was at a lunch in Seattle that included someone who runs a retreat center in Turkey. She knew of only 4,000 evangelical Christians like her in the country, which under the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been encroaching on the religious freedom of non-Muslims for some time.

Evangelical Protestants are one of the smaller groups among Turkey’s 160,000 Christians, most of them Orthodox Christians linked to the city's history as a crossroads in the early church. The Christian community that was, in 1914, 19 percent of Turkey’s population is now a tiny group amidst 80 million Turkish Muslims.

So I was interested to read a Los Angeles Times story about the increasing pressure by Islamic activists to turn the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. We've covered this before but the volume has been amped up.

So what is missing in this report on a topic that will be of special interest to Christians, as well as Muslims, around the world? Want to guess?

As the time for afternoon prayers approaches, Onder Soy puts on a white robe and cap and switches on the microphone in a small 19th century room adjoining the Hagia Sophia.
Soon, Soy’s melodic call to prayer rings out over a square filled with tourists hurrying to visit some of Turkey’s most famous historical sights before they close for the day.
The room Soy is in -- built as a resting place for the sultan and now officially called the Hagia Sophia mosque -- fills up with around 40 worshipers, drawn not by the modestly decorated space itself, but by the ancient building it shares a wall with.


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Mummies and saints: Scientists found 'dark,' 'secret' lair under church altar in Lithuania? Really?

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If you know anything about the history of sacred architecture, you know there is nothing strange about believers being buried inside church sanctuaries.

In fact, there is an ancient tradition of celebrating the Mass on altars built directly on or over the tombs of saints (see the New Advent online Catholic Encyclopedia). In Eastern Orthodoxy, altars and sanctuaries still contain relics of the saints, usually fragments of bones. Consider this 2014 column I wrote about efforts to rebuild St. Nicholas Orthodox parish at Ground Zero in New York City.

Some people find these traditions creepy. But the whole idea was to link heaven and earth, for believers in this life to worship with the saints of old.

Perhaps this is rather advanced material, in terms of church history. Still, I assumed that some journalists (maybe even at the New York Times copy desk) would know that the altar of the most famous church on Planet Earth -- St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican -- is build directly over catacombs containing the tomb of St. Peter and other popes. Don't these people read Dan Brown novels?

I bring this up because of a strange passage in a recent Times science piece that ran with this double-decker headline:

The Mummies’ Medical Secrets? They’re Perfectly Preserved
Mummified bodies in a crypt in Lithuania are teaching scientists about health and disease among people who lived long ago.

As it turns out, the crypt in question is located underneath an altar in a Catholic church in Vilnius, Lithuania.


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London mosque attack: Are journalists covering a 'van driver' or a 'white Christian terrorist'?

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So, what are reporters supposed to call the driver of the white van that veered into a crowd of worshippers as they left  a mosque in north London?

That's a logical and totally appropriate question for journalists and multicultural activists to be asking, as the coverage digs deeper and deeper into the facts surrounding England's latest terrorist incident.

A "terrorist" attack? Obviously. This certainly appears to have been the work of an anti-Muslim terrorist who was reacting to previous attacks on civilians by terrorists preaching, in word and deed, a radicalized brand of Islam.

The New York Times team noted that a rather prominent writer -- J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter fame -- has spoken out on this topic. In a tweet that was later deleted, she opined: “The [Daily] Mail has misspelled ‘terrorist’ as ‘white van driver. ... Now let’s discuss how he was radicalised.”

To which I say, "amen" on the radicalized question. Still, I advise -- as in the past -- caution and some basic research before journalists start throwing labels around.

Does anyone remember that hellish 2011 rampage in Norway by Behring Breivik? People started using the term "Christian fundamentalist" before facts emerged that pointed in a radically different direction. As I wrote at that time:

... What are journalists looking for? ... We need to know what he has said, what he has read, what sanctuaries he has chosen and the religious leaders who have guided him.
Also, follow the money, since Breivik certainly seems to have some. To what religious causes has he made donations? Is he a contributing member of a specific congregation in a specific denomination? Were the contributions accepted or rejected?

In other words, journalists (and law officials, for that matter) need to ask the same kinds of questions when a terrorist attacks Muslims that they should be asking when radicalized Muslims attack those (Christians, Jews, secularists, other Muslims) who oppose their approach to Islam.


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Strike a pose, ask a question: So what kind of name is 'Nikos Giannopoulos' anyway?

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When people talk about a piece of digital media going "viral," this is precisely what they are talking about.

I am referring to the official White House photo that was taken the other day -- the kind of photo-op that presidents do day after day -- with Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump and the Rhode Island Teacher of the Year for 2017, one Nikos Giannopoulos, a 29-year-old special education teacher at the Beacon Charter High School for the Arts.

It's one of those photos that takes a few minutes to unpack, because Giannopoulos packed in quite a few symbolic statements during his moment in the spotlight.

However, the professionals at National Public Radio were TOTALLY up to the task, in terms of asking the questions that legions of enquiring minds would want asked -- with one exception that will be of interest to GetReligion readers. Hold that thought.

First things first, as described by NPR -- there is the matter of the "sassy" teacher's "fabulous" delicate black lace fan.

The fan was actually my partner's. He bought it as a souvenir on a trip to Venice, but I found it about five years ago. Since then I've integrated it into my day-to-day life. I'm extremely campy, and it's a popular prop of mine. I've taken it with me all over the country whenever I go on vacation, so that's why I had it.
But ultimately, I have been visibly gay my entire life; I was more feminine than a lot of boys and I carried myself in a nontraditional gender expression. And I got a lot of flak for it. As a boy, I think I internalized that and didn't embrace that part of me. Now, as an adult, I adjusted to my queer identity. So the fan represents self-acceptance and being unabashedly myself in a society that's not always ready to accept that.

Trump praised the fan from the get go, according to Giannopoulos. When members of the White House team questioned whether the fan was an appropriate element in this kind of picture, the teacher asked the president what he thought. The result was an image straight out of a music video (nod to Madonna, of course).


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