I’ve made the case that the gospel-centered movement needs a shot of confessional sacramentology if it wants to be refreshed and missionally potent in the coming years. My focus has been on the spiritual reality of participating in Christ with the sacraments, but especially when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, the rubber meeting the road in the life of the church is being able to articulate how Jesus meets us at the table. Pastorally you can hammer the point all day long that in the Supper you truly feed on Christ, but what that means for the regular Christian who comes to the Table can sometimes feel vague.
My friend Hannah King has written the most wonderful book addressing just this. Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness is part memoir, part pastoral theology about what it means for God to feed his people with Jesus at the Table. Not that she is short on good theology, but her focus in the book is what it means for us to receive Jesus. Not the doctrinal question — but what does it mean to meet Christ?
The most challenging requirement to being an elder is that your kids need to be faithful and well-behaved. Your kids are simultaneously their own people, with their own wills and personal faith, and part of your resumé, open to evaluation by your church. The requirement is then difficult on two fronts: you are being evaluated based on someone else’s character and behavior and the church has a legitimate interest in observing your kids.
I didn’t grow up as a pastor’s kid; in fact, as far as I can tell, I’m the first pastor in my family going back at least 8 generations. But the reputation of pastor’s kids veers wildly from the most-straight laced, spiritual kids (who may or may not burst out of their inhibitions upon adulthood) or church-based terrors. And pastors often make the mistake of treating their kids not as their own child first, but as extensions of their ministry to the church. This looks like kids being turned into ministerial props, and their lives being put on display (sermon illustrations anyone?) with no sense of privacy and dignity fir the kid. Especially as the kids get older, the realization that they are constantly being watched and evaluated, and that their parents are holding them to a high standard precisely because of that evaluation, often leads to resentment, pressure, and rebellion. Or worse — entitlement, when the kids think they have some kind of trickle-down authority in the church because of who their parents are.
So, the very nature of the requirement that a pastor’s kids be faithful often raises the pressure that encourages unfaithfulness…
A friend of mine grew up in farm-country Indiana, and their family faithfully attended church twice on Sundays. She likes to tell us that the only times as kids they were allowed to skip the Sunday evening service was when Elvis and then the Beatles performed on the ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’. The evening service was once a regular feature of American Protestant worship, but for a variety of reasons has slowly disappeared. I believe that an evening service is incredibly valuable for Christian spiritual formation; for that reason we instituted an evening service in my congregation two years ago.
But I couldn’t help but think of my friend’s story when I was recently introduced to a phrase from the Dutch Reformed tradition: “Oncers become noncers…”
Keeping Kids Christian was released on February 24th! Unfortunately, I was sick this week and missed posting on the launch date. You can find the book for over 30% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com and Westminster Books, and can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
It was wonderful to see such nice reviews by Nadya Williams at Mere Orthodoxy and Austin Gravely at The Gospel Coalition. An excerpt from its seventh chapter also ran at Christianity Today.
My essay “How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?” has been included in Mere Orthodoxy‘s inaugural ebook, Spiritual Formation for the Family. If you become a member of MO you have access to this and all future ebooks. That essay was the origin of Keeping Kids Christian, which is published in one week! You can find it for pre-order with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and 40% off at Westminster Books (it was WTS Books’ promotional focus last week, which was cool and humbling); and for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
Ryan Burge is the guru sociologist of religion who writes at Graphs about Religion. I’ve followed and appreciated his work for years now, and have read all of his books. His most recent is The Vanishing Church. It explores the decline of the mainline tradition and its central thesis is that the moderate sensibilities of mainline congregations couldn’t handle the increased polarization of American culture and that very sensibility is something desperately needed to moderate the most extreme impulses in our society, both religious and secular. It was classic Burge: lots of statistics that are easy to digest, the familiar recounting of the American religious landscape over the last 75 years, with the vulnerability of a pastor whose church shut its doors.
What left me scratching my head was how he contrasted mainline with evangelical sensibilities when it comes to Christian discipleship…
