Meanderings, 10 April 2024

Good morning from the beauty of Santa Cruz. We are here for an event with some of my favorites.

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Fair and honest with Uri Berliner:

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley. 

I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI. 

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. 

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise. 

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. 

Kelley Mathews on the church calendar’s formative powers:

The church calendar, used primarily by liturgical denominations worldwide, teaches the life of Christ more or less chronologically. The seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany focus on the early years of Jesus, while Lent, Easter, and Pentecost help us reflect on his final days and the coming of the Spirit. Altogether, these major emphases take up only about five months of the calendar year, from December to April. 

Even the lowest of low-church evangelicals are at least vaguely familiar with the major church seasons I just mentioned. But unless you worship in a denomination that follows the Book of Common Prayer or another lectionary, you may not realize how Scripture readings in each Sunday service progress through the Gospels. And if a new season begins on a weekday, such as Ash Wednesday or Ascension Thursday, churches typically hold special services on those “holy days” (from which we get our word “holiday”). 

By retelling major events from Jesus’s life every year, church leaders could catechize—or educate—the masses. They needed ways to reinforce biblical truth to believers who did not have printed Bibles of their own. Through artistic renderings of Bible stories on the walls of churches, commissioned statues of biblical heroes, and the rhythmic retelling of Christ’s life in the calendar, the church came to know their history, their faith, and their God.

Fred Harrell’s advice to pastors at a new church:

So what have I told pastors taking a new church?  3 things, but there are of course many more things to say.    

1. Continuity versus change: these are the opposing forces you'll grapple with. Which should take precedence in your first year? Almost invariably, it's continuity. The mere fact of your presence, replacing the former leader, represents a significant change for the congregation. Often, that’s about as much change as they can handle in year one. In transitional ministry you have to move a little faster, but the principle still holds.

   However, more crucially, you're in no position to discern what needs changing until you've listened, observed, and asked questions—from the previous pastor to the freshest face in the pews. Emphasizing continuity is essential because, frankly, you lack the insight to pinpoint necessary changes. After all, you've just arrived! Change inevitably breeds conflict, making continuity a valuable ally in the early stages of your tenure.

   Failing to prioritize continuity in this regard can spell disaster.

2. Respecting the past is pivotal for fostering innovation in the future. Innovation necessitates trust, something you don’t have upon arriving at a new church. "Trust is earned, not given,” parents the world over have in one way or another told their recalcitrant teens. This axiom holds true in the realm of church leadership as well.
   
   When I speak of honoring the past, I'm not suggesting reverence for the former pastor, especially in cases involving scandal. However, unless there's such an extreme circumstance, it's crucial to honor the collective history of the church. This history is rich with the sacrifices of individuals who have dedicated their time, resources, and talents. They've weathered both good and bad times, and their faith has been shaped by their experiences within the church community.
   
   While you may identify aspects of the past that you find disagreeable, dismissing it entirely would be foolish, unless it involves a grave scandal. Instead, acknowledge and honor what God has accomplished through the church's members in the past. You honor what God has done through them in the past, and they are ready to join you in making new history in their future, under your leadership.  Failing to recognize this step can have catastrophic consequences, albeit in a subtle manner. It may take significantly longer to earn the trust of the congregation, and in the interim, congregants will vote with their feet.

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3. Your first 20 appointments in a new call will likely be what I call “grievance appointments”.  “I wanted to start a dog walking ministry and the pastor before you said ‘No’!”   Now, I know there are also grievances that are serious and difficult as well. All churches are filled with people and are therefore filled with flaws. The old saying goes if you find a perfect church don’t go there because then it won’t be.  These appointments serve as crucial opportunities to delve into the church's history, offer pastoral care to those who have been hurt, and grasp the dynamics of the church's family system structure. Here’s the massive mistake on this one: Listen, empathize, and learn…but by no means set an agenda based on grievance appointments. These are helpful things to know, but you have to have enough experience to know there are 3 sides to every story and often, paradoxically, two things can be true at once.  But don’t shy away from these appointments. There is gold in those hills!

Barth, Lewis, and the evangelical receptions. When I came of age in theological studies in the 70s, Barth was a No-No and Lewis was a Yes-probably.

The acceptance of Lewis as a resource for Christian learning especially among evangelicals came much quicker than Barth. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that Lewis was foremost a novelist and so his audience first read the beloved children’s literature then took a look at his Christian essays. Or perhaps this had more to do with Barth’s theology, steeped in the Continental tradition, being more difficult to decipher, whereas Lewis’s theology was more readable (could also be that Barth wrote books that look like encyclopedias). Much like Noll’s book on Lewis, years ago Bernard Ramm’s book After Fundamentalism declared that Barth will continually be an important conversation partner for evangelicals (Thorne, 183-4). A recent book on Karl Barth and Pentecostal Theology shows that Ramm was right.

Lewis and Barth are now considered two of the titans of modern Protestant Christianity, both popular among U.S. American evangelicals. Noll’s book helps illustrate the fact that at one point in history that U.S. Christians from different traditions began reading Lewis and Barth. Lewis continues to enjoy a broad readership among people of all ages. As much scholarship shows, Catholic readers of Barth and Lewis were some of the most generous. One of the most surprising, as seen from the epigraph quoted from Ralph C. Wood’s book Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, comes from Catholic short story writer Flannery O’Connor (Wood, 10). Believe it or not, unlike O’Connor, who owned and enjoyed Barth’s book Evangelical Theology, it seems Lewis had not read much of Barth (Noll, 98).

Brand evangelicals with Joey Cochran:

The emergence of mid-twentieth century evangelicalism, often referred to as “New Evangelicalism” or “Neo-Evangelicalism,” created an influential conglomerate for the purpose of regaining cultural and political power, and it was nothing short of a re-branding effort of conservative, reformed, protestant Christians, who had witnessed how the “Fundamentalist” brand power had been diminished in the public’s eye by modernist pastors like Harry Emerson Fosdick and journalists like H. L. Mencken. I have come to refer to this turning point in the history of Protestant Christianity in the States as the birth of the Brand Evangelicals. …

The momentum of the movement, which I like to call Brand Evangelicals, coincided nicely with the emergence of what historians have dubbed as the post-WWII Affluent Society, and this movement fostered a particular socio-cultural demographic. The makers of the Brand Evangelical movement were characteristically white, male, suburban husbands, and the affinity group most drawn to the movement was unsurprisingly much like the movement’s makers, white and suburban….

How Brand Evangelicals will rebrand is yet to be determined, but there is undoubtedly an attempt to keep Reformed Protestantism at the center of the brand. However, I believe this attitude perpetuates the short-comings of the Neo-Evangelicals and the Reformed Resurgence. Until evangelicals can set a truly broad ecumenical table, in the spirit of Lausanne, that reflects the texture and features of global Christianity, while also attending to a distribution of power among a diverse socio-cultural demographic, the movement, regardless of what name we attribute to it, will continue to suffer from the same dysfunction and dysphoria that has plagued it during the last four generations of Brand Evangelicals.