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For reporters' datebook: A busy nine weeks on LGBT issues for U.S. Protestants

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For reporters' datebook: A busy nine weeks on LGBT issues for U.S. Protestants

With Easter celebrations behind them, four U.S. Protestant denominations are about to plunge into a 9-week swirl of big decision-making on their unceasing and anguishing gay dispute. The actions will come less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage.

In the Reformed Church in America, 21 days of continent-wide fasting and prayers for wisdom will culminate in an April 15-18 “Special Council on Human Sexuality” in Chicago. The 74 delegates are assigned to devise “a constitutional pathway forward” that can manage the deep division over sexuality, for proposal to the General Synod June 9-14 in Palos Heights, Illinois. Though relatively small, the RCA is one of the oldest U.S. denominations, dating to 1628 in New Amsterdam (today’s New York City). 

Next up is the May 10-20 General Conference of the large United Methodist Church in Portland, Oregon. The UMC has debated the question without letup since 1972, always upholding the belief that “the practice of homosexuality” is “incompatible with Christian teaching,” while liberals regularly defy the required discipline of clergy living in homosexual relationships or who conduct ceremonies for same-sex couples.

An unusual aspect of the situation is that though the U.S. flock has declined dramatically to 7.2 million, the UMC includes overseas churches, mostly in Africa and mostly conservative, that now boast 5.2 million members. Legislation on the table includes a bid from the “Connectional Table,” an official coordination body, to replace the strict UMC-wide policy with local option.

The split is demonstrated by two pending cases.


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Painful church split in Twin Cities: But what kind of Lutherans are we dealing with here?

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Attention all supporters of strong, accurate religion-beat reporting: What is the first question a journalist needs to answer for readers when covering a "Lutheran church" story, especially when it is linked to controversy?

Let me raise the stakes a bit higher. This question is especially true when dealing with a flock located in Minnesota or elsewhere in the upper Midwest, which is often called the Lutheran Belt in American life because there are so many Lutheran congregations in that region.

The question: So what kind of Lutherans are we talking about?

Are we dealing with a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which, despite the presence of the E-word in the name, is a liberal flock on key issues of doctrine and moral theology? Or how about the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod, located on the right side of the mainline Protestant world? Or how about the smaller Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which is also more doctrinally conservative than the ELCA?

So check out the top of this major story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press earlier this month. Yes, you'll have to look for clues in this long passage:

North Heights Lutheran, the one-time megachurch of Arden Hills, has run out of prayers.
The church is shutting down, the apparent victim of a civil war that has split it apart. After 70 years of weekly worship, the church’s last service will be Sunday.
“This took me by surprise,” 20-year member Zelda Erickson said Monday after learning of the closing at an announcement during Sunday’s church service. “I feel terrible about this.”

North Heights once had Sunday attendance of 3,400 at two church locations. But attendance has fallen recently to several hundred -- not enough to keep the church afloat.


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On Easter, this obscure topic made front-page news: Why that's a very good thing

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In a GetReligion post last year, I wrote:

"Church-planting" is, of course, a buzzword in Christian circles these days.
Not too many journalists, though, could turn that esoteric subject into the lead story in the Sunday edition of a major metropolitan daily.

In that case, I was talking about award-winning Godbeat veteran Peter Smith of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

But add another religion writer to that elite list: budding star Holly Meyer of The Tennessean.

Meyer's deep dive on a United Methodist church plant in the Nashville area dominated the top two-thirds of her newspaper's front page on Easter Sunday.

Her timely angle:

Providence United Methodist Church has a new beginning this Easter season.
The church began eight years ago with an Easter Sunday service in Mundy Memorial Park in Mt. Juliet. And after holding 389 services in parks, school gyms and the like, Providence will celebrate its first Easter in a new building of its own on South Rutland Road.
It's a key milestone in the history of the congregation, which began as a church plant and has emerged as a leader in the Methodist denomination's nationwide efforts to grow.
“I’m pumped about our building because of what we get to imagine together,” Pastor Jacob Armstrong told the congregation during the final service at West Wilson Middle School.
Members of the church sat on bleachers and folding chairs as the gym's basketball hoops hovered overhead. They listened intently as Armstrong, 35, recounted how Providence's dream to reach those who feel disconnected from God and church manifests itself in overseas charity work, special-needs ministry and more.
“It’s been a great run in the school, guys, hasn’t it? It’s been a great run," Armstrong said. "Celebrate it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But here’s what I don’t want to do — stop dreaming.”
Providence began in 2008 just as the United Methodist Church as a denomination was preparing to launch a program focused on the intentional creation of new churches across the country. But it's not just the Methodists; new Protestant churches nationally are starting faster than old ones are disappearing, Nashville-based LifeWay Research shows.
Denominations are making it a priority, with more than 4,000 new churches launching in 2014 across the nation, said Ed Stetzer, executive director of LifeWay Research and an expert on planting churches.

Count Stetzer among those impressed with Meyer's story. He tweeted to his 186,000 followers:


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Weekend think pieces: Concerning 'evangelicals' and the quest for better exit polls

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If you have been on Planet Earth in recent months, and have the slightest interest in (a) religion, (b) politics or (c) both, then you know that the rise of Citizen Donald Trump has raised lots of questions about religion, politics and exit polls.

To be specific, the press has been obsessed with the idea that evangelical Protestants have fallen in love with Trump.

Sure enough, some evangelicals are quite fond of Trump, especially those who -- in the words of historian Paul Matzko of Pennsylvania State University -- are "cultural" evangelicals, as opposed to folks who frequent church pews once or more a week. You may want to check out this academic paper by Matzko: "What Evangelical Support for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump Suggests About the Future of American Evangelicalism."

But forget Trump for a moment. The most interesting concepts in Matzko's paper concern the fault line between evangelicals who backed Rubio and those who support Cruz. Here is a chunk of my "On Religion" column from this week:

"... White collar" evangelical elites have appeared to favor Rubio while "evangelical workers" may appreciate Cruz's hard-line stance on illegal immigration. 

However, Matzko believes a deeper, more complex split is emerging, one rooted in history. 

On one side, he wrote, are "18th Century evangelicals -- a "persecuted religious minority" in American culture that yearned for the "liberty to practice their faith free from State interference. To that end, they allied with freethinkers like Thomas Jefferson. … They had little interest in fomenting sweeping social change, in using State power to make America more pious, holy or Christian. They asked only for the freedom to be left alone."  
On the other side, Matzko argued, are "19th Century evangelicals" who, by the end of that century, had begun to gain cultural influence and political power. This would eventually lead to talk of a "Moral Majority." 


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Did a familiar religion-news 'Blind Spot' shape coverage of ISIS genocide declaration?

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Did a familiar religion-news 'Blind Spot' shape coverage of ISIS genocide declaration?

Back in 2008, I was part of the editorial team that produced a book called "Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion" for Oxford University Press. The whole idea was to look at a number of big national and international news stories and demonstrate that journalists could not do an accurate, informed, balanced job covering them without taking religion seriously.

I know. That wasn't a shocking thesis for a project linked to this website. What is shocking, nearly a decade later, is that most of the book's case studies remain amazingly relevant.

Hang in there with me on this. I'm providing background on the discussion that host Todd Wilken and I had during this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in). This was recorded soon after the declaration by Secretary of State John Kerry that, yes, the Islamic State was committing "genocide" in its slaughter of Christians, Yazidis, Shiite Muslims and other religious minority groups. This followed a 393-0 vote on a U.S. House of Representatives resolution on this topic.

As you would expect, mainstream news coverage focused on the politics that framed this issue. This story was all about Republicans trying to hurt Democrats in an election year, "conservative" religious groups trying to embarrass the White House, etc., etc.

Same old, same old. Politics is real, while religion is not all that important. For example, why not talk to the leaders -- here in America -- of churches that are directly linked to the flocks being massacred in Iraq and Syria? For Christians from the Middle East, there is more to this tragedy than election-year politics.

As I noted in a GetReligion post on this topic -- " 'Aides said' is the key: Why it was so hard to say ISIS is guilty of 'genocide' against Christians" -- the Kerry announcement received very low-key coverage, which is probably what the U.S. State Department wanted. The story then vanished from the mainstream press, while coverage in religious-market outlets continued.

This is, you see, a "conservative" news story that gets covered at places like Fox News. But why is that? Human rights used to be a liberal cause. Correct?


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Religion-beat professionals: Yet another reference work that belongs on your desk

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Religion-beat professionals: Yet another reference work that belongs on your desk

Our previous religion-beat Memo puffed “The Study Quran,” a truly path-breaking production.

The Religion Guy now outpoints a  standby that belongs on the desks of journalists who don’t have one of the two earlier editions: “The Catholic Study Bible” (Oxford University Press, available in paperback for US$39.99).

The volume includes the latest (2010) version of the New American Bible, the official English translation used in the U.S. Catholic Church, alongside numerous articles and detailed verse-by-verse commentary from a 20-member team. The new edition adds, for instance, surveys of archaeological finds regarding the Bible, by Ronald Simkins of Creighton University in Omaha (Old Testament) and Dominican Sister Laurie Brink of Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union (New Testament).

In addition to keeping this book handy for future reference, newswriters could use it as a hook to analyze trends in Catholic scholarship on the Bible. The book bears the hierarchy’s  declaration that all material “is free from doctrinal and moral error.” Yet a spot check indicates the latest edition continues and somewhat reinforces the secular and liberal Protestant sort of scholarship that influenced the first two editions.

A fascinating in-depth project could compare the Study Bible’s approach with the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s conservative declarations from 1905 through the 1962 opening of the Second Vatican Council, as indexed right here.   

Among other things, prior commission decrees affirmed Moses as the “substantial” source of the first five Old Testament books; single authorship for Isaiah’s prophecy; the historical veracity of Genesis 1-3, the Book of Acts, and the Gospel of John; and that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written prior to A.D. 70.

Today, those sorts of views are largely confined to conservative Protestant or Orthodox Jewish scholars.


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Sunday morning in Palm Beach: What happens when, and where, for Citizen Donald Trump?

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A decade or so ago, I lived in West Palm Beach, Fla., and taught at a campus on the other side of the Intercoastal Waterway from the famous, and infamous, world that is Palm Beach.

Now, the people who live in this enclave of big money tend to talk and, no surprise, one of things they love to talk about is people with money and how those people spend their money. A central question is whether the person being discussed is "old (inherited) money" or "new money."

The key: Those "new money" people (think Rush Limbaugh) have to graciously earn respect from the many Palm Beachers with old money, don't you know.

During the years I was there, I heard local folks say one thing over and over about Donald Trump, whose profile on both sides of the Intercoastal was, well, YYHHUUGGEE. Trump, folks agreed, was the ultimate example of "old money" who kept acting like "new money." This was not a compliment.

I pass along this observation because of that New York Times feature that ran the other day describing the life of the billionaire GOP front-runner through the eyes of a man who would certainly know the fine details -- the man who for decades served as the butler at Citizen Trump's Mar-a-lago estate in Palm Beach.

Anthony Senecal, now semi-retired, has to know the details of Trump's life, tastes and habits inside out. In light of the obsessive news coverage of Trump's life and beliefs during this campaign, what question would any reporter be SURE to ask if granted an interview with this butler?

Let's see if we can spot the God-shaped hole here. But first, the overture:


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Churches and the homeless: Oregon media do the best job crediting who's really helping out

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Homelessness is a huge problem on the West Coast, which seems to be the nation’s new mecca for tent cities, shelters and encampments under the freeways. California alone has 25 percent of the nation’s homeless population and when the weather gets warm, a lot of them migrate north to Oregon and Washington.

Several mayors of large cities in three states met in December to figure out how to solve a problem that’s increasingly taking up public money and sidewalk space.

The Oregonian did a series on the problem a year ago, as Portland’s lenient policies on sidewalk residents –- along with a lack of low-cost housing –- have attracted a large population. Willamette Week recently compared Portland’s generous policies with other West Coast cities. And the homeless problem here in Seattle has become so epic, photographers are doing year-long projects about it.

As I’ve scanned bunches of articles on this phenomenon, I’ve noticed a dearth of mentions on the churches that are out there helping the homeless. There are some exceptions, such as this 2004 Los Angeles Times piece on Azusa Pacific University’s homeless outreach.

Note: I had to go back 12 years to find that one.


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Did later Christians change what the earliest followers of Jesus believed about him?

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Did later Christians change what the earliest followers of Jesus believed about him?

NORMAN’S QUESTION:

Why do an overwhelming number of Christians believe (or say they believe) things about Jesus that were not believed by his earliest followers in Jerusalem, led by his brother James?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

This important question results from the previous Q and A item, which summarized central teaching about Jesus Christ that has united most Christians since it was finalized by 5th Century ecumenical councils. It holds that the one true God exists in a Trinity of three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that Jesus the Son has two natures, fully human yet fully divine. Myriad worshipers over centuries have professed each week that Jesus Christ is of one “being” or “substance” with God the Father.

However, in modern times the traditional teaching has been challenged in differing ways by secular thinkers, Protestant liberals, Unitarians, Latter-day Saints (“Mormons”), Jehovah’s Witnesses, certain Pentecostalists and, of course, by religions totally outside the Christian orbit like Judaism and Islam.

The Religion Guy confesses he has not read the hefty books that discuss this and relies upon secondary materials from the experts. This answer bypasses numerous technicalities; if interested, you can research why early church councils rejected the teaching of the Apollinarians, Arians, Docetists, Ebionites, Eutychians, Gnostics, Sabellians and the rest. Note that the question raises only the divinity of Jesus the Son, not of the Holy Spirit, and only what the earliest Christians believed, not how Jesus thought of himself.

About James. He was one of Jesus’ four "brothers" (Mark 6:3) and a skeptic turned believer who, yes, led the original church in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin accused James of violating Jewish law and he was executed in A.D. 62. He’s traditionally seen as the writer of the New Testament’s letter of James, though other options have been proposed.

With that ground cleared, on to Norman’s theme.


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