Other religions and denominations
I just don’t think they get it. The Church of England is hemorrhaging members and money, even to the point of finding it difficult to maintain its historic cathedrals. So what is their plan for reversing this trend? Are they formulating a bold new evangelization? Seeking to bring the basic truths of the Gospel to a new generation? Reaching out to the masses of new immigrants who might be receptive to the faith of their new homeland? Not at all.
Instead one cathedral has hired an experienced retail marketer who plans to open wine bars and hand out “loyalty cards.”
The first “director of hospitality and welcome” at an English cathedral has unveiled far-reaching plans to make its operations more business-like. Mark Hope-Urwin, a former executive with the John Lewis department stores chain, has been recruited by Birmingham Cathedral to oversee a radical change to its image and branding. His plans, revealed today, include a chain of city-centre wine bars and “loyalty cards” for regular worshippers to obtain discounts at the cathedral’s shops.
I don’t think they could find a more telling cliché for the perceived elitism of English-speaking Anglicanism today than a wine bar, which is the sort of place you find the snooty upper-middle class dual-income, no-kids yuppies, not salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar and white-collar families.
The very attitude of the brains behind this idea is telling.
“We are in a competitive environment. People have all kinds of distractions in their busy lives and at the moment too many just see the cathedral as a big brick monolith. That has to change if we are to bring people in.”
If you approach the mission of the Gospel as just one among many distracting entertainments on the menu, then you’ve already lost the fight. If I’m looking for a “distraction” or entertainment, then church is low on the list.
Being a committed Christian of the sort who will remain loyal to the local parish is a lifestyle, not a hobby. Christianity doesn’t live in a box to be brought for an hour on Sunday, but is something that changes the very essence of your being and brings a change to your entire life through an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ.
But you go ahead with your wine bar. Oh, and how many points do I have to earn on my loyalty card before I get one of those snazzy collared purple shirts?
Photo credit: Yajico. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
This is not a whitewash of the Crusades, but a well-researched and explained look at the successes, failures, and motivations of the Crusades from the intensely devotional to the mundane, being sure to examine the crusaders and their foes in the context of the times and culture they lived, not holding them to the standards of today or of our culture.
The book was updated after 9/11 to place the Crusades within the geopolitical context of today. The last chapter examines how the Crusades have been perceived since the seventeenth century and very relevantly among the Muslim people of today. You might be surprised (but then again you might not) that what you’ve been told in the media about Muslims nursing grudges against the West for the crusades for the past seven centuries is a lot of bunk. In his penultimate chapter, Madden concludes:
It is not the crusades, then, that led to the attacks of September 11, but the artificial memory of the crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists. They stripped the medieval expeditions of every aspect of their age and dressed them up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism. As such, they have become an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.
What could have been
The history of the Crusades fills me with sorrow because of the sorrow they wrought for all of Christendom. Along with many other failings during the Middle Ages—the political intrigues and ecclesiastical heterodoxy and more—the Crusades sapped the attention and resources of Europe as well as the prominence and esteem for the papacy and led to the Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called Enlightenment, which ended in the rejection of so much popular faith and devotion in the name of secularism.
Madden claims convincingly that Protestantism owes its existence to the threat of the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Turks:
The Protestants and the Turks had a mutually beneficial, although unintentional, relationship. The Turkish threat distracted the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor long enough for Luther to nurture his movement and secure his position. Because of his wars with the Turks and their allies, Charles V was unable to remove Protestants from his northern domains. As Kenneth Setton has noted, “without them [the Turks], Protestantism might conceivably have gone the way of Albigensianism.”
And yet if they had been successful in capturing the Holy Lands and beating back the armies that would have followed, including the Mongols and the various Turks and Tamerlane’s forces and what have you, would we be better off?
I thought this was a parody at first, but evidently it’s not. If you’re an Evangelical who believes in the Rapture—the theology behind the “Left Behind” series of End Times books—then you believe that at some point all the “real” Christians are going to disappear into heaven (be assumed?), leaving behind all those poor benighted non-believers who will have to endure the Apocalypse and have one final chance to give their lives to Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.
But say you’re a tech-savvy Christian who wants to give your non-believing friends and family one last chance — or at least a final “I told you so”— then you need to sign up for “You’ve Been Left Behind.” YBLB is an email service that will send one final message to all those people who have been “left behind”. As their press release puts it:
This website allows the customer to edit all documents and addresses at any time. This online site is run and programmed by Christians. It employs a “dead man’s switch” to automatically send the Emails after the Rapture of the Church has taken place. Multiple safeguards have been put into place to prevent premature sending of stored documents.
Customers of You’ve Been Left Behind Get an account with 250MB of storages space. And can upload any document to send to as many as 62 email addresses. 150MB are stored 256 bit encrypted. Those documents can be individually sent to up to 12 specific email addresses. 100MB of unencrypted storage can be collectively sent to another 50 email addresses. A blog is also available to customers with prewritten documents for the customer who does not have the time or prophecy knowledge to write their own general letters.
All this for only $40 per year. Every year. And all the proprietors have to do is … nothing. The perfect business plan.
Let’s not disturb the kiddies by telling them about the crucifixion. And if you can’t tell them about the crucifixion, you can’t tell them about Easter. One North Carolina Protestant church got basically that response from the publisher of their Sunday school curriculum.
“Easter is a special time in churches,” the letter from the publisher says. “It’s a time of celebration and thankfulness. But because of the graphic nature of the Easter story and the crucifixion specifically, we need to be careful as we choose what we tell preschoolers about Easter.”
But can children be presented with the fact of death and not scar them? Can we tell them about Jesus’ sacrifice without going into the gory details? And is it worth tossing out the resurrection to avoid the cross?
Yet the cross is at the heart of our faith, as St. Paul tells us: “But may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal 6:14) Yet, even in Paul’s time there were those who thought the cross was just too gruesome to consider, but he rejected the attempt to expunge it from Christianity: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18)
“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18)
This is the wisdom of the Catholic crucifix, a cross with a representation of Christ crucified upon it. Isabella has grown up seeing these crucifixes in our home and in our church and they do not startle her. She sees the cross, points, and says “Jesus Christ” and begs to kiss the cross. The last is not at our prompting, mind you, as she is a child who has learned to kiss that which she loves and she loves Christ. When she is 5 or 6 years old and we tell the story of Good Friday with no more gore than the Stations of the Cross in our parish church, will she be able to hear it without being scarred for life? I think so.
Perhaps our children—and ourselves— have become too citified, too far removed from the messy reality of life. Children raised on farms usually learn early on the lessons of life and death and suffering and sacrifice, not to mention children who grow up in much less civilized surroundings. Heck, there are plenty of kids in inner-city neighborhoods who know plenty of those topics.
Apparently, the publisher of this Sunday school lesson is connected to some of those suburban mega-church evangelical places in the Midwest, those places of the happy-clappy health-and-wealth Gospel. I suppose it’s not surprising it would be hard to find the hard teaching of the cross there. And they have so well illustrated for us that when the cross is removed, Easter is not far behind.
