When we look back at World War I 100 years after its start, it’s easy to see that public opinion was wrong in its optimism that the fighting that began in early summer would end by Christmas and all would be right with the world. As I made a recent visit to the terrific National World War I Museum in Kansas City, I was struck by the inaccuracy of that prediction. But it made me wonder what public opinion is getting wrong today. Let’s look at the conventional wisdom about mainline Protestant churches such as our PC(USA) denomination. In sum, it’s this: The future is dismal. The church is dying. Young people especially are becoming religiously unaffiliated. The empty churches of Europe are a harbinger of what will happen in the U.S. Churches that want to survive will have to downplay theology and emphasize “moral therapeutic deism,” a term introduced in a 2005 study about American youth and religion and later popularized by Kenda Creasy Dean of Princeton Theological … [Read more...]

WASHINGTON D.C. – It was late on a recent Friday afternoon when I slipped into New York Avenue Presbyterian Church here to check out something I was alerted to by a fellow member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, meeting here in annual conference. The woman at the reception desk said the Lincoln Parlor, containing an early emancipation document that Abraham Lincoln signed on July 14, 1862, was closed — but because it was just my wife and me, she’d allow us to have a look. So we entered the parlor with its red and gold wallpaper and its large wooden dining room table with 10 chairs at its center and found a display about the Emancipation Proclamation on a wall. The document there is one Lincoln drafted a week before he presented the proclamation to his cabinet. In the formal language of the period, the document begins, “Herewith is the draft of a Bill to compensate any State which may abolish slavery within its limits, the passage of which, substantially as … [Read more...]

I think of Margaret E. Towner as the Presbyterian Jackie Robinson. In 1956, she broke the gender line to become the first woman ordained as a pastor in our denomination. She’s now 89 and still active in church work, including serving on a committee of Peace River Presbytery in Florida. Some weeks ago I called her to talk about ordination of women because I was working on a piece for The National Catholic Reporter about the 40th anniversary of the July 29, 1974, ordination of the first female priests in the Episcopal Church. And I wanted to remind my Catholic readers that we Presbyterians beat the Episcopalians by about two decades. Marg, of course, knew all about that so-called “irregular” ordination of the “Philadelphia 11” two years before the church formally changed its rules to allow for female priests. In fact, her mother, whom Margaret describes as “an ecumaniac,” attended that service because she was friends with one of the 11. With almost 60 years of history of … [Read more...]

For four straights Sundays, my congregation brought in two excellent seminary professors to talk to us first about why we should care about Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and then about how to read the Bible the way seminary professors do. My thought in inviting David May of Central Baptist Theological Seminary and Mike Graves of St. Paul School of Theology was that sometimes our own people aren’t very articulate about their own faith and need a bit of help. This biblical and theological illiteracy can make ecumenical and interfaith dialogue difficult or fairly worthless. The result is what Rabbi Brad Hirshfield calls “interfaithless dialogue.” Sort of the blind leading the blind or maybe the bland leading the bland. Faith communities continue to try to improve the religious literacy of their own people, but those efforts aren’t always successful — sometimes because people are, instead, paying more attention to “Dancing With the Stars” or something equally … [Read more...]

Late last year, as I was finishing the manuscript for my new book, “Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans,” which is rooted in my hometown of Woodstock, Ill., I thought about how, as a kid, I learned what church is. As you can read in the book, I figured it out in the basement of First Church of Woodstock, my family’s congregation. That’s where some of hid behind the furnace to talk, look at racy magazines and try cigarettes. As I write in the book: “Church, at its core, is about relationship — vertically with the divine and horizontally with other humans. We boys were figuring out the horizontal part of that in a building where people prac- ticed the vertical part together. Together. That’s the key. We were comrades, plotters, secret-keep- ers. We were learning to trust one another, to rely on one another, to have one another’s back.” Please know I’m not suggesting that youth leaders today encourage kids to hide in church basements, … [Read more...]