Prof. John Stackhouse’s Weblog

By now we’ve all heard the latest about Ted Haggard, former pastor of New Life Community Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and former head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Brother Haggard–and he is my brother in Christ, as my Bible reminds me–was found out as having had sexual relations with a male prostitute in Denver. He resigned in disgrace, and has since been in counseling.

According to the Denver Post, the four pastors in charge of overseeing New Life Church in the wake of this disaster recently made a surprising–to some, an astonishing, and to others, an absurd–announcement. One of them, Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur, Colorado, was quoted as explaining Haggard’s three-year relationship with the man thus: “He is completely heterosexual,” Ralph said. “That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”

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I don’t know that I have met Dr. LeRon Shults, but he is a highly respected American theologian who recently took a job in Norway. He has recently posted some “work in progress” regarding the influential anthropologist René Girard and the implications of his views for Christian theology, especially of the atonement.

Many of you are about to stop reading now, and that’s fine! But for those who are interested, your servant took exception to one or two things in Professor Shults’s post and we engaged in what became a rather extended to-and-fro that the theologically-minded might find interesting here.

Oprah Winfrey’s latest spiritual sensation is The Secret. Her talk show has featured it prominently, her website presents a lot of material on it, and she directs us to those who are now marketing The Secret through webcasts, DVDs, and other media that more than coincidentally recall The Da Vinci Code.

The Secret promises a better life for everyone. Testimonies abound from those who have found business success, romance, marital happiness, emotional and physical healing, and weight loss (not to be despised) through applying The Secret. So should we, as the advertisements proclaim, prepare for “a new era for mankind”?

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(I recently was asked to address the question of the “parachurch” by the Canadian Council of Christian Charities. Here is a brief summary of my main argument.)

What are we to make of World Vision, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, freestanding Christian schools and colleges, evangelistic associations, and the myriad of other “special purpose groups” (as Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow has termed them) that have proliferated within and especially beyond the congregation-denomination structures of Christian organization?

These groups are usually, but mistakenly, called “parachurch” as if they are not the Church (that is, the worldwide Body of Christ), but instead occupy a shadowy zone “beside” the Church. I use the term “shadowy” to allude to the suspicion and even outright hostility with which they are viewed by some Christians—not least by many clergy and denominational leaders. For such groups often are seen as distractions and diffusions of the Church’s resources, not least its money. Thus we hear pastors urging congregations to tithe first to the local—which is to say, the “true”—church, and then (perhaps) to other ministries.

I respond that such groups are not churches (that is, congregations or denominations), but they are certainly part of the Church. Indeed, I see them as the Church of Jesus Christ deployed in particular modes to accomplish particular purposes.

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I won’t recommend books often on this blog, but I want to recommend this one: Cancer: A Medical and Spiritual Guide for Patients and Their Families. Written by an oncologist, Dr. William Fintel, and a theologian and pastor, Dr. Gerald McDermott, the book offers a wealth of information and wisdom about traversing this awful terrain.

I recommend it second-hand, as it were. My late father, Dr. John Stackhouse, was a cancer surgeon and also a church elder and Bible teacher. My mother, Dr. Yvonne Stackhouse, has been a literature teacher and historian and–quite to the point–is a cancer survivor. Their joint testimony has been that this is the single best book of the many they have read on cancer.

The book has been through several editions with several publishers. Baker has it now, but they have done little to promote it. So I’ll do what little I can here. If you or someone you know is walking through the valley of the shadow of cancer, get them this book. And spread the word. When you’re dealing with cancer, you need all the help you can get.

(A number of friends have asked me to make this article–published originally in the Canadian journal ChristianWeek–available in this form. So here it is.)

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The way some Christian churches and other organizations pay their speakers, it makes me embarrassed to be a member of the same faith.

A friend of mine is a gifted staff worker with a well-known Christian organization on a university campus. He is married, with three young children, and works hard and long at his job. Frequently he is asked to speak at churches’ youth retreats or special events sponsored by other groups. Rarely is he paid well for what is in fact overtime work–for audiences other than the one that pays his regular salary.

One weekend, he left his family to speak at a retreat for more than 100 young people, each of whom paid to go away to a well-furnished camp for three days. My friend gave four talks and participated in a question-and-answer session—a typical, and demanding, schedule. But his work didn’t end there, of course. Retreat speakers are “on call” all weekend: for impromptu counseling, offering advice over mealtimes, and modeling what they preach on the volleyball court or around the campfire. Make no mistake: There is very little relaxing in that role, however restful the retreat might be for everyone else.

So at the end of this tiring weekend, at the close of the Sunday luncheon, the leader of the group thanked him profusely at the front of the dining hall (he had gone over very well). Then he tossed the speaker a T-shirt emblazoned with the group’s logo while everyone clapped. It took my friend several minutes to realize that this shirt was his total payment for the weekend’s work. He got in his car, without even a check for gasoline, and headed back to his waiting family.

An isolated and extreme example? Not at all. Every professional Christian speaker has stories like these.

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I normally stay away from commenting on the convulsions of the Anglican Communion, whether here in the Diocese of New Westminster, whose bishop is a heretic and schismatic (by the standard definitions of those terms), or in the Anglican Church of Canada, which tolerates such behaviour, or in the Anglican Communion worldwide, which is wracked by controversy over the legitimacy of homosexuality (ostensibly) and a lot of other things, such as heresy, schism, power politics, racism, and more (fundamentally).

I have belonged to Anglican congregations in Winnipeg and Vancouver, and have lots of contacts in Anglican churches in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., but I am not a confirmed Anglican and so I rarely speak up about what are “family problems” in someone else’s “tribe.”

Speaking of “tribe,” however, I am moved to headshaking by the recent appointment of Mark MacDonald, already an Anglican bishop, to the newly-created post of National Indigenous Bishop in Canada. According to the Anglican Journal, Bishop MacDonald will have “pastoral oversight over all of Canada’s indigenous Anglicans no matter where they live.”

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Those of us who care have seen Super Bowl XLI. Those of us who don’t, don’t want to read about it. So I’ll make this brief, and it’ll be easy to skip anyhow.

Peyton Manning did not deserve the Most Valuable Player trophy. His two running backs did. He didn’t play a bad game, but his only impressive completions came when Chicago’s defense completely blew coverages and left receivers wide open. Super Bowl MVPs need to do more than complete such passes, but Manning didn’t do much more. His backs did, and he rode them to victory. I hope he learns humility from this entire postseason, in fact, during which he threw a lot of interceptions, some of them stupid, and needed his team to get him out of trouble–not the other way around, which is what MVPs are supposed to do.

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