Christians and the Public Good

Can Christian organizations insist that their employees believe Christian doctrines and practice Christian ethics? Not as often as they used to, and not as often as you might think they should be able to. The Ontario courts are considering a case of giant judicial implications as they decide whether Christian Horizons, an organization that cares for the mentally handicapped in group homes and other facilities, can insist that its employees share its Christian profession and practice.

They’re in trouble because one of their employees “came out” as a lesbian in a sustained relationship and complained to the Human Rights Commission when Christian Horizons terminated her after reminding her that she had said she would conform to their conservative Christian ethical standards. Despite what she had promised, she now felt ill treated. A commissioner mostly agreed with her grievance, and his finding was so sweeping that Christian Horizons has appealed to the courts.

Read what the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism (full disclosure: I’m their senior advisor) has to say on this and topics related to the question of what public good is accomplished by churches and other Christian organizations.

What do you think? Should Christian organizations (our American cousins treat this matter as the question of “faith-based initiatives”) be free to hire only Christians? Even if they serve non-Christians? Even if they get public funding? No matter what work they do?

(As a bonus on this site, you’ll find an article in which your servant takes yet another kick at the perennially available can of defining evangelicalism, this time in relation to fundamentalism. But it’s not as interesting as the other stuff.)

Special Events This Week in Vancouver–and Abbotsford

I’m to speak at the following three special events this week. If you come and you heard about it/them here, let me know!

Study Skills Seminar Friday, 23 January, 1-4 p.m., Regent College  This course will help you listen better in class, take better notes in class, read anything more quickly and more efficiently, mark up a book so that you understand its architecture and can come back to it for reference, take notes from sources you don’t own (as in a library), make the most of every study session, and more. Indeed, one of the skills you’ll learn is how to read a book in 15 minutes. And another skill you’ll learn is when you can safely stop studying for a test. It’ll cost you about thirty bucks. Sign up in advance with the Academic Secretary for a discount.

Writing Seminar Saturday, 24 January, 9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., Regent College  This course is not a remedial course. My colleague Polly Long teaches a fine course next weekend for students needing help writing at the graduate level. My seminar is at a professional level for very good writers who want to consider writing as part of their occupation. It’s about how to conduct a writing life—a Christian writing life—and how to make the most of one’s skills especially in scholarly or theological writing, but also in mainstream and Christian journalism as well.  Same deal: thirty bucks or sign up in advance with the Academic Secretary for a discount.

Public Lecture Sunday, 25 January, 7 p.m.: “Are Christians Un-Canadian?” at Calvin Presbyterian Church, Abbotsford, BC. This will be a discussion of obstacles Canadians face in both evangelism and public policy, and how we can respond positively and creatively (that is, not all in the same way!). All welcome.

Faith, not Just Good Works, Needed in Africa–according to an Atheist

You’ll be seeing this one flash around the Internet, I’ll bet. I just got it and read it (thanks, Christina!) and want you to see it, too. Imagine: an atheist finding that Christianity changes people–individuals, families, and cultures–for the better, and not just through its helpful charities or basic decency (which lots of atheists manifest too, of course), but through its religion and thus through its–yes, he actually uses the word–evangelism.

Bravo to Matthew Parris for the guts to break ranks and acknowledge what other thoughtful people have observed, whether they could explain it according to their own worldview or not.

And let’s be careful, those of us who do believe in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be respectful of the struggles of an honest man like this, careful not to crow (and thereby humiliate ourselves as quite unlike the poised, quiet Christians he so admires in Africa), and determined to do what our Lord told us to do: “let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5)– as Matthew Parris has done.

Suffering–not Surfing–in Malibu

Actually, I’m not suffering either, although I’m talking about it. I’m here during unseasonably warm weather (high 80s today) to give a bunch of lectures at Pepperdine University, which enjoys one of the world’s great locations high above Malibu, California. Today I spoke to 50+ professors, administrators, and staff at a luncheon (on “America Today, the Vocation of a Christian University in America Today, and What You Should Be Doing in a Christian University in America Today”); recorded a podcast; gave a lecture at the Law School (“Hegemony, Harmony, Anarchy and Affirmation: The Realities of Multiculturalism”); spoke to area pastors and spouses at dinnertime; and gave the annual Frank Park Distinguished Scholar Lecture on “Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil.”

Tomorrow I’ll speak in the all-school chapel service and then at a luncheon for 40-some professors and students who have signed up in book groups to read the new edition of Can God Be Trusted?, hot off the InterVarsity Press this month.

Here’s a shout-out to friends Tom Wright, Scot McKnight, and Lauren Winner, my three immediate predecessors in the Park Lecture who, I am told, all recommended I be invited to give this lecture. It’s been an honour to follow in their train.

And I’m so glad to have visited Pepperdine and to see a fine Christian university go from strength to strength academically and athletically (Pepperdine is elite in both respects) while becoming more intentionally Christian than it was a decade or so ago. Pepperdine is now added to my very short list (along with Hope College, Michigan–where my friend Jim Bultman is president–and the University of Notre Dame) of schools that have become significantly more Christian, rather than letting that heritage and mission slip away. And here’s hoping friend Nathan Hatch can lead Wake Forest along a similar path.

And if you’ve been blessed with some Big Money, please consider spending it to help these schools–oh, yes, and Regent College, too!–get through these next tough months, and maybe years, of economic downturn.

Give God What He Wants

“Did you have a good Christmas?” Kids know how to interpret that question. It means, “How was your haul? Did you get everything you wanted from Santa?”

I wonder if God had a good Christmas. I wonder if he got what he wanted.

If not, maybe he waited for New Year’s Eve to hear what resolutions we would make for 2009 and see if those held any promise for him.

So, a few days after New Year’s, do you think God got what he wanted—from you, from me?

As Time Goes By…

…one’s sight is not as good as it used to be.

I had LASIK surgery a couple of years ago and, for the first time since I was eight years old, saw the world without glasses or contact lenses. Fantastic!

Alas, ageing proceeds apace, and I’ll soon need reading glasses for my presbyopia. That means, “having the squinty, blurry eyesight of a typical Presbyterian,” I think. Oh, I’m just kidding! Settle down, you brittle Reformed types. ; )

So I’ve forked over some bucks to WordPress, the fine people who let me run this blog, so I can increase the font size as many of you have asked me to do. In light of all the kind things people have written to me in response to the entry of a few days ago about blogging, it was the least I could do.

Church Membership and the Strange Case of Billy Graham

I’m a big fan of Billy Graham in lots of ways. I especially appreciate what seems to be a deep and determinative commitment to doing what he thinks God wants him to do, even if he doesn’t always seem like the right man for the job. Obviously he is a gifted evangelist: It can be raining in sheets, Billy can have a throat-rasping cold, his notes can blow off the pulpit, and yet when he invites people to come forward to make a decision for Christ, down they come. I’ve watched it on video a hundred times (I did some research on Graham and his crusades some years ago) and it’s amazing to me every time.

But I also admire his willingness to innovate, to start things that needed to be started, whether Christianity Today magazine, or the Evangelical Council on Financial Accountability, or the Lausanne Conferences, each of them highly significant institutions.

Yet I know he’s not a plaster saint and I don’t agree with some of the decisions he has made in his career. Most recently, Brother Graham decided to transfer his church membership from First Baptist Church of Dallas to First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina. And this strikes me as multiply weird.