Prof. John Stackhouse’s Weblog

It’s getting towards the end of the academic term throughout North America, and it’s time to confirm a thought that haunt the corners of many student minds particularly this time of year. It’s not a pretty truth, but it needs to be said:

Your intelligence, your chance of competing successfully in the global marketplace, your ability to contribute meaningfully to the world, and your entire worth as a human being is precisely correlated to your grades.

The corollary to this axiom is that you must do everything you can to earn or otherwise obtain the highest grades possible, even if that includes shameless flattery of professors (”Have you been working out, sir?”), dark hints of litigation (”I don’t know how my parents, or their attorneys, will feel about any grade lower than a B+”), or obsequious alacrity in helping in the classroom (”Here, let me move that podium for you, ma’am, and get you some nice, cool water to go with the chocolates I’ve brought, and fan you while you lecture”).
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“I wonder what would happen,” reflects author Mark Alan Powell, “if we collected the offering on Sunday morning, set the plates on the altar, and then tossed in a match, burning up everyone’s money.”

In his book Giving to God: The Bible’s Good News about Living a Generous Life (Eerdmans, 2006), Powell reminds us that most of the sacrifices in the Old Testament were consumed by fire, rather than being used to sustain the priests, or help the poor, or accomplish some other practical purpose. Like the costly perfume that could have been sold to benefit the poor, the giving to God was itself the point.

This has been a hard lesson for me to learn, and I’m still learning it.

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It’s summertime, and we’re all dealing with e-mail as best we can. Some of us answer it daily no matter what. Others let it pile up when we’re on vacation, and then whittle away at it upon our return. Others blast through the pile in a burst of sustained correspondence the first day back.

In the summer, we all recognize that people’s normal communication habits are interrupted.

But in the rest of the year?

I’ve come to see e-mail silence–when someone takes longer to reply than I think she should–as a Rorschach test. How I interpret that void, how I fill it in, tells me what’s in my mind to use as filler.

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We evangelicals are a funny bunch when it comes to numbers. Some of us sectarian types–and I was raised among such, in a little church in northern Ontario–used statistics to congratulate ourselves on our sanctity, by way of inverse proportionality. The proof of our holiness was precisely in our tiny numbers. We hadn’t “sold out” to the culture, like the “liberal” churches had, and thus we were faithfully small.

Now a lot of evangelicals, here and abroad, congratulate ourselves because our numbers are big. Big church memberships, big churches, big church staffs, big budgets, big paracongregational organizations, big schools, big everythings: clearly God is blessing us!

(Meanwhile, some in the liberal/mainline churches have flipped things around and are congratulating themselves, precisely as we fundies used to do, for their refusal to “sell out” to the culture, maintaining their prophetic integrity and thus their declining numbers.)

So what about the decline of churchgoing in Canada–and in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and, according to some recent surveys, the United States–over the last few decades? Evangelicals have been alarmed at this decline. But should we be? Read the rest of this entry »

A correspondent recently posed a series of good, tough questions about the nature of faith. One of them had to do with just how a Christian definition of faith differs from that of magic: “Some Christians pray as though they can compel God to do their will. I would argue that doing so is very much like or identical to doing magic.”

For the record, however, Jesus does seem to sound to some ears as if he is recommending a kind of magic: “Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, `Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22-24)

Health-and-wealth “prosperity” preaching loves this passage. So do certain sorts of faith-healers. “Name it and claim it,” they say.

So, is faith just a combination of wishful thinking and incantation?

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This is a blog about religion, spirituality, theology, and such like. Well, you need to hear about the cult I joined a few years ago and that I advocate–in good proselytizer fashion–to anyone who will listen to me.

It’s the cult built around, yes, a sacred text: Getting Things Done (Penguin, 2002), authored by the (unlikely-looking) guru David Allen. Yep, there’s a book title and author’s name guaranteed to disappear from your memory as soon as you read them! Nonetheless, Allen’s book has changed my life–given me clearer, more focused concentration, made me more attentive to my loved ones, eased my mind of anxiety, and increased my productivity. You can understand, therefore, my enthusiasm! You should join up, and join now!!!

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