• ON THE BRINK
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On the Brink…

At the risk of "being political" I'd like to share an interesting insight from the current political campaign. I'm writing this article the day before the Wisconsin primary so you might say I have politics on the brain…

On Feb. 8, NPR's All Things Considered ran an interesting piece entitled "Understanding the Gospel According to Huckabee" (www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18821021 ) I say it was interesting but it also was troubling and insightful.

As you will see in the article, it makes note that Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will often make biblical allusions in his speeches. The reporter from NPR took some of those allusions out to the people "on the street" to see if they knew what Huckabee was talking about. Some of the examples:

• "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."
• "One small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor."
• "We've also seen that the widow's mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world."

The reporter, for the most part, found that people did not know what Huckabee was talking about. There were some very creative answers, but not the correct answers.
To make things a little more interesting, and the point for this article, the people asked, all professed to being raised in the church.

Reflecting on this, Boston University professor Stephen Prothero said: "Half of Americans can't name any of the four Gospels, and that includes the Christians." He went on to say that "half don't know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible."

For me this raises a disturbing problem for our congregations - we are people of the book but people who don't know the book!

Last year in one of my articles I wrote about the "Christian Bubble" - the idea that Christians tend to associate only with other Christians when we are called to go out into the world to make disciples.
Add to that observation the fact that we don't know our "book" and I have to ask - do we have a problem in our congregations?

What do you think? What's your experience? I would love to hear about the role bible study plays in your ministry? Do you think the members of your congregation "know" the bible? How did you do on the examples - do you know where they came from? Maybe you think that the best way to reach out to others is not to share biblical references but to share your own story about walking with Jesus in the mission field you find yourself planted in. Is the day of the "4 Spiritual Laws" over? Like I said, what do you think? I really would like to hear from you. Send me an email at Sam.Brink@abcofwi.org or call me up for coffee!

Sam Brink

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Think on this…

"…We are not becoming less religious, as some people argue. We are becoming differently religious. And the shift is significant…

…In the twenty-first century, it's not God who's dead. It's the church. Or at least conventional forms of church…

…The modern church - at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings - was an endeavor by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means. The desire of the emergents is to live Christianity, to build something wonderful for the future on the legacy of the past..."

- Tony Jones

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