miscellanies (15 Mar 2025)
not so random reads from the interwebs
miscellany [ mis-uh-ley-nee], noun 1. a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items 2. a miscellaneous collection of literary compositions or pieces by several authors, dealing with various topics, assembled in a volume or book
The things that resonated most with me this week were seemingly unrelated: the state of the faith in America and two pieces about keeping the 'main thing' the main thing. On the surface, they may seem unrelated, but I think the exact opposite is true.
“Is Christianity No Longer in Decline?” I'm sure many of you have seen the news about a recent Pew Research Center survey. “The most prominent finding was that the share of Americans who identify as Christian has stopped declining the last several years, and the percentage of adults who have no religious affiliation has plateaued right around 30 percent...Now we can say with some certainty that this period of rapid secularization is largely over.” While this is certainly good news, we shouldn't be so Pollyanna-ish as to think the next Great Awakening is a sure thing. This First Things article gives some important insights about data like this and how to interpret it. More importantly—and this is not in the article—I think these results only emphasize the need for the Church to remain steadfast and not let her guard down. Christ will build his Church, he's promised that, but he's promised to do that through the means of you and me.
“Starbucks Lost Its Soul to Efficiency and Plans to Get It Back with Empathy.” Starbucks became an incredible success not because it serves great coffee (it's coffee is awful, can we please be honest about that?) but because is served a great experience. Things are different now. “72% of Starbucks store sales today come from its mobile order and pay app, delivery apps, and drive-thru purchases (source). Stores have removed seating and tables to encourage a grab-n-go mindset. This watering down of the Starbucks experience has turned the customer experience into a systematic and soulless mess.” In other words, in a corporate world where business is dominated by efficiency, throughput, and the proverbial bottom line, it traded the experience for the almighty dollar...and now is striving to change that. What does any of this have to do with the Church? There's a huge push to see the Church as just another business with mission statements, emphases on secular leadership models, and efficiency. While that is novel and interesting to many, it is not the Church as established by Jesus Christ. The Church is not a business. She is deliberately inefficient in many ways. She is incredibly backwards, culturally, in many ways. Preserving the Church that has been handed down to us as our inheritance requires us to acknowledge and sometimes even embrace new means, but only insofar as that can be done without selling out her soul to the secular world.
“Mission-Critical?” What is the capital-M “Mission” of the Church, and how does that get translated into her lower-M “missions” and activities? This piece by LCMS pastor Larry Beane writes about the chaos that results when we get the two confused. Yes, he's writing specifically within the context of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, but there is much here for us to learn from also...“If we believe the Small-M mission is identical with the Capital-M Mission, then anything and everything that we do is for the sake of evangelism – including worship. And while I agree that how we conduct worship is related to evangelism, and is a component of it, it is not the purpose of it. In other words, the Small-M mission is not the Capital-M Mission. For we exist – individually as people bearing the image of God, and collectively as the body of Christ – for the very purpose of worshiping God for eternity. Our eternal purpose, our Capital-M Mission, is to be whom God created us to be, and we do that by virtue of the sacrificial and atoning blood of Christ. And yes, we engage in missionary outreach because of both our love for the lost, and the command of Christ. But there is so much more to the Christian life than selling Jesus as if He were a product at Walmart, and measuring results, as if human beings were consumers racking up measurable revenues on a balance sheet.”