Henri J. M. Nouwen , on how spiritual fundraising is driven more by the goal of communion than by the hope of a return on investment:

In the world, those who raise funds must show potential donors a strategic plan that convinces donors their money will help to increase the productivity and success of the organization. In the new communion, productivity and success may also grow as a result of fundraising. But they are only by-products of a deeper creative energy, the energy of love planted and nurtured in the lives of people in and through our relationship with Jesus. With the right environment and patient care, these seeds can yield a great harvest, “thirty and sixty and a hundredfold” (Mark 4:20). Every time we approach people for money, we must be sure that we are inviting them into this vision of fruitfulness and into a vision that is fruitful. We want them to join us so that together we begin to see what God means when God says, “Be fruitful” (Gen. 1:28).

Dinos bearing gifts

Brad East, commenting on how surprising it is (or ought to be) that American evangelicals so passionately embrace C. S. Lewis, given many of his beliefs and practices (a phenomenon I’ve pondered and drawn attention to from time to time):

Lewis was not much of an American evangelical—that is, not a primitivist, not a teetotaler, not a literal reader of Genesis 1–11, not a strict inerrantist, not a Young Earth Creationist, not a Zwinglian on the Supper, not hesitant about sacred tradition, not anti-creedal, not anti-paedobaptism, not anti-establishmentarian, not anti-sacramental, not congregationalist, not anti-evolution, not squeamish about pagan or secular culture, not allergic to “catholic” language about the saints or sacraments or liturgy. […]

If there were a similar author today, would American evangelicals feel about him the way they feel (now) about Lewis? Would they blurb his books and invite him to conferences? Would they push him into pulpits and put his works in the hands of young people? Would they move heaven and earth to publish him in their flagship journals and magazines? Would they feel that he represented them, giving eloquent voice to their life and faith as believers?

What I don’t mean is: Could someone like this get a hearing today? Clearly there are plenty of Anglican (and not a few old-school Presbyterian) authors and speakers who fit the bill and don’t seem to have trouble getting published or finding venues. I would argue that many of them code “moderate” or occasionally “left of center” to normie evangelicals, but even still: they exist.

No, what I mean is: No one that I can think of who meets most/all of these descriptions would be received across the board—by charismatics, by non-denom-ers, by Baptists, by Reformed, by conservatives, by hardliners, by squishy nonpartisan types—as “our guy,” as “one of us,” as fundamentally non-threatening and unqualifiedly lauded. I just can’t see it. Whether it’s the “catholic” language and doctrine, or the personal life, or the evolution stuff, or the scriptural issues, or the elite status—one or another item would prove one too many.

Brad East (once more), on how a proper grasp of the essence of Christian worship ought to serve as an antidote to the evangelical tendency toward tech-obsessed, performance-based productions:

We might instead interrogate the nature of Christian worship itself. I asked my students what they would expect, visiting a church for the first time. What should they expect?

The historic answer of the church down through the centuries is that they should expect the liturgy of Word and sacrament. They should know in advance that, with real but limited variations, they will pray, sing, confess their faith, confess their sins, hear the word of the Lord in Scripture, hear the gospel of the Lord in proclamation, and receive the visible word of the Lord’s body and blood, the bread of heaven broken for their salvation. Whatever country they are in, whatever language is spoken, whether visiting a city or a town, a congregation of 5,000 or a parish of 50—this is what should await them.

Notice what is necessary for the celebration of this liturgy: sisters and brothers gathered in the name of Jesus, a leader, the Bible, a little bread and wine. Believers, Scriptures, elements, and a place to bring them together. That’s it. In fact, on a given Sunday morning around the world, you can find them brought together in cathedrals, in houses, in apartments, in strip malls, in cafeterias, in mud huts, out in the open by rivers and under trees, hidden in basements and attics for fear of being found out.

This is the genius of Christian liturgy. Beyond the tools required to produce texts (which long predate the printing press) and food and drink (which are necessary to live), no technology is necessary for the church to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth. Perhaps, as the case may be, new technologies have the potential to help. But they always have the potential to harm, to distort and misshape.

On one hand, worship is a form of catechesis. It molds our hearts, minds, and imaginations. Young people are right to expect, on a given Sunday, what they have seen and heard on hundreds of previous Sundays. It’s clear to me that the present catechesis has worked, but in all the wrong ways.

Too many evangelicals assume that ordinary worship is what I’ve elsewhere called the tech-church show—a performance in every sense of the word. Not the drama of the Eucharist or the reenactment of the liturgical script but a slick, high-def production. If I am right that this is what many assume is normal, based on its prevalence among larger churches, then my suggestion is that ministers need to go back to the drawing board. Back, I should say, to the time-tested wisdom of Word and sacrament. Call it the ABCs of Christian liturgy.

Brad East, on the church’s uncritical adoption of technology in worship:

Long before COVID-19 but exacerbated by lockdown, many churches have been competing in a kind of techno-liturgical arms race to draw seekers, especially young families and professionals, to the “Sunday morning experience” of high-tech public worship.

For many seasoned evangelicals among the millennial and Zoomer generations, the result—state-of-the-art, high-definition, professional video and audio and music, with smooth transitions and fancy lighting, all frictionless and ready-made for the internet—is simply becoming the norm. It’s what church, or worship, means.

At best, the gospel retains the power to cut through all the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.

If you think East is being alarmist and blowing this whole thing out of proportion, then I don’t think I know how to help you.

James K. A. Smith:

We are bundles of potentiality, but the possibilities are not infinite. We are thrown into a time and place, thrown into a story that is our history, and these form the horizons of possibility for us…. That is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I’ve been given to till. These neighbors I am called to love. These talents I’m exhorted to fan into flame. This neighborhood in which to birth a future.

James K. A. Smith:

What I aspire to is a factor of what I’ve inherited. What I imagine as a possible future—even what I can hear as a “calling”—is a reflection of what my past has made imaginable. Our now is always bequeathed to us.

James K. A. Smith:

A buried past is not dormant. Ignoring the past is not a way to escape it. Indeed, the buried past probably takes more than it gives.

Cypresse (1889) by Vincent van Gogh: