Vanity Fair (in light of Earth Day which was last Saturday) gives us Fifty Ways to Help Save the Planet.

Mike pointed me to this article in the Vancouver Sun that has probably more or less affirmed what I have more recently thought, as opposed to shocking me, or causing me to raise an eye.

“There’s a huge gap between those who believe and those who belong,” said Andrew Grenville, senior vice-president of the polling firm Ipsos Reid.

“There are three times as many believers as there are regular attenders.”

Sixty-two per cent of those polled agreed with the statement that “through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God provided the way for the forgiveness of sins.”

So here are a couple big questions I gleaned from Mike and some others that wrote on his blog:

• What do they actually believe that would convince them that attendance/participation is not necessary or even important?
• Do many people who believe feel that they don’t or can’t belong?
• If many believe the wrong thing (believe and not practice), how did they get to this point, and how do they learn?

The article goes on to say:

“The church in a way is perceived as just another institution and people are shying away more and more from things institutional,” he said. “Often I’ll hear things like ‘I’m religious but I don’t go to church, I’m spiritual but I don’t go to church.’ There’s a clear difference to them between believing in God and the institution of the church.”

Perhaps that’s where our church chimes in…or at least that is our hope that God can transcend the institution.

Malcom Gladwell wrote a review for the New Yorker last week on Charles Tilly’s new book “Why” and although i didn’t get into the review as much, here is some great insight by malcom on our world that i gleaned from his blog post. I blocked it out below, but what i loved is the idea that different communication styles connect with different contexts and one of the jobs of the marketer is to determine which story for which context in order for that group to understand, experience and follow.

For those who haven’t read it, Tilly provides a taxonomy of reason-giving. We emply four kinds of explanations, he says: conventions (social formulae), stories (common sense narratives), codes (legal formulae) and technical accounts (specialized stories). And we get into trouble when we use one kind of reason in a context where another is necessary. What’s fun about Tilly’s argument is that it provides a way of understanding all kinds of problematic social interactions. In the piece, I talk about the difficulty children have in understanding the admonition “don’t be a tattle-tale” and the Dick Cheney shooting accident and restorative justice–among other things. Here is a comment from a reader, Jason Oke, who is the senior planner at Leo Burnett in Toronto. It’s an elegant extension of the arguments I made against focus groups in “Blink,” this time using Tilly’s taxonomy:

I think, as I gather you do, that how we feel about a brand, and which products and services we choose, is usually explained by a fantastically complex set of factors: the brands our parents used, the brands we see people around us use, the image of the brand, our personal experience with it, a sale, a half-remembered ad from 10 years ago, and so on. This is probably best explained as a story – we may both buy Tide, but there’s a different narrative that brought each of us to pick it up.

But in market research, the answers people give sound more like conventions: “It’s a good value”, “my family likes it”, “it tastes good.” And it seems that because of the artificiality of the situation, the perils of introspection, etc, most market research actually encourages people to answer in conventions, and doesn’t encourage the telling of stories. Many of these stories are probably complex and deeply buried such that they are hard to consciously access anyway.

Dear Friends and Family,

What a great month the open house had in March. We celebrated our first community event, witnessed increased growth of our faith community, are getting ready for our our new interns coming this summer and even saw some of our prayers that you prayed for, Answered!

Please take the time to read the the open house newsletter april-06, and if you would like us to mail you a copy of the newsletter please email me your mailing address.

I would like to also give to your attention a project we are excited about this summer. The open house has be given the opportunity to mentor 3 university interns this summer who will in turn serve us in our church, and for us to give them the experience they need, including covering some of the costs for transportation, food and housing we need to raise 2000$ for their 2 month stay. Therefore we created a way for you to donate online at http://theopenhouse.givemeaning.com.

We are trying to recruit 300-400, 5$ or 10$ donors to donate online through the Give Meaning site. So please consider helping us out with 5$ or 10$ and please pass on our need to others. thanks so much and please visit the site here.

Now I have my own issues with types of outreach methods we use in our churches, so I don’t want to get into them here, but i wanted to point out something I gleaned over at the leadership blog, about the Passion of the Christ movie not having the huge impact on culture as we may have thought it would.

According to George Barna, it did not. Barna conducted an extensive survey of those who saw the film and concluded:

“Among the most startling outcomes…is the apparent absence of a direct evangelistic impact by the movie…. Less than one-tenth of one percent of those who saw the film stated that they made a profession of faith or accepted Jesus Christ as their savior in reaction to the film’s content.”

Sure it made millions, and it made people aware of Christians, but did it really help in terms of the movement of people toward God or away from God? I am sure that is a number that is not easily measured, but it is an interesting thought.

More from the article:

The debate over using films for evangelism isn’t new. Back in 2004, Leadership hosted a lively interaction about The Passion’s potential for outreach featuring Rick Warren and Brian McLaren. Warren wrote that his church was eagerly riding the “spiritual tsunami” created by the film. He reported 892 commitments to Christ were made during his two-week sermon series based on The Passion, over 600 new smalls groups were formed, and his church’s average attendance increased by 3,000. This response, while worth celebrating, according to George Barna does not represent the experience of most churches who reported little or no growth as a result of the film.

Brian McLaren, on the other hand, was hopeful that millions would be impacted by Gibson’s film but he remained skeptical. McLaren was bothered by the hype surrounding the movie and questioned why slogans such as “the greatest outreach opportunity in 2000 years” held such sway with church leaders. He cautioned us to not put our hope in “products (like films, radio broadcasts, boxed programs, etc.),” but in the good works of disciples filled with God’s love.”

McLaren’s cautions seem to be validated by Barna’s research. Despite having more media resources than ever before to accomplish its mission, including big-budget films, the church in America isn’t growing. Barna reported that church attendance has been experiencing “a very slow but steady descent” for the last 15 years. Disturbingly, at the same time churches are increasingly looking to the silver screen to aid in outreach, Barna reports that less then one in 25 churches ranks prayer as a top priority.

I think we need to think through our mediums more thoroughly than we do. What worked in our father’s time may not work in ours.

Monday night our church went on a little pilgrimage to visit another local church to contemplate and reflect on Easter. Over at Grandview Calvary Baptist church, they had different members of the church create artwork (specifically drawing) of different Stations of the Cross that Jesus went through. Some of you reading who wonder what the stations of the cross are, they are different significant points of Jesus’ crucifixion journey, starting at the garden of Gethsemane and ending up after the resurrection.

From Wikipedia:

The Stations of the Cross (or Way of the Cross; in Latin, Via Crucis; also called the Via Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows, or simply, The Way) refers to the depiction of the final hours (or Passion) of Jesus, and the devotion commemorating the Passion. The tradition exists in Roman Catholicism, Anglican, and Lutheranism. It may be done at any time, but is most commonly done during the Season of Lent, especially on Good Friday and on Friday evenings during Lent.

Some will remember Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” which was a movie based on the Stations of the Cross (also called the Passion).

What was really cool about this experience was when we arrived the churches worship band was practicing, and although at first we wondered whether we were disrupting their time by walking around the sanctuary looking at the artwork and the scripture, they instead accommodated their music for us and played some spectacular contemplative music that moved our souls. We are deeply thankful to them for that. What a great night it was!

I meet many people in east Vancouver who are very open to spiritual things, and who can see good in things that I in my “Baptist” roots fail to see at times. They see how pluralism is a way of building people up, rather than tearing them down…as sometimes we tend to do in church life…”I’m right and you’re wrong,” mentality.

However, amongst this relative living there is something that my friend Jason pointed out to me through his reading of the Life of Pi. Although he didn’t write it plainly, his words and the words of Yan Martel, author of “Life of Pi” brought to light something that I have been wrestling and pondering called “religion of everything,” which was emphasized in a quote from the book.

“I’ll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” (p. 31)

I realize that although these people want to be apologetic to all religions and philosophies, they are in themselves missing an opportunity to make a choice and their choice of “no choice” is really a form of doubt. But what if God is asking us to take a risk, to jump off the 3m diving board even though we have never felt the waters touch from that height before, rather than stand and simply encourage those who run by and jump beside us?

Is there anything Google can’t do? The wonderful developers at Google just developed Google Romance, via.

Now you can search for stuff or a blog, read the news, do your email, read a blog, read a group, analyze your web site and finance, and find your soulmate!

Unbelievable!