From Sampler to Sower

Monday I shared a survey I prepared to help me get a grasp on how well my teens understood some of the most basic tenets of Christianity.

Yesterday we started looking at the five questions in which student’s responses diverged the most from my own.

Today I’d like to continue looking the results from our beliefs survey, continuing to move from the questions where student opinion diverged the most, to those in which they were most aligned with my own.

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Note: If you’re from MCON and have any interest in taking the survey yourself, please don’t read any farther until after you take the survey to avoid skewing your responses.

Yesterday I shared the Basic Beliefs survey that I asked students in our youth ministry to complete in order to investigate their understanding of some central tenets of Christianity.  The purpose was one part evaluative (has anything I’ve taught stuck?) and three parts prescriptive (going forward, what topics need special attention?).

Today I’d like to start looking at some of the results.

Methodological Concerns

Before diving into particular questions I would like to offer a couple of caveats.  First and foremost, let’s face it, taking tests isn’t most students’ idea of a fun night at youth group. Couple a students distaste for testing with the total lack of consequences for carelessness in taking this survey, and one must wonder “Did my students think through any of these questions carefully enough to answer what they really believe?”

Complicating that issue is the fact that in the interest of brevity, this survey lacks the kind of redundancy necessary to evaluate just how indicative of true beliefs the responses really are. I didn’t have time to ask each question three different ways so that I could compare how consistent any given respondent’s answers were.

And compounding all those concerns is the fact that I am by no means a trained pollster. I tried to be careful to make sure my responses did not reflect a bias one way or another, but the question remains just how effectively I accomplished that goal.

So, keeping in mind those weaknesses to this survey, let’s look at the results…

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Not long ago I was sitting in a sermon-slash-lecture presented by a local educator to a group of pastors from our community.  He was arguing that private Christian education is vitally important not only to the intellectual, but also to the spiritual development of our students. He mentioned some beliefs central to the Christian faith and cited research that showed such seemingly basic beliefs are no longer widely held among American youth.

And that got me thinking…

Just how well do my students understand the basic tenets of Christianity?

And so the survey was born.

Last Wednesday night I asked the students at our midweek service to take our Basic Beliefs survey.  I explained up front that this wasn’t a test.  Unlike tests, this obviously wasn’t for a grade.  And unlike tests, it wasn’t as if every question only had one right answer. That’s not to suggest there are no wrong answers on the survey, but in cases where there were more than one answer that could be correct, they were to choose the answer that best matched their understanding. The point was to help me understand how they viewed various aspects of theology, not to see if they could find the one right answer.

20 questions total. 16 drawn from topics covered by the Articles of Faith and the Agreed Statement of Belief for the Church of the Nazarene. (Incidentally, this school year I taught on each and every one of these subjects at Water’s Edge. So for those who have been a part of our program throughout the school year, these should be familiar subjects.) Four are demographic, dealing with age group, length of time involved in Water’s Edge, frequency of attendance, and the involvement in other religious activities at the church.

Today I’ll share the survey with you. Tomorrow we’ll begin looking at some of the results from my group, Wednesday we’ll wrap up the review of the results, and Thursday we’ll see if there’s anything we can learn from all this.

You can download a pdf version of the survey here, or check out the questions and answers after the jump.

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I (along with I suspect a healthy number of fellow Christians thanks to some brilliant pre-release publicity from John Piper) recently read Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins.  Unlike some other prognosticators, who apparently understand Bell’s reasoning so well they can respond to it before it’s even published, I’ve decided to take some time to think, read, pray, eat and love before chiming in.

Having spent a decent amount of time the last two weeks doing those very things (especially eating…) I think I’m going to start here.

It’s probably an understatement to say that much of what Bell suggests run counter to the faith as it was handed down to me. While Bell isn’t the first to suggest things like the possibility of post-mortem repentance and the idea that maybe, just maybe, God is good enough to save all humanity through faith in Christ (not by at least 17 centuries), suffice it to say there haven’t been many voices in my ecclesial neck of the woods advocating such views.

And that’s what makes Bell’s book such a good thing.

Let me explain.
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Our church is currently holding revival services with Rev. Larry and Tamla Leckrone.  That’s right, good old fashioned revival.  I count it a privilege to serve a church that still makes a priority out of revival. And it’s an honor to be a part of a theological tradition in which revival services have long had an important place.

Of course, sometimes being a part of the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition carries with it some baggage which proves less than helpful.  The Holiness tradition in general and the Church of the Nazarene in particular have a long reputation of being legalistic.  For many years the American Holiness Revivalism movement has defined holiness in terms of the things we don’t do.  We took seriously the call to “Come out from among them, and be ye separate” and frequently measured that separation in terms of the things we turned away from.

• We didn’t drink.
• We didn’t smoke.
• We didn’t dance.
• We didn’t cuss.
• We didn’t wear make-up.
• And we certainly didn’t stop the list with just five prohibitions.

Then something happened…

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It was early Sunday morning, March 13, 2011, the Sunday that churches in the Orthodox tradition would be celebrating the Triumph of Orthodoxy, the Seventh Ecumenical Council that formally addressed the iconoclast controversy in the Church and officially affirmed the use of icons in worship.  (For more about the history and theology involved in Triumph of Orthodoxy, see my post from yesterday.)

Of course, in our Nazarene congregation (Protestant, Wesleyan, Holiness) I may have been the only one who noticed. In many ways it was stretching our liturgical muscles just to recognize it as the first Sunday of Lent. It wasn’t the first time our congregation had observed the Lenten season, but for many of our people Lent is something relatively new rather than an old and welcome friend.  (Imagine that, Lent is new!)

I was in our video booth, working on preparing the visuals for use in our worship that morning. I’ve been re-reading Leonid Ouspensky’s Theology of the Icon and I found myself thinking through our use of imagery in worship. I was struck by how far from our Protestant iconoclastic roots many of our churches have come.  There was a day when using pictures along with our worship would have scandalized our theological forebears.  Now I rarely visit a church that doesn’t have some way of projecting words, pictures and videos onto a wall or screen for congregants to see.

Somehow I doubt St John of Damascus had any idea how thoroughly Orthodoxy would one day triumph.

Or has it?

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No one could describe the Word of the Father;
But when He took flesh from you, O Theotokos,
He consented to be described,
And restored the fallen image to its former state by uniting it to divine beauty.
We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images.
(Kontakion on the Triumph of Orthodoxy)

Chances are you probably didn’t sing that hymn in worship yesterday. Let’s face it, chances are, you didn’t even know that yesterday was the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Yet Christians around the world who worship in congregations that are part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition celebrated what is, in their estimation at least, one of the most significant events of Church history: the Seventh Ecumenical Council, also known as Nicea II.

Let me save you a trip to your church history books. The seven truly Ecumenical Councils were synods held by the Church to which bishops from the whole of Christendom were called to wrestle with heresies confronting Christianity and to define the boundaries of orthodoxy.  (The Roman Catholic church considers 21 councils to be ecumenical; the Eastern Orthodox church only acknowledges seven.  It seems hard for me to consider any council not affirmed by both East and West to be truly ecumenical.  Either way, however, both main streams of Christianity consider Nicea II to be an Ecumenical Council.)

This council predated not only the Protestant reformation, it predated the Great Schism itself. It is a truly Ecumenical council, an event that all Christianity shares. In other words, this isn’t just their history. It is our history. And the truth it defended has profound implications for our theology and liturgical practice. Here’s why:

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Our church is preparing to embark on an exciting journey next Wednesday night. Along with many sister churches across the denomination, we will be journeying from Ash Wednesday, through Easter, to Pentecost Sunday in a series we’re calling Ashes to Fire.

To begin this journey, we will be having a special Ash Wednesday service on Wednesday, March 9 at 6:30 pm.  Like most Ash Wednesday observances, our worship service will focus on reflection and repentance at the outset of our Lenten journey.  And as in similar Ash Wednesday observances in the past, our service will include a ritual called the imposition of ashes.

We realize that such a ritual may seem unusual to some of our parishioners.  It is very possible to have grown up Nazarene and never taken part in such a ritual.  Understandably the unfamiliarity of the ritual to some, as well as its association in the minds of some with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, leads to questions.  This is my attempt to answer some of these.
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Late last month, I attended a Holiness Summit on the campus of my alma mater Olivet Nazarene University.  I began blogging about the different presentations at the Summit, as well as my reactions to them.  I returned home to my wonderful family, and much to my chagrin, my 4 year old daughter who loves notebooks took a shying to the Moleskine Ruled Reporter Notebook in which I had taken such careful notes of each of the sessions.  It soon disappeared and was only unearthed recently by by loving wife.

My notebook now restored to me, I return to the Summit, already in progress . . .

On Tuesday morning, March 24, 2009 we returned to the sanctuary of College Church of the Nazarene for the final day of the Summit.  After the mixed bag of presentations the previous day, I was unsure what to expect.  But I was looking forward to hearing Dr. Frank Moore, a theologian whose writings I have enjoyed in the past.  Little did I know the best sermon of the day would come from Michael Benson, Olivet’s chaplain.

In his introductory remarks, Benson noted that Jesus is the person who defines who God is.  As God-incarnate, Jesus is the kind of God that God is.  In light of that fact, Benson suggested the best 3 point, 8 word sermon he had ever heard read thus:

See Jesus.

See Jesus run.

Run like Jesus.

Perhaps the best holiness sermon of the entire summit.

Especially meaningful to me during the worship time were the words of the classic/modern hymn “Adoration”.

Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness!
Bow down before Him, His glory proclaim.
With gold of obedience and incense of lowliness,
Kneel and adore Him the Lord is His name!

Fear not to enter His presence in poverty,
Bearing no gifts to present as your own.
Bring forth in its beauty and love in its purity
These are the offerings to lay at His throne. (Verse One by John Monsell, Verse 2 by Ken Bible)

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Dr. Nina Gunter; General Superintendent, Church of the Nazarene

Session five began in College Church on Monday evening of the Holiness Summit at Olivet Nazarene University.  Our time of corporate worship was especially encouraging as the song selections focused on God’s promises to stand beside His people.  The Olivetians sang the song “Through the Fire” which encourages

Just hold on,
My God will show up
and take you through the fire again.

Together we sang the chorus “I Will Sing Praise” which restated the promise in these words:

No matter the storms that come my way,
No matter the trials I may face,
You promised that you would see me through.
So, I will trust in You.

And perhaps most powerfully, the Olivetians sang a rendition of the third psalm which declares:

But you, O LORD, are a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head. (Psa 3:3, ESV)

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