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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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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Dr. Louie Bustle, Director of Nazarene World Missions

After a great lunch with a good friend, Tony Fightmaster, talking about the excellent scholarship opportunities that exist at ONU for Nazarene students, I returned to College Church for session four of the Holiness Summit on Monday afternoon. One of the highlights of the worship service was hearing George Wolfe sing Larnelle Harris’ song “Were it not For Grace.” Especially after my concerns about the implications of the self-help book metaphor for sanctification from the preceding presentation, those words “Forever running but losing the race, were it not for grace” were especially apropos.

The speaker of the hour was Dr. Louie Bustle, the World Mission director for the Church of the Nazarene. Preceding his message, a student read from Luke 24:49, which Bustle cited as Christ’s promise to give his disciples power through the Spirit.

After citing that verse, Bustle acknowledged the common question in the denomination’s theological circles: Are we Wesleyan?  Or are we American Holiness?  Bustle’s answer: “I say yes.  But even more than that, we should be Biblical.”

And then he spent the next 30 minutes completely ignoring Scripture.

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The third session of the Holiness Summit at ONU followed very quickly on the heels of session two.  After a 15 minute break we filed back into College Church’s sanctuary, being met at the door by ushers passing out half sheet fill-in-the-blank handouts for a message entitled “Sanctification for Dummies.”

I wasn’t sure what to think of these portents, especially following the depth of Dr. Quanstrom’s message.  It was a morning session rather than an evening service.  The congregation gathered were primarily pastors, university professors and theology students.  I wasn’t sure we were really eager to hear the doctrine presented for the sake of “dummies.”

The presenter for this second session was Rev. Mark Fuller, pastor of the Grove City Church of the Nazarene in Grove City, OH.  Chaplain Benson prepared us for his message with an invocation in which he declared “We don’t want to be mere dabblers, but doers.”  After a time of worship, a student read Romans 12:1-2 from the New Living Translation – certainly more accessible than some of the other translations, but it left me wondering if something of the power of that passage was lost in translation.

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Dr. Mark Quanstrom, Professor of Theology, Olivet Nazarene University

Our first full day of the Holiness Summit at Olivet Nazarene University began Monday morning in the sanctuary of College Church of the Nazarene in Bourbonnais, IL.  ONU’s chaplain, Rev. Michael Benson opened the service with a quote from James Allen’s classic As A Man Thinketh.

And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you secretly most love. Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you earn, no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.

This is not just some new-agey thought inspired by The Secret.  It is an affirmation of a Wesleyan holistic psychology which affirms our actions and our achievements are shaped and driven by our affections.  And it was a good reminder that what we think about these things really matters.

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Dr John Bowling; President, Olivet Nazarene University

As I mentioned earlier, I’m spending a few days attending a Holiness Summit at my alma mater, Olivet Nazarene University.

I wasn’t privy to much publicity about the event in advance. Our denomination is approaching our quadrennial General Assembly, and the scuttlebutt going around the denomination is that they will be reconsidering the wording of our 10th article of faith regarding Entire Sanctification.  I was expecting a theological conference at which people presented papers and we discussed the implications, listening to a variety of voices and working through the ideas together.

In reality, a Holiness Summit is a lot like camp meeting, without the campground.  There are a total of nine services over a period of 2 days and 3 evenings.  Worship, and preaching, and not much discussion or dialog,  unless you count the aftermath in the coffee shops of Bourbonnais as pastors seek their caffeine fix after sitting through so many sermons.

That’s not to say the Summit hasn’t been good.  I’m really glad I came, and have gotten some good out of (most) of the preaching.  I’ve definitely been refreshed and encouraged.  And the best part is catching up with old friends from around the region.  It’s just not been what I expected.

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