Eliminate the Undergraduate Degree

A common question with regard to preparation for ordained ministry is "How much can we live without?"  Several emergent circumstances prompt this question -- decline in seminary enrollment, the difficulty of church bodies to subsidize their seminaries, the crushing burden of academic debt on people who have been painstakingly prepared for a profession in which full-time work is becoming scarce.  Naturally, churches ask how to control the cost of preparing their ministers, a question which leads just as naturally to the follow-on: which aspects of the present preparatory routine are dispensable?

For those who do not know, the preparation of a Protestant minister, in the United States, typically looks like this:

• a four-year undergraduate degree in any subject, although the humanities are preferred; 
• a three-year graduate program in "divinity," which quaint word indicates a combination of Biblical, historical and theological studies; 
• practical work, normally taking the form of field work while in seminary, Clinical Pastoral Education and (for all Lutherans, at least) a year or so of (very lightly paid) parish internship.  
• Lutheran students who have  graduated at a non-Lutheran school may also be required to complete a year of residential study at one of their own denomination's seminaries.

It amounts to nine or ten years of study, the last few of them 12-month years during which postulants have no vacation time in which to earn any money.  They are all but guaranteed to graduate penniless, hungry and in debt.

In fairness, churches have not mindlessly insisted upon adherence to this general program.  For years, they have experimented with variations.  Especially popular these days are "terminal internships," in which a candidate completes the entire classroom course of study, and is then placed in a parish as "vicar," under the periodic (but not daily) supervision of a neighboring pastor.  The expectation is that after ordination the vicar will became pastor to the same parish.  Other less popular variations include distance learning, which allows the student to continue working and avoid the costs of residential study,  and programs that simply waive some academic requirements for older postulants from "emerging ministries," meaning especially minority communities.

None of these is bad, but none of them is a magic bullet, either.  Terminal internships may place new pastors in difficult situations without adequate mentoring, and in any case save them only the costs of the internship year.  TEEM and similar programs save a lot more money, but create the very serious risk of burdening congregations with pastors who are not intellectually adequate to the task, or whose adequacy is limited to the very specific location to which they were ordained, and do not transfer well to other parishes.

Over and over, it comes back to "What can we cut?"  Is a decent grounding in Biblical languages more or less important than a summer of hospital chaplaincy or a year of daily supervision?  Is a grasp of Reformation history more or less important than an a third semester of homiletics?  All of these things matter; all of them are important to the effective conduct of pastoral work.

But do you know what is not important?  A degree in biology.  Or aeronautics, or even "religion" as that discipline is understood by the modern academy.  These are undergraduate studies, of great interest by themselves and in some cases of direct value to potential employers.  They are not, however, subjects absolutely required for pastors and theologians.

So let's make studies in divinity an undergraduate subject.  

By which I mean: let us agree upon a course of study which can, in four years, prepare a capable high school graduate to carry out the duties of a parish pastor.  Teach them, in the course of four years, the things we now teach them in three, and add to that a smattering of "elective" subjects -- music and art would be the most professionally useful, but such matters could be negotiated. So might an optional fifth year of study, in which an advanced degree (rather like the Th.M. or S.T.M.) could be granted.

Such a plan might give new life and purpose to our moribund seminaries.  The course of study could not be as diffuse as those which lead to the typical BA and BS degrees -- and this degree would be neither of those.  It would have to focus more narrowly on theological subjects, which most colleges are unprepared to teach, but at which seminaries excel.  Therefore, a seminary is the natural institution to offer such a degree, perhaps  after enlarging its faculty a bit or in conjunction with a larger school.

But the chief virtue of such a plan is that it could potentially save a fortune for those with an early vocation.  Of all the costs incurred in the "typical"process, the undergraduate education is surely the greatest for most people, and yet paradoxically it is the one with the least obvious practical value.

Oh, downsides are obvious.  Pastors prepared this way would be less mature in years, and likely emotions, than those to which parishes are accustomed.  Moreover, they might lack exposure to fields of study -- especially sciences both natural and social -- with genuine, if secondary value for a theologian. Second-career pastors gain nothing from this plan, although they do not lose anything either.  There are no doubt other difficulties as well.  But still:  It. Saves. A. Fortune.

What do you think, readers?

Rumor of the Day

This rumor has recently reached us.  It is unsubstantiated, and we hope it is false; therefore, we present it blind-item style.

Professor A was for many years the systematic theology instructor at Seminary B.  In that capacity, he helped to form a generation of Lutheran pastors, most of them (in our experience) very fine indeed.  He has since retired, but remains a formidable presence in Lutheran theology.

His former post is now held by Professor C, who is far less of a household name.  it is reported that Prof. C. so dislikes Prof. A -- whether personally or theologically we are not told -- that his works are not taught at Seminary B, and indeed his name is not mentioned by students seeking a respectable grade.  And so a remarkable legacy is squandered.

Can this be true?  Perhaps not.  But just for fun, we invite our readers to try filling in the blanks.

Under a Bushel

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger is promoting a book called Contagious:  Why Things Catch On.  Here's a morsel that we heard him share on NPR, and now at HuffPo:

New York City is a tough place to open a bar. Competition is fierce and it's hard to cut through the clutter. ...

But a few years ago Brian Shebairo launched a place that's been packed since the day it opened. In fact, it's one of the most sought after drink reservations in the city. Bookings are only available day-of and people frantically hit redial again and again hoping to snag a spot. Yet he's never advertised the bar. Never spent a dollar on marketing.

How did Shebairo do it?

He hid his bar inside a hot dog restaurant.

Walk into Crif Dogs in the East Village, and you'll find the most amazing hot dog menu you've ever seen. ...

In one corner off to the side is an old-school phone booth. One of those rectangular numbers that Clark Kent used to morph into Superman. Walk inside and you'll see a rotary dial phone on the wall. Pick up the phone, and just for fun, dial the number 1. Someone will pick-up the other line and ask you if you have a reservation. And if you do, the back of the phone booth will open and you'll be let into a secret bar called, of all things, Please Don't Tell.

Has Please Don't Tell violated traditional "laws of marketing?" Sure. There is no sign on the street and no mention of it in the hot dog place. In fact, they've worked hard to make themselves a secret.

If it were that simple, the ELCA would be the hottest, hippest, fastest-growingest church body in America, if not the world.  Because no group of human beings on earth is better at keeping itself a secret than we are.  Compared to Lutherans, the Illuminati are as zealous for fame as the Kardashians.

We build ugly churches on out-of-the-way streets; we greet visitors with a handshake (maybe) and a "bulletin" full of paper that falls all over their laps and confuses more than it clarifies; we offer serious inquirers a confusing mishmash of doctrine and worship, usually filtered through the accumulated mini-traditions of the particular congregation or, worse yet, through the personal sensibilities of the pastor.  Nobody knows who we are or what we are, much less where to find us.

Sadly, mere self-effacement is not the whole of Berger's strategy for spreading the word.  The real secret, he says, is something called Social Currency, and which sounds a lot like old-fashioned bragging rights:

People talk about things that make them look good. Sharp and in-the-know. Smart and funny rather than behind the times. If people go to a place like Please Don't Tell ... they tell others because it gives them status.

Social Currency isn't just about hidden bars. It's why people brag about their thousands of Twitter followers or their kids' SAT scores. Why golfers boast about their handicaps and frequent fliers tell others when they get upgraded. ... 

Ouch.  That's a big problem for the ELCA, and for many of our sister churches:  we don't like to brag.  It isn't merely a matter of Scandinavian reserve, either.  We are wary, theologically, of the pride that goeth before a fall, and of the hypocrites who pray to be seen by others.  The thought that we should ourselves be something about which our members boast is problematic, both culturally and doctrinally.

Of course, there have always been churches that manage to make members feel special because they are members, while still maintaining at least a semblance of personal humility.   Episcopalians used to be geniuses at it, although in recent years they have seemed showier and correspondingly more desperate.  Likewise Presbyterians.

The worst case scenario, of course, is that you create a cult:  a community which makes its members feel special because they are not like Them -- not, in other words, like the aliens, the outsiders, the impure, however broadly or narrowly defined.  In the form of exaggerated claims to doctrinal purity over against the rest of world Lutheranism, this has been the Missouri Synod's strategy from the beginning.  It worked well enough, up until recently, but has certainly left them with few friends outside the kraal.

We in the ELCA, however, have no gift for this.  Making, or even allowing, people to feel special is unsettling to us.  The closest we can come, and this on our best day, is to offer them coffee and some green jello after an otherwise unremarkable hour of worship.  Coffee and jello are lovely things, but they offer no cachet, no bragging rights, no sense of having discovered a rare and marvelous treasure.

Most painful of all is this:  we at the Egg believe that Lutheranism, particularly as represented by the ELCA and its LWF partners, is indeed a rare and marvelous treasure.  It holds, deep inside, gems both spiritual and intellectual, tools which, properly understood, can critique modernity without denying it, and lead the soul toward God without compelling it.  But, at least if Berger is right, we have no real hope of ever going viral.

Maybe we should ask the Methodists if they have a phone booth we can hide behind.

Sound Familiar?

From the Times:

Faced with profound and seemingly irreversible shifts, the legal profession is contemplating radical changes to its educational system, including cutting the curriculum, requiring far more on-the-ground training and licensing technicians who are not full lawyers.

Well.  At least we're not the only ones.

The problem in law is a bit more complex than the one facing mainline churches.  They actually have a shortage of law school applicants, for example.  But there are certainly some eerie parallels.  The stunning indebtedness of recent graduates is one.  Another, somewhat counterintuitively, is that many institutions aren't able to hire those graduates.  Law firms still make truckloads of money, but they don't quite make the truckloads required to provide on-the-job training for an annual legion of book-smart kids with no real practical knowledge.  Churches don't mind hiring the kids (who come cheaper, and generally have more field experience than lawyers built into their curriculum); churches are just tanking left and right.

Anyway, it's worth a read.

In Praise of Hunting

We've been spending a lot of our time mulling over the question of gun violence lately.  (You've probably noticed, and are hankering for your dose of ecclesiastical antiquarianism; don't worry, it's coming). But readers may notice that, although we have called loud and clear for a level of regulation that may never be politically practical in America, we haven't actually talked about, well, taking away people's guns.

Oh, don't get us wrong.  If we had our way, there would be a lot fewer guns, and a lot fewer gun owners, in this country.  That would be a natural effect of laws that required a demonstration of competence and concern for safety on the part of owners, as well as the modest rise in price associated with, say, RFID tags. For that matter, we think it is perfectly reasonable for municipalities, especially large ones, to devise regulations so strict that, basically, only law-enforcement professionals wind up able to own guns legally.

But that's not the same as rounding up all the guns and throwing them away.  We actually wouldn't like that at all, and for a good reason.  It's called hunting.  And hunting is important.

Anybody who has ever lived in a wooded area understands why hunting is a good thing.  Deer are the most widely hunted animals in North America, and when they are not hunted their populations explode.  It is sad to see their dead bodies littering country highways, where they are killed by (and pose a grave danger to) motorists.  It is even more sad, if you like animals, to hike through overpopulated areas and see deer in the wild.  Too often, the lean and muscular creatures we remember from childhood have been replaced by scrawny, knock-kneed, malnourished little things that look lime they belong to some other species.

We've wiped out most of their natural predators, and moved into much of their habitat.  Culling the herd is now our duty, and failing to cull deer is as inhumane as beating a dog or kicking a cat. Hunting isn't the only way to do it, but it is an old, traditional and deeply beloved way.

And there's the problem.  American hunting has been in decline for decades.  Although there has been a modest nationwide uptick over the last few years, the number of hunting licenses sold in Massachusetts is down 50% over 20 years; Pennsylvania is down 20%, and Michigan 301%.   This is especially bad because hunting licenses often generate income for state conservation work. Worse than that, as a report by the National Shooting Sports Foundation summarizes it:

The national hunting base is aging, with fewer young hunters filling the gaps that older hunters create when they no longer hunt.

Non-resident hunters, who generate more income for states and businesses, are older still.



Hunters are getting older and not replacing themselves, just like ... well, like churchgoers, coincidentally enough.  Per the NSSF, in-state hunters average 41.2 years old, and men outnumber women by 9 to 1.  Most churches would love to be this young, and at least a little more male than they are at the moment, but the problem is the same.  We expect that it is shared with labor unions

But hunters have a bigger problem.  To our surprise, it turns out that there are only about 3.5 million American hunters.  This is truly shocking -- it's less than 1% of our population, and far fewer than the  number of regular churchgoers.  Hunters, all told, only make up a moderate-sized denomination.

We're not joking, here.  Although we don't hunt personally (Dad didn't, so we never learned), we support the sport strongly, at least in principle.  We sincerely hope that any future regulation on guns will be strict and wide-ranging -- but will also find ways to encourage the training and equipping of a new generation of hunters.

Dear Mr. President

Dear Mr. President,

So -- two inaugurations, two potential chaplains forced to withdraw.  Rick Warren then, Louie Giglio now.  What are you going to conclude from this?

You could, we suppose, conclude that there is a vigilant homosexual lobby that watches your every move, and pounces when it doesn't get its way.  That being the case, you'd have two choices:  defy them or placate them.  So far, you've done neither very well.

However, a likelier conclusion is that you've got some bad instincts where religion is concerned.  This seems pretty likely; your Chicago pastor was ... an oddball, even within the most liberal of American church bodies.  Your party has grown so accustomed to fighting off the Religious Right that its leaders are prone to a defensive secularism.  Many don't seem to know what to do with the fact that millions of Americans vote Democratic for reasons that are inseparable from their faith.  Actually, sir, despite the faith that clearly informs your own life, you're also one of those uneasy leaders; we all remember your dumb remark about "clinging to guns and religion."

All this being the case, we applaud your effort to find common ground with Warren and with Giglio, who shares your determination to end human trafficking.  But, as you can see, his views on one of the most divisive moral questions of the hour puts him at odds with a lot of your constituency -- and with many of your own public statements.  Frankly, as far as most of your constituents are concerned, guys like Warren and Giglio are playing for the other team.

So let's make it simple for you.  If you want to honor a minister by asking him, or her, to bless your service to our nation, how about choosing somebody from your own team?

Heaven knows you have plenty of choices.  Roman Catholicism is the traditional backbone of the Democratic Party, and -- even after all these years, and after the death of Rembert Weakland -- there are still plenty of notably left-leaning bishops.  Of course, they're no help to you with the gay thing, and may well bring their own baggage, abuse-wise.

Which leaves mainline Protestantism.  Specifically, it leaves you the "liberal" side of the mainline -- ELCA rather than Missouri Synod Lutherans, American rather than Southern Baptists, and so forth.  We get a lot of abuse these days, for being "NPR at prayer," for being less influential than we were a few decades ago, and so forth.  But there are still tens of millions of us, all together; and even though we aren't, by any means, all Democrats, we certainly have a big Democratic membership.  It's especially big among our leadership; indeed, one of the problems we have failed to address is that our pastors and denominational executives frequently lean a good deal further to the left than the people in the pews.  For us, this is a problem -- for you, it is an opportunity.

You've got plenty of Democratic-voting, poverty-fighting, gun-control-supporting ministers to choose from.  A fair number of these will also marry or ordain gay people.  As a member (at least for many years) of the UCC, the first historic American denomination to marry and ordain gay people, you might very well invite Geoffrey Black, its General Minister and Church President.  Failing that, there are the presiding bishops of two other well-known churches, Katharine Jefferts Schori and your fellow Chicagoan, Mark Hanson.  And of course, there are an almost unlimited number of politically engaged lesser clergy, some with stellar good-works cred to impress your secularist cohort.

So, yes, reaching across the aisle is a display of good faith and leadership.  We get that.  But sometimes, Mr. President, it's wisest just to dance with them that brung you.

Sincerely,
The Department of Homechurch Security

Somewhere on the Property

There we sat in church this morning, enjoying a perfectly lovely celebration of the Epiphany (and a fine sermon by a dear friend), when the Devil got his hooks into us again.

"Why," he asked, "does such a lovely little parish on a main street in an urban area not have more worshipers?"  Like many of you, we spend a lot of time on questions like this.  We have a number of pet theories, of which our personal favorite involves church bulletins -- those little explosions of loose paper that slide into your lap when you sit down, and which you then have to re-organize by separating, folding, inserting between the pages of a hymnal, and balancing upon your folded coat.

Church bulletins are, by and large, horrible things and enormous obstacles to the worship of God.

But sometimes it isn't as complicated as the Devil wants us to believe.  During the Hymn of the Day, Kindergartener Anonymous announced that he needed a drink of water, and we were assigned to accompany him down to the kitchen.

As we passed through the undercroft, we saw a table with perhaps twelve Sunday School students and two teachers.  While we thoroughly disapprove of holding classes during worship, we realize that for many parishes this heinous custom has become non-negotiable.  So no surprise there.

The surprise came when we turned toward the kitchen, and saw a cluster of perhaps ten teen-agers, all of post-confirmation age, standing around by the Christmas tree, having some sort of discussion.  What were they doing?  We don't know, and we don't really care.  They were not worshiping.

In fact, although we had seen most of them serving as acolytes on Christmas Eve, we had not otherwise -- in several months or regular attendance -- seen them in worship.

Why don't young adults come to worship as often as we might like?  Perhaps it is because, from the time they are small children, we encourage them to get up on Sunday morning, get dressed, be dragged over to the church building by earnest and hopeful parents -- and then stay the hell out of the nave.  And we, as a church, are just happy to have them somewhere on the property.

This is fine, really, if you want Christianity to die in your own lifetime.  But if you'd like to pass the traditions on to a future generation, then you really have no choice but to pass them on.  Which starts, at a minimum, by telling your kids to spend an hour or so singing hymns and listening to the Bible.

A Lutheran Joins the Ordinariate

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter ordained a formerly-Episcopal priest the other day.  And he's a Lutheran.

Well, a former Lutheran.  Also a former Pentecostal and a former Roman Catholic.  The Brooklyn Tablet explains:

Born in Sunset Park [Brooklyn] and of Puerto Rican descent, Father [Belen] Gonzalez y Perez was baptized a Catholic as an infant at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica, Sunset Park, but became an active participant in Pentecostal youth groups. 

He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from State University of New York-Empire State College in Saratoga Springs. He went on to receive a master of divinity degree and a master of arts in religion, with a focus on systematic theology, from Gettysburg Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa. While in seminary, his studies included courses at Catholic schools such as Catholic University, Washington, D.C.; the Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, Texas; and St. Vincent de Paul Seminary, West Palm Beach, Fla. 

He was ordained a Lutheran priest in 2002 and received certification as an Episcopal priest in 2008.

The Tablet does not make clear whether Fr. Belen is incardinated -- rostered, in ELCA-speak -- in the Diocese of Brooklyn or in the Ordinariate.  This is a minor but important point.

We aren't sure whether we know Fr. Belen or not.  His name is instantly familiar, and we have surely met at synod events through the years.  In any case, and notwithstanding our grave doubts about the wisdom of the Ordinariates, we wish him well.

We will take this occasion to point out that one characteristic of Tiber jumpers (and Bosphorus jumpers as well) is that many of them pass through several church bodies on their way to Rome (or Constantinople, as the case may be).  Among American Lutherans, the most common trajectory seems to be LC-MS-->AELC-->ELCA-->Rome.  Call it the via Neuhaus.  But we number among our friends and acquaintances many variations on the theme; a dear friend began life in the bosom of the Scarlet Woman, passed through Lutheranism like gravel through a duck, and is now happy in the OCA.

Why are the LC-MS and its unloved daughter the AELC the starting place for so  many of these wanderings?  We suspect a combination of causes.  It starts with the claim of the LC-MS, whether explicit or implicit, to be the one true church.  A child bred in that creed, confronted as an adult by the obvious fact that it is untrue, is almost forced to begin a search for an ideal church.  Members of the Seminex crowd were confronted en masse by the failures of Missouri, and so began their search en masse as well. Add to that the tremendous influence upon most of them of Artheur Carl Piepkorn, and their eventual destination was not difficult to discern.

The ELCA has no doubt driven many AELC pastors away, by failing to live up to their hopes and expectations.  If Missouri is rigid and self-important, the ELCA has been chronically wishy-washy and self-effacing.  It has gone out of its way to avoid "churchiness" in polity and even theological language.  Most significant, the ELCA's central leadership has generally been dominated by its liberal wing.  There's irony here, since many of the most left-leaning voices in its creation came from the AELC.  They, however, are not the ones leaving for Rome.

Of course, each person's journey is unique.  Belen Gonzales y Perez, for example, has nothing to do with Missouri and its mythology; his return to Roman Catholicism will have a different character altogether.  As the Seminex generation ages, we anticipate that the common trajectory will become less common, and these stories will bear more and more of an individual stamp.  (Although we also expect a cluster of mass defections to begin shortly, as Seminex grads still in the ELCA retire and collect their pensions).

These things happen, of course, and they are no crime.  John Donne was born to a family of Papist martyrs, and died as the dean of an Anglican cathedral.  Tertullian was baptized into Catholicism and died in Montanism.  Opinions change, and we are lucky that in modern Christianity no bloodshed -- or even tax liability -- normally accompanies changing opinions.

The End Times Are Upon Us

For the first time, Protestants are now a minority in the United States.  We will expect our affirmative action programs to begin shortly.

This is development not surprising; the demographic trends have been evident for decades. Roman Catholics may not make babies the way they used to, but they practically own the world of mass immigration.  And we're a more pluralistic nation than we used to be, what with all those Buddhist temples and kundalini meditation groups that Diana Eck has spent her life documenting.  Why, this year's presidential campaign comes down to the choice between a Gnostic and Muslim.  (Joking, for pity's sake.) 

"Christendom is dead" is as hackneyed as "paradigm shift," and the next person to use either one in our presence will get smacked. Still, the role of the various Protestant churches in American life has been so important for so long that it is worth pausing to think about what the future may look like without them.  We're eager to learn whether atheists and Wiccans may eventually take to founding hospitals and operating food pantries.

However, we hope that this reflection, when it comes, will run deeper than the LA Times blog post linked above.  It is a brief piece, which recounts the Pew Forum findings, provides some simple demographic breakdowns, and then throws in a few remarks by Southern Baptist spokesman Richard Land.  This is a strange choice -- Land is one of the more polarizing figures in American religious life.  There's some logic to it; the SBC is large, old, and manages to straddle the worlds of both mainline and soi-disant "evangelical" Protestantism.  Still, Land is noted neither as a sociologist nor as an historian; he is by and large a political player.  Why choose him?

The answer seems to come in the very bad final graf:

In a counterweight to evangelical Christians who tend to back Republicans, the vast majority of religiously unaffiliated Americans — who number 46 million — vote Democratic and are politically liberal. Two-thirds support President Obama, compared with 27% for Republican nominee Mitt Romney the study found. Nearly three-fourths support legal abortion and same-sex marriage.

Ah, so that's it.  This is a political story, at least in the eyes of the Times reporter.  In which case, we have to point out, the story is far more complicated.

To begin with, of course, there is the mainline:  the Lutheran, Anglican (including Methodist), Reformed and Baptist families.  In decline for decades, this group nonetheless represents what "Protestantism" means to most informed people.  (Indeed, as we've mentioned before, Romanian sociologists have a salutary custom of using another word, "neo-Protestant," for most of the movements that developed after the 16th century -- basically, they make "mainline" and "Protestant" synonymous.)  It is still a substantial group of people, numbering in the tens of millions nationwide and the hundreds of millions worldwide.  Pew, working with a somewhat different definition than we would use, calls the mainline 18.1% of all Americans.  Because we treat some socially and theologically conservative denominations from the major families as part of the mainline, we'd put the number closer to 30%.

And many, many of its members vote Democratic. President Obama is part of a mainline Christian denomination -- indeed, of one of the most severely challenged of them all.

What the reporters don't get (and neither, apparently, does Pew) is that "mainline Protestantism" is properly divided roughly into a liberal and a conservative wing (ELCA/LCMS, SBC/ABC, etc.).  The paired churches in these two wings each share a common history and doctrinal positions which would look very close to outsiders.  They are separated by a combination of history (often the Civil War), doctrinal minutia (e.g., views on predestination, ordination, or marriage) and social teaching.  But they are, in each case, divided brethren.

Over against these two wings stands a truly different form of Christianity, distinguished by a brief and largely American history, a shallow but intensely-argued body of doctrine, and denominational structures which run the gamut from weak to nonexistent.  This,if you must oppose the word to "mainline," is "evangelical" Protestantism.

By no means do all members of "liberal" church bodies have liberal politics, nor "conservatives" conservative politics.  But it is wildly irresponsible to write as though the decline of Protestantism were a matter of fussy old religious Republicans giving way to modern, forward-thinking unaffiliateds.

The thing we hope that journalists will pick up about this story is that it is not, really, a political one.  Nor is it a religious one, strictly speaking.  It is instead a story about the growing pluralism of American society, and the concomitant loss of a commonly-agreed-upon set of values.  Call it the End of the Midcentury Synthesis. Religious communities are one reflection of this change, but so too are labor unions (in decline, except for the public ones), universities (soon to be dominated by women and Asians) and broadcast television networks.

"Christians Practice Their Faith By Treating One Another Well"

This, as blogger Scott Gunn says, is the sort of headline we are unlikely to see.  Like "Dog Bites Man," it is the unexceptional norm.  We do well to remind ourselves of that, when it so often seems otherwise.

Gunn is writing in response to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, about the recent General Convention of the (D&FMS of the) PECUSA.  The piece, by Jay Akasie, paints an extraordinarily unflattering picture of the convention.  The impression is conveyed, quite directly, of free-spending bishops paying for steaks and whiskey from the diocesan coffers; of a "secretive and authoritarian" presiding bishop who "brazenly" carries a style of cross to which she is not entitled and bankrupts the church with vindictive lawsuits; of a church in utter captivity to political correctness; and of plans afoot to give funerals to dogs, marginalize laypeople, rewrite the Prayer Book and generally drive out "traditionalists."

This is unflattering.  It is also familiar, to anybody who has ever picked up a copy of Forum Letter or Presbyterian Layman, or who has skimmed Virtue Online.  The details vary by denomination, but the general tone is consistent, and has not changed significantly in thirty years or more.  (Although Forum Letter is generally much better-written than this, or was in the years when we still contributed.)

In fact, Akasie's little screed is too familiar to be credible.  Like a third-rate concert pianist, it hits all the customary notes, but one can sense that there is no truth behind it.  And sure enough, at least if Gunn's response is to be believed, there is not.  The cross was carried by her two predecessors; the dogs won't really get funerals; and many dioceses have rules against buying liquor with their money.  Perhaps Akasie is not lying, exactly, so much as he is presenting the most jaundiced view imaginable of the facts, and the least charitable interpretation possible of the intentions of the people and the likely results of the votes.

Gunn was there, so read his post for a corrective.  It may also be helpful to scan the comments after Akasie's piece; several are by other attendees who express polite disagreement, and a few are by very angry sympathizers who express nothing at all politely.

For our part, we were simply mystified by one bit of speculation.  Akasie is unhappy about the push toward a unicameral assembly (for which we ourselves do not much care, by the way).  He is concerned that such an assembly would be dominated by leftist bishops, who despise Thomas Cranmer and seek to defame his memory.  And yet, at the same time, he writes of these dire consequences if laypeople "are further squeezed out of ... [the] legislative process":

A long-standing quest by laymen to celebrate the Eucharist—even taking on functions of ordained ministers to consecrate bread and wine for Holy Communion, which is a favorite cause of the church's left wing—would likely be snuffed out in a unicameral convention in which senior clergy held sway.

Huh?  So the leftist bishops are trying to squeeze out the leftist laypeople?  This sounds improbable.  And in any case, unlikely as lay presidency in the Episcopal Church may be, we would think that self-proclaimed traditionalists would make common cause in a heartbeat with any change of polity designed to prevent it.  (We certainly would.)

On the whole, Akasie's op-ed piece strikes us as poorly written and poorly thought out gibberish, factually dubious and intellectually dishonest.  We are disappointed, although not entirely surprised, that the Journal chose to publish it.

[UPDATE:  GetReligion's George Conger calls this "an egregiously bad article," and calls Akasie out on a lot of the details, including the graf above.  Conger wins the headline trophy, too, by adapting Churchill:  "Rum, Sodomy and the Cash."]

Byzantium, Slouching

Lest you missed it, the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America just kicked out its primate, Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen.  Read about the ugly details here.

Jonah was a former Episcopalian.  He had previously been suspended by his peers, and asked to sumbit to a psychological examination to determine his fitness for office.  At that time, he also admitted that his first three years in office had been "an administrative disaster." 

Mark Silk, writing a column at RNS, places Jonah among those Americans who have converted to Orthodoxy, seeking both "an uber-authentic form" of Christianity (whatever that means) and an ally in the culture wars.  Silk sees Jonah's removal as a response by the "old-timers," whose vision of Orthodoxy is less beholden to American theoconservatism.

Meanwhile, theocon converts to Orthodoxy Terry Mattingly and Rod Dreher are up in arms.  Naturally.  Dreher calls the Holy Synod "a pack of ravening wolves," "dirty, filthy," and so forth.  Also claims they have signed their church's "death warrant."  Mattingly calls Jonah and the converts "the authentic voice" of the OCA, which is likely a hard claim to sustain against "old-timers."

But we really don't know.  Maybe Jonah is the greatest thing since canned beer, and the other bishops are just a bunch of KGB plants.  Stranger things have happened, not least in Orthodoxy.

Whither the Seminaries?

Egg-reader and master photographer Mark Christianson offers some thoughtful reflections on the ELCA's budgetary priorities, and especially on how much (or little) it apportions for seminary support.  This well worth a read, and some sober reflection.

He also suggests closing and/or merging several of the ELCA's eight seminaries.  The idea is hardly new; we've heard variations of it for years.  The reason it has not taken place already is that each of the seminaries has its own constituency, militant in support of its particular history and minutely-nuanced variation on the common mission of all seminaries.  Fair enough.

But let's be frank.  Eventually, seminary closure is going to happen on its own, most likely through catastrophic failure.  Worse yet, it will happen slowly, as individual institutions wither away.  Some readers may recall the cautionary tale of the Hartwick Seminary, which helped to divide and embitter the New York Ministerium for several generations.

The real question, then, is whether the eventual closure of some seminaries will be directed deliberately, or left to chance.  This is, not incidentally, the question that faces many other church institutions, not least individual congregations.

At least in the case of seminaries, an argument can be made either way.

There is obvious logic to a denomination-wide master plan, such -- for example -- as one which would leave the ELCA with seminaries distributed geographically -- one east, one west, one north-central, one south-central.  (Since there is nothing fitting that last description, such a strategy actually involves the expansion of an existing extension program in Texas to the rank of a seminary.)

On the other hand, the invisible hand of the market is a powerful tool for discernment.  If it proves that there are not enough students and benefactors to support a new seminary in Dallas (or an old one in fill-in-the-blank), then perhaps it is best to accept that such a seminary does not really need to exist.  To the counter-argument that this leaves the ELCA lopsided, and unprepared for mission in a certain geographical region, one can only respond that Americans are wildly mobile, and that other graduate students routinely travel across the country to study.

We're not really sure what to do here, and nobody is asking us anyway.  But the merger of Southern Seminary with Lenoir-Rhyne and the situation which resulted from McCormick's threatened  withdrawal from LSTC both press the point.

Moral Hazard

The Times has spent a couple of days pointing out that government benefits have come to subsidize what is left of the American middle class -- including many people who believe in sharply reducing government benefits. (Story here, map here, charts here).

Now, this sort of thing is great fun as we approach election time. Look, we are allowed to say as we point a righteous finger, this guy in Minnesota depends on federal money to feed his kids breakfast and lunch at school, to pay for his mom's hip surgery, and so forth -- and yet he supports the Tea Party! Nothing makes us cleave to our received convictions like watching somebody we disagree with get ribbed for hypocrisy, which is why politicians and op-ed writers (and bloggers) so love to pluck the low-hanging fruit.

But beyond the rhetorical theatrics lie genuine ethical questions, as well as genuine personal pain. Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff, in the Times article, do a decent job of showing us both. Democrats have long ben fascinated, and appalled, by the way Republicans convince poorer people to vote aganst their own apparent economic interest, and this article offer a little window into that phenomenon.

There are at least three ethical problems at play here. The first is the obvious concern that government expenditures greatly outnumber revenues, and create a snowball of debt which poses a risk to future generations. Fair point. The second is that government money doesn't necessarily go to what the Times has always like to call "the neediest cases":

The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

This is, or may be, revelatory. For a moment, one thinks: Wait -- has the middle class taken to stealing money from the truly poor? And then, with a gasp of horror, one realizes the deeper truth: that without money from the government, much of the middle class would be truly poor.

From the dawn of time, politicians have used their power to reward their supporters, and buy more support. Cicero did it, and so did Boss Tweed. And for decades, American politicians have known that their political fate depended upon the votes of the middle-class masses, so they have thrown them bone after bone, until at last the bones have come to replace the meat, once represented by good jobs and affordable services.

These considerations lead to the third ethical consideration, which is sometimes called "moral hazard." That's the theory that providing people with help when they need it will cause them to become permanently dependent on such help. You hear it most often when conservatives decry the supposed welfare state, which has -- again, supposedly -- created an entire underclass of government clients, families who have been on the dole for generations with no hope of getting off. (The existence of such a class is debated, and we are aware of evidence both ways.) But the moral hazard theory is also championed, for example, by insurance companies, which use it to argue that insuring their clients against risk will then encourage them to take risk. This argument may not lack merit, but can easily become (yet another) cynical excuse for not paying a claim.

The implicit question in the Times story is whether the use of government benefits to appease voters has been a symptom of the middle class's disappearance, or a cause. If it is a cause, then government benefits have helped millions of people get by, even if they have also helped to mask the severity of the situation. But if benefits are reckoned as a cause, then the moral hazard theory seems vindicated, and those benefits have actually killed off the sort of initiative that might have kept the middle class going.

We have no answer to the question, by the way. We are certainly skeptical of easy answers, especially ones like Charles Murray's recent suggestion that poor people are poor because they lack virtue, an idea only marginally less offensive than his earlier proposal that black people are poor because they are stupid. We haven't been able to take political pontifications about "virtue" seriously since we learned of Bill Bennett's $8 million gambling debt.

Which brings us to the personal pain involved here. Remember, the "initiative" envisioned by moral hazard theory is, to put it bluntly, hunger. It is hunger, poverty, and curable diseases that go untreated, which have historically driven some poor people to educate and innovate their own way out of poverty. (Also, not incidentally, to lie, cheat and steal their way out.)

And that's what makes the story so compelling, at least in places. Over and over, the authors interview people who depend on government benefits to get by, and yet who believe -- seemingly not because they have been brainwashed, but as a matter of principle -- that those benefits must end for the good of the whole country. Even if this belief proves to be ill-founded, it is hard not to admire. And your heart breaks when one man admits that he doesn't know whether his mother should be able to walk, another whether his wife should go blind, and when a woman -- trying to balance her needs with her principles -- simply surrenders, and begins to cry.

Cranky Old Age

Ah, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.

When Father Anonymous was a mere slip of a thing -- Vicar Anonymous, they called him then -- there were some cranky old men hanging around the synod. The ones he knew best were super-high-church types, ordained in the 1960s or earliest 70s. They had been eccentrics then, although often quite vocal and even influential ones. Over time, several had become extremists; but, having lost any real influence, they kept their extremism largely to themselves.

It is hard to generalize, because these guys did not think with one mind any more than do we, ahem, modern people. But in general they had all at one time or another taken a vocal public stand against something on this list:

• Ordained women
• Altar girls
• Feminist theology, liberation theology, and so forth
• The Lutheran Book of Worship, especially (a) the loss of the Introit, (b) the addition of the canticle "This is the Feast," and (c) the Swedish eucharistic formula beginning "Blessed are you."

(With these antipathies, for the record, we agree about the Introit, and straddle the fence regarding the canticle. Otherwise, we're in utter disagreement.)

The first three objections, obviously, came from what today is easily dismissed as sexism tout court, although that isn't quite fair. Several of these guys were very sharp, and several had done remarkable -- and arduous -- ministry among the desperately poor and brutally oppressed. And it is worth noting that they weren't, and those who remain aren't, part of the Anita-Bryant-era anti-gay revolution. On the contrary, while they may not care much for the current regularization of same-sex romance in the Church, this was probably the single community with the longest record of shrugging their shoulders at gay colleagues, extending the charitable if specious assumption of celibacy, and moving on.

Naturally, by the time we came across them, these old codgers had already lost the argument on every item to which they objected, at least so far as the course of the church's common life was concerned. In some cases (altar girls, notably) parish pastors had even been instructed by a bishop to toe the line in their own parish. Those who know our polity will be able understand what a rare thing this is.

But they lost, consistently. In the face of the Commission on a New Lutheran Church, and the regime which followed it, none of their concerns had any real chance of survival. Frankly, better minds and better ideas were marginalized with an efficiency that was one side or the other of ruthless. (Bill Rusch, anybody?)

So what did they do after they lost? A few of them switched churches, generally heaving-ho in the direction of Rome. A few others flamed out, caught in one or another sort of public scandal. But most just settled down to spend those last few years in their own parish, hanging out with like minds and complaining (often acidly) about the evil times they had lived to see.

We have been thinking about these guys lately, mostly because of the Facebook group for ELCA pastors. It's a sort of nationwide cocktail party, in which we talk about the sort of things pastors talk about: problem parishioners, management software, the old three-way volunteer-vs-paid sexton-vs.-cleaning service debate. Occasionally, the talk turns to truly important things (mission; evangelism; staying out of court); often, it dwells on the sort of thing that could only interest a cleric, if even that (vestments, the pension plan, funny stories about incense). Whenever it gets too caught up in trivia, some well-meaning soul can always be counted upon to bleat, in effect, "What about the children?!"

And this group is turning us into one of those cranky old men. Fast.

Don't get us wrong. We like our colleagues, and always have. Lutheran pastors are a smart, decent bunch, with comparatively few stinkers among 'em. We like our colleagues, but have to confess that we don't really care for some of their ideas. Okay, a lot of their ideas. which means, in turn, that we don't really care for the direction that the church has taken over the years. Reading these posts, we come away with a sense that the "other" Lutheranism -- the mildly pietistic, aggressively modernistic, liturgy-bashing, bad-"contemporary"-service-organizing, Marty Haugen addicted, grape-juice-in-little cups-distributing Lutheranism we have heard about but rarely encountered -- is really much bigger than we had ever imagined. And that thought terrifies us.

What terrifies us even more is the likelihood that our own inevitable encounter with it may be coming fast. We can't stay holed up in Europe forever, and there is only so much of our home synod to go around. We are slowly coming to terms with the fact that our future may very well involve fewer thuribles and more little cups.

What does this mean? Frankly, it means a little blood in our mouth, as we accept the things we cannot change. And it means occasionally sitting at a table with colleagues, drinking bad coffee out of plastic cups, and complaining. Some will join us in our complaints, others will fight with us, and a decent few will sit by quietly, disagreeing but amused. We will, in short, have become one of the Cranky Old Men.

To repeat: we didn't agree with these sadsack old coots.. We didn't even like most of them; they were often pompous, and prone to smoking cigars. Apart from a general predisposition in favor of incense and chasubles, we had very little in common. But one of the things Fr. A. enjoys most about parish ministry is the chance to sit around church basements listening to old men talk (also old women, of whom there are many more), and while he prefers WWII veterans, these guys would do in a pinch.

So we hope that someday, when we have become embittered and cigar-prone, some young punk of a seminarian will be willing to sit around the undercroft with us, listening to our tales of the good old days, when there were no robot pastors and people still had their doubts about polyamorous wedding services.

It All Started With Lucent

Look, we actually like faux-Latin. We think it's funny, and -- frankly, our own command of the actual language being what it is -- we often find ourselves mumbling the faux variety when we didn't mean to. (Hey, it's not not like we're offending the natives, right?)

But when Bell Labs changed its name to Lucent in 1997, it was like Pandora opening her box. What followed was a deluge of macaronic neologisms: Altria, Vocera, and on and on. And why? "Bell Labs" was easily the most respected name in privately sponsored research. They invented everything you've ever heard of, and their original name carried so much weight that, as the company's fortunes declined, Lucent eventually re-rebranded itself as Bell Labs again, in a futile effort to stave off its corporate decline and retreat from basic science.

Despite this, other companies jumped right onto the bandwagon. Latin was appealing because the rebranders could easily find familiar-sounding words that nobody had yet used. Lucent itself, of course, is a form of luceo: they shine. But its successors got wilder and wilder. Novartis, for example, might conceivably be a dative or ablative plural of the feminine noun "novarta," meaning new art -- if such a word existed, which it doesn't. It's just gobbledygook, and transparently fake gobbledygook at that.

But the dogs piled on. James Archer has a list of them here, several of which he counts among "the biggest jokes in corporate naming." And you know what's on the list, right?

Thrivent. Of course.

The names of Lutheran Brotherhood and the Aid Association for Lutherans may not have been quite as prestigious as Bell Labs, but they sent a message of solidity and community. Thrivent, a Latinate verb ending stuck onto an Old Norse root, sends just the opposite message. It cries out phoniness, fakery, Potemkin-villagery. And, for the record, we at the Egg like Thrivent, a lot, and have trusted it with much of our financial well-being. We're just worried about the name, which stinks of desperation and lack of corporate confidence.

So comes now the most ominous name-change yet. The ELCA Board of Pensions is changing its name to Portico. The word itself is not fake; it is a real English word, with obvious Latin roots (porticus and of course porta). And that's the nicest thing we can say about it.

In an astonishing bit of double-speak, the BOP website claims that "We're changing our name to be clear about who we are and what we do." This is nonsense of the arrant variety. "ELCA Board of Pensions" was nice and clear. Sure, they've had some bad publicity lately, as the value of their investments (and therefore ours) has plummeted. But at least you knew what the organization was there for.

As for the new name, well, it doesn't say much of anything. The publicity makes a big deal about how a portico is a covered area where people gather, and well as the entrance into "something larger" -- they mention Solomon's Temple, although not a church, but let's assume that's what they meant. There's no real sense to this; they aren't a social organization, and they although they serve the church's mission, they certainly aren't leaders in evangelism per se.

Color us mystified, and annoyed. And a little scared: it took twenty years from the moment of its rebranding for Bell Labs to get out of basic science. How long will it take the Board of Pensions to get out of ... pensions?

On the other hand, you can't fight progress, or city hall, or the tide. Maybe this is a good and God-pleasing development, soon to be followed not merely by church-related organizations, but by churches themselves. After all, none of us likes the alphabet soup that makes churches sound like New Deal agencies, so maybe it's time for some ecclesiastical rebranding. Here are some suggestions; yours are welcome:

• The Presbyterian Church USA becomes ... Kirkitas.
• The RCA becomes ... Extra-Calvinisticum.
• The United Methodist Church becomes ... 1000Tongues.org
• The Roman Catholic Church ... well, they already think they have trademark protection on "The Church," so they're not going anywhere.*
• The United Church of Christ becomes ... Occupy Wall Street.

As for our own tribe:

• The LC-MS has often been ... Virulent.
• The ELCA, if not careful, may wind up ... Silent.

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* The Domestic & Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA is in court right now, fighting the RCC's trademark claim.

Mainline Decline is Over!

Not really. But things are comparatively stable at the moment.

This, at least, according to the membership numbers gathered by the National Council of Churches and described at the Religion News Blog. To summarize their findings in a sentence: all the familiar trends in American Christianity continue, but slowly. For example, the number of Roman Catholic faithful increased by .57% this year, apparently on the strength of disaffected former AELC pastors. The Southern Baptist Convention declined by .42%, probably because Richard Land talks too much. And so forth.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America declined by 1.96%, the Missouri Synod by 1.08%. We expect the Steadfast types are gloating over their victory.

Now, these numbers are notoriously tricky. They depend upon self-reporting by the denominations, which isn't consistent. Different groups define and measure membership in different ways. Several of the largest denominations, notably African-American, Pentecostal and Greek Orthodox church bodies, declined to provide updated membership figures at all. And "membership," at least in the short term, is quite different from active participation in the life of a congregation. We Lutherans will (eventually) delete from our rolls those members who have neither communed not contributed for several years; others may not. And so forth.

A couple of standouts:

• The biggest winners among the top 25 church bodies were the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, increasing membership by more than 4%.
• The Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc. was the biggest loser, on paper, at a stunning 59.6%. It's not that the faithful are fleeing the pews, just that the denomination has changed its reporting standards. Most parish pastors have experienced something like this, when they "clean out the rolls." It's a blow to the ego, but you get over it.
• The Presbyterian Church USA lost 2.61% of its membership, a fact which is put into perspective by the Episcopal Church's loss of 2.48% in the middle of a schism.

Anyway, there's lots more where this came from, but you have to pay $55 for the NCC Yearbook.

Pre-Advent Special: You Saw It Coming

In an electronic newsletter from the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, the new homiletics professor offers a criminally brief piece called "411 on the Emerging Church."

Ah, yes. We suppose that is to match the 911 on the rest of the church.

Dumb Accusation of the Week

The Crystal Cathedral has declared bankruptcy.

This was not hard to see coming. The church has changed leadership three times since 2006 -- Schuller pere turned the reins over over to Schuller fils, who was then ousted and eventually replaced by Schuller, uh, fille. None of this bodes well; the crowds like stability, and that means more than just keeping it in the family. Add to that a bad economy, and of course mainline decline -- because it is a congregation of the Reformed Church in America, albeit an anomalous one -- and, well, you've got some painfully familiar problems.

Readers may recall that we have a soft spot for the Crystal Cathedral, which is neither made of crystal nor an actual cathedral. It is an interesting building which houses an innovative ministry of a church with which we are in full communion. We may not care personally for the particular emphases of the ministry, nor for much of the art which decorates the campus, but we find the place interesting and have always wished it well.

This leaves us a bit peeved about some of the coverage. Blogger and freelance writer Sasha Brown-Worsham is having a schadenfreude-gasm over the idea that a congregation with a conspicuously large and expensive building should now have money problems:

And though they blamed it on the economy and dwindling conributions, one has to wonder, did God really need all that fancy glass and money? Was that megachurch for true spirituality or for greed and fame? ...

Think of all the money it takes to run such a mega church, so much, in fact, that they managed to build a $55 million debt. How many people in the world could eat on $55 million?

Yes, yes. And the nard could have been sold for poor relief. Thank you, Judas.

We don't mean to be too dismissive, but we hear this sort of thing too often. People who don't actually go to church themselves (and some who do) often have it in their heads that, because the church puts a priority upon social services, it is therefore about nothing but social services. This was not the case in the days of Jesus, nor is it now.

Brown-Worsham goes on:

Religion is many things for many people, but as far as a relationship to God goes, why does it take so much money to have one? Why is so much show needed to worship and feel close to God? ... This kind of show makes a mockery of real religion and the people who practice it.

Ah, yes. Show. We've heard this before: "Why do we need those silk vestments? Stained glass windows? Do you know how much an organ costs?" There has always been a puritanical strain within Christianity that asks these questions, and is outraged by the answers. But it has always been a minority voice. From the beginning, most Christians have taken for granted that the worship of God -- as the most important thing their community does -- deserves a bit of show. The cathedral at Chartres didn't come cheap.*

Of course we glorify God by feeding the poor; but we also glorify God with prayer and song, and pretty buildings in which to pray and sing. And, not incidentally, in which to feed people -- many of whom, poor as they are, appreciate that much more keenly the opportunity to spend an hour or two in a pretty building, giving thanks to God, in the one place where they can sit beside the wealthy as their absolute and unquestioned equal. If Worsham-Brown thinks these things mock "real religion and the people who practice it," we suspect she has little acquaintance with either.

Still, as with the money problems in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, this reminds us that the present catastrophic decline of so many Christian churches is not exclusive to the easily-picked-upon liberal Prots. It goes much deeper than that -- we're not yet sure how much deeper, but we do not believe that the life of any American church will look in, say, 2035, much as it does today. We may yet wind up being just what the Brown-Worshams of the world want.

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* We have no idea how to estimate the actual construction cost of a medieval cathedral. But St. Patrick's, in Manhattan, was built between 1859-1879 for a total cost of $1.9 million. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to over $43 million in today's dollars. St. Paul's, London, cost 700,000 pounds in the 17th century, roughly $83 million today. The Dresden Frauenkirche was rebuilt in the 1990s for something like $250 million. At a piddling $18 million, the Crystal Cathedral was a bargain.

Thirteen Letters, Sounds Like "Trouble"

The word is restructuring, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is doing it. Again.

The bottom line is that giving -- what used to be called "benevolence," and is now called "mission support" -- is down dramatically over the past few years. Many or even most of the ELCA's 65 synods are in serious financial trouble, and so is the national church.

Why? Everybody has a theory. Maybe it's the result of decades of debilitating internal warfare over Episcopalians and gay people. Maybe it's the cost of a topheavy administrative structure. Maybe it is all those old people who won't listen to the young people, or vice-versa. Maybe it was the CNLC's captivity to ultra-liberal Protestantism. Maybe it's the effect of a worldwide economic crisis, which features 10% unemployment and pension plans in dire jeopardy. Or maybe it's mainline decline, the undiagnosable black box of modern church history. (We at the Egg blame the AELC, just on principle. At this point, we may as well put our cards on the table and admit what readers have already guessed: we also think the AELC killed Kennedy and is hiding the truth about UFOs).

Whatever the cause, the result is clear. Painful as it is, we are glad that the church had the guts to take action, further streamlining its structure. We may tease Bishop Hanson about his albs, but we admire his willingness to face reality. You might be surprised by how rare that is in church leadership. And we are very sad that he's had to do it twice.

We don't know all the details of the bloodletting. Here's a press release, but it only hints at what the result will look like. As 16 "units" and "sections" are condensed into three units, will there be some functions that are no longer given proper attention, or attended to at all? Will there be some gains, in coherence and missional focus? We hope so, but only time will tell.

What concerns us most right now is the human cost. A national staff of 358 will be reduced by 65 or so. That's nearly a 20% layoff, on top of the cuts earlier this year -- and in a virtually stagnant labor market. How will those people pay the rent and buy groceries? Five foreign missionaries on active duty will be called home, almost immediately. Who knows how disruptive that will be, not only to the missionaries and their families, but to the ministries they have be building up?

Please pray for the church, and in particular for those who are facing the end of ministries they had cherished and cultivated.

Environmentalists Caused Gulf Oil Spill

Just ask Sarah Palin. Seriously.