Page 2335 – Christianity Today (2024)

Social media like Facebook and Twitter have received an abundance of critique, not the least of which is that social media users are self-absorbed. But I wonder if we might turn answers on Twitter to the question “What are you doing?” or on Facebook’s status update into an opportunity for self-examination. It might even be an opportunity for Twitter and Facebook users to examine not just what they are doing but how it aligns with our mission.

I’ve spent some time observing pastors who tweet or regularly update their status on Facebook, and I’m far from convinced it’s simply self-absorption or an attempt by little people to make themselves famous. But these updates do reveal what is uppermost on the mind. But let me begin with a confession: I use these social media tools to draw folks to my blog and to the concerns I have there. In addition, on Facebook I have a good time with my “Friends” discussing sports or the news.

And I’m not alone. The idea of both Facebook and Twitter is to share with friends – real friends and not just cyberfriends – what you are doing. We all know that this can slip into silliness with tweets like: “Having a chocolate macchiato latte, double shot espresso with a raspberry scone” But we should also admit that tweets can be a valuable communication form. And another thing is clear—Twitter and Facebook are here to stay. Over time the craziness will wear off and the abilities of social media will become more clear.

Still, there are observations to make about what we see from pastor tweets. Over time I’ve noticed that many pastors tweet links to business people and leadership gurus, Seth Godin being the most common. We discover plenty of emphasis on news items, especially controversial ones. Pastors often became “green” in the recent Iranian student revolution. Pastors tweet a lot about sports. There seems to be a near obsession in pastor tweets with terms like “creativity” and “innovation,” and a corresponding neglect of our great tradition or our heritage in the Church.

Pastors tweet quotes from their reading, and inform us of what they are reading. Sunday tweets tend to be gratitude tweets. We also regularly discover who is meeting with whom (and the “whom” is always a notch above the “who”), or where someone is traveling. We hear about accomplishments but almost never any failures or disappointments, making the Twitter world largely a happy face community.

I have seen some gospel in Facebook updates – some tweets about Jesus, his life, death, and resurrection, but very few about how Israel’s story came to its goal in Jesus. Very few, in fact, about the Old Testament at all. There is some theological orientation. Even if it is hard to reduce theology to 140 characters, the limit of a normal tweet, it can be done and it has been done well. The issue is how infrequently pastors and religious leaders provide such theological orientation and how often they link us to such concerns. Oddly, there is an absence of short prayers for others or ejacul*tory prayers for God’s help in a tough situation. In fact there are almost no prayers at all.

So, let me ask pastors who tweet and who update their status a few simple questions: What do your updates tell us about what you are doing? About what is uppermost on your mind? About what is most important to you? It is time to take stock. Perhaps you are like me—using social media to draw the attention and time of others to something else. But where are we leading these folks? What do our links reveal about what is most important to us? About what is uppermost on our minds?

Twitter and Facebook offer us an opportunity for self-examination. I know they have for me.

The Museum of Innocence tells of Kemal Bey’s obsessive love for his beautiful distant poor relation Füsun. Set in Istanbul between the late 1960s and the present day, Kemal’s narrative begins with “The Happiest Moment of My Life” and ends with “Happiness.”

While the story of his love knows two brief periods of intense fulfillment, the eight years bracketed by those flashes are composed of patience, incomprehension, and the unconscious hoarding of every physical trace of every waiting moment. And after? Kemal traveled the world, acquiring anything associated with his extended moment of true feeling.

Toward the end of his life, the wealthy Turk contemplated framing his collection with a story: “I would dream happily of a museum where I could display my life—the life that … everyone else thought I had wasted—where I could tell my story through the things that Füsun had left behind, as a lesson to us all.” So he hired prominent novelist Orhan Pamuk to write the catalogue of this Museum of Innocence, where, “wherever one stands inside it, it should be possible to see the entire collection …. Because all the objects in my museum—and with them, my entire story—can be seen at the same time from any perspective, visitors will lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life.”

A man as interested in happiness as Kemal Bey sowed a lot of passing misery along the way. In a country where a woman’s putative virginity is in most cases all the goods she brings to the cultural table, Kemal took Füsun’s proffered virginity on her 18th birthday, weeks before the party announcing his formal engagement to Sibel, the perfect wife. When his cousin asks Kemal if he’s having sex with Sibel, he denies it. A lie. They’ve been doing it in his office on the leather divan. After the engagement, avoided by Füsun, he cohabits with Sibel, who wonders at his newfound impotence. Is something wrong? Is there someone else? Will he visit a psychoanalyst? No, no, and yes: all lies.

The perfect marriage doesn’t happen.

Kemal tracks down Füsun. She’s been married off to a fat boy. They live with her parents. Nearly every day for eight years, Kemal goes to their apartment for dinner and sits up with the family until the TV signs off, a patient suitor for a married woman’s hand. He takes the family to dinner at restaurants, and issues an invitation in a narrative aside: “I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn’t that the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?”

Kemal’s mother takes a different view. He can’t find happiness with Füsun, or he’d have found it by now. He responds with a smile. Angered, she declares: “In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or even have a conversation, there’s no such thing as love …. By any chance do you know why? I’ll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don’t even bother themselves with whether she’s good or wicked, beautiful or ugly—they just pounce on her like starving animals. This is simply their conditioning. And then they think they’re in love. Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this? Take care! Don’t deceive yourself.”

If there can’t be love in a place, can there be happiness? If there is only avowed sincerity to prove or disprove the existence of happiness, or love, what to make of the avowals of a confessed liar?

“Love,” Kemal Bey explains, “is deep attention, deep compassion …. What Turks should be viewing in their own museums are not bad imitations of Western art but their own lives …. My museum comprises the life I shared with Füsun, the totality of our experience, and everything I’ve told you is true, Orhan Bey …. [E]ven though I have … described my life with utmost sincerity, even I cannot know how much I have understood it as a whole. We can leave that job to future scholars, and the articles they will write for Innocence, the museum magazine.”

I was stuck for a long time on the innocence. Kemal and Füsun were first alone together when they were twenty-four and twelve respectively, six years before the happiness began. They’d run short of liqueur at a large family party celebrating the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice. Kemal’s father dispatched him to restock and, seeing young Füsun standing near the door, Kemal asked her along. On the way to the corner shop, they paused with a crowd gathered to watch the butcher slit a lamb’s throat. The secular Kemal couldn’t properly explain the story of Abraham and Isaac to the child. So he appealed to the family chauffeur, who related that “By this sacrifice we say that we are willing to lose even the thing that is most precious to us …. And we do that without expecting anything in return …. [Y]ou don’t need religion or a mosque to know such things.”

In the final chapter, “Happiness,” Orhan sought out the now-retired chauffeur. Çetin Efendi describes Kemal as unchanged since boyhood, open and optimistic. Füsun and Kemal “were essentially good and innocent souls who suited each other perfectly, but as God had been unwilling to let them be together, we mortals were in no position to question the outcome too closely.”

Orhan Pamuk’s 1998 Ottoman-period novel My Name is Red (which might have been called “Someone is Killing the Sultan’s Manuscript Illuminators”) contains an extended discussion of the conflict between the rising Venetian school of portraiture and the dominant Persian style, teasing out the mortal implications of what might otherwise be mistaken for art history. By the time that book appeared in English, in the winter of 2001, the questions this fiction asks had acquired more urgency, more resonance. What exactly is a person’s individuality? How can it be represented? Which is more powerful: religion, culture, or erotic and thanatoptic nature? Does love conquer, and if so, what? Among the many narrators of this mystery of ideas is the six-year-old Orhan, who, like all of Orhan Pamuk’s storytellers, is both witness and participant.

Pamuk’s next novel, Snow (2002 in Turkish, 2004 in English), collaged the notebooks and journals of the deceased poet Ka with news clips, interviews, and on-the-scene research. The poet’s friend Orhan, an Istanbuli novelist, tells Ka’s life as he lived it: a story of revolutionary commitment and aesthetic modernism, journalism and prophecy, love and impotence in Kars, in northern Turkey, near the border of Georgia, Armenia, and Iran.

At Kemal’s last meeting with Orhan Bey as recounted in The Museum of Innocence, the collector of memories says, “I read your novel Snow all the way to the end …. I don’t like politics. So please don’t be offended if I say I found it a bit of a struggle. But I liked the ending. At the end of our novel I would like to do the same as that character in Snow and address the reader directly. Do I have this right?”

Is this the plea of innocence, or of not knowing?

Kemal Bey is a self-confessed liar. He lied to his lover, to his fiancée, and to his mother. Presumably, he also lies to his hired scribe, Orhan Pamuk. No one is deceived except himself.

One insignificant guest at Kemal’s engagment party to Sibel, who as a young man danced once with the beautiful Füsun under Kemal’s jealous gaze, Pamuk is no fool. The novelist knows Kemal for what he is, which must be in part himself. From this distance or privileged vantage, the ghost author of the museum catalogue withholds some thing from his narrator—not his time, certainly, and perhaps not even affection; perhaps judgment.

Laurance Wieder’s review of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow appeared in the November/December 2004 issue of Books & Culture. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

This compilation of primary documents, with short introductions by the editor along with an introductory and concluding chapter, is meant for classroom use. University classrooms, Jonathan Bean suggests, are virtual propaganda cells in which brave students who dare to raise any argument from the classical liberal tradition are ” ‘shut down’ in silence” until they have parroted the “correct answers they have found in other discussion readers.” This anthology, by contrast, aims to free students to “consider another way of looking at the world.”

In my experience, this text actually represents almost exactly how the great majority of my students look at the world. But perhaps I’m the anomaly who somehow has student survivors of the Manchurian treatment administered to them in the academy. Supposing that college classrooms nationwide are sanitized of any germs of classical liberal thought before students are allowed to enter them, let us consider this anthology in the spirit in which it is offered. Appropriate for a classroom, let’s start with a pop quiz:

What do the following have in common: Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, William Graham Sumner, Warren Harding, H. L. Mencken, R. C. Hoiles [publisher of the Orange County Register and other newspapers with a libertarian editorial focus], Milton Friedman, Linda Chavez, Martin Luther King, Stephen Carter [the Yale law professor, author of Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, and defender of Sonia Sotomayor], and Antonin Scalia? Is it:

A. Little except they all discussed race, and most deplored racism, at some point in their lives, albeit for entirely different reasons and with little or no common philosophical basis otherwise—indeed, often for reasons that contradicted others on this list. Or is it,

B. They were all representatives of the “classical liberal tradition,” all believing in and acting on its “fundamental doctrines of individual freedom from government control, the Constitution as a guarantor of freedom, color-blind law, and capitalism,” in contradistinction to “left-wing liberalism, with its emphasis on group rights, government power, and hostility to free market capitalism” [and, usually, religious belief].

Jonathan Bean’s answer, as you probably guessed, is (B), and this collection of primary documents is an argument in defense of the proposition that the classical liberal tradition, because of its hostility to government power and group rights, has been the primary force in forging racial justice and freedom in American history.

My answer is closer to (A). What the author sees as a tradition, I would suggest is more like an imagined community—emphasis on imagined.

Key in assessing this kind of text are the following questions: do the documents selected here cohere in presenting a unified classical liberal tradition that students don’t know about, but need to understand in order to comprehend the history of racial equality? Further, does the text present a rich assortment of documents, with appropriately nuanced and historically informed introductions, showing the variety and sheer human complexity of the large topics it addresses?

The answer is no. But before explaining why, a few words about the virtues of the anthology. Perhaps most important, the text resurrects some little-anthologized or relatively forgotten authors, writers, and editors, especially black authors. Students will learn much from contrasting the usual suspects in anthologies of black writing with figures such as the “black Mencken” George Schulyer, the black business tycoon S. B. Fuller, the more contemporary author Anne Wortham, and the religion professor Kelly Miller. All of these (and more, including contemporary columnist Walter Williams and political activist Ward Connerly) get their say here. Likewise for R. C. Hoiles, the important newspaper publisher and founder of Freedom Communications (and owner of my local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette), who articulated a philosophy that Barry Goldwater later took national. Heroically, Hoiles stood against Japanese internment during World War II when few others did; his critique of FDR’s internment policy is reproduced here.

Likewise, the latter part of the text introduces some more complex figures, such as Stanley Crouch and Stephen L. Carter, who in reality don’t fit very well into any tradition (as Bean acknowledges with Carter). The book concludes with an editorial jeremiad about our two major political parties, both of which allegedly have caved to “diversity liberalism” (don’t tell the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee). Thus, while this is an ideologically driven text, it is not partisan.

Provocation can make for good pedagogy, and I love to champion texts that resurrect understudied authors. Yet this compilation ultimately fails in presenting a coherent argument, for two basic reasons. First, the “tradition” invented here encompasses too many people who were fundamentally and philosophically at odds with one another; the center of this imagined community does not hold. Second, Bean too often fails to investigate the complexity and contradictions within classical liberalism with the same zeal that he applies (especially in the conclusion) to left liberalism. The result is an anthology that mostly cheerleads rather than analyzes, and that quite often grievously distorts and oversimplifies the history of the people and subjects it covers.

Documentary readers work best as provocative pedagogy when they open up a topic. On occasion, this text does that, most successfully in the last chapter. Most of the other chapters fail in this regard. Take for example the treatment of R. C. Hoiles, as unsullied a representative of 20th-century classical liberalism as one can imagine (think Milton Friedman on steroids). The premise of Hoiles’ argument against Japanese internment was the same as his argument against government involvement in anything whatsoever. Hoiles’ opposition to internment, moreover, must be set in the context of his opposition to every single civil rights bill of the 1950s and 1960s, his defense of private rights of discriminatory behavior, and especially his vitriolic denunciation of all forms of public education, K through PhD. Public education, he said in a document reproduced here, inevitably leads to “moral delinquency.”

Nearly all of Hoiles’ positions would have enraged that other alleged classical liberal, Frederick Douglass, who fought valiantly for public education after the Civil War, demanded government activism on behalf of the same, and decried the Supreme Court’s disastrous 1883 decision which (on classical liberal grounds) found unconstitutional the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. Douglass is the single most reproduced author in the entire volume and emerges at the end as the heroic “omni-American.”

Douglass certainly drew (as did most antislavery activists) from the classical liberal tradition, and the contribution of classical liberalism to the antislavery movement stands as its proudest moment. But of course, the most representatives defenders of that classical liberal tradition were southerners such as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, who perceived the Republicans as the party of big government, conspiring to take away local authority, individual freedom (especially property rights), and the proper Constitutional authority of the states. The Confederate revolution was, in large part, a classical liberal one, an inconvenient truth for the thesis presented here. Moreover, the villain of the antebellum section of this text, William Lloyd Garrison (criticized for viewing the Constitution as a proslavery document, which Douglass rejected), emerged after the war as the perfect classical liberal in arguing that slaves had freedom, therefore the job was done. But Douglass knew that the slaves had “nothing but freedom,” and that freedom was not enough.

Much the same historical distortion appears in the author’s arguments about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially Title VII of that act. Bean reproduces Barry Goldwater’s explanation of his principled libertarian reasons for opposing the act. Goldwater believed, for example, that if you didn’t want to serve someone of another color in your restaurant, then you had the right to exclude that person. So did (more famously) Lester Maddox, who stood at the door of his Atlanta restaurant heroically defending his individual rights against the encroachments of government power and “group rights.” Moreover, Goldwater’s position was further developed and continued by the legion of classical liberal authors in National Review. Like William F. Buckley, by attacking every single civil rights act of that era they stood athwart history and yelled “stop.” They drew from the same reasoning as does Pat Buchanan, whose recent diatribe against Sonia Sotomayor and affirmative action and his extolling of the “white man who built this country” simply update arguments extending down from a long line of classical liberal thinkers, including John C. Calhoun, Alexander Stephens, the Southern Dixiecrats, James J. Kilpatrick, William Rusher, and Glenn Beck. In contrast to them, Frederick Douglass’ words lie smoldering in his grave.

Left unmentioned here is how and why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 actually worked (to the extent that it did). It only did so because of black and female pioneers who sued in court and demanded that the law be enforced. They knew that “freedom” was necessary but not sufficient; they knew that freedom was not enough. Ultimately, the law worked (and revolutionized American life, for the better in every way) because black and female litigants made it work. And in making it work, they opened up the door for the very figures who, late in this text, resurrect the pure classical liberal tradition (including opposition to “group rights”) for our time. Without Title VII, Clarence Thomas would be unimaginable. The same, it should be said, goes for the Voting Rights Act, which produced a revolution in black political participation through the very kinds of government activism which depended on arguments contradicted by the classical liberal position.

The classical liberal tradition always has grappled with its own self-contradictions when dealing with race. Government activism in the service of racism—for example, segregation laws and internment camps—are lambasted here by heroic voices in defense of individual freedom; this is the glory of the story of race and liberty told here. But absolutely necessary government activism in securing greater racial justice (such as the civil rights acts of the Reconstruction era and the 1960s) consistently has been opposed by scores of classical liberals in American history, some anthologized here, most not. That dilemma of the tradition begs for analysis.

All forms of liberalism have their internal tensions and contradictions; that’s why “left liberal” authors have led the charge in analyzing the shortcomings of the New Deal in terms of reinforcing segregationist and gender-biased wage structures. In their best historical work, left liberals (who are, it must be said, grotesquely caricatured, even slandered, in this book) have recognized the contradictions and difficulties of government involvement in pursuit of economic and racial justice. This text, too, would have been much stronger had the editor used the opportunity to analyze not only the triumphs but also the difficulties and contradictions of a classical liberal tradition that has at various times been on the side of the angels, and at other times on the side of the demons.

Paul Harvey runs the blog Religion in American History at usreligion.blogspot.com

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Do you struggle to get members to church business meetings, either because of hectic schedules, a growing but less interested membership base, or both? Several solutions exist, ranging from an open-meeting format conducted over several days, to forming a select voting class of members, to hosting an electronic meeting.

None of these options is cut-and-dried. Without careful planning, one misstep can tarnish the results of any vote.

“Most churches aren’t thinking about it until after a problem develops,” says Frank Sommerville, a Texas-based attorney who works with churches and nonprofits. “That’s the sad part—you then have to go back and redo everything.”

Sommerville, a contributing editor of Your Church magazine and Church Law & Tax Report, recommends three steps before planning any type of business meeting:

1. Review the state’s nonprofit corporation statute;
2. Review the church’s articles of incorporation;
3. Review the church’s bylaws.

This will let you know what types of meetings are allowed, and what steps must be followed in order to conduct them. They also will refresh collective memories on a variety of other key items, including the notice required for meetings, a member’s minimum age to vote (some churches allow 16-year-olds to become members, but in most states, non-profit corporation statutes don’t allow them to vote until they’re 18), and what constitutes a quorum.

In instances where the church’s articles or bylaws conflict with the state nonprofit corporation statutes, Sommerville says, the church is required to follow the state nonprofit corporation statute unless the articles or bylaws set a higher standard.

Looking for an alternative to the traditional business meeting format?

Sommerville says the most straightforward approach is the open-meeting format hosted during a period of days. Electronic meetings typically require too much (for instance, some states require 100 percent of members to agree to an electronic meeting); a voting class of members is less difficult, but typically requires amending church bylaws first.

Presuming the church’s articles and bylaws don’t prohibit them, open meetings offer the opportunity for more members to participate because polls are held open longer, Sommerville says.

“Most states allow you to have a meeting over an extended period of time,” he says. “There’s just a right way and a wrong way to do it.”

But there are two notable drawbacks to this approach: floor amendments and additional nominees can’t be added during the meeting. “All you can do is just go in and cast your ballot,” Sommerville says.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Irresistible cuteness, in pictures and videos online, is overwhelming America, says Jim Windolf in December’s Vanity Fair. Office workers gather around YouTube videos of toddler antics, the Mini-Cooper has been out-cuted by the Smart Car, and the website Cute Overload (filled with pictures of puppies, kitties, and bunnies) gets 100,000 hits a day.

Part of this new addiction is as ancient as our human nature, Windolf writes. Ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed in the 1940s that we naturally want to care for any small, vulnerable creature. “Lorenz suggested that infantile characteristics—big head, big eyes, the very round face—stimulate caretaking behavior,” Marina Cords, a professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University, told Windolf.

Then why, if we’ve always been attracted to adorable infants, is the cuteness craze gaining ground now?

Part of it is certainly the accessibility. Thousands of websites and e-mail forwards offer the goods. Bored with a work project or with doing laundry? Pop onto the Internet or your phone for a quick pick-me-up.

Another part of it, according to Windolf, may be our collective unhappiness—lengthy wars on two fronts and a struggling economy. He points to Japan, where he says cuteness took hold in the post-war 1940s and 1950s, influenced heavily by Disney’s Bambi and Fantasia. Now big-eyed, infantile anime characters can be found almost everywhere in Japan, from airplanes to condoms to ATM cards (and, as Her.meneutics blogger Lisa Graham McMinn covered, on body pillows made to look like young girls). “Cuteness in Japanese culture” even has its own Wikipedia entry.

Cuteness as an antidote to social unhappiness—there’s something to that. Photos of cute things—a kitten frolicking in a field of flowers, a toddler dancing, a pair of puppies cuddling—are comforting, and give us a moment to escape, to be where all is right with the world. Like happy endings, they let us breathe a sigh of relief that for someone, somewhere, things are working out perfectly.

And we crave those moments more when life around us is dark or uncertain. For example, I am a voracious reader, and normally I appreciate books that tell a good story or raise significant points, even if they don’t end with the main characters riding happily into the sunset. But when I am worried or dejected, I crave a moment of light, of beauty, even of cuteness. I want my movies to end happily, my books to be resolved to my satisfaction. I want to feel that life is working out for somebody, even if that somebody is fictional, since it doesn’t seem to be working out for me.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with a desire for happy endings. A breath of joy, even from something as insubstantial as an image of a baby chick, is still a breath of joy. What we need to remember, of course, is that it is a temporary fix. A better option is available to us: a prayer, a Bible verse, a quiet moment remembering who is in control. The peace from such moments lasts longer, and works more deeply in us, than a baby laughing or a panda sneezing.

Of course, our God is the Creator of puppies, too. And kittens. And laughing babies, and dancing toddlers. Go ahead and enjoy them—remembering that he is the real source of our joy.

Two of Mel McGowan’s earliest memories are bombs exploding in Saigon during the Vietnam War and then, a few months later, gazing at the lights of Main Street USA at Disneyland. The juxtaposition of those scenes was, in his words, the start of his “weird wiring.” McGowan was born to an American G.I. father and his Vietnamese wife near the end of the Vietnam War but was raised primarily in Germany. McGowan became a Christian in high school when his family moved to California. He then followed his best friend to film school with plans to influence the world through movies. But McGowan was soon drawn to architecture and urban planning courses.

After graduation he went to work for Disney designing a number of the entertainment company’s properties, including Downtown Disney. McGowan now serves as the president of Visioneering Studios, a leading design firm for churches and ministries. Rather than communicating through movies, he found his calling by communicating through sacred space.

Leadership’s Marshall Shelley and Brandon O’Brien met McGowan in Los Angeles, where he showed how sacred space reinforces and transmits a congregation’s values.

You believe churches need to think about facilities in new ways. Why?

Most church leaders—and even most architects—hold a false dichotomy about church buildings. One view is the high church model that tries to rebuild the Temple. They use ascension, whether with steps or ramps, and filtered light through stained glass, and other techniques to induce a sense of sacredness.

The opposing view is what seems like Quaker or Puritan asceticism, emphasizing functionality and thrift in church design. “We’re not spending anything on these facilities. We just need to keep the rain off our heads.”

And the problem with the functional approach is …

What I call “Midwestern multi-useless gymnatoriums.” Their primary purpose is to hold lots of people, and get them in and out quickly. If that’s all you want, then a big aluminum building is all you need.

But the purpose of sacred space is to lift the spirits and inspire by pointing people toward eternity. That’s what makes the experience of being in a cathedral so powerful.

When I hear “inspire,” I think “expensive.” Can sacred space be economical?

Sure. People often feel more connected with the Creator of the universe in nature than in an opulent manmade facility. Sacred space can maximize God’s architecture—the natural landscape around the facility—to great effect.

What’s an example of functional and inspirational being combined successfully?

A biblical example is the tabernacle, basically a tent in the wilderness. It was very practical. But everything meant something. There was intentionality behind every material choice and every sculptural choice. The primary concern wasn’t occupancy but telling a narrative and conveying meaning.

So a church building should communicate a story?

The church should figure out a way to regain our spot back in the heart of the community.

Designed well it can communicate a congregation’s unique history and vision. Every church is a unique finger on the body of Christ. Every church facility should be a unique solution for each congregation’s ministry and local culture. And each church building should be responsive to God’s architecture—the unique way the wind, the sun, the topography, and the drainage all work in that location.

God is a God of place. In the Garden of Eden, God created a perfect environment so people could share fellowship with him and with each other. Later he gave his people specific plans for the desert encampment, the tabernacle, and the Temple. In each of these cases, place can either impair or facilitate connection and community—with God and with each other.

How can a building hinder community?

Let me give you an example unrelated to churches. The public housing projects of the twentieth century were built because the designers believed that everyone deserved decent housing. They wanted to get rid of the urban shanty towns. That was a good cause.

Unfortunately the replacements were built by modernist architects who thought of space primarily in functional, pragmatic terms. So they built tall, impersonal apartment buildings. They didn’t consider that when you disconnect people you dehumanize them. The residents no longer had eyes on the street where their kids were playing. And they didn’t have a physical connection with the outdoors anymore. The space created social instability. The experiment went so poorly that within 20 years, they had to demo the majority of the projects. The demolition of one housing project in St. Louis is considered the death of modernism in architecture. It marked architecture’s loss of faith in the aesthetic of function.

Fostering community is a challenge everywhere today, not just in public housing.

Years ago, before air conditioning, people would sit on the porch at dusk to cool off, and all of the neighbors did the same thing. People walked up and down the street. The porch served as an intermediary zone between the private space and the public space. It was the communal America where you actually knew your neighbor.

Today the basis of suburban planning is isolationism. We want to pull into our three car garage, file in through the kitchen door, and never have to talk to my neighbor. Now we have social isolation. It’s hard to physically connect with other people.

What does this mean for a church building?

When you look up the word ecclesia, the Greek word for “church,” you find out it’s a secular term referring to an assembly, the gathering of the citizens or denizens of a city. So we are talking about a container for people. That’s one function: it has to hold people.

But unlike a secular ecclesia, a Christian ecclesia must do more than facilitate horizontal connections between people. It must simultaneously facilitate a vertical connection with our Creator.

Historically this kind of sacred space has been both indoor and outdoor. And it has been mixed use, including worship, retail, and even residential space. The first church buildings, the basilicas, were the Roman shopping malls and government buildings. When the Christians had the opportunity to move out of the catacombs and take over the basilicas, it was like taking over the city hall, downtown office space, or the Wal-Mart building today.

So buying a large tract of land outside of town wasn’t their first instinct?

No, because the location of a church building says a lot. If a church finds its 20 acres in an undeveloped area and waits for the rooftops to follow them, this communicates to the community that Christians want to escape the urban areas to form a private haven.

Historically, the church was given the place of prominence on a hill or at the center of town. It was the faith-based anchor of a community. From the Greek agora, the Italian piazza, and the Spanish plaza, to the New England village greens, the very first thing that would get sited was the sacred space—the church.

Frankly, that’s what convicted me when I was designing Downtown Disney. We were modeling the area after European villages, and we recognized that we had a God-shaped hole in the center of our master plan that historically would have been filled by a cathedral. I found myself thinking, We have to fill this central spot with some of the same things that people try to fill that God-shaped hole in their lives with—entertainment, movies, sports, the consumer stuff. That got me thinking that maybe the church should figure out a way to regain our spot back in the heart of the community.

Beyond location, how do church buildings communicate to the wider community?

Think about churches with multiple buildings on a campus. The buildings usually face inward toward a green or fountain or some sort of gathering place. The front door is often away from the street. That means the buildings all face each other and the ugly backsides of the buildings are facing the neighbors. I call that “mooning the community.”

The idea of a campus is that it’s self-contained and separate—like a monastery. In the worst cases, campuses create Christian country clubs. You’ve got your own Christian school onsite. You’ve got sports leagues where your members play basketball only with other Christians, and the fellowship is fairly exclusive. It’s introverted; it isn’t outreach oriented or connected to the larger community.

How do you design facilities to focus outward?

Instead of building facilities that are used only for church functions and stay empty most of the week, churches are finding ways to share space with their neighbors.

Some churches with contemporary services are creating performing arts spaces that the outside community can use when the church doesn’t need the auditorium. We’ve actually branded a facility separately from the church.

One was called Stage One at Candlewalk. Candlewalk is the name of a mixed-use development, and Stage One is a church auditorium. The church uses the name Stage One when they’re selling tickets to a secular concert through Ticketmaster. Some people don’t ever know they’re in a church facility.

How would you advise a church plant that’s considering property and a building?

A church planter I spoke to recently wants to do something that is a blessing to the broader community, not just their own internal Christian community.

I suggested they do a community needs assessment while they conduct their own strategic ministry planning. They’ll determine the right strategy when they see where those lines intersect. The church might want to do homeless outreach, but if the neighbors do not want that in their backyard, the church might want to go somewhere else. We’ve got to consider our neighbors and not just ourselves in the ministry planning process.

How do you walk church leaders through this process?

We ask, “Who are we designing for?” The primary customer should be the community of the lost, those outside the walls. Ultimately if we’re working with a Spirit led, Bible based church, they tend to believe that God cares as much for the people who are driving by the church as he does for the ones that are already in the door.

I’ve become convicted that church walls are the biggest barrier between the church and the unchurched, the lost and the found, Christ and community. And our passion and mission has been to not let that happen.

Assuming the church wants to reach the lost, what’s next?

We ask, “What do you love and appreciate and celebrate about your community, both your church community and the local community? Where do you spend time when you’re not at home, church, or work? Where do you hang out? Where do you take visitors? What are the cultural competitors to the ministry here?”

Do you ask these questions to leaders or the whole church?

We encourage churches to make their brainstorming sessions open events so that once construction is under way, they can say with all honesty and integrity, “We gave everyone an open invitation to weigh in on this at the beginning.”

Because of our background in urban design and social activism, we also recommend that churches cast a wide net and include not only internal stakeholders but also external community stakeholders. Invite neighbors and local officials into the conversation even if they are not part of the church.

What if a church doesn’t really know what it wants?

That’s why conversation is important. People will usually have opinions from the beginning about general stewardship issues, cost effectiveness, and aesthetics. But once the designer starts raising questions about maximizing indoor and outdoor space, people will say, “We love these oak trees. We definitely want to protect those. We desperately need some active recreation space.”

It’s hard for people to describe what they like if they’re not trained in planning and design, but ultimately they know it when they see it. And that’s the comment we’re known for—”Yeah, that’s us. You heard us. You reflected us and where God’s taken us.” That’s what we want to hear. It can be a powerful moment when it feels like God is in the house and you feel that divine intervention in the design.

Is there a facility that came together in that way for you?

Yes, in Corona, California, the community had older stakeholders who had seen the old agrarian citrus groves disappear and turned into tract homes in a Spanish Mediterranean motif—I call it neo-taco architecture—standard for all their buildings. The city mandated that every gas station, every Wal-Mart, every tract home had to have a fiberglass red tile roof and stucco. But it had none of the quality and the integrity of some of the classic 1920s and ’30s era coastal towns.

The pastor wanted it to be the church of the new millennium to reach the next generation. His opinion was, “I don’t really care about Corona history and, frankly, I don’t think most of the people that move here care. They’re here because they can’t afford to be in Orange County.”

What was your first step?

Normally I would say we opened the Bible. That’s where 99 percent of these stories come from. But we opened, in this case, Webster’s dictionary and looked up the word corona. And rather than being Spanish for beer or crown, the dictionary definition that resonated with us was “a concentric circle of light surrounding a luminous body.” We immediately realized there was a powerful metaphor there—a circle of light, a circle of friends, the city on a hill.

We went to the city and proposed emulating an Italian hill town with a piazza and a church at the center rather than doing the cheesy fake stucco and Spanish tile. Even though it’s a contemporary cathedral with a very modern performing arts center, the plan was to let the church take that symbolic place as the cathedral on the piazza. The proposal included interactive fountains and a circle of palm trees. The city loved it.

How does that facility serve both the church and the community?

The piazza area creates space for the community to gather, and it houses a caf that is open to the public. There is education space on the site, and there are plans to expand with more retail and even residential space around it in the future.

In terms of design, it’s something that feels like Corona, a hybrid of where Corona has been, but also where the city, church, and neighbors want Corona to go. This project united the church’s vision, to be at the center of the community, with the community’s vision to have an upscale leisure and lifestyle district.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

The House just voted 220-215 to approve health care legislation that would create a public health insurance option and require employers to offer health insurance.

Before the final vote, the House also voted 240-194 to bar federal funding of abortion in the proposed government-run health care plan.

Sixty-four Democrats voted in favor of the amendment led by Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), while Republican Rep. John Shadegg voted present in an effort to derail the bill. Here’s the full description of the Stupak amendment.

The amendment prohibits federal funds for abortion services in the public option. It also prohibits individuals who receive affordability credits from purchasing a plan that provides elective abortions. However, it allows individuals, both who receive affordability credits and who do not, to separately purchase with their own funds plans that cover elective abortions. It also clarifies that private plans may still offer elective abortions.

Here’s analysis from the Associated Press:

Under the Stupak amendment, people who do not receive federal insurance subsidies could buy private insurance plans in the exchange that include abortion coverage. People who receive federal subsidies could buy separate policies covering only abortions if they use only their own money to do it.

Companies selling insurance policies covering abortions would be required to offer identical policies without the abortion coverage.

…A health overhaul bill pending in the Senate also bars federal funding for abortion, but the language is less stringent. Discrepancies between the House and Senate measures would have to be reconciled before any final bill is passed.

CT reported earlier on how abortion and health care had split Democrats, and The New York Times reported that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to deal with another fight before the final vote.

With just hours to go before the start on Saturday morning of historic floor debate over the health care bill, leading Democratic members of the Pro-Choice Caucus emerged from Ms. Pelosi’s office unable to contain their fury. Ms. Pelosi, unwilling to delay a vote on the larger bill, had decided that Democrats who oppose abortion simply had too many votes on their side; for the moment, at least, the liberals who favor abortion rights had lost.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released a statement praising the Stupak amendment but said that the health care legislation is “seriously flawed.”

“The Speaker’s bill still allows rationing of health care for seniors, raises health costs for families, mandates that families purchase under threat of fines and penalties, encourages counseling for assisted suicide in some states, does not offer broad conscience protections for health care workers and seeks to insert the federal government into all aspects of citizen’s lives.”

A week from today, Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic epic 2012 hits the big screen, and the trailer clearly shows such iconic Christian sites as the Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro (in the poster at left) all come a-tumblin’ down when all heck breaks loose on doomsday.

What you don’t see getting smashed to smithereens are any Islamic holy places – and that has at least a couple of bloggers mad.

Calling director Emmerich a “coward,” a blogger for The American Catholic writes, “This is just another example of Hollywood picking on us Christians. ‘Us’ Christians call this behavior bigotry in the form of Christophobia. More commonly known as anti-Christian or more specifically anti-Catholicism in the case of this film.” The blogger goes on to note that Emmerich was concerned about having a fatwa (essentially a Muslim death threat) on his head.

Meanwhile, at Big Hollywood, Greg Gutfield writes, “Where are Roland Emmerich’s balls?” He notes that Emmerich had said “he hoped to destroy the Kaaba, an Islamic holy site, but his fellow screenwriter Harald Kloser persuaded him not to” – again, out of the fear of fatwa. Gutfield writes: “Hollywood screws with Christians because Christians don’t behead people. But tweak Islam, and you could end up like director Theo van Gogh – dead on a street with a flag impaled on your chest. Roland picks the safe target because he’d rather live . . . [This] proves that Roland has the gonads of a shrimp.”

As for Emmerich, here’s his explanation, in his words, for not destroying anything Islamic: “We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have … a fatwa. So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”

For what it’s worth, the early teaser trailer for 2012 shows some sort of Himalayan holy man – presumably a Buddhist – biting the dust first. (He’s pictured in the screen capture at left.) So, it’s not like Emmerich was just picking on the Christians.

Here’s the latest trailer:

Deforestation takes on new meaning when you’re standing in Loma de Ardilla, a cluster of homes perched on a dusty 6,000-foot ridge overlooking an endless sea of Oaxacan mountains. The Mexican village’s name means “Squirrel Hill.” But its residents haven’t seen a squirrel there for years.

Deforestation claimed this mountaintop long ago, as traditional agriculture methods removed precious topsoil while subsistence farmers survived by turning trees into charcoal to sell. Equally barren mountains extend to the horizon like the swells of a dusty brown ocean. They starkly contrast the green maze of pine-covered hills behind the ridge that one must navigate to reach the village.

Yet joining the soft purple of the sparse jacaranda flowers — virtually the only color in this deforested landscape — is another color of hope: the sky blue walls of new ecological latrines. They join water tanks and ecological stoves as signs that something new is happening.

Another sign: the wall-less Presbyterian church above the village. Prince of the Shepherds members tore down their 13-by-20-foot building two weeks ago to build a bigger one for the growing congregation of seven families. A work in progress, today six wooden beams support a corrugated aluminum roof that shelters 14 rudimentary pews hand-carved from pine.

“It’s important for the church to be active outside its four walls. That’s why we don’t have any walls on the new church,” said church leader Santiago Perez with a laugh.

Prince of the Shepherds has partnered with Mision Integral (MI), a Christian development ministry and local partner of the San Diego–based reforestation ministry Floresta.

“Some people separate the physical and the spiritual,” said Luis Alberto Castellanos, general director of MI, which is based in the nearby city of Oaxaca. “We believe the gospel is integrated. Our work is our testimony, a chance to show our faith in the love of God.”

Oaxaca, along the southeast coast, is one of the poorest of Mexico’s 31 states. MI is active in Oaxaca’s Mixteca region, a remote mountainous area where water access is severely limited and lack of economic opportunity has led to crippling deforestation.

Founded in 1998, MI started with reforestation projects in four Mixteca communities of subsistence farmers. Today the ministry is active in 40 communities on projects ranging from family gardens, latrines, and ecological stoves to fish farms, dental clinics, and microfinance.

“People said we were crazy for planting trees,” said Castellanos. “We do much with little. As when Jesus fed the 5,000, God multiplies out of nothing.”

Word of watering mouths

To see for myself, I cram into a white Chevy Colorado 4×4 pickup with five MI workers carpooling to remote Mixteca communities. The two-hour drive northwest from Oaxaca is gorgeous: rolling folds of pine-covered 8,000-foot Sierra Madre mountains as far as the eye can see. We turn off the highway at a magenta Catholic shrine just past Kilometer 140, and descend the windy dirt road down to the narrow valley below. It’s a land of acidic red soil and seasonal streams. The April sun pushes 100 degrees.

Near the barrio (village) of Rio Plaza, we begin where MI starts with most communities: a family garden. Each features 12 varieties of vegetables, such as onions, broccoli, red cabbage, and lettuce. Silver plastic wraps five garden beds 60 feet long. Holes poked with an aluminum can on a stick allow the garden plants to emerge. A drip irrigation system conserves water and reduces labor.

The garden’s design keeps the soil soft, allowing the produce to grow bigger. I pluck a red cabbage and sink my teeth into it. The taste is fresh and organic, with a sharp bite.

Past a few bends in the road is an invernadero, a greenhouse run by a Mixteca cooperative called Yute Nuu Yavi. The local climate is too cold or varied for tomatoes. The 1,000 8-foot-tall vines spanning 12 rows are mostly barren, a testament to the just-completed third harvest at MI’s largest greenhouse. The harvest is timed for the high point of the tomato season when demand and thus prices are highest.

The garden and greenhouse are carved into the mountainside along the road so passersby will see them and become interested in MI’s techniques. An example of this word-of-mouth advertising is Eunize Lopez Martinez. The 42-year-old mother of seven lives up the road. Next to a mound of smoking dirt, where her husband is making charcoal, is her garden.

“I never planted a plant until MI taught me how to have a family garden,” said Lopez Martinez. Before she had to walk to the weekly traveling market, where produce was often unavailable, too expensive, or of poor quality. Sometimes her family would go weeks without vegetables. Now they have vegetables for lunch and dinner daily. And passersby ask her how they can get a garden of their own.

Over the next ridge is the village of Monte Flor, a sprawling community of 1,500 where 10 volunteers are building a cement water tank that will collect rainwater from the corrugated roof of a nearby house. Four men mix cement, water, and gravel while others use rods of rebar to pack the mixture down to the bottom of wooden forms. The 10-foot diameter tank takes one day to build and three days for the concrete to set.

Group leader Carlos explains that local families maintain small gardens near the river below but must walk three hours from their mountaintop homes. The 400-gallon tank allows for gardens near the house, as the rainy season will provide enough water to last the dry season, from March to July. The tank will be Monte Flor’s third, following 14 latrines and 26 stoves built since 2008.

The Monte Flor community started working with MI after seeing the results of its projects in neighboring Rio Plaza.

“This is the multiplication effect,” said Raul Casaos Martinez, MI’s family project coordinator. “People saw the impact in the lives of recipients and wanted their own. It’s like evangelizing.”

Observing the tank construction is Gumercindo Martinez, a 33-year-old with an affable smile and rumpled cowboy hat. He lives a four-hour walk from Monte Flor, but heard about MI’s projects by word of mouth.

“I saw the onions from the family gardens. I was amazed at how big they were,” he said. After training on family gardens in Rio Plaza, today he is growing his own cauliflower and onions.

Just down the hill, Don Claudio Hernandez, 49, shows off his month-old ecological stove, which features a barrel lid for baking, two makeshift burners, and a flue. The corrugated aluminum roof of his pine slat house used to be silver. Today it is solid black, a testament to the smoke that his wife and six children inhaled for years as they cooked over a hearth.

His MI stove will improve their health, as will the water tank outside the one-room house’s only door. He learned of both MI projects from Epigmenio Miguel Lopez, the farmer of the family garden we saw first.

The MI projects are partnerships, not handouts. In the case of the gardens, families contribute 30 percent of the 150 peso starting costs for seeds, and MI the remaining 70 percent and the training. The families are responsible for labor.

Next we descend to the valley to visit a tree nursery in Ojo De Agua where a rotating three-person team of caretakers is raising 30,000 seedlings, making it the largest of MI’s seven nurseries. Six tiers showcase the eight-month progression from seeds shaded by netting to saplings in the open sun. The species — cedar and Oaxacan, Michoacán, and Suedostro pines — are commercial trees whose long needles are used for making baskets and other handcrafts.

The caretakers point to areas in the surrounding mountains where batches of thousands of trees from previous years have been planted. Reforestation is done by churches and schools who coordinate weekly blitzes by volunteer planters. They are waiting for the wet season’s first rains to plant the next batch in July.

“Before we saw the hills nearly empty,” said a former nursery caretaker who lives nearby. “Now we can see trees growing again. It looks beautiful.”

Beside green pastures

At a Wednesday night church service back in Rio Brava, about 20 people fill the 12 wooden pews of the Presbyterian church. Men leave their straw cowboy hats outside the door. We stand and read Psalm 8 from the Reina Valera, then sing three hymns before hearing a message and ending the service reciting Psalm 23.

Over a late-night dinner of giant quesadillas, 42-year-old pastor Efrain Ortiz Lopez sits on his porch under a bare light bulb among his seven kids, ages 12 to 2, and talks about how MI has helped his church. Ortiz has used MI materials and staff to evangelize local youth for four years. The MI pickup bed currently has a load of balls to distribute at the church’s upcoming Children’s Appreciation Day.

“Children are very important,” said Ortiz. “They now understand that they are children of God. I can see the difference in their lives.”

The next morning we read Psalm 24 as a devotional over a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs, beans, and bananas. Corn tortillas are hand-pressed and baked on an oil-drum stove as we speak.

His wife, Eunize, whose garden we visited the day before, shows off the basket she wove from foot-long pine needles as part of an MI women’s microfinance group. “Before we just made charcoal and didn’t have enough money to raise the family,” she said. “I had seen the baskets but never thought I could learn to make them. Now I can help my husband raise the family.”

Seeing shoots

After breakfast we drive through El Oro, MI’s first partnering community. We pass a Presbyterian church with a 70,000-liter tank that collects rainwater from the roof for community use since MI helped built it in 2006. Along the ridge we pass the hopeful symbols of cement gray tanks and sky blue latrines, which seemingly alternate with the discouraging symbols of woodpiles and bags of charcoal.

Leaves fall from the dry trees as songbirds and woodpeckers flit about and the sun bakes off the morning mist. About 15 minutes later we hit the edge of the remnant forest and the frontier of the deforested wasteland: Loma de Ardilla.

Here signs of change abound. At the village entrance, a dozen goats are clustered in an MI-inspired wooden pen rotated around the hilltop so that their droppings might create a thick bed of fertilizer for future planting.

The village’s Presbyterian church began hosting workshops of Church, Community, and Change, a Floresta curriculum developed to transform the physical and spiritual environment of communities such as Loma de Ardilla. The workshops teach church members to first identify the needs of their community, then develop the resources to meet those needs.

MI trained the church members as they built a cement water tank in 2006 that provides 22 families with clean water, saving them the long hike down to the valley. The project was followed by 10 ecological latrines and 22 ecological stoves in 2007. Recipients are selected by ballot, and benefits are shared among Christians and non-Christians.

We have an impromptu lunch on the hand-carved pews as a strong breeze blows through the wall-less chapel toward the deforested hills. We dig into bowls of mole amarillo containing chicken from an MI community project that trains locals to raise better chickens in coops. Those who do well at the community garden can receive a chicken project.

In the valley sits Loma Chimedia, where we visit a women’s microfinance group, one of 12 run by MI.

Isadora shows off her table decorations made out of corn husks, pine needles, and flowers. She has spent three hours of her free time from daily chores each day since 2004 on her handcrafts, which she sells in nearby towns. Her yarn purses take one month to make. Her bracelets take five minutes.

“I’m very glad to learn how to make things that I didn’t know I could do,” said the hardworking mother of four. “I feel better about myself, I have more self-confidence, and now I can help with the costs of the house.”

Loma Chimedia first partnered with MI five years ago over their most basic need: access to water. A water tank was followed by family gardens, latrines, and ecological stoves. Then a tomato-producing greenhouse, MI’s first of 20.

“Now I can’t imagine carrying buckets of water or using the same old latrines. We have a better quality of life because we have water,” said Alier, 26, president of Grupo Xe’e Xiki, which operates the greenhouse. The Catholic group will use proceeds to build a training center to preserve their Mixteca language.

Next we visit Rio Yutanume, where MI helps an independent missionary church provide its neighbors with family gardens and chicken projects.

“For me this work is a testimony,” said Eracleo Garcia, 73, pastor of the church since he came to faith in 1984 after healing from a kidney ailment. “We can evangelize through these projects.”

The adobe church with red metal doors built in 1992 offers the Community, Church, and Change workshop to helps its 40 attending families identify community members in need and bring MI projects to them.

“We share projects and share the gospel so they can have a better quality of life,” said Garcia. Seven chicken projects have led to conversions. A greenhouse project brought two families to faith. This weekend Garcia is going to a nearby community where recipients of MI projects have asked to learn more about God.

MI doesn’t evangelize or disciple directly. Instead they connect people to the local church. “Even though I don’t always share the gospel with the Bible in my hand, my attitude is even more effective,” said Eduardo Lopez Cortez, who coordinates MI’s reforestation projects.

This partnership is healing souls as it heals the land. “We are completing the commandment of God to serve our neighbor,” said MI director Castellanos. “We know that as Christians we are the body of Christ. Churches do worship, preaching, and evangelism. MI helps meet people’s physical needs. One hand helps the other hand, and together they complete the integral mission.”

Jeremy Weber is associate editor for news at Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

This article accompanies one on Floresta’s work, “Trees of Life: How Floresta integrates development, discipleship, and creation care overseas.”

Earlier this week, Purpose Driven Connection, the partnership between the Readers Digest Association and Saddleback church’s Rick Warren, announced a transition to digital online content only, dropping the high-cost print edition.

The final print edition of PDC is due to roll out across the 2009 holiday season. No matter how you look at it, this decision is a hard pill to swallow for Saddleback and RDA.

When RDA and Saddleback first announced their partnership, hopes were (in retrospect) running way ahead of the economic realities of 2009. Since then, RDA has downsized and it is currently wading through bankruptcy proceedings.

The secular press has been rather doubtful from the get-go about a strategic relationship between old media (RDA) and faith-based media (such as Purpose Driven and other mega-church content providers).

Here are comments from a writer for Folio magazine, a trade publication that tracks magazine publishing:

I asked the spokesperson directly if RDA considers the Purpose Driven Connection venture a failure. Of course he said it wasn’t a failure. From an operational point of view, he said that shutting down an otherwise interesting product that doesn’t meet financial criteria “is every bit as important as green-lighting others to go forward.” He also said RDA gleaned “proof of concept” insights into serving a community like Warren’s that’s bound by faith or philosophy.

“We believe that we could take this forward with a community that had a somewhat different characteristic—larger, more open to purchasing memberships, more universal, global, etc.,” the spokesperson said. More open to purchasing memberships. That might be key. This shouldn’t suggest, though, that Saddleback hasn’t had any success from the venture. The church said subscribers to the Daily Hope devotions newsletter have grown to 400,000 since Purpose Driven Connection launched early this year.

If not for monetary reasons, I think the loss for RDA is substantial, despite the positive lessons it says it learned from giving it a shot. It has to be tough, especially for a company that’s now steering itself out of bankruptcy, to watch a product it called one of its most important ventures ever fail after only four issues.

I haven’t personally talked with Rick himself about PDC. But he strikes all positive notes in his press release, saying:

“Our biggest discovery was learning that people prefer reading our content online rather than in print, because it is more convenient and accessible,” said Warren. “Cell phones now allow us to take content everywhere. And, from our viewpoint, an online magazine allows us to minister to people internationally; provide more content and features than we could fit in a print magazine; create interaction and two-way dialogue; and offer it for free.

“So when we heard the feedback and noticed subscriptions to the print magazine lagging behind Internet usage, in spite of strong retail newsstand sales, we jumped at the chance to go all digital,” Warren concluded. “Thankfully, Reader’s Digest was willing to help us make the transition.”

Some dreams die hard. Others are kept alive by human imagination (and capital).

Just yesterday, I received in the mail news that the Christian Science Monitor, which has transitioned to all-online, was about to launch – guess what? A new, in-print, weekly news magazine.

It seems to me that the reality check for RDA and Purpose Driven is that they serve different masters. One is profit-driven. The other is change-driven. The partnership wasn’t working institutionally.

In the current economic climate, I think hybrids are more important than partnerships. (Think Ford Fusion and Toyota Prius.) This means that a hybrid of old media and new media calls for innovative use of resources, but often does not require organizational partnerships in the same way they were done years ago.

Isn’t that what the church might learn from Apple and Google?