For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George July 21, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Facebook post by daughter Melissa of great grandson Jesse

There was this guy pushing a peanut…
On Friday morning, 53-year-old Bob Salem became the fourth person to push a peanut to the top of Pikes Peak with his nose. It took seven days—mostly at night to avoid distracting questions and requests for selfies from passersby—and the peanut in question was actually about a dozen peanuts, as he lost and ate a few along the way.
There’s a lot we could say about this, but our first question is: fourth!?

So much for bingeing on Netflix…
…as media multiplies, so does competition for attention. And as competition for our attention multiplies, content is no longer optimized for beauty or art or even enjoyment—but rather for its addictive qualities.
…we regularly mistake this addictive media for entertainment. There’s some psychological function deep in our brains that tells us, “Well, I just spent six hours watching this show, I must like it a lot.” When, no, its script is actually a mediocre piece of hot trash and you’re being manipulated by cliffhangers and bad writing for hours on end to keep watching. The same way you get hijacked into scrolling through social media way more than you’d actually like to, your brain gets hijacked to watch “just one more episode” to find out if so-and-so really died or not.
When everything is measured in terms of engagement, content will be optimized for addictiveness. Not entertainment or artistic merit. Not intellectual substance or creativity. Pure, plain addictiveness. That means we, the consumers, get a higher quantity of more predictable, less innovative, less interesting art in our lives.
Mark Manson

As Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

Saved by Pickleball?
Can pickleball save America? More than 1 million people picked up the sport—played with paddles and a Wiffle-like ball—during the pandemic, bringing the total number of pickleheads in the United States to 5 million. “Robert D. Putnam’s book ‘Bowling Alone,’ from 2000, mourns the loss of beloved community groups—a bridge club in Pennsylvania, an N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Roanoke, a sewing charity league in Dallas—which, for decades, fostered norms of reciprocity, trustworthiness, and general good will,” Sarah Larson writes in The New Yorker. “A craving for such feelings is a key part of pickleball’s popularity. At one tournament, a senior pro told me, ‘The most important thing about this sport is the friendships. I just lost my husband a week ago, and the only reason I’m here today is because of my pickleball community lifting me up.’ She got teary. ‘There’s no other sport like that. Tennis isn’t like that. You go to a tennis tournament, it’s them against you.’”
The Dispatch

Consent is not enough
Even when it goes well, sex is complicated. It involves our bodies, minds and emotions, our connections to each other and our deepest selves. Despite the (many, and popular) arguments that it’s only a physical act, it is clear to almost anyone who has had it that sex has vast consequences, some of which can last long after an encounter ends. Over the past several decades, our society has come to believe that consent—as a legal standard and a moral requirement—could somehow make our most unruly activity more manageable. But it was never going to be that easy.
Christine Emba

A glimmer of hope
…in every single argument and controversy under the sun, reality gets a vote. Culture wars are ultimately won or lost not by online arguments but through their real-world consequences, and the position that leads to greater human misery tends to lose.
I don’t mean to claim that cultural arguments have no effect. We shouldn’t simply stand by while bad ideas do their terrible work. Good faith engagement can both mitigate the damage when a misguided cultural trend is ascendant and provide a robust alternative moral framework when frustrated and alienated citizens seek a different path.
The key phrase above is “good faith.” When human beings turn from the broken path, they don’t want to be greeted by a taunting crowd that’s drinking their tears, but rather by a compassionate community that humbly recognizes its own mistakes. Peak woke should be replaced by tolerance and pluralism, consent culture by love and respect.
David French

“the noetic effects of sin.”
The word “noetic” comes from the Greek word noein, “to perceive.” The noetic effects of sin concern how sin affects our perception.
Most of us think of sin in moral terms. Sin is a moral failure, missing the moral mark, disobeying God’s law. But the Bible and the Christian tradition also describes sin as having perceptual consequences. Sin affects our vision. Phrased differently, sin has epistemological consequences, affecting our ability to know and how we envision the truth.
Simply, the noetic effect of sin is perceptual damage. Blurred vision. A wounded mind.
This changes how we might think about being “lost.” Growing up in a conservative Christian tradition, “lost” has generally meant for me “damned,” heading to hellfire. But from a noetic perspective, lost can simply mean lost. As in, you have no idea where you are or where you are going. Maybe because it is dark and you can’t see. Maybe because you lost your compass and map. The issue is perceptual and epistemological.
This is a helpful shift of focus. When I describe the world as being “lost,” I don’t have to think of people as being particularly depraved or going to hell. I can, rather, simply see people as lost, noetically lost–rudderless, confused, wandering, and directionless.
Richard Beck

To live is to stand before an endless sea of possibilities, and it’s your responsibility to choose a defining commitment and enter the anxiety that lies between who you are and who you might become.
Ryan Snider

The single most important actions in the life of this world,
on any given day, are found in the various places where the people of God have gathered and the Divine Liturgy is being offered “on behalf of all and for all.” Our modern sensibilities have oftentimes reduced the Liturgy to a “filling station,” providing us with energy and inspiration so that we can go out into the world and do “our real work.” These are two competing visions – and the first one – the ancient one – is increasingly ignored in its proper role.
If we understood the true nature of prayer – our communion with God – we would find every possible occasion to pray. When we enter into prayer in the presence of God, we take our place among the righteous. We become God’s salt and God’s light.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Zero SUM- NOT!
There is no scarcity. There is no shortage. No lack of love,
of compassion, of joy in the world. There is enough.
There is more than enough.

Only fear and greed make us think otherwise.

No one need starve. There is enough land and enough food.
No one need die of thirst. There is enough water. No one
need live without mercy. There is no end to grace. And we
are all instruments of grace. The more we give it, the more
we share it, the more we use it, the more God makes. There
is no scarcity of love. There is plenty. And always more.
Rachel Harding recalls her mother’s vision

View from the front porch…
July 23 marks another 60th anniversary. On that day in 1962, I was hired as an hourly employee at at the Ford Motor Company Nashville Glass Plant.
I wrote this post in 2009:

It was 47 years ago today that I walked into the Ford Motor Company Nashville Glass Plant as a new employee. It was both exciting and scary. Getting to work at Ford was a blessing. The opportunity did not come not because I had been recruited for my skills and talents. Joe Clark, a good friend of Ann’s family worked there and had the influence to get me hired. He literally sneaked into the employment office past others waiting for an opportunity to go to work. Ann and I did not have two pennies to rub together with a baby on the way. We were living with the Clark’s until we could get on our feet. I guess I couldn’t reach my bootstraps.

For the next 36 years 5 months and 8 days my life was pretty much defined by “I work at Ford’s”. My work experience was rewarding both materially and personally. I am thankful for the opportunity that came my way and it is good to be reminded that it was only because of the graciousness of others that it was possible.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George July 14, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Quit thinking so much. *If thinking would solve the problem and make things less complicated, you’d be through by now.*

It’s not too late
We have news that eight-year-old you would have loved: Hasbro announced yesterday that, starting this fall, you’ll be able to put a 3D-printed version of your own head on any of the toy company’s signature action figures.
Only $59.99 (plus tax) to transform into the Red Ranger, G.I. Joe, or Princess Leia? Total steal.
The Dispatch

Modern Catechesis
“People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.” Alan Jacobs

Exposed
The Dobbs decision has revealed fault lines in American Christianity. These fault lines lay just below the surface for a long while, but are now clearly exposed. As long as abortion was legal by Supreme Court decree, it was possible to identify as pro-life but keep that commitment at the level of theory; one could hold pro-life views but not be perceived as a threat. All that has now changed. To identify as pro-life post-Dobbs is not simply to hold an opinion many regard as wrong; it is to be part of an act of political and social “oppression.” And predictably, many Christians are feeling the need to “nuance” their relationship to the overturning of Roe.
Carl Trueman

Funeral Sermons
Funeral sermons do need to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. They certainly can’t tell the whole truth. But they should do what I had intended—and failed—to do: acknowledge hurt, pain, and brokenness when appropriate, and with pastoral sensitivity.
God’s love can’t be reduced to free-floating aphorisms sewn into a blanket. It’s an active, redeeming love, its beauty most luminous in relationship to our flaws, shortcomings, and sins, which it forgives and heals. If that harder subject matter is off-limits in a funeral sermon, then so too is the deepest truth of the gospel.
Roger Owens

Fundamentalist
Here is one way I identify a fundamentalist church or individual. There are three types of Christian beliefs: essentials (dogmas), non-essentials (denominational doctrines), opinions (definitely non-essential even if interesting beliefs). Fundamentalists empty the “opinion” category and move everything they believe into the “essentials” category. (Some moderate fundamentalists will leave some non-essentials in the middle category.) Liberals, on the other hand, move everything into the “opinion” category, leaving the essentials category virtually empty. (I’m talking about doctrines here, not ethics.) Moderates are those who make serious, thoughtful effort to put the right beliefs in the right categories. We are very few.
Roger Olson

Following Jesus
I don’t mind people pointing to Jesus as an ideal moral exemplar. But problems come when we reduce Jesus to being a moral guru or an enlightened human being. We see Jesus standing at a summit of moral progress with a smooth road leading up to him. We climb, as heroes, toward that summit. We are on a journey of moral and spiritual self-actualization. But in the Christian story, this entire enterprise is radically called into question. We can’t climb. We can’t self-actualize. We’re stuck. And so Christ comes down to us and dies for the ungodly.
Richard Beck

Prospective Converts
Tim Keller writes, “The United States is slowly running out of traditionally-minded Americans to be converted, and conservative Protestants on the whole are unwilling or unable to reach the highly secular and culturally different.”

Many of the things that you believe right now—in this very moment—are utterly wrong.
I can’t tell you precisely what those things are, of course, but I can say with near certainty that this statement is true. To understand this uncomfortable reality, all you need is some basic knowledge of history.
At various times throughout the history of humankind, our most brilliant scientists and philosophers believed many things most eight-year-olds now know to be false: the earth was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, smoking cigarettes was good for digestion, humans were not related to apes, the planet was 75,000 years old, or left-handed people were unclean.
Around 100 years ago, doctors still thought bloodletting (that is, using leeches or a lancet to address infections) was useful in curing a patient. Women were still fighting for the right to vote, deemed too emotional and uneducated to participate in democracy, while people with darker skin were widely considered subhuman. The idea that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way was unfathomable, and the fact the earth had tectonic plates that moved beneath our feet was yet to be discovered.
Issac Saul

Inflation Casualties
Nearly two-thirds of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. An estimated 41 percent — 135 million people — are considered either poor or low-income. Eighteen percent of households earn less than $25,000 a year. Even before the pandemic hit, one in four Black families had a net worth of zero.
Rachel Poser NYT

No short term solution
“The US hasn’t built a full-scale refinery since 1977. Designing and constructing the labyrinth of pipelines, tanks, and distillation columns would easily cost $10 billion and take as long as a decade,” they write. “During the pandemic, plants that distill crude into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel shut down around the world, and construction of new ones was postponed. The closures were especially acute in the US, where old facilities suffered irreparable damage from breakdowns and hurricanes while others were converted to produce renewable diesel. … ‘My personal view is there will never be another new refinery built’ in the US, [Chevron CEO Mike] Wirth said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in June. ‘You’re looking at committing capital 10 years out, that will need decades to offer a return for shareholders, in a policy environment where governments around the world are saying, ‘We don’t want these products.’”

View from the Front Porch

In a recent Sunday morning worship service. It occurred to me that in 1972 I would have been wearing a suit, maybe 3-piece, white dress shirt with a Countess Mara tie and polished dress shoes. My leather bound Bible, with index tabs to facilitate quick reference, at my side. Highlighters and a fountain pen to take notes. Today, my Sunday morning worship clothes are a casual collared shirt with slacks and casual shoes— no socks. Instead of a Bible i bring a journal to take notes. Of course my iPhone is handy with Bible apps and numerous translations.
I am pondering what is different about me today than 50 years ago. Hopefully more than appearances.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George July 7, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

metanoia
is the word translated as “repentance” in the Bible. The root concept of the word means “to turn,” associated with a “change” or “turn” of heart and mind. For Peterson, metanoia is a sign of humble fallibility–a willingness to admit error, to learn, to grow. That’s a really healthy posture when life hits you with some hard truths, especially truths about your own failings and limitations. Here’s Peterson:
The devil, traditional representation of evil, refuses recognition of imperfection, refuses to admit “I was in error, in my action, in my representation”; accepts as a consequence of unbending pride, eternal misery–refuses metanoia, confession and reconciliation…
Such refusal–the inability to say, “I was wrong, I am sorry, I should change,” means the death of hope, existence in the abyss…
The act of metanoia is adaptation itself: admission of error, founded on faith in ability to tolerate such admission and its consequences…
Richard Beck

A spiritual discipline is
…a repeated practice that nourishes one’s soul and expands one’s sense of the grandeur of God and the connectedness of creation. Dallas Willard
Well done. Willard sometimes spoke of the disciplines as creating openness to God and to grace and to the Spirit.

Dissent
Inherent to all traditional religion is the peril of stagnation. What becomes settled and established may easily turn foul. Insight is replaced by clichés, elasticity by obstinacy, spontaneity by habit. Acts of dissent prove to be acts of renewal.
It is therefore of vital importance for religious people to voice and to appreciate dissent. And dissent implies self-examination, critique, discontent. Creative dissent comes out of love and faith, offering positive alternatives, a vision.
Self-criticism is quite rare in the history of religion, yet it is necessary to keep religion from its natural tendency toward arrogant self-assurance—and eventually idolatry, which is always the major sin for biblical Israel. We must also point out, however, that mere critique usually deteriorates into cynicism, skepticism, academic arrogance, and even post-modernistic nihilism. So be very careful and very prayerful before you own any self-image of professional critic or anointed prophet! Negativity will do you in.
Richard Rohr

Followers of Jesus are the light of the world…a city set on a hill…a lamp so that others may glorify God, unless you’re a really cool band of Christians, and then you can just sing about a vague spirituality of love which cannot be distinguished from any other positive way of thinking.
Matt Redmond

Living in Community
Until and unless Christ is experienced as a living relationship between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness toward another, through concrete bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on by words, sermons, institutions, or ideas.
Living in community means living in such a way that others can access me and influence my life. It means that I can get “out of myself” and serve the lives of others. Community is a world where kinship with each other is possible. By community I don’t mean primarily a special kind of structure, but a network of relationships. Sadly, on the whole, we live in a society that’s built on competition, not on community and cooperation.
Richard Rohr

Modesty Phenomenon
David Brooks dives into the false modesty phenomenon, and why it’s found such a natural home online. “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and especially if you’re around the high-status world of the achievatrons, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the form,” he writes. “The first rule is that you must never tweet about any event that could actually lead to humility. Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I went to a party, and nobody noticed me.’ Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I got fired for incompetence.’ The whole point of humility display is to signal that you are humbled by your own magnificent accomplishments. We can all be humbled by an awesome mountain or the infinitude of the night sky, but to be humbled by being in the presence of yourself—that is a sign of truly great humility.”

Gender Gap
Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic:
American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider. Last year, U.S. colleges enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Men accounted for more than 70 percent of the decline.
The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s—every year, in other words, that I’ve been alive. This particular gender gap hasn’t been breaking news for about 40 years. But the imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy, and society. The world has changed dramatically, but the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up. (Emphasis added.)

Reading
“Lest we approach our reading with a disposition of humility, hospitality, and receptivity, our reading will not of its own accord form us into ever-expanding, morally sharpened human beings we seek to become.”
…if you read a book to assert your superiority to the book you will do more damage to yourself than good. No one is wrong all the time, and if you think they are, don’t read them until you have acquired sufficient humility to receive their writing as a gift.
Scot McKnight

Reasoned Solutions
We could find reasoned solutions to many of the issues we face if we were willing to treat those who differ with dignity and grace and find solutions for the common good…but we would rather succumb in the fire and think we are noble in doing so…
Generally speaking…if you ask me a theological question, I’m going to refer you to sources to read so you can make your own conclusions…if you have no interest in doing the work…don’t ask the question…it’s obviously not that important to you, so don’t waste my time…
I have never lived in a time when people were more intellectually lazy and more convinced of their knowledge…and we wonder why things are circling the drain…
Phoenix Preacher

The Body of Christ
During the apostle Paul’s lifetime, the church was not yet an institution or structural grouping of common practices and beliefs. The church was a living organism that communicated the gospel through relationships.
Paul’s brilliant metaphor for this living, organic, concrete embodiment is the Body of Christ: “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them” (Romans 12:4–6). At the heart of this body, providing the energy that enlivens the community is “the love of God that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5).
Richard Rohr

View from the Front Porch
Occasionally my view gets disrupted. Recently we had a water main break. Occurring in the early morning hours, I found this scene when I came out to the porch. Our city’s maintenance crew completed repairs without any disruption for us. Waiting for the street to be patched.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 30, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

Roe v Wade
I have a lot of thoughts and emotions on today and in time I will share them as I parse them out. I can assure you they are multi-faceted and complex. Abortion has been an issue close to my heart for more than two decades and Bethany served many years as a crisis pregnancy counselor for various local resource centers and went through the process of an unplanned pregnancy herself which helped shape a lot of her views and subsequently many of my own. So this just can’t be a passing issue of minor theoretical relevance to me (I also was recommended to be aborted as an unborn baby myself, of which I am personally glad did not happen–albeit, point taken that I would have never known). So yes, thoughts and emotions.
That said, I want to implore people to remember this: no matter where you stand on today, it is more than likely (and if you don’t, you’re likely living in your own echo chamber) that you have a good deal of friends and loved ones that stand on the stark opposite of you as it relates to abortion. People you love, appreciate, and even respect as thoughtful people with genuine experiences and honest hearts.
Be patient. Be kind. This is a felt justice issue at all sides and simply condemning one side as being bigoted or evil stops any conversation from moving forward as they are or could equally condemn you under the same descriptors.
Unfortunately, I know people that will hang up friendships on this issue alone. And they will feel justified in doing so. But that doesn’t allow any potential listening to occur and even if you feel action is necessary, one should always be in a state of listening. If not to the ideas and thoughts that shape the perspective, to the person behind those ideas and thoughts.
Randy Hardman

A thesaurus
—here it comes—is for increasing one’s aliveness to words. Nothing more and nothing less. By going into the buzzing and jostling hive of words around a word, we get a purer sense of the word itself: its coloration, its interior, its traces of meaning. I looked up the verb excite just now and found the word in its affective (touch, move) and mechanical (electrify, galvanize) aspects. Which gets at who we are, as humans, doesn’t it? Feelings and circuitry.
As for you, blessed Mr. Roget, they say you had OCD. Of course you did. You were hooked, hung up, haunted by the hidden life of words: their selves, their stories, as told by the words they are closest to. You gave us a great gift. May you rest eternally among your synonyms.
James Parker – Atlantic

Hoofprint
You’ve heard of the carbon footprint. Now there is a development on the carbon hoofprint.
New Zealand has announced a plan to tax livestock burps in an effort to curb the country’s gas emissions.
Methane emissions from animals is a well-known issue. Cows alone are responsible for about 40% of those planet-warming gases globally — mainly through their burps.
UC Davis scientist Ermias Kebreab is something of a cow whisperer who has spent two decades studying the greenhouse gas contributions of hoofed animals.
“If you tell me how much your animal is consuming, I can tell you pretty closely to the actual emissions using mathematical models,” he said.
“Most of the gas is formed in their stomach, so in their guts, particularly in the first chamber. And so they belch it out.”
He and other scientists have developed special diets and genetic predictions that could help reduce the methane formed in cow stomachs.
Now, New Zealand could become the first country to tax its way to fewer “four-legged” emissions.
There are seven times more cows and sheep than people in New Zealand. And on Wednesday, the country’s government released a draft plan to have farmers pay for their animals’ emissions, starting in 2025.
The group recommended the government “introduce a farm-level split-gas levy on agricultural emissions with built-in incentives to reduce emissions and sequester carbon.”
Past measures to tax farmers have met strong resistance, but New Zealand’s climate change minister James Shaw thinks it is a good start.

Extremism
The prevailing operative worldview is shaped by by a view of the world seen in the extreme. Facilitated by media and technology we see the world magnified to the extreme, an equivalent of bacterial bed buddies.

Dead skin cells, sweat, saliva, and more can turn your comfy bed into a petri dish for germs to grow. For instance, lab tests found that swabs from pillowcases unwashed for a week harbored 17,000 times more colonies of bacteria than samples taken from a toilet seat.
Information that is true, when viewed in the extreme is unreal. Unreal in the sense that it does not reflect reality. It is true but not real. Reality is the sum of all parts. Bacterial bed buddies are true but they do not reflect reality. They are one minuscule part of a vast reality, which when understood in proper perspective will produce healthy outcomes… enjoying freshly washed bed linens and sleeping soundly. Magnified out of proportion they produce anxiety, fear and disproportionate responses.
Rohr puts it this way: People with a distorted image of self, world, or God will be largely incapable of experiencing what is really real in the world. They will see things through a narrow keyhole. They’ll see instead what they need reality to be, what they’re afraid it is, or what they’re angry about. They’ll see everything through their aggressiveness, their fear, or their agenda. In other words, they won’t see it at all.
Society’s (our) gross misbehavior, comes from viewing a world distorted by extremism. Ever present media depicts what is true, but seldom real. We are lost in the desert desperately pursuing a mirage, living in panic, fighting bacterial bed buddies.
I have little optimism that secular society will embrace what is true and real. My hope lies in the transcendent reality of the Kingdom of God, where what is true and real dwells.

To that end, my prayer remains,
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
George Ezell

Prayer
A father has a young child whom he greatly loves.
Even though the child has hardly learned to speak,
           his father takes pleasure
           in listening to the child’s words.
Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Stained Beauty – Sexual Abuse and the Church- the Problem

George June 24, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

This post concludes this series. The subject has not been exhausted. Hopefully, it has raised awareness of the SBC crisis and its implications for all churches. I have no illusion my posts will have much impact, but I could not not write on the subject of sexual abuse in the church.
Conversation with clergy and others outside the bible belt revealed little awareness or interest in the SBC by their congregants. I suspect that is true for most non-SBC churches in the bible belt also. As one leader expressed, “I’m glad we don’t have to deal with this.”

I believe such responses are short-sighted. As is often the case, the presented problem is not the real problem. The SBC crisis is a problem but it is only the tip of an iceberg. I applaud the reform efforts that have been approved but they address symptoms not cause.

““‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”Revelation? 2:2-5 ESV (my emphasis)

The church is dying— the fragile local church,— not the Body of Christ, eternal and impervious. SBC is representative of every other church/denomination in western Christianity, not dead but on a trajectory that portends their demise. SBC by virtue of its size and influence is the leading edge of a tsunami . Receding waters that follow the initial crisis warn of what is to come. This is not a time to breathe a sigh of relief, but to repent.

That trajectory can be described in a number of ways:
— abandonment of “the love they had at first”.
— “I am the Vine, you are the branches…Separated, you can’t produce a thing. John 15 – MSG
— “..not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together…” Col 2:19 ESV
— “hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness…” Matt 23 ESV
Each of these offer insight into how the church (we) can be headed in the wrong direction and should be the subject of self-examination.

I want to suggest another trajectory— more subtle and insidious —secularization.
Secularization, for Christians, typically brings to mind culture war issues such as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and drug use and multiculturalism, diversity, and school curricula, to name a few. Though each is important in their own way, they are a distractions from the real problem. Charles Taylor in his tome A Secular Age defines the essence of a secular age as disenchantment. An unfamiliar term , the following is helpful in understanding disenchantment.

The default mode for the disenchanted age is reliance on human ability/reason and scientific laws as an ultimate source for answers to the problems of modernity. Utility, efficiency and production are our preimemmant tools to achieve full potential as human beings. Inherently, disenchantment rejects the transcendent. Mystery, fantasy, spirituality, faith, divinity, magic, art, namely, enchantment, is rendered irrelevant. our existence in a disenchanted age is reduced to one dimension, removing depth and meaning and distorting the purpose of our lives. (Emphasis is mine)
http://www.georgeezell.com/2019/02/defaulting-to-disenchantment/

That definition led me to make this assertion: Living in a disenchanted age is the most significant challenge we face in seeking a relationship with God. I have not changed my mind about that but have been affirmed by what is happening in Christian churches.

Expressed differently, disenchantment is loss of transcendence. Fr Stephen Freeman recently wrote about the loss of transcendence:

…a common element within human experience can be suggested by the word “transcendent.” It is an experience of beauty, of goodness, of wonder, that goes beyond itself. It demands poetry and art, songs and symbols. And despite our love of technology and the giftedness of our machines, it is the transcendent that speaks most fluently to our lives. We get out of bed in the morning because of transcendence (or so I believe). The loss of transcendence is something akin to death.
If, as I believe to be the case, we are created for wonder and transcendence, then it would seem that we are malnourished and suffer from starvation in our souls. If everything that troubles us within the “problem of evil” were to miraculously disappear, or even be diminished for the greater part, it would do nothing to nourish our souls. In a certain manner, we live in a vegetative state in which our “needs” are met while our true hunger is ignored.
The “belief” that is native to the human soul is among the casualties of the modern life-style (in all its aspects). We are not particularly nurtured with awe and wonder, but by the consumption of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Our pleasure/pain principle has created a shallow culture. In short, we do not suffer well (as in somehow becoming better, more compassionate people), nor are our pleasures remotely sublime. Two words: reality tv. We have become a people among whom the cheap-shot versions of atheism easily prosper.
The experience of belief begins, I think, with the experience of transcendence, the questions of meaning and significance. It is a conversation that struggles to find its way in a sea of commodities and mundane pleasure. We are not immune to the transcendent – but simply distracted.
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2022/06/22/healing-the-soul-and-unbelief/

As a Christian, I believe there is a transcendent reality. An awareness that we exist and recognize our need for meaning and purpose which is unfulfilled in a disenchanted reality. This is our common need which can only be fulfilled in the transcendent.

Christianity, at least western Christianity, navigating a secular age has chosen a trajectory leading to increased reliance on human ability/reason and scientific laws as an ultimate source for answers to the problems of modernity. Utility, efficiency and production are our preimemmant tools to achieve full potential as human beings.

It is my contention the problem for SBC and western Christianity is loss of transcendence.
Admittedly debatable, I find no joy my conclusion. For if true, Christian faith devoid of transcendence portends fulfillment of Nietzsche’s infamous declaration, “God is dead”.
Ironically, Nietzsche believed that scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had effectively ‘killed’ the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. (Wikipedia)

Perhaps the Apostle John writing to today’s western churches would say: ” I have this against you, that are abandoning our transcendent GOD. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, you will lose your place in the Kingdom of God, unless you repent.”

STILL ON THE JOURNEY