At my church the other day, the pastor said that next Sunday he wanted to talk about his “vision” for the future. Oh. I know what that means: building programs. I’ve seen this before several times. His vision will probably be about buying more property or constructing bigger auditoriums. There was a big chunk of land just up the street that they had been interested in, although the owner was still reluctant to sell. It seems that things invariably reach this stage when churches get to a certain size.

Now the church we’ve been attending indeed has become fairly large, but not quite “mega-church” yet. Currently we are having three Sunday services in the morning, and the auditorium holds close to five hundred people or more. Also, since the church is signed up with the Willow Creek Association, it’s a safe bet that the pastoral staff completely subscribe to the general Willow Creek “church growth” philosophy—that ever bigger is always better. Will the members get to vote on the building program? Possibly, but I haven’t heard yet.

Speaking of buildings, what churches have on their properties nowadays are almost always auditoriums of some kind, big or small. Mega-churches, on the other hand, can be small cities almost, stretched out on enormous properties with huge auditoriums, and having wide parking lots, schools, bookstores, and offices, even restaurants and coffee-shacks and businesses on the side. But there is one thing I don’t think you will ever see, and that is cemeteries. Churches no longer take care of burying the dead, and churches don’t have sextons or fossors.

If one looks back in history, it wasn’t always this way. Let’s take Britain for example. Look at some of the old parish churches that dot the English landscape and almost always there was a graveyard situated on the church grounds, usually somewhere in eyesight of the sanctuary. Often one had to pass tombstones on either side of the walkway to get to the main entrance. To go to church on Sunday meant encountering some reminder of our mortality just over your shoulder. You knew that when you died the brethren at your church would take part in arranging your burial beneath consecrated ground. And when your surviving relatives went to church, they would pass by your tombstone and see your name inscribed there, along with your date of birth followed by the date of your death. Back in those days the term “xtian burial” had a very definite meaning, and life was recognized as something fleeting, and our stay in this world as only very temporary.

It seems, especially in the United States—at least everywhere I’ve been—that churches no longer have graveyards located on their properties. Instead we have asphalt parking lots, somewhere to park our massive, shining SUVs. Yet there is nowhere to park your mortal remains as they await the resurrection of the dead. It’s a little strange that things have turned out this way because I thought that the resurrection of the dead was central to the whole xtian Gospel, what our core message revolved around. But going to church no longer has any reminders that we’re all going to die. In fact, the whole messy business of sickness and death has been pushed off to be handled, out of sight, by the medical industry and the funerary professionals, who charge exorbitant prices, the first to ameliorate the suffering, and the second to hide its ravages with clever makeup. No longer do the brothers and sisters of your church take your mortal remains, bathe them, lay them out naked on the table, and lovingly wrap them in shrouds and grave clothes, put them in a coffin, and bury them in the cool green earth. Once death was a serious matter of keen interest to xtians, and it was a community affair for the whole church; burying the dead once was one of the Church’s important ministries. Back when Xnty started, xtians in Rome were even meeting in catacombs, which were vast underground necropolises for burying the dead. Imagine what your worship experience would be like if next to your pew there were sarcophagi, or if the interior of your mega-church was also serving as a large mausoleum. It’s true it wouldn’t be very “seeker sensitive”, but definitely there would be more depth of commitment. The Roman xtians didn’t seem to have a problem evangelizing their neighbors. Somehow they got them to come to church, even though it was located down there with the sepulchers.

What does the word “secularism” mean? Well, the word “secular” originally had as its core meaning the idea of an “age”. In fact, in astronomy the word “secular” is still used in this sense when refering to changes in the parameters of the planetary orbits that shift gradually over long periods of time or “ages”. But “secular” also came to refer to human life as it pertained to this present age or world in contrast to life in the age to come. And nowadays “secularism” really designates the general and pervasive attitude that only life in this present world is all the matters or should ever hold our attention. On the other hand, being a xtian means, or should mean, that one has realized that such an attitude is at its essence erroneous, and that this present life cannot be even properly understood except by reference to the Age that is to come. If we had cemeteries brushing up adjacent to our church auditoriums, would it help to counteract the overwhelming secularism of our ultramundane society? I think it might help. A cemetery is a reminder of the supreme fact that this life comes to an end, which is something most Americans very much like to keep from intruding into their consciousnesses. As the Scriptures say, it is appointed to man once to die, after that the Judgement. So if you can look out the window and see the tombstones as your pastor is preaching about this, I think the truth of it will strike a little more vividly, because you will know that it could just as easily be your tombstone out there that someone will be looking at someday. Imagine what evangelism would be like. Standing in contrast to the mad American scramble to acquire more things, there would be those somber reminders out there in the boneyard you walked past, as you went in through the front door, shook hands with the “greeter” in the foyer, and picked up the Sunday’s bulletin (packed with half a dozen different, multi-colored sheets of paper and what not)—yes, those silent reminders that life is short.

I doubt that I ever will get to vote on the pastor’s vision for the future. Probably things have been decided already, and I am sure the congregation will go along with whatever he has in mind. But there is this large section of vacant land just east of the church parking lot. If I were able to propose a motion for a vote, perhaps I’d suggest that the land be used for a cemetery, instead of a larger auditorium and bigger parking lot. With a little landscaping it would be quite lovely, and we could see it through the eastern windows.

In a jocular manner of speaking, I have refered to Lunar Skeletons as “the blog no one dares to read”. Well, actually there are a few brave souls out there who have read Lunar Skeletons, and a few of them have linked to me here. Since I am in the middle of trying to finish up with some of my reading, for now I would like to mention briefly some bloggers who have recently linked to Lunar Skeletons, and to thank them. Their blogs are called Bandits No More, Short Attention Span, and Dr. John Mark Reynolds. Thank you, Gentlemen.

I just recently finished “The Cube and the Cathedral” by George Weigel, which contains his thoughts about what’s happening in today’s post-xtian Europe. It’s a pretty good book and I recommend it, notwithstanding my pessimism about the future of Europe not being changed all that much by it. Also, I am currently working through the two volumes of William Granger Ryan’s excellent translation of “The Golden Legend” by the 13th Century Dominican monk Jacobus de Voragine. The “Golden Legend” was probably the most widely read book in medieval Europe, second only to the Holy Bible. Ryan’s translation into English is very beautiful. If you see it at the bookstore, buy it up immediately because they don’t publish books like this very often. For anyone seeking a better understanding of Medieval and Renaissance literature, reading “The Golden Legend” is absolutely indispensible Furthermore, Marva J. Dawn has written a very worthwhile book entitled “Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down—A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time”. Although the book was originally published back in the 1990s, and Dawn tends to write in a somewhat academic manner (she likes to use the word “dialectical” a lot), yet her book is full of so much uncommon good sense and insight. I liked it so much that I am giving it a second reading, and I really wished I could somehow cleverly conspire to get the pastor and the worship leaders at my church to read it as well.

Finally, I picked up and zoomed through Matthew Stover’s “Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith”, the official LucasFilm Ltd. novelization of Episode III. Since I knew that the plot of the movie would zip by so quickly it would be hard to catch it, I decided to read up on it before I saw the final installment of George Lucas’s galactic faerie tale, which I saw today. Given all the bloviation I’ve heard from film critics about Star Wars, there is only thing I have to say about it: people, you are taking things way too seriously.
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Long ago, I once promised blogger Russ Lipton, of the now mostly inactive coffeehouse-at-end-of-days, that I’d write about some of my thoughts about church music. Well, I finally got around to it.

I had read somewhere that Rick Warren once had polled his congregation over what music they listened to. So I went hunting around to see if I could find anything about this. Over at purposedriven.com, I did come across an article by Ron Sylvia, entitled “Determining Your Worship Style”. Here is a quote:

Match your music to those you want to reach. Research what music they listen to during the week. Rick Warren discovered this at the beginning of Saddleback Church by surveying his congregation. He asked the congregation to write the radio station they listen to most on their communication cards and place it in the offering. He discovered that the overwhelming majority of people in his church listened to top 40 radio stations. Hymns would not reach these people without a church background.

First of all, I have no problems with “non-traditional” music as such. Although it’s possible that Warren might have found out what people prefered to hear on the radio, yet I see a small problem with Warren’s procedure of basing things on a poll: most people cannot sing the sort of stuff they like to hear on the radio. Take “contemporary xtian music”, for example, which is nearly all that is played on commercial xtian radio anymore. Much of the music is indeed beautiful, and the artists who create it are proficient, and often highly talented and creative. Using Warren’s procedure, it would follow that the music used in church should be patterned after this because it’s closer to what people prefer to hear; indeed, the commercial stations wouldn’t be playing it unless it had a wide audience. My observation is that churches often pattern their musical styles in precisely this way, with the muscians often playing selections heard on the xtian radio, and even occasionally “secular” radio stations. And I would agree that the music is often beautiful to hear, and the musicians who perform it in church very talented and proficient. Nevertheless, many people out in the congregation are not as musically proficient as the musicians up on the stage. And when the music in church becomes too difficult to sing along with, many people don’t bother to participate—they really can’t. Consequently, this ends up cutting off many people from participating in communal worship, and thus they are reduced to merely spectating. As an example, Ms. Moonbones is musically gifted, far more than I am; in fact, she was once a member of a fairly good “a capella” ensemble, has had professional voice coaching, and so she can sing in tune and can handle some unusual or offbeat rhythms. But there often have been times in our church where the music was so difficult that even she had to give up, even though what the musicians were playing, up there on the podium, would sound great if it were broadcast on the radio.

I am not a musicologist, but I suspect there was a reason why many of the older “traditional hymns” often were written in a relatively few number of “times” such as “4/4”, often with a very regular beat. It was because experience had shown over the years that it is much easier for the common people to sing this way; everyone could participate. But things have changed since all the hymnals were thrown in the dumpster years ago. The music in church is great—it’s just too bad how often we end up being left out of it. Therefore, I have to respectfully disagree with Rick Warren’s utilitarian approach to this matter. Most people cannot sing everything they may like to hear on the radio. I thought the whole point behind music in church is to provide the one opportunity for the church to do communally here on Earth what is done in Heaven: that is, worship God. Yes, while music can be used for facilitating evangelism, music of itself was never meant to be its primary vehicle. Preaching was. Worship is really what sets the xtians apart from the world. People in the world will always be uncomfortable with it, but that’s because they are still standing outside the community of the redeemed, and they need to become part of that community. The community shouldn’t just indiscriminately model itself after every preferences the world might have.

So am I saying discard all “contemporary” styles of music? Absolutely not. All I am asking is that pastors and music leaders please take into consideration what facilitates worship, what the congregation can handle. Music that might be great for listening may not always be congregationally doable.
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Nobody reads Lunar Skeletons, yet if they did they might ask something like “You’re a xtian, so why don’t you run a nice, uplifting ‘xtian blog’ like everyone else?” Well, there are already a zillion uplifting xtian blogs out there, and I don’t see what purpose would be served by having yet another one. There are already far too many of them.

Another hypothetical reader might ask “why don’t you write nice articles on xtian apologetics, like so many others?” My answer to this question is multi-part.

First of all, I do appreciate that there are some xtian bloggers out there who do apologetics, and some of them seem to do it well. I say all power to them. However, I don’t do apologetics primarily because I don’t think that I am brainy enough for the task, nor do I have the time or the educational background needed to do it well; and secondarily because I just don’t have the patience for it. To use blogging as a vehicle for apologetics would require having comment boxes and dealing with the all the assorted riff-raff that turns up in them. Some bloggers, such as Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, seem to not mind dealing with it all. I just don’t think that I can. I am just too irascible.

Furthermore, and I can be wrong about this, but it doesn’t seem to me that blogging is really the best vehicle for doing apologetics. In reading the comments at Evangelical Outpost, for example, I have never discovered any instance when someone has said “Wow! your well-written and pursuasive explanations have really cleared up the many concerns and doubts I had. Yes, I am ready to believe in XP.” I am sure there might be somebody like this out there, somewhere, whom apologetical blogging was truely effective in evangelizing, but I have never encountered such a person. In fact, the comments at Evangelical Outposts, those in particular that are responding to one of Joe Carter’s articles dealing in apologetics, such as “Intelligent Design” for example, show plenty of people whose primary mission in life seems to be tearing down anything Joe Carter might have to say; and there is no indication that anyone is actually being persuaded by any of his articles. I commend Mr. Carter for his persistent efforts, despite the constant barrage of flak he receives. But in my case, I just don’t have the patience for this sort of stuff, which is another reason why I don’t do apologetics here on Lunar Skeletons.
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Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has been running a “Know Your Evangelical” series for some time now. Using the names he has been running, I did a funny experiment using Google, everybody’s favorite Internet search engine. I call it my “Know Your Heretics” list. In compiling this list, what I did is compute, using the hit numbers from Google, my Heresy Index Value, or HIV, for each evangelicals that Joe Carter has named as being in his series. Here is my procedure:

First, using Google, I obtained the following statistics:

• Get n(i) = Google hits for the ith evangelical using his name
• Get h(i) = Google hits for the ith evangelical using his name plus “heretic”

Next, I compute the following summations:

• N = SUM n(i) which is the total hits for all
• H = SUM h(i) which is the total hits for all with “heretic”

Next, for the ith evangelical, I compute the corresponding base number:

• b(i)= f * n(i)/N * h(i)/H for each evangelical

I use the number f as a suitable factor to keep the values of b(i) within a reasonable range. It turned out that 10e7 worked out about right.

Finally, I determine the median M of the b(i) values. Using the median M, next, for each evangelical, I computed his corresponding HIV, that is, his Heresy Index Value using the following formula:

• HIV = 100 * ( M - b(i) ) / M

Therefore, using the above procedure, I constructed the following table which shows my results—the name of each evangelical, and his (or her) corresponding Heresy Index Value. I sorted the names in the table by the ranking, from the least “heretical” at the top, down to the most “heretical” at the bottom.

Udo Middleman	100.0
John Kilner	99.9
Donald Bloesch	99.7
Os Guiness	99.6
Millard Erickson	99.3
Harold O.J. Brown	98.7
Francis Beckwith	98.6
Richard Mouw	94.9
John Mark Reynolds	94.9
Nancy Pearcey	94.0
Mark D. Roberts	83.6
Stanley Grenz	79.3
Carl Henry	71.4
Beverly LaHaye	59.5
Al Mohler	58.8
Kay Arthur	58.3
Greg Laurie	57.6
Adrian Rogers	56.8
Mark Noll	55.6
Greg Boyd	43.9
Marvin Olasky	35.9
Chuck Swindoll	32.7
J.P. Moreland	31.7
Alvin Plantinga	23.6
Tony Evans	22.7
Jack Hayford	18.4
Alister McGrath	1.9
Michael Horton	-1.9
Norman Geisler	-28.7
Dallas Willard	-61.6
D.A. Carson	-66.3
Bill Hybels	-82.6
George Barna	-102.4
John Stott	-105.0
Tony Campolo	-113.6
Richard Foster	-120.7
Ravi Zacharias	-158.6
Hank Hanegraaff	-174.2
J.I. Packer	-297.0
Phyllis Schlafly	-342.0
Charles Colson	-350.0
T.D. Jakes	-568.0
Jim Wallis	-577.0
Francis Schaeffer	-662.7
R.C. Sproul	-685.8
Cal Thomas	-705.3
Joyce Meyer	-977.3
Philip Yancey	-1925.9
Tim LaHaye	-2692.9
John MacArthur	-2797.8
James Dobson	-3748.2
John Piper	-4526.5
Rick Warren	-9097.3
Hugh Hewitt	-53,991.1

The HIV is a adjusted value, in the sense that it prepresents the heresy level weighed in proportion the the evangelical’s relative importance on the Internet. After all, a little bit of heresy in someone who is highly influential can have very widespread and pernicious effects; consequently, his heresy weighs him down a little more. As for the interpretation of the HIV, having an index number of 100 marks someone with the purest orthodoxy, of such that outshines even the apostles themselves. However, a postive number less than 100 represents varying degrees of backsliding, yet since it’s still in the positive range, the evangelical will probably make into the Beatific Vision, although some cantankerous Catholics might suggest that a good, long stay in Purgatory might be in order. Finally, a negative number is definitely not good news in regard to Final Things, and the more negative the HIV is, then…well, that goes without saying.

Looking at my list, we can say that someone ought to hang onto Udo Middleman’s feet, because, with his HIV of 100, at any moment he will be translated, just as Enoch and Elijah were. Looking down my list, I see that my old pastor Greg Laurie, with an HIV of 57.6, is already half-way backslidden. At 18.4 and 1.9 respectively, Jack Hayford and Alister McGrath, with their low postive numbers, have just barely made it into the Pearly Gates. Now, looking at the negative numbers, it is completely unsurprising that Rick Warren is nearly at the bottom with his awesome HIV of -9097.3, which was much worse than Bill Hybels’ measly -82.6 and George Barna’s lukewarm -102.4, but Rick’s HIV turned out not to be the absolute worst in the list, strangely enough. And I guess that, if “Reality Based” progressives were to believe in eternal perdition—which they don’t because they’re are just so dang “enlightened”—they would be rejoicing that Phyllis Schlafly at -342.0 and Chuck Colson at -350.0 will both be spending time with Richard Nixon. Everybody’s favorite writer of never-ending volumes of Left Behind, Tim LaHaye, had a surprisingly dreary value of -2692.9. The NY Times and The San Francisco Chronicle will definitely celebrate since James Dobson, with an HIV of -3748.2, has ended up in one of the chasms of the “Malebolge”. But as to why Hugh Hewitt ended up in “Cocytus” with his absolutely horrifying HIV of -53,991.1 is, well, beyond me, but I imagine that there would be plenty of Leftist™ bloggers who would be besides themselves with ecstasy to hear this news.

Addendum: For those of you linking here from Evangelical Outpost, don’t just stop here but be sure to read my postings that were made on later dates, otherwise you’ll only get part of the picture.
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Joe Pursch, a radio talk show host, had something to say that I thought was interesting:

It convinced me further that people of faith in America are beginning to taste two experiences unfamiliar to the affluent and apathetic believer: outrage and desperation. They sense for the first time the outer ring of a circle of darkness, and they are being stirred to pray. I think something may be moving in evangelical America.

I think it about sums up my feelings much of the time—outrage and desperation, but mostly desperation. On most days, I feel like I’m living in the midst of a disintegrating church, in the middle of a disintegrating country, and I have no reasons to be optimistic that things can really be changed. The factiousness that I have been observing is just one symptom of the overall situation. Nobody bothers to really listen to one another anymore. And for another example, I cannot understand why more xtians are unable to see what’s politically going on. Why can’t they see that the Republicans are reverting back to what they have always been, historically, underneath all the song and dance and PR: it’s the same old Rich Man’s Party, made up of patricians eager to sell out this country to China and Mexico just to make a quick buck. They really don’t care about anything that I am concerned about.

Francis Schaeffer once talked about the “Great Evangelical Disaster”. While it may not be shaping up exactly how he envisioned it, nevertheless, it’s here and now and happening right before my eyes, and there is nothing I can do about it. I am also feeling pretty sick right now. I have a bad sore throat; I ache all over, and my lungs are feeling tight.
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