Links To Go (May 22, 2014)

Are Millennials Really Leaving the Church? Yes — but Mostly White Millennials

But the switch from most Christians being white to the majority being non-white has largely gone unnoticed. Instead, most of the focus has been on the idea that “young people are leaving the church.” That idea is true among white evangelicals, who show a dramatic decline in PRRI’s polling. Among Americans 65 and older, nearly 3 in 10 (29 percent) are evangelicals. That number drops to 1 in 10 for younger Americans.

The future, says Gray, will belong to churches that are multiethnic, because that’s what God wants.

Gray says that in the past, white Christians were in the majority, so they assumed what happened in their churches was happening in every church. So if the number of young people in their churches is going down, he says, they assumed it was a universal problem.


Lies My Pastor Told Me: Speak it Into Existence

Far from being taught in the Scriptures, “speaking things into existence” is explicitly contradicted in the Scriptures. James 4:13-16 warns, “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.” In short, to speak as if you have knowledge of the future, much less control over it, is pure evil. Every detail of our lives, according to James, is subject to “the Lord’s will,” not our own.


Are We Headed For A Crash? Reflections On The Current State of Evangelical Worship

It’s the theme of performancism. The worship leader as the performer. The congregation as the audience. The sanctuary as the concert hall.
It really is a problem. It really is a thing. And we really can’t allow it to become the norm. Worship leaders, we must identify and kill performancism while we can.


The Danger of Lectio Divina

This, then, is a danger in Lectio Divina, that it may teach us to approach the text subjectively rather than objectively, and that in this way it leads to unstable, unsupportable conclusions. Though it appears to elevate piety, it may just train us to preach badly.


3 Tough Things About the First Year of Marriage

There was no particular sin or problem that made it hard. It wasn’t that we were mismatched. It was more just that it was painful to figure out the changes. The most honest thing we were able to say about that first year was that it was “a big adjustment.”


Newspaper Reporter Discovers That He’s Allergic To Newspaper Ink

Baltimore Sun veteran reporter Mike Dresser tells colleagues that he’s just discovered he’s allergic to newspaper ink and warns that “you may see me wearing the type of rubber gloves used by a doctor or a crime scene technician.”
Dresser tells me that since putting out the memo, “I learned that a colleague shares that affliction. Most people see the irony. Mostly I’ve gotten amused sympathy.”


Levi CEO’s jeans go unwashed for year

Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh takes water conservation seriously. Bergh said he hasn’t washed his jeans in a year.
“These have yet to see a washing machine,” Bergh said at a Fortune Brainstorm Green conference Tuesday, the same day as the company’s 141th anniversary


.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.