Wednesday, April 11, 2007

It's all about us

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE between this, courtesy of The Associated Press . . .

DAYTONA BEACH -- No hymnals. No pews. No steeple. No stained glass windows. And no women.

This isn't your grandma's church.

Organizers of the Church For Men say that guys are "bored stiff" in many churches today.

"We try to make it interesting for them. We meet in a gym and we talk about issues that mess men up," said Mike Ellis, 46, the church's founder.

The Church For Men meets one Saturday evening a month, drawing about 70 guys dressed in everything but straight-laced shirts and neckties. The service features a rock band, a shot clock to time the preacher's message and a one-hour in-and-out guarantee.

Ellis' church is part of a national movement to reverse what many Christian pastors and ministers are calling a troubling trend. Studies show that men are less likely than women to show up on Sunday mornings, and the reaction has been an emerging testosterone theology of sorts. Churches nationwide are now reaching out to men.

One study found that the average U.S. adult church congregation is 61 percent female, said David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going To Church." The research shows women are more likely to attend church, Sunday school and small church groups.

"Going to church is perceived as womanly behavior," said Murrow, who is based in Anchorage, Alaska, and travels the country lecturing about the issue. "We don't go to church for the same reason we don't wear pink."

Communication skills, public forms of affection, such as hugs and hand holding, and other "soft skills" make many men feel incompetent in church, Murrow said.

Long church services also cause men to leave the fold, said Ellis, who first got the idea for a man-only church six years ago.

"I have the attention span of a flea," he said. "They say that if you don't get a man's attention in six to eight minutes, you lost them."

To that end, followers at Church For Men meet on a basketball court, a large scoreboard with a time clock ensures the preacher's message is delivered in 15 minutes, and the same rock band that opened for Bad Company and the Georgia Satellites a month ago bangs out a three-song set of hard-rockin' tunes.
. . . AND THIS, courtesy of herchurch.org, the website of Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco:

We are a diverse community, standing firmly within the Christian tradition in order to re-image the divine by claiming her feminine persona in thealogy, liturgy, church structure, art, language, practices, leadership, and acts of justice. Challenging the church’s restricted language of the past, we pay special attention to images and metaphors that attempt to embrace divine fullness and that offer a witness of holy nurture and inclusive justice, both to the church and to the world.

A new form of church is happening at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 678 Portola Drive in San Francisco. Gather at 10:30 AM Sundays for a lively, engaging, thoroughly inclusive and feminist service of worship. Led by Pastor Stacy Boorn, the liturgy features images and metaphors that will enlarge understanding of and connection with the sacred. Music and readings further reflect this commitment to reclaiming the feminine persona of the divine. Come as you are – you’ll find hope, healing, and community. All are welcome at this table! Worship Sunday mornings at 10:30

Our Christian/Lutheran feminist prayers and liturgy reach back into the storehouse of tradition to bring forth names as Mother, Shaddai, Sophia, Womb, Midwife, Shekinah, She Who Is. They do so out of renewed insights into the nature of the Gospel empowered by the risen Christ-Sophia.

Let your relationship with the Divine be opened and expanded.


Our Mother who is within us
we celebrate your many names.
Your wisdom come.
Your will be done,
unfolding from the depths within us.
Each day you give us all that we need.
You remind us of our limits
and we let go.
You support us in our power
and we act with courage.
For you are the dwelling place within us
the empowerment around us
and the celebration among us
now and for ever. Amen
THE DIFFERENCE between these disparate groups of flakes is . . . not much, actually.

You know, if the word "solipsistic" didn't exist, we'd have to invent it so as to adequately describe our present age. And these Left and Right Coast bunches of self-absorbed, chronologically-challenged adolescents are just so indicative of who we are today, and why we're in such deep doo as a people.

Out there in Florida, we have to resort to making church a pseudo sporting event so that men can be bothered to get off their asses, cut off ESPN and worship the Celestial Bobby Knight to a hard-rock beat. One can only wonder whether they replace the sign of peace with a Folding-Chair Fling-Ding.

Or maybe a fart-and-belch break after the horn blows on the "sermon clock." And Doritos and Budweiser for communion -- which might necessitate moving the fart-and-belch break to later in the service.

Gee, maybe if Jesus had been more "hip" and "with it," the people would have let Pilate cut Him loose instead of Barabbas. Of course, that would have defeated the whole plan of salvation, but what the hey . . . .

AND WHAT CAN ONE SAY about the ovary-obsessed goddess worshippers out there on the Bay?

They take the prevailing solipsism a small step beyond only worshipping a God who can entertain them to only worshipping a God who's just like them. Finding the notion of a patriarchal deity repugnant to their navel-gazing, womyn-centric sensibilities -- and not having the courage to do the intellectually honest thing and become Wiccans, athiests or Satanists -- they find it a simple matter to rewrite nearly 6,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition and scripture into crone-centric, quasi-pagan glop.

Oh well, so long as their deity does not hurt their tender feelings or challenge them to look beyond their own narcissism. That's the New American Way.

And it's how the Evangelical Right and the Reimagining Left are more alike than they'd care to admit.

It's a free country, and the God-belchers and Sophiaholics may do what they please, but "as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord." Not ourselves.


Hat tip: Mark Shea.

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