Church Rater Gets National Radio Attention

Jim Henderson and his new venture Interfaith 360, has a great platform tonight with ChurchRater, a dialog-based forum where everyday people give their Yelp-like opinion about faith communities visited. Hate it or rate it, they're getting national coverage tonight on NPR's All Things Considered. Here's the details that Jim emailed out today. Check out the broadcast if you can!
 

ChurchRater.com, the first online property of our start-up Interfaith 360, Inc., is going to be featured on tonight's episode of All Things Considered - a National Public Radio classic.  

The mission of ChurchRater is simple - to encourage dialogue and help people find a church that fits. It is a socially conscious enterprise partially owned by a non-profit and dedicated to distributing a portion of its (we hope to make some) profits to charitable causes.

The NPR story should air at 5:45 pretty standard across the country.  You can also find the appropriate radio station frequency by visiting and searching for your city and state.

Most NPR stations have All Things Considered locked in for the 4-6 pm block regardless of the time zone because it's mostly prerecorded.

The Controversial Mark Driscoll and thoughtful Dwight Friesen weigh in on ChurchRater as well as ChurchRater co founder and Duke Divinity Student Tyler Mahoney

 All Things Considered gets an average of 12 million listeners daily nationwide.

The only way we could have out done All Things Considered was get on NPR's Morning Edition or Rush Limbaugh.  (But we don't like Rush Limbaugh :)

Hope you can check out the segment tonight.  Best wishes from the ChurchRater team - Jim Henderson, Matt Casper, Tyler Mahoney, Chris Lauer, Helen Mildenhall, and Julian Zegelmen

WHAT IF... pastors didn't earn a living from pastoring?

"If you read the obituaries of African-American pastors you'll find that many of them are listed as not just having pastored a church, but actually earning their living from some other trade. It used to be that pastors had jobs in their communities and did not support themselves or their families solely from their religious vocation."

A friend of mine, who is a former pastor, said this to me in a discussion we were having about the tricky business of being a professional Christian. It seems to create an incredible amount of dilemmas, power issues, and ethical quandaries when people of spiritual leadership seek to earn their sole living from a religious position.

The bible doesn't really give us a concrete guideline about this. We know that Jesus and his disciples worked for the majority of their lives and spent only a portion of their lives living off the kind charity of others.

Paul, that great apostle and father of the faith, was a tent maker by trade as well as a formerly trained Pharisee, though the New Testament seems to indicate that he chose to earn what he could from tentmaking rather than theological discourse.

WHAT IF... women led the church and men were in support roles???

How do you think church would be different? How would the world be different?  What if there was a theology that seemed to indicate that men could not teach and that women were to be "their covering?"   Would motherhood be viewed differently or wifery??


What if women were in charge?  How do you think that would change things??

Breaking the Back of Traditionalism {Heretics Gone Wild}

"I'm not sure where I'll land, but I know that I don't hold a traditional view any longer," said the seasoned pastor and bible teacher in a recent phone conversation. "I am open to other ideas about the eternity of hell." The pastor went on to reveal that he had contacted a few of his ministry colleagues asking them about this question: Is hell an eternal reality? Or is this doctrine invented by man?" He received a number of replies including the predictable, "Be cautious where you are treading." But he was most surprised when his most respected colleague and bible teacher, the one with the strongest teaching chops, told him, "I don't ascribe to the traditional view any longer either."

Traditionalism is a commitment to upholding a set of beliefs and views and defending them from being discounted or rejected. Christian traditionalists, for example, tend to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, born of the virgin Mary, lived a life beset with holiness and miracles, suffered death by crucifixion, and rose from the tomb on the third day. Other traditional beliefs include the idea that women are blocked from spiritual leadership over men and that men are the head of not only the home but also the church; that the bible is the inerrant word of God...and the idea that hell is a place of eternal condemnation for those souls who have not received Christ as their Savior.

WHAT IF... women threw rocks at the stained-glass ceiling and men joined in?

What if women stopped being polite about the whole inequity deal in many Christian settings and took aim and threw great, big rocks at that pretty stained-glass ceiling aka as complementarianism.  This is a fancy theological word that simple means Women remain relegated to certain roles. Period. 


Many Christians feel safe and comfy with this position because it seems so nice and moderate. "Women and men are equal," they insist, "it's just that women have certain roles and so do men. As women can't be fathers and men can't be mothers, so women have limitations on certain roles within the body of Christ. Like leadership over men.... "   


There are entire denominations and hundreds of modern day congregations that espouse this point of view in their defense of what they are convinced is a biblical mandate. Yet there remains incredible scholarship that says otherwise - even a shallow glance at certain narratives in the bible indicate that God didn't seem to have a problem with women having spiritual authority over men.   If you are a bible type, consider Deborah, a judge in Israel who oversaw civic and religious issues. A military leader came to her, respecting her authority, when political tensions were mounting. God apparently had no problem appointing her (didn't he know about her "role?")

WHAT IF... you could preach one sermon to America's pastors

What would it be?

I know what mine would be. I would sermonize about No Us or Them. In today's religious culture we are not a whole lot different than the spiritual elitism of yesterday. Many pastors and reverends and bishops and what have you live at a safe distance from the average person sitting in their congregation. Some churches have become so large that the pastor does not even know who half or even a quarter of his own spiritual community!

If you have read me for any length of time then you know I am not fond of the megachurch model. I'm not. And this is one of many reasons why. It creates an overinflated sense of importance for the leader and and a spectatorship mentality of many in the audience....and that's what it becomes. An audience viewing religious theater Sunday after entertaining Sunday morning.

What if you had the floor for a half hour to be heard out by America's church leaders. What would you preach on?

WHAT IF... God Really Loved You

Just the way that you are. No expectations for you change or improve. No pressure for you to bolster your morality or strengthen your character. What if God really and truly and wholeheartedly loved you as much as when you are at the lowest of your game as when you are at your pinnacle?

What if it's true? What if you really believed it all the time and not just some of the time?

The next time you are in the pit of shame of whatever it is that slays you, stop, pause...pray, and right there in that space ask God if he loves you and see what happens.

WHAT IF...there were no hell?

What if? If you are a Christian and you discovered that hell was a borrowed myth back in the day to help motivate people to follow the Christian God, how do you think this might affect your faith and outlook?

Or, what if it becomes a more mainstream view, this idea that God ultimately reconciles all of humankind to himself and that none will suffer eternal damnation, that the grace of Jesus triumphs over the gates of hell and none perish???

If you are a professional Christian, someone who earns part or all of his living from religious vocation of some kind, how would your job security be affected if you no longer believed in eternal hell (and were forthright about it)?

I listened to an amazing hour long podcast from This American Life a couple of days ago. It is titled Heretics, and is the story of Carlton Pearson, a Black minister in Oklahoma who at the height of his ministry had a change of thinking about hell that compelled him so much that he sacrificed power, money and fame and reputation in pursuit of a greater grace known as universal reconcilation.

You can find this remarkable podcast HERE. I encourage you to download it and listen to it. I listened to it on my Blackberry while I was on a cleaning gig. At one point, I had to stop. I leaned up against the kitchen sink of my client's home and cried as Carlton spoke outloud what has been quietly brewing in my heart for the better part of three decades.

For more insight on my journey towards a view of hopeful reconciliationist, click HERE for the archives of what I call Hell Stories. (start backwards and work your way up, though...)

**a special thanks to D.C. for pointing me to this podcast.

*** this post kicks off a series of What If questions. If you have a What if question you'd like me to address send it my way. If I use it, I'll send you a print of my collage art.

Larry's Story : Discrimination for Living Outside

This video is an interview with Larry, a man who is a part of a community in Portland, Oregon known as HOMEpdx.  Larry, who is very well spoken and respectful, tells his story of how local authorities treated him while standing on a city corner with a cardboard sign looking for work.

Larry was willing to tell his story to help dispel the myth that all homeless people are lazy, drunken bums. And to also educate people with awareness of the reality of some of the difficulties people experience when they are homeless.

A real glimpse into the reality of street living....


**If you are one of my subscribers who lives in a country that blocks Youtube videos shoot me an email and I can send you the video file if you are interested in viewing it.

The Overcrowded Blogosphere

When I first entered the blogosphere in 2005 there were not nearly as many blogs then as there is today. At that time I stood apart as a woman writing in a public forum on issues of faith and Christian spirituality. But nowadays the blogosphere has become an overcrowded forum; a bloated city square overrun with too many soapboxes of town criers competing for the reader's attention.

There have always been a small contingent of power bloggers, but the tribe of everyday bloggers like me has swelled to such a tsunami wave of digital content, that it has become increasingly difficult to attract new readers or keep much of a readership.

My stats show that this blog's readership is thinning out at an ever increasing rate. Yes, there is a subscriber base and that does account for one component of less blog traffic. Yet even the subscriber base has plateaued.

It makes this busy modern woman wonder if perhaps there is a better way, a new innovative way of connecting to my readers apart from the noisy plaza of bloggerville.