Creation Ministries Conference

Trevor and I went to this conference back at the end of October, but my report wasn't needed until the next church newsletter deadline, which wasn't until this week. So of course I didn't write anything about it until late last week...and I didn't write as much as I wanted to, because it was already over a page long, and the longer it is, the less likely people will be to give it much attention! I'm a pretty passionate young-earth creationist, but mostly in writing, not so much in person because I'm just not that chatty, so hopefully this doesn't scare anyone away. :)

Creation Ministries Conference Report

At the end of October, Trevor and I had the exciting opportunity to attend a Creation Ministries International (CMI) conference in Red Deer. Trevor has written a five-page report on it, so ask him if you are interested in more detail, but here are some of the things I found particularly interesting.

To quote Pastor Joe Boot, one of the speakers, 'men are trying to bring the word of God in line with their sinful desires' by promoting evolution to the exclusion of a Creator. He also said that 'evolution is a religious ideology' and that 'modern evolutionists have replaced God with another idea'. It is a 'cultural myth' that many people 'believe without question', even though scientific evidence has yet to explain how it actually worked. According to the evidence, evolution could not have worked the way it has been theorized to, yet the theory is adhered to with religious fervor.

1 Timothy 6 says: ³ If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, ⁴ he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. (ESV)

Most public school (and even Catholic school) teachers and university professors unquestioningly 'believe in evolution', despite scientific evidence to the contrary. As Christians who are instructed to be ready to give an answer for the hope that we have (1 Peter 3:15), it is vital that we be familiar with the lies which the world overwhelmingly presents as fact, especially when they are presented as fact to children who do not know to question them. We need to teach the young people for whom we're responsible to have a Creator God-centered worldview, not an evolutionist one. When young people’s faith is built on the solid foundation of knowing God as their creator, and when they know that the Biblical account of creation and the age of the earth are true, they will be less likely to fall away when they go to post-secondary school and come under attack by the secular education system, which will tell them that the Bible is a myth.

Did you know that there is a very important distinction between the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘natural selection’, and that they are often used incorrectly? Did you know that ‘natural selection’ reduces genetic information and does not add new variations or improvements? Did you know that there is no such thing as a ‘simple’ cell, and that they are all too incredibly complex to have evolved by random chance? Did you know that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that all humans are actually varying shades of brown? Did you know that not only did Charles Darwin likely plagiarized most of his ideas from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, he believed that women and people with coloured skin were inferior to white men, and that his work strongly influenced the Nazi regime?

www.creation.com has hundreds of great resources with an excellent search engine, and from what I can tell, their theology is very similar to Lutheran theology. You can sign up for a daily email newsletter that contains a different creation-centric topic every day – and if it's not a topic that interests you, you can just delete it. I usually find about half of them every week to touch on something I'm interested in, and I highly recommended them! I can't say enough good things about how valuable CMI is, both as a youth leader and as a university student who hears Darwin's name almost every day, and sometimes multiple times every day.

When confronted with the university’s (false) absolute certainty that we evolved from pond scum and then an ape-like creature, I am comforted by these verses from 1 Corinthians 1:

¹⁹ For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” ²⁰…Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?... ²² For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (ESV)

CMI is tentatively hoping to have another conference in Alberta in 2014, and I strongly encourage everyone to attend!  In the meantime, check out the CMI resources online, and pray for those people whose faith is under attack by the false teaching of evolution, and pray for those who teach the truth about God the Creator, that the Holy Spirit would enable willing hearts to hear the truth. And if you struggle with the false doctrine of evolution yourself, please talk to one of the church staff!

- Submitted by Michelle Heumann

Faith & Fangirling

(With credit to my friend Erin Erickson for somewhat inspiring the title of this post. :)

 

 

Well, this is coming a day late, which you may or may not have noticed. I did...but I had a German test this morning, so there wasn't much I could do about it. I tried to find a chart on line to show you how darn confusing possessive pronouns are, but I couldn't even! It's so confusing even Google can't help me. :P

 

So, last Sunday, October 28 (and that weekend we were in Red Deer at a conference, but that'll be its own post when I get organized!), was Reformation Sunday, the Sunday when we celebrate Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg. It's also Confirmation Sunday at our church, when the youth who are around 14 years old, and who've been taking confirmation classes for two years, publicly express their faith and what they've learned, by presenting papers and essentially making a vow.



 

I don't have any photos from this year, so here's one of Trevor getting confirmed. :)

 

I've seen a lot of confirmation classes come and go, and you can usually tell from their papers which of the kids actually 'get' it, and which of them are just jumping through the hoops so they can 'graduate'. There were 14 this year, and I only knew a couple of them well, but you can tell so much about them from their papers, and even the ones I don't really know I still care about whether or not they get it. I don't really know why - maybe it's just the burden/gift God has given me (?). Anyway, there may have been a few tears, and not because I was over-tired from being at a conference all weekend. :)

 

Then the first weekend in November was our annual fall youth retreat, which I seem to have somehow and totally accidentally ended up becoming chair of. I think it's because I'm kind of bossy and I just like organizing stuff and so I sort of took over organizing meetings, which then just evolved into 'chairing' them (which I use loosely because we've been doing this for so long that we all pretty much just know what to do and how to work together - it's a great team of people!), but I'm also the registrar, which is a TON of work. Add that to homework, two weeks of being sick, and an unusually tempestuous registration process, and by the time Thursday night rolled around I was seriously questioning why I was putting myself through the agony.

 

But by Friday morning, I was fatalistically calm. If anything else went wrong, there wasn't any way to prepare for it, so it would just have to happen as it happened. Then my friend Brittni arrived to help and the kids started coming, and I got excited again. It's so much fun having a church building filled with life and excitement. Things went really well - we had some scheduling issues Saturday night, but I kept calm and changed the schedule, and it worked out well. I was proud of myself for not freaking out...a couple of years ago I wouldn't have been able to function under my schedule not proceeding as planned, but I'm getting more flexible in my old age. :P Pretty sure it's a God Thing!

 

Some of the 75-ish people at the fall youth retreat

 

By the time everyone left on Sunday, I didn't want it to end, which is how I usually feel on the last day of a retreat. You get this sense of community in a small group, living in a building all together for a weekend like that, which you don't really find anywhere else. I always feel like it's a very imperfect but tantalizing glimpse of what heaven will be like - a giant youth retreat, only without all of the logistical work. :)

 

Then on Monday I had this parcel card, so I went to the post office to pick it up. I figured that I must have forgotten to decline last month's movie club offering, and I was still thinking about the youth retreat, so I wasn't really mentally present in the post office when the clerk handed me a large bubble envelope that didn't look anything like a DVD. I stepped away from the counter and looked at the return address, and got very intrigued when I saw that it was from Shelli.

 

I didn't waste any time ripping it open, and found a recycled inter-office mail envelope. Curiouser and curiouser...and then I opened that, and found THIS:

 

 

 

I definitely said "OH MY GOSH" out loud, because I'm pretty sure the lady standing nearby turned around to look at me, but I was to busy processing to care. (For the first time, I did wish I had a smartphone so I could take a photo and post it somewhere right then and there, because fangirling shared is definitely more fun!) When I got home I had to Google the indecipherable signatures to check whose they were, and it is signed by the entire main cast of Hell on Wheels. How awesome is that? It was totally the cherry on top of an already awesome day! Thanks Shelli! I'm definitely a receptive audience! :)



So You Think You Hate Religion But Love Jesus? Or: The Dangers of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and Lukewarm Theology

Doctrines of faith seem foreign to teens, and when polled, most believe in a form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism;

1.      God exists, created and ordered the world, and watches over human life on earth.

2.      God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3.      The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4.      God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5.      Good people go to heaven when they die.

MTD bears little resemblance to the historic Christian faith...it might be called American civic religion. (Quoting Dr. John Oberdeck from Eutychus Youth: Applied Theology for Youth Ministry)

There’s a video going around the web in which a young man, Jefferson Bethke, rhapsodizes about how he hates religion, but loves Jesus. It came to my attention when several of my former youth were passing it around Facebook, commenting on how moving they found it, so I watched it. I was deeply unsettled that youth I thought I knew well would fall prey to Bethke’s smooth patter. I almost don’t even know where to start with his clearly heartfelt mishmash of statements that are so contradictory and ill-informed that it requires a professional theologian to untangle and thoroughly address. However, as a Lutheran and an English major, a couple of things caught my attention right away.

The most significant and dangerous contradiction spoken by Bethke is that he “hates religion but loves Jesus”. In fact, Christianity, the believing in Jesus Christ as Saviour, is a religion. What is the definition of the word religion? According to the Oxford Dictionary, religion is:

Belief in or acknowledgement of some superhuman power or powers (esp. a god or gods) which is typically manifested in obedience, reverence, and worship; such a belief as part of a system defining a code of living, esp. as a means of achieving spiritual or material improvement. (www.OED.com)

I am aware that the word religion has developed certain cultural context that is not reflected in the dictionary definition of religion; this is simply because the culture is using the wrong word, much like the espresso versus expresso debate; a misuse of language. I believe that religiosity is what Bethke is so passionately denouncing. Religiosity is “affected or excessive religiousness” (www.oed.com) and it is what St. James describes:

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. (James 1:26 ESV courtesy of www.biblegateway.com)

St. James goes on to explain what religion is:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (James 1:26-27 ESV www.biblegateway.com)

My religion is Christianity; to love my neighbour as myself because God first loved me (Luke 10:27 and 1 John 4:19) and to not conform to the world (Romans 12:2). My denomination is Lutheran; based in law and gospel doctrine, as laboriously and scripturally researched and taught by Martin Luther. I’m not a member of an emergent church movement that believes you can have a perfect life here on earth; be happy, healthy and wealthy by following the Prayer of Jabez, or following seven steps to success, or by being simply spiritual and letting doctrine fall by the wayside for fear of offending someone. I have come to be deeply, deeply thankful that I am part of a church body that does not ‘politically correctify’ the Bible in order to be more culturally relevant or seeker sensitive. These trends in Christian pop culture are dangerous and misleading.

There is no such thing as a perfect Christian; not me, not Bethke, not Luther. However, Christians with a firm foundation in scripture and a solid theological background recognize this trend of lukewarm theology for what it is. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a dangerous and growing movement, rising from the lack of a firm theological underpinning in the larger Christian church. This lack of teaching develops young adults like Bethke who “hates religion” and who has fallen to a MTD-esque belief that he can be spiritual and in a relationship with Jesus without being part of a religious body. The Christian church is a religion; there is simply no escaping that basic fact no matter how Christian pop culture may try to spin it.

The most alarming thing about this video, aside from the flawed theology, is how quickly it spread. It has well over fifteen million views, and it seems as though people were so engaged by Bethke that they missed the crucial step of testing this video against scripture. It seems as though feelings invoked by spirituality have become more important than scriptural knowledge.

... solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:14 ESV www.biblegatway.com)

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. (2 Peter 1:5-7 ESV www.biblegateway.com)

Global Christian culture is on a dangerous path, and only a firm grounding in scripture and good theology will keep us, and our youth, from being misled by slick marketing and sketchy feel-good pseudo-doctrine.

Check out this video for another Lutheran view on Bethke's video:

http://youtu.be/TbsadOQK_6A