With the podcast on pause while I write, I encourage you to pick up the free book entitled "What in God's Name is Happening to the Church" that gives an overview of the forthcoming four book series and that offers 14 chapters across the four books of that series. And I invite you to let a review of that book and also to subscribe to my email updates at www.achurchdismantled.com. The Kindle book is free through August 6. 

This week of June 14-19 begins a six episode series that summarize much of what I have been teaching, preaching and podcasting for the last 25 years regarding race and racism in the United States. I created these episodes originally as videos that can be found on my You Tube channel along with study guides at www.achurchdismantled.com. The impetus for these episodes came out of  my continued concern for the misinformation that has been spread by many in the church about the nature of racism, its continued perpetuation and impact, and my deep conviction that of all people, we who follow Jesus must be doing all we can to confront the failure of the church historically as well as its continued failures to address the multitude of ways that systemic racism continues to be manifested—from slavery to Jim Crow to housing discrimination, to mass incarceration of Black men and boys, to police brutality, and now to a fierce reaction to so-called critical race theory.  These episodes were intended for those who are looking for a Biblical response to racism and a Biblical response to those who continue to sustain racism’s inequities and division. Thank you for joining for this series, and I pray that it will both enlighten, inform and give you the courage you need to be a voice in this ongoing confrontation of the principalities and powers that one day will be defeated as we continue the grand excavation project of the Spirit to lower mountains, raise valleys, make rough places a plain and crooked places straight. And don’t forget to look for further resources on my You Tube Channel as well as at www.achurchdismantled.com.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

In this episode, I discuss a recent conversation with a friend who wanted to know whether I was drifting from my Christian orthodoxy. Here is an excerpt: 

"As the church is dismantled, the categories and labels we created for one another are being exposed for the lunacy that they are. And as a sociologist and a church leader, I as much as any am guilty of propagating them. But they have damaged and destroyed long enough. How can we expect two categories--conservative and liberal--or any other number, to come even close to defining who one is in dismantled church where division and disunity have created hundreds of different denominational and religious groups. It would seem that the categories we hang on to are nothing more than ways of saying to everyone else that I am "'not like the other.'"

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Last weekend, on PBS, I watched an interview with Yo-Yo-Ma, undoubtedly the best cellist at that trade for decades, whose fame began as early as the age of seven when he played for  President John F. Kennedy.  Decades later, he helped many a person through the season of COVID-19 with his beautiful album "Songs of Comfort." 

But there is not an ounce of arrogance in Yo-Yo-Ma. Indeed, he is spending these latter years of his career trying to bring a divided country together and to encourage the development of musical gifts among budding young musicians. Yo-Yo-Ma bemoaned the tragedy of what he and the host described as that "cemetery of amateur musicians," where so many who began music lessons as children and even became pretty good at their trade, buried their talents and walked away from their passion. Why? Because, said Yo-Yo-Ma, "of the development of recordings." He noted that before we could record music, if we wanted to hear a piece we had to sing it or play it ourselves or spend time with other singing and playing folks. But professional recordings made us all consumers rather than players and participants. Thus the cemeteries and thus the lost gifts and so many who could have become really good at their trade.

In both of these examples I think of the church and how we  move forward after the dismantling and as part of the grand excavation project of Isaiah 40. What have we been doing that has been about following the rules of supposed success, passed down to us from a past in which those rules functioned well but in this moment of dismantling are now irrational, and can we now let go of those things? What have we picked up from the modern world and other social institutions that should never have been part of what it meant to be the people of God, and can we now let go of those things? To what degree have we absorbed the cultural fog of the  last 300 years of American culture with it violence, systemic racism, personal independence, individualism, a syncretic faith that mixes God with country? The sense that bigger is always better and that mega this and mega that are the metrics of success? The sense that church services must be perfected within a 45 minute window in which only the best get to sing and play and preach and teach? Where children are seen as consumers of religious products rather than collaborators and participants with us in lowering mountains, raising valleys, making rough places smooth, and crooked places straight? 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Monger was born in Nebraska and lived her formative years there, until at age 19 she and her family apparently admitted defeat and returned home to the Valley. But for whatever reason, as a young woman, Monger never joined the Old Order Amish church and eventually became the homemaker for widower Joseph Renno. Eventaully they would marry and have two sons--Erie and Paul. Erie was my grandfather who in previous podcasts I have spoken of as "Pap," overseer and dearly loved minister at Locust Grove Mennonite Church within the Conservative Mennonite Conference.

I was just seven when Monger died. She and I share the same birth date though separated by nearly 80 years. I remember Monger for her molasses cookies and her sugar cookies, and  her sitting on her rocking chair braiding rugs. She was one of the saints, and I also remember her for being part of the older women's "Amen" corner in our old wooden church structure, where as we sang hymns from "Life Songs" and the "Church and Sunday School Hymnal," always in acapella and without accompaniment, the voices of the older women always rose above those of the rest of us and always sounded as if they would break through the rafters into heaven itself. This was especially true when we sang those beautiful old hymns about heaven that seem to have disappeared from our worship today--Marching to Zion, Sweet Beulah Land, There is a fair and happy land...and many more. Their high voices were hauntingly beautiful, almost a screeching at times, but a beautiful screeching from many who widowed, were looking into heaven itself, And never more so when we sang "For God so Loved Us He Sent the Savior," first in English and then in German "Gott is Dei Liebe..." And in those moments all of us saw into heaven if we had any eyes at all.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

Reflections from Psalm 131 and a story of a our grandson Ezra.

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

I have to confess that as both a sociologist of religion and a follower of Jesus, I have long assumed that the European church--Anabaptist and otherwise--was at the tail end of the procession of the saints, disappearing into the secular culture and society of its surroundings while churches within the U.S. and the Global South were those with greater vitality. And perhaps there is some truth to that in terms of the assumption of vitality, however one can best measure that.

But after my interview with Henk Stenvers and reading his essay "Walking on Water," which later today I will place on my website at www.achurchdismantled.com, I recognize that I failed to appreciate what the Spirit was up to in the European church and the value of what this church has to teach the rest of us. For let us give this church the credit for being around longer than any other Anabaptist community (one must add the Swiss movement as well to this short list of long-haulers), and so it is somewhat arrogant for the rest of us in the global church to assume that by the time our Anabaptist communities reach their 500th birthday that we will be any different or in any better condition than our European brothers and sisters. 

As I've noted this week, I am now confident that the U.S. church is much closer to the experience of our European cousins than I had thought in the past. The difference for us is that we continue to deny our dying and have found ways to do so pretty effectively. As I've noted in the past, Richard Halverson argued that once the church got to the U.S., it became an enterprise. There is good reason that sociologist talk about the American church in terms of an ecclesiological marketplace, with church shopping and church switching only making it easier to eventually bail out of church all together. 

The U.S. church has continued to be able to deny its dying by creating new programs, building megachurches which like malls, only led to the death of the small community churches or "mom and pop" shops. There is no evidence that megachurches have increased church going in the U.S. and to the contrary there is evidence that they have reduced a sense of church as a community of disciples. As I've noted before, its the MacDonaldization of American religion on my terms and at my convenience and customized to my preferences. But the rapid disappearances of malls these days, now undone by Amazon and Ebay and a host of other even more efficient enterprises points to the likelihood that megachurches themselves are but a temporary form of church that is likely to meets its demise when the products of church can be purchased at an even lower price and delivered more quickly.

The U.S. church continues to crank out one new religious program after another--as with most pastors I am bombarded with emails from so-called ministries that have the next best answer for whatever happens to ail our congregation at the moment and to resuscitate our last dying breath. It is so hard to let go, especially when church as commodity and church as capitalism keeps offering hope if we will just pay enough money to obtain it.

Which brings us back to the prophetic word of Henk Stenvers, Dutch Mennonite leader whose essay "Walking on Water" I have been relying upon for this week's series of essays. For what Stenvers reveals is a Dutch church which, because of its decline, has broken the power of formal rationality and church bureaucracy, leaving only the people of God in its wake. Stenvers notes the increasing irrelevance of churchly councils both locally at the congregational level and nationally at the denominational level. There are no longer enough members to attend the meetings or to fill the required positions. 

In addition, as I have been arguing for fifteen years, the professional clergy model is disappearing. Congregations cannot afford to pay professional pastors, and so they are increasingly turning to lay leaders to guide the flock. And of course, with the formal bureaucracy gone, it is a less complicated job to care for that flock--fewer meetings to decide on the color of the carpet, to decide what time Sunday School will start, to plan worship services which become less complicated, to fill positions on ballots, to design new programs, and on and on. For indeed, all that is left is the people of God, and for all intents and purposes the iron cage has become irrelevant. 

We can bemoan the loss of that cage these days and the fact that it just might be that the U.S. church is following the European model, or we can celebrate that we have finally been set free to be the people of God in the world that Jesus always intended for us to be--that the powers of Christendom have been broken, that the impacts of the Enlightenment minimized, and the Spirit just might break out anew as a result. 

RNS news release

 Walter Brueggemann has been writing for the American church for six decades and continues to produce four to five books a year.  His biography has finally been written by Conrad Kanagy of Elizabethtown College, PA. Amazon currently offers a 45% discount bringing the paperback to 13.80.

Tune in for regular readings of the Brueggemann biography and the forthcoming series!

While I love hearing about the Spirit's movement in the global South, the rapid growth in churches, the new leaders being developed--quite honestly, in the cultural context within which I minister and live--I often find that news hard to relate to. For given the reality of the U.S. church and its context, it is unlikely that the Spirit will replicate what is occurring in the global South. And many of us live in such guilt and shame because our churches look so unlike those in the South. 

But Henk's word makes it clear that the Spirit has not fled the European continent as we in the U.S. have sometimes been arrogantly prone to assume, and perhaps what offers us hope in Henk's word is that the the Spirit might just might be replicating that work in the U.S. as well--bringing us in barrenness to our knees and understanding once again that "though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea," there remains a "river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells." Or in the language of Judson Cornwall, though the mountains are leveled by God's Spirit, there will be a grand highway into that "holy place where the Most High dwells." 

For the thing about the Spirit is that we  never know where and when and how the Spirit moves and acts--and just as the European Anabaptists first led the rest of us into the radical reformation, they may also show us how to keep the flame lit when the darkness gathers round us and how to create a highway when the Spirit levels the sacred mountains.