Magistra et Mater

In response to:Church growth, negative evangelism and beta churches

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:43:00 +0200

P.S. I have been trying to connect with your friends list by sending you an invitation through BCUK. It doesn't seem to like the way I type in your site name at blog.co.uk!!

Would you mind trying to send me an invitation at www.myword at BCUK.

Thanks :)

In response to:Church growth, negative evangelism and beta churches

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:38:06 +0200

PPS. Finally got the invitation system to work. :yes:

In response to:Church growth, negative evangelism and beta churches

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:11:55 +0200

Hi,

First, I must congratulate you on keeping my avid attention to your analysis. I like your comparative analysis on the Christian faiths. The following activity is, if you like, a mix of anecdote and qualitative observation. I am not a researcher.

As you say, much of what you write would apply to other faith groups and their communities. Living in a small town which is served by a number of Christian-based churches, it is easy to witness the transferring of some congregants, from one church in particular, to affiliate themselves to other seats of Christian faith. It is also clear, which churches have more settled congregations. There is just one small Catholic church, which experiences movement out, particularly from its younger members. There is evidence of a growing Humanist interest.

One important feature to mull over and compare here when analysing movements in belief, is, I think, the impact of faith on individuals in their 'congregations,' and the emotional draw and pressures of 'community'. I believe these are two different entities. In diaspora the former merges into the latter for a whole variety of reasons, thereby strengthening the bonds. I am not aware of that dynamic here.

Thank you for igniting my thoughts.

In response to:Church growth, negative evangelism and beta churches

Thu, 02 May 2013 22:03:35 +0200

A really fascinating analysis and an interesting use of my church growth models. Well done! There is so much I could respond to here I will restrict myself to what I think is your major claim which is to challenge the common assertion that theologically conservative churches grow whereas liberal ones decline.

This assertion is often attributed to Dean Kelley in his book “Why Conservative Churches are Growing”. But he never did claim that statement, and from the preface to the original edition he did not appear that happy with the title of the book. His assertion was to do with the connection between strictness and strength. You rightly point out that strict is not the same as conservative. These days many conservative churches are lenient in their requirements of people. They are conscious of not wanting too strict an image. Likewise some liberal churches can be very strict over adherence to their stance on justice, inclusiveness, etc. There are many dimensions that make up a church’s life. Both conservative, liberal, strict, lenient can all lack enthusiasm to recruit, so none of those labels gives a guarantee of growth.

You suggest one reason liberal churches will survive is that they are needed as a place for liberal minded people to go to from conservative churches. I will suggest another reason why they will survive: Over time conservative churches themselves become liberal. It is not just individual Christians who liberalise, perhaps through life experience, being hurt in church, etc, but whole congregations change their churchmanship, though this is a much slower process.

Thus some conservative churches become less conservative over time and in a generation or so become liberal. You can see this in names like "open evangelical", “progressive evangelical”, “small ‘e’ evangelical”, “accepting evangelical”. In other words they are starting to liberalise in some aspect of practise or belief that a previous generation would never have considered. A good example would be attitudes to alcohol. Another would be a requirement to assent to a statement of faith.

The pressure to liberalise can be two-fold. Firstly it can come from a congregation being more liberal than the ministers. Conservative ministry can produced very strong churches which attract people who want a good and effective church. They may not agree with all the views of the minister, but tolerate them, as other aspects of the church are helpful to them and their beliefs. A good home and good friends are more critical than theology for many people. When the time comes for a new minister there is pressure exerted to get someone more tolerant and less "harsh".

Secondly the minister may be more liberal than the congregation. This has been the familiar situation in Wales where the minister picked up the liberal views from the seminary. Seminaries often attract more liberal people due to the need for academic credibility. We have seen this process for years in the mainstream denominations of Wales, but the same process is now happening amongst the evangelical churches. They are now "modern" evangelicals. Another generation or so they could well be liberal!

You note that the Southern Baptists are now declining. Back in 2002 when it was still growing my model predicted its rapid growth was ending and it would be followed by some decline. This overshoot is caused by the rapid growth being balanced with people leaving the church. It is a natural dynamical cycle. There may also be a generational effect with some of the children of members not adopting the churchmanship of their parents. Its decline is not necessarily attributed to it becoming lenient or liberal. But it could also be competition with the more fashionable Pentecostal and charismatic churches drawing people away. There a many processes in churc growth and decline and black and white explanations are rarely sufficient

I completely agree with the need for an extra arrow in my models where the evangelism may have a negative effect on people. One of my students has been exploring this effect by using an extra variable to measure the intensity of the “spiritual life” of the church. This rather unusual variable could also be interpreted as strictness or any other quality a church has that could have both positive and negative effects. There is no space to go into detail here – but you have captured the main power of system dynamics to make people ask questions as to what actually happens and to challenge narrow hypotheses and bounded thinking.

Again – well done!

In response to:Nicky Gumbel, evangelicals and homosexuality

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:41:44 +0100

First of all, I don't assume that there are simply gays and straights. I don't often tend to discuss bisexual people (I say a small amount in the comments to this post), or those who would consider themselves asexual etc, because for the historical periods I mostly study, there's very little evidence. I'm aware of studies such as those by Lisa Diamond suggesting that women's sexual orientation may be more fluid than previously realised (though I don't know if anyone's produced similar evidence for male sexual orientation as fluid). However, the fact that sexual orientation is fluid doesn't in itself prove that it can be deliberately changed by the individual. Both my natural hair colour and my eyesight have changed over the years, sometimes in ways I like, sometimes not. But no combination of willpower, training or prayer will give me black hair or 20/20 vision.

Secondly, I don't believe that a life without sex is unhappy or unsuccessful. I've known several people who have made a success of a life that included a permanent commitment to celibacy. What I believe is that *my* life would have been less successful and happy without my marriage and the sexual activity that forms part of it. And what I object to is lifelong celibacy being considered compulsory for people who are only attracted to their own sex. If gay people voluntarily choose lifelong celibacy that is fine by me, but imposed celibacy has a pretty poor record, both in medieval monasteries and among the modern day clergy. I don't believe that many people have the gift for making something positive out of lifelong celibacy: if they did, why aren't more heterosexual people embracing that way of life? Are you celibate, for example?

As for your final point, I'll try and say something more about church growth in a later post. (It's slightly more complicated than you're making it sound). The point isn't that people go to church because they're sinful and they know there's something wrong with their life. That's why I stay in the church as well: because I'm a sinner. The problem is that if I go to a church and am told that homosexual acts are wrong in all circumstances, that's not a statement about my behaviour. I've never seriously been tempted to sleep with another woman. What I'm being told is that the gay couples that I know are bigger sinners than I am, even though I look at the love in their relationships and there is no non-religious reason for condemning them. I am told that relationships that are just as full as love as my own, just as faithful, sometimes more self-sacrificing than my own are wicked. Talk about motes and beams. As I said in a previous comment, if the churches give an account of people as sinners that doesn't match up with evidence of actual harm they are doing, they lose the trust of both their congregations and potential converts.

In response to:Nicky Gumbel, evangelicals and homosexuality

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:05:29 +0100

Enns' book sounds very interesting - if I didn't have a long list of books I *have* to read in the next year, I'd liked to have had a look at it. I think that ancient (and medieval) writers do sometimes use and cite Bible texts in a different way from us, just as they come to those texts with different initial assumptions. And the language point you make is also an important one. Unlike when translating a modern language, where one can ask a native speaker or consult a contemporary dictionary, sometimes when translating from an ancient language it is very difficult to be sure about exactly what some words/phrases mean (whether they're Latin agricultural terms or Greek lists of sins). I still take the Bible seriously, just as I did when I was an Evangelical, but I take it seriously in a rather different way than I once did.

In response to:Nicky Gumbel, evangelicals and homosexuality

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:24:48 +0100

Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think you make three false assumptions: I would like to comment only on the third, for brevity.

(1) You assume that humans consist of two types, "gays" and "straights".
Hollywood supports this, the evidence doesn't.

(2) You assume that a life without sex is unhappy and unsuccessful.
Again, this is Hollywood.

(3) You assume that, to convert people, churches must fit in with their tastes.

The exact opposite is true. Throughout history, the "appeasement" churches have declined, and the "fundamental" churches have grown. In our own time, the Anglican, United Canada, Unitarians, Universalists, and I suspect Quakers, are dwindling rapidly. The Jehovah's Witnesses, the Pentecostals, the Reformed churches, are all doing well and growing, despite the popular anti-church fashion of thought. I predict the new (rather fundamental) Pope will see growth in the Catholic church also.

Why? Well, when people join a golf club, they choose one that suits their tastes. But people join a church for a different reason!

They join a church precisely because they are NOT happy with their life and their tastes. They sense that they are somehow failing, faulty. They look for real standards, real principles, not fashions. They want to know which way is up! And, having seen where wordly standards lead, they do not trust popular opinion.

In response to:Nicky Gumbel, evangelicals and homosexuality

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 20:46:20 +0100

This discussion of scriptural authority ties in with a book I am currently reading: Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by Peter Enns. Enns is opening my eyes to an understanding of ancient cultures and how a texts were interpreted by the audience of that day — and not always literally. As Enns explains (with examples), even New Testament writers sometimes quoted the O.T. out of context to make a point and this was not considered deceptive in the rabbinic tradition of that day. If the N.T. writers were God-inspired, then God must have approved. God can keep up with the times without our help or hindrance. By locking ourselves into a literal interpretation of words written 2 or 3 milennia ago, in languages most of us have not mastered, we miss what God may be saying to us today through those same authoritative writings. There is so much more in scripture to be taken seriously than literal words on a page. I find Enns to be thoughtful and his teaching enlightening.

In response to:Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:17:54 +0100

Not sure if worth erading according to your standards :)

There are contemporany sources, (ie: Vita Geraldi) that specifically links depopulation with sarracen slave trade. Some modern authors, from my bibliography:

Poly, Jean-Pierre : 1976 : "La Provence et la société féodale 879-1166 : contribution à l'étude des structures dites féodales dans le Midi"

Weinberger, Stephen : 1992 : "The Reordering of Society in Medieval Provence" : Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire : 70.4 p.907-920

But the right men to ask for sarracen provençal slave trade evidence is probably Philippe Senac, unfourtunately, I have no any especific citation of his about this.

In response to:Humiliation and obscurity

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:00:17 +0100

I must talk this one over with a friend of mine who has been a spiritual director and is deeply versed in the monastics. Should be an interesting discussion.

In response to:Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:01:46 +0100

I wasn't suggesting for a second that Wickham is uninterested in long-distance or regional exchange or trade. He is, and we all should be. I was saying that his view is that small scale movement of luxuries (whether papyrus, pepper or people) has little to do with "economic history" in this period.

In many ways it is similar to Peter Brown's arguments about donations to the Church - it is of greater structural importance for the Church that it got 100,000 small donations of one solidus, than it got a single large headline grabbing donation of 2,000 or 5,000 solidi.

It is the constant, repeated and the everyday (but low value) that is of greater structual significance than the high value rarity.

In response to:Humiliation and obscurity

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:54:20 +0100

It's an idea that goes very much against modern views of democratizing knowledge and making it available to all. Any deliberate focus on making a work of art or a text obscure (such as modernist literature) is exclusionary: not everybody will "get" it. The counterargument is that by focusing on difficult language (or by using visual references that only some people will spot, etc) you're producing something richer, something that will repay intensive study with additional insights. Early monasticism was always very much about such repeated and contemplative reading, and they were unashamedly an elite, so an ethos of obscurity fitted in very well.

In response to:Late antique Christianity and equal marriage

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:26:16 +0100

"Unmarriages" is one of the many, many books I have on my list to read when I have more time: it sounds very interesting. I think a lot of "traditional" views on marriage ignore just how ambiguous the first Christians were towards the family (as well as the frustrating Christian spokesmen who just flat out pretend that indissoluble monogamous marriage is a universal custom).

In response to:Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:22:55 +0100

I'd be interested in hearing about the sources for depopulation in Provence. One of the things I'm realising needs to be included in any discussion of the early medieval economy is population trends, but a lot is still being based on outdated views on this. Can you recommend anything worth erading on the topic?

In response to:Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:20:54 +0100

Chris has more to say about the importance of regional exchange as against long-distance trade in a later article: Wickham, Chris. 2008. "Rethinking the structure of the early medieval economy". In The long morning of medieval Europe: new directions in early medieval studies, edited by Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick, 19-32. Aldershot, Ashgate.

But I'm not yet sure whether his own theories as to why growth happened work: I'm hoping to blog about that a bit more soon, but I'm conscious that my own knowledge of economic theory is ditinctly lacking.

In response to:Can men control their lust?

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:34:57 +0100

I think that men are born due to evolution with strong sexual desires but ultimately we are responsible for our own actions.

lisa

In response to:Humiliation and obscurity

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 19:07:55 +0100

I'm fascinated by the thought that knowledge should not always be explained to make it more accessible - there is a case to be made out for it being difficult. I'll have to ponder that one.

In response to:Early medieval comparisons: kings east and west

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:21:12 +0100

Jinty didn't discuss later ceremonies in this talk, because she was focused on Pippin. The best place to start for her detailed views would probably be Janet L. Nelson, "The Lord's anointed and the people's choice: Carolingian royal ritual", in Rituals of royalty: power and ceremonial in traditional societies, edited by David Cannadine and Simon Price, 137-180. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. It's a while since I've read that or anything else much on inauguration rituals, so I don't want to get into detailed discussions, but there is always a tension in being anointed or being crowned between the power you gain from this and the implicit power you grant over you to the person (pope or bishop) who does the anointing/crowning. I think Charlemagne and Louis may have been reluctant to grant too much to the papacy in the way of claims to authority over them.(The latest IHR report I've just written has a bit more to say about that power dynamic).

In response to:Late antique Christianity and equal marriage

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:31:54 +0100

Very interesting post. At the moment I'm reading Ruth Mazo Karras's Unmarriages: Women, Men and Sexual Union in the Middle Ages and I've also been struck more than ever about how so many 'traditional' arguments about what does and doesn't constitute marriage are not actually traditional at all.

In response to:Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:06:47 +0100

I am glad to hear that The Making of Charlemagne's Europe project is also building a prosopographic database of individuals!

On the slave trade scale: there's also evidence of depopulation in C10th Provence, so that was probably not small bussiness; but slave trade commerce, by his very nature, cannot be a stable market, so it's an evolving topic. Hard to put it as a major global economic grow factor, more probable certain at the local level.

In response to:Slavery and early medieval economic growth

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 13:28:07 +0100

Even if we accept all the calculations that it takes to get there, I just don't see 2.7 sunburnt northern Europeans arriving in Baghdad each day as a driver for European-wide economic growth.

Buried in a footnote in Wickham's _Framing_ is a comment that people who look at the shipment on a small scale of luxury goods are just not doing economic history. I read this as a dig at Pirenne and McCormick, but it applies equally here.

In response to:Civic identity and the B-word in sixth-century Francia

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:37:34 +0100

Thanks for all your comments. A few individual replies:

Gilly – there's a long antique tradition of identifying yourself with a city, especially in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman empire. This goes back, I assume, right to the city states of the seventh and sixth-century BC. I think we tend to underestimate it in Britain (well, I certainly do) because Romanised cities in England only lasted a few centuries and so didn't really develop the same traditions as those in the East (or even in the south of France).

Richard – presumably you're referring to the argument about the dating of the Pactus Legis Salicae and whether it should be seen as sixth century or fourth century? I must admit I'm not up to speed on that debate, but I would just point out that having a higher wergild doesn't necessarily equate to being more socially approved. For example, there are some laws which have higher wergilds for women/marriageable girls than men or boys, but that definitely doesn't mean that females are imagined as better than males. So a high wergild for someone with a particular usefulness could co-exist with social disdain.

Curt – thanks for the reminder about Erica's Kalamazoo paper: I didn't hear that, but Jon mentioned on his blog that she'd also given a paper on Visigothic identity at a conference in Oxford. One of the most interesting comments she made during questions was that she was also very interested in political identities in the Merovingian period, and thought that maybe we'd concentrated on ethnic identities to the exclusion of those too much. Of course, it's only when you've got sources detailed enough to show you political factions that you can start to discuss political identities, whereas you can (with caution) use archaeological and onomastic evidence to look at ethnic identities, so that's an option for Frankish history, but not Visigothic.

In response to:Early medieval comparisons: kings east and west

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 09:46:59 +0100

Did Jinty gave some clue about why Charlemagne and Louis did not seek annointing legitimation? If my memory does serves me, I recall his emphasis on Charles the Bald as being the first to re-use annointing after Pipin, but that was a century later... Not a small topic on the logic of royal sacred legitimation.

In response to:Why I no longer read historical fiction

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:28:30 +0100

I've just read the profile of her in the New Yorker, which is very interesting. Especially, when she's talking about the tensions between the unconscious and the card index: the novelist's imagination and historical facts as they are recorded. That is a genuine difference in perspective and one I think historians and novelists should respect.

In response to:Civic identity and the B-word in sixth-century Francia

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:16:00 +0100

She must be working on a pretty interesting dissertation on ethnicity. At Kalamazoo she gave a paper on the post-Arab Conquest survival of Gothic identifiers in Iberian sources. Interesting argument re Gregory. I'd have to see the evidence for that to decide if I'm persuaded. I don't buy the argument that there weren't any Gallo-Romans left. He's pretty open about his background and when you look at his subjects in his various writings there are plenty of Latin names. And as Dr. Landes mentions, a separate wergild is established for Romans as late as the Lex Salica Karolina. That may have been nothing more than a recognition of tradition but it seems to indicate the continuing existence of those categorized as Roman.

However he may have believed those were the people most likely to read what he was putting together.

In response to:Why I no longer read historical fiction

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 20:56:52 +0100

She claims to be ambiguous about Cromwell, and I think she succeeds. She's very clear about the difference between her own approach and that of a historian.

In response to:Sex, historians and assumptions

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 22:51:15 +0100

It's interesting how our culture has been so influenced by sex and sexuality.

lisa

In response to:Civic identity and the B-word in sixth-century Francia

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 04:09:18 +0100

of course the b*rb*r**ns had double the wergeld of the romans.

In response to:Why I no longer read historical fiction

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:44:15 +0100

Sorry for delay in replying: I haven't read Hilary Mantell myself, but there have been some discussions of Wolf Hall by History Today (here and here), which are not that positive about the strictly historical aspects. I suspect one of the problems is with how Thomas Cromwell's personality is shown. In a historical novel it's acceptable to imagine a possible character for a historical figure that can fit sufficiently well with the known facts (and the known facts can be bent a little if necessary). So Cromwell can be made a hero. In writing history, you have to work with the most likely personality as seen from the surviving sources, so Cromwell, if not as black as he's painted, probably wasn't an admirable person.

There are some interesting parallels here with the idea of fan fiction and how one of the biggest complaints you can make about a story is that a figure is OOC (out of character).

In response to:Civic identity and the B-word in sixth-century Francia

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:42:18 +0100

Might this have anything to do with the original Roman concept of being a freeman of a city - hence you were called by that city eg 'Paul of Tarsus' ?