Upon further review:

A re-wording of a question about religious beliefs coupled with a more precise definition of a Christian group found that far fewer evangelicals are universalists than what the Pew Forum reported in its landmark report last week.

LifeWay Research, associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, found that only two out of 10 evangelicals – as defined by their belief system rather than what church they attend – agreed with the statement that eternal life can be obtained through religions other than Christianity.

LifeWay used the Barna Group’s definition of evangelical to classify its respondents, and the survey asked about “religions other than Christianity” rather than “my religion,” because some Christians use “religion” and “denomination” interchangeably. Pew found 57 percent of evangelicals hold universalist beliefs, but the mushy wording of the question and an equally mushy definition of “evangelical” seem to have combined to produce Pew’s surprising findings.

I confess, I haven’t read “The Shack” yet, but I need to–so I can find out what all the controversy is about. But blogger David Burchett makes some excellent points about the way Christians have responded to apparently questionable theology in the book:

Be careful how you share your concerns with others. When I read comments like “are these people just blind to heresy?” I cringe. Because you reinforce the feelings of so many people that are moved by this book. They have experienced a Christianity that is judgmental and sometimes downright mean. If your heart is to be a guardian of truth you will damage that worthy desire by harsh criticism of those who are touched by The Shack.

Be prayerful about why this book has connected so surprisingly with millions. I think I know some reasons why this book is resonating with so many. Those of us raised in the desert of legalism are desperate for the cool, refreshing waters of grace. Those of us who have been wounded by other Christians want more than anything to believe that Jesus does love us and our experience is not how it should be in the church. We need guardians of the truth of God’s Word but we also need those guardians to be shepherds that care and not just condemn. Some of the articles have been so stern that I felt like I would be sent to after school detention when the writer was done. That doesn’t help a wounded believer. Jesus said to both feed and take care of His sheep. 

Amen, brother. Shouldn’t Christians show love to each other, even in disagreement? I’m pretty sure I read that somewhere.

Smart move:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and—in a move sure to cause controversy—support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama wooing evangelicals? To some extent. But don’t forget that Obama became a Christian in an African-American church, and black churches tend to be more involved with providing social services in their neighborhoods than your average white evangelical church in the suburbs. How could Obama not keep the faith-based initiative without breaking faith with the black church?

African-American churches, by and large, also have fewer problems with the notion of accepting government money than white churches.

This graf in the AP story, though, made me go “huh”:

Like Bush, Obama was arguing that religious organizations can and should play a bigger role in serving the poor and meeting other social needs. But while Bush argued that the strength of religious charities lies primarily in shared religious identity between workers and recipients, Obama was to tout the benefits of their “bottom-up” approach.

I don’t recall ever reading that Bush was making a connection between the faith of the service provider and the faith of the recipient. Remember that Don Eberly of East Hempfield was a deputy director in the Bush Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives early on, so we talked about the whole concept — and his emphasis always was on the grass-roots effectiveness of faith-based charities. Just like Obama.

The Episcopal Church either needs better lawyers or a quick exit to federal court:

A Civil War-era law that lets Virginia churches keep their property when leaving a denomination where a “division” has occurred is constitutional, a county judge ruled Friday, June 27, siding with 11 former Episcopal parishes.

Fairfax County Judge Randy I. Bellows’ ruling on the 1867 law stops short of awarding the property to the parishes, but it hands them a major legal win.

<snip> The ruling could encourage the dozens of Episcopal parishes in similar court battles across the U.S., and shake the confidence of mainline Protestant denominations that fear losing churches and people to breakaway groups.

Hard to believe that a state law wading into church property disputes doesn’t fall afoul of the First Amendment.

The Virginia situation may be unique; there don’t seem to be any other states with similar laws on the books. But this ruling, if it stands, has repercussions for all the other denominations — including my own United Methodists – with “trust clauses” specifying that all local church property is held in trust for the denomination. There will be little incentive to try to work out internal disagreements if local churches can “walk” and still keep their buildings.

Christianity Today interviews Andrew Stanton, director of the new Pixar flick “Wall-E,” about faith in Hollywood:

Some Christians want more “message movies,” and they want them to be movies where the gospel is preached loud and clear. But when movies get too driven by their agenda, you often end up with a crummy movie, and …

Stanton: Yeah, I’m right with you on that.

But guys like you and others at Pixar, and other Christians like Scott Derrickson and Ralph Winter, are bringing biblical themes into the movies without making them feel “preachy.” Where are you on all of that thinking?

Stanton: I agree with what you said. Just because you’re strong in your faith doesn’t mean that you suddenly have to be dumb and pander to a certain audience. When did that become a rule? I think you were given a brain to use it, and I think you were given talents to use it.

It’s about communicating your values without whacking people over the head with them … for Christians in the entertainment media, though, taking this tack can get ‘em in trouble with church people who expect Christians to make only “Christian” entertainment.

But the fact that Christians have retreated to our subculture of Christian music, Christian movies, Christian books, Christian radio, only means that mainstream culture doesn’t come into contact with our values in the marketplace of ideas. We’ve ceded all that cultural ground to other viewpoints and values.

So non-Christians assume stuff about us. (I’m thinking of this TalkBack thread about kids waving their arms in the air at the Witness Festival. Good grief, this is exactly what you’ll find at any secular rock concert — so what makes Christian kids mindless zombies? Nothing except assumptions.)

C.S. Lewis was right: What the world needs is not more Christian writers — or artists or musicians or filmmakers — but more writers and artists and musicians and filmmakers who are Christian.

Apropos of that Pew Forum study, Baptist Press expands on the point that GetReligion was making — that the Pew question on whether “other religions” than the respondent’s own can lead to eternal life fails to adequately define “religion”:

“I’ve heard people use the phrase ‘Baptist religion,’ ‘Methodist religion,’” Kelly Boggs, editor of the Baptist Message newspaper in Louisiana, told Baptist Press. “I have known people who would confuse the word ‘religion’ with the word ‘denomination.’ They would be saying, ‘Yes, many denominations lead to eternal life.’ Since I have known people who have confused those two terms, I’m sure many of these folks in the poll did. They believe Jesus is the only way to heaven. They just believe that their particular denomination — in their minds, ‘religion’ — is not.’”

Here’s why evangelical leaders are flummoxed by the Pew findings:

For instance, according to the survey 61 percent of Southern Baptists and 71 percent of those in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) believe that many religions can lead to eternal life. The latter denomination was formed in the 1970s out of concern over liberalism in the Presbyterian Church USA. Additionally, 53 percent of those in the Assemblies of God and 78 percent of those in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod believe many religions can lead to eternal life.

Even 60 percent of independent Baptists — sometimes viewed as the most conservative of all Baptists — hold that there are many religions that can lead to eternal life, the survey found.

It IS kinda hard to believe that so many people in those extremely conservative — fundamentalist isn’t out of the question — denominations would see any faith other than faith in Jesus as leading to eternal life.

Lancastrian Don Eberly’s new book gets a shout-out from Ron Sider, founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, in the latest issue of ESA’s electronic newsletter:

Dear ePistle readers,
I want you to know that Don Eberly has just written another very important book — “The Rise of Global Civil Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up” (Encounter Books, 2008).

Don is a brilliant thinker and influential activist. He has worked on important assignments in the State Department and White House. He was the key organizer of the highly influential, broad-based Fatherhood Initiative. And he has written earlier influential books on civil society in America.

In “The Rise of Global Civil Society,” Don shows how citizens, social entrepreneurs, and volunteers are prying open closed societies and nurturing democratic practices around the world.

Treat yourself to a great book.
–Ron Sider

Don is one of those guys who sees trends before the rest of us do.

Fascinating stuff in the latest Pew Forum survey on faith:

America remains a deeply religious nation, but a new survey finds most Americans don’t believe their tradition is the only way to eternal life — even if the denomination’s teachings say otherwise.

The findings, revealed Monday in a survey of 35,000 adults, can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don’t know fundamental teachings of their own faiths.

Among the more startling numbers in the survey, conducted last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life: 57 percent of evangelical church attenders said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.

In all, 70 percent of Americans with a religious affiliation shared that view, and 68 percent said there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their own religion.

This phenomenon crosses denominational and faith lines, so maybe it’s that dreaded postmodernism at work. Or maybe the problem really is that religious leaders haven’t been teaching their flocks well enough.

Really, why call yourself a particular variety of believer if you’re not convinced of the truth of what you’re espousing? Read More…

How to take the Wiki thing way too far — try to translate the Bible that way:

The eclectic group includes a liberal Christian living in the United Arab Emirates and a Methodist financial counselor in Texas. Some claim to be formally trained in Biblical Hebrew and classical Greek; others, such as user John Kloosterman, admit to being “without qualifications of any kind.” The project will take a few years to complete and require constant refinement, says John Vandenberg, one of project’s main administrators. But “that is part of the beauty,” he writes. “It’s a laissez-faire translation.”

But Bible translation isn’t a laissez-faire project. (Oh, yeah, note to Newsweek: Classical Greek wouldn’t be a lot of help; the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, which is a commoners’ version of the language. Also, if you can read Greek, you should be able to sound it out!) 

There are so many potential problems in this, it’s hard to know where to begin: Which Hebrew and Greek texts are translators using? (There doesn’t seem to be any standard.) Do these folks even KNOW the original languages? (Not all of ‘em, apparently.) Do they understand the subtleties of the Greek participle? (Argh!)

I’ve taken Greek and Hebrew. I know enough to be able to make a rough translation of the text, with plenty of help from language software, lexicons and other aids — the point being that fighting through your own translation helps an exegete to identify critical words, phrases and other points in the text that make for fruitful teaching and preaching.

I wouldn’t presume to think I can do a better job of translating than the scholars who labor for years on Bible versions.

Even Bart Ehrman, the lapsed evangelical who was caught up in the “Gospel of Judas” hype, isn’t buying the Wiki Bible:

“Democratization isn’t necessarily good for scholarship,” says Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who worked on the most recent translation of the New Revised Standard Version in 1988. “Those were the best Greek and Hebrew scholars in the country, and it took them 20 years.”

Congregations are hard to kill:

Religious congregations in the United States have a “mortality rate” of 1 percent, which is the lowest among other organizations, according to a newly published study.

About 10 out of every 1,000 religious congregations disband each year, sociologists at the University of Arizona and Duke University found. The low rate of demise revealed that the religious organizations are some of the strongest in the nation, the report stated.

But here’s the bad news:

Despite the low rate of closures, Duke Univesity professor Mark Chaves cautioned that it could mean that “weak congregations limp along rather than die, whereas in other organizational populations weak units die rather than live on in a weakened state.”

Organizational theory says that there are two institutions that are capable of renewing themselves at the end of their life cycle: universities and churches. This may partly account for the resilience of congregations; they have hope that miracles can happen.

At the same time, it’s far easier to plant a new congregation than it is to change the DNA of an older one, which is why you see so many Christian denominations focused on planting rather than revitalizing churches. One of the hardest decisions for a congregation to make is knowing when to pull the plug … trusting that another, vital faith community can step in and fill the void.