Do-it-yourself Christianity -- USA TODAY, October 29, 2007

The search for accurate information about 2008 presidential hopefuls has become tougher than ever, especially online. Bloggers often tout opinions instead of facts, and amateur editors or even political activists can revise Wikipedia entries on the candidates. The English-language version of this popular online encyclopedia has at least 5.5 million registered users, and any one of them can edit the site. In Virginia, a Republican state legislator recently included comments from a blog in an attack ad against his Democratic opponent — comments that cannot be verified, identified only as what "others are saying."

As a Presbyterian pastor, I'm often approached by people who are on a search for truth, and as I attempt to help them, I draw on my religious tradition, sacred Scriptures and theological training. Unfortunately, more and more people are taking their quest directly to the Internet, surfing for religious as well as political insights.

I'm convinced that the Christian faith is becoming more like Wikipedia and less like Encyclopedia Britannica. Instead of time-tested religious insights, people are accepting "what others are saying."

A generation ago, people turned to trusted authorities such as newspapers and mainline churches to get information. But trust in such institutions has fallen over the past 30 years, eroding the relationship between Americans and a number of traditional sources of trust. A poll called the General Social Survey has asked people whether they have "a great deal of confidence" in social institutions, and their answers reveal a clear decline.

According to this survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, confidence has dropped since the 1970s in:

* Banks and financial institutions (From 35% to 28%).
* Major companies (26% to 17%).
* The press (24% to 9%).
* Education (36% to 27%).
* Organized religion (35% to 24%).

Whether you attribute this fall to Watergate or Enron or clergy sexual misconduct, the damage has clearly been done.

The effect on religion

This is a serious concern to pastors like me, who serve churches associated with what used to be the "trusted brands" of Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and Presbyterian Christianity. These mainline denominations grew through the 1940s and '50s but began to lose members about 1965. Today, some are one-third smaller than they were 40 years ago.

In their place, independent and community churches have appeared. Some have congregational leadership and stand alone, while others are denominational churches that are simply dropping "Baptist" or "Methodist" from their names in an effort to attract more worshipers. For instance, a congregation near Detroit called Temple Baptist became NorthRidge Church in 2000 to avoid the possible negative connotations of being Baptist. Its pastor, Brad Powell, says it is "a non-denominational Bible-believing church."

Congregations with "community" in their title became the largest group of Protestant churches in the country in the 1990s, including Saddleback Community Church in California and Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. These houses of worship are trying to reach the many people who have a longing for community, coupled with a distrust of institutions.

Grace Chapel, an independent congregation with 2,100 members in Englewood, Colo., fits the suburban landscape by looking more like a big box store than a church. It has no mysterious denominational name such as "Presbyterian" to act as a barrier, and it requires no insider knowledge in order to participate in services. Like many growing congregations, it has contemporary praise music in worship and a variety of programs designed to meet the needs of children, youths, college students, singles, couples, women and men.

These independent congregations are the bloggers of the Christian faith, speaking the truth as they see it. They have every right to do so, based on our nation's commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But given the fact that faith has long had a "binding" effect on society (in fact, the word religion has the root meaning "to tie fast"), I worry that loss of trust in denominations is causing society to become ever more fractured. If we completely lose faith in institutions — denominations, newspapers, banks, companies, political parties — there will be very little to tie us together as a nation.

Serving the next generation

Of course, denominational pastors like myself have some lessons to learn from successful independent churches. I need to accept that today's spiritual seekers want quality, clarity, convenience and community in their practice of faith, and they will choose the church that offers the programs that best meet their personal needs. Few people will join my church simply because it is Presbyterian, just as a shrinking number of people will buy a car because of loyalty to General Motors. Consumers today want a product with the best features, whether it is a church with a dynamic youth program or an automobile with an excellent crash-test rating.

Individual choice and control are affecting all of our institutions, from financial organizations (Internet banking) to journalism (blogging) to education (distance learning). The church is not immune from this, and we'll see increasing diversity in the "emerging churches" that are attracting a new generation of people in their 20s and 30s who are suspicious of organized religion. Overseas, independent churches are experiencing explosive growth, especially in Brazil and South Africa, and it won't be long before churches in the USA feel the effects of this movement.

Sadly, what is lost in this fracturing of church and society are the worldwide networks that have long been maintained by Protestant denominations. Isolated congregations can certainly meet the spiritual needs of individuals, but they cannot do the work of denominations in supporting thousands of missionaries around the world, creating seminaries for the training of clergy, or taking stands for peace, justice, and religious freedom on the national and international levels. In addition, independent congregations cannot be counted on to preserve a historically based understanding of the Christian faith, or to maintain the unity of the church across geographical or cultural boundaries.

So even though trust in institutions continues to fall, I'll continue to be a Presbyterian pastor. My denomination will never be the cultural force it once was, but I believe it provides some necessary social glue in a society that is becoming more fractured every day.

My Bad -- FPC sermon excerpt

One afternoon a carpet layer had just finished installing carpet for a woman. He stepped out for a smoke, only to realize that he had lost his cigarettes. After a quick but fruitless search, he noticed that in the middle of the room, under the carpet that he had just installed, was a bump. His cigarettes!

“No sense pulling up the entire floor for one pack of smokes,” the carpet layer said to himself. So, he got out his mallet and flattened the bump.

Not long after, as he was cleaning up, the woman came in. “Here,” she said, handing him his pack of cigarettes. “I found them in the hallway. Now,” she said, “if only I could find my parakeet.”

Oops.

My bad.

Animal lovers — I want to assure you: No animals were harmed in the making of this message.

Sometimes we know when we’ve made a mistake. Sometimes we don’t. It’s the ones we don’t see that can really bite us. In the magazine mental_floss (March-April 2007) is a list of the 20 greatest mistakes in history. They include:

The mistake that burned down London. On the night of September 1, 1666, the oven of the royal baker to the king of England sparked a fire. It was not a spectacular fire, and it seemed like no big deal at first, but it burned for five days. In the end, it wiped out 13,000 homes and leveled 80 percent of the city.

The mistake that sobered America up. Prohibition in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933, and during this period it was illegal to manufacture, transport, and sell alcoholic beverages. It seemed like a great idea at the time — outlaw liquor, and you eliminate a number of alcohol-related social ills. But Americans like to have a drink or two, and Prohibition opened our eyes to the ways in which organized crime will meet this demand in violent and destructive ways.

The mistake that killed John Wayne. Much of the filming for the movie “The Conqueror” was done in Utah’s Snow Canyon, which is located about 150 miles downwind from a nuclear testing facility. At least 91 of the 220 people who worked on the movie contracted cancer, and more then half of them died — including John Wayne.

A spark jumps out of an oven, and a baker fails to snuff it. A well-intentioned ban is placed on alcohol. A movie is filmed downwind from a nuke facility. These are small oversights, errors, and miscalculations that we do not tend to see as major mistakes.

But secret problems can hurt us. They can quickly get out of control and kill us. They should drive us to our knees, cause us to do some searching self-examination, and lead us to confess what the Bible calls our “hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12).

In other words, they should cause us to admit to God, “My bad.”

Small Steps -- FPC sermon excerpt

We’ve got the power. In fact, each of us is a little power plant.

Did you know that every time we take a step, we generate six to eight watts of energy? But then — poof! — it dissipates into the air.

If only we could capture it.

An architectural firm in London is now looking at ways to capture that energy on a large scale and turn it into electricity. At Victoria Station, for example, there are 34,000 people traveling through in one hour, rushing toward their trains. That’s a lot of steps. “If you harness that energy,” says the firm’s director, “you can actually generate a very useful power source.”

According to Fast Company magazine (September 2006), this architectural firm is working to develop vibration-harvesting sensors. These sensors would be implanted in the structure of train stations to capture the rumblings of commuters, turn the motion into electricity, and then store it in a battery.

There is power in small steps.

In today’s passage from Luke, the apostles say to Jesus, “Increase our faith!” They feel as though their faith is too miniscule to make a difference, so they plead for Jesus to enlarge it. But Jesus understands the significance of small steps, so he says to them, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it would obey you’” (Luke 17:5-6).

Have you ever seen a mustard seed? Not many have. It is hard to see — each one is about one-twentieth of an inch in size. Very, very small. The point Jesus is trying to make is that faith doesn’t have to be huge to have an impact. It doesn’t have to make the news to make a difference.

There is power in mustard-seed faith.