What I did for my involuntary vacation

This week on the Progressive Christian Blog with Author & Web Minister Paul J. Bern: The reasons for my recent absence, and what I've learned along the way. It's nice having Jesus for a tutor -- https://zurl.co/xlij #perseverance #trustingGod #fortitude

I think I've found the reason for the increase in school shootings, but not everyone will like what I've written

Staggering Numbers Of Millennials Are Leaving Church

and It's All Our Own Fault

by Web pastor Paul J. Bern

For viewing in any browser, click here :-)

For decades, the United States has been thought of as a Christian nation around the globe. But today that is dramatically changing – especially among America's young people. The truth is that all of the recent polls tell us that Americans under 30 years of age are rejecting the Christian faith in unprecedented numbers. In fact, what the numbers reveal is not a slow move away from the Christian faith. Rather, they clearly portray a massive wave of young Americans running away from traditional Christianity as fast as they can. Not only that, but the vast majority of young adults in America today do not go to church, do not pray and do not read the Bible. Just consider a few of the results from a fairly recent (2015) and deeply troubling survey of 18 to 29 year old Americans:

• 65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either.
  
• 65% rarely or never attend worship services of any kind.
  
• 67% don't read the Bible or any other religious texts on a regular basis.
  

That is a solid two-thirds of American young adults who don't even have the slightest connection to traditional Christianity. If the current trends continue, the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Daewoo, Plymouth and Saturn dealerships from just a few years ago. The survey did find that 65% of those surveyed did call themselves "Christian", but among that 65%, the majority are what I call CINO's (Christians in name only). Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith.

But it just isn't this latest survey that is showing a mass exodus from the Christian faith by America's young people. According to a more recent (2016) survey by America's Research Group, 95 percent of 20 to 29 year old evangelical Christians attended church regularly during their elementary school and middle school years. However, only 55 percent of those young evangelical Christians still attended church regularly during high school, and only 11 percent of them were still regularly attending church when they went to college. That's it, just a paltry 11 percent! And that was among self-identified evangelical Christians.

But the most recent survey from this same nonprofit was perhaps even more troubling. According to that survey, 15% of Americans now say they have "no religion" – which is up from 8% in 1990. However, what was much more disturbing was that 46% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 indicated that they had no religion in the survey. Is it any wonder that atheism is on the rise? Forty-six percent is not just a trend. That is not just a landslide, either. I would define that as a stampede. Today there most certainly is a mass exodus of America's young people from the traditional Christian faith. There is simply no getting around it. Another recent poll by America's Research Group showed that less than 1 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 hold a Biblical world view. And what is a Biblical world view? This has been defined as someone holding on to the following six key beliefs:

1) Believing that absolute moral truth exists.
2) Believing that the Bible is completely accurate in all of the principles it teaches.

3) Believing that Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic.

4) Believing that a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or by doing good works.

5) Believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth.

6) Believing that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.

Using those six criteria, less than 1 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 hold a Biblical world view. That's no more than 3 million out of 330,000,000! The implications of this are staggering. The truth is that the United States is quickly becoming a highly secularized nation. Europe has already been down this road, and now America is rapidly following. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of churches will close in the next 10 years as more and more people simply quit going. Large numbers of Christian ministries, radio stations, television shows and book stores will have to shut their doors because there will not be nearly enough people to support them. But the most frightening thing of all is that we are losing almost an entire generation to the world. Never before in U.S history has an entire generation rejected the Gospel as much as this one has. America's young people are rejecting the Christian faith, and yet the mainstream Christian establishment keeps running around and telling everyone that everything is fine. Fine??

No, everything is not fine. Not even close -- in point of fact, nowhere near! The Church in America is broken – completely! It is very rare to find a church where authentic Christianity is being practiced anymore. Our young people are not stupid. They know what is real and what is not. When they hear pastors tell them they must give 10% of what they earn each and every week, that's not what the Gospel says and they know it. When they hear TV evangelists trying to convince them that God wants us all to be rich, when our youth hear them condemning gay people when it's not their business to judge, when they see 'conservative Christians' protesting abortion in the streets as they send your sons and daughters off to fight wars that benefit only a handful of people, millennial's can see the hand-writing on the wall. If the Church in America – yes, I said the Church – would repent and turn back to real, authentic Christianity, at least we would have a chance of capturing the attention of those young Americans who are honestly looking for the truth. But instead, people of all ages – not just the young – are hungry and thirsty for some real truth. They're fed up to here with all the spiritual bull-crap being dished out by for-profit churches and all the con artists on TV who have the nerve to call themselves “apostle” or “bishop”, and they're looking for some authenticity. You know, like the kind Jesus had?

What did Jesus say about all this? “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (Matthew chapter five, verse 6).” Translated into 21^st century English, this simply means come to Jesus Christ in and of himself, and simply leave the churches behind. You will no doubt recall that Jesus put his money where his mouth was in this regard when he threw the money changers out of the temple. He wasn't nice about it either. He didn't have to be. In the here and now of the modern church – or Church Incorporated as I like to call it – anybody can see that the descendants of the money changers have once again set up shop in houses of worship. As a result, you had best be really sure that He is returning very soon for yet another house cleaning. Christ will be far more angry the second time around as he was the first. So much more....

On the surface, it would be easy to say that every bit of the fault for this lies with modern church leadership. But that is not entirely the fault of the Church, although the leadership does bear a good bit of the responsibility. The truth is that we – the parents of the millenials I'm writing about – have created a society where our children are taught that Jesus and Christianity are not important any more. Our public schools teach our children day after day after day that they evolved from monkeys, that abortion, indiscriminate sex before marriage and homosexuality are perfectly normal for everyone, and that anyone who disagrees is either a bigot or an idiot. Then these same accusers go home and surround themselves with endless entertainment for the rest of the day (television, video games, Internet, movies, and often pornography), effectively isolating themselves from their families and each other. The overwhelming message regarding the Christian faith in the above forms of entertainment is that either Christianity is irrelevant, not true or should be openly mocked. Only thing is, they have forgotten that you can't mock God or Jesus. You cannot mock God any more than a Chevy can mock General Motors.

So should we be surprised that the overwhelming majority of our children and grandchildren have rejected the Christian faith? Should we expect anything else? What else were we expecting, John the Baptist? We have raised our children in the godless society that we have constructed and now we are so surprised that they are godless. People everywhere are pulling their hair out trying to figure out why all these school shootings have sprung up seemingly out of nowhere over the last 15 years or so. But nobody should be surprised. We are just reaping what we have sown, and we now have an unexpected bumper crop of wanton violence. I'd say we have our work cut out for us for the foreseeable future, so we'd better get started. Because if we don't start repairing the damage we have caused by letting electronic devices do our parenting for us, we are going to lose an entire generation. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be totally unacceptable.

Jesus is keeping up with the changing times, but some churches are barely hanging on

Why Technology Is Reinventing

Church As We Have Known It

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

To view this in any browser, click here! :-)

The celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible was back in 2011, and Bible publishers are still ostentatiously commemorating that landmark by producing an abundance of gorgeous hand-bound versions complete with illustrations – for a premium price, of course. The hoopla is entirely justified, since the King James Bible revolutionized Bible reading, bringing Scripture into a common vernacular for the first time for the English-speaking world. Although I personally use other versions (NIV, NLT, & Amplified), it is not too much to say that the King James Bible – mass produced as it was – democratized religion by taking it out of the hands of the clerical few and giving it to the many, thanks to a cutting edge technology from back then called the printing press.

Today, another much bigger revolution in the Church is underway. Today’s technology goes a giant step further, making Scripture – in any language and any translation – accessible to anyone on earth with a decent mobile phone. It need not be a “Smart-phone” anymore, just a basic one with a decent sized screen is all you need. Just like the 500-year-old Protestant Reformation, which was aided by the advent of the printing press and which helped give birth to the King James Bible, changes wrought by new Web-based technology have the ability to expand the reach and scope of the gospel of Jesus Christ like we previously never have. In the face of church leaders who claimed that only they could interpret the Bible for the common people, Reformation leaders like Martin Luther taught that nothing supersedes the authority of the Word itself. "A simple layman armed with Scripture,” Luther wrote, “is greater than the mightiest pope without it."

In that vein, digital technology gives users the text, plain and simple, without the interpretive lens of established authorities. And it lets users share interpretations with other non-authorities, like family members, friends and coworkers. With the Bible on iPhone's, iPad's and 'tablets' of various kinds, believers can bypass constraining religious structures – otherwise known as denominations and brick-and-mortar churches – in favor of a more individualized connection with God. We can't see God, and we can't see the internet visually, yet people who have a hunger and a thirst for God – or at the very least some power greater than themselves – connect with God this way. This website is based on that fact, that there is an emerging new power outlet that we can plug in to that is like a direct link to God. Churches are getting on the Web in droves because they are discovering the same thing. There is an intensity now, a burning desire to bring ourselves as close as we can get to God, because millions of Christians all over the world are beginning to recognize that we are living in the Last Days. There is now a growing sense of urgency to get as many souls into God's kingdom as can be because we are all running out of time! The more ways we can find to do this, the better.

This helps solve a problem that Christian leaders are increasingly articulating; that even among people who say that Jesus Christ is their personal Lord and Savior, too many folks don’t read their Bibles. Here in the 21st century, more than a third of those who self-identify as born-again Christians rarely or never read the Bible. They don't even own one! Among 'unaffiliated' people – that is, Americans who don’t belong to a religious congregation – more than two thirds say they don’t read the Bible. Especially among 18-to-29 year old's, Bible reading has come to feel like homework, associated with “right” interpretations and “wrong ones,” and accompanied by stern lectures from the pulpit. Today's young Christians, or “millenials” if you like, have come to expect experiences that appear unscripted and interactive, which allows them to be open and honest with their questions. To put it simply, they are hungry and thirsty for an authenticity that can only be found by reading the Bible. If anyone reading this does not own a Bible because they can't afford it, please send me your email addresses in the responses below, or contact me directly from this link.

This yearning for a more directly connected faith – including Bible readings and verses to inspire or console wherever and whenever they’re needed – is being met with an enthusiastic embrace. For growing numbers of young people, a leather-bound Bible sitting like an artifact on a stand in the family living room has no allure. It’s not an invitation to exploration or questioning. Young people want to absorb their spirituality the way they do their news or their music. They want to browse on Facebook, Tweet on Twitter, link up on Linked In, and Google whatever is left. They are also streaming Christian content on their various digital devices directly off the Web, bypassing cable TV and printed media completely. Thus we now have products such as “Youversion”, a digital Bible available for free on iTunes and developed by a 34-year-old technology buff and Christian pastor from Oklahoma named Bobby Grunewald. In an interview on a Christian TV channel recently, he said he conceived of it while on a layover at Chicago O'Hara International Airport, wishing he had a Bible to read. “What we’re really trying to address is, how do we increase engagement in the Bible?” he said. Now available in 113 versions and 41 languages, including Arabic, “Youversion” has a community component that allows users to share thoughts and insights on Bible verses with friends. It has been installed on more than 20 million Smart-phones since 2008.

Traditionalists (and I'm definitely not one of those) worry that technology allows young believers to practice religion without committing to what many churches call “a church home” – and they’re right. What they are really afraid of is that donations will falter as a result of this development. The very idea of not having the church participants right there with them so these hireling pastors can pass around a collection basket (or two) completely unnerves these types of 'leaders'. That's how you can tell if a pastor is in the ministry for the right reasons. Let me give you an example. I once watched a Michigan pastor named Rob Bell on a Christian video that I streamed off the Web. It was the eve of the publication of his new bestseller "Love Wins" (I don't recall the date on the video, but it was a couple of years ago). It was said on the show that after the book-signing, many of Pastor Bell's acolytes said they felt they knew Rob through his sermons, which they regularly downloaded off the internet, even though they had never met him. They hailed from places like Australia, South Africa and New Jersey. They listen to Bell while they’re working out, or commuting to work. They get their religion – like their meals – on the run. Pastor Bell is going about this in the right way, and traditional churches with their comparatively high overhead are being left behind in the dust of history.

The family Bible has long been given as a gift on graduation day or other big occasions and inscribed with special dates such as births, marriages, or deaths. Some of these Bibles would go on to become collector's items that are treasured, protected and preserved. I can see a world in the not-too-distant future when the Bible may exist primarily online, or on a 'thumb-drive', especially due to the number of trees we must otherwise cut down to make the paper on which to print them. For right now, worship services and Bible studies are still done almost exclusively as public gatherings in a house of worship, or sometimes in a “home church”. But more and more people are beginning to trend towards Web-based Churches that offers a more personalized experience. As a result for some, the necessity of physically gathering each week in the same place with the same people becomes a traditional form of worship that has begun to fade into the past. Moreover, more and more people are getting by without the expense of owning and insuring (and fixing!) a motor vehicle. Without a doubt, these two trends represent a new crisis for organized religion if it has difficulty adapting to these new technologies that can reach audiences that number in the millions. This question already has organized religion seeking to redefine what it means to be a body of believers. Besides, with all this new technology, the faithful can now have church as little or as often as they want (but often is definitely better, even if it's for only 5 minutes each time). Just remember to make sure your worship is as authentic as the Lord and Savior you worship! Search your hearts for the answer to this question. God sees all and He knows all. Above all, never stop praying and praising Jesus, because he's coming back real soon.

The Trump White House Is Gives a Sucker Punch to Religious Conservatives Who Helped Elect Him

The 'Spiritual, Not Religious' Gospel of Progressive Christianity Grows as More Become Disenchanted With Traditional Religion

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

To view this in a browser, click here! :-)

So-called “experts” call them “unaffiliated,” as in a recent Pew poll, or “nones” – or even just 'not very religious.' A 2013 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute divided these groups further into “unattached,” “atheists”, “agnostics,” and “seculars.” One thing is for sure; this ever-growing cohort of non-Church Americans made up, at 23 percent, the single largest segment of Barack Obama’s “religious coalition” that helped him win reelection in 2012 (compared to the 37 percent of white evangelicals who supported Mitt Romney). As a result of this, the unaffiliated clearly had their moment. Media analysis, however, did not go very deep – there was a story that went beyond these names and numbers.

I first published this website after I began to understand who the current crop of unaffiliated people are, what they believe in, and who or what inspires them. Yet we have precious little historical understanding of this critical and rapidly growing demographic. What are their roots? What religious, cultural, economic, demographic, and political processes shaped their sensibilities, habits, and makeup? In order to understand these still-believing nonreligious/unaffiliated/agnostics etc., we need to understand that much of the religious dynamism in the United States happens outside the church walls. Moreover, this has been ongoing for quite some time now. The “rise of the non-religious believers” is but the latest phase in the long transformation of religion into what we now commonly call “spirituality.” In my case and that of my peers, it is Christianity and the strongly held belief in Jesus Christ, not as a distant and mysterious god, but as the Son of God who we can develop a relationship with on a personal level. So if you want to get closer to God, just get one-on-one with Jesus. How do we accomplish that? By asking Him into your hearts, to come and dwell there forever. There is truly no other way to get to know him! By the same token, spirituality can mean many things to many people. The language of spirituality is used by traditional religious adherents as well as the religiously unaffiliated. But only the “nonreligious” have made it into a cliche: “spiritual but not religious.”

The history of American spirituality reveals that our commonplace understanding of spirituality — as the individual, experiential dimension of human encounter with the sacred — arose from the clash of American Protestantism with the forces of modern life back in the nineteenth century. While religious conservatives fought to stem the tide, giving rise to fundamentalism, religious Progressives like myself have adapted their faith to the 21^st century, often by discarding orthodoxies (such as my strict Catholic upbringing) in favor of maintaining one's mental health just as anyone would do for a physical ailment, combined with or as a supplement to a personal relationship with our risen Savior. It looks to me like the majority of today’s nonreligious individuals – those who claim no religion but still embrace some form of spirituality – are engaged in the same task of renovating their faith for a new historical moment of major awakening! I am convinced that this moment has in fact arrived in the form of resistance to the Donald Trump presidency. Because this has occurred, right-wing conservatism and the religious right are being dealt a blow from which it will take them a long time to recover, if ever. The Progressive Christians, as I have been calling folks like us (not “liberal”!), will get the football the first time something goes horribly wrong in the Trump White House (only time will tell). It will be up to us to score when that happens, so let's start planning now!

Today’s unaffiliated and nonreligious, like the liberals of previous generations, typically shun dogma and creed in favor of a faith that is truthful, genuine, practical, psychologically attuned, ecumenical and ethically oriented. Of course, Americans of all religious varieties have allowed themselves to be deeply influenced by consumerism, but media and markets are shaping the religious lives of those without formal institutional or community ties. The religiously unaffiliated might not attend services, but they “have” their religion in many other ways: they watch religion on TV and listen to it on the radio; find inspiration on the web; attend retreats, seminars, workshops, and classes; buy candles and statues, bumper stickers and yoga pants; take spiritually motivated trips; and, perhaps most significantly, buy and read books. Books have been the most important conduit for spreading the 'spiritual but not religious' gospel.

This dependency on the consumer marketplace, and especially books, has had significant consequences for the religious lives of all Americans, especially the unaffiliated. First, it has enhanced the tendencies within American religion toward a therapeutic understanding of life from a spiritual vantage point. The profit-oriented commercial presses that came to dominate religious publishing naturally pursued the largest market possible for their goods, and seized on the nondenominational, nonsectarian, and psychologically modern forms of faith advanced by the religious left as a common American Christian vernacular. These trends have only accelerated from the 1920s to the present, so that now the line between religion and self-help sometimes disappears in the spirituality section of Amazon. Second, spiritual consumerism has fostered books that allow some readers entry into religious worlds to which they have not been previously exposed. Since the invention of the printing press, the lines of denomination and tradition have gradually mattered less and less. This process has accelerated greatly with the relatively recent invention of the Internet.

Progressive Christianity's rise and liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that the Republican party has recently won the White House and Congress. The cultural victory that is the anti-Trump backlash is happening now because more Americans have been driven away by conservatism in light of a Trump presidency. In other words, leftist religious values and sensibilities became more and more normalized culturally speaking. The recent chapter 7 bankruptcy of Family Christian Stores is only the latest example of the decline of “Religion, Inc.” Even as religious affiliations continue to decline, on-line churches combined with Christian but nondenominational book sales and TV shows are continuing to proliferate. In the process, Christianity is becoming as interconnected as the rest of the world, which can only result in more rapid growth. This is very encouraging news for people like me who wish to spread the Gospel as widely and effectively as they can!

This is what can happen when Murphy's law kicks in

Lessons Learned From Being Knocked Off the Internet, or

How I Spent My Involuntary Vacation

First, let me thank all my faithful readers who have waited patiently while I put up this new website, got all new email set up and restored access to my blogs and social media. Although I posted several messages apiece on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ alerting everyone that my site and email were all down, it sure is good to be back! For all the rest, or who may be seeing one of my postings for the first time, my website fell victim to a particularly ferocious hack attack on the 10^th of January. This hack evidently originated somewhere in Russia, and was apparently motivated by the fact that mine is an exclusively Christian website (never mind the 'progressive' part for the moment) and the hacking was done by purported atheists. At first it was absolutely maddening – I couldn't log on to anything because all my passwords had been changed, and I had no way to change them back (can I get a witness?). But it didn't take me long to figure out there was nothing I could do about it – the damage had already been done. Being a follower of Christ, I did not allow any of that to make me angry, although having a fit of rage did cross my mind.

That was over two weeks ago. After discovering that there was a chance the hackers had at least attempted to access my bank account, I was compelled to go down to my credit union, close out my checking account and open a new one in its place. Afterwards came a slow-as-molasses-in-January wait for my replacement debit card to arrive in the mail. Since I'm retired and on a fixed income, I have only one debit card and no credit cards (if I can't afford to pay cash for it, I can't afford it). That's why I was forced to hold off on constructing my new website, since I had no way to pay for the new Web services I would need. But the new website you're all looking at now is the end result of all the fuss and the trouble I have been through to get this ministry back to this point. At least it looks better than the old one, mainly due to the fact that the 'app' I'm using to build and power this site is far more sophisticated than my old one, which was from 'Yahoo'. But there's so much more to this than that. Let's see what the Bible says about someone being attacked just because they're Christian.

First, it says in Matthew chapter 5 and verses 11-12, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets that were before you.” Have I been insulted on line? I can't even print some of the junk I have been told, mainly by Muslims and atheists but also by a surprising number (to me at least) of alleged “Christians” who condemn everybody who doesn't believe what their little denominations believes in. This has been a problem within the greater Church since the days when the apostle Paul wrote what we now call First Corinthians chapter three, where he rightfully shamed the church at Corinth for conflicts over doctrine that were occurring at that time. What persons, living or otherwise, could be examples of Matt. 5:11-12 as I write this? The first and most obvious answer would be none other than Jesus Christ Himself, who was beaten and whipped unmercifully, and then shamed by his death by crucifixion, the ultimate death penalty. Jesus rejoiced and was glad in His Spirit when He was crucified – although He chose not to show it – and was buried, only to rise from the grave on the morning of the third day. Moreover, Jesus has received an eternal reward for his perfect fulfillment of Biblical prophecy by being seated at the right hand of his Father in heaven.

Another example I can think of is Rev. Dr. King, Jr. He was followed incessantly by FBI agents everywhere he went and hounded by the press for years, who hoped they could catch him in one kind of illicit behavior or another. But, even after all those years, they couldn't pin a single thing on that man – nothing! So, they killed him instead. In much the same way the prophets of old were treated, such as the original 11 martyred apostles, and even the prophets of the Old Testament such as Isaiah, who was killed by being sawn in half. More Christians were martyred for their faith in the 20^th century than were killed in the previous 19 centuries combined! Moreover, there are as many Christians who have been martyred for their faith in the 21^st century up until today than were martyred in the entire 20^th century. If this isn't a ramping up in the Spirit towards the rapture of the Church, then I don't know what is.

There was at least several, and likely more, of the original 11 apostles (or 12 if you count Paul) who also had something important to say about enduring personal attacks as well as attacks in the spirit. Consider the following quotes from James chapter 1, verses 4-5: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops persevereance. Persevereance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything”. And again it is written further down in verse 13: “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him”. Plus, let's not forget that the apostle Paul taught that “God does not show favoritism” (or, 'is no respecter of persons' in the KJV). Everybody has to go through strongly negative experiences at some point in life, but it happens so God can build us up, not so He can tear us down. God never does that to anybody unless it's a rebuke, but people can do it to themselves unawares.

So, from all that has happened here during the last couple of weeks, I have learned to feel blessed when faced with adversity, to praise God even when I am attacked, and to be at peace, even when surrounded by enemies. God has given me a lesson in perseverance, and I have evidently passed the test, although it wasn't easy by a long shot. There were times when my patience were pushed to its very limits and beyond, but now I'm stronger because of it. Now I know more than ever that a crown of righteousness awaits me when my life here is over and I enter heaven, because I have endured the trials that have been set before me, and I will continue, with God's help, to be made strong enough by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to endure any trial or trouble that may come my way. And, since I'm no smarter or better than anybody else, everyone who reads this can do the same.