The Bosque Boys

This brief article surveys the recent research and comes up with 14 factors cited by various "experts" to explain why some Christian congregations grow. Link from The Layman Online.

Here is a summary of the 14 factors which I document fully below: (1) witnessing, (2) strictness, (3) high fertility rates, (4) caring for children and youth, (5) high involvement, (6) welcoming new people, (7) leadership, (8) prayer, (9) being a church of 1000+ attendees or under 50 attendees, (10) being located in rural counties, (11) being in rapidly growing zip codes, (12) being in a tradition that is altering worship practices slightly but not too much, (13) churches that offer “intimacy and choice” and (14) attractive worship style, senior pastor, and church reputation.

(10)"Rural counties," above seems to mean exurban counties rather than the middle-of-nowhere counties, and so would overlap (11) rapidly growing zip codes. (9) Under 50 attendees would naturally reflect larger percentage changes with fewer numbers, also, many new church starts would be in this group. Numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 often overlap with theologically conservative beliefs. And, (9) over 1000 attendees (not just members) often would be conservative churches rather than theologically liberal.

For those who like dates and charts, 2007 can be regarded as significant in the decline of the former Mainline Christian Denominations, and the rise of the (formerly)Sideline groups. According to the most recently available data, in 2007 the Presbyterian Church, USA, declined to 2.9 million members, while the Assemblies of God increased to 2.9 million members.

Interestingly, denominational declines were not limited to the Mainline (read Liberal) groups. The Southern Baptist Convention declined slightly, as did the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. So did Roman Catholics. The only large Christian denominations growing are the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God-Cleveland, Tennessee. (There are several groups calling themselves "Church of God," so they are differentiated by the location of their headquarters.)

Story.

Both the Assemblies of God, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tenn.) are charismatic--emphasizing personal experience of the miraculous.

"In general, though, the modern tendency was to feel rather than to think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing new diversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier of cosmic mystery. Religion was a leading interest in Tsath, though very few actually believed in the supernatural. What was desired was the aesthetic and emotional exaltation bred by the mystical moods and sensuous rites . . . " H.P. Lovecraft describing a fictional civilization in decline 1929/30

Michael Jackson as an icon of Pan, or Bacchus; enabling the worshiping throngs to commune with the gods.

What has been forgotten by the modern devotees is that Pan or Bacchus were dangerous, and linked to death as well as orgiastic pleasure.

A few scattered thoughts on the scattered Palin announcement:

1. TRULY UNEXPECTED and disappointing on two fronts: a) quitting is irresponsible and damning; and b) she delivered another less than impressive rhetorical performance (which is merely exasperating).

2. Having said that, her decision was not idiotic.

3. 2012 seems completely out of the question now--but that may not be a bad thing. So much of the immediate punditry and conventional wisdom centered on 2012--but that analysis misses the forest for the trees. Forget about 2012. In fact, taking herself out of the running in terms of the next election is the smart play. Although the ODS wing of our party remains convinced that the GOP is well-positioned to defeat the President in 2012, I disagree vehemently.

More to come on this as we move forward, but beating Obama in 2012 is a very tall order--and unlikely at this point. For a number of reasons, Mitt Romney is the man for 2012. He will probably lose--but he is more than willing to brave the long odds and fight the good fight. He wants his shot. He is well-funded and popular on the right. Give him the ball. We could do a lot worse.

4. What does the future hold for Sarah Barracuda? Palin is a heavy hitter. She will continue to be very successful on the stump. She will continue to be very successful on the lecture circuit. If she makes the difference in a number of tight races in 2010 and 2012 and 2014, she will be an even more formidable national figure.

5. Frankly, she is too impoverished (relatively) RIGHT NOW to make a serious run for the presidency. Politics is an almost impossible business for working-class people (especially for a conservative who must run against the media). She needs to build some wealth, which she can do quite easily by shedding the "ball and chain" of the Alaska governorship. The very least Sarah Palin ought to get for her troubles is to be as rich as David Letterman.

Prediction: Sarah Palin will never be president of the United States.

However, there is no reason why she can't be a Republican Al Gore, beloved and admired on her side of the aisle and reviled and ridiculed by her irate opponents. Remember, Vice President Gore has reportedly earned $100 Million during the years following his defeat in 2000. Like Gore, Palin will always have star power and the ability to draw a crowd. We can expect her to use her influence on the party faithful when needed, and we can also expect her, like Gore, to continually dangle the prospect of running for president before the press and her faithful boosters (but my hunch is, ultimately, she will never pull the trigger again on a all-out run for the big prize).

All she needs now are a "few inconvenient truths."

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In conclusion, this very brief analysis from VDH via NRO's the Corner is on the mark and also well worth your time. If she were to be a serious contender for the GOP nomination someday, she would need to follow this path:

In the long run, she can lecture, earn a good income through speaking, develop a coterie of advisers and supporters, take care of her family, not have the constant political warring on all flanks, and invest time in reflecting and studying issues, visit the country, meet leaders, etc. She's not looking at 2012; but in eight years by 2016 she will be far more savvy, still young, and far more experienced. It matters not all that the Left writes her off as daffy, since they were going to do that whatever she did; the key is whether she convinces conservatives in eight year of travel and reflection that she's a charismatic Margaret Thatcher type heavyweight.

UPDATE: big BB welcome to Instapundit readers.

UPDATE-2: big BB welcome to Wizbang readers (another one of our favorites).

UPDATE-3: interesting thread in response to this post on FARK.com--doesn't seem to be many folks actually reading the post, but the idea touched off a heated and sometimes ribald but sometimes funny debate among mostly non-fans of Palin.

There's nothing like a good scandal to make the news, and politicians have been awfully obliging the past few months. Marital infidelity is an oft-recurring scandal, and the more brazen the attempt to conceal the affair ("hiking the Appalachian trail," for example), the bigger the news buzz. There are also bonus Nielson points for soliciting prostitutes, using drugs, or attempting to hide homosexual behavior.

But why, why is this such a common theme? I'm not asking why cheating politicians make CNN headlines; I take our collective indignation/morbid curiosity as a given. I'm asking rather why it is that there seem to be so many politicians who risk political suicide for a momentary (or repeated) satisfaction. These are smart guys, right? (Almost always guys, yes.) Why then the stupidity, the risk?

I think the most explanatory analogy comes from the field of statistics. Any researcher working with sample data (statistics) knows that to be a true representation of the larger population, the sample must avoid, as much as possible, any selection bias. Simply stated, a selection bias can taint the results of a survey by virtue of the method in which the survey is collected. A well known example is "Dewey defeats Truman," which was based on a survey conducted via telephone in an era when telephone ownership was restricted to richer (read: Republican-leaning) Americans. The survey was flawed; the sample group was not representative of all Americans.

Representative democracy works on a principle similar to statistics: A group is selected from the total population and is intended to represent the wishes of the whole. [I know this isn't exactly fair to the political philosophy of the Framers, WF and OG, but spare me the historical skewering for the moment, please.] However, representative democracy, particularly in the modern, financing-driven style, is subject to a selection bias, specifically a self-selection bias. Think about the years of political maneuvering, fund-raising, back-scratching, and bacon-bringing required of any politician who wishes to be successful. Anyone who willingly subjects himself to that gauntlet, on the assumption that he/she can actually win at it, is likely to possess traits which may ultimately lead to a fall.

Pride, of course, goeth before the fall, and pride, manifested politically as (pick your term:) ambition, arrogance, charm, confidence, egotism, self-aggrandizement, or selfishness, is required of any politician. I'm an armchair psychologist at best, but I think there is a strong connection between the pride that allows one to consider politics and the pride that allows one to think he can get away with a crime. Speaking statistically again, one could say that there is a positive correlation between a political figure's political skill and SBI - Slime-ball index.

I guess the good news is that if this is true, and politicians are biased as a selected group, then what politicians do does not necessarily reflect on the general morals of Americans overall, since they're not a representative sample.

For debate: Is this self-selection bias an inherent flaw in the system? Can it be overcome structurally, or do we just need to pray for a Washington every election?

I have posted this essay many times over the years, but, on this momentous day, perhaps it is once again appropriate to reconsider this restatement of WHY WE WENT TO IRAQ:

1. Saddam was bad. He deserved ouster, capture, trial, and execution. Twenty-five million Iraqis deserved an opportunity to take control of their lives free of Saddam's oppressive regime.

2. Saddam was at war with the United States and a threat to regional security. For more than a decade, we flew combat missions over Iraq and drew anti-aircraft fire everyday. Our forces were stationed in Saudi Arabia to neutralize the threat Saddam posed to the region. Our presence in Saudi (part of our essential commitment to preserving the peace) irritated the international Muslim community. In fact, Osama bin Laden cited our presence in Saudi Arabia as the casus belli for war against America in general and 9-11 specifically.

3. Saddam was contained--but only as a result of the costly military commitments cited above. In addition, Saddam was contained as a result of a United Nations sanctions regime. Before the war, several human rights organizations charged that the heartless US-driven sanctions policy had killed upwards of 500,000 Iraqis through malnutrition and lack of adequate medical attention. Later, we learned of massive corruption on the part of the UN in administering the sanctions against Saddam's Iraq. Moreover, by 2002, the flagging resolve of the French and other European powers threatened the entire sanctions program. Containment was a leaky policy taking on more water every day.

4. Saddam unbound meant a return to the status quo ante bellum in which he had threatened his neighbors and worked assiduously to manufacture and deploy weapons of mass destruction.

5. Saddam and 911. It is a long held article of faith in the mainstream media that "911 and Iraq were not connected." This is nonsense. What they mean to say is that Saddam and his regime were not complicit in the terrorist attacks of 911. Those two statements are not the same. Conflation of these two distinct ideas belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the task that confronts us.

Although there is very little patience for a nuanced discussion of Saddam and the dangers he posed in the Middle East, here is a review in a nutshell:

Saddam was our sworn enemy. We know that he supported terrorist networks in the Middle East, and he may or may not have been harboring al Qaeda operatives (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) [6-30-09: IT IS CLEAR NOW THAT THIS RELATIONSHIP WAS NOT INTENTIONAL]; either way, his regime, inarguably, contributed to the continuing turmoil in the region. More importantly, our state of war with Saddam's Iraq, and the continued vendetta with him presented an insurmountable obstacle to progress in the region.

Saddam was connected to 9-11 in that the insecurity he created in the region contributed to the greater instability and discontent, which facilitated terrorism. The relationship between Saddam's Iraq and the cauldron of hostility that produced 911 was so obvious and internalized for so many of us that public opinion polls have consistently revealed a significant portion of Americans who connect Saddam and 911. Of course, many have taken those numbers as evidence that the Bush administration merely deceived the simple-minded. But that conclusion, once again, flows from the mistaken but foundational premise that 911 and Iraq cannot be connected; therefore, any person who makes that connection is: 1) wrong; 2) deficient in intelligence and 3) under the spell of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

The bottom line: If Saddam could be deposed, many of us believed that a new Iraq would emerge, which would begin a process that might lead to an era of reform in the Middle East, which might ultimately make Islamic terrorists as rare and irrelevant as Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

Yes. Iraq was a war of choice--but it was not a frivolous choice. Granted, now we face potential crises in the region of our own making that dwarf the old inconveniences. However, while it is tempting to view the past through the knowledge of the present, we must remember that the Iraq policy emerged from a long list of terrible choices. Doing nothing was an extremely unattractive option in the post-9-11 world.

All of the above is unalterable history. Now What?

I received this email today:

Hi, Prayer Warriors,

How are you?

President Obama, according to this article, has picked a church and personal spiritual advisors.

Whether we agree with his politics or not, let's pray that he is surrounded with God's truth and His love.

Thank you.

May the Lord bless you,
Philip

I like the tone of this note. Thanks, Philip. In my view, it is much more Christian than an "imprecatory prayer" against the President.

Allow me to associate myself with this invitation to pray for the President of the United States.

From VDH via National Review:

"[Barack] Obama plants soft questions at news conferences, lies about earlier promises of posting pending legislation on government websites for public perusal, feigns populist unease with his radical government expansion, fires public auditors who uncover liberal transgressions, and in general adopts a hardball politics that the Left claimed was innate to George W. Bush. These again are lies that are noble, in that they facilitate progressive politics that help the people — and they are presumably indiscernible by a fawning media and an unaware electorate.

"So why does President Obama so often get history wrong, so often call for utopian schemes he would hardly adopt for himself, and so often distort by misinformation and incomplete disclosure?

"Partly the culprit is administrative inexperience, partly historical ignorance. But mostly the disconnect comes because Barack Obama believes he is a philosopher-king, whose exalted ends more than justify his mendacious means."

I recommend you read it all here. Insightful analysis and a helpful mini discussion of Plato's Republic. Can't beat that combination.

Powerline links to The Washington Times for the story.

Vietnam's "hidden" war on Christianity just rumbles along, and on March 13, the communist authorities demolished one of the first Christian churches built in Vietnam's Central Highlands. While religious persecution is nothing new to Vietnam, the significance of this demolition is particularly symbolic because the church was more than a historical landmark. The large stone Church at Buon Ma Thuot for the last 34 years had been deliberately closed by Vietnam's security police, and yet, all those years, the church remained a powerful symbol to the local indigenous Christians. Unfortunately, the church was also an unwelcome reminder for the communists who had murdered a number of Christian missionaries near the grounds in 1968, and a reminder of the very movement the government is trying to eliminate. This movement, so hated by Hanoi, is nothing other than "independent" Christian house churches.

The story also reminds us that our abandonmnt of South Vietnam meant abandonment of our Montagnard allies to the tender mercies of the victorious North Vietnamese.

He could dance. He could sing. He could do both at the same time and make it look effortless.

But, he has been dead only a few hours and already I am sick of the eulogizing.

The dude had serious problems.

He did not want to be a black man. He spent umpteen dollars on surgery and treatment to look more and more white, and more and more feminine. He lived in a theme park like a 12-year-old who became rich.

He preferred the playtime company of children. Was it all none-sexual? Hard to believe.

He made the artist formerly, and now again known as Prince seem normal.