One of the huge fights online between reform and ‘emergent’ church movements moves well beyond theological differences and gets to the core of what the social gospel looks like for 20 and 30 something Christians in the US.

Bill Kinnon has a good round up of a speech by a guy named Tim Keller who looks at these sorts of shifts bouncing off Dashouse. Tied in nicely with my reading this week over at SoMA’s review: Wrestling With Rauschenbusch

One hundred years ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Walter Rauschenbusch wrote and published his book, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” Upon his return, the theologian, Baptist minister and professor of church history at the Rochester Theological Seminary discovered that, in his absence, he had become “the most prominent public intellectual of the young 20th century,” as Stephen G. Carter puts it in the just-published centenary edition of the book. Rauschenbusch was ushered off on a national speaking tour. For three years “Christianity and the Social Crisis” sold more copies than any other religious text but the Bible. Its publication, said the great liberal pastor Harry Fosdick, “ushered in a new era in Christian thought and action.”

Yet ask ten mainstream Christians today who Rauschenbusch was and you’ll get an average of seven shrugs. Changing that ratio is clearly the intent of the centenary re-issue, re-titled Christianity and the Social Crisis of the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke Up the Church and furnished with companion essays by well-known faith-based types like Carter, Rev. Jim Wallis, and Stanley Hauerwas, and an afterword by the late philosopher Richard Rorty, who was Rauschenbusch’s grandson. The editor of the book, Rauschenbusch’s great-grandson, is Paul Raushenbush, a chaplain at Princeton University. Full disclosure: I was his editor at Beliefnet some years ago and we remain friends. Coincidentally, the book arrives at a time when the elder Rauschenbusch needs all the friends he can find.

I’m not big on theologians and I’d never heard of the guy. What I am reading makes me realize I am more influenced by his thinking than I would have stopped to think about.

Jordon Cooper points me to this post by Pernell Goodyear of the Canadian church Freeway in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Hamilton Ontario.

We live in a diverse community with many:

• impoverished people
• street kids
• single moms
• retired folks
• new Canadians
• folks with physical and developmental disabilities
• artists and musicians
• young professionals
• folks with mental health issues
• etc.

Ours is not a “one-size-fits-all” neighbourhood [or church community]. On a daily basis we encounter folks who face all sorts of challenges in their lives: financial, emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, etc. Being part of The Freeway means that you are faced, first-hand, with what it means to live with and minister to people [and receive ministry from people] who:

• Crap their pants during church. Smell terrible. And haven’t the sense to excuse themselves and go clean up.
• Have job interviews and come in looking for you because they need a pair of pants, because they don’t have unsoiled pants to wear at the job interview you’ve helped them prepare for.
• Think that sex is the only way they can validate who they are, or make a living, or find love, or stay in the country. So they exploit others or are themselves exploited.
• Have to choose between baby formula and their next fix. They really don’t know which would be the better choice for their family.
• Have been rejected by their family, friends and community because of their sexual orientation, or loss of work, or religious confusion, or a decision they made when they were a kid.
• Are desperate for God. But have been rejected by the church, or can’t make their way through the religious mumbo jumbo, or don’t know where to begin, or feel unworthy.
• Just need to eat a meal, or get a hug, or talk with another human being.

Today at the Mission is another blog that reflects the missional, incarnate love of God to Canada’s poor.

(I was going to blog about the 3 professors dismissed by Oral Roberts University and the lawsuit, but blogs like Today at the Mission and SBC Outpost have been doing a much better job)

Update: Court papers - suit against Oral Roberts University and plaintiffs: President Richard Roberts, Provost Mark Lewandowski, Dean Wendy Shirk, Asst. Provost Jeff Ogle

Local paper Tulsa World is keeping up to date with ongoing events and reacts as well as background.

Leaving Fundamentalism

Scandals in US religion are nothing new. Amiee Semple McPherson, Jimmy Swaggart, PTL Club, past Oral Roberts, (Time Magazine cover 1987) Benny Hinn.
Fred Clark at Slacktivist lays out this is a series of scandals (plural) and while Americans can move on from IRS fines levied against ministries, lavish conspicuous spending, it’s going to be the sex scandal. Once those texts of Mrs. Roberts and boys are released…Clark believes ORU will go down as big money backs away.
Street Prophets and Digby have slightly different takes.

Those who are raised in fundamentalism have a difficult time if they are able to get out, emotionally, socially. What of the Roberts children, growing up in a celebrity bubble that rivals only Hollywood?  We know many of our beliefs are set by the time we are 30. For those wounded by this unorthodoxy and scandals, emotional, social and spiritual relearning is very difficult.

I think this is going to be a big story spreading through the US, well past Oklahoma  - as big as PTL, as dramatic as eagerly soaked up by a cynical public craving the entertainment and salacious details as the PTL fall out was.