Has America Become Too Religious?

Back on January 19th, I went out on a limb with this bold prediction: "Fresno State will beat Nevada, who'll likely be ranked in the Top 10, when they play in the Save Mart Center later this year.

That limb broke last night.

Nevada showed up ranked #12 and the Bulldogs hung tough for a half before falling to the Wolfpack, 81-68.

The game was secondary, though, to spending time with Trae and Tori and watching them, once again, do their thing with the cheerleaders on the floor during a second half timeout.

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Later this morning, Tori and a recovered (finally!) Mandy will join me as we head to the Bay Area for this evening's Sweetheart Dinner at the Lassen Street Church of Christ in Vallejo. I am excited about the opportunity to speak after dinner this evening. The folks in Vallejo have had us there twice in the past for seminars and it will be great to renew some friendships that are very dear in our lives.

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I left the last post on ministry in Fresno up for three days intentionally. Perhaps you thought I'd taken a blog siesta, but I wanted that particular entry to get as wide a read as possible. For all you Woodward Park'ers, thanks for reading and thanks for emailing me your comments and insights. I appreciate your willingness to "think outside the box" with me. Right now, we're dreaming and envisioning. The day is coming, though, when the dreams and plans must become reality. I hope you're beginning to pray for God's direction, guidance and strength to minister most effectively to our city...all of our city.

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My Yahoo homepage has a link to a poll question that caught my eye: Has America become too religious? As I write this, there are 600-plus replies to the question. Interestingly, many believers in God have responded in the affirmative, yet drawing a distinction between being "religious" and being in "relationship" with God.

In Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes: "I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's heart into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God" (13).

Does your faith find you relegated to the realm of "religion" while forfeiting "relationship" with God? Jesus himself said the essence of eternal life was to know God (see John 17.3). There is a qualitative difference in knowing facts about God and knowing God; in knowing all about God and truly having relationship with God; in settling for religion when relationship is available for the taking.

Ministry in Fresno, California

I am grateful to be the Preaching Minister of the Woodward Park Church of Christ in Fresno, California. The Woodward Park family has blessed my family by taking us in and loving us as if we were their very own. It is humbling, rewarding, and eternally gratifying.

My family has now lived in California for half-a-year. The acclimation to California culture hasn't been too difficult; grasping the challenges of ministry in this city and culture, on the other hand, continues to stretch and challenge me in ways ministry in the south never did.

Consider, for example, the Fresno metropolitan area is home to over 1,000,000 people and is one of the fastest growing metro areas in California. According to a CSU-Fresno website, over 100 different languages have been identified within Fresno, making it one of, if not the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States (at Woodward Park alone, we have assemblies for English, Laotian, Cambodian and Hmong while supporting an inner-city church where the services are held in Spanish). According to an October, 2005 Brookings Institute study, Fresno was ranked as the city with the highest percentage of those living below the federal poverty threshold in concentrated areas (neighborhood clusters). In city-wide poverty rankings, Fresno ranks 16th among the nation's largest 50 cities.

To help grasp the sociological ramifications of life in Fresno as a window to ministry need, I have immersed myself in readings on California demography in general and Fresno county demography in particular. I'm learning more than I ever dreamed so as to better understand how to serve as an equipped minister in this multiracial, multicultural city.

Last Friday at Borders, I picked up Mexifornia: A State of Becoming and devoured the insights in the book. Mexifornia is written by current Stanford classicist professor Victor Davis Hanson, a resident of Selma (17 miles south of Fresno on CA-99), and addresses the immigration issue and its impact on life in Calfornia. Using his hometown of Selma as his laboratory, Hanson explores how life has changed in one small, central valley town in the course of his lifetime:

"I write here from the perspective of a farmer whose social world has changed so radically, so quickly that it no longer exists. Three decades ago my hometown of Selma was still a sleepy little town in central California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, between the coast and the high Sierra. It was a close-knit community of seven thousand or so mostly hardscrabble agrarians whose parents or grandparents had once migrated from Denmark, Sweden, Armenia, Japan, India, Mexico and almost every other country in the world, to farm some of the richest soil in the world. Selma's economy used to be sustained by agriculture -- in the glory years before the advent of low prices caused by globalization, vertically integrated corporations and highly productive high-tech agribusiness -- and supplemented by commuters who worked in nearby Fresno. The air was clear enough that you could see the lower Sierra Nevada, forty miles away, about half the year on average, not a mere four or five days following a big storm, as is now the case.

Sociologists call a small, cohesive town like the old Selma a 'face-to-face community.' As a small boy I used to dread being stopped and greeted by ten or so noisy Selmans every time I entered town. Now I wish I actually knew someone among the many I see.

The offspring of Selma's immigrant famers learned English, they intermarried, and within a generation they knew nothing of the old country and little of the old language. Now Selma is an edge city on the freeway of somewhere near twenty thousand anonymous souls, and is expanding at an unchecked pace...

Time passes; things must change. And so I accept transformations that are inevitable: a price-cutting Wal-Mart would drive out our third-generation Japenese-owned nursery, and multinational agribusiness would overwhelm the once prosperous Sikh family farm down the road. While I saw all this happening as if by time lapse, I hoped that the new Selma would at lease retain the language, customs, laws and multiracial but unicultural flavor of the old. But it has not" (1-2).

Hanson captures well the sentiment of many long-time Fresnans who've lived through the changing demographic of their home city. To walk through the mall or browse the aisles of Target reveals a city unlike any I've ever experienced: a veritable melting pot of cultures, languages and peoples who've descended on central Calfornia.

As a minister and disciple of Jesus, my heavenly citizenship must frame the way I see every person. I cannot look upon others as an impediment to my lifestyle; no, I give thanks to God that he is bringing the nations to our doorstep.

Our challenges are great. The needs of our city, immense. But I have faith that the God who enabled a band of twelve men to change the world in their lifetime can enable a strong, healthy congregation like Woodward Park to reach their city with the gospel by living out the mission of Jesus everyday.