Due to a variety of factors, it has been many days since I have posted anything on this blog. Covenant Congregational Church at Piedmont College will be no more after Sunday, April 27. So, my time has been dedicated to preparing for the last service of the church and finding a new place of ministry for me. I am grateful that I have news on the "finding a new place" front, but I will share more about that later.
Today will be some snippets from the news that have caught my eye.
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The New York Times is running a series on how the Russian Orthodox Church has been flourishing lately and how other churches have been suppressed.
At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990's, Protestant Church groups, especially those with more evangelical fervor, saw this as a grand opportunity, a providential opportunity one could say, to plant new churches in the "formerly Communist" country. The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church was none too pleased at the influx of these new groups. The Orthodox church sought governmental controls and protections to help protect it in the new rough and tumble of the religious free market.
Officially, there is freedom of religion in Russia, but, in a recent poll, 71% of the people identify with the Russian Orthodox Church. This is quite reminiscent of the number of Americans who identify with Christianity.
Now, though, according to the leadership of the other church groups, the protection afforded the Russian Orthodox Church has gone rather far. From the article is a report from a place called Stary Oskol, which is 300 miles south of Moscow, "the police evicted a Seventh-day Adventist congregation from its meeting hall, forcing it to hold services in a ramshackle home next to a construction site. Evangelical Baptists were barred from renting a theater for a Christian music festival, and were not even allowed to hand out toys at an orphanage. A Lutheran minister said he moved away for a few years because he feared for his life. He has returned, but keeps a low profile." The Post report also detailed instances of harassment of other Christian groups despite the official policy._____________
This story illustrates the potential for the discrimination against minority religious groups anywhere despite what the official policy of the country is.
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In the Post On Religion section, Eboo Patel reported on the visit of the Aga Khan to America to promote his vision for education in the developing world. The Aga Khan commented on modern religious pluralism, “Balancing the universal and the particular is an age old challenge - intellectually and practically. But it may well become an even more difficult challenge as time moves on and the planet continues to shrink. It is one thing, after all, to talk about cultural understanding when 'the Other' is living across the world. It is often a different matter when the 'Other' is living across the street.”
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This is precisely the situation in America. There are few places in our country where people from different religious backgrounds do not live close to one another. Unfortunately, we do not always do as good a job of respecting and living with the 'other' as we should.
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On Monday, April 21, in USA TODAY, Oliver Thomas had an op-ed entitled "Might our religion be killing Us?" with the provocative lead, "Is what we preach - and ultimately, what we believe - hastening the destruction of our planet? The answer appears to be a resounding yes. So then what?"
Thomas asserts, with good reason, I think, that "much of our environmental problem is due to overpopulation" and cites several religious groups that promote large families. Thomas, however, does not mention a growing movement within Evangelical Christianity that exhorts Christians - of the right kind - to have large families. They use the phrase having 'many arrows in the quiver' - and warn that, if this does not happen, Christians will have lost the world, as we seem to have lost Europe, to other religions, like Islam, with rising populations.
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So, what sense does it make for Evangelical Christians to promote large families in the face of the impact that Americans have on the resources of the world?
