ODDS - Church ATTENDANCE/Sunday School
​"GOD'S ODDS"
Preached by Jack Kurtz
Bush Hill Presbyterian Church, Alexandria, VA 22310
June 18, 1989, Matthew 7:24-27
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In a recent survey, a comparison was made between a representative group of teenagers who attended church school regularly from infancy through high school and a second group who were matched with the first in every respect except the fact that none of them had attended church school at all, or so sporadically as to be of little significance.
The study showed that:
In the “church school attending" group, 10.2% had experienced some kind of drug-related difficulties. In the non-attending group the figure was 37%. In the attending group, 12.8% had been in some kind of trouble with school authorities. In the non-attending group, 43.6%. In the attending group, illegitimate births, abortions, or pressured marriages had involved 16.8%. In the non-atttending group the figure was 46.9%.
In the attending group, 7.6% had experienced some kind of difficulty with the law. In the non-attending group, 32.4%. In the church school attending group, 28.6% had acne. In the non-attending group 71.6% had acne.
I lie. Those statistics are phony, I made them up out of my pointy little head.
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They are representative, however, of what some of us expect from the church school. Parents probably have two basic motivations for sending children to church school.
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First, the desire that the child “become a Christian," accept a particular religious orientation. Among more liberal, less rigid parents this desire might be expressed more in terms of wanting for the child the knowledge which would allow him to make his or her own decision in the matter.
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The second motivation would be the desire that the child accept a particular lifestyle, a particular set of morals and values. Again, among the less rigid, the desire might be expressed that the child gain experience in making ethical decisions, that she learn to form her lifestyle in a valid manner, without the expecatation that it will necessarily turn out to be a specific 103 point moral code.
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Most of us who send our children to church school want for them either a particular religion or a particular lifestyle and moral code. Or, obviously, both.
I hope that I am mature enough - and Christian enough - that I do not want my children to have exactly the same set of morals and values that I have. I know some of my weaknesses. I would hope that they would not be the weaknesses of my children. I'm reasonably certain that I have not interpreted the will of Christ for human life in general with unquestionable accuracy. I would hope that my children would not make my mistakes. I'm aware that even if I am a Christian and my children make the same decision, they are individual Christians and that the will of God for their individual lives will not be precisely the same as it
is for mine.
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But with all these provisos, there are still certain attitudes I want for my children, and I make no apology for this. I want my children to grow up finding joy in human life, but I want them to be sensitive enough to the evil and heartbreak around them that they will want to make some changes in the world.
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I want my children to realize that love is more than sex or feeling warm around friends. I do not want them to escape into the world of drugs or alcohol. I want them to have respect for legitimate authority - respect for other people whether in authority or not— but I also want them to recognize that authority is sometimes evil and be willing to fight it when it is.
I want my children to see people instead of races or social classes. I want them to know the Christ and the direction and power which he gives to life. I do not want them to be slaves to tradition or their parents' blindness, but I do not want them to throw away that which is good in unthinking imitation of their peers.
And so on.
While I made up those statistics at the beginning of this sermon, I am firmly convinced that participation in church school and youth fellowship and the total life of the church will improve the odds that my children will accept at least some of these values and, hopefully, will accept Jesus Christ as the Lord of their lives.
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There is no guarantee. There are men and women in the prisons of America today with sixteen-year perfect attendance pins from church school. There are committed Christians who never darkened the door of a church in their childhood or youth, and fine, compassionate, responsible people who are not Christians. I believe, however, that having one's children in church school and involved in the life of the church on a regular basis improves the odds considerably.
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That's all I'll claim. Life is complex. There are too many other factors—parents, friends, public school, genetic traits, the society in general. All church school does is improve the odds. How much does it improve the odds? That I can't say. I made up those statistics at the beginning.
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I'm convinced there are other things we can do to improve the odds. The odds will be better, as has frequently been suggested, if Mom and Dad are significantly involved in the life of the church, too. Children want to do things adults do. Bringing the children to church school and heading out for breakfast at Roy's says something to children. It says that church is for children. And children want to be like adults.
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If parents are actively involved in the life of the church and if children see that their parents' faith makes a difference in their lives, then I figure that makes the odds even better.
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But it's just the odds we're talking about, no guarantees. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock."
There's a lot of material in the Sermon on the Mount, and, of course, Jesus said a lot of things besides what's in the Sermon on the Mount. What happens if we only hear half the words of Jesus and only follow through on one-quarter of them? Well, my assumption is it's better than nothing. Maybe it's enough of a foundation to withstand a fifty-mile-an-hour wind and two inches of rain. The more we know of the teachings of Jesus and the better we follow them, the better chance we have of handling the storms of life. We increase the percentages. We improve the odds. The more we understand about the teachings of Jesus Christ and the better we follow them, the better foundation we have for all of life.
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How much church do you need? Is Christmas and Easter enough? Is regular attendance at worship enough? Do you need worship and church school and a small group and active service on some committee and involvement in Christ's mission to
the poor and tithing and ... I don't know. I just figure it's obvious that the more involved a person is, the better the odds that it will work in life. No guarantees. Just better odds.
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There are some real statistics. You've heard me mention this before, but these are the most concrete, best-attested statistics I know. A married couple with no religious affiliation is twice as likely to get a divorce as a married couple with the same religious affiliation. Those are American statistics, so I assume we're talking primarily about Christianity and Judaism. They're real
statistics. I've seen them before and I saw them most recently a few years ago in a high school home economics text book.
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We're only talking about odds. Two of the most committed Christians in the world can get a divorce. Atheists have happy and successful marriages. But what are you willing to do to double the odds that your marriages will work? A magazine., a few years back, did a survey of its readers'. I think it was Cosmopolitan, but I'm not sure. The survey showed that those who regarded
themselves as Christians were much more satisfied with their sex lives than those who were not Christians. How about that for a statistic?
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One more real statistic. Ministers live longer than the general population. There are a couple of insurance companies who specialize in life insurance for ministers and offer lower rates because of those statistics. I'm guessing that Christians who take their faith seriously probably have similar statistics to ministers for the same reasons. I'll let you think about the reasons.
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I don't have any more real statistics, but I'm betting; that committed Christians who are active church members are more likely to be honest politicians and businessmen. I'm betting they're less likely to be muggers.
Percentages, odds. Just odds. No guarantee for the individual. All you can do is improve the odds.
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True of all of life, isn't it? There are people who smoke, drink to excess, eat nothing but fried food and never exercise who live longer than people who never smoke or drink, eat only fish and vegetables, and run ten miles a week. But they're the exceptions. The odds are with the people who have the healthier lifestyle. And there are people who dropped out of school in third grade who are millionaires and people with doctorates on skid row, but they're the exceptions.
The odds go the other way and we know it.
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Three things I'm trying to do this morning.
First, I'd like to convince some of you to come to the Adult Inquirers' Class this afternoon. Faith in Christ and commitment to the church don't guarantee anything for life, but they improve the odds on a whole lot of things.
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Second, it's time to sign up for the annual church retreat. I can't guarantee that the study I'm going to lead will radically change your life and give you an unshakeable faith in Jesus Christ. I do believe it will improve the odds. And I can't guarantee that a weekend with other members of this church will give you new friends and make you feel that you're really a part of this
particular family of faith, but it will certainly improve the odds. I don't need a Bible verse. It's just common sense.
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Third, the parents in this church badly need to take the church school more seriously, for themselves and for their children. There are a lot of things we want for our children. Do we want them enough that we'll make the supreme sacrifice of losing an hour or two of sleep on Sunday morning to improve the odds?
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No guarantees. You may be sacrificing those hours for nothing. Our kids may turn out to be mass murders, anyhow. Or you might sleep in every Sunday morning and the kids will turn out fine. All I'm talking about is improving the odds. Of course, that's about all we can do with anything we do with our lives.
There are a number of ways to plan for retirement. We can get jobs with good retirement plans and we can put a lot of money i into investments. Or, we can plan on winning Lotto America. Ever looked at the odds on that?
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We can try to live happy, valid lives without Christ or the Church. Frankly, I don't like the odds on that much better than the odds on Lotto America. Amen.
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OPEN MIND
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"An open mind at both ends is a wind tunnel."
Tom Gillespie, President of Princeton Theological Seminary, April 1988 at a PTS Alumni Luncheon
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ORDINATION OF WOMEN
Here’s One Conclusion: Don’t Ordain Snakes
by Ina J. Hughs
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The commercials are wrong. We haven’t come a long way, baby.
Take what happened this year at the Southern Baptist Convention in Kansas City.
Should women be ordained?
That was the question before some 8,000 ministers and laypeople who were there.
Judging from the news reports, there was not only smoke, there was fire and brimstone. Tempers flared and sizzled, and Scripture quotations were tossed in the air like secret ingredients in a boiling caldron of magic potions.
It wasn’t even close. The no’s had it by more than a thousand votes. The resolution adopted said that women should not be placed in a position of authority over men because women are responsible for bringing sin into the world.
Whew!
It’s hard for me not to get mad. And to turn the other cheek.
But part of me also understands.
Just this morning I pulled into a gas station to have my car serviced. Out walked a woman with a wrench in her pocket. I watched her unscrew the gas tank and squirt-clean the wind-shields. But when she raised the hood, I had my doubts. Pumping
gas is one thing. Tire pressure and fan belts, carburetors and brake shoes are another.
Several weeks ago I was talking with a friend about doctors. Since I’m new in town, I’m shopping around. My friend named several, but when I asked if she knew of any women doctors, she looked just slightly horrified and shrugged.
“No. I could never go to a woman doctor . . . I don’t know why . . . ”
But I know why.
And in some crazy way, it’s the same little thorn on the brain that led some 5,000 Southern Baptist saints to say the same thing about women preachers and to wonder the same thing about them that I did about women mechanics.
Why must the church be a late bloomer when it comes to liberation? Wasn’t the question settled ’way back there when Jesus stopped the traffic with his ideas about women? Didn’t even Paul, a dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist himself, say the old standbys of ranking people according to ethnic groups, social standing or sex just weren’t good enough anymore?
Women—who make up the bulk of the membership in most denominations—are allowed to teach Sunday school. In fact, if the Sunday schools closed their doors to women teachers, they’d have to close their doors, period.
Women are allowed to fix the altar flowers, plan the fellowship programs, bring their tithes and offerings, polish the cups for Communion. But from what I can gather, the flags still go up in some circles when you talk about women administering the
Eucharist.
I have a Baptist minister friend who, horrified at his denomination’s front-page resolution, said from his pulpit that the convention
had gotten it all wrong. It wasn’t a woman who brought sin into the world. It was a snake. Therefore the resolution really should have read that no snake could be ordained.
Any way you look at it, Biblically, historically, logically, practically, the ordination of women seems to me to be absolutely consistent with the New Covenant, from Bethlehem to Calvary.
Ina J. Hughs is a free-lance writer living in Charleston, S.C., in November 1984 edition of PRESBYTERIAN SURVEY
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OWNERSHIP
by John Calvin
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We are not our own; therefore neither reason nor our will should predominate in our deliberations and actions.
We are not our own; therefore let us not presuppose it as our end to seek what may be expedient for us according to the flesh.
We are not our own; therefore let us, as far as possible, forget ourselves and all things that are ours.
On the contrary, we are God’s; To God, therefore let us live and die.
We are God’s; therefore let God’s wisdom and will preside in all our actions.
We are God’s; toward God, therefore, as our only legitimate end, let every part of our lives be directed.
(Calvin's Institutes, Book III, chapter 7, paragraph i).
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OXYMORON
Column by Sydney Harris
Combine two opposites to create an oxymoron
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Queries, Quibbles, and Quips:
Dear Mr. Harris: Lately I have run across the word “oxymoron” several times. I know it is some kind of figure of speech, but could you give me an illustration of how it is used? — M.L., Long Beach, Calif.
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An oxymoron is a statement that combines opposites to make a kind of epigram, such as “Oh, nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded.”
The word itself is an oxymoron, since “oxy” means “sharp” and “moron” stands for “stupid” in classic Greek.
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DETROIT FREE PRESS/TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 1982
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