Autumn is in the air. The nights are cooler. Some maples are showing early color. The cat is seeking the indoors more often. Spiders are everywhere. An article in the Seattle Times said the annual arachnid invasion is not because spiders are seeking warmth; it's that legions of spiders hatched in the spring have now grown up, are needing larger web sites, and are on the prowl for mates. Whatever the cause, the hanging webs of orb-weavers across every path and doorway seems to accompany autumn here in the Northwest.
 

Another sign of the season is, of course, school opening. But will they open? A school principal of my acquaintance is hard at the task of getting ready for a new school year. Will schools open on schedule on September 8 or will there be a teacher's strike? Seattle School District teachers vote Thursday on their new contract. Independent evaluations of the respective contract proposals of the SEA (teacher's union) and SSD (School District) find the latter serious and substantive, the former defensive and temporizing. A strike in the current climate seems both unwise and unlikely.
 

A great article in the August 10 edition of The Christian Century by Kenda Creasy Dean, "Faith, Nice and Easy: the Almost Christian Formation of Teens." Working off the results of a national study on youth and religion, Dean finds that what many churches offer youth (and themselves) is a thin "Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism." Here's Dean: "We 'teach' young people baseball, but we 'expose' them to faith. We provide coaching and opportunities for youth to develop and improve their pitches and their SAT scores, but we blithely assume that religious identity will happen by osmosis and will emerge 'when youth are ready' (a confidence we generally lack when it comes to, say, algebra)."
 

Later in her article Dean uses a phrase I love, "God's preferential option for the unlikely." Dean: "God calls people not for what they have but for what they lack. Empty hands receive, empty wombs are filled, empty tombs proclaim resurrection--and the unformed selves of adolescents make room for Christ in ways that are difficult for adults' hardened, formed egos."
 

The notion of God's preferential option for the unlikely could be the basis of a theology for the small church. One event I'm doing this fall, on Long Island on October 18, is particularly for smaller membership congregations. God, after all, chose "tiny" Bethlehem as the place of the Savior's birth, not big Jerusalem.
 

Our Congregational Leadership Northwest "Conversation about Writing and the Pastoral Life," held last week proved to be delightful. My angle of approach was vocational. Is a part of your pastoral call a call to write? One of the many things pastors have to offer, whether in sermons or published writing, is their awareness of life's messiness and mystery. Where much contemporary media labels and puts people in boxes, clergy are constantly encountering the ways that people, actual people, are more surprising, elusive and interesting.
 

Next up for CLN is a "Workshop on Congregational Purpose and Vision." So many congregations seems to find it difficult to develop or maintain a sense of direction. Lacking a reasonably clear sense of direction, congregations often fall prey to chronic conflict and to congregational factions (or even noisy individuals) that cry out loudly for attention to their needs or agendas. This workshop will be held on Saturday, October 9, 8:30 to noon at Rainier Beach Presbyterian in southeast Seattle. For more info and to register go to www.clnorthwest.org or click on "Learning Opportunities" on my homepage.
 

I made my debut as a sports columnist this week, with a piece for Crosscut.com on the abysmal state of Seattle sports (except for the women's NBA team, the Storm). Like Seattle itself, the Mariners and Seahawks seem to be leadership averse. Or at least that was my argument. See for yourself. Go to Crosscut.com.
 

Pondering the Mosque controversy last week I happened on this from philosopher Josef Pieper: "The place of authentic reality is taken over by infectious reality." While people were arguing for and against the Ground Zero Mosque, a Seattle cartoonist, Molly Norris, was in hiding and under FBI protection because a Muslim cleric in Yemen has called for her to be killed. Who knew that being a cartoonist was such a dangerous occupation? Pete Jackson wrote about this for Crosscut. In my denomination people are rushing to show their good will toward Islam by reading from the Koran in services and the like. But no one I know is talking about the plight of Molly Norris.
 

Enjoy the waning days of August and the early days of September. Grace and peace,

I am back home, in Seattle, after my six week sojourn in the Wallowa Mountains, providing support for my elderly mother as she summered at her cabin there. She has returned to her home, with my sister, in Lynden, Washington. The Wallowas are a stunningly beautiful and historically/ cultural fascinating area, one to which our family has deep connections. But I am glad to be home. Given the amount of travel I already do for work, six weeks away was a long stretch.
 

My Crosscut piece, last week, on the acquisition of University Baptist's property and buildings by Seattle's Mars Hill Church got a lot of readership and response. You can click on it here: http://crosscut.com/2010/August/17/religion/20069/A-tale-of-two-churches:-Mars-Hill-vs.-University-Baptist/. 
 

Some of the response, both on-line and directly to me, asked if I thought liberal churches have a future at all and would I comment? Of course, most of my 33 year ministry, ten books, and hundreds of articles, and far too many sermons all are addressed to those questions and to what I think historically liberal congregations need to be doing to have a present and a future.
 

There are no simple answers to such questions. Part of the problem is with "liberalism" itself, which has become arrogant, complacent and intellectually moribund. Related to that, "liberal theology," has lost energy, direction and substance. Simply repeating "inclusive, diverse, and justice," does not a theology make. I certainly do think liberal or moderate or mainline churches can have a future, but not without some serious questioning of basic assumptions, real housecleaning, and new seriousness about Christian faith/ theology and leadership.
 

In a way related to this is preacher and teacher of preachers, Tom Long's, recent book, "Preaching from Memory to Hope," which I've just read. Long takes the measure of much contemporary mainline preaching, which lacks both passion and conviction. He does a great job of assessing what he calls the "gnostic impulse," expressed in the work of such fellow travelers as Elaine Pagels, Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, Bart Ehrmann, John Shelby Spong and Robert Funk. (A common denominator among many of these is that they are former fundamentalists who have swung from one extreme to another.)
 

Long's chapter, "Meeting Marcus Borg Again for the First Time," is alone worth the price of admission. Preachers in many mainline churches should consider a sermon series on the work of these figures and the "gnostic impulse," being careful to be as restrained and yet forthright as Long is.
 

One sign of the mainline's problem is that most clergy (and churches) are preoccupied with directing their fire, such as it is, against the religious right or conservatives (often cartoon versions of them), while failing to recognize that the really important challenges are coming from, one wants to say "the left," but that's not really the right term for Armstrong, Borg, Spong, et. al. It is more of a new gnosticism, with some Pelagius thrown in. Entertaining for intellectuals, but not at all helpful to the church or faithful witness.
 

All of this is complicated by the culture wars, which make us stupid. The current raging battle front there is the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque." This issue, like so many of the culture war issues, is more a media creation, and specifically a Fox News Corp. creation, than anything else. It reminds me of the Jeremiah Wright controversy of spring 2008, which was also largely a creation of Fox.
 

I thought Frank Rich's column in yesterday's (8/22/2010) New York Times, pointing out that this raging attack on Islam here at home makes the military effort in Afghanistan doubly hard quite right. Afghan and Iraqi Muslims are supposed to believe we really care about their nations and cultures while Islamaphobia is on such vivid display here?
 

Related to this (somehow) were last week's news reports indicating that 20% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. I wonder how that percentage correlates to the viewership of Fox and the listenership to Limbaugh and the like? My hunch is that this audience would be equally surprised to discover that the majority of the world's Christians are not Caucasian but African, Asian and Hispanic. One thing I notice on my forays into middle and rural America are that Fox is the default network of choice in many bars, hotels, restaurants and the like. One recalls the acid phrase of William Dean Howells, "No artist ever starved by underestimating the taste of the American public."
 

Ah well, may the closing weeks of August bring you ripe blueberries, colorful zinnias, a good sermon or two, and love. Grace and peace.