7/7 New England has something to teach You

"New England has something to teach you about your faith." That's what one of the campus ministers here at Brown told me when we had coffee on Friday. He talks about his own process of having to deconstruct what "conversion" or even faith meant in light of this new setting.

We talked about how it was to be a Christian in a non-saturated (or Christendom) some would say kind of setting. He talks about it being very hard here. Their numbers of course are small. He is spread between 3 campuses. He talks about the parable of the sower, how here the soil is hard, its almost a post-Christian society. He says in the general process of helping transform people he has to do a lot of "weeding" out of lies or untruths about god, religion, christianity. Pluralism, definitely came up.

He says he was surprised by the way people responded to a Christianity based on social justice issues or even personal justice issues, but that in a lot of ways this area of the country wants to pretend sin doesn't exist (he did say they'd "lost the concept of sin"), that personal morality is unimportant. Maybe not exact words, but the general concept. Of course, we all know one cannot become too overly obssessed either in the personal morality or social justice directions....forgetting that the gospel is found somewhere in the intersection of all these things.

He also mentioned a generally lacking in this area of people calling people into conversion or transformation. I think what he was referencing is that a lot of people hear things from the church or Christians, either socially-related messages or whatever, they may like it or be drawn by god to these places or ministries, attending regularly even in some cases. However, the problem came that people were rarely being challenged to have transformation take place in their lives and selves.

It was not all bad.....
He talked about because "the ground is so hard," and being a Christian here can be so difficult when people grow up with little background to be rooted in, those that do survive and stay Christians tend to be very vibrant, lively Christians. We talked a lot about finding that middle ground between assimilating into the culture and becoming complacent and being too adversely affected by the culture and shocked to the point of inaction.

One interesting passage he referenced as Acts 17 where Paul goes into some city and sees they have tons of idols, so many they even have an idol to the "unnamed God," in case they forgot one. Instead of telling these people: damn you, you are hopeless and clearly idolatrous in extreme ways, Paul instead remarks "I see you are religious people....let me tell you about the God I know." Paul works with what the people have, with what's already in their system, what they can undestand. That's how he described ministry here.

On another note....
After I saw this guy, I walked over and joined the end of a visitors-welcome bible study going on in the student union. It was lead by a couple of his students, I didn't find out about it from him but instead from a poster. Turns out one of the guys there has 2 friends that go to the Wednesday night bible study I mentioned in an earlier entry. Those same people that lead that bible study also volunteer at a ministry the guy mentioned to me (3rd time this week I've heard abotu this service that goes on 1 hour from here). And of course, almost all of these people/minitries were referenced at church.
It is somewhat odd that I've pretty quickly networked into the christian scene here in providence. In other ways its really exciting and really refreshing, it creates a true feeling of an underbelly, a subculture that is alive and working.