Offer Multiple Experiences

Craig Groeschel

The most effective spiritual growth happens at Life-Church.tv when people are engaged in multiple areas. For example, if someone only attends weekend church services, their spiritual growth will be limited. If the same person starts using their gifts to serve, participates in biblical community, and begins to live missionally, their growth trajectory will likely skyrocket.

To help believers become more like Christ, we concentrate on the efforts that bring the biggest return on people’s investment of their time and energy.

• Scriptural teaching that challenges people, no matter if it’s their first time at church or their one-thousandth.

• Intense worship that is focused on connecting people with the heart of God.

• An environment that encourages people to continue taking their next step through leadership opportunities, community partnerships, individual development, and more.

• Small groups that offer a network of support, accountability, and mutual growth.

• A service-oriented culture that transforms people from spiritual consumers to spiritual contributors.

When these pieces all work together, individuals step into a spiral of growth. What they learn shapes what they do. What they do re-frames what they’ve learned into real personal experience, which in turn opens new pathways for learning. It’s what happened in the early church, and it’s still the best model today.

—Craig Groeschel, LifeChurch.tv Edmond, Oklahoma

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Pastors

Decidedly Un-Hip

David Fitch

Can you plan worship experiences that generate worshipful people rather than spoiled consumers?

The church gathered is not about dispensing information, like a lecture hall, or for cheering those in attendance, like a pep rally. It is a formative encounter, where we are to be shaped in the image of God.

Liturgy is the dreaded “L” word of evangelicalism, but it is through the repeated acts of worship that we are shaped. I don’t know that one sermon and one service can change anytbody, but over several years, we are changed. As Dallas Willard says, we need to do the disciplines together—silence, confession, affirming truth together. When we hear the word, not as an expository distribution of information, but proclaimed over us, the word shapes us.

Admittedly we are fighting an uphill battle as we seek to worship in ways that don’t encourage consumerism. At one point in our church’s life, it was as if liturgy was becoming hip. People were coming to experience it but not to be changed by it. So we made a few changes. We arranged the chairs around the altar—in the round—so that the “up front” aspect of preaching is deemphasized. We have four pastors who share the preaching responsibility, so we don’t make the sermon a “show.” We ask the speakers to wear black when they preach, so that speaking is not about us, but about Jesus, and we minimize the personality-driven aspect of preaching.

And we tell newcomers to the church the things they should NOT expect from a missional church—which is often the very things they expect from their church experience.

—David Fitch, Life on the Vine Long Grove, Illinois

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Pastors

Help Them Get Their Veggies

Phil Vischer

Whether it was writing for VeggieTales, or for my new educational series, What’s in the Bible?, I’ve always started with two goals: First, to lead my audience to a new understanding of a spiritual truth. Second, to make my lesson entertaining, or the first goal just isn’t going to happen.

This leads to the issue of generating even more “hard-to-please” Christian consumers. (“This Sunday school class isn’t as funny as VeggieTales! I’m outta here!”) I wish there was an easy answer to this problem, but there isn’t. Once upon a time, kids were more than happy to sit around the fire, listening to Pa read aloud from the “Good Book.” Of course that was typically after 8-12 hours of hard work in a field or a textile mill. Maybe even a coal mine.

Kids today don’t spend eight hours a day in a factory or a coal mine. They spend eight hours a day watching the Disney Channel or playing video games on an Xbox 360. As a result, dryly reading from the “Good Book” seems to have lost its appeal. Hence a talking tomato and cucumber, or a bunch of wisecracking puppets—and the problem of consumer Christians.

So what to do? I use humor to get kids’ attention, but then I try to slow them down at some point so we can talk seriously. Humor buys me that opportunity and earns me the right to talk seriously.

—Phil Vischer Veggie Tales Creator Wheaton, Illinois

- More from Phil Vischer

Pastors

Serve a Balanced Diet

John D. Witvliet

Can you plan worship experiences that generate worshipful people rather than spoiled consumers?

True transformation is a gift of the Holy Spirit which we can pray for, but can’t engineer. We can also lead in step with the Spirit by ensuring that our services include a balanced diet of Spirit-inspired biblical texts, that their ethos tastes like the fruit of the Spirit, and that they not only equip worshipers to hear, but also to respond to the Bible’s life-giving commands.

For 3,000 years, the most transformational approaches to public worship have not been presentational, but participatory. They challenge us to ask: Are our services giving us practice at “fixing our eyes on Jesus” rather than on a leader? Do they help us perceive how the triune God not only receives worship, but also inspires and perfects it—making participation in worship a gift, not an accomplishment? Are they like the Psalms, an adequate “language school” for discipleship, helping us say things that we would never come up with on our own? Do they help us eliminate distinctions between the haves and have-nots at the Lord’s Table and pray for our enemies?

Engaging questions like these collaboratively can itself be an instrument the Spirit uses to shape transformational worship.

—John D. Witvliet, Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary Grand Rapids, Michigan

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Why Men Should Read Jane Austen

Gina Dalfonzo

And, how we all should read works like ‘Pride and Prejudice.’

Nobel-winning novelist V. S. Naipaul recently started a firestorm with his remarks about female writers in general and Jane Austen in particular. According to the Guardian:

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.

Naipaul’s words caused controversy for obvious reasons: They were self-serving, condescending, and, as any of Austen’s millions of devoted readers could attest, wholly untrue. Not only was Austen’s talent equal to that of virtually any other great writer, but she was about as “sentimental” as a surgeon’s scalpel … As my friend Lori Smith writes in her book A Walk with Jane Austen, “Biographers sometimes wrestle with Austen’s complex character—the good Christian girl with the biting wit, with the ability to see and desire to expose the laughable and ludicrous …. She had a capacity for devotion as well as an ability to wryly, if at times harshly, engage the world around her.”

But Naipaul’s words will blow over before long, as publicity stunts tend to do. What should be troubling us is that his attitude seems to be deeply embedded in our culture. I’ve known quite a few men—educated, well-read men—who either dismiss Austen as “chick lit” or simply never bother to give her a thought. (I’ve even heard one man say that she didn’t know what she was talking about because she never married.) There are men who still read and enjoy her, but their number seems to be diminishing.

One reason for this, I’m afraid, is the way that many of us women read (and watch) Austen these days—drooling over the romances while passing over the satire and ignoring the fact that, as Lori puts it, “the triumph of the books … is not only that the relationships come together but the kind of people who are allowed to come together—two people with characters that have been hammered out a bit, with faults that have been recognized and corrected.” In other words, the books are not just about love triumphant, but about the formation of good character and good values.

We Austen readers miss so much when we ignore the religious and moral bedrock of these novels. Sometimes we “use” the books rather than truly reading them (as C. S. Lewis expressed it in his insightful work An Experiment in Criticism), getting only romantic gratification out of them instead of thoughtfully taking in all that they have to offer. I’m not saying we shouldn’t enjoy the romance, but when we enjoy only that, we create an impression that that’s all these books are good for—and that’s an impression that’s hardly appealing to the average male reader.

Another reason is that we as a society seem so determined to segregate children by gender as soon as they begin to read. It’s not that we do it out of bad motives; it’s more a matter of wanting to make sure that both girls and boys will love to read. The way to do that, most of us believe, is to offer books that appeal to them on the basis of gender—just as pop culture offers them movies and shows and games on that same basis. Have boys read only boyish books, the theory goes, and they’ll want to read more and more. Except that it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.

When we at BreakPoint started covering books for teens and tweens, we heard from several parents begging for some good reading options for their sons. Yet the libraries and bookstores are full of books about boys and their pursuits. Why, then, do parents have such a hard time finding material?

Maybe the answer lies in what we’ve taught them to enjoy. Everyone has different tastes, of course, but I wonder if we adults have had more input into children’s tastes than we realize. In fact, I wonder if our gender-based ideas have created something of a vicious circle: The more we promote books that we think boys will like—always exciting, not too difficult, with as many boys and as few girls as possible—the more we help to narrow their minds and ensure that they’ll never try anything else. And in the process, we’re exhausting the amount of literary resources available to them.

This problem doesn’t just involve gender, of course; it’s also about what Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is far more rampant in our time than in his. It leads too many parents to dismiss shelves full of classics that appealed to children in earlier generations, in endless pursuit of the modern and relevant. We send them the message that classic literature is too hard, too boring, too far removed from their lives—is it any wonder they believe it? And this doesn’t apply just to Jane Austen, or even just to female authors. Try running a blog about Charles Dickens, and finding yourself constantly explaining to people that (1) yes, Dickens is worth reading, (2) no, he was not “paid by the word,” and (3) no, they do not deserve to be pitied for the rest of their lives because a teacher “forced” them to read him.

I realize I’m asking for a lot here. These days, teaching children, regardless of gender, to enjoy all sorts of literature from all sorts of authors is generally held to be far too difficult and not worth the effort. I’m not saying it would be easy, but I am saying it would be very much worth the effort. Aside from the obvious benefits to their intellect, vocabulary, and faith—for many of those great writers incorporated a Christian worldview into their work—it would broaden their horizons and teach them that it might just be possible to learn something from people who are different from them.

V. S. Naipaul might not approve, but I’ll bet Jane Austen would.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.organdDickensblog. She wrote “The Good Christian Girl: A Fable” and “God Loves a Good Romance” for CT online, and “Guarding Your Marriage without Dissing Women,” “Bill Maher Slurs Sarah Palin, Now Responds,” “The Social Network’s Women Problem,” “Facebook Envy on Valentine’s Day,” “What Are Wedding Vows For, Anyway?” “Why Sex Ruins TV Romances,” and “Don’t Think Pink” for Her.meneutics. Her book, “‘Bring Her Down’: How the American Media Tried to Destroy Sarah Palin,” is now available on Amazon.

This article was originally published as part of Her.Meneutics, Christianity Today's blog for women.

- More from Gina Dalfonzo

Pastors

The Church is Dead…

by Skye Jethani

…Long Live the Church!

Last week the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, gathered for its annual meeting in Phoenix. The media pounced when stats were released indicating SBC membership had shrunk for the fourth consecutive year. In addition (or should I say subtraction), the number of baptisms declined by over 17,000 in 2010 compared to 2009. This is the eighth drop in 10 years.

Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay, was honest about the statistics. “This is not a blip. This is a trend. And the trend is one of decline,” he said.

Lone Democrat Keeping NY One Vote Shy of Same-Sex Marriage, For Now

Tobin Grant

The New York State Assembly recently approved a bill that would expand marriage to include same-sex couples. The Marriage Equality Act headed to the Senate where it is one vote short of the 32 needed for passage. That vote will need to be a Republican because there is just one Democrat opponent left—Senator Rubén Díaz, one of the most vocal opponents to same-sex marriage in the legislature.

Díaz is a Pentecostal minister and president of the New York Hispanic Clergy Organization. He has participated in rallies against same-sex marriage.

“I am blessed to serve as a Pentecostal minister and I celebrate this!” Díaz said. “As a Christian … I will continue to defend the teachings of the Bible and oppose homosexual marriage. As a Member of the New York State Senate, I will continue to defend the definition of New York’s marriage laws to be between a man and a woman.”

Díaz’s outspoken position on same-sex marriage has made him the target of gay rights groups. He even became the subject of a gay writing contest: “[Expletive] Ruben Diaz: Gay Erotica Featuring NYC’s Number One Bigot.”

With Díaz voting “no,” proponents are now trying to convince one more Republican to back the bill. Ironically, a similar bill failed in a Democratic-controlled Senate two years ago. This time around, vote switching by a handful of legislators from both parties may mean it will pass a Republican-led Senate. Even if proponents of the bill are able to garner one more Republican supporter, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R) may not bring it up for a vote. However, many expect a vote today or early next week.

The bill is focus of heavy lobbying on both sides. Supporters of gay marriage include Barbara Pierce Bush (daughter of President George W. Bush) and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. The mayor travelled to Albany Thursday to discuss the bill with Republican Senators.

“I still believe if [the senators] do vote their hearts and principles, New York State will become the next state to adopt marriage equality,” Bloomberg told reporters.

Opponents include Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, the leader of the Catholic church in New York, who compared the effort to redefine marriage in New York to China or North Korea.

“In those countries, government presumes daily to ‘redefine’ rights, relationships, values, and natural law There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means,” Dolan said. “But, please, not here! Our country’s founding principles speak of rights given by God, not invented by government, and certain noble values – life, home, family, marriage, children, faith – that are protected, not re-defined, by a state presuming omnipotence.”

The bill passed the State Assembly by a vote of 80 to 63. All but a few Republicans voted against the measure. Some of these Democrats represent districts with large religious blocs of voters who tend to vote Democratic in state politics, such as conservative Jews, Catholics, or African-American Protestants.

Dov Hikind, one of the 15 Democrats opposed to the bill, was not shy about invoking God into the debate. The Brooklyn legislator held up a copy of the Hebrew scriptures.

“You want to tell God he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?” Hikind said.

- More from Tobin Grant

Books

Excerpt

A Meal with Jesus

Tim Chester

Discovering grace, community, and mission around the table

Consider for a moment what happens at the feeding of the five thousand. God gives out bread. On a massive scale. Or think about the wedding at Cana. Jesus turns perhaps 120-180 gallons of water into wine. Quality wine. At the beginning of the Bible story, the first thing God does for humanity is present us with a menu: "The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food" (Gen. 2:8-9). At the end of the Bible story, God sets before us a perpetual feast. God likes doing the catering. He thinks food is a good thing.

A Meal with Jesus: Discovering Grace, Community, and Mission around the Table

Tim Chester (Author)

Crossway

144 pages

$9.81

God incarnate eats. Jesus would have eaten two meals a day. When he ate with the rich, he might have had white bread, but most of the time he ate the barley bread eaten by the poor, along with cheese, butter, and eggs. Meat and poultry were too expensive to be eaten except on feast days. He may have had fish on the Sabbath. There was of course no tea or coffee. Jesus would have drunk wine, generally mixed with three-parts water. Honey was the primary sweetener, along with figs. Pepper, ginger, and other spices were imported, but were expensive. Such was the diet of God incarnate.

The risen Christ eats. Indeed he makes a point of doing so publicly: "They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them" (Luke 24:42-43). Eating in the presence of God is our future. Food will be part of the renewed creation. Food is not left behind with the resurrection. References to a future feast are not just metaphors for an ethereal future existence. Our future is a real feast.

The point is that food isn't just fuel. It's not just a mechanism for sustaining us for ministry. It's gift, generosity, grace. Jesus gave thanks and broke bread. In so doing, he affirms that food is to be received as a gift from God. Food matters as matter. It's a physical substance, and part of God's good world. We're to embrace the world as it is—not merely as a picture of some other spiritual world.

Food is a central ingredient in our experience of God's goodness. It's not merely an illustration of God's goodness. If it were a mere illustration, we could leave it behind once we'd gotten the idea.

Related Elsewhere:

A Meal with Jesus is available at Christianbook.com and other retailers.

Previous Christianity Today articles on meals and food as spiritual practice include:

Pass the Casserole | Losing control over your eating—like, when you can't cook after surgery for cancer—has a way of turning anxiety into gratitude. (November 24, 2010)

A Feast Fit for the King | Returning the growing fields and kitchen table to God. (November 5, 2010)

Dining Dilemmas | How shall we then eat? (June 27, 2006)

- More from Tim Chester

Theology

The Joyful Environmentalists: Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris

Interview by Andy Crouch

The duo thinks of creation care not as an onerous duty but a natural response to the goodness of God.

Rosie Perera

Creation care is a hot topic among Christians, but it is nothing new for longtime friends Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris. Peterson's recent memoir The Pastor (HarperOne) is saturated with environmental themes and metaphors, grounded in his annual visits to the family cabin in the highlands of Montana, where he now resides. In 1983, Peter and Miranda Harris and a few friends founded a Christian ecological study center in Portugal called A Rocha (Portuguese for "the rock"). It is now an international conservation organization that has recently expanded its work in the United States. Christianity Today editor at large Andy Crouch spoke with Peterson and Harris on the banks of the Frio River in Texas at a conference on faith and technology at Laity Lodge.

Eugene, how did you come to be so involved in conservation and environmental issues?

I grew up in a very sectarian world. There was no explicit care for creation. My parents were indifferent to it, and my church was indifferent. Hunting was the closest my family or my church ever came to being involved in the world around us. But after they killed their deer or their elk, they were done.

In some ways, that indifference was good for me and for our family, because our kids discovered environmental concerns as we hiked, fished, gardened, harvested, and canned fruits. It was more of a discovery and enjoyment. When I met Peter and saw him at work and listened to him, I realized this really was something significant and biblical.

Peter Harris: It's important to understand that A Rocha, as a movement, is driven by biblical theology. It's not a Christian attempt to "save the planet." It's a response to who God is. Therefore, the role of people like Eugene has been to help us lay that foundation.

Many people—and many Christians—would be happy just to say they are "saving the planet." How would you distinguish a biblically formed movement?

Harris: We may do many of the same things as do secular environmental organizations, but we do them for very different reasons. One question for any kind of activism is, how long are you going to be able to keep doing it? If you believe you're going to be able, by technology, by political force, by whatever means, to save the planet, you may well get exhausted and disillusioned and depressed. These are genuine problems within the environmental movement.

If, on the other hand, you do what you do because you believe it pleases the living God, who is the Creator and whose handiwork this is, your perspective is very different. I don't think there is any guarantee we will save the planet. I don't think the Bible gives us much reassurance about that. But I do believe it gives God tremendous pleasure when his people do what they were created to do, which is care for what he made.

There are some obvious biblical texts to which Christians tend to turn when they think about creation—Genesis 1 and 2, and maybe Romans 8:22. Are there any others?

Peterson: The book of Exodus and the Egyptian plagues. Those 10 plagues are all exorcisms of specific aspects of Pharaoh's control over the world. For eight months, the whole country of Egypt was turned into a theater of exorcism, item by item by item. Pharaoh was unable to do what he had done to creation, and the evil was exorcised by the command of God.

It's extraordinary, taking away the authority of the powers that be and demonstrating that to the whole nation, maybe most of all to the Hebrews, who themselves had been under Pharaoh's power. Here is a huge wrecking ball: smash, smash, smash, smash, and after eight months there's nothing left of Pharaoh's power.

Then out of this highly technologized world of Egypt—the pyramids, the statuary, the temples—they go into the wilderness, which is supposed to be empty. Yet they are all provided for, and they live by the providence of God in a most unlikely place. You can bet that they gained an appreciation for the fertility of the world they were living in—that they did not need all of Pharaoh's technology to be provided for. That's a great environmental text, even though I don't think it's ever been used that way.

Harris: Our job in reading Scripture is not primarily to find proof texts about creatures with wings or legs. Our job is to discover: Who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? What do they care about? And how does the Spirit enable us to live that life?

Look at Hosea 4. In the first three verses, we have moral problems: adultery and murder, bloodshed following bloodshed. But then, "Therefore the land mourns," and "the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, and even the fish of the sea are taken away" (v. 3, ESV). That's a prophecy three millennia before we have the words for a marine crisis. Who would have thought that the fish of the sea would die? Until modern times, the fish of the sea seemed like an inexhaustible resource.

You get those ecological consequences of the broken relationship with God all the way through Scripture. But at the same time, there's the phenomenal hope that as people are restored in Christ to a right relationship with God, there will be a restoration of our relationship to creation and healing for the creation.

How do these themes connect with Americans, who mostly live in either suburban or urban environments?

Harris: That's one distinction between a Christian take on creation and a secular romanticism about wilderness. Think about Psalm 104. In that psalm, which echoes Genesis, you don't just have "the sea and everything in it"; you have ships on it, working. You don't just have the land; you have people, working. There is a radical environmentalism that wishes people were not on the planet. That's not the biblical view at all. A Rocha in the United Kingdom actually works in the most polluted, urban borough of the country, because creation isn't absent just because people are there. The challenge is how to restore a right way of life, rather than escaping to some wilderness paradise. Fifty percent of the planet now lives in cities. That is where we live out our relationship with creation.

'I don't think we realize how much of our view of wilderness comes to us through the Romantic movement.'—Eugene Peterson

As Christian conservationists, do you see urbanization as a good thing, a bad thing, or something neutral?

Harris: My biblical theology means I cannot see it as a bad thing. The ultimate biblical vision is the heavenly city. Our challenge is the redemption of the urban, not the consecration of wilderness.

Peterson: I agree, and I don't think we realize how much of our view of wilderness comes to us through the Romantic movement. Romantic literature was written at the height of the industrial city, with its exploitation, poverty, and child labor. In reaction to all that, they gave us the concept of nature as romantic. But it's not romantic.

Harris: It may not even be natural. Sir Ghillean Prance, who has studied the Amazon rainforest for decades, believes that the very diversity of the rainforest is a result of gardening. The human beings who lived there selectively used it and tended it, and that is the best way to account for its extraordinary botanical diversity.

'The ultimate biblical vision is the heavenly city. Our challenge is the redemption of the urban, not the consecration of wilderness.'—Peter Harris

Even biologically, the idea of a pristine, teeming world without human beings probably isn't accurate. Britain is certainly a case in point. The original British form of vegetation was a pretty monocultural oak forest. It was only as farming came and we had a diversity of habitats that we had the biodiversity that we cherish on the British Isles today.

So we should understand the human presence on the planet in God's purposes as a blessing.

A Rocha focuses on conservation. In a biblical sense, what is it that we are to conserve?

Peterson: For me and for my family, our primary entry point to conservation—to keeping—was keeping the Sabbath. At one point we decided we were going to keep the Sabbath. We kept a regular Monday Sabbath because as a pastor, Sunday was a work day. We're still doing that. Our kids grew up doing that. If you keep the Sabbath, you start to see creation not as somewhere to get away from your ordinary life, but a place to frame an attentiveness to your life. And it doesn't necessarily have to do with seeing birds or foxes or whatever. Sometimes it is your own kids—putting them in a different setting and bringing them home refreshed.

Harris: It's important to recognize that we are losing species on the planet at an unprecedented rate since industrialization. Now, if in Psalm 104 it says, "In wisdom [God] made them all," and if God gave us the work of caring for creation, then clearly, we aren't fulfilling the biblical vision.

But I think the Christian vision of conservation is exactly as Eugene framed it. It's a wider one that has to do with human flourishing, that has to do with recognizing that a ravaged creation has wrecked not just species but God's intention for time, for Sabbath, and that in turn wrecks families and whole societies.

Some Christians believe that prioritizing environmental concerns limits economic growth and consequently the prospects of the poor. Increasingly, one hears the charge that environmentalists care more about birds than people, but more pointedly that they care more about species than about human beings who are poor.

Harris: Every Christian leader I've ever met in poor parts of the world understands that they live an unmediated relationship with the creation. That means that if there is damage done to the creation, there is damage done to the human community. I would argue that the economic possibilities lie now in the building of a sustainable economy; that's where the smart money is today. In any case, an economy founded on degrading the creation is theologically incoherent. The old model that you can make your money any which way and then give some of it away when you're rich enough is lacking biblical warrant. A much better way is to make money in a way that impacts the poor and the planet beneficially.

Clearly there is a growing enthusiasm among Christians for creation care. But enthusiasm can go wrong. What do you see as the deepest risks in our current interest in environmental concerns?

Harris: I think eco-judgmentalism is a real danger. This is not a matter of finding another five quick rules to keep you on the right side of God. This is not about what we do; this is a change or a development in the depth of our relationship with God himself. It's about everything, not just about a narrow slice of topics. It would be disastrous if we turn the biblical vision into a code that "good" Christians follow—something like, thou shalt eat muesli, wear sandals, and look miserable.

I think the environmental movement has been perceived as judgmental and angry, claiming moral high ground and issuing rules with disapproval. Recently a social scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told me that studies have shown one of the marker personality traits among environmentalists is anxiety. The Christian approach is very different: it is celebratory and grateful and hopeful.

Related Elsewhere:

Eugene Peterson's memoir The Pastor (HarperOne) is available at Christianbook.com and other retailers.

A Rocha, the international conservation organization co-founded by Peter Harris, maintains a website with environmental news, videos, and audio.

Previous Christianity Today coverage of global warming, creation care, and the environment includes:

A Covenant with the Earth | Why the work of Christ makes all the difference in our care of creation. (October 14, 2010)

Creation Care: No Less Than Stewards | How concerned Christians should be about environmental care. (June 30, 2010)

Why We Love the Earth | "Our belief in a Creator, not crisis scenarios, drives our environmental concerns." (June 1, 2001)

Previous reviews of Eugene Peterson's books include:

Eugene Peterson: A Pastor's Journey | The memoirist reads the text of his life, and addresses the parlous state of the pastoral calling. (March 18, 2011)

Letting Words Do Their Work | Why the care of language is more important than ever. (September 22, 2009)

Everyday Lord | Jesus' language shows the mundane is where faith is fleshed out. (January 12, 2009)

- More from Eugene Peterson

Culture

Review

Green Lantern

Steven D. Greydanus

In brightest day, in blackest night: Green Lantern comes to theaters.

Green Lantern is a superhero movie that is very much for comic-book geeks. The title character comes to the screen with more mythological baggage than most: the Guardians of the Universe, a super-ancient race of philosopher-kings who live on the planet Oa; the Green Lantern Corps, with their power rings that run on the green energy of will-power; the dangerous contrary yellow energy of fear. Rather than try to minimize its comic-book silliness, Green Lantern embraces it, from the mostly straight-faced storytelling to the computer-augmented hyper-reality of the production design, which looks more comic-booky than any superhero movie I can think of, including this spring’s Thor.

If only the filmmakers had put as much creative energy into the character of Hal Jordan as they did into his lovingly rendered CGI-enhanced suit, which pulses and glows as it hugs every bulge and swell on Ryan Reynolds’ impressively sculpted torso. Impressed with the popular success of Iron Man, they’ve turned their hero into the big-screen Tony Stark’s screw-up kid brother, an irresponsible, wisecracking, self-destructive womanizer with absent-daddy issues who flies military planes instead of running a military contracting firm.

Counting Thor, that’s three recent comic-book bad-boy heroes who need to grow up and learn responsibility. Of the three, only Iron Man‘s flawed hero is persuasively humbled, hits rock bottom, is forced to face the consequences of his irresponsible ways and fundamentally reexamine his priorities. When Hal encounters a dying alien warrior who entrusts him with an awesome power ring, he does ask some uncomfortable questions about himself. As with Thor, though, there’s no moment of truth like Tony’s experience in that terrorist camp—or like Peter Parker holding his dying uncle, for instance. When Hal suddenly starts acting like a noble superhero, it doesn’t feel earned.

Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan, Blake Lively as Carol Ferris

Complicating matters is the element of destiny or fate. Unlike Tony Stark, a manifestly flawed man whose power came from necessity and invention, Hal was chosen for great power by the ring itself, which (we’re told) never makes mistakes. Thus, Hal must already have the makings of a hero—but why? It’s a question that baffles him, his friends, the Green Lantern Corps, the audience, and perhaps the filmmakers, who offer a few unconvincing stabs at an answer. “Maybe on their planet ‘responsible’ means ‘a—hole,'” muses Hal’s friend Tom Kalmaku (Taika Waititi). Real friends tell you the truth.

There are some redemptive flashes. I like the way Hal’s first response on seeing the dying alien, after a moment of shock, is to leap into action to try to save him, with no thought of risk—and how, genuinely distraught when the alien dies, Hal buries him, telling Tom that he couldn’t leave him lying there. In the comics Hal is originally chosen for his fearlessness, but the movie goes beyond this, invoking the idea of courage as acting in spite of fear rather than as its absence. (In Christian tradition, burying the dead is one of the seven corporal works of mercy, while courage is one of the four cardinal virtues.)

Peter Sarsgaard as Hecktor Hammond

But it’s not enough. The movie jokes about the Green Lantern oath (and they’re funny jokes), but never considers the moral significance of that oath, or how Hal is or is not bound by it. In the end, Hal seems to suggest that the ring chose him for his flying skills. Toward the end, when Hal goes to the Guardians to plead for help saving the earth, the movie doesn’t even seem sure why human beings are worth saving. At least, Hal’s speech isn’t very moving, even in a corny, comic-booky way. (Where’s Roland Emmerich when you need him?)

Reynolds is game, but lacks Downey Jr.’s larger-than-life charisma. The supporting cast fares somewhat better. Peter Sarsgaard is entertainingly skeevy and over-the-top as embittered biologist Hector Hammond, called in by the government to examine the alien corpse. Mark Strong has terrific presence as a senior GL warrior named Sinestro, whose name tips off even the uninitiated that he is destined for the dark side. As Carol Ferris, Hal’s boss, fellow pilot and love interest, Blake Lively is no Gwyneth Paltrow, but at least she has more of a character than Natalie Portman in Thor—and she gets one of the funniest moments in any superhero movie, a send-up of the whole genre.

Green Lantern and Tomar-Re, voiced by Geoffrey Rush

I like a movie that’s not afraid to bite off more than it can chew, but pitting the novice GL against Parallax, a cosmic energy being that represents an existential threat to the entire GL Corps and the Guardians, is a mistake. It diminishes the Corps as well as leaving sequels little place to go. I’m not saying there will be sequels, but, well, it’s a vicious circle, isn’t it?

At the same time, the action is pretty paltry, at least until the end. GL’s earthly debut consists of a single stunt rescuing an out-of-control helicopter. After that, there are two brief indoor fight scenes before the big climax. Hal’s friend Tom chides him for the banality of the helicopter rescue, essentially a Hot Wheels stunt writ large. The same charge applies to the filmmakers: Couldn’t they have come up with more visionary ways to use a power ring that can create anything one can visualize? Don’t tell me that they were limited by Hal’s imagination. That’s why God created suspension of disbelief, and anyway, this isn’t a movie that’s worried about plausibility or plot holes.

Mark Strong as Sinestro

If it were, the government would not have responded to the discovery of an extraterrestrial corpse by pulling in a single biologist with sketchy qualifications, no matter how connected he was. (See the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still for a much better scenario.) A fight scene at a lab would not begin with GL appearing unexplained, or end abruptly without explaining what happened. A later fight scene would not leave viewers wondering whether GL can or can’t control the ring when he’s not wearing it. Oh—and in the whole film we only see him charge the ring once. Going in to the third act, the ring sputters once during a deep-space flight (now would be a bad time to run out of juice)—but then he goes the whole climax with no trouble, right up to the end.

A few lines about the power and dangers of fear hover on the edge of topicality and thoughtfulness, but when the dialogue turns to will as the strongest source of energy in the universe, and how will is stronger than fear, I found myself wondering whether we really need an Ayn Randian Superman, and where the biblical notion that “perfect love casts out fear” would fit into this schema. (I looked it up. In the comics there’s a whole “emotional spectrum” from “rage” [red] to “love” [violet], with “will” [green] right in the middle. According to Wikipedia’s account, love is the “most pure” emotion but also “just as distorting as rage.” None of this is in the film, though.)

In the end, the filmmakers seem not to appreciate the idea of expanding DC’s big-screen presence. At a time when Marvel movies are savvily building a cross-franchise universe toward next year’s Avengers film, a flying man in a green suit appears in a new cinematic world—and there’s no sense of what that world makes of him. The first time Hal’s friend Tom sees the suit, he chortles, “You’re a super hero!” Does he mean “like in comic books and movies”? Or “like those guys over in Metropolis and Gotham City”? If you aren’t interested in questions like that, why are you making this movie?

Talk About It

Discussion starters

What is a hero? Can a single heroic act make someone a hero? Or is more required? Is Hal Jordan a hero? If so, when—and why—does he become a hero? Is his heroism convincing? Why or why not? Carol Ferris tells Hal that she sees something special in him. What does she see?
Sinestro tells Hal that he dishonors the ring and its previous owner by wearing it. Yet Tomar-Re (the fish-headed GL) says that the ring never makes mistakes. Who do you think is right? Can they both be right?
Which character(s) in Green Lantern do you most look up to? Why?
If an institution like the Green Lantern Corps really existed and included members of races all over the universe devoted to protecting the common good, what would that say about good and evil?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Green Lantern is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action.” The violence includes some scary images: A number of characters who are killed by a process that looks like sucking their souls or life-force from their bodies, and another character undergoes a gruesome and painful transformation, leaving him grossly disfigured. There is also some sexual content—nothing explicit, but we meet Hal waking up with a woman who has evidently spent the night at his place for the first time (and is never seen or heard from again), and his ex-girlfriend Carol Ferris, who remarks that she’s “seen him naked,” implies that he’s had many partners in the interim. Language includes recurring misuse of God’s name and some crass language.

- More from Steven D. Greydanus

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