Re: Living and Worshipping in the real world

My church (a very youth and young adult-dominated Mennonite Brethren
church) has long encouraged its members to be in a "small group",
which is usually a study of a book of the Bible or some other
Christian bestseller. When the time came for my small group to find a
new book to look at, I suggested we just spend a few weeks looking at
(my words) "Creation and Evolution". Officially the MB church takes
no position other than "God created and it was good", but I suspect
about one-third of the congregation is YEC. Every time the church
bulletin mentioned our topic it was labeled as "Creation vs
Evolution", though it might have just been assumed that's what we were
doing. As it happened, John Mackay of Australia-based Creation
Research came to town during the time we were studying the topic and a
lot of the group wanted to check him out. I hesitated at first but
decided that we would spend that week going to hear him speak, and the
next week we could talk about what he had to say. It was definitely
the right thing to do: after they had a chance to hear YEC views
explained in some (preposterous) detail, much of the group's support
for the position evaporated. In fact they were somewhat puzzled as to
why Mackay was so animated over the issue.

In denominations that are not fundamentalist, it seems like the main
exposure most churchgoers get to YEC is through remembrances of their
Sunday school teaching, the odd study Bible, and bestsellers at the
Christian bookstore. In the past YEC was the only view on the table
in that marketplace. One indirect benefit of the ID fracas has been
that the "Faith and Science" section at my local bookstore has tripled
in size. Many of these books are Discovery Institute productions, but
others are more holistic in approach. "Darwin's Block Box" sits next
to "Coming to Peace with Science" on some of those racks. If I buy a
book for the church library from the Christian bookstore, nobody is
likely to challenge the addition.

Chris

----------------
Christopher J. Barden, Ph.D.
Department of Chemistry
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Received on Mon Jan 23 12:02:20 2006