Delta Hospice Society in British Columbia is one organization seeking to do just that, by helping individuals and their families live with comfort, meaning, dignity and hope in the last stages of life. It’s life-affirming perspective means no medical assistance in dying (“MAID”) can be performed on site. But, as we discussed in our April Bulletin, the local health authority deemed this a breach of contract and it withdrew funding. 

This should serve as a wake-up call for Christian ministries everywhere. It tells us that organizations and ministries that object to MAID will come under increasing scrutiny. It tells us how quickly a legislative exception to the criminal act of murder has become an “obligation” of healthcare organizations and professionals to facilitate. It also has the very real possibility of influencing other government authorities’ approach to MAID.

Pressure to provide MAID will likely increase as eligibility expands – Bill C-7 is currently before Parliament and would allow MAID where death is not reasonably foreseeable, and in some circumstances, by way of advance directive. For a more detailed discussion, see the Horizons column in our April Bulletin.

Given the situation, Delta Hospice’s Executive Director is asking for Christian brothers and sisters across Canada to join in a 30-day call to prayer for the hospice and for the nation, from May 28-June 26, 2020. More details can be found in the letter below.

We invite you to join with them – and us – in this initiative.

To learn more on this topic, see

The Right of Religious Hospitals to Refuse Physician-Assisted Suicide (24 May 2018)

Quebec Court Expands Assisted Suicide Eligibility (12 Sept 2019

Euthanasia: Tell the Government What You Think (21 Jan 2020)

The post A Call to Prayer for Life appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Christianity and Modern Thought

Science, Reason, and Religion

Many people try to pit science against religion, as if only one can be true. This is a false dichotomy. The popular assumption of a conflict would only be true if they both claimed to explain the same thing, and this simply isn’t the case. Albert Einstein aptly summed up the complementarian relationship between science and religion as: Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is empty. Another way to phrase it would be that science answers the “What?” and religion answers the “Why?” Science explains how things work, and religion explains why things are. They are two very different topics that actually work quite well together.

The same logic can be applied to reason and religion. Most people believe that the Enlightenment was an age of reason that juxtaposed faith and reason, assuming again that only one could be true. However, all the early thinkers of the Enlightenment were sincere Christians who believed that reason was possible only because God exists and is orderly in his ways. It is because of God’s orderliness that we can study and increase our knowledge about how God’s world works.

Some people believe that the more we understand how things work, the less we need God. They see God as a black box to explain what we do not yet understand. But this is not true either. It is still God who sustains it all. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton, who originated the idea that there are Laws of Nature, believed that those laws proved God’s existence on the basis that if there is a law, then there must be a Law-Giver.

During much of the Enlightenment, reason and God went together quite well. In fact, John Locke (one of the heroes of the Enlightenment) wrote a book called The Reasonableness of Christianity in which he made the case that the Bible, taken literally, is entirely reasonable. However, the one downside to the work of the early Christian Enlightenment thinkers was that it had the effect of downgrading revelation as a source of knowledge.

What really turned modern thought anti-religious was when the French philosophers got involved. They were the first to pit reason against religion. The French philosophers were very anti-Catholic, and by extension, anti-Christian and anti-religion. They did their best to replace God with reason.

More than Reason

While many would like to depend upon reason alone as the infallible guide for acquiring knowledge, it turns out that reason alone is not up to the task.

• First, we don’t agree on what is reasonable! Reason can be quite ambiguous. For example, a later Enlightenment thinker, David Hume, believed it was common sense not to believe in God, while his contemporary, Thomas Reid, believed it was common sense to believe in God.
• Second, it also became clear that reason alone cannot explain everything because:
  • we also learn from experience
  • we allow passion, and not reason alone, to help us make decisions, such as who we will marry
  • we create understanding or meaning based on faith and trust
  • we use our imagination to create preferred futures that go well beyond what reason alone might reasonably project
• Finally, reason cannot tell you the ultimate truth of reality. It can’t prove God’s existence or character. This is because reason functions within what philosophy calls appearances, the physical world. But there is a world beyond appearances that we can only get to by faith. Faith, combined with personal experience of God and with understanding that comes from God’s self-revelation in Scripture, provides a reasonable belief in the existence of God.

And lest we think that those who promote reason as the only way to gain knowledge have successfully made the case against faith, remember that faith in reason alone is still faith!

Engaging the Opposition

There will always be people who don’t think alike. In fact, given our different experiences, education, personalities, and so forth, it is amazing that there are as many people as there are who do think alike! However, the reality is, there will always be people who do not see things as you do.

Rather than shunning or demonizing them as “those dastardly fiends,” get to know them. Talk with them and use the exchange to evaluate the goodness of your beliefs:

• If your arguments stand up to scrutiny, you will be better off and more confident about them.
• If your arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, you may find there is a better way to defend your belief. Or you may discover you need to correct your belief. Sometimes we believe something without a lot of thought, or we misunderstood something or misinterpreted it.

Etymology Is No Help

When people discuss the Bible and want to drive a point home, they sometimes appeal to the etymology of the Greek or Hebrew word to get at the ‘real’ meaning. Unfortunately, this kind of word study has little, if any, value. A word’s etymology may be of historical interest, telling how the word came to exist, but the word itself means what it meant at the time it was written.

Bear in mind that it may take only a few years for a word to completely change its meaning. Here are some examples of words that have changed their meaning:

1. Wicked and bad now both mean good.
2. The word religion in 1602 meant piety, not a system of belief.
3. When William Wilberforce campaigned for the reformation of manners in the 1800s, he wasn’t campaigning for more politeness, because manners did not mean etiquette but a way of living. Child labour, animal abuse, terrible treatment of prisoners in jail, and so forth all showed how society wasn’t as genteel as the upper class imagined it to be. Its manners, its way of living, needed to change so that these situations would no longer exist.
4. The word careful as used in the King James Version means anxious or worried today. To be full of care is to be full of worry. The word awful used to mean full of reverential awe, and terrible used to mean awesome.

So when you want help with what a word means, check out what it meant at that time (and even, possibly, in that place, as it might have been a local colloquialism) and see what it meant to the writer.

Humanist Morality

Humanist morality is a non-religious morality. Even though we’d like everyone to have a Christian morality, it is vital that there be a non-religious morality or else there is no reason for non-religious people to be moral at all.

The favoured morality today is utilitarianism: Whatever gives the greatest number of people the greatest happiness is moral. This works well for most people, but it does not work well at all if you are part of the minority who gets pain instead of happiness. For example, it might make most people happy to have slaves do their tedious work, so a utilitarian law allowing people to own slaves would be moral. The owners are happy, but the slaves sure aren’t.

The kind of morality that causes a person to be a moral hero and to live sacrificially simply isn’t possible or rational in secular morality.

The one who tells the best story wins!

The strategy of post-modernists today is to out-narrate their opponents. That is, to tell a better story to persuade people and win their argument. It doesn’t matter if the story is true or false, it just matters that it works.

Objectivity

Christians believe that goodness is an objective property that is very real, and it should be loved. Love, truth, compassion, and wisdom are all part of beauty, and all reflect the character of God. The secular world is obsessed with ambiguity, turning things upside-down, and utility over beauty.

The professor (called a tutor at Oxford) says we are indeed in a culture war. Most people do not believe in objective moral truth. They have replaced moral truth with moral opinions. To win people over, Christians must address the issue of whether or not there is objective truth.

C.S. Lewis and the Christian Imagination

Longing for God

Lewis assumes that everyone experiences inconsolable longing for something more than this world. He calls this “desire” in Surprised By Joy.

My question is whether people today are reflective enough to even be aware of longing. With so many ‘needs’ created and so quickly fulfilled in our consumer society, do we get to the bigger, more existential type of longing that Lewis writes about? We probably do if we are languishing in poverty or oppression, but otherwise, maybe not. This has implications for how we evangelize.

Feeling or Experience?

Lewis was very bothered by the fact that a good writer telling a story like Narnia, one that evokes spiritual feelings, can lead people to an experience that is imaginative in nature and not an actual spiritual experience. Worship music can do the same. We get the feeling of being spiritual without actually being spiritual. Closeness and intimacy with God take time spent in Christian spiritual practices. Lewis believed that stories and music can be shortcuts to imitative (false) experiences of God rather than actual experiences of God.

The primary goal of stories and music, according to Lewis, is to show what the good, the virtuous, and the lovely look like. Stories are for moral formation, and this is what Lewis was doing with his fiction books. Modern stories, however, are all about moral ambiguity and dystopia. These stories are programming recent generations of children quite differently than the stories read by their parents. Authors of children’s stories have the power to shape children in their formative years. Both children and adults need stories that train them to make right decisions in real life.

Understanding Those Who Differ with Us

Many of the conflicts we have in our world today are actually the result of people having different understandings about things such as the environment. Lewis says that it helps to know what the purpose of that thing is, because what is good is what fulfills its purpose. So when it comes to the environment, should we chop down a large tree?

• If we think its purpose is to provide shade, we would say the good thing is no, don’t chop it down because the tree is fulfilling its purpose.
• But if we think the purpose of a large tree is to provide firewood for heating, then the good thing is to chop it down and use it.

The real conflict is not about cutting down the tree or not, but what is the reason why the tree exists. That’s what should be debated. The appropriate action (or inaction) would become clear once the purpose has been determined.

Human Progress

Secular people often think that society has progressed a long way since Christianity lost its dominance, They’ll say something like, “We don’t burn witches anymore.”

Lewis would say that yes, we have progressed, but not morally. We’ve progressed in our knowledge that witches cannot cast spells that cause a pregnant woman to lose her baby, for example. If we thought they could still cast spells that result in miscarriages, we’d treat them the same way as we did years ago. The proof is that while we don’t burn witches anymore, just look at how we treat terrorists at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

Big Ideas

These last few posts have given you a taste of the topics covered in the four courses I took at Oxford University. They certainly provided me with a lot of food for thought, and I hope they’ve done the same for you.

The post At Oxford: Food for Thought appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Make a lampstand of pure gold. Hammer out its base and shaft, and make its flowerlike cups, buds and blossoms of one piece with them. Exodus 25:31

It’s fascinating that God was so particular in giving instructions about how to build the Tabernacle. He could have said, “Build a lampstand” but he didn’t. He said “Build a lampstand using a hammer and be sure to put exactly this ornamentation on it.” God could have finished working on creation when it was made up of things that were only utilitarian. He could have stopped designing when he had the functions he wanted. But he didn’t. He went beyond what was strictly necessary to add beauty to utility and form to function.

Was the artistic detail of the lampstand for his benefit or ours? I think it was for both. Bearing his image, I’m sure we find beautiful what God finds beautiful, so we can both enjoy good art. And since God gives us artistic skills, the church should support the arts. In fact, I think it is more important that we do so now than it has been for many decades.

Why the Church Needs More Art Now

Why now? Because the last fifty years has seen the public frame their perception of the socially conservative wing of the church by what it opposes, not for what it promotes. As you’ll find in upcoming posts, I believe the church must be much more intentional about telling our story – who we are and what we do.

But telling stories is just one way to communicate. The arts, by which I mean everything from architecture to music to literature to dance to visual arts of all sorts, are a great way to convey impressions and messages on a more subtle, emotional level. We can use various forms of art to put a warm and engaging face to our faith in addition to all the other good things we do in God’s name and to make him look good.

Historical Examples

We’ve done this before quite well. Throughout history, the church was the pre-eminent patron of the arts in the Western world. It used the arts to build magnificent buildings which speak of God’s glory. Chancel, nave, and transcepts made the church building itself a cross and meant our worship and prayers were made from inside a representation of the cross. Architects learned how to build higher and thinner walls to give the sacred place a hint of the majesty of God and to allow the stained glass windows to be as large as possible. The many tri-fold arches and windows speak of the Trinity.

Music also speaks of God. The musical scales we use, four-part harmony, and the musical notation system were all developed to facilitate church singing. The pipe organ was developed from a rudimentary set of flutes to an engineering marvel because (until the synthesizer was invented) it was the only musical instrument which could play a note forever with no diminishment of sound. That’s important because the lack of any decay in sound was likened to the eternal nature of God!

When literacy was low and Bibles were scarce, churches portrayed the biblical stories in art, particularly in stained glass windows. Parishioners could ‘read’ the Bible through their church’s art.

Now that we read the Bible itself, art serves to remind us of those stories and help us reflect on who God is and our relationship with him.

Why the Arts Are Important

Tom Wright makes a great case for why the church should support the arts:

“Part of the role of the church in the past was – and could and should be again – to foster and sustain lives of beauty and aesthetic meaning at every level, from music making in the village pub to drama in the local primary school, from artists’ and photographers’ workshops to still-life painting classes, from symphony concerts to driftwood sculptures. The church, because it is the family that believes in hope for new creation, should be the place in every town and village where new creation bursts forth for the whole community, pointing to the hope that, like all beauty, always comes as a surprise.” Tom Wright¹.

Innovative Approaches to the Arts

The Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland & Labrador (PAONL) made a serious commitment to the arts in 2012 when they purchased a commercial theatre. The venerable Majestic Theatre had been a cultural fixture in Saint John’s, NL for 190 years at that point. When it went out of business, the PAONL purchased the building and today they are close to finishing its refurbishment so it can be used again for live theatre. As I heard from PAONL about their plans for the theatre, I got excited about the possibilities. It will be used for church outreach events and for regular theatre productions. This is about the church showing support for its community and accomplishing its mission at the same time.

I recently visited Westside Church in Vancouver which is located in a former live theatre. A group of Christian business leaders bought the building and then dedicated it to the church for its own use and to rent it out for live, secular theatre productions. In fact, the venue is of such high quality that the Vancouver International Film Festival is held in the building. Hollywood producers and stars attending the festival are treated to a beautiful church facility complete with billboards for Children’s ministry and Small Group Bible studies, and of course, a large cross on the stage. Nothing is taken down when Hollywood comes to town!

Christianity and the Arts

If you are interested in the historical details of the relationship between the church and the arts, How Christianity Changed the World is a good overview of how Christian faith shaped art, architecture, music, and literature, as well as science, medicine, education and so on.

And if you would like to explore more about Christian arts through history, there is an excellent coffee table book which surveys great works of Christian art, literature, music, and film through the millennia entitled 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know. The stories behind each of the artistic selections are quite interesting, and you may (as I did) decide to delve deeper into the world of Christian art. This book is a great survey of a wide selection of art in its many forms. You’ll know what to look for and will appreciate its significance when you find it. The book covers everything from Michelangelo to Makoto Fujimura, from Mendelssohn to Bob Dylan, from the windows of Sainte-Chapelle to the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s a very engaging read!

How Art Can Be Used

Christian art doesn’t have to have explicit Christian imagery to be considered Christian and useful. It just needs to be created by a good artist who sees the world through Christian eyes.

Art Talks about God

In Art for God’s Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts, Philip Ryken says that art is capable of appealing to our longing for beauty. It communicates to Christians and others a portion of God’s beautiful creation. It draws our attention to parts of God’s creation that we may never personally see, or notice even if we do see it. Art can therefore be a subtle outreach to our culture. A lot of today’s art is created from a pessimistic view of the world and represents values at odds with Christian values. Christian art could have a more positive view based on different values, celebrating the positive world that God created and is re-creating through Jesus Christ.

As I look at the picture of the peacock below, I marvel that God created such a magnificent display of feathers. Why are there so many varieties of birds, as opposed to just one kind? Why are there such dramatic differences between a peacock, a cardinal, and a pigeon? The variety tells us something about God. He obviously likes variety and there are so many beautiful possibilities he imagined for designing a bird that he couldn’t design them all into just one species! So he gave us many. At least, that’s my guess.

Art Talks about Us

But in addition to the beauty of God’s creation, great Christian art can also portray the darkness and ugliness of a world caught in sin and separated from God. We can use art to to enhance our evangelism programs and to advocate on behalf of those who need our help. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a good example of Christian advocacy literature. Images, plays, novels – all can help us understand who we are and our need for God’s love and forgiveness. I think the greatest single piece of Christian literature has got to be Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. I love this book! From cover to cover, God’s grace flows liberally through the story! Many people wouldn’t think of picking up the Bible, but they will pick up a novel.

Building Design

Here are two great examples of adding aesthetic value into the design of our churches. The first one is historical and the second is present day. For the best modern-day example that I know of, of incorporating art into church design and decoration, check out Southview Church in Calgary.

The central tower of Wells Cathedral was built in the early 1200s, and in 1313 was heightened by about thirty feet. Unfortunately, the pressure of the extra weight began to buckle the walls of the church and they had to be braced. Additional pillars would have served the purpose and been a utilitarian solution. But between 1338-1348, master mason William Joy designed and built the incredibly beautiful and unique “scissor-arches” that support the tower and add beauty. His solution to an engineering problem became the “trademark” of the Cathedral.

Brandon Malo, pastor of Elevation in Waterloo, ON told me the story of how his church came to meet in a beautiful sanctuary. When he needed a larger space for his church of young families, he visited St. John’s Lutheran church, a gorgeous stone church near downtown Waterloo. He by-passed the sanctuary and looked at the gym, which was what the congregation was used to, and thought it would be great for his church. When he brought his steering committee to see the gym, they never got past the sanctuary. Looking at its beauty, they said to him, “Why would you worship in a gym when you could be worshipping here?” He coordinated service times with the Lutherans and they now share the same delightful sanctuary!

Centre Street Church in Calgary needed a humidifier system for their building. They could have purchased equipment and done a standard job, but instead they chose to design a waterfall for their foyer. Not only do they have a beautiful attraction that doubles as a humidifier, but they also have a pool in which to do baptisms! A great job of bringing ‘living water’ indoors!

Now I’m not saying that we should be building cathedrals today. But could we pay more attention to the arts in the buildings we do have? The examples I’ve given so far come from large churches, but most churches today are small, between 50 to 200 people. However, even a small church can add beauty to its building. Maybe you won’t have a dramatic waterfall, but you could spruce it up with greenery or some artwork. Even just the way you paint your walls might add beauty.

I recently visited Journey Canada in Vancouver and this small office created an immediately favourable impression of their ministry through brightly coloured walls, a bold painting and a decorative brass vase. What a surprisingly beautiful sanctuary of sensory delight inside an old brick manufacturing building that used to house a coffin manufacturer!

Barrhead Church of God in Barrhead, AB has a stained glass picture mounted on a light box, which adds to the visual interest of their foyer.

Art Distinguishes ‘Place’

Art lets people know they are somewhere distinctive. It denotes that “this place is different from other places.” James Davison Hunter writes that “when the physical places we inhabit look alike, place seems to matter even less. What was distinctive about a place [pales] into [an anonymous] space and we end up with what James Kunstler has called ‘a geography of nowhere’ – where every place looks like no place in particular.”² Art can create places of wonder, awe, and mystery.

Art and the Poor

Ray Bakke has said that “The poor need beauty as well as bread.” According to Charlie Self, “It is not too expensive to invite artists and artisans, builders and craftsmen, to adorn the worship locale with color, light, and images that convey the mission, vision, and values of the community. Simplicity does not mean plainness, and good stewardship includes aesthetic leadership.”³

So what can we do?

First, here are three other articles with great ideas for how to support or use the arts:

• Comment magazine: The Church’s Role in Art
• RELEVANT magazine: 5 Ways the Church Can Make Art Great Again
• Faith Today magazine: Artful Discipleship: How the arts can help in spiritual formation

Display Their Visual Art

CCCC invited six young aspiring Christian artists to exhibit their work at The Pursuit ’16 conference. All of them made sales and took away leads for further work. This is an easy way to promote their careers and delight your members.

Yorkminster Park Baptist Church in Toronto actually has an art gallery in their church. It’s beautiful and tells visitors they care about the local arts community.

Buy Their Products/Services

Of course, you can directly promote their careers by purchasing their books, music, or visual art. Or hire them for an event. CCCC hired a Christian acting troupe to perform at the conference banquet this year. I personally purchased a painting from one of the young artists exhibiting at the conference. Click on the picture for “Dusk” and you will be taken to the artist’s gallery. And CCCC commissioned another of the artists to do an original piece of art for us: a starling murmuration, a very meaningful image for us. It speaks of community leadership, as I described (with a video) in my community leadership post.

Key Thought: Part of our witness to the world is showing how the beauty of our world reflects the beauty of God. 

“The book, 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

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