The Melheimian Sabbatiblog

Why God Almost Ready to Ship to Testers

We are gathering the senior high apologetics materials together this week to put the final polish on them before they go out to churches who took the training. Their job will be to teach them, beginning in the fall, and work the rest of the bugs out. There are four major themes, each with an 8 week, 8 point defense:

    1. Origin of the Universe
    2. Origin of Life
    3. Origin of the Human Brain
    4. Origin of the Soul

The kids will use our prototype materials for Sunday School, small group, or some other weekly hit for 8 weeks, then on the nineth week they'll teach an adult forum on the subject before moving on to the next theme.

Our friend Pastor Paul Owens sent this in as a theme verse for our "Why God?" apologetics course that we're writing:

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.” 
I Pete 3.15-16.

He says, " the last clause seems particularly important… ‘cause if I am grumpy or combative witness that ain’t gonna win very many ears."

If you didn't get kids to one of the three test seminary this winter/spring but still would like to get in on the test, let me know. We'll probably do three more tests this fall (Maryland, Illinois, California). Then, a year from this summer, we hope to be having KIDS leadiing week-long seminars at colleges across the country as the adults begin to write "Why Jesus?" and "Why the Bible?"

Losing Faith

H2H Director Monty was floating around the radio dial, and  ran across David Wheaton talking about a new book he just wrote about spiritual issues of teens going off to college. He's a Minnesota boy who was a pro tennis player in the 1990s.

From http://www.davidwheaton.com:

The statistic is staggering: As many as 50 percent of Christian students say they have lost their faith after four years in college. That's right: 50 percent! Just as surprising, there is little difference in the faith attrition rate whether at secular or religious colleges. For far too many, the transition from home-life to campus-life is traumatic -- what begins as a University of Instruction ends up being their University of Destruction…with long-lasting negative effects and no guarantee of return. Author David Wheaton, radio talk show host, inspirational speaker, and professional tennis champion, relates his own collegiate experience at Stanford and captivatingly conveys:    
€      The three Pillars of Peril students face in college: Sex, Drugs/Alcohol, and Humanism (secular or religious);    
€      A time-tested game plan for victory over these pitfalls based on improving your spiritual G.P.A.;
€      The important difference between professing and possessing Christians;    
€      Practical advice on dating, friends, and choosing the right college;    
€      How to get back on course if you have gone astray.

The Train: Apologetics from St. Paul

This just in for your "Why God?" senior high apologetics course:

by Pastor Paul Owens
St. Paul Ev. Lutheran Church, Alpena, MI

“Always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within you.”  - St. Paul

Imagine you knew of a train that was pulling out on a journey and that YOU KNEW it meant a good future for you, your family, your community. You knew that you, your family, and anyone else who boarded that train would be better equipped to deal with life... and would be healthier in body and soul. You also knew that you were only allowed one carry-on (i.e., you can’t take all your baggage with you). You also knew that if you didn't get on the train you would miss out and end up lost. What would you do?

Furthermore, at every stop along the way (and the train will make several stops daily) you will meet people who will try to talk you off of the train. Some of them will look a lot like you, some of them won’t. Some will be very friendly and attractive; others will appear more passive… just sort of sitting around, waiting for circumstance to end you up hanging out with them. Still others will be openly antagonistic to you. The one thing they will all have in common – regardless of whether you or they realize it – is that they will all be out to keep you from continuing on the train. Some will even persistently seek to derail the train.

There is no way you can avoid these folks. They will always be with you on your journey. So… relative to this reality, how shall you spend your time?

1) Naively hoping you will never encounter such folks and therefore not preparing yourself?

2) Going into “fight or flight” mode when you meet these folks… that is, getting hooked by them or anxiously trying to avoid them?

3) Or… calmly preparing yourself with a clear understanding of where you are going and what you believe… so that you can clearly, reasonably, playfully defend yourself… and who knows, perhaps even convince another to get on board with you?

Which of these three approaches do you tend toward?

And by the way, what does Jesus the conductor, expect of you?

The Reality

A couple years ago Dr. Rollie Martinson led a study of young Christian adults representing many denominations. The study tracked 2,500 of the most active, faithful 16 year olds from congregations across the country. These 2,500 were leaders in youth group and active in congregational life. Ten years later, at age 26 only 12% of them were active in any congregation. 88% of these 16 year olds had lost or left their faith in ten years. 

The 12%, had seven key dynamics at work for them; 3 of these dynamics are:

1) parents who connected Christian faith in the home & the congregation

2) multiple, redundant faith mentors (several adults in their lives who modeled and mentored the faith)

3) they were able to state why they believe what they believe.

A definition

Apologetics is a term with roots in the ancient Greek legal system. It means “to state or build a case”. It is the practice of being able to state why you believe what you believe.

An excerpt from FINK’s Y3: Confidence in the Faith

In a world of science and skepticism, it is interesting to learn that the highest percentage of faculty at universities who consider themselves Christian are mathematicians and astrophysicists. Do they know something we don’t know? And can their latest research into the universe, life, and the human experience help our young people walk out of high school with a confident faith in the God of the Bible? Can we send them out equipped to discuss their faith with sound logic and an articulate, informed defense? What if we do? And what if we don’t?

This course will explore the complexity of the universe from the micro to the macro, and equip critically thinking young people to enter college with intellectual integrity and confidence in the Christian world view.

 

 

 

Teenagers & Faith Language

From a survey in Touchstone magazine:

There is good news for the church in your study. But there is plenty of bad news as well. For example, you found in your in-depth interviews with teens that a vast majority of them are “incredibly inarticulate about their faith, their religious beliefs and practices.” You found very few teens from any religious background who are able to articulate clearly their religious beliefs and explain how those beliefs connect to the rest of their lives.

One way to frame this problem is to think of the language of faith as something like a second language in our culture. And how do you learn a second language? You learn a second language by listening to others who know how to speak it well, and having a chance to practice it yourself. I don’t know how much teens are hearing other people speak the language well, and it really struck us in our research that very few teens are getting a chance to practice talking about their faith. We were dumbfounded by the number of teens who told us we were the first adults who had asked them what they believed. One said: “I do not know. No one has ever asked me that before.”

OFF to Paradise

We're off to Paradise Lutheran in Thomasville, PA, for the next test of our "Why God?" course. A special surprise visitor, movie star Thomas Ian Nicholas, from the FINK Music Guild will be joining us to sing three of the four Bible theme songs he wrote. We are also going to talk him into a concert Saturday night. Tom has been writing songs for us since he was 16, and we're excited to have him between movie shoots.

In other news, Music Guilder Rick Barron, has a song #1 on the charts in Australia!

Way to go Rick!

Evolution and My Daughter

My 16 year old daughter, Kathryn, is  getting crap from her science teacher who goes to church but doesn't believe in God.

They're on Peppered Moths and whales in class right now. Kathryn simply said that she couldn't accept it as fact because there weren't any transitional fossils, and that a fish turning into a land rat and running back into the sea to lose its legs, move its nose to the top and learn to bear babies that could suckle at birth without getting sea water in their mouths seemed like a stretch for anyone with a scientific mind.

Her teacher lost it and ridiculed her in front of the class. She said she was almost to tears, but kept her composure.

"If you want to talk Creationism, do that in theology class. This is a science class!"

Kathryn got into it further saying she could believe in microevolution with billions of bacteria and billions of years, but there are too few whales, their gestation period is too long, and they are too large to have all of those complex systems change and adapt in the time available.

"So, you think I'm going to hell?"

That was an actual statement from a teacher in front of the class when Kathryn got into it with her.  Anyway, Kathryn is very happy to be joining us at Paradise Lutheran in Thomasville, PA, April 1-3 to get one more dose of "Why God?"

They say, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

I am so glad that my daughter can take this great course right now.

She's 16 and she's ready!

Three Things

We just returned from a sparkling sunlit day of skiing at 10,000 feet and 45 degrees. Marvelous.

Last night we say "Million Dollar Baby". Marvelous as well. Bring kleenex.

Upon returning, I find there's the new stuff coming off the printer in my spare bedroom back in Minnesota from He Qi.

More tomorrow.

Rich (feeling every bit of 49 in the knees)

Apologetics Test II

We're in LA today through Sunday, doing the second round of testing on our new Apologetics course, "Why God?" Michah Schaffer, producer of the HBO documentary "Death of Two Sons" is with us doing the filming. Rev. Dana Hanson is our master teacher. I'm here with my new 12 year old son (okay, he's not new, but being 12 is new for him) and my 16 year old daughter to do the creative interruptions and see if the course we've created needs tweaks. We'll tweak after the weekend, teach it again in Paradise Lutheran in Thomasville, PA, the first week in April, then hand all of the kids who are taking it a rough curriculum for fall. They'll help create it as they go, study the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of the human brain, and the concept of the soul, and teach an adult ed course at their church every tenth week.

Sounds like fun?

Stay tuned.

Cosmic Connections

Okay, this is freaky.

A month ago I received an email from our FINK fans Tim and Ann Seitz-Brown near Gettysburg, PA (Paradise Lutheran/Thomasville). They were about to do stones and had some questions. I told them about the apologetics course and they were interested in exploring hosting.

This morning I woke thinking I should get back to them. Before saying "yes" to hosting, I thought I should check and see if they were in a central location for our east coast FINKs who might like to be involved in the test phase of the experiment.

I clicked over to ELCA.org and found the church. I clicked "find a map" and at the very second the map popped up, I heard a "bing" alerting me to an email incoming. I clicked to email, and the following opened.

---

From: Timothy and Ann Seitz-Brown [mailto:seitzbrown@adelphia.net]
Subject: FINK apologetics course

Rich,

 

We'd like to talk sometime about hosting/testing the "Why God?" course. Thanks for sharing the summary with us.

 

Some questions: is this a lock-in kind of event since it is spread over a weekend? should we check with our local Lutheran camp about hosting? when would you like to run the east coast test? is there someone at the FINK office that we could talk to? how many youth would you need to run the test? how many adult guides/youth would we need to recruit?

 

BTW, I had one college kid who had to stand toe-to-toe with her atheist philosophy professor. I scrambled to provide materials for her. She held her ground. It would be great to prepare our youth for this in a more intentional way.

 

Reading the summary of the event, I love having the youth teach the adults when they complete the course! Around here that makes the adults' chests pop out with pride! That happened last Sunday at our CONFIRMATION stepping stone when 3 young women sang the "I will pay my vows" song. There were some teary eyes in the congregation. A definite high.

 

See ya,

 

Tim

 

A glitch in the Internet causing brainwaves and microwaves to cross over? Some kind of cosmic ESPN? A tear in the time-space continuum?

Na. Just a God thing.

Senior High Apologetics, Take Two

We're getting ready to do a second test run on the apologetics course which we unveiled at Renaissance this summer. I've written a news release. If you have five minutes, take a look and send me any thoughts, critiques or comments on this before I release it.

Also, if you know of any sharp kids (or a carload of them) who might be willing to test the stuff and teach it as four adult ed forums in their church, let me know personally. Thanx.

RAM

“Why God?” Senior High Course Launched
New Apologetics Course Enters Phase II Test in LA & Denver

Faith Inkubators is looking for a few sharp sophomores, juniors, and seniors to help test a new Christian apologetics course.

“Why God?” is a senior high immersion into the latest and best scientific arguments for the existence of God.

Developed as an apologetics boot camp for young intellectual Christians, “Why God?” will invite senior high youth to explore the complexity of the universe, the origin of life, the uniqueness of the human brain, and the concept of the soul.

The Designers
Rev. Dana Hanson (www.transformationleaders.blogspot.com) from First Lutheran in Northridge, CA, is the senior researcher and main teacher for the project. Astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross from Cal Tech, biochemist Fuz Rana, and ethicist Dallas Willard from the University of Southern California are advisors. Hollywood actor and FINK Music Guilder Thomas Ian Nicholas has written the four NRSV-verbatim theme songs for the resources. FINK’s artist-in-residence, Dr. He Qi, from Nanjing Theological Seminary is painting four new Biblical scenes for the theme. “This course will use the latest of scientific research to explore the complexity of the universe from the micro to the macro, and equip critically thinking young people to enter college with intellectual integrity and confidence in the Christian worldview,” says Pastor Dana.

Faith Inkubators tested and tweaked the initial resources with a live audience of High School youth from coast to coast in July. For this second phase of the design, FINK is hoping to enlist two dozen youth groups to experience and critique the logic, arguments, and resources being created for the 2008 release. After spending three days with us, your youth will be commissioned to teach four adult education forums at your church on the “Why God” sub-themes: The Big Bang of the Universe, the Big Bang of Life, the Big Bang of the Human Brain, and the Big Bang of the Soul.

Youth involved in this phase of the experiment will also be invited to help Faith Inkubators design and create four nine-week small group studies and the home devotional materials in support of the themes.

“Many of our brightest and best kids go off to college with a Sunday school level faith and, within three years, have drifted away from the church or lost their faith completely," says Rich Melheim, FINK’s Chief Creative Officer. “Send us your brightest and best kids – kids who could easily be agnostics five years from today if they leave home without asking and answering the difficult questions of faith – and we’ll see if we can change that!”

The Sessions
Students experiencing the Friday through Sunday event will study:

Friday Night (Session I) - “The Origin of the Universe: Big Bang of the Universe” (Cosmology) How can there be a God? How can there not be a God? A moment before creation there was no space, matter, energy or time. Then suddenly everything in our physical universe exploded into existence. In the words of David Letterman: “If there was no space, energy, matter or time, then what, for the love of God, banged?” There are two basic laws of physics. 1. Nothing comes from nothing. 2. Something had to. We call that something God. Mathematicians and astrophysicists know that it takes much more faith to be an atheist today than a Christian. Without cracking the Bible, people of integrity are searching for the answers to the start of it all, and the latest research is sounding a whole lot like what Christians have known all along.

Saturday Morning (Session II) - “The Origin of Life: Big Bang of Life” (Biology) One cannot speak of the origin of life. Today one must speak of the origins of life. The carbonaceous deposits in the oldest known rocks on the planet suggest that life appeared shortly after the earth cooled, then disappeared, then arose again, then disappeared in a series of multiple spontaneous eruptions and mass extinction events. Recently, science has made it disturbingly clear that the conditions on earth were hostile to life arising at each of those times. The chemicals for the “primordial soup” did not exist for the recipe and the UV radiation bombarding the earth would have killed off anything organizing into strands of life without some thing or some one “hovering over” the whole experiment. That life would arise by chance even once is mathematically improbable. That it would arise again and again in absolutely hostile conditions is cause for great skepticism. So how did we get here? Where did we come from? And where are we going?
Saturday Afternoon - Critiques of Sessions I & II, and workshops on: 1. Asking the Tougher Questions, 2. Practicing Apologetics, 3. Creating the Weekly Small Group and Nightly Home Huddle materials.
Saturday Evening (Session III) - “The Origin of Humanity: Big Bang of the Brain” (Psychology) For a million and a half years the bi-pedal primates that roamed the savannah and tundra were using the same rock chopping tool to crack open shells and bones for food. Then, suddenly about 45-50,000 years ago there was art, music, burial with religious artifacts, architecture, cities, law, and government. In strict natural selection theory, this is impossible. Change only happens in slow, plodding, random trial and error processes where most mutations render the changed individual sterile or dead. How did the human brain suddenly explode on the scene when the very fact that it did breaks every law of Darwinian evolution?

Sunday Morning (Session IV) - “The Origin of the Soul” (Morality) Is there a reason for human life? Is there any meaning and existence beyond these seventy years we spend on the planet, or do we die and cease to exist? Are we more than the sum of our biological parts? Simply a higher form of animal – a naked ape who by chance developed an opposable thumb and happened to figure out how to eat the marrow from bones and thus, developed a better brain and a language that could pass our learning down from generation to generation? There is a certain soul-ishness among the higher forms of life on this planet. Dogs, cats, porpoises and apes all seem to have an intellect and feelings that go beyond mere instinct. Are we the same as them? The ultimate question of human meaning comes down to this question: Are we a soul housed inside a physical body, or are we simply a physical body with a certain soul-ishness that disappears when we turn to dust? Exploring this question leads us to the doorstep of a different type of ethics, morality, and ultimately, a reason to get up in the morning. It leads us on a life-long quest for meaning, and toward the One who started and will end it all.
Sunday Afternoon - Critiques of Sessions III & IV, and workshops on: 1. Creating the Weekly Small Group and Nightly Home Huddle, 2. Teaching "Why God" as adult education forums in your church.

Long Term Plans: Two Additional Apologetics Courses
After the “Why God?” course has been properly tested and tweaked, Faith Inkubators plans to unveil “Why Jesus” and a “Why the Bible?” senior high resources to complete a three-year series for sophomores, juniors and seniors. All courses will include 4 PowerPoint major themes, 36 weeks of small group materials to reinforce the themes, nightly home devotional resources, as well as the once-a-quarter “Adult Education Forum” for the teens to teach their parents.

“In a world of science and skepticism, it is interesting to note that the highest percentage of faculty at universities who consider themselves Christian are mathematicians and astrophysicists. Do they know something we don’t know?" asks Melheim. "And can their latest research into the universe, life, and the human experience help our young people walk out of high school with a confident faith in the God of the Bible? Can we send our brightest and best young people out equipped to discuss their faith with sound logic and an articulate, informed defense? What if we do? And what if we don’t?”

Registration
Registration is limited, so if you have a carload of sophomores, juniors and seniors who could break away for a transformational weekend in January, please take them out for ice cream ASAP and ask them to consider helping us change the senior high world.