Prepackaged curricula for summertime Vacation Bible School have been around for awhile. Has your church assessed the costs and benefits of VBS-in-a-box? The Clarion Ledger reports:

The Bible, which was the only book some churches used during VBS back then, since has been replaced with prepackaged materials manufactured by church supply companies, which include step-by-step curriculums, CDs, recreation and games supplies and ideas, decorations, promotional materials, souvenirs and ready-to-make crafts. Everything in the package revolves around a theme. In [one church's] case, the theme was "Game Day Central: Where Heroes Are Made," developed by LifeWay Christian Resources, which has more than 100 stores nationwide.

Isabella Evans, assimilation and outreach coordinator for New Hope Baptist Church in Jackson, said churches are following other VBS trends, which include holding adult VBS, community outreach VBS and afternoon or night VBS to accommodate working mothers who wish to volunteer.
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But some churches have reverted to the old-style methods of VBS after trying prepackaged materials.

Sarah Buffington, VBS chairwoman for St. Andrew's Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson, said planners there felt the children were having fun but were missing out on Bible history....

The Social Science Research Council has a new website that offers a series of essays about the religious engagement of college students. Here is the SSRC explanation for the website:

Recent studies of college students' attitudes toward religion suggest that the academy is no longer the bastion of secularism it was once assumed to be. And these studies further reveal that the spiritual landscape on today's college campuses is virtually unrecognizable from what we've seen in the past. Evangelicalism--often in the form of extra-denominational or parachurch campus groups--has eclipsed mainstream Protestantism. Catholicism and Judaism, too, are thriving, as are other faiths.

To help make sense of these changes, the SSRC offers this online guide, which was derived from a series of essays it commissioned from leading authorities in the field of religion and higher education.

SSRC President Craign Calhoun offers further thoughts in his preface to the website:

By now, most college professors have noticed that there is renewed religious engagement among American undergraduates. Or at least they have heard this in the media. Fewer are in active conversations with students about matters of religion. Fewer still have a nuanced understanding of the patterns of their students’ religious participation and exploration.

One reason for this is that much of the religious engagement on American campuses takes place outside the classroom. At the same time, the extent to which professors are engaged with students’ extracurricular lives has declined with the increasing scale of universities, the emphasis on research productivity, and the growth in numbers of non-faculty advisors and other student services professionals. This means that many professors have little first-hand knowledge of the context of their students’ religious or spiritual lives. If they stop to consider these at all, moreover, they are likely to do so on the basis of the memory of their own student days or projection based on what they’ve seen in the media.

Memory can be specifically misleading. As the essays in our forum inform us, the proportionate role of mainline Protestant denominations in campus religious life has declined in recent years. While there are still campus Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists, growth has been mostly among Baptists and Catholics and members of other faith communities – from Buddhists to Muslims to observant Jews. What’s more, campus religious life is less denominationally organized. “Parachurch” organizations like the Campus Christian Fellowship play very large roles. These may or may not be formally recognized affiliates of specific campuses; they usually are not organized under chaplaincies. But they are centers of religious engagement – and importantly, this is often intellectual engagement. Students in these organizations discuss how to interpret the content of their courses – often without the knowledge of their instructors – as well as how to understand the big issues of the day. And – contrary to stereotypes – this is an active part of life at schools like Princeton, not just at less elite and more explicitly religious institutions.

The SSRC website can be found here. Among the more interesting essays are "Do Religious Students Do Better?" and "How Does College Affect Students’ Religious Beliefs?"

For those who have worked in college ministry, what has been your experience? Is there a renewed interest in religion on campus? What should the Episcopal Church do in response?

Maggi Dawn has an interesting post that starts off addressing questions about Christology and the emerging church, and how the latter has received some criticism for not having enough of the former. She goes on from there, however, to address how we as Christians engage the non-Christian world we often find ourselves living in. She notes Friedrich Schleiermacher's efforts in the early 19th century to reconcile faith and reason:

As Schleiermacher tells it, when people encounter God they do not first of all become aware of God as a doctrinally complete concept, nor of a three-personed Trinity. It takes time and patience to understand the God one initially encounters, and doctrines like Trinity and Christology are ways of learning to understand and articulate that encounter.

Rather than accusing the emerging church of having an immature theology, however, Dawn is pointing out the similarities between the emerging church--indeed, many of the movements that downplay creeds and doctrine--and Schleiermacher's attempts to, as Dawn writes, "get these people to understand that true Christianity was not the passionless affair they thought it was, but precisely what would meet their deep longing for spiritual truth."

That points to the greater challenge for postmodern evangelists, a word I use with reservation because of its connotations, in secular society, with extremely conservative approaches to Christianity. It is one thing for those within the faith to debate the this-and-thats of Christian theology, including the nature of the Trinity. However, these debates about doctrines and correctness, as well as the "language of religion" itself, may be the barrier that keeps people who shun religion from becoming, or becoming aware that they are, disciples:

...for those who live as Christians in a culture that despises religion, there may be good reason to have a thorough-going orthodox Christology but not wear it on your sleeve in everyday conversation. Why would that be? Because if you frequently find yourself as the only Christian in a group of people you work or socialise with, you cannot help but be alive to the fact that the language of religion fails to connect people to any lively interest in Jesus or Christianity. For those of us who live in that kind fo culture (and I'm speaking here of 21st century England), however important an orthodox Christology is to me, it's not the first thing that arises when debating religious issues with those who are strangers to the faith. In my experience, people are more interested initially in whether and why observing religion at all is a viable possibility in 21st century Britain. In such conversations, I find myself describing what religion is not, and making connections between other people's spiritual experience, not to say they are all the same, but to say that in my experience true Christianity is not the outmoded museum piece people imagine, but precisely the kind of spiritual reality that we long for.

The essay, and some lively responses in the comments to it, are here.

Simon Barrow, one of the editors of Ekklesia writes on his discovery of a new book by James F. Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structures, available online here.

Along with the World Council of Churches' conversations about "the missionary structure of the congregation" back in the 1960s; Bonhoeffer's reflections on church, discipleship and ethics; the work of the Alban Institute; the Christian community movement; and base ecclesial communities (BECs) in Latin America and elsewhere, Hopewell is really one of the pioneers of all the change-agency based explorations of practical ecclesiology which have come so much into vogue in recent years

At the time of his death in 1984, James F. Hopewell was Professor of Religion and the Church and Director of the Rollins Center for Church Ministries at the Candler School of theology, Emory University. Published by Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1987, his book 'Congregations' was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

It would be interesting to know what Hopewell would have made of all the current talk of deep church, emerging church, liquid church, new ways of being church, fresh expressions of church - and the like, I expect he would have said that linguistic inflation is not a substitute for the hard slog of doing church as a conserving and emancipatory expression of the Gospel in action.

Barrow also discusses Communities of Liberating Conviction at his blog, Faith in Society.

So what can and should the church-as-witness be, in different ways and in different places? The answer is a vulnerable but hopeful group of people narrated together in the story and life of Jesus, in such a way that we find ourselves linking worship (the right designation of worth-ship), prayer (seeking the grace to live beyond our means), eucharist (the celebration of God in the fleshly and the material), common life (people-at-odds who surprisingly find each other in the face of Christ) and politics (re-rendering power in terms of giving rather than claiming).