"Religulous" Review on Dan Kimball's blog

There is a great review of Bill Maher’s humorous new documentary film about religion, called “Religulous” on Dan Kimball’s blog. I would encourage Christians who are reformationally re-thinking Evangelical faith to go see the film and to read Kimballs review. Below is a brief portion of the the review.

vintage faith

“…Bill Maher is trying to show how "religion" in general is messed up and even very damaging (which it can be). He tries to make his point in a very, very humorous way. But it also was very predictable in what it covered. I have either listened to or read most of the arguments he made in the film, so what was in the film itself wasn't really new information...

…Although it was a humorous film, and although it raised great questions which need to be asked - it only showed a very one-sided perspective. Thus, to me it was a poor film journalistically as it misrepresented Christianity by only showing the extremes of it...

… A somewhat tender moment in the film actually was in the beginning when he was interviewing some attending a truck stop chapel. As he left he thanked them for "not being Christian, but being Christ-like". That was the best moment in the film to me. Maybe one day someone will make a movie called "Jesusology" or something and it will be a film done as professionally as this one in quality.”

MOVIE TRAILER

"Jesus" in the eyes of people outside the church

This is a great Youtube video interviewing young people to ask them what they think about Jesus.

Claiming no religious afiliation in Miami

I am taking a class on religious diversity in Latin America with a professor at FIU. Tonight she shared some demographic data with our class that was very surprising to me. The data is taken from the ARDA, Association of Religious Data Archives.

Miami-Dade County, Florida Religious Affiliations, 2000

Evangelical Protestant - 158,052
Mainline Protestant - 49,777
Orthodox - 3,570
Catholic - 542,984
Other - 138,551
Unclaimed - 1,360,428

I am not entirely confident that the data is accurate…it seems to me that the “Independent Charismatic Churches” membership data should be much higher…I am away of several independent Charismatic Spanish speaking churches that are over 2000, one that is nearly 20,000. However, the rest of the data is probably pretty accurate.

http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/counties/12086_2000.asp

What does this mean for missioners? Where do we go, and how to we connect with the million and a quarter people in our county who claim no religious affiliation? How do we serve them? What are they looking for that organized religions are not providing?

I remember a recent survey by George Barna that claimed that most people were looking for an "experience" with God...only a very small percentage of church-going Christians actually "experienced" God's presence in church over the course of a year.

I decided that "I want to know what love is" by Foreigner would go well here... over a million people within a one hour's drive of my house are likely singing this song in their hearts: