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Today's Top Five

1. Lent: It's not just for Catholics and mainliners anymore

Yes, the "Happy Ash Wednesday" title is supposed to be ironic. But it may represent a way in which the holy day and the Lenten season are changing as they're adopted by happy evangelical Protestants who once rejected the church calendar as "too Catholic." The Tennessean subtly notes the parallels between the imposition of ashes and evangelical altar calls: "There is something about coming forward, walking down the aisle with a purpose," Thomas Kleinert, senior minister at Vine Street Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), tells the paper. "On Ash Wednesday, that purpose is very much about a person acknowledging that they want to concentrate on God and reduce whatever is keeping them from God." Roman Catholics would agree, but they probably wouldn't describe Ash Wednesday in quite those same terms.

2. Pope Benedict XVI relinquishes a title
In other church unity news, the Italian news agency ANSA takes note of a quiet story that may have long-term significance. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered that one of his nine official titles—Patriarch of the West—be dropped in the new edition of the Vatican yearbook. He took the move to ease tensions with Eastern Orthodox churches, but at least one observer worries that the move could signal "indirect affirmation of himself as 'universal patriarch.'" Indeed: it's the titles like "Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church" and "Vicar of Jesus Christ" that are more problematic for church unity.

3. Dirty laundry in Orthodox Church in America?
The Washington Post reported Sunday that the OCA's former treasurer says top church officials "misappropriated millions of dollars in donations … to cover personal credit card bills, pay sexual blackmail, support family members and make up shortfalls in various church accounts." The church's governing Holy Synod is scheduled to meet today to consider an internal investigation and an independent audit.

4. Da Vinci Code goes to court
Nobody has a monopoly on truth, it's often said (though not frequently by evangelicals). Now that a British court is considering whether Dan Brown ripped off Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the question arises: Can you have a monopoly on a specific falsehood?

5. Fearing the media—the Christian media
"It's the liberal mainline churches whose congregations are shrinking and the conservative evangelical ones that are growing," Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley's Stewart Heller tells the San Francisco Chronicle. His analysis: It's the media. So for his "Electronic Christian Media" class, he's bringing in conservative evangelicals as guest lecturers at the notoriously liberal school. Some students are worried that they'll be "marginalized" by the instructors, some of whom see their classroom mission as evangelistic. But don't worry, Heller told his students. "They don't hate you." One thing that doesn't show up either in the Chronicle story or, seemingly, Heller's class: the reason conservative evangelical churches are growing faster than liberal mainline ones may not have anything to do with media savviness.

Quote of the day:
"I would say that there was broad dismay with some of Pat's comments and a feeling they were not helpful to Christian broadcasters in general, but by no means was there any broad effort in our association to dissociate ourselves with him."

—National Religious Broadcasters president Frank Wright, on Pat Robertson's failure to be re-elected to the NRB's board, despite being one of 36 candidates for 33 slots. He was quoted by The Washington Post (second item).

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50