Life Happens

Two things have happened this past week, one a source of sorrow and one a good thing.  For the first, I found out that a fellow blogger, the host of the group blog "Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization" had passed away in the last few weeks.  He had invited me to join them back in 2010, and I blogged on that site for that year, along with this blog.  I left because of family issues--it looked for a while like I would have to be taking care of my mother.  That changed, but I was busy and did not go back there.  Last year he emailed me, inviting me back.  The group was smaller--only three of us rather than the dozen or so we had in 2010.

He had emailed me in mid-January saying he and his wife both had come down with Covid--he said it was mild so far.  I checked back on the blog regularly, to see if he was back to writing--nothing.  Last week I tracked down the third remaining author, and she had just found out he had passed away.  Since he managed the postings and editing for the site, and was the owner of the URL, there probably is not much anyone can do to keep it going.  The site is still online, but probably only until the next fees come due.

I will miss our discussions.  I had been putting my posts on current politics over there.  Now I have nowhere but here for those.

The other happening was a happier event.  I was able to re-connect with an old boss and friend that I had worked for fifty years ago.  I had not seen him since the mid-'80s.  But I had done an online search and found his current address, and wrote him a letter.

At the time I met Ken, I was a senior in college, and working part-time.  I had just been laid off after Christmas from a job at a discount store in Cincinnati.  Somehow I got wind of a company hiring.  It turned out to be a new startup franchise company, cleaning office buildings at night.  I was the sixth person hired by the new company, and the second to last a full year.  After two years, I took a post as assistant manager of the Indianapolis franchise.  That did not work out--partly because of the local boss, partly because of problems in the franchise organization.

When I moved back to Cincinnati, Ken had left the organization too.  He helped me get a janitor service of my own off the ground--not with money, but with potential customers and suppliers that he knew.  I did that for twelve years, until I found my way into the home remodeling field.

But the big thing about Ken was that he modeled what it really meant to be a Christian in the business world.  It was not about having fish emblems or crosses on your vehicle or business cards.  It was not about going to the meetings of the Christian Business Mens' Committee or similar organizations.  It was about how you treated your employees and your customers.  One of my earliest posts here, from April 2007, was "Authority and Respect," about the difference between the temporary respect that comes with a position compared to the respect earned by good relations with others.  That was one of my most important lessons from Ken.  He never asked anyone to work harder than he did.  He was not afraid to get his own hands dirty.  He knew my job and could do it better than I could.  His customers respected him because his word was good.  His employees respected him because he treated them as well as he could.

He also taught me some basics about running a business.  Back then there were no cell phones, and no such thing as voice mail.  His rule was, if someone calls you on business, you get back to them within twenty-four hours.  Years later, after I moved from Cincinnati to Dearborn County, IN, it seemed I was the only contractor in the county who always returned calls.  He would not use an answering machine--he said people want to talk to a real person, not a recording.  (I still think the modern computerized phone systems are the dumbest thing American business has ever done!)

Anyway, I thought about what I had learned from him all those years ago, and how it had helped me ever since.  I managed to track down his current address, and I wrote a letter to tell him how what I learned from him had helped me, and that I still appreciated it.  I put my current email and cell phone number at the bottom.  Yesterday, he called me.  He was touched that I still appreciated what I learned from him.  We caught up on each other's families, where we are now, and other things.  I think we both enjoyed the talk.  I may find an excuse to go visit him later this year.

So, some sadness, and some joy.  Not a bad week at that.

How Much Faith Do You Have?

Recently a friend recommended a book to me--"I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist" by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek.  I managed to borrow it from the local library and read it.  Many of the arguments presented in the book were things I had seen before, but never all in one place.  I had been introduced to both C. S. Lewis and Francis A. Schaeffer when I was in Bible college, and had read other works on apologetics back then.  But I had not read much recently in that field.

One of the major problems in modern higher education is the narrow focus on a limited area.  There's an old definition of a high level scholar as someone who studies more and more about less and less until he reaches the point where he knows almost everything--about almost nothing! 

And there have been some once-major topics that have been ignored now for many years.  One principal one is Logic.  This was once taught to most students--it was considered an important part of education.  Now the only exposure to it is in math classes.   The problem with that is, while mathematics uses some logic, it does not use all of it.  And teaching only math does not prepare a student to deal with bad arguments.  Here's an example:  I was hearing the idea in high school (back in the late '60s) that our thoughts are just the results of chemical and biological reactions in our brains.  And what follows from that is that there is nothing more than that involved in our thinking.  Well, one basic principle of traditional logic is that any line of argument that undercuts the validity of human reason is automatically invalid--because you are trying to use human reason to say there is no such thing as human reason!  If what you are saying to me is only the result of random chemical reactions in your brain...why should I listen to you?

One sad truth is that the typical modern scientist does not even know the limits of his field.  Speculation about the origins of the universe used to be considered part of the field of Cosmology--and it was regarded as a part of Philosophy.  Now the scientist--including some of the big names in the field--does not even notice when he strays out of his field and into philosophy, because he never really studied any of it--it wasn't required for his science degrees!

For years there has been all sorts of speculation about life on earth being brought here by aliens--and the people saying it do not realize that is just kicking the can down the road.  So where did the aliens come from?  Who created them?

Another idea popular these days is that we live in some sort of computer simulation.  To me, that's simply another Creation myth.  If this is a simulation, then who created the computer?  In the past I have read the Creation myths of the Greeks, Vikings, Babylonians, Egyptians, and others, including some Native American stories.  The Creation story in Genesis is simpler, less extravagant, and more sensible.  If you are bothered by the Genesis account of Methuselah living 969 years, the Babylonian King Lists claimed that their earliest rulers lived for 10,000 years and more!

One of the basic principles of modern science is Uniformity of Natural Causes.  This means that the natural processes we see today have always worked throughout history in the same way, and at the same rate.  And atheistic scientists also believe the universe is a closed system, with no God to intervene.  The catch with this principle is that it is an assumption--it has never been proven; and by its very nature it cannot be proven!  There were no scientists hanging around during the Big Bang to measure the reactions and their results, and write it all down.  They can observe the reactions and rates in the present; but they have only been doing that for the last few hundred years.  They think they can trace the results of the Big Bang in the movements of stars and galaxies--but they have only been doing it for a short period of history.  The vast majority of what they say is an interpretation--what if it is a wrong interpretation?  The assumptions people take into interpreting physical events do influence their interpretations.  And sometimes they are wrong.

Here's an example from modern history, one that I am familiar with because of my being on the autism spectrum.  The first doctors in the US to notice and study autism, back in the 1940s, decided it must be caused by environmental factors.  In fact, Leo Kanner, the first doctor in the US to write about it (and name it) thought it was caused by mothers who were not affectionate enough.  That assumption of his drove most of the care and treatment of autism in this country until the 1980s--and still pops up among some psychiatrists today.  In contrast, Hans Asperger, working in Vienna in the 1940s, guessed it was genetic--because he noticed the parents of the children he was working with had some of the same traits as the children.  But Asperger's writings about his studies were not translated into English until the 1980s.  Now it is known that autism is primarily genetic--you get it from your parents!  The CDC has a section on autism on its website, that I have seen, that estimates autism is 70-80% genetic.  That seems to be the conservative estimate--I have seen mentions of an Italian study that came up at 95%!

It is worth remembering that when Charles Darwin published his book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, nothing was known about heredity and genetics in the universities in Britain or the US.  Gregor Mendl's studies about heredity were not published until later.  Microscopes were still quite primitive compared to what they are now.  Darwin had no way to know how complex even a single-celled creature is, as shown by our modern equipment.  An awful lot of his work, and of those who came after him, was based on pure assumptions, including that law of Uniformity of Natural Causes (in a Closed System) that I mentioned earlier.  Before the development of nuclear science that led to the use of Carbon-14 dating, and use of other isotopes for longer periods and other materials, the joke was that geologists used to date rock formations by the fossils found in them, and paleontologists dated fossils by the rocks they were found in!  Even to this day, there is a lot of interpretation involved in scientific work.

So remember, there is no such thing as "settled science."  It can always change, sometimes unexpectedly.  And there are some things it simply cannot account for or explain.

A Possible Cause of Church Decline

A couple of weeks ago I ended up making two comments on an opinion article at World Magazine on Populism.  I may end up making a post at Aleksandreia.com on the political aspects of that discussion.  But I want to go into some issues related to that discussion that affect the church in the US.

In recent weeks I have seen reports about a study showing that membership in religious organizations in the US has dropped below 50% for the first time since such things were recorded.  And in recent years, my own adult children have noted that the gap between blue-collar workers and white-collar workers has widened over the years, compared to when I was growing up.  And I strongly suspect that what the churches are experiencing is mostly the loss of the blue-collar people.  I also suspect strongly that the loss is the fault of the church leadership.  Let's look into that.

In 1962 my parents bought a brand-new house in a rapidly-growing suburb on the north side of Cincinnati Ohio.  I was 12 years old at the time.  We moved there from a rural area east of the city--my older sister had married a boy there and remained out there.  My parents bought that house for $16,000.  It wasn't a mansion; it would be considered small by today's standards--probably in the 1000-1200 square foot range, with a one-car attached garage.  My father was an hourly employee at a Ford Motor Co. factory less than ten miles away.

In those days, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers still largely lived in the same neighborhoods, mostly shopped at the same stores, sent their children to the same schools, and often attended the same churches.  At the Church of Christ we attended, there were both blue-collar and white-collar workers among the elders and deacons.  Even among my schoolmates and the boys in my Scout troop, if their fathers were white-collar workers, they were usually the first in their families to attend college (many of them through the GI Bill after WWII).

And those veterans and GI college grads, along with their blue-collar neighbors, had mostly grown up in a society where college was not common--in most places, the only people around them with a college education were doctors, lawyers, preachers and school teachers.  College just was not that big a thing for most people before WWII.  It was an upper-class thing, not for ordinary folks.

Even in the '70s, as I was becoming an adult, marrying, starting a family and starting a business, the gap was not that big.  In 1977, we bought our first house, a run-down place in an older Cincinnati neighborhood, for $17,000.  Two years later we had it fixed up, sold it for $25,000, and bought another run-down house in another neighborhood.  And at that time, you could still buy a brand-new house for $30,000 or less.

The inflation of the late 1970s and early '80s hit the cost of housing hard, and started a spiral of costs that continues to this day.  Mortgage rates rose.  Expectations rose, too.  Where once families mostly had one car, now they had two, and expected a two-car garage for their house--until they wanted a three-car.  One bathroom in a house was no longer enough--there had to be one bathroom for the kids, and a "master-suite" with its own bath and walk-in closet for the parents.  There was also an increase in local regulations on housing, also--both government building codes and homeowners' associations added rules that added to the cost of housing.  

In 1990 and '91 I built a house for my family.  We found a plan we liked--but I had to alter it because of the rules of the homeowner's association.  It was a two-story, 1500 square foot house, and would have a full basement.  But to get it approved we had to enlarge it--because the HOA insisted all houses had to have at least 900 square feet on the ground floor.  They would approve a 950 sq ft ranch, but not a 1500 sq ft two-story!  So I revised the plans to get it up to 928 square feet per floor.  Eight years later we sold it--for $125,000.  (Our second rehab had sold for $60,000.)

The rise in housing costs did a lot to separate the working populations.  The higher-paid people could afford the higher costs; the lower-paid, not so much.  They were stuck in the run-down sections.  Over time, that separated the blue-collar and white-collar people more and more.  Now their kids didn't go to the same schools, and often the parents did not shop at the same stores.

There was another factor in this that affected the churches.  And I have seen this even with some pastors that I knew in college.  There had always been some problems with pastors showing favoritism to the wealthier members of their congregations.  But as more and more of their congregants were college grads, that became more pronounced.  Some of the older pastors I have known were not like that.  They treated all their members the same.  But the younger pastors, of my generation and later, seemed to have more trouble relating to people who were blue-collar--and less inclination to try.

If someone was to try to analyze the decline in church membership, I suspect that they would find a large part of it is the loss of the blue-collar demographic.  I am not saying that is the only cause; but I do think it is part.  If a leader of the church is not welcoming to people he perceives as being socially inferior, sooner or later, those people will get the idea, and quit showing up.

I know there are some churches that are not so uppity.  Chris Arnade, in his book "Dignity" was impressed by the churches he saw in the run-down neighborhoods that tried to minister to the poor around them--so impressed with them, and the results he saw of their work, that during the time he wrote the book he shifted from atheist to agnostic (and since then he has returned to the Catholic church he grew up in).  But many of the churches in this country do little to reach the less affluent.

The best church I was ever part of, a Vineyard in Cincinnati, (on the north side, just a few miles east of where I grew up), made an official policy to be welcome to all.  They also spent a lot of money to minister to all, including the poorer neighborhoods.  They had the largest outreach to the poor I have ever seen in any church--not only a food pantry (a big one) but also clothing, basic medical care, some job training, and more.  But they were rare among churches.  And people flocked to their services--in twenty years they went from 35 people to 6,000, and planted more than three dozen other churches besides.

But sadly, they are an exception among modern churches.  The mainline Protestant denominatons--the so-called "Seven Sisters" (Episcopals, Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, United Church of Christ, American Baptists, Presbyterian Church USA, and Disciples of Christ) have been in decline for over 60 years.  The Episcopalians, for instance, have half the number of members they had in the 1960s--while the US population has doubled.  The rest of the Seven are not much better off.  The Methodists are looking at a liberal-conservative split in the next year or so.

But conservative denominations are mostly not much better off--their growth has slowed or even stopped.  The Southern Baptists are having to deal with the problem of sexual abuse by their pastors and other prominent members; some of the top brass are resisting, but the members are getting fed up.  Others are having problems, too.

I think the religious scene in this country is changing.  What will take shape is to be seen, and whether it will be good or bad in the long term.

I mentioned a discussion I was in on World Magazine's website in the start of this post.  In my second comment I ended with a question to the others (a question I once posed to the founder of the magazine in an email a few years ago).  Here's the question:  At the congregation you attend, on any given Sunday, are there any blue-collar people in the group?  And do you ever talk to any of them?

The truth is, there are more people in this country without college degrees than with them.  When the chips are down, there are more blue-collar workers than white-collar.  And the executives and management people are a minority, not a majority.  But if the local church leadership mostly writes off the majority of the people, it is no wonder that church attendance declines.

Church--Or Life?

 When you look into the world of Christianity today, most of the statistics you will find are focused on the modern "church system'--the buildings, the people who come to them, the clergy, the denominational structures.  Even with the "non-denominational" churches, the records and numbers all home in on the buildings and the staff and the people who go there.

But what if that traditional vibe is not what was originally intended?  Here's something to think about:

If you go through the New Testament, obviously a lot of it is about the events:  where Jesus went and what He did, what the apostles did after the Resurrection, the places Paul traveled to.  But if you look into the things that Jesus and the apostles said and wrote, there is actually not that much about what goes on inside the gathering of believers on the first day of the week.  If you took all the passages in the New Testament about what to do in a church gathering and strung them together, you would not even have a full page!  

But throughout the New Testament, there is a lot of things said by Jesus, and said and written by the apostles, about how we should conduct our lives all week long.  Does that give you any idea about what they considered important for Christians?

One of the books that started me on a lifelong journey away from tradition was "Brethren, Hang Loose" by Robert C. Girard.  Girard was a Wesleyan pastor who had planted a new congregation in Scottsdale, AZ.  The startup seemed to begin well, but then things stalled.  And in trying to sort through what was going wrong, he began to look at his own approach, and was bothered by what he saw:

"I found myself measuring individual spiritual growth by some of the same outward standards I had deplored in the established churches:

--how they were picking up the "language"

--whether or not they would pray in public

--regularity of attendance

--how many of the church's activities they involved themselves in

--availability to the organization

--agreement with the pastor!

All the marks of a truly "involved" churchman."

That is actually fairly typical of a lot of churches--the ones I grew up in over fifty years ago, and even today.  All too often the pastor evaluates people in his church by those standards--and has little to no idea what is going on in their lives outside the building.  In the larger churches, there is no way one pastor can know much about that many people.  Even in the smaller ones, the pastor usually doesn't know that much about any individual.

But there is another problem with that way of evaluating church attenders:  if you think about it, every last one of those "standards" can be faked!  People who are not believers can mimic those activities and pass themselves off as Christians even if they are not; once in a while such a person ends up in church leadership!  There have been a few cases in the religious news of the past few years where pastors have admitted to being atheists and resigned their positions--and those are the honest ones!

When I was a teenager planning to go to Bible college and study for the ministry, all the college did to evaluate my character was to request a letter from one of my local church leaders.  Think about that...in the light of that quote from Girard above. 

There is a standard for local church leadership set out in the New Testament, mostly in Paul's epistles to Timothy and Titus.  The picture he presented was of older men, men with families, men whose children showed signs of living by Christian values, and men who had a good reputation in the community outside the church.  Taking young people and sending them to a college to teach them how to lead a church is the opposite of what Paul was teaching.

And while some denominations and individual churches do have "elders" supposedly working with the pastor, in the real world the pastor usually ends up the supreme authority.  In the first place, he is respected as the Authority.  He also has the free time and flexible schedule to end up doing most of what gets done.  And he often has influence on who becomes an official "elder" or board member.  And people who disagree or are just not "respectful" enough get sifted out.  Sometimes they step down after a tiff, sometimes they are not re-elected.

I suspect that this non-Biblical church system is the real reason so many denominations and local churches are in decline.  There is speculation that the Episcopal Church may nearly disappear in the next 20 years or so.  All of the traditional "mainline" Protestant denominations have been shrinking for the last half-century and more.  Many individual congregations, of all groups, are closing their doors.

But there is a growing group of Christians who are not tied into the old denominations and church structures.  Some are part of "house churches" that do not have buildings and often no official pastors.  Others are a group that was labeled "Dones" in the book "Church Refugees" by Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope.   https://www.amazon.com/Church-Refugees-Sociologists-reveal-people/dp/1470725924

They were writing about people who were often core members of their congregations, but left the system--without abandoning their faith.  While their aim seems to have been to help the system sort out what they were doing wrong and win people back, I do not see much sign of that happening.  The traditional churches are still declining.

I admit I am one of the leavers (some of us prefer the term "Free-Range Christian" to "Done").  I get together with brothers and sisters when I can, and also communicate with some online.  But my energy and effort goes into how I live all week long, not just what goes on inside a building on Sunday morning.

Autism and Me

I need to start out here by making clear that I will be describing my own issues and quirks.  Someone else's may be different.  There is actually a lot of variety among people on the Autism Spectrum.  One of the leading experts on autism today is Tony Attwood, an English psychologist now working at a university in Australia (the Brits and the Aussies have been doing better than the American med/psych establishment on dealing with autism for at least the last 40 years!).  Anyway, here's one quote from Attwood:  "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism."  Meaning--the second one you meet may seem totally different.  None of that "If you've seen one you've seen them all" business.  Even my own kids and grandkids are different from me.  But we are all on the spectrum. 

That said, autism is not just a disability.  It is a mix of traits, some of which can be detrimental and some that can be helpful, depending on the circumstances at a given time and place.  And sometimes the particular strengths and weaknesses cannot be separated from each other.  You just have to learn to cope with them.

One common autistic trait that I share is a basic clumsiness.  I was never much good at sports.  I wasn't just the last one chosen for a game at recess--it was like, "If we have to take him, then we get______!"  (One of the best players, to offset me)  Over the years, I found that I could learn some physical things--if I wanted to badly enough.  It was hard for me to learn to ride a bicycle, too.  I tried three times to learn to play guitar; I finally succeeded when I was 15.  When as a newlywed I was trying to put a shelf up in our apartment closet, my wife broke out laughing at how bad I was with a hammer; twenty years later she was amazed at the quality of my carpenter work.

I mentioned above that some traits may be both strengths and weaknesses.  One common autistic trait I have is called "hyper-focus."  On things I like and want to do, I have tremendous powers of concentration.  But the flip side of that is that I cannot multi-task.  When I first started doing interior trim on houses, the men I was working with were impressed with how precise I was; some would even bring me their measurements and ask me to cut the pieces for them to install.  But I can't lead a crew--unless I have nothing else to do.  One time the church we were attending put a new roof on the preacher's house, and as the most experienced, I was leading half the crew.  But then I got tied up in one of the picky jobs, putting flashing around a dormer wall, and my son had to run the crew for an hour (fortunately, he was up to the job!).

Partly because of the hyper-focus, I was very good at school.  Attending elementary school in a rural area, that did not endear me to the other kids.  But we moved when I started 7th grade, to a suburban district on the north side of Cincinnati, OH.  I was in every accelerated class they had in high school--English, math and science.  I graduated fourth in a class of 265.  I got a scholarship for college, and was salutatorian of my college class, and spoke at graduation.  A lot of people in high school and college thought I would end up a professor.  That did not turn out, in part because of my other traits.

One of those seems to be not doing well with bureaucracy.  I don't do well in corporate settings.  I managed to start a small business when I was 25, as a janitorial contractor.  Going into offices as an outsider in the late afternoon and evening, I did not have to deal with office politics--I sometimes saw it going on, but I was not involved in it.  In my late thirties I transitioned into working as a carpenter and remodeling contractor.  Occasionally I worked as part of a larger crew, but mostly I worked with a close friend for the first five years, and after that alone--with my son as a helper at times. 

One thing that helped me with my customers, and is probably related to the hyper-focus, is that I am very detail-oriented.  And that not only applies to the details of the work itself, but also to things like showing up when I said I would, returning phone calls, getting one job before I left to do another, and cleaning up after I finished my work. 

One area that is difficult for me is emotions.  When things get emotionally charged, it's like something inside me freezes up.  My ex-wife could talk rings around me, and I could not respond quickly enough.  And that was probably a factor in our divorce after forty-eight years of marriage.  It is still hard for me to express my feelings.  Sometimes I can vent the emotion through music--singing and playing guitar.  But in interpersonal communication, it is hard for me.

In other areas, I am often a bit of an oddball.  When I was learning to play guitar, the Beatles were the big thing; I was into folk music rather than rock.  Instead of sports, I went into Boy Scouts, where I could hike and camp and stay individual.  And as a Christian, I am no longer part of any organized church, but what some now call a "free-range" Christian.  Some, especially people in the clergy, may be bothered by that.  But just as offices have politics, so do churches, and it frees me from that aspect.

There are other things that are not necessarily related to autism that also affect me and add to the effects of autism.  For instance, I am very much an introvert--on the Briggs-Myers test I scored as a 9 or 10, the severe end of the scale, as an introvert.  The big difference between introvert and extrovert is not whether or not we like people; it is how we re-charge.  An extrovert re-charges by being with others; an introvert has to be alone to re-charge.  That is likely also a factor in why I have spent so much of my adult life working alone.

There was an event in my childhood that probably masked some of my physical issues when I was growing up.  During kindergarten, I came down with rheumatic fever, which is a complication of strep throat.  I was really sick--I was in a hospital and then in bed at home for eight months.  It gave me issues with my knees for a few years, and left me with a heart murmur.  They gave me so much of what was then a new miracle drug, penicillin, that I ended up allergic to it a few years later.  Because of the heart murmur, I was restricted on physical activity for some years.  For a long time I attributed my being behind in sports and other physical games to that.

One thing that is common in autistic people is sensory issues.  There are an amazing amount of different ones we may have--and everybody has different ones.  My family members do not have the same ones I do.  Issues with foods are a part of this, but again, each person is different.  My ex-wife hated mashed potatoes; I was okay with them, but not peas or dried beans, even cooked.  One of my sensory issues that has protected me from becoming an alcoholic is that I cannot stand the feel of an alcoholic beverage in my mouth.  If a church is using wine instead of grape juice for Communion, I know it instantly.  As a teen, my father let me taste a beer one time (he was a very occasional drinker--about once every ten years he would get the urge to have a beer).  I could not stand it.  I never did have enough beer or wine to get a buzz on, and then want that enough to put up with the feeling in my mouth, so to this day I am a teetotaler--not for religious reasons, just because of my sensory issue.  But for years, I thought it was a result of that bout of rheumatic fever.  After that year, every time I got a sore throat, out came the prescription cough medicine--which, back in the 1950s, was probably about 40 proof!  I thought that caused my aversion to alcohol, until I began to learn about sensory issues with autism a few years ago.

This is just a start.  There are probably other aspects of autism in my life that will come to mind later.  Maybe I will post some more another time, after I think of them.  But this may give readers some idea of how being on the autism spectrum can shape people's lives.

I Dood It!

The title above is borrowed from one of Red Skelton's characters.  ( BTW, if you are ever in Vincennes, IN, there is a cool museum of his career, with his costumes, audio and video clips, and displays.  He was one of the few who started in vaudeville, made the change to radio, but then successfully went on to movies and TV--some, like Fred Allen, made it in radio, but went no further.)

And I have bit the bullet.  I have changed the name of this blog!  When I started blogging years ago, "postmodern" was a trendy term.  Now it is mostly forgotten.  And there have been changes in my life and situation as well.

The part that has not changed:  I am still a Redneck.  If anything, as I get older, my redneck traits seem to become stronger.  I get it from both sides of my family.  My father was born near New Richmond, OH, where his ancestors had settled in the 1790s.  It is now a small town east of Cincinnati, that's been turning into a Cincinnati suburb.  It is also historically considered the eastern edge of Appalachia in Ohio.  While the family had been farmers and small businessmen for generations, my grandfather pulled up stakes looking for work during the Great Depression, and ended up a cooper (making and repairing wood barrels) at a Seagram's distillery in Lawrenceburg, IN that had reopened with the end of Prohibition.  My father went through assorted blue-collar jobs over the years, but settled in Cincinnati (with a stay of 6 years in Brown County, OH, a rural area about 40 miles away from the Ford factory where he worked).

My mother was born at a coal mining camp called Blue Diamond, near Hazard, KY.  She was the fifth of seven children (the first two died before age 3).  Her father and her older brothers all worked in the mines in that area.  Her mother died of cancer, and her father died of injuries from a mine accident.  From the age of 12, she was passed from one relative to another depending on who could afford an extra mouth for a while.  This was also during the Depression.  When she was 16, she and a friend hitch-hiked to Cincinnati to live with her older sister.  A couple of years later, she was out with a friend (also from KY) and met my father.  They got married in 1940.

On the Autistic side, I first found out about what they then called Asperger's Syndrome in 2005.  The lights came on for a lot of things in my past life.  I was fortunate enough to be good at school; a lot of autistic kids struggle there.  But over time I learned I did not fit well in most corporate settings.  I found my way into the world of small business and have been self-employed since 1976.  I didn't get rich, but I usually made a living; there were a few rough stretches.  But as my three kids grew up and got married and had their own kids, the autism matter came into sharper focus.  The schools never diagnosed me as autistic or Asperger's, nor my kids; but they have been finding my grandchildren.  So far, at least 8 of my 10 grandkids have a diagnosis.  The rest will probably get identified sometime.

Why so many?  Some families go along for generations, and then suddenly they get an autistic kid.  In my family, from what we have figured out, we have been marrying other autistic people for at least three generations that we can tell.  We don't know enough about the people to go back farther than that.  So the genetics have gotten a bit more concentrated than usual.

How many are there of us?  Nobody really knows.  In the first place, autism was not even recognized by the medical and psychological professions until the 1940s.  Even after that, for many years they weren't that good at finding us.  It has picked up a bit in recent years.  The conservative estimate is that there are roughly as many of us in the US as there are Jews--2-3% of the population.  The number of school-age children seems to conform to that these days.  The wild-and-woolly estimate is that we may be as much as 15% of the population.  And we aren't just rednecks--we are found anymore in just about every ethnic group and every skin color.

Autism is a complicated thing.  Psychologists in the US are now calling it a spectrum, a range of characteristics.  Many autistic people have adopted the name "Neurodiverse" because we are not only diverse from the "Neurotypicals" but also diverse from each other.  In my own family, we have musicians, artists, science geeks, a computer programmer, a high-tech repairman (who is also a musician), and more.  I will probably be posting about some of the things I have learned about it in the past few years.

I will also keep posting about Christian matters as well; I have done that for years.  I probably will not add much political stuff--I will likely keep posting that at a group blog I am part of, "Alexandria--Crossroads of Civilization."    (https://www.aleksandreia.com/)

I may come up with other things to write about as well.  We shall see.

What is Worship?

 I grew up in churches, went to a conservative Bible college, preached for a few years, and "led the singing" in the old-style services, and have been a "worship leader" with my guitar in small churches and small groups over the years.

When I was growing up, mostly we sang hymns and gospel songs in church services (the difference between the two was, gospel songs had choruses, hymns did not).  Hymns had come into fashion in the English-speaking churches around 1700 and after; gospel songs started with the revivals of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Before 1700 many sang the Psalms--passages from that book of the Bible set to music.

During my time in college things began to change.  Some new music was coming out, from several writers, that did not fit exactly in either category.  They were more complex than the simple choruses used in children's church services and youth groups, and had some feel of modern popular music.

By the mid-1970s the church I was part of was getting in on the new style music at least part of the time (we still used the hymnbooks, too).

There were several factors influencing the new music.  I was in Cincinnati, a city where Roman Catholics were a majority of the population.  Most Protestant churches also had some ex-Catholic among them.  So it was fairly easy for us to pick up on the songs coming out of the Catholic folk mass trend that started in the mid-'60s.  The Jesus Movement was going on a bit later, and added more music.  Meanwhile, the Charismatic Movement was starting up, and producing new music also.  A lot of this music initially had a lot in common with the folk music trends of the period.  And in the churches I was in for some years, we did not have fancy sound systems.  We did not have "bands" for worship; if we had a couple of guys who could play guitar and take turns leading the singing, that was good enough.  And some of the music would be written by local people.  Some of it was Scripture verses set to music.  Some was borrowed from the new movement of Messianic Jews.

As the Jesus Freaks and the Charismatics began converting rock musicians, the new music began to change.  There were bands and sound systems, and vocalists to do solo parts.  It did not happen all at once, but it began.  And new companies sprang up to market the new music.  One was associated with the Vineyard churches.  Another was Hosanna Music, which started putting out new albums 6 times a year, and books of music scores for the musicians.  Even at the time (late '80s) I was getting a sense that they were falling into the pattern that prevailed in the regular recording industry in Nashville--each new cassette/CD had one or two songs that were good or even great, and the rest were either so-so or even just filler.  And for smaller churches one problem was that their musicians got the idea they had to sound like the big worship bands on the recordings.  All too often they did not have the number of musicians, or highly skilled musicians, to make it work.  And over time it leaked out that Hosanna was recording a live worship set, but then taking it back to the studio and dubbing in additional instruments!

Even then, not all were happy with the developments.  From 1995 to 2005 I was part of a Vineyard Church in Cincinnati.  The head of the national Vineyard organization until his death in November of 1997 was John Wimber.  He was also pastor of the Vineyard Church in Anaheim, CA.  He had a background in music--he had been a member and manager of the group "The Righteous Brothers" until he became a Christian in 1963.  He walked away from that life and went into ministry.  But he also wrote a number of worship songs.  Some time after his death I read an interview with his widow, Carol Wimber.  She said her husband was concerned with the direction praise and worship music was heading; he thought worship songs should be kept simple enough that the average guitar player could play them for his small group gathering (no sound system, no band, no backup singers).

Over the years since, what I have been hearing from all over is that in many churches, worship music has turned into a spectator thing.   In the '70s and early '80s many of us sang our hearts out, standing the whole time, shouting out lyrics, going off script and singing choruses over and over, even sometimes making up new verses to a song.  In recent years, reports I have seen talk of people sitting and watching the band perform, as if it were a concert.

After 2009 I became what some of us called a "free-range Christian"--not part of any organized church.  I looked for a house church, but in Indianapolis there isn't much of them.  I did find a group of several Christian families that got together regularly, not even as formal as a house church; some of that group moved away, but others of us still get together a couple of times a month.  But I got away from the Contemporary Christian Music field and the praise and worship music market.  For a couple of years after my divorce, I was attending a local church in town, primarily for their men's fellowship group.  Their services were a mix of the old hymns and what was apparently more recent modern worship music.  What they were using did not impress me--the melodies especially were kind of blah.  I do not know for certain whether that is where the whole field has gone or if it was just the tastes of the local group.

But one thing I have learned over the years is that no Christian movement goes on forever.  I have been part of several--the small group movement, the charismatic movement, praise and worship movement, home schooling, and more.  But the useful life of any of them seems to be in the range of 20-40 years.  After that, they don't go away--but they quit "moving"--they don't really break any new ground, they just stay settle down and keep doing the same old things.  And the praise and worship movement is following the same pattern.

Personally, I have always loved music.  My own family was musical--my two sons are fifth-generation guitar players (plus other instruments).  I sang in church choirs and high school choir and ensemble.  I still love a lot of the old hymns and the new music as well.  But I have also come to the conclusion over the years that music is only part of worship.  I have seen too many people who were active in worship music, but their personal lives did not match what they sang.  This goes clear back to my high school years as well as modern incidents.

I have come to believe that musical worship can express your Christian life, but the music is not all of it--if it is all of it, you are not there yet.  There really is not that much in the New Testament that talks about what goes on in church meetings.  There is much, much, MUCH more about how you live all week.  There is a saying attributed to the Amish:  "Work is worship."  I think a lot of Christians need to learn to live that.

I am going to close this post with the words to one of those Scripture songs we sang back in the day, from Micah 6:8:

He has shown thee, O man, 

What is good and what the Lord requires of thee (repeat)

But to do justly, 

And to love mercy, 

And to walk humbly with thy God.