God's Unwelcome Recovery: Why the New Establishment Wants to Proclaim the Death of Faith, by Sean Oliver-Dee
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God's Unwelcome Recovery: Why the New Establishment Wants to Proclaim the Death of Faith, by Sean Oliver-Dee
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It s time to challenge the myth of a dying church There is a disconnect between the official accounts being peddled in political and media circles telling us that Christianity is on the decline in the West versus the reality of church growth on the ground. Why are such different pictures being painted? Sean Oliver-Dee suggests that the disconnect is deliberate. While setting the record straight on church growth, he exposes the social and political agenda that underpins the narrative of the death of faith. Author Oliver-Dee proposes that the growth of the church is not being acknowledged because it contradicts three myths that the new establishment wants to assert: first, the gradual death of religion is a good excuse to ignore the views of Christians on public matters; second, encouraging Christianity to die would benefit society because religion is perceived as a primary cause of world violence; and third, there is a trajectory of progress focused around scientific enlightenment, which necessitates the death of faith. God s Unwelcome Recovery reveals how the enduring nature and recent growth of the church runs contrary to all three assertions.
God's Unwelcome Recovery: Why the New Establishment Wants to Proclaim the Death of Faith, by Sean Oliver-Dee- Amazon Sales Rank: #4202309 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.70" h x .70" w x 5.10" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 192 pages
Review "A stimulatingly counter-intuitive take on the state of British Christianity, this should be read by anyone - believer or non-believer - who is interested in the future of religion in Britain." -- Tom Holland, author of Rubicon and Millennium "This book offers a timely word of encouragement to British Christians and a robust challenge to the narrative of church decline ... Anyone who has been enticed by the story of the decline of British Christianity will be forced to review their evidence and their assumptions." -- Dr Jonathan Chaplin, Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Tyndale House, Cambridge "This small book raises big questions that need to be addressed. You will find in these pages provocative and challenging analysis. Have a read and then join the debate!" -- Dr Krish Kandiah, President of the London School of Theology
About the Author Sean Oliver-Dee is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture, Regents Park College, University of Oxford and the interreligious advisor for the diocese of Peterborough. He is also associate researcher for the Anglican representative to the European Union. He is a regular consultant for government on identity issues and has written several papers for NGOs and think tanks.
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Atheism and the Death of Faith By Don Haflich Strange reports are coming from the land which gave us great preachers like Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones. A strange tale of the "New Establishment" take-over where giants like C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield engaged the culture and changed the literary world as we now know it. Sean Oliver-Dee, a religious affairs consultant, uncovers the myths behind these reports and shows us that the church in England is not only falsifying these reports but actually feeling the tremors of a rising church culture.If the language in God's Unwelcome Recovery: Why the New Establishment Wants to Proclaim the Death of Faith sounds vaguely familiar you may notice that New Atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens were all bred on the grounds where the Inklings once lurked. The rise of the "Nones" in the United States and the language used by the "New Establishment" is nothing short of what can be attributed to the rise of militant atheism the men above represent.This book uncovers the plot to bury Christianity by proposing three statements regarding the vitality of the Christian world view:The gradual death of religion is a good excuse to ignore the views of Christians (and I would add to that a certain level of hatred toward them),Encouraging Christianity to die will benefit society (causing the Christian voice to be suppressed in the public square)Scientific progress will necessarily cause the death of faithIt's an interesting read as Oliver-Dee explores these three propositions in depth. I'll start with the third one in saying that the new atheism has claimed that only Naturalism has a proper place in thought life of both Brits and Americans. Great Christian philosophers like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, and John Lennox have repeatedly offered statements which the Naturalistic world view can not account for.In exploring the second proposition, that society will benefit if Christianity dies out, the Establishment ignores historical facts which point to an increase in economic status, value in education, and an overall well-being of the populous as we see with Calvin's Geneva during the time of the Protestant Reformation.On the surface of the first proposition it seems like a pretty harmless offering to an alternative view of reality which Christianity offers. But if you dig down and read volumes like Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation you will notice the lengths one has to go through to completely silence the Christian, often implying that death would be an adequate solution to the problem.As a book built on reports and numbers, this small introspection into the Church of England has much to offer us here in the States. As our cultures collide and stand together in a day of radical terrorism, jihadist beliefs, and a crumbling moral foundation, God's Unwelcome Recovery certainly does the church a service in helping to uncover the falsities which the Establishment or New Atheism would like us to believe.God has always delivered on his promises we should have no reason to believe any other outcome in our day. Let us in America and across the world who are in Christ stand together and proclaim the message of the gospel with unwavering resolve. Let us teach believers how to think and let us continue to shape the world view of the watching world with the precepts stretched out before us in God's eternal word. Bravo Sean Oliver-Dee for helping us to do so.Oliver-Dee, Sean. God's Unwelcome Recovery: Why the New Establishment Wants to Proclaim the Death of Faith. Oxford: Monarch, 2015. 192. Print.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Well Articulated Perspective By Amazon Customer If we are to believe all the reports, Christianity is a dying belief system both in Europe and in the United States. This is the narrative that is repeated so often by the establishment and replicated in Facebook feeds and Tweets every day. But is this really the case? Is there reason to believe that Christianity is dying? Sean Oliver-Dee is not convinced and he has written a wonderful little book explaining how the reports we keep hearing may not be supported by the data. The reason he says is that those who control the media want Christianity to fail and are attempting to change public perception to convince everyone that their faith is a relic from the past and the source of violence and regression.To be honest I was a skeptic when I first picked up the book. After all, the message we continue to hear from the research experts combined with experience tells me that there are fewer people engaging in the Christian message than there were just fifteen years ago. However, as I began to read, I realized that there is more to the story than first meets the eye. The reasons are many. There are many areas within the UK that are experiencing a decline in Christian belief but there are also areas which are experiencing tremendous growth. The pubic mindset has shifted in many ways; the youth of today no longer associate with organizations and are more likely to identify with a cause than an association. But this doesn't necessarily point to a change in religious conviction as much as it pints to a change in how the youth identify themselves. For example, Greeneace has been experiencing a decline in memberships since the mid-1990's but their cause of environmentalism has continued to grow. Their decline in the number of people identifying as Greenpeace members does not necessarily mean than the broader umbrella of environmentally minded people is lessening.While the author does a god job examining the facts and pointing to actual grown in Christianity, I couldn't help but make an obvious observation. Does the actual number of people self identifying with a religious tradition really mean anything if the fruit of regeneration is missing? We can count all Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Orthodox, Pentecostals,Joel Osteeners and other groups claiming to be Christian and come up with a pretty large number of people. The number may or may not be declining (after reading this book I do not believe it is declining) but in the long run what does it matter if there are 3 billion or 2 billion people who can check a box if the end result is not real conversion? This is a question which I suppose it out of the scope of the book so I don't hold anything against the author for not giving the question more thought. However, I was at times overwhelmed with a sense that there is too much of a focus on numbers and not enough on disciple-making.Despite my mind wandering back and forth between the numbers and the question f authentic Christianity, this is a book that I really enjoyed. It appealed to my inner statistician. The author is asking the right questions because they are questions that any data-scientist would ask. Who is the population being surveyed? What are the inherent biases in that population? How are the questions asked and how do the questions in one survey correlate to the questions in another? How much can we really extrapolate to the broader population given what we know about the sample population? These are not only important questions, but questions which would e irresponsible to not ask. Sean Oliver-Dee is on the right track. He has asked the right questions and as a result, has uncovered some counter-intuitive facts. Get this book if you are really into statistics and cultural analysis. You will also enjoy this book if you are a reformed post millennial Christian and are looking for some good data to help bolster your hope for a utopian golden age.Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Kregel Publications in exchange for an online review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising"
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Bold Attempt to Counter the Statistics of Gloom By Dr Conrade Yap We are living in a climate of suspicion, sarcasm, and skepticism of all things religion, especially in the West. Is it the death of faith or religion? Is it true that there are more Muslims immigrating to the West than Christians? What can we make out of the polls and statistics that suggest the Church is not only dying, but are becoming extinct? What about those Church-based surveys that paint a pathetic picture of the Church? Rather than accepting these findings and conclusions at face value, there is a small group of individuals who are bucking the depressing trend. They believe that such negative perceptions of the death of faith are hyped and lack the credibility of the real world. They believe that these negative perceptions need to be challenged so that the truth can be revealed. In other words, it is one thing to be indoctrinated by the news media and the influential public leaders about the state of the Church. It is yet another to learn to defend the truth and to ensure that people are not blinded by the clouds of doubt when they are in fact in the wide fields of hope.Challenging the popular statistics, Sean Oliver-Dee breaks down the numbers to determine the true picture of decline. He shows us that not all decline are attributed to people leaving the Church. There are those who died or have joined other denominations. While mainstream churches are declining in numbers, other groups like the Pentecostals are registering big increases. Another problem in the statistics is that many of them are almost always reliant on "white" data, ignoring the other ethnic groups such as the Blacks and Asian churches. Another reason is that the data is not as updated as we thought. What troubles the author is that while many statistics capture the decline, they fail to zoom in on the scattered increases happening in other sectors of Christianity.Apart from numbers, Oliver-Dee looks at the historical trends surrounding the perceptions of the Church. Since the power struggle between Church and State during the Middle Ages, the religious wars, and the way history has been written regarding the relations between the Church, the State, and the public. Much of the reporting has been sadly "unbalanced." The secular society has quietly dismissed the contributions of Church schools, voluntary services, charitable giving, and the freedom philosophy that the Christian faith had helped cultivate. He also looks at the narrative of religious violence that seem to pit religion as convenient the whipping boy, rather than recognizing the root of all problem is not religion but the sin in people. By lumping the radical acts of Islam together with Christianity, much public perception has thrown away the baby of religion out with the bathwater of radicalism. Negativity also pits science against faith, accusing the latter of impeding progress. They say that religion is incompatible with scientific advancements, forgetting that much scientific advancements are made by people of faith too.This is a bold attempt to help correct the unbalanced view of religion and the Christian faith. The concern is two fold. First, the public and believers must learn not to believe everything the media and negative narratives try to tell us. Learn to question the assumptions. Learn to examine the way the statistics are put together. Ask about the sources and the survey size. Determine who are the people doing the surveys. What are their intentions? Do they have an ulterior motive? Second, Oliver-Dee calls for appropriate reporting of the actual increases that are happening. It is too lopsided for any respectable organization or publication to just report one point of view, that is, that the Church is declining. A more balanced reporting and surveying is necessary.Oliver-Dee suspects there is a conspiracy against the Church that comes forth in three myths. They want the public to disregard the views of Christians on the basis of Christians being in the minority and rapidly declining. They want to maintain that the hope for society is in the death of religion, thinking that without religion, there would be less problems such as violence and radicalism. They want also to paint a false dichotomy between science and faith, that in order for science to flourish, faith must die. All of these three myths are powerfully debunked in this very powerful statement of hope: There is much hope, in fact, many flickers of hope all over Christianity.If you are discouraged by reports of how the Church is declining in numbers, or how bad the Church is, take a step back. See beyond the numbers. Examine the sources. Question the conclusions. Look for the truth of light amid the dizzying groups of numbers. Ask about the authenticity of the data and the error rate. If you are not sure what to do, perhaps, pick up this book. Purchase another for a friend. Share the contents of this book and see how Oliver-Dee gives us a new lens to interpret data thrown at us. This is a book of hope. I recommend it highly.Rating: 4.75 stars of 5.conradeThis book is provided to me courtesy of Monarch Books and Kregel Publications in exchange for an honest review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.
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