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I want to thank my friend David for that very warm and generous introduction. This is my first visit to Austin, Texas. And yesterday, David and his wife, Melissa Wigginton, took Steve, my husband, and me out to lunch. I was really eager to have some good Southwestern cuisine.

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They took us to one of Melissa's favorite Mexican restaurants. And I happened to dip a tortilla chip into some innocent-looking red sauce. And my mouth was on fire for five minutes. I also want to thank President Ted Wardlaw for this wonderful invitation.

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and the faculty, the administration for a Texas-sized hospitality. We are thoroughly enjoying ourselves and gaining such a warm feeling for this tremendous institution and for your mission and your service. It is a challenge to be the third lecturer this morning. We are already saturated by a wealth of ideas,

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of eloquence and challenge. I overheard one man after the first lecture said, I'm going home to bed. He said, I've already had enough for a whole day. And there is a certain serendipity, or as we Calvinists would say, providence, in the way these three lectures weave together in their topics.

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And I think it will be especially fun today at 3:30 when we have an opportunity to do that more intentionally in a dialogue that's scheduled. I also want to thank the person who chose that hymn this morning, speaking of serendipity or providence. Lord, speak to me that I may speak. What a perfect hymn to flesh out what we're going to be considering today.

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Like many of you, perhaps, I have been intrigued by some of the conversations surrounding the publication of James Fry's new memoir, A Thousand Little Pieces. It's about his drug addiction and incarceration for assaulting a police officer. Oprah Winfrey liked it so much, she selected it as one of her books, and the sales skyrocketed. Yet, a book reviewer putting together something for the New York Times was seeking a police photo of the author to accompany his book review and discovered that there was no police photo available.

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Fry had not gone to jail, as his memoir claimed, and in fact, a lot of what he had included was fabricated. There's a cartoon satirizing this situation. A man walks into a bookstore and says, Where is A Thousand Little Pieces? And the bookstore clerk says, Well, over there in the fiction section are some of the little pieces, and over there in the nonfiction section are some other little pieces.

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A week later, Winfrey took Fry to the woodshed. and excuriated him for what he had done on one of her shows. Yet Fry's book remains number two on the bestseller list, because people love a tale of redemption, even if it's an invention of the author. As literature professor who wrote a memoir herself commented,

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I fell in love with memoir when I read Helen Keller's in the fourth grade. Had it turned out that she had been nearly nearsighted, not blind, deaf, and mute, my bubble might have been popped. It raises the question about how we approach truth-telling. Does it really matter in how we tell our stories?

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I mention this recent news story because these two lectures will take up the topic of the Christian practice of testimony. And testimony, as Christians generally practice it, include two elements that are at the crux of this story. Testimony includes truth-telling, and testimony includes a personal story. When I say the phrase Christian practice of testimony, maybe you think immediately of a campfire.

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You can hear the sparks of the logs crackling. You can smell the pine trees. You can hear the lapping of waves along a shore. You can see stars above.

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And you're reminded of the intimacy of a circle of people gathered together by the dark of night, far away from home. One by one, people rise to tell stories about themselves. They talk about how they feel and experience God in their lives and in the world. And the truth of God becomes real to us in these stories, and particularly if you're one of the ones telling a story.

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Testimony offers an occasion for putting into words things you might have known, but you didn't know you knew them until you spoke them. So why the topic of Christian testimony in a lectureship focused on Christian education? Years ago, I conducted a study on the religious lives of Catholic, Methodist, and Evangelical Protestant high school seniors that David referred to. I wanted to know what factors influenced church-related teens

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to claim the Christian tradition in which they had been reared. And I was especially interested to know that as they approach the precipice of the dropout years, the period that begins in about the second-half of the junior year of high school usually, and we hope ends in the early 30s. when young adults tend to disappear from the life of the church. And incidentally, John, a senior from this institution, and I were talking, and I don't necessarily accept this as a given that there has to be a drop-off period in the life of young people.

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But what I noticed about these high school seniors who were reared in the church as I conducted 42 interviews and observed them for an entire year, was how inarticulate many of them were about their faith. Even if they were strong in their beliefs, they had a hard time talking about what they believed in more than a superficial way. The evangelical teens in my sample were a little more forthcoming than the mainline Protestant teens and the Catholic teens.

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But overall, there wasn't the complexity of expression or the integration of identity that one might expect. And I was validated in this finding when Christian Smith's National Study of High School Teens came out in 2003 saying the same thing. He noticed that teens could talk generally about God, but not specifically about Jesus.

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These same teens could be remarkably articulate about subjects on which they had been drilled, like sex, drugs, drinking, STDs, but they couldn't talk about faith and practice and commitment to God in more than a vague kind of way that didn't seem very real. And the situation with adults may not be so much better. Well, for years Gallup polls have shown consistently that a large percentage of Americans say they believe in God. Douglas Porpura, in some recent research on adults, found that 93% were unable to say what they meant by God.

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There's a widespread inability to articulate anything of substance regarding God and what we claim to believe. This is indeed a strange phenomenon when we think of our heritage as Christians. When we think of the long line of Christian witnesses who have gone before us, the Greek word for witness Martorieria is the root of our English word martyr, which means someone who dies for his or her faith.

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Our heritage contains more martyrs than we can possibly name. There was nothing timid about the Apostle Paul when he was beaten and stoned and imprisoned and possibly executed for his faith. Having lived in St. Andrews, Scotland for a year, the martyrs who come to my mind immediately are two from the Scottish Reformation, Patrick Hamilton and George Wishart.

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Their initials P.H. and G.W. are marked in the cobblestone brick of the streets of St.

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Andrews on the sites where they were burned at the stake for speaking their reformed faith. They say the stench from the burned flesh of Patrick Hamilton lingered over the city for days because of a low-hanging fog, and this incited reformers to be even more steadfast to their cause. American Presbyterians might think especially of missionary Don McClure, who perished in 1977 at the hands of rebels in Ethiopia, with whom he had worked for over half a century. We think of others who may not have died for their testimony, but who have suffered.

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Presbyterian missionary Benjamin Weir was imprisoned in a small room in Lebanon for years. We think of the woman who refused to sit at the back of the bus because of her God-given dignity, Rosa Parks, and today especially, we think of Coretta Scott King. In the Presbyterian Outlook this month, there was a story of Gorban Tehrani, a Christian convert in Iran who was martyred recently. Tehrani converted to Christianity after hearing the gospel from visiting evangelists while he was in prison in Turkmenistan for manslaughter.

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Tehrani converted to Christianity and after he was released, he started a house church in his home in Iran on the border, which was a risky venture because proselytizing is punishable by death. In his obituary, Tehrani was described by an unnamed Iranian pastor as a fearless Christian who would boldly share about Jesus in the streets, in the shops, and in the bazaars. There is indeed a great cloud of witnesses. What will happen to this legacy?

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in our generation if we can't talk about our faith. In this lecture, I'd like to look at some of the explanations for how we got ourselves to this place of silence in American Christianity and in mainline Protestantism, Presbyterianism in particular. I would like to frame a discussion of the Christian practice of testimony In a promising new discourse about Christian practices that has emerged in the last decade or so, I think there's a way of rethinking testimony, the full range of it, that includes speaking at campfires, in Sunday school classrooms, and also in other settings, in settings outside of churches.

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Testimony is what happens when we talk to our kids as we're driving in the car. It's what we say to our co-workers over a coffee break. It's what we say to the members of our community as we write a letter to the editor in the newspaper. It's what we say to our neighbors in a public meeting about zoning issues.

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We need to practice a way of testifying to God that is confident, but not arrogant, that's coherent, but not formulaic. So what makes us reluctant to talk about God? Since the founding of this country, Christians, especially Protestants, have been the dominant religious group.

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We could count on the government and the schools and the major institutions of society to support the cultural influences of Christianity. In the lifetime of many of us in this room, stores were closed on Sundays. The Lord's Prayer was said in public schools. Sports teams did not schedule games on Sundays.

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In the early days of our country, some state governments even collected taxes to support the churches. While the percentage of mainline Protestant congregations has dwindled today to perhaps 26% of congregations in this country, the cultural influence has continued to a greater degree, and mainline Protestants still hold a position of influence way out of proportion to their numbers. And as sociologist Nancy Amerman finds in her research, because of this legacy, there is a long-established hesitation on the part of mainline Protestants to take advantage of their hegemony.

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In some ways, you might categorize this as exercising voluntary restraint on our Christian liberty as expressed in 1 Corinthians 6. All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial. There is a desire not to flaunt dominance or coerce.

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In Paul Lichterman's recent study of mainline and evangelical Protestants in a Midwestern city, people who participate in faith-based groups in their communities to provide shelters and meals and tutoring and other services to take the place of the safety net that is diminishing for the poor of our society. He found evidence of what can be called the privatization thesis. This is the commonly and implicitly agreed upon understanding that while religious values may influence our actions in public, these values should remain private.

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Lichterman found that the Presbyterians, and Lutherans, and Episcopalians, and Disciples of Christ, and Methodists, and other mainline Protestants did not use religious language or theological ideas to frame their civic service. In fact, sociologist Robert Wuthnau found in an earlier study that volunteers rarely talked at all about why they performed civic service. Lichterman, when he questioned people about this, heard church volunteers saying that just being a member of a congregation while performing this service was meaningful.

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To the volunteers, church membership was a silent signal of their shared norms. Their Christian testimony was not spoken, but rather embodied in their actions of care and service. Now, the professionals working with these church members may have framed the volunteer work in Christian terms in the brochures that they published about the projects, but the church members themselves were nearly silent about it.

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Lichterman, a Jewish sociologist, noticed this puzzle. Mainline Protestants continue to be more likely than other Protestant or Catholic congregations to carry out projects that connect their congregations to the surrounding communities. And the customs of partnership and volunteering have special affinities with Mainline Protestant traditions. Yet theologies and formal beliefs

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are not observable. People are tongue-tied when you ask them why they're doing this. Lichterman notes the contrast with evangelicals who use more religious language and reference more scripture in their service. He notes the difference in how African-Americans approach the historic civil rights struggle.

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Much of the civil rights movement was clearly religiously motivated activism and tapped into a rich discourse of historic black Christianity. Also Catholics, as they organized to organize inner city residents, they drew explicitly on Catholic social teachings. In Diana Butler Bass's recent study of religious vitality among mainline Protestant congregations, she finds that this assumption of Protestant dominance related to this privatization thesis may be changing among younger generations. While the older ones that Lichterman studied, and most of these volunteers happen to be in their 50s and 60s and 70s,

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They may be the silent ranks of Christians in the public sphere. Younger generations are now no longer viewing mainline Protestantism as dominant. Diana Butler Bass says there's a newly emerging sense of a minority status with an accompanying freedom to be more forthright in speaking about God. And she tells a little anecdote about a young man who started attending an Episcopal church in order to expose his children to a religion and found himself strangely transformed by this experience in his own life.

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And when he went to work on Monday morning and people would say, how was your weekend? He would go into an enthusiastic description of the beauty of the liturgy. He was not silenced by a fear of imposing the dominant religion on his coworker. workers.

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Yet, a growing religious pluralism in this country is a second factor that influences how mainline Protestants approach the Christian practice of testimony. Whether mainline Protestants are dominant or not, there is a desire to be respectful and civil in discourse in the pluralistic public sphere. We are alarmed by obnoxious, offensive faith talk that just turns people off. That Ariel Sharon might have deserved a debilitating stroke, or the people of New Orleans, the destructive hurricane, as Pat Robertson has publicly said, is the kind of talk that gives Christian testimony a bad name.

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It is imperative that we recover a way of speaking about the particularities and the distinctions of our faith without risking religious division and conflict. We should be able to say in public what some of those particularities of our faith are and why they matter. Robin Lovin, a Christian ethicist from another fine Texas institution, SMU, has argued for a position of articulation.

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And this contrasts with other Christians who withdraw from public discussions because they have limited expectations of how Christians can influence society. And his position contrasts with those who say Christians must provide the foundations on which our country can be moral by reasserting a so-called Judeo-Christian consensus in this country. Instead, Robin Levin argues for an articulation of the Christian tradition that brings Christian symbols and values to bear on public choices by relating them to arguments and analyses.

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He cites the example of Catholic bishops who stress justice as measured by treatment of the powerless, described as the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger, in other words, the non-Israelite in Hebrew scriptures. Articulation does not presume that Christian values and symbols are culturally legitimated, but that the Christian tradition can be made intelligible to people even though they're shaped by other traditions. We should be able to advocate publicly for the concern for the well-being of the public using our sacred stories and ground our civic actions for justice in our faith tradition.

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A third factor in our reluctance to speak about God is that the very name Christian is increasingly associated with a particular conservative social agenda. The word Christian evokes an image of a judge trying to get the Ten Commandments ensconced in stone on the grounds of a state courthouse. A school board trying to ensure that intelligent design is taught in public school science classes.

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And best-selling books such as the Left Behind series that Bill Karl referred to last night, a series promoting a dangerous pre-millennial dispensationalist theology. Many coming from that position claim that for the rapture to happen, the temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt on that original site. The problem with that is that current site is occupied by the Al-Aksai Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam.

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World conflagration would certainly ensue if they were successful in that goal. And increasingly visible are preachers who twist the message of grace into a prosperity gospel. A preacher in Atlanta who happens to be named Creflo A. Dollar teaches, If you sow a seed on good ground,

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you can expect to reap a harvest. In other words, if you send them dollars, God will bless you with wealth and other forms of prosperity. I've heard young adults say they don't want to be associated with what's named Christian. This might or might not be connected to research that shows that Presbyterians are reluctant to increase their efforts

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in evangelism. A survey by the Presbyterian panel in 1996 found that few members, only 5%, and elders, 8%, responded very likely when they were asked if they were willing and able to allocate more time and effort to reach out to the unchurched in their community. Another 28% of members and 36% of elders responded that they were likely. But the majority of members, 57%, and a large plurality of elders, 46%, indicate that they are either not very likely or not likely at all to find more time for evangelistic efforts.

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We are indeed reluctant to speak our faith these days, and it is a great loss. Testimony is not only how we share our faith, it's how we're formed in our faith. In my research that I'll report on tomorrow on how people speak about God in their lives, I will show that this practice of testimony satisfies a very deep hunger that we have for truth-telling and for making meaning in our lives.

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And to lay the groundwork for that tomorrow, I want to share a framework in which I view the Christian practice of testimony. There's a particularly lively conversation that's been flowing in different parts of the country for over a decade now, exploring Christian practices and how they shape our lives in response to God's grace in the world. This discourse chooses to view practices such as testimony as actions that can't just be cataloged, for example, by counting the times the name God is mentioned in a conversation.

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And this discourse chooses not to limit practices to historic spiritual disciplines such as fasting or walking the labyrinth or Lectio Divina. These things are practices too. But this particular discourse chooses to define practices theologically and normatively as the larger coordinated actions of Christian communities and Christian people as they live out their ordinary lives.

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Practices are things like honoring the body, showing hospitality, keeping Sabbath, giving testimony, practicing discernment, shaping communities, forgiving, healing, dying well. Practices are the threads that weave together the fabric of our whole lives into a tapestry. The threads overlap with one another and create a distinctive pattern of the Christian life.

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You can pick out almost any thread and follow it and examine it and see the dynamics of the power of the gospel in people's lives. The definition used by church historian Dorothy Bass and Christian educator Craig Dykstra to define practices is as follows. Practices are things Christian people do together over time to address fundamental human needs in response to and in the light of the gospel for the life of the world in Jesus Christ.

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Now, for the purposes of our discussion today, what's most important is that practices respond to deep human needs. Testimony, for instance, responds to the deep human need to tell the truth. It is practiced by all people, not just Christians, and it's part of every sphere of our lives. Perhaps the first picture that comes to your mind when I say testimony in a general sense is a court of law.

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We think of giving testimony for the purpose of finding out the truth. As the formula goes, I pledge to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Truth is necessary for achieving justice. and justice is a virtue of human community as it flourishes as God intends.

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The example of testimony that probably rests heavily on our minds most today is the recent testimony of Judge Samuel Alito as he was interviewed in the Senate Judiciary Committee for a position on the Supreme Court. We see how complex this practice comes when something as simple as answering questions truthfully is part of a political process of competing interests. As David White notes in his book, Practicing Discernment with Youth, the Germanic root for the word truth gives rise to our word troth.

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In the ancient wedding vow, I pledge thee my troth, Truth, when it can be found, is the foundation of covenantal relationships. Truth-telling is the basis for promises that will form our deepest relationships of steadfast love. When I explained to a professional colleague that I was studying testimony, she was anxious to talk to me about her powerful urge

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to testify and how this had become a part of her life. She's an alcoholic, and she belongs to Alcoholics Anonymous. That was something I didn't know until she told me. She said that part of her healing is to tell her story and to continually confirm her new identity as a sober person by telling it over and over.

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Testimony, or as they call it in AA, qualifying or taking the lead, wells up from a powerful urge to tell the truth. And not just for one's own sake, but for the sake of the whole community. Recently, the new president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, spoke of her experience of narrowly escaping rape in that war-torn country overrun by factions of insurgents.

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The people of her country were astonished that the taboo against speaking such a topic had been breached by their highest public official. And it brought out into the open the pain of the violence that continues in that country even now as the most intense fighting has stopped. There is a liberation in testimony in speaking the truth. It leads to confession and reconciliation in relationships that have been violated so that peace might come as God intends.

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And most importantly, for the purposes of this lecture in Christian education, Testimony is a practice that is crucial to our formation as Christians. Learning to talk about God forms us in faith to begin with. As homiletics professor Tom Long summarizes testimony, it's talking ourselves into being Christians.

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It's speaking ourselves into faith. It's really not, as the philosopher Wichtenstein advocated, that we come to know what we believe so that we can talk about it. Rather, it's more like what the phenomenologist Merleau Ponty said, that you can speak about something before you know you know it. And it's in speaking the words that we often begin to know what we think.

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Just as God created the world through speech, our speech shapes our thoughts and empowers us to know what we know. And especially when we speak to others, we have a sounding board that helps us hear what we think. The sociologist Anne Swidler calls this echolocation, borrowed from the study of bats. Bats navigate by bouncing sound waves off the objects and walls of the caves where they fly.

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And hearing their sound bounce back to them gives them knowledge of their location in the dark. Likewise, we talk our way toward belief, says Tom Long. We talk from tentative belief through doubt to a firmer faith. We talk our way toward believing more fully, more clearly, and more deeply.

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Putting things into words is one of the ways that we acquire knowledge and passion and conviction. So to reach kind of a summary, what is testimony defined in this theological and normative way? James Neiman, who teaches theology at Hartford Seminary, gathers up seven elements that grow out of these rich conversations about practices that I mentioned earlier, and he summarizes elements of testimony drawn especially from Tom Long's work on that topic. The substance of Christian testimony is rooted in testimony to Jesus Christ, and the models for witness are evident in

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scripture. This substance is learned within the household of faith and especially as the assembly gathers to worship God. Its bearer takes ownership for a personal faith narrative that is incorporated into a divine narrative of grace. This person is characterized by humility

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that meets others in ordinary circumstances of life. The testimony is offered in a spirit of honesty, balanced by compassion. It remains dialogical, always open to risking an authentic encounter with another person. And it longs to enhance the worth of the other person

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so that that other person might become more fully alive. Some of these elements are in Lillian Daniel's testimony that she reports in her new book about testimony. She's a United Church of Christ pastor, and while she was serving a congregation in Connecticut near the campus of Yale University, she decided to invite members of her church to give their testimonies on Sunday mornings. in what started as a Lenten reflection series.

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Now it had to be called that because the word testimony was way too threatening to the United Church of Christ members. And one of the interesting aspects of this story is that this takes place in that denominations, not among the Baptists, and also among people who are known for their New England reserve. After they did this for about two years, she found that this practice was transforming their congregation in the quality of the fellowship ties among the members, in the stewardship, in the kind of leadership that was rising to the top, and even in numerical growth. And then someone asked the pastor about her own testimony.

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She preached every Sunday. But she had really not met them in the same practice that she had asked them to perform. And so one Sunday she gave her testimony. She told about walking to her father's bedside in a hospital years ago after his heart attack.

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Suddenly it hit me, she said. I didn't want to be the 21-year-old child of a divorced man, the only one to speak to the doctors and keep track of the details. I didn't want to be an adult. I wanted to be the child again, to re-enter that world where parents lived forever and only children were allowed to get sick.

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She found the hospital chapel and collapsed on a kneeler and prayed. She felt a deep sense of unworthiness. She asked to be forgiven for the shallowness of the way she lived her life. And as I knelt there, she said, I suddenly felt this tremendous peace, this sense of a blanket wrapped around my shoulders.

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I had this sense that Jesus was standing behind me and placing two hands on my shoulders. And suddenly she said, I could see the whole scene as if I were above, looking down on myself. And I was seeing Jesus looking so very sad, like a person who had suffered himself. And I realized that my father might or might not make it, and that the peace I was feeling was not the promise of a trouble-free life,

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But it was the power of the Holy Spirit that could take a world of pain and put the balm of God over it. And so I surrendered myself. In my young, yuppie dreams of worldly success, she goes on, the word surrender is the worst. But I sat comfortably on my heart that day

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And I said, I surrender my life to you, Lord. I'm giving my life to you. And I felt Jesus take it. It may be true that we are reluctant to speak about God because of the strong norm of privatizing religion, because of our concern not to offend,

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because of the negative associations that have been attached to the word Christian. But in the next lecture tomorrow morning, we will look some more at how some normally quiet and reserved Christians even Presbyterians, can become remarkably passionate as they practice testimony. Testimony does not always focus on a conversion story, as Lillian Daniel's story illustrates.

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But testimony of all kinds can be occasions for making coherence of the disjointed and disparate pieces of our lives as we suddenly speak to others with attention to God's grace in our lives. Tomorrow we will also explore how this practice can take on greater significance in the ministries of our church and in the ministries of people as they go about their daily lives. Thank you.

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I look forward to that.