Just another story about Sudan

WASHINGTON -- A story can be inspirational without having a happy ending.

Activist Jim Jacobson of Christian Freedom International is used to seeing suffering during his illegal visits to Southern Sudan, where war bands sent by Khartoum's Islamist regime continue to terrorize Christians, animists and even other Muslims. But his face still clouds over when he describes what happened this April to a tribal matriarch in the burned-out village of Akoch Payam.

It's not an unusual story. That's the problem. It's a frighteningly ordinary snapshot of life in the overseas twilight zones in which intolerance, violence, politics and big business are creating nightmares for many believers.

"Religious persecution is so widespread and the issue is so complex. Sometimes it seems like there is nothing that governments and bureaucrats can do," said Jacobson, a former Reagan White House staff member who now works in hands-on relief work. "There are so many stories to tell that you can end up leaving people stunned. I mean, everybody talks about Sudan and China. But this is bigger than that. Things are happening all over the world."

To cite one example, Jacobson noted that he has made nine trips into Burma during the past 12 months, leading "backpack medical teams" into areas in which the government is pitting Buddhists against Baptists, with tragic results. He's also watching events unfold here in the nation's capital, where the new U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom - which grew out of legislation passed last year - is holding its first meetings.

Meanwhile, Sudan's hellish civil war is finally receiving attention because of a strong media hook - the renewal of slave trade. But, again, the story is more complex than that.

When Jacobson's plane landed, a family rushed out with the body of a grandmother named Anchor Ring. She had been hacked with a machete as more raiders rolled through the region on horseback, stealing the latest United Nations shipment of food and kidnapping new slaves to carry away the spoils. The head wound was so deep that Jacobson and a journalist traveling with him could see the yellow membrane around her brain.

Her tribesmen pleaded: Could the plane carry her to Lokichokio? A hospital there, just over the border in Kenya, offered the latest in Western technology.

"We radioed the U.N. compound, but we already knew what would happen," said Jacobson. "They asked if she had a passport and visa to travel into Kenya. Right! Does she have a passport and visa? First of all, we're hundreds of miles out in the bush. It's like stepping back 6,000 years in time out there. On top of that, we're in rebel territory in the middle of a civil war. Who has the power to give out passports? The government in Khartoum, that's who."

No, she didn't have a passport and visa. Then the hospital is full, said a U.N. official.

The tribesmen could see that the plane was half-empty and they struggled to grasp the politics of the situation. They didn't understand that, just over the border, bureaucrats were waiting with a book of regulations. They would make Jacobson turn the plane around and take the injured woman back into the bush, back into the war zone in which her grandchildren were being kidnapped and sold into slavery. It would cost nearly $10,000 to make the symbolic gesture of flying her to the hospital, knowing she would be turned away.

Jacobson did what he could, leaving behind medical supplies that might save her life.

Whenever he tells this story, listeners want to know if Anchor Ring survived. And what about the others injured in the raid? What about those who were kidnapped as slaves? What about the burned houses, the burned churches?

"I don't know what happened to her," said Jacobson. "There's no easy way to communicate with those villages, except to go there. We'll have to go back and we will go back. There's just so many places we need to go, right now."

Worship '99: Buy incense now...

The worshippers may gather in a candle-lit sanctuary and follow a liturgy of ancient texts and solemn chants, while gazing at Byzantine icons.

The singing, however, will be accompanied by waves of drums and electric guitars and the result often sounds like a cross between Pearl Jam and the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The icons, meanwhile, are digital images downloaded from the World Wide Web and projected on screens.

The people who are experimenting with these kinds of rites aren't interested in the bouncy Baby Boomer-friendly megachurch praise services that have dominated American Protestantism for a generation. They want to appeal to teens and young adults who consider "contemporary worship" shallow and old-fashioned and out of touch with their darker, more ironic take on life. They are looking for what comes next.

It might be smart to buy incense now, before prices rise.

"People are trying all kinds of things trying to find an edge," said the Rev. Daniel Harrell, a staff member of Boston's historic Park Street Church who is active in ministry to the so- called "Generation X" and other young adults.

"They'll go online and go to Brother Jim's icon page. Then they right-click with a mouse, save some icons and they're in business. The basic attitude is, 'It's old. It's real. Let's put it up on the screen and play a grinding grunge worship song. That'll be cool.' "

The result is what Harrell, writing in the journal Leadership, has called "post-contemporary worship." If previous generations of free-wheeling Protestants have tried to strip away layers of tradition and ritual, in an attempt to appeal to modern people, some of today's emerging church planters are trying to add a few doses of beauty and mystery. They are trying to create - on their own terms - new traditions out of the pieces of old traditions.

It helps to realize that almost every church found in an American telephone book has been buffeted, for several decades, by changes caused by television, rock 'n'roll, the Internet and every other form of popular culture. Vatican II opened the door to neo-Protestant changes in Catholic hymnody and worship, while some influential Protestants have been digging into their ancient roots. Others have openly tried to incorporate elements of drama, humor and film into user-friendly services for the media age.

"While some churches are busy buying brand-new hymnals, others are discarding theirs, not to be replaced," noted John Witvliet, director of the Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College. "Some churches are approaching such changes eagerly and expectantly; others are embroiled in 'worship wars.'"

If the Baby Boomers shunned churches that they thought were pompous and boring, then their pierced, tattooed and media-numbed children appear ready to shun churches that feel fake and frivolous. The key, according to Harrell, is that worship services must feel real. Services are judged to be authentic when they feel authentic.

"It's not that feeling has totally replaced doctrine, or anything like that," he said. "The people who are doing this have doctrine. In fact, they are usually very, very conservative - almost fundamentalist. But they may know little or nothing about the doctrines that actually go with the symbols and the rituals and the words they are using."

The final product is uneven, to say the least. Protestant piety collides with Catholic language and Orthodoxy iconography is grafted into charismatic prayers. These experimental churches noted Harrell, are almost always based on a "free church" concept of government in which all decisions are local. A shepherd and his flock can change from one style of worship to another with a show-of-hands vote in a mid-week committee meeting, if they want to do so.

"So people are borrowing things from all of these traditions, often without realizing that some of these symbols and rites may even clash with each other," he said. "It's easy to be cynical about this, but they really are searching for something. They are borrowing other people's images and rites and experiences, as part of their own search for something that feels authentic. They are trying to step into the experiences of others."

Chalk one up for God?

Virtually anyone linked to God and cyberspace gets the same letter several times a year as it's copied and forwarded, and copied and forwarded, from one e-mail list to another -- World Wide Web without end, amen.

It contains a "true story" about an atheistic philosopher at the University of Southern California, a courageous student, a piece of chalk and a miracle. The letter ends by challenging the reader to pass it on, rather than hitting the delete key. Clearly, readers are supposed to have enough faith to keep this evangelistic chain letter going.

Well, the philosophy faculty at USC doesn't have enough blind faith to let this story keep making the rounds. In a few weeks the department will - after years of calls, letters and email -- add a front-page link to its Internet site offering a pack of proof that the story simply isn't true.

"I don't think the people who keep sending this around mean any harm and I can understand why it appeals so much to some people, especially to some Christians, who often feel like they are treated poorly in academia," said Edwin McCann, director of the school of philosophy. "But if people fall for this story because it bolsters their faith, and pass it on, they're spreading around something that isn't true. Serious believers need to base their belief on truth."

The most popular version of this tale describes an event that happened "a few years ago" in a required class that one professor annually dedicated to his belief that God could not exist. For 20 years, no student had dared to answer when he shouted, at the end of the semester: "If there is anyone here who still believes in Jesus, stand up!"

Then the professor would hold up a piece of chalk and challenge God to keep it from hitting the floor. Every year it shattered into tiny pieces. Finally, a freshman - after months of prayer - dared to make a stand. The professor called him a fool and proceeded to perform his famous chalk test. However, this time the chalk slipped, hit his shirt cuff, rolled down his leg and off his shoe - unbroken.

"The professor's jaw dropped as he stared at the chalk," says the story. "He looked up at the young man and then ran out of the lecture hall. The young man ...proceeded to walk to the front of the room and share his faith in Jesus for the next half an hour. Three hundred students stayed and listened as he told of God's love for them and of his power through Jesus."

The story usually arrives in a letter from someone who received it from a friend who knew someone who heard the story from another friend who knew a student who saw it happen.

Meanwhile, McCann freely testifies that this hasn't happened during his 14 years at USC, or during the 32-year tenure of the noted Christian philosopher Dallas Willard. Plus, there is no required course that fits this description and the only class, in this era, that has had the same professor for 20 years doesn't address the issue of God's existence and so forth and so on.

An epistle McCann will soon post online traces the story to a 1977 book called "70 Years of Miracles." In that account, author Richard Harvey shares an anonymous account of an atheistic scientist who performs a similar classroom test of faith with a glass beaker - in the 1920s.

Also, the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's massive Internet site dedicated to collecting and dissecting "urban legends" (http://www.snopes.com) notes that a similar story appears in a tract from the anti-Catholic scribe Jack Chick. The current story reached the Internet in 1996 and one reader wrote the site to say it already was circulating in California in 1968.

Actually, the true miracle would be if 300 modern students sat in a classroom for more than 60 seconds when they were not required to do so, noted Barbara Mikkelson, a curator of the urban-legend site.

Chalk this one up as a charming parable, one not grounded in the facts as reported," she said. "It's David and Goliath in a classroom."

A new Presbyterian Reformation?

The two men spoke on the same topic, on the same day and at luncheons early in the same gathering -- the 211th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

But Harvard University minister Peter Gomes and ex-gay counselor Joe Dallas found radically different messages when they opened their Bibles.

Right now, said Gomes, the forces of biblical literalism are waging a campaign of "textual harassment" against those who want to welcome gays and lesbians into the ministry and bless same-sex unions at church altars. But progressives must not surrender to those who are bound by "fear and ignorance," he told the Covenant Network of Presbyterians.

"The cause is just," said Gomes, an openly gay Baptist who leads Harvard's Memorial Church. "The experience of the gospel is in your direction. You are sailing with the wind of the Holy Spirit. You are on the Lord's side."

The Covenant Network luncheon Monday symbolized one side in what Presbyterian politicos call the "Battle of the Amendments," which continued all this week at the assembly in Fort Worth, Texas. After a year of debate, the church's regional presbyteries in 1997 voted 97 to 74 to add Amendment B to its Book of Order, stating that ministers must "live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness." A year later, the presbyteries voted 59 to 114 to defeat Amendment A, which would have required "fidelity and integrity in all relationships."

Dallas spoke at a luncheon sponsored by OneByOne, a ministry within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) created to minister to "those in conflict with their sexuality." He stressed that those backing a pro-homosexual view of ordination and marriage have based their arguments on their feelings and experiences, not on scripture.

"The real question in assessing relationships is not, 'Is it loving?', but, 'Is it right or wrong?'," said Dallas, who lived for years in gay relationships before he got married and became an ex-gay leader. "The scriptures on homosexuality are unambiguous in both testaments. The only relationship considered best is a monogamous relationship between one man and one woman."

That's one way to read the Bible, said Gomes. But as inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, he said Covenant Network supporters could believe in the vitality and authority of the Bible without "bowing down to some inerrant text or to some absolute school of exegesis" from the past.

"God speaks in the present tense," said the Harvard theologian. "Now, it is interesting to know what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Antioch, what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Chalcedon, even what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Geneva. But it is equally important to ask, 'What is the Spirit saying to the churches today, in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in the last year of the 20th Century?' "

Gomes was preaching to the choir. Covenant Network leaders already have portrayed themselves as the true defenders of a tradition that allows each generation to reform earlier interpretations of scriptures, creeds and confessions. As a touchstone, they cite a 1924 document written when other Presbyterians defeated a conservative attempt to enforce "biblical inerrancy" and literal interpretations of the virgin birth, the atonement and the resurrection.

"With respect to the interpretation of the Scriptures, the position of our church has been that common to Protestants," noted the Auburn Declaration. While Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches stress the authority of centuries of church teachings about the Bible, "our church lays it upon its ministers and others to read and teach the Scriptures as the Spirit of God through His manifold ministries instructs them, and to receive all truth which from time to time He causes to break forth from the Scriptures."

Winning this debate over the Bible and tradition remains crucial for the left in today's battles over sexuality, marriage and ordination, said Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, in a paper circulated by the Covenant Network.

"We must," she said, "develop a clear, compelling demonstration that our understanding of ordination will make the church more Presbyterian than it is now, or we will not prevail."

Death of a seminary visionar

Early in his first pastorate, the Rev. Clyde McDowell was hit with one crisis after another and none of them seem to have been covered in his seminary textbooks.

The son of a church member got caught up in a bad drug deal. Then a girl ran away from home. Then a boy was tossed out of school for threatening someone with a hunting knife. Then there was a guilty wife and an angry husband and a messy sexual affair. Then McDowell had to climb out on a roof to talk to a suicidal member of the youth group, who was holding at shotgun.

His early sermons and church board meetings were tough, too.

"I felt like I was lost and nobody had given me a set of directions," he told me, a decade ago. "I knew a lot about the Bible, but I didn't know how to be a pastor."

McDowell survived and then thrived. Then, in 1996, the 46-year-old pastor accepted the challenge of being a seminary president. He was emerging as a new voice in a critical debate about the future of seminaries. But doctors discovered he had a brain tumor only 16 months after he became president of Denver Seminary. He died on June 7.

It's crucial to understand that McDowell did not want to "modernize" the process of seminary education, but to embrace an older model. He wanted ministers to do their studies while surrounded by flocks of real believers and the experienced shepherds who lead them.

Today, most seminaries are structured like graduate schools and teach clergy a specialized theological language that often makes it harder to talk to lay people, said the Rev. Leith Anderson, a nationally known author and megachurch pastor who is serving as Denver Seminary's interim president. It helps to contrast this with the approach used in medical schools, in which students are quickly given a white coats and, under the watch-care of mentors, asked to do case studies on real people while continuing classroom work.

"Would you want to go see a doctor who had been to med school and had taken all the right courses, but had never touched a patient the whole time he was there?", asked Anderson. "Would you want to be that first patient? I think not. So, would you want to be in somebody's first church if they had taken all the right seminary courses, but had never had any contact with real people and real pastors? I think not."

Nevertheless, many faculty members believe the core courses in the archetypal seminary curriculum have been carved in stone. Meanwhile, stressed-out pastors face media-saturated homes, workaholic parents and children who seem mature and frighteningly immature at the same time. When it comes to spiritual answers, their people are as likely to turn to Oprah and "The X-Files" as to church programs.

Many growing churches have responded to all of this by ceasing to hire seminary-educated men and women. Some train their new leaders on their own.

These issues were swirling around Denver Seminary in the early 1990s, when I taught courses there focusing on mass media and popular culture. I led a number of forums with McDowell at the nearby Mission Hills Baptist Church, which grew from 600 to 1,700 members during his 13-year tenure. His vision was already taking shape.

At some point, he said, people needed to know that pastors truly understood the issues they faced in daily life. This would require more than adding a few course titles in the seminary curriculum and increasing the amount of audio-visual equipment on campus. While he didn't what to short-change the study of doctrine, he had decided that seminaries couldn't settle for teaching truth as a list of statements on a test.

Competent, healthy pastors, he said, must be able to live the truth, as well as write academic papers about it.

"They must be truth implementers," stressed McDowell, in one 1997 essay. "They must know how the truth applies to this age whether it's the Age of Aquarius, the Age Wave or the New Age. In this age of unbelief, belief comes hard to those who only hear the words of preaching, but see little evidence in life."

Ignoring the shepherds of Kosovo

It's tricky for anyone to sign a document in Belgrade these days with the word "peace" in the title.

But back on April 19th, while air-raid sirens screamed overhead, an interfaith quartet of shepherds released a gripping statement to their Yugoslavian flocks and to the world.

"Even as evil cannot be overcome by evil, so peace and harmony cannot be attained by war," said the seven-paragraph "Appeal for Peace," released from the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate. "To be a peacemaker is the greatest duty and most noble obligation of every man. That is why we are not afraid to be the first to extend the hand of peace to one another. In the name of our future and our common life together, we pray to God and appeal to all men of good will to endeavor with maximum effort to end this war and resolve the problems by peaceful means."

The document was signed by Serbian Patriarch Pavle, Catholic Archbishop Franc Perko, Mufti Hamdija Jusufspahic and Rabbi Isak Asiel, all of Belgrade. Together, they called for all bombing and fighting to cease and for the return of refugees to their war-ravaged homes - both the ethnic Albanians fleeing the paramilitary units of Slobodan Milosevic or Serbs fleeing the Kosovo Liberation Army.

This cry for broader negotiations in the Balkans followed a "Kosovo Peace and Tolerance" declaration released on March 18 in Vienna. This longer, more detailed document was signed by a quartet of Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish leaders from Kosovo.

Officials in NATO alliance should have the highest possible motivations to support coalitions seeking common ground in the Balkans, said Father Irinej Dobrijevic of Cleveland, who accompanied the Rev. Jesse Jackson during his unofficial mission to Belgrade, leading to the release of three American prisoners of war.

If so, ignoring the Vienna and Belgrade interfaith statements represented "major missed opportunities to support those who wanted to promote democracy" and defeat Milosevic, who is a holdover from the Communist era, said Dobrijevic, during a Capitol Hill forum this week focusing on Kosovo, sponsored by the conservative National Clergy Council. "We missed the boat when we failed to listen to these kinds of mainstream, moderate religious and intellectual leaders."

The panel of clergy and scholars addressed the question "Does might make right?", probing Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant teachings on war and how they might apply to the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia. The forum covered territory from St. Augustine's "City of God" to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the failed Paris accords, with many stops in between. Some argued that this war is unjust, or even evil, while others said its humanitarian goals were just, but questioned NATO strategies. Everyone agreed that it's hard to evaluate whether a military effort is morally justified when no one can agree on its goal. Was this a war to protect ethnic Albanians, topple Milosevic or cut Kosovo out of Yugoslavia?

Whatever happens next, it's hard to imagine anyone traveling the road to peace without the help of religious leaders in Yugoslavia - the very voices that Milosevic has attempted to silence and that Western diplomats and media have consistently ignored.

This was perfectly symbolized when Orthodox Bishop Artemije of Kosovo stood knee-deep in the snow outside the chateau at Rambouillet -- locked out of the tense negotiations between leaders of NATO, the KLA and the Milosevic government. The most radical elements of the Serbian regime have even labeled Artemije a traitor to his country, due to his years of activism on behalf of all refugees and his efforts to force a new government in Belgrade, including five U.S. trips in a year before the bombing began.

"The greatest victim of your NATO bombs is not what is demolished and broken or killed and wounded (however great that number may be), but rather something which you stopped from developing," the bishop of Kosovo later wrote, in a letter to Western leaders.

"Before your bombs, democratic forces existed here, open and with potential; there existed a democratic process, however embryonic. There existed a hope with these people, that with your support the process of democratization would come to life and prevail. All of that is gone now."

Star Wars -- the only parable in town

The Rev. Calvin Miller is one Southern Baptist preacher - a seminary professor, no less - who openly admits that he communed with the Star Wars faithful on the opening day of "The Phantom Menace."

He pretty much got what he expected - high tech fantasy and lowest-common-denominator mysticism, stone-faced knights and wisecracking sidekicks ready for toy-store shelves. George Lucas keeps offering a pinch of Freud, a shot of Oedipus and a baptism into Buddhism. Miller grimaced, but wasn't shocked, when the mythmaker even tossed in a virgin birth and a messianic prophecy.

"We have to understand that people are out there hunting for metaphors to help them make sense of their lives," said Miller, who teaches preaching at Samford University's Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala. He also has written more than 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, including a set of poetic novels entitled "The Singer Trilogy."

"This is what we all do. We pick a metaphor and then we indulge ourselves for 50 or 60 years. Some people change in midstream. ... We need metaphors and narratives that tell us who we are. It shouldn't surprise anyone that millions of people find these big stories at the movies."

In the classroom, Miller tries to convince seminarians that pastors should help people interpret the myths they buy at the mall -- to separate the wheat from the chaff. Preachers also can lay claim to a rich Judeo-Christian heritage of storytelling, he said. In the Bible, the doctrine and the drama are intertwined. For centuries, rabbis told dramatic stories and then interpreted them. Priests inspired the young with vivid accounts of the lives of the saints.

In other words, the fires of hell would not consume the sanctuary if a preacher dared to speak the words "a long time ago" and then told a parable in the pulpit.

"No one can deny that art and drama and icons and stories are important parts of human life and have been part of the church's traditions for centuries," said Miller.

But this is a tough sell, these days. In most congregations, the word "sermon" means a verse-by-verse explanation of scripture, perhaps enlivened with occasional illustrations from daily life. Thus, most people hear academic lectures at church, then turn to mass media to find inspiring tales of heroes and villains, triumph and tragedy, sin and redemption, heaven and hell.

Part of the problem, argues Catholic writer Roberto Rivera, is that science has claimed the right to define what is and isn't real. Scientists, of course, insist that truth be found through propositions and hypotheses, not through symbols and stories. In response, the church has tended to ask worshippers to subscribe to a list of propositions about God, rather than offering them sweeping, dramatic narratives about God's work in history.

Yet people still yearn for stories that feed the soul. If traditional religious groups keep offering "arid propositions that leave us cold and bored," people will seek other sanctuaries, said Rivera. The Star Wars series is merely one example of this trend toward stories that are highly commercialized, yet undeniably spiritual.

"If you want to engage people where they really live, you've got to reach for more than their heads or even their hearts," said Rivera, a researcher with the Wilberforce Forum led by evangelical leader Chuck Colson. "You've got to engage their imaginations. ... If you want to teach moral lessons, there's no substitute for a good story."

Thus, legions of Lucas disciples fill their homes with icons and statues and gather on thousands of World Wide Web sites. Many yearn for a personal audience with Lucas. Star Wars has a lot going for it as a spiritual story, noted Rivera. Its devotees don't have to get up on Sunday mornings and there's no moral code to make them uncomfortable.

"The problem," he said, "is that, after you've lined up, memorized the dialog and made the pilgrimage to Skywalker Ranch, what have you got to show for it? And, heaven forbid, what if 'The Phantom Menace' disappoints? What's your fallback position? After all, it's still only a movie."

The Star Wars nativity story

Every epic story needs a central character and he has to come from somewhere.

So the key moment in the cosmos of mythmaker George Lucas is when Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn asks Shmi Skywalker to identify the father of her mysterious young son, Anakin, who will someday become the evil Darth Vader.

"There is no father," she replies, in Terry Brooks' novel "Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace," which is based on the screenplay by Lucas.

"I carried him, I gave birth to him. I raised him. I can't tell you any more than that."

It seems the slave boy was "conceived not by human contact, but by the essence of all life, by the connectors to the Force itself, the midi-chlorians," a form of life living in the blood. "Comprising collective consciousness and intelligence, the midi- chlorians formed the link between everything living and the Force," explains the novel.

This leads to the final details in this nativity story. The priestly Jedi have long pondered an ancient prophecy that "a chosen one would appear, imbued with an abundance of midi- chlorians, a being strong with the Force and destined to alter it forever." The chosen one would "bring balance to the Force" -- balance between the darkness and the light.

Once upon a time, Star Wars raised one big question for parents and clergy: Is the Force the same thing as God? Now, the first chapter of the saga that many scholars believe has shaped a generation is raising more questions, even if Lucas scoffs at believers who dissect his work.

Why use the title "chosen one"? Was this a miraculous conception? Is Qui-Gon a John the Baptist figure? Perhaps Anakin Skywalker is the Moses who will liberate his people? If the Force is God, and the midi-chlorians help channel the Force, then what are the midi-chlorians? Did Lucas shred the Holy Spirit and then inject the results into his characters' blood streams?

"When you look at literature you find myths and messiahs and saviors everywhere. That's fair and everybody does that," said Alex Wainer, a Milligan College colleague of mine whose doctoral work focused on mythic archetypes in popular culture, including Star Wars. "The problem isn't that Lucas is creating a heroic myth and using religious symbolism. But he has taken all of the religions, put them in a blender and hit the button."

While many critics will say that the gospel according to Lucas is too vague, the problem for many traditional believers will be that his story has become too detailed. The use of the virgin birth motif, and the title "chosen one," may even cut through the entertainment fog that envelopes most consumers when they enter a movie theater.

"Lucas is getting so specific that his work is losing its metaphor quality," said Wainer. "He isn't just using an occasional religious theme. He is creating a whole religious system and the more questions he raises, the more he's going to have to answer. He's on the verge of de-mystifying his own myth and he may end up killing the whole thing. It's like he's trying too hard."

For years, Lucas has said that his goal is to create a framework in which children can learn about good and evil, right and wrong. However, he also is painting a picture inside this frame. While he clearly believes that children need moral guidance, he also urges them to follow their emotions, not religious dogmas.

As Qui-Gon tells the young Skywalker: "Concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think."

"I see Star Wars as taking all the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down into a more modern and easily accessible construct -- that there is a greater mystery out there," Lucas told Bill Moyers, in a recent Time interview. "I remember when I was 10 years old, I asked my mother, 'If there's only one God, why are there so many religions?' I've been pondering that question ever since, and the conclusion I've come to is that all the religions are true. Religion is basically a container for faith."

The time for broken communion?

It's been seven years since Bishop C. FitzSimons Allison faced the fact that some of his fellow bishops worship a different god than he does.

The symbolic moment came during an Episcopal House of Bishops meeting in Kanuga, N.C., as members met in small groups to discuss graceful ways to settle their differences on the Bible, worship and sex. The question for the day was: "Why are we dysfunctional?"

"I said the answer was simple - apostasy," said Allison, a dignified South Carolinian who has a doctorate in Anglican history from Oxford University. "Some of the other bishops looked at me and said, 'What are you talking about?'"

Many Episcopalians, he explained at the time, have embraced the work of theologians such as Carter Heyward, a lesbian priest, seminary professor and author of books such as "Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God." Allison asked the bishops how they would deal with those who say they serve a god that is "older and greater" than the God of the Bible.

Some of the bishops said they either shared this belief or could not condemn it.

When the time came to celebrate the Eucharist, Allison knew what he had to do in this particular circle of bishops. He declined to share the bread and the wine, but didn't publicize his act of conscience. Now, the retired South Carolina bishop has openly crossed a line in Episcopal canon law, signaling his belief that "broken communion" is becoming necessary between many bishops, their priests and their flocks.

This past Sunday (May 16), Allison served as celebrant in a Mass for members of St. Paul's Parish in Brockton, Mass., who have been evicted from their sanctuary after clashes with Diocese of Massachusetts leaders who are liberalizing church teachings on marriage and sex.

For 10 weeks, the orthodox outcasts have been worshipping on the sidewalk outside their old church. A cell of diocesan loyalists now has legal rights to the building and the name, St. Paul's Parish. On Sunday, the 72-year-old Allison joined about 100 worshippers - including Anglicans from Nigeria, Uganda, Liberia and Haiti -- in a procession around the corner to meet in a gymnasium at a Seventh-day Adventist church.

Allison was supposed to have received Massachusetts Bishop Thomas Shaw's permission before leading rites in his diocese. He didn't do that.

"I definitely broke canon laws. I freely admit that," said Allison. "Right now, I think it would be a badge of honor to be censured by the House of Bishops. Of course, if they put me on trial they will give me a platform to discuss the key issue - which is what I believe and what they no longer believe."

The Brockton case is important for several other reasons. First, clashes over the rights of existing parishes, and independent missions, are increasing -- in the Carolinas, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Washington, Georgia and Texas, as well as other cases in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, emerging American networks - such as the Association of Anglican Congregations on Mission - are seeking new spiritual and even legal ties with Third World conservatives who won major doctrinal battles with First World progressives at last summer's Lambeth Conference in Canterbury.

And finally, said Allison, similar tensions over the ties that bind exist in other folds, such as the United Methodists, old-line Presbyterians, the Disciples and many Lutherans. In most cases, these conflicts appear to be about marriage and sex, with fights over same-sex union rites and the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals getting the ink. But these sexual issues are signs of deeper divisions.

It's tragic to have to talk about breaking communion, said Allison. But it's also impossible to ignore the doctrinal cracks in the foundations of so many churches.

"I know that we can't go around giving everybody orthodoxy tests all the time," he said. "But right now we can't agree about what the creeds mean, what the scriptures mean or even on the ultimate issue of who God is. At some point we will have to be honest and say that if we are not united in one faith, how can we be in communion with one another?"