An Easter 2021 Meditation

This last year has felt a lot like death.

We’ve had a pandemic sweep the world, and in this country had our leaders fail to lead, instead spreading rumors and assigning blame. Hundreds of thousands are unnecessarily dead. We’ve necessarily stayed cut off from work, family, friends, school, church, and travel plans to protect ourselves and each other. It feels a lot like death.

We left our church last year. This year I‘ve been watching as the evangelical church in America consistently chooses the hope of political power over truth and justice. Chooses to side with abusers rather than victims. Chooses to marginalize women in the name of Biblical literalism. Chooses to persecute LGBTQIA people rather than love and accept them. Chooses “personal freedom” rather than taking basic steps to protect others amid the pandemic. It feels a lot like death.

In August last year we had a derecho destroy our city. The majority of our tree canopy is gone. Everyone had house damage. Our power was out for almost two weeks. Eight months later, I don’t have to drive further than my own street to see houses still missing siding and fences, roofs with tarps where shingles should be. In my own yard where three old friendly trees once stood, all that remains are ragged scars and chips left by a hurried stump grinder. It feels a lot like death.

There are other stories too personal to post. Stories that aren’t mine to tell. Stories that have kept us awake at night, on the floor in desperation, in helpless gnawing realization of things that aren’t alright. That has often felt a lot like death.

This is the first Easter in my memory that I haven’t been to church to celebrate. That, too, feeels like death.

Somehow, through all this, Jesus still holds on to me. I don’t know how. Even after I put away the fear wrought by legalism, after the habits are ripped away, after the culture that taught me Jesus for 40 years has turned from Him in the name of power and freedom, Jesus is still there. Faithfully loving and sustaining me. Faithfully promising that, in the end, this mess will be redeemed.

In this year that has felt a lot like death I will cling to the hope that Jesus is risen. Somehow, He feels a lot like life.

What systemic repentance might look like for the Evangelical church

There are a few big stories rattling around the American evangelical church community lately that I see as being related. I’m not sure that there’s a single root cause, but there are some common symptoms and conditions that contribute to them all.

There have been barrels of ink used to write on these issues already. I’m primarily thinking about:

Recognition of a broad historical pattern of misogyny within the church.

The #ChurchToo movement, recognizing a long pattern of cover up of sexual abuse and assault in the name of protecting church leaders and “the church’s witness”.

The disgrace of several multi-site megachurch pastors.

Reeling yet? That’s all just within the past five years or so. And there are undoubtedly more revelations to come.

Common threads

A few decades from now I’m sure there will be analyses with better perspective on this stuff, but right here in the middle of it I want to suggest two common threads in all of these.

Powerful, unaccountable men. Whether at the megachurch level or the independent Southern Baptist Church level, men craving power find ways to set up systems that will keep them from accountability. They hand-pick their elder boards. They re-write church bylaws and membership agreements to ensure that they have all the control.

Systemic silencing and ignoring of women If you haven’t read Beth Moore’s post yet, go read it. She’s just one of many, but expresses the issue well. In complementarian churches, women who are themselves fully committed to the idea that they shouldn’t be elders or teachers too often find themselves pushed out of any role that smacks of leadership. Tim Challies, no flaming outlier in the neo-Reformed camp, restricts women from publicly reading Scripture in a worship service. John Piper says that women shouldn’t be police officers because they ought not to be “giving directives” to men. I could go on.

Practical steps going forward

It’s not enough to lament. Real repentance includes taking real steps toward change.

When the doctor tells you that you’ve got heart failure and high blood pressure and are going to die very prematurely if you don’t make some changes, you don’t just say “thanks, doc” and then keep your old lifestyle. You re-evaluate your priorities. Sure, you believed strongly in desserts and cheeseburgers and lots of Netflix time. But if you want to be healthy, you may find that a belief in vegetables and desserts in moderation and regular exercise are also acceptable life choices and will allow you to flourish in a way you wouldn’t otherwise.

Similarly, the evangelical church needs to look at its “life choices” and tightly-held doctrinal distinctives and the fruit that has resulted and make decisions accordingly. How serious are we about repentance?

Accountability Pastors and leaders need real, tangible accountability. For denominations that are structured with congregational autonomy, there should be elder boards that can call pastors on the carpet when need be. We need to take the qualifications for eldership seriously. Not argumentative? Not greedy? Heck, we need to take the fruit of the Spirit seriously. Peace? Patience? Kindness? Self-control? A lot of this stuff is obvious and just needs to be followed.

Additionally, stronger denominational oversight, even an accountability hierarchy, may be appropriate. It’s not a silver bullet - the Roman Catholic church is the largest religious bureaucracy in the world and has its own accountability issues - but something needs to be done. If congregational autonomy is so important that it precludes churches from reporting and protecting other churches from known sex offenders, congregational autonomy is an idol that should be done away with.

Bigger is not better Can we all just agree at this point that big multi-site churches with charismatic preachers streaming in over video are a really, really bad idea? How many more Driscolls and MacDonalds do we need to build and then destroy these empires before we’re willing to acknowledge that this model is unhealthy, produces unhealthy churches, and causes serious hurt to thousands of believers who were a part of those churches? Give me an army of Eugene Petersons ministering in little neighborhood churches rather than a Mark Driscoll or James MacDonald or (dare I even say it) Matt Chandler projected larger than life on a video screen at campuses across the country.

Listen to women and believe their testimony When women and young people come forward with allegations of abuse, we must take them seriously. We must have good processes and training in place at our churches to make sure that children and young people are protected. And we need to be willing to expose abuse if it happens, and learn from it, and improve. This is non-negotiable.

Bring women into leadership It seems obvious that if women were included in the leadership of these churches, and if they were listened to and had power such that they could take action, we would not have the systemic ongoing issues with abuse that we have today. (Again, not a silver bullet - Willow Creek has women in leadership - but still…)

I don’t want to add another thousand words to this post to stake out a position on complementarianism vs. egalitarianism. (OK, so I want to, but that’s another post.) But even pragmatically, if people like Scot McKnight and N. T. Wright - neither of whom can reasonably be accused of being wild-eyed progressives - can find a Scriptural basis for women being ordained into ministry leadership, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether complementarianism is a second- or third-level doctrine that deserves another look.

Finally

Repentance requires action. Repentance for particularly painful, systemic sin probably requires painful, systemic action. Whether the evangelical church in America will be willing to broadly repent remains to be seen. I pray that it will, and commit to doing what I can in my own congregation to act out that repentance.

What are Evangelicals afraid of losing?

Dr. Michael Horton has a wise piece on CT in response to President Trump’s comments to evangelical leaders that they are “one election away from losing everything”.

Nowhere in the New Testament are Christians called to avoid the responsibilities of our temporary citizenship, even though our ultimate citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). However, many of us sound like we’ve staked everything not only on constitutional freedoms but also on social respect, acceptance, and even power. But that comes at the cost of confusing the gospel with Christian nationalism. … Anyone who believes, much less preaches, that evangelical Christians are “one election away from losing everything” in November has forgotten how to sing the psalmist’s warning, “Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save” (Ps. 146:3).

That’ll preach.

-- What are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing? - Christianity Today

Fr. Boules George: A Message to Those Who Kill Us

The priest at one of the Coptic Orthodox churches that was bombed on Palm Sunday responding to the bombings with a message to their killers.

If your church had been bombed and your people killed, would your reaction be ‘Thank You’ and ‘We Love You’? Yeah, probably not. So it’s worth reading.

The Benedict Option (i.e. Christian Cultural Withdrawal)

Rod Dreher has been championing an idea he calls The Benedict Option - as he describes it, “a limited, strategic withdrawal of Christians from the mainstream of American popular culture, for the sake of shoring up our understanding of what the church is, and what we must do to be the church”

St. Benedict of Nursia

Alan Jacobs spins things in a slightly different direction:

So I wonder if a better way to think about the Benedict Option is not as a strategic withdrawal from anything in particular but a strategic attentiveness to the institutions and forms of life within which Christians can flourish.

It’s some interesting reading, even if Dreher can be rather dour. But I really like what Jake Meador has to say about it today over at Mere Orthodoxy.

…perhaps the issue isn’t that the culture has moved away from the faith, but that the faith’s adherents have moved away from it along with the culture–and as the culture we’ve attached ourselves to becomes progressively more antagonistic to orthodoxy we are simply becoming aware of the distance that has opened between the faithful and traditional orthodoxy. We’ve been riding along with the culture even when we shouldn’t have and we’re just now beginning to realize where that ride has taken us.

While there will always be some who feel called to a more significant strategic withdrawal from the culture, Meador’s analysis seems close to the mark. Maybe withdrawing from the culture isn’t something special for this time and era so much as it is a call out from a culture to which we’re far too drawn in. Certainly worth some reading and thought.

MPT: 20 Problems with Progressive Christianity

Matthew Paul Turner says he’s a “progressive Christian”, but that he’s never really owned the label because he’s not entirely sure how to define it. He writes an insightful piece, with a title (“20 Problems with Progressive Christianity”) that’s a bit of a head fake - rather than being a list of 20 items, it’s an essay with 20 “problems” identified throughout.

While I wouldn’t identify myself as being in the same theological place that he is, I do recognize myself in some of his self-descriptions. For instance:

A part of the bigger problem is that it’s easy for many of us onetime conservatives/now progressives to get caught up in our faith being defined by our past as opposed to it being inspired by what’s in front of us (<-Problem number 10). In other words, many of us know exactly what we believe to be true and untrue about the churches we grew up in, the theologies that we were taught, and the perceptions of God that we once worshiped. And there’s nothing wrong with knowing what we believe to be good and true about our pasts. But sometimes we fall onto the path of getting so lost in fighting the ills of our former spiritual lives that we go for long periods of time when that’s all our faith is, one big fight against what was.

I went through that period for quite a while a year or two back. It might’ve been helpful to me for a while, but it was something I had to get beyond if I was going to move forward.

Turner never really gets around to defining what he means by “progressive Christianity”, so I’m not sure whether I’d self-identify as a member or not. I often find myself somewhere in between, not willing to fully endorse the liberal leanings of folks like Rachel Held Evans, but also not fully embracing the conservatism of my more fundamentalist past or the neo-Calvinism to which many of my friends hold.

Down in the comments of Turner’s post, Colorado pastor Jeff Cook proposes a set of “centering affirmations” of progressive Christianity, and these I could probably get behind:

… We believe in a New Creation , not in an escapist soteriology. We do not embrace the Gospel as “the plan of salvation” (a gospel just about me). The Gospel is the royal announcement that Jesus Christ is Lord (a gospel about all of creation). … We have moved from speaking of ethics as simply rules to follow, to seeing the good life as a process of becoming a person fully alive in Christ and in community through the power of the Spirit. … We have moved from thinking history doesn’t matter or that modernity is history’s zenith to seeing the past as full of wisdom to draw on. …We are aware that the Bible must be interpreted by fallible readers. … We elevate Jesus’ life, teachings, resurrection and ascension, and reject an exclusive focus on just the virginal birth and cross. All 6 are necessary to see God and his unveiling story.

If you’ve made it this far through my post, I’ll recommend you go over and read MPT’s post in its’ entirety.

My brain is full: a quick clarification

I realize after writing these last couple of posts that they may make me sound like I’m deeply unhappy or unsatisfied with my current church. Given that lots of my local church friends read my blog, let me assure you that it’s not the case. I’m happy with where we are as a church. I’m encouraged and challenged by the teaching on a regular basis. I enjoy serving as a part of our music team. I’ve made some good friends in the three years we’ve been at Stonebridge, and I know those relationships will only deepen as time goes on.

We’re also involved in a community group (which is a new addition for us this year). It’s possible that as we get to know our group better it will serve as some of the fellowship I’m looking for. But those relationships take time to grow. We’ll see how it goes. And I’m also enthusiastic about the spiritual goals that our church leadership has set out for us this year. They’re good ones. We just have to follow through on them and make them more than just words.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I get an email from my pastor sometime within the next week saying “hey man, read your blog, anything we can talk about? How can we minister to you better?” I love my pastor deeply and greatly appreciate the fact that he will notice it and be faithful as a shepherd to get with me and see what’s up.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think that what I’m looking for is someone or some group to minister to me in a way that I’ve been missing. What I’m looking for is a community of believers who can join, side by side, in agreement that we are all broken and in need of the Gospel to minister to us on a daily basis.

[My apologies: 300+ words is hardly a quick clarification. sigh]

My brain is full, part 2

Yesterday’s post wandered a bit in talking about the relevance of God’s Word even as it is found in the daily readings and prayers of the church. When I started writing I was aiming for an appreciation of the BCP daily prayers and how they have ministered to me even in just the bit I have used them privately. Where I wandered, though, was to the observation that “my brain is full; it is my soul that needs fed”, and I’d like to work through that thought a little bit more today.

Certainly my personal quirks and characteristics help cause this condition: I read a lot. My mind never seems to let go of details and trivia. (Let’s put it this way: I was the kid who at the age of 9 or 10 was reading through encyclopedias in the morning when I’d wake up early.) I do a lot of synthesizing, by which I mean that I’m not so good at creatively staking out my own position, but that I can listen to two or three other positions, evaluate them, and then pull together the pieces into a unified whole that makes sense to me. I also don’t re-read much, because my brain says “yeah, been there, read that”, and it becomes hard to slow down and concentrate on something for a second time.

As a teenager and into my twenties my voracious book appetite combined with the wealth of good books on theological subjects served me well. I read a lot, learned a lot. My bookshelves are still filled with Lewis, Piper, Keller, Wright, Chesterton, and Spurgeon. I read through a lot of Schaeffer. I had a hard time finding the patience to appreciate some of the older theologians; how can you use so many words to say seemingly the same thing over and over? I could sit and talk theology with my church leaders, and before long that desire and aptitude, combined with the ability to apply it in practical ways, drew me into church leadership myself. (Somewhere along the way we had three kids, I over-committed to almost everything, burned out, and changed churches. But that’s another story.)

Our current evangelical culture, and especially the neo-Reformed subculture within it (wherein I find currently myself) seem to highly favor this intellectual, bookish approach. Pastors like John Piper pen profusely. Pastor Mark Driscoll established his own publishing line of theological literature. Tim Keller seems to crank out a book a year (at least). It’s as if you’re not anybody until you’ve published a book. But with very few exceptions, these books don’t seem to really say anything new; the publisher is just pushing an update or a rehash with new cover art and the current big-name pastor as the author.

Now that I’m in my mid-30’s, things seem to have changed in my reading appetite. I can think of only three or four books I’ve read in the past 5 years that have really made me just stop and go “wow, what did I just read?”. Now, maybe I’m just failing to choose the right books. (In that case, I’m open for recommendations, so please leave me a comment or send me an email, FB message, or tweet with your ideas.)

But maybe I’m at a plateau where more head knowledge is not the answer. And this is where I file my desire (expressed yesterday) for the daily corporate practice of Scripture, prayer, and worship. Even that is undoubtedly not the magic answer. Maybe the struggling pursuit of the seemingly elusive daily “quiet time” is a more practical answer. But that, by itself, seems to private and insulated to me. I need community to go with it. Not community for study purposes; I just want to be with people who, like me, have that need in their soul to pray, worship, confess, and hear the Word on a regular basis. If you know where to find it, please let me know.

My brain is full; it is my soul that needs fed.

BHT patron and Twitter friend John H posted earlier today about the “Flash evensong” he participated in last night in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Since St. Paul’s has been closed due to the Occupy London protests happening nearby, there was a “flash” decision to hold a standard Anglican evening prayer service in public outside of the cathedral. (John can be seen in this video, in the back row, wearing a blue, open-collared shirt.)

[Click here to see the video - I removed the embedded video because it annoyingly auto-plays every time my site is loaded.]

John notes how relevant even this standard, everyday service was for the situation:

What really struck me about the service, though, was this: the service was nothing more than the Church of England’s standard evening prayer for tonight, with the psalms and lessons taken from the lectionary, and the hymns and anthem being pretty standard fodder as well. And yet large portions of what was said, sung and prayed seemed to speak very directly to the context in which the service took place.

And further down in the post:

I think it is that “crunchiness” [the against-the-mainstream aspects] of the word of God that turned an exercise that may have had an element of whimsy to it – or at least could have been seen as nothing more than a bunch of mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly Anglican people being “well-meaning” – into something transcendent.

A few thoughts prompted by, if not directly related to, John’s post:

First, this not-quite-comfortable evangelical would’ve loved to be a part of that service. I was greatly moved just watching the short video.

Second, I, too, have been struck by how often the “everyday” readings seem to speak with the subversiveness of God’s kingdom directly to the events of the day. The past few months I have tried, on a maddeningly infrequent basis, to start and end my day with the Book of Common Prayer morning and evening prayers. Even practiced as just a personal reading and prayer, the Scripture and prayer elements of the service have spoken directly to my heart with surprising regularity with regard to the events of my day, both personal and public.

Finally, there is a part of my soul that yearns for a daily corporate practice like this. I would dearly love it if there were some local early-morning gathering around which I could schedule my day. What I really don’t want is the (for me) awkward, informal Bible study and prayer groups that seem to abound in my evangelical church culture. Sitting around in a circle waiting for someone to come up with some thought on the day’s passage and then sharing shallow prayer requests doesn’t feed me in the near the way that the morning prayer liturgy could. I need that daily practice of praise, confession, Scripture and prayer, and the opportunity to do it corporately rather than off by myself.

My brain is full; it is my soul that needs fed.

Hard, true words from @tallskinnykiwi

Andrew Jones (aka “Tall Skinny Kiwi”), “itinerant social entrepreneur”, wandering missionary and prolific blogger, has a hard but true, and dare I say, prophetic post on his blog today. It’s unfortunate that the piece is headlined as an appeal to be chosen to speak on The Nines, because the bulk of the post is about the changes coming for the church and for Christian culture.

Did I mention it was a hard word? Here are just a few of his headline points:

  • Church as we have known it is not the first option for the next generation. Neither is it an affordable option. It is not sustainable in the long term.
  • Seminaries are in trouble.
  • The Christian music industry as we have supported it, is over.
  • The Christian publishing industry, as we have enjoyed it over our lifetime, is over.
  • The church planting movement, in its ecclesiocentic and unholistic form, has played out its song and is now doing an unrequested encore.
  • Prayer meetings are focused on making our outdated methods work better.

“If Americans want to play in the sandbox in global missions and sustainable holistic church ministry”, says Jones, “then they need to listen to what the majority world is already discovering and implementing.” He says that we can and should use this time of recession to re-orient and re-calibrate our thoughts on ministry and mission rather than just asking for more money.

You should go read the piece to hear his whole argument. Hard as it may be, I think Jones is right.