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The lectionary readings were just some real bangers today
When the Lectionary readings seem ever so timely… First up, from Jeremiah 23:
I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed!” How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.
Substitute “American evangelical preachers” here for “the prophets” and the word still burns with fire.
Then comes Psalm 82, which includes:
Save the weak and the orphan;
defend the humble and needy;
Rescue the weak and the poor;
deliver them from the power of the wicked.
So say we all.
The ‘great cloud of witnesses’ reading from Hebrews is a banger on its own - mocking, flogging, frigging sawn in two, but the bit that stuck out at me this morning was this verse, right before the big “therefore”:
Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.
So all these heroes of the faith still did not get everything that was promised. “WTF?” the reader may rightly ask. Why not?
Because, the author of Hebrews says, they need all of us with them to be complete, to reach fulness. Wowza.
And then there’s the Gospel
I will quote it in full (from Luke 12):
Jesus said, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.”
He also said to the crowds, “When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, ‘It is going to rain’; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat’; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?”
Our priest this morning called to note the specific generational nature of the conflict that Jesus brings. And which among us has not felt that conflict this past decade? So many of us had and continue to have painful disagreements with parents about what it looks like to follow Jesus. We can read the clouds and see the storm brewing. We’re already feeling the wind gusts. We need to buckle in and hold tight. This may well be the time when we make up what is lacking in Christ’s suffering, as we build toward the completeness of the faithfulness of the people of God.
Cultivating Natural Community, or, Making Friends Outside of Church
It’s been a couple weeks since I first read this piece but want to make sure I don’t forget it. Kenneth B. on Substack wrote “Another Bible Study Night Will Fix It… Really????”, and boy did it ring true to me.
Why is Christian community in America so often based on church meetings? Have you ever noticed that churches tend to organize social life around structured gatherings, rather than around the kinds of unplanned, natural friendships that unfold throughout the ordinary rhythms of daily life?
Here is a sample of recurring meetings I’ve seen in various churches: “Bible Study,” “Men’s Group,” “Women’s Group,” “Young Married Couples’ Group,” “Sunday School,” “Vacation Bible School,” “Youth Group,” “Promise Keepers,” “Wednesday Night Service,” “Divorce Recovery Group,” “Alcoholics Anonymous,” “College and Career Group.”
The list is virtually endless. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with organizing groups like these, there is something telling about our need to program fellowship so meticulously.
During my adult years in evangelicalism I was so deep in this I hardly noticed it. It was the water we were swimming in. All of our community interactions were centered around church activities. The furthest we got out of that stream was an occasional lunch or coffee invite - usually initiated by me, and almost never reciprocated. I still haven’t figured out why this was such a struggle.
In my youth this was a thing our family and community seemed to do a lot better. We seemingly constantly had friends over in our home or were over at their homes; youth hangouts were frequent, families would come over for an evening meal… maybe it’s larger in my memory than it was in reality, but it was definitely more frequent than it has been in my adult life. (Was this a product of having a very outgoing father who initiated these meetups? Maybe that’s the difference?)
One of the big consequences in adulthood of having all of our friendships and community built around church activities is that when we left the church, the community (such as it was) went away as well. As in, we left the church and never heard from almost any of them again. Ever.
Kenneth has a vision for what it could look like instead:
This is not meant to be an indictment of the entire Church in America. There are wonderful communities doing beautiful work. But it is an invitation to all of us—myself included—to rethink what we mean when we say we want to “make disciples.” Are we imagining coffee shops, mentorship books, and curriculum? Or are we imagining homes with open doors, unglamorous errands, shared laughter, and long nights of prayer?
I would love to have more friends where the relationship was built around just… being friends. To have around for whatever is going around in our lives. Saturday work project? Sure, let me come over and help for a few hours. Slow weekday evening? Come over for some food and let’s hang out. No event required. Eventually I’d like to be comfortable enough friends that I’m comfortable having you visit without feeling like I have to clean house for an hour beforehand. (Now there’s the true test of a friendship!)
“Normal” Friendships Look Different
Another voice popped into the discussion in my inbox today via Stephanie Jo Warren’s slightly more aggressive post “The Myth of Christian Community”.
If you’ve never been part of a fundamentalist Christian church, here’s what you should know: We were raised to believe that connection was made through confession and that love was shown through pain. Jesus expressed his love by dying on the cross for us, and God demonstrated his love by watching in anguish as his son Jesus was crucified. Because of this, it was natural for us to associate love with pain.
We were told, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” but in practice, that love often appeared as emotional monitoring. Oversharing was seen as a sign of holiness, boundaries were regarded as selfish, and privacy was interpreted as hiding something sinful. As for friendship, it was unconditional; everyone in the church was considered a brother or sister. Yet, in reality, no one truly was.
Now that I’ve left the movement, I’m still learning how to be a person, let alone how to be a friend.
This also rings true to my experience. Emotional monitoring. Oversharing as a sign of holiness. Boundaries regarded as selfishness. She goes on:
There is a distinctive longing experienced by former evangelicals, ex-cult members, and those raised in environments where control replaced genuine connection. It’s a craving for friendships that don’t come with religious or spiritual expectations, for love that isn’t contingent on loyalty tests, and for invitations extended simply because someone enjoys your company- not because they’re trying to ‘pour into your life.”
It’s the pain of realizing that everything you believed about outsiders was wrong. Surprisingly, those who were meant to love you, your church community, were often the ones causing the most harm. Meanwhile, the perceived “enemy” out there can be much safer than the person sitting next to you in the pew.
I resonate with this, too. The past five years outside of Evangelicalism have been a real adventure in learning what it looks like to build relationships - can we use easier terminology here? - to make friends outside of the facilitation of church activities. Unsurprisingly, but jarringly, this only happened when we started getting involved in activities that weren’t church activities. (We never had time for those before!)
Going Forward
My kids have had to learn this post-church friend-making sort of mid-stream in their childhoods. I am happy to see them slowly figuring out how it works and finding their own communities at high school and college. My wife and I are now just a couple years from becoming empty nesters, which means the challenge of community morphs yet again as we work out what our lives look like when they’re not largely structured around kids at home.
Whatever community we find and whatever friends we make, I hope that we can end up eventually with friends who are friends to spend normal time with, doing normal life things. (The evangelical phrase “do life together” came naturally to my mind but the experience of decades puts the lie to it.) Humans need community, need friends to thrive. I hope I’ve still got some years of thriving ahead of me.
My talks at Christ Episcopal Church Adult Forum, May 2025
The past two Sundays I had the opportunity to talk at my church’s Sunday morning Adult Forum. The first Sunday I spent most of an hour just telling my story of growing up in Evangelicalism and eventually leaving it and becoming Episcopal. It’s a long talk, but was good to tell my story and to feel like I finally have enough space and distance from it to start to be able to tell it clearly and fairly.
As I was writing my story for week 1, I had multiple topics that came up where I thought “that’s an important thing about Evangelicalism, and if you didn’t live in it for a while it might not be obvious at all”. So I compiled those into a short list and spent Week 2 talking about them. These topics included:
- Biblicism
- Congregational independence
- Entrepreneurialism
- Gender hierarchy
- Insular cultural environment and the influence of Christian media
- Opposition to Christian Tradition
One of the folks who attended week 1 sent me a link to an Ann Patchett interview with the hope that I’d respond to some comments near the end (starting about 26:20 in the link) where she asks whether what religion you pick really matters at all. It was a perfect final question to respond to and tie off my two weeks of discussion. I won’t give away my answer but I’m happy with where it landed.
Something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant
I’m reading Rowan Williams’ Where God Happens: Discovering Christ in One Another, and this bit is just beautiful:
The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perform, told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labor anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God.
The church’s rationale is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experienceable. And since one of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect our picture of ourselves as right and good, one of the most obvious characteristics of the church ought to be a willingness to abandon anything like competitive virtue (or competitive suffering or competitive victimage, competitive tolerance or competitive intolerance or whatever).”
Bullet Points for a Friday
- Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
- I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
- Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
- Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
- This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
- I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
- Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.
Happy Friday, everybody.
I may have become the stereotypical liberal exvangelical.
On a beautiful Sunday morning, I slept in (until 8).
Kicked off the coffeemaker to brew my locally-roasted beans.
Played Wordle. (Got it in 4.)
Read through my email newsletters for the morning. Realized I was long overdue to support A.R. Moxon. Clicked the link and started a monthly donation. By my count, the 5th recovering homeschooled or super-conservative Christian-schooled evangelical-kid-turned-writer I’m supporting. It’s a whole genre.
Made breakfast. Drank coffee. Started reading a book on social science.
I’m now a member of a church where you don’t have to show up at the crack of dawn and stay all morning to prove your devotion to the cause. My wife and kids aren’t going this morning. (My kids don’t usually. My wife has other plans today.) I’ll show up this morning for the 10:15 service and do my part by getting up to read the OT and Psalm. I’ll be home by 11:30. (The Episcopal Church: Where You Can Love Jesus and Your Trans Kid. ™)
After church I’ll probably hit the neighborhood farmer’s market. (First market of the year today!)
Still evangelical enough that there’s a verse in my head to summarize my morning thoughts:
“When the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”
I'm not claiming any special prescience, but...
I was cleaning up old blog posts here and found this that I wrote back in 2012:
I think it may take the American evangelical church another decade or so to really realize how closely intertwined they are with the Republican party, but my prayer is that the realization hits sooner rather than later. What compounds the issue is that our view of American exceptionalism makes us prideful enough that we are resistant to learn from our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world on the topic.
Little did I expect that, a decade later, the evangelical church would, see it, realize it, and embrace it. God help us.
Reimagining Orthodoxy
Dr. Chris Green shared part of an essay today on a theology of disagreement. There’s a ton of good stuff in it. For example, early on:
Truth be told, what seem to be theological disagreements very often arise from and are borne along by other conflicts rooted deeply in hidden personal and interpersonal anxieties and ambitions. But at least some of our theological disagreements, I want to insist, are in fact the upshot of the Spirit’s transforming work taking shape in our as-yet-unperfected lives, moving us toward the “fullness of Christ” in which we find shalom.
This represents a beautiful freedom that I never found in my life in the American evangelical church.
But further, I want to commend to your thinking what he says about orthodoxy. In the evangelical and fundamentalist church, “orthodoxy” tends to be a cudgel used to keep unwanted questions and questioners away, and to scare the flock away from being tempted toward theological ideas that stray from the party line. Green, though, quotes Rowan Williams to suggest a different approach:
[W]e must reimagine the nature and purpose of orthodoxy. Instead of conceiving of it as a wholly-realized, already-perfected system of thought, we need to recognize it as a fullness of meaning toward which we strive, knowing full well we cannot master it even when in the End we know as we are known. Because the Church’s integrity is gift, not achievement, we can never know in advance “what will be drawn out of us by the pressure of Christ’s reality, what the full shape of a future orthodoxy might be.”
He continues, quoting Williams further:
Orthodoxy is not a system first and foremost of things you’ve got to believe, things you’ve got to tick off, but is a fullness, a richness of understanding. Orthodox is less an attempt just to make sure everybody thinks the same, and more like an attempt to keep Christian language as rich, as comprehensive as possible. Not comprehensive in the sense of getting everything in somehow, but comprehensive in the sense of keeping a vision of the whole universe in God’s purpose and action together.
A lot to chew on there, but I love the vision of orthodoxy as a commitment to keeping a vision for God’s continuing purpose and action to which we are only slowly understanding. Beautiful stuff.
Did the Emerging Church Fail?
Richard Beck has a series going right now in which he asserts that the Emerging Church movement failed. I’m usually pretty aligned with Beck but I’m not so sure this time.
He defines the Emerging Church by some familiar characteristics:
- Engagement with post-modernism
- Struggle with evangelical doctrinal positions, leading to epistemic humility
- New awareness of liturgy
- An “aesthetic component”, including skinny jeans and a “coffee shop vibe”
That group, Beck argues, “never was able to establish a broad network of churches”, and eventually failed because “evangelism became deconstruction”, and, says Beck, “You can’t build churches upon deconstruction.”
I think Beck is setting up a bit of a straw man here to try to make point he wants to make against deconstruction. But I think there’s an alternate history to Beck’s that comes to a different conclusion.
I think we can see two developments from the Emergent Church of the early 2000s.
First, It’s easy to forget that along with Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, people like Mark Driscoll also came along under the Emergent label. The part of Emergent that went the way of Driscoll took an aggressive posture in their engagement with post-modernism, and rejected epistemic humility, but took up at least some pieces of a new liturgy, and were the exemplars of Beck’s skinny jeans-wearing, beer-drinking, coffee shop vibing “aesthetic component”. In short order they would reject McLaren and Bell’s post-modernism and fall into doctrinal fundamentalism, but they didn’t just disappear as Beck asserts.
Second, Beck severely underplays the movement of many in the Emergent Church into mainstream denominations. Rachel Held Evans famously wrote about “going Episcopal”. Nadia Bolz Weber is ELCA. Scot McKnight became Anglican. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk, is the patron saint of the whole movement. Anecdotally, at the less-famous level, I see a steady stream of exvangelicals deconstructing, embracing epistemic humility, rediscovering the historic liturgy, and embracing a more traditional “aesthetic component” by joining high church mainline traditions.
So did the Emerging Church “fail” as Beck suggests? Maybe, if you construct your definitions as narrowly as he does. But look just a little more broadly and you can trace a path from the Emergent deconstructionists of the early 2000s to the exvangelicals of the 2010s and 2020s and into the pews of the mainline. Whether we will bring the mainline to a resurgence or only forestall its demise by a few more decades remains to be seen.
We have attended an Episcopal church now for a few months, enough times at least to get sucked into volunteering for small roles on a Sunday morning. A month ago Becky and I served as greeters/ushers for the service, which she noted might be the first time we’ve ever signed up for a service task that we did together. (Usually I’m the musician and she’s working in the kitchen somewhere.)
Then a couple weeks ago I did the musician thing and played the piano for a service. But we have a regular pianist on the payroll who’s not me (which is a good thing!) so this upcoming Sunday I’m trying something else: I’m gonna be a reader.
I have been assigned the Old Testament reading and the Psalm. I will be practicing ahead of time so that we can avoid any “banana” moments.