Defenselessness is what makes love indestructible

Fr. Matt Tebbe has a long Facebook post laying out how White Evangelicals in America have a supremacy problem. It’s a good read and compellingly argued, but what I want to share here is the comment conversation between Fr. Matt and Fr. Kenneth Tanner.

Fr. Kenneth:

The healing of this comes by revelation that Jesus Christ is humble and lowly of heart: the infant in the feed box, the criminal on the tree; to worship this God is to be in union with poverty.

This God joins us in the poverty of the grave, and only from that solidarity (with everyone) can we truly know anyone well or live well or die well. Trust in the story of Jesus is the undoing of supremacy.

If you want to know how a Christian can be attracted or seduced by worldly powers, just take a look at what they trust about Jesus Christ.

Fr. Matt:

yes and

Jesus has been (ab)used for centuries, seized and made king, crowned the face and name of supremacist demagoguery and oppression.

Jesus is largely rejected - his life and teaching - in two ways:

  1. that doesn’t work anymore and
  2. Jesus’s teaching isn’t possible/realistic to be obeyed - rather - it functions to bring us to the end of ourselves so we can be ‘saved by faith through grace’.

The paschal mystery is indeed the hope of the world- overcoming the slavery to death in our bodies as we live in love - and what we need in this moment is a robust political theology that makes this embodiment material, concrete, specific, tangible.

And back to Fr. Kenneth:

and that fruit is borne by bearing accurate witness to Jesus Christ … I’m not convinced the American Church knows the story of Jesus, and so we trust in false gods … good politics has its roots in good Christology

to put a finer point on it … God is revealed to us in poverty and surrender; God is poverty … defenselessnees is what makes love indestructible

I am so thankful for these men and their teaching.

On Jimmy Carter and Evangelical salvation anxiety

Former president Jimmy Carter’s state funeral is today. Carter, perhaps one of the most famously evangelical Christians of the 1970s, continued to work in service to God and his neighbor for the four decades after he left the White House. Whether it was building houses with Habitat for Humanity or teaching Sunday School at his local Baptist church, he maintained the humble integrity that was the hallmark of his presidency.

To recognize this, Christianity Today editor Russell Moore (a famous evangelical and Baptist of the current decade) writes in CT today arguing for Carter’s salvation. That, 50 years after his election to the presidency, this is still the topic of debate in the evangelical world highlights the level of anxiety rampant in evangelicalism, even (or maybe especially) in determinism-friendly Calvinist evangelicalism, about salvation assurance coming through having the right doctrine and cultural positions.

I keenly remember this discussion in family settings when I was a kid. My grandparents were all faithful members of mainline Protestant churches (United Methodist and ELCA), and from the midst of our most fundamentalist evangelicalism there were anguished family discussions about whether or not they were “really saved” because they couldn’t/didn’t articulate the Gospel message the way we learned and shared it. As a young teenager I knew enough that I was supposed to be concerned for them, and suspicious of the churches they attended.

My paternal grandfather passed away in 2010, and opportunity of his funeral and the family gatherings around it gave me the chance to hear stories I’d never heard before. I knew my grandpa as a hard working, blue collar guy who loved his family and liked to tell a good joke. I knew from our visits to their house that he was a diligent member of his Lutheran church, with a big cross necklace hanging over his necktie as he headed out the door on Sunday morning. But then I heard about his other practical service. He was a zillion-gallon blood donor. For years he arranged rides so that mentally impaired residents of the local group home could attend church. And I started to ask myself: if evangelicals suspected this man, who faithfully loved his family, was baptized, confessed the historic creeds, participated in the Eucharist regularly, and served his neighbors, was likely “not saved” because he didn’t articulate the same Gospel presentation or support the same political party they did, maybe something was wrong with their (our) evaluation grid.

I was a couple years into my early evangelical deconstruction at that point, but the realization triggered by my grandpa was a significant further step in that direction. Is God really going to put on eternal blast those faithful folks who just didn’t articulate “the gospel” quite right? And how right do you have to be to be “right enough”? (There’s that evangelical anxiety!) And if we can logically posit that even the theologian who has it the most right (I think at this point I was using Al Mohler or John Piper in this argument) is wrong about maybe 10% of his theology, how does he know which 10%? And why doesn’t that inspire a little more humility in his approach to others? And does it really make sense then to believe or fear that there’s some threshold of theological accuracy to pass the heavenly gate?

Fast-forward to today. I now, too, am a member of a mainline Protestant church. I am quite convinced that the hallmarks of a “real faith” are a love for God demonstrated in a loving service to those around us, not in some doctrinal or political purity test. I’m also pretty convinced that, through Jesus, eternal reconciliation is coming for everyone, but that’s a different post.

If you are still anxiously in the middle of the evangelical game of trying to establish a level of doctrinal understanding and correctness that’s “good enough” for God and your church leaders, friends, it’s time to take a lesson from WOPR: the only winning move is not to play.

High enough anxiety

Earlier today a post came across Bluesky that stopped me short. Canadian author Ryan North put it this way:

All pleasures are guilty pleasures if you have high enough anxiety

Now, as far as I know, North is just trying (with some reasonable success) to be funny. But as a former evangelical this single line sums up the angst of modern neo-Calvinism as well as anything I’ve ever seen.

The core conflict of the neo-Reformed theology I spent most of my adult life with was that for all the assertions that God controls and predestines everything, serious believers should have an ongoing concern, verging on fear, that they are not doing enough. Not living piously enough. Not evangelizing enough. Not spending enough time in prayer and Scripture. Not having theological arguments honed well enough. In one breath the pastor would say “you can’t do anything about whether you’re one of the elect or not, it’s all God’s decision if you are saved” and in the next would say “if you’re not doing X or Y or Z you should probably be worried about whether or not you’re actually one of God’s elect”.

Neo-Reformed guiding light John Piper is a sterling example of this sort of divinely-inspired angst. Listen to any sermon of his, read any book, watch any interview, and you will get the sense of a man who is driven with a wretched, endless anxiety about his relationship to God. He’s always on edge, always afraid that he (and by extension, you, his listener) might be knowingly or unknowingly Wasting Your Life or Wasting Your Cancer or wasting your Retirement or missing What Jesus Demands or not Delighting In God or not Desiring God enough. Joy comes with the companion fear that the joy might be misplaced or appreciated a little too much. There is very little chill or rest or peace or pleasure that comes across there.

And let’s face it, friends: if you take the evangelical teaching on eternal conscious torment seriously, it’s hard to see how you could not live that anxiously all the time. Is there even a minute chance that you, or someone you love, is going to experience ultimate torture for all eternity? How could that not make you anxious? How could you ever enjoy life?

My therapist likes to say that there are two basic types of religion: one that has a goal to control, and one who has a goal of life enhancement. It’s a sign of how steeped I was in anxious evangelicalism that I had a visceral reaction to “life enhancement” as a religious goal. Isn’t that self-centered? Wouldn’t that make God mad? Shouldn’t we be God-centered instead?

It took several years of detox under other Christian teachers to find that I could actually be a Christian with a level of peace and chill that seems more in line with what Jesus seemed to be hoping for his followers. It doesn’t include the fear that God is going to eternally torture anyone. It does allow me to think about sin, healing, forgiveness, and godliness in terms of how our behavior encourages or hampers human flourishing. Suddenly the Gospel feels like real “good news” - not in the “hey if you’re desperately lucky and get stuff right you might avoid eternal damnation but you’re not gonna be sure about that until you die” sense but in the “wow that makes me smile and breathe easier” sense.

Friends, if you find yourself in a church that stokes your anxiety about whether or not God loves and will accept you: it doesn’t have to be that way. Jesus came that we might have abundant life (which sounds an awful lot like “life enhancement”, now that I think about it), and gave us peace. Let’s not let anxious teaching rob that from us.

Image credit: Anxiety by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

More mess at The Village Church

A small bombshell dropped in the Neo-Reformed evangelical world with today’s episode of the The Bodies Behind the Bus Podcast (BBTBPOD). BBTBPOD, which centers stories of those harmed by abusive evangelical church situations, today released an interview with a former chair of the elder board at The Village Church (TVC) in Denton, Texas, originally a campus and then a full plant from The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, pastored by Matt Chandler. Chandler is a big name in the Neo-Reformed world. His sermon audio has been very popular; he took over leadership of the Acts 29 church planting network when Mark Driscoll got out of hand, and has authored numerous books.

Today on BBTBPOD, former TVC Denton elder chair Chris revealed that in 2007, leaders from TVC hired Steve Chandler, Pastor Matt’s father, to work as a custodian at the Denton campus, knowing full well that Steve had a history that included confessed child sexual abuse. This history was not made known to Steve’s supervisor or the staff of the Denton campus until 2009, at which point “safety standards and protocols” were put in place. Steve worked in that role, with full access to the building at all times, until 2012. It was not until 2019 that this information was revealed to TVC membership at a members’ meeting. The statement given to the church at that members’ meeting largely lionized Steve, praising him for “steward[ing] his testimony for the edification of the church”. Steve was reportedly given a standing ovation by the membership at the end of the meeting.

That TVC would hire a known child sexual abuser is horrifying. That they would not inform that person’s direct supervisor or insist that safety protocols were immediately in place is, at best, wildly irresponsible. That when it finally came to light, the statement presented to the church served to lionize the offender and ignore the victim is tragic and infuriating. That all this would be done to provide employment for the father of the celebrity lead pastor is awful. That the church leadership would handle it that way in 2019, in the midst of all the other sex abuse scandals churning under the surface in the Southern Baptist Convention (later coming to light in 2022) is inexcusable.

Why am I writing about this here? While I’ve been out of the evangelical church for 4 years now, I spent most of my adult life in it. I was a Driscoll fanboy for a long while, and when he clearly got out of hand, I became a Chandler fanboy. I wrote positively about it when Chandler took over the reins of Acts 29 back in 2012. I have friends who have been members of TVC. So I write this with some feeling of responsibility both to own up to my own responsibility, and to sound the warning to any who still might hear me and read this far.

The Village Church is not a safe place. Its leadership has demonstrated through several well-documented cases that it cannot be trusted to responsibly handle instances of sexual abuse and misconduct. Matt Chandler himself took a leave of absence in 2022 for vaguely-specified misconduct involving “frequent, inappropriate messages” with a woman not his wife. At each instance TVC’s first move has been to protect the church’s reputation rather than to protect the victim. I am personally convinced there is a direct line that can be drawn between the determinist and patriarchal theology that TVC, Acts 29, and similar Neo-Reformed churches teach and their awful handling of abuse. These churches do not deserve our support or our participation. Those who love Jesus should be praying for the truth to come to light, for justice for the criminals, and healing for the victims.

A couple recommended reads: Trusting your Heart, and Christianity as an MLM

A couple posts came through my inbox while I was traveling the last few days which I want to pass on and feel like they have some parallels:

Katelyn Beaty asks “What if you can trust your heart?”

I have written before about evangelicals’ love for playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card. This tactic is regularly used to push people into submission to their leaders’ arguments even when their internal compass says something isn’t right. Beaty calls out this unease with feelings so prevalent in Reformed evangelicalism, and says we need to pay attention to our whole selves, our gut instinct as well as our rational thought.

…I’ve only grown in the belief that our gut is always speaking and deserves to be listened to. “Gut intuition” is distinct from emotions more broadly. But both are pre-rational, something we feel in our bodies before we have the words to articulate them. And I wonder if that’s why a lot of the evangelical world has trouble honoring them: we’ve inherited a mind-body dualism that says that mind is good and the body is bad. And, of course, that the body is the realm of women: messy, “irrational,” “crazy,” prone to quick changes and fluctuations, etc. This is all Plato, not Jesus, folks…

I can’t tell you the number of stories I’ve heard that someone’s “off” feeling about a person, place, or institution proved to be disastrously true, that they should have spoken up sooner but stuffed their feelings in the name of loyalty to a leader or cause. And I wonder if we’d have fewer church scandals if Christians honored intuition as a worthy source of truth — even as a place where the Holy Spirit is speaking to or through us, if only we would listen.

I think she’s onto something there.

Second is Katharine Strange’s post on ‘Christianity vs. Therapy’. In reviewing Anna Gazmarian’s Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, Strange discusses evangelicalism’s long-standing beef with psychology and therapists. Many evangelical churches are strong on Biblical Counseling, a movement which trains laypeople to exclusively use Scripture to counsel people, a movement which is strongly antagonistic to professional psychotherapy. (Oh, do I have thoughts on this. But I’ll save them for another post.)

Strange pulls at another thread in suggesting why evangelicalism is so opposed to therapy, and it resonates with my own experience:

But I think a large part of the problem boils down to the way that Christianity is “sold” in this country. As I’ve written about before, there’s so much pressure to convert our friends and neighbors that what we often end up presenting to the world is a kind of “prosperity gospel lite”—Jesus as cure-all. Being both Christian AND a person with problems is bad for the brand.

This “multi-level marketing” version of Christianity leads to a religion that values a mask of perfection over authenticity. Belonging, in this case, means cutting off parts of ourselves, whether that’s our sexuality/gender expression, our personal struggles, or even the fact that we experience basic feelings like sadness, irritation, envy, etc. It’s toxic positivity as a ticket to sainthood. Churches that buy into this methodology create lonely people even in the midst of community (for what is belonging without authenticity?) They also have a tendency to thrust narcissistic and authoritarian types into leadership because these are precisely the kind of people who are best at never letting the mask slip. Such environments can easily erupt into abuse, religious trauma, perfectionism, and scrupulosity.

While I knew MLMs were largely fueled and run by religious people, I hadn’t ever really thought about the idea that evangelicalism is essentially selling Christianity as a sort of MLM, by MLM principles. Now I can’t unsee it.

Rosaria Butterfield and the trajectory toward anti-LGBTQ violence

Man, Rick Pidcock has become a must-read. His piece this morning on Rosaria Butterfield’s trajectory into anti-LGBTQ hate is really something. She’s one of those people that was lionized at my old evangelical church after she hit the scene - the perfect “ex-gay” story for them to hold up. She still spoke kindly about gay people in the church, even though she loudly said they were wrong. But no more:

Notice the shift in Butterfield’s language over time. She goes from considering Side B Christians as “faithful brothers and sisters” to calling them heretics. She goes from promoting hospitality toward LGBTQ people to promoting hostility, even referring to the conversation as a “war.” She goes from extending mercy to LGBTQ people to cutting off mercy due to thinking God was less merciful than she was. She excuses homophobia. She embraces conversion therapy despite its ineffectiveness and the harm it causes.

Phew.

Rick’s conclusion is spot-on, though. While evangelicals warn about a “slippery slope” of LGBTQ tolerance leading to full acceptance and embrace, they don’t recognize the slope they themselves are on: from dismissal and dehumanization to full-on hatred and violence.

So yes, once you begin interpreting the Bible through a lens of love and wholeness, there can be a slippery slope toward accepting LGBTQ people because planting seeds of love and wholeness will produce the fruit of more love and wholeness.

But there’s also a slippery slope on the other side. And planting seeds that cause the violence of disembodiment and dehumanization will produce the fruit of more disembodiment and dehumanization. The question we must face this Pride month is toward which fruit we want to slide.

Choose love, my friends. Love wins.

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.

The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

I just finished up reading Sarah McCammon’s new book The Exvangelicals and I need to take the time to recommend it here. McCammon, a 40-something NPR journalist, has written a book that’s part memoir and part explainer on where Exvangelicals have come from over the past decade, and, more importantly, why.

When I reviewed Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory earlier this year, I noted at the time that he was joining a list of kindred spirits who I found online or by reading their books, and who turned out to be fellow devout homeschooled kids who grew into adults questioning evangelical distinctives and dismayed by the devolution of white American evangelicalism into Fox News-watching Republican sheep. I named McCammon at this point as another one of those people. Little did I know how familiar her story would be.

I first encountered Sarah McCammon when she was a host on Iowa Public Radio. Eventually I followed her on Twitter, and continued to read and occasionally interact with her as she moved from Iowa to the east coast, eventually to work directly for NPR. Her reporting during the 2016 presidential campaign was nuanced and insightful. In hindsight, I should’ve known why.

In The Exvangelicals, McCammon unpacks her own story and uses it to illustrate the Exvangelical movement. She’s a few years younger than I am, but our stories run parallel tracks: growing up in the Midwest, a devout churchgoing family, culturally sheltered, homeschooled, evangelical youth groups, marrying young, eventually finding her own faith torn as she experienced the wider world. Eventually she left the church and faith fervor of her youth, getting divorced, becoming an Episcopalian, marrying a Jewish man. Despite so much Evangelical rhetoric saying the Exvangelicals are only leaving because they want to be free to enjoy sin, McCammon recognizes that it’s actually really painful:

Leaving conservative evangelicalism means giving up the security of silencing some of life’s most vexing and anxiety-inducing questions with a set of “answers” - about the purpose of life, human origins, and what happens after death. It also means losing an entire community of people who could once be relied on to help celebrate weddings and new babies, organize meal trains when you’re sick or bereaved, and provide a built-in network of support and socialization around a shared set of expectations and ideals.

It’s often felt, for me, like a choice between denying my deepest instincts about truth and morality to preserve that community, or being honest with myself and the rest of the world and risking that loss.

She has summed up there in a single sentence my experience of the last dozen years.

It was interesting reading this book back-to-back with Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife. Lyz is another exvangelical, though I don’t know she’d describe herself that way, who writes with an acerbic fire about coming through her evangelical upbringing and a troubled marriage. (Lyz actually provides one of the blurbs on the back of McCammon’s book.) McCammon’s prose is more NPR, Lyz is more shock jock. McCammon makes me comfortably say “yes, this! Exactly this!”. Lyz makes me uncomfortably say “well, she’s not wrong…” They are both important voices whose words should be read and wrestled with.

The Exvangelicals is a book I would recommend for anyone outside the evangelical experience trying to understand where us weirdos are coming from, and for any one of us Exvangelical weirdos who wants to feel less alone.

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