evangelicalism
- Read Jane’s story of sexual assault cover-up at The Masters College or about
- The abuse scandal at Sovereign Grace Churches, or about
- Paige Patterson getting the boot from Southwestern Baptist Seminary, or about
- The abuse mess at Southern Baptist churches that the Houston Chronicle has been reporting on this week.
- Mark Driscoll built and then destroyed the Mars Hill empire.
- Bill Hybels at Willow Creek was revealed to have a long unchecked history of sexual misconduct which ended up with the resignation of both of his replacement pastors and the Willow elder board.
- Just this week James MacDonald was fired by Harvest Bible Chapel after suing journalists who had been investigating abuse coverups at HBC, including a bizarre recording of MacDonald talking with a Chicago radio host about trying to put illegal porn on the computer of the CEO of Christianity Today.
- Plan and implement Trinitarian, gospel-centered music (Col. 3:16) for Sunday worship services, and special services as required, in consultation with the Elders
- Recruit, train, and rehearse members of the music team.
- Disciple music team members in a gospel-centered, historic worship paradigm
- Coordinate with A/V team regularly to assure quality sound and video/visuals for each presentation and oversee training of A/V volunteers
- Attend weekly meetings with the Elders and Leadership Team.
- Committed to definitive Nicene orthodoxy and gospel-centeredness in doctrine, life, and music
- Possess a solid understanding of and commitment to historic Christian worship
- Band-driven rather than orchestral-driven style of music
- Must be able to incorporate strings, percussion, and other instruments into contemporary-band driven arrangements
- Must be able to play piano and/or guitar in a contemporary band setting
- Minimum of bachelor’s degree in music and/or 5 years' related church or industry experience. Possessing an MDiv or MA in theology is ideal.
- High-level of overall musicianship
- A builder/self-motivated/entrepreneurial spirit
- Sanguine stage presence
- Experience in leading corporate worship, and knowledge of directing, orchestrating, and coordinating various instruments in a band
- Ability to work with and train vocalists in singing of parts
- Ability to incorporate backing tracks and loops into regular Sunday and special services
- Leadership ability and ability to work with and inspire volunteers
- “Trust in the inerrancy of Scripture” is waning. This is bad.
- This is happening in large part because Christians have more information than they used to have.
- If Christians having this information causes a bad result… maybe Christians shouldn’t have this information?
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
Power corrupts. Including religious power.
Former Christianity Today editor Katelyn Beaty has a great op-ed over on RNS making the case that the #ChurchToo scandal isn’t as much a case of sex abuse as it is a case of power abuse. And while the church has spent a lot of time talking about the proper boundaries and exercise of sex, it has spent almost no time talking about the proper boundaries and exercise of power.
If money, sex and power are the unholy trinity of spiritual temptation, arguably most Christians have a relatively paltry understanding of the third. Churches teach regular tithing and Dave Ramsey-style financial management. Scads of books and articles are written every year helping Christians practice sexual purity before marriage and sexual fulfillment within it. By contrast, little is taught and written about power and its corrosive effects.
Beaty goes on to suggest three actions for the church if we want to avoid continued scandals like the one with Bill Hybels at Willow Creek. She hits the nail right on the head with the first one:
Churches must seek leaders who are accountable and vulnerable, not just charismatic and driven.
Hybels and Willow Creek have taught the evangelical church culture a lot of lessons over the past two decades about church growth and the megachurch model. Now maybe it’s time to start un-learning those lessons. Beaty has some good ideas on where to start.
-- As Willow Creek reels, churches must reckon with how power corrupts
Zahnd: Christianity vs. Biblicism
I attended the Water to Wine Gathering at Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO a couple weekends ago. WOLC’s pastor Brian Zahnd included in one of his talks some discussion of the dangers of biblicism. I had hoped to summarize that talk in a blog post, but happily Zahnd has published a post of his own doing just that. (It’s actually the preface to an upcoming book, but he shared it on his blog.) I find his thinking very helpful in how we approach and interpret the Bible.
I particularly enjoy his opening metaphor:
As modern Christians we are children of a broken home. Five centuries ago the Western church went through a bitter divorce that divided European Christians and their heirs into estranged Catholic and Protestant families. The reality that the Renaissance church was in desperate need of reformation doesn’t change the fact that along with a reformation there also came an ugly split that divided the church’s children between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father. In the divorce settlement (to push the metaphor a bit further) Catholic Mom got a long history, a rich tradition, and a unified church, but all Protestant Dad got was the Bible. Without history, tradition, or a magisterium, the Bible had to be everything for Protestant Dad — and Protestants have made the most of it.
He goes on to liken the Bible to rich soil out of which grows the tree that is the Christian faith. The Christian faith is rooted in and draws nourishment from the Bible, but Christianity and the Bible are not synonymous. To approach it this way, says Zahnd,
…is both conservative and progressive. Conservative in that it recognizes the inviolability of Scripture. Progressive in that it makes a vital distinction between the living faith and the historic text.
I probably have some readers getting very nervous at this point, but if so I would really recommend reading the whole thing. Zahnd and others like him are pointing the way to embrace Scripture while at the same time moving past reading it in a flat, biblicistic way.
Christ has made our hearts glad... and is waiting for our politics to catch up
Matthew Lee Anderson has published over on Medium a transcription of a great little talk he gave recently at the Evangelical Theological Society. [Aside: I cringe every time I see good authors publishing stuff at Medium… it’s not hard to own your own words on a site of your own, come on, folks!]
Anderson makes the point that, as much as anything, it’s evangelicals' attitude that needs to change - an approach that Andrew Wilson, picking up from Anderson and riffing off Rod Dreher, describes as The Taylor Swift Option:
[T]he conservative evangelical political witness has been fueled by a narrative of decline and of its own precarious position in the world. This narrative, that to be an evangelical means to be an embattled minority fighting the dark forces of an oppressive secularism lurking in every public school and in every corner of Hollywood, empowered evangelicals to be adept users of the grievance politics we are now so familiar with from other communities… Every response by evangelicals to contemporary events happens against this backdrop, whether we like it or not, or were responsible for it or not. Regardless of our intentions, our denunciations of the spirit of our age invariably take on the atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and resentment that has suffused evangelicalism’s political life for the past 30 years. The first task, then, is to purge ourselves of such affections and passions and establish the evangelical political witness on a new foundation. Such fear and resentment cannot be simply verbally repudiated; they must be expunged, rooted out and replaced by a hope that is less spoken of directly and more felt, a hope that we do not name but that permeates and suffuses our response to culture war conflicts. Such good cheer must be hearty, for Christ hath made our hearts glad—and he is waiting for our political discourse to someday catch up. Second, with this gladness I would commend a deflationary attitude toward those grand narratives of decline and to the day-to-day disputes and dramas that we think embody them. If the West is dying….so? If we are all going to be bigots, well, we might as well get on with it and become likeable bigots. If “marginalization” or “dhimmitude” are the new form of persecution, I for one will happily take it over many of the alternatives. The sooner we turn such instruments of stigma into pieces of art, the sooner we will begin actually resisting the very ideology we claim to be. As the prophet Taylor Swift hath said unto us, “haters gonna hate, hate, hate….you just gotta shake, shake, shake…”
I’m not much for claiming the evangelical label myself these days, but I think Matt’s put his finger on changes that have to be made if the evangelical church is ever to regain its witness in America.
I’m reminded of the subtle dig thrown by Metropolitan Tikhon Mollard in the statement from the Orthodox church after the Obergefell ruling back in 2015. His opening paragraph:
The recent ruling by the US Supreme Court on the legality of “same-sex marriages” has received much press coverage and has already caused some consternation about its implications and ramifications. But we Orthodox Christians must rest assured that the teaching of our Holy Church on the Mystery of Marriage remains the same as it has been for millennia.
“Eh, what’s that, a “recent ruling”? The church has been around for millennia. We’ll survive this. "
Regardless of your feelings about Obergefell, this is the sort of attitude the evangelical church should be taking more often.
Now if I could just get that Taylor Swift song out of my head…
Albert Mohler, the SBC, and #MeToo
I’ve been chewing on Dr. Albert Mohler’s post on The Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention for the past several days. If you’re interested in the topic of the #MeToo movement and the evangelical church, it’s worth a read. In it Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, recognizes the rot of sexual misconduct and misogyny that is being brought to light in the Southern Baptist Church and more broadly in evangelicalism, and does what looks like some soul-searching for answers why.
Is the problem theological? Has the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention come to this? Is this what thousands of Southern Baptists were hoping for when they worked so hard to see this denomination returned to its theological convictions, its seminaries return to teaching the inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures, its ministries solidly established on the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Did we win confessional integrity only to sacrifice our moral integrity? This is exactly what those who opposed the Conservative Resurgence warned would happen. They claimed that the effort to recover the denomination theologically was just a disguised move to capture the denomination for a new set of power-hungry leaders. I know that was not true. I must insist that this was not true. But, it sure looks like their prophecies had some merit after all.
On one hand, this is a pretty stunning bit of realization for Mohler. But on the other hand, I don’t think he really goes far enough. Because he doesn’t have any particular change to propose, other than “people should stop doing that stuff, and we should stop covering it up”. As Jake Meador says in his brilliant piece on this topic, “I can’t help wondering: Where do Mohler and a few other prominent evangelical leaders go from here?”
A few cautious words of critique…
It feels like Mohler gets this close to having a more eye-opening realization, but just can’t get there. Sure, people warned that this patriarchal complementarian theology would lend itself toward such abuses. And those warnings “had some merit”. But… that can’t possibly mean that those people were right, can it?
Though it sounds like a jest, I’ve frequently said quite seriously that I imagine at least 20% of my theological beliefs are wrong… I just don’t know which 20% those are. And so while I clearly think my current beliefs are correct (because if they weren’t, I’d change them), I remind myself to try to have the humility to realize that unquestionably some of them are wrong.
I’ll allow that for someone as erudite as Dr. Mohler we might lower his likely percent-wrong-ness to something smaller than my own - 10%? Single digits? But it’s still folly to suggest that it approaches 0%. What I wish we would see from Mohler is that next step to acknowledge even just the hint of a possibility that patriarchalism/complementarianism might be in that small percentage he could admit might be up for grabs - not to full-up change his position on it, but just to admit that maybe it’s worth some open discussion.
An alternate approach
I really appreciated Richard Beck’s analysis of the situation today. (I almost just linked to it instead of writing this post…)
I appreciate [Mohler’s] both/and balancing act here, trying to keep the complementarian structure yet speak a strong word for protecting the abused. And yet, this is the exact same balancing act that evangelicals and the SBC have been preaching and attempting for generations. And by Mohler’s own admission, it has brought the judgment of God down upon them. In short, Mohler seems genuinely anguished and searching for answers, but he can’t offer an accurate diagnosis of what went wrong. He seems legitimately perplexed. He says nothing beyond the same old, same old: Men are in charge, but they shouldn’t abuse the women under their leadership. But clearly, that’s been a disaster. And it’s not really hard to see why. I think the problem evangelicals are having here is the same problem they always have. They only look at the Bible and they ignore human experience. Evangelicals always make man serve the Sabbath, rather than having the Sabbath serve man. In this instance, the Sabbath is “God’s plan for marriage and the church,” and men and women must conform to that plan. Come hell or high water. Well, they’ve found hell and high water.
Beck goes on to make the case that the Scripture is not conclusive as to either complementarianism or egalitarianism, and that with freedom in where we land on the question, we should consider the results of the positions as we look for a landing place. Egalitarianism, Beck argues, provides more concrete, structural ways of protecting women. (It’s worth reading Beck’s whole piece - I’ve summarized about 6 paragraphs of his here.)
Time to wrap this up…
The position and argument that Beck describes is more or less where I find myself these days. While I know and respect many who would disagree (on both ends of the spectrum!), I think there’s plenty of room to argue the topic, and I don’t think it’s essential to the gospel message. I think it is reasonable and helpful to look at the fruit these positions have produced over the past few decades, too. And I pray that, regardless of where churches and pastors land on complementarianism / egalitarianism, concrete, structural safeguards are in place to ensure that women are not just protected but lifted up as equals and co-heirs of the Kingdom.
What will happen with the children of post-evangelicals?
Richard Beck has an insightful piece up on a topic that’s had me thinking. While he’s a decade older and from a different denominational background than I am, he and I have traveled a similar path from a strict conservative Christianity into a progressive post-evangelicalism. But what impact, he asks, does this have on our children?
Anyway, we were talking about how our kids now view the church. We’ve become liberal in our views and so we’ve raised our kids as liberals. We’ve preached messages of tolerance and inclusion. And we’ve been successful. Our kids don’t look on the world with judgment and suspicion. They welcome difference. But we’ve noticed that this comes with a price. Our kids don’t have the same loyalty to the church as we do. We were raised conservatively, so going and being loyal to a local church is hardwired into us. We can’t imagine not going to church. It’s who we are. But our kids weren’t raised by conservatives, they were raised by us, post-evangelical liberals. Consequently, our kids don’t have that same loyalty toward the church. So we were talking about this paradox in our small group, how our kids weren’t raised by our parents, they were raised by us, and how that’s made our kids unlike us. Especially when it comes to how we feel about church. Basically, our kids aren’t post-evangelicals. They are liberals.
He goes on to say that he doesn’t mean that being a liberal is a bad thing, but that he wonders if his children will have a rootedness in a community and deep sense of belonging that he experienced growing up in a more conservative environment.
I’ve had similar questions about raising my own children. While I consider myself pretty solidly post-evangelical, as a family we have spent the last decade as committed members of a fairly conservative evangelical church. My kids attend Sunday School and youth group and get taught many of the same things I did when I was their age. Then they come home and I feel the tension keenly when we have discussions about hot topics that have come up - things like evolution, gender roles, religious tolerance, and historical and textual criticism of the Bible.
Maybe my willingness to stay committed to a conservative church gives lie to the claim that I’m post-evangelical. I guess that’s ok with me - it’s not like post-evangelicalism is a club for which I need to establish my bona fides. What I’m really hoping for my kids is that we can find a sweet spot in the middle - one that doesn’t view orthodox doctrine and social responsibility as an either/or proposition but rather a both/and, one that sees questions as a sign of a strong faith rather than a weak one about to shatter.
Maybe it’s truly the journey that has shaped my theology and Christian outlook into what it is today, but I’m holding onto hope that my children can find their path to a confident faith even through being raised by a meandering post-evangelical.
The Gospel Coalition has its #MeToo moment
The pace of sexual abuse allegations and resignations / firings in the wake of the #MeToo movement has been stunning. Since early October when Harvey Weinstein was deposed from his organization, executives, journalists, actors, athletes, and doctors with patterns of abuse have been uncovered and summarily fired, retired, and replaced.
Last week, the trial of US Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar provided the most heartbreaking story yet as 160 women gave victim impact statements, confronting a man who had abused each of them under the guise of providing medical treatment. (As many as 265 people have now come forward accusing Nassar of abuse.) Rachael Denhollander, a victim of Nassar’s as a teen, was the key witness in his prosecution and provided the capstone victim impact statement last Friday. In a 30-minute address in the courtroom, Denhollander spoke bluntly about the systems that had failed her and Nassar’s other victims, about her struggles to advocate for abuse victims, and then about the good news of the Gospel.
Denhollander’s statement went viral. My Facebook and Twitter feeds were full of Christians, from leaders to laymen, lionizing her courage and willingness to share the Gospel so publicly. But from a close reading of her statement, there was a question stuck in my head: she said that her victim advocacy “cost me my church”. What was that all about?
Yesterday, in a fantastic interview with Christianity Today, the other shoe dropped. Rachael revealed that the church she lost was a church “directly involved in restoring” Sovereign Grace founder C. J. Mahaney, who left his pastorate after being accused of covering up sexual abuse within his church network. She says that she and her husband were told by multiple church elders that this church ‘wasn’t the place for them’ if they were going to speak out for abuse victims that way.
This hits close to home.
Mahaney was a council member of The Gospel Coalition (TGC), a group that is strongly influential in the evangelical circles I’ve been in all my life. TGC leaders have consistently supported Mahaney, with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler making jokes about the accusations against Mahaney while introducing him as a “guest speaker” at the “Together for the Gospel” (T4G) conference in 2016. Mahaney resigned from the TGC council after the abuse scandal broke, but has slowly, without publicly addressing the allegations, worked his way back into good standing with the group. He is now back as a regular headline plenary speaker at T4G 2018.
Mahaney isn’t the only T4G plenary speaker in the penumbra of this kind of allegations. A former student at The Master’s College, founded by John MacArthur, has come forward to allege that the leaders of that college forced her into a “biblical counseling” session with her abuser, and then threatened church discipline if she refused to drop charges, eventually kicking her out of the school.
It’s time for The Gospel Coalition to come to grips with their own #MeToo moment.
TGC is filled with men (and yes, it’s only men) who have served long in ministry and been helpful to many. I’ve personally benefited from the teaching of MacArthur and Matt Chandler and TGC founder Don Carson over the years. But in this cultural moment, their willing blindness to these issues is inexcusable, and their silence is deafening. Indeed, this planned T4G 2018 seminar leads me to believe they still really don’t get it:
We can do better.
How loudly would it speak to the watching world if Rachael Denhollander were invited to be a plenary speaker at T4G18? For the leaders of the theological movement that Rachael and her husband are a part of to recognize their failures in the area of addressing abuse, to repent, and to hear the truth spoken by their sister?
Rachael is a survivor of abuse and mistreatment from the hands of both a despicable doctor and a group of church leaders more intent on protecting themselves than their sheep. Her words cry out to them like the blood of Cain’s brother calling from the ground. From the end of her interview with CT:
First, the gospel of Jesus Christ does not need your protection. It defies the gospel of Christ when we do not call out abuse and enable abuse in our own church. Jesus Christ does not need your protection; he needs your obedience. Obedience means that you pursue justice and you stand up for the oppressed and you stand up for the victimized, and you tell the truth about the evil of sexual assault and the evil of covering it up. Second, that obedience costs. It means that you will have to speak out against your own community. It will cost to stand up for the oppressed, and it should. If we’re not speaking out when it costs, then it doesn’t matter to us enough.
Rachael Denhollander is a hero and example to us all. It’s time for The Gospel Coalition to admit their complicity in these things and show true repentance. Come on, guys, set an example for us. Invite Rachael to speak at T4G. Let’s show the world what it can really mean to be together for the Gospel.
15-year-old Chris would be in disbelief
File this under “things that would’ve stunned the 15-year-old Chris”.
As a teenager, the evangelical Christian culture we were in lionized people like Jay Sekulow. He founded the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which was out there fighting against the secular world to protect Christians' rights. He argued and won a 9-0 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed Jews for Jesus could distribute evangelistic pamphlets at Los Angeles International Airport. A sterling example for Christian young people to look up to.
At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was spoken of with disgust. Anti-Christian. There to take away our religious liberty. Thank God we have people like Jay Sekulow to fight them on our behalf.
Fast-forward 25 years.
We now have a President who has been described by Jerry Fallwell Jr. as “evangelicals' dream president”. In that president’s flurry of anti-immigrant activity, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now looking to deport more than 100 Iraqi Christians, most of whom have been in the country legally for many years, and send them back to Iraq where they are a heavily persecuted minority.
Wait, what? Christians immigrants being deported? Where are the religious liberty groups like the ACLJ and our brave heroes like Jay Sekulow?
Oh, that’s right: Sekulow is currently a part of the President’s legal team and is making the rounds of the Sunday news talk shows arguing with TV hosts about why the President’s tweets saying “I am under investigation” don’t really mean that he’s under investigation.
And who is standing up for the Iraqi Christians?
Yes, I know all the objections that will come back to this. Not all evangelicals. Franklin Graham actually broke with the President on this one. Some of the deportees have criminal records. The ACLU supports some causes I disapprove of. Etc, etc.
But really, this is such a stunning reversal of positions (or at least, my perception of those positions) over the past couple decades that it’s enough to set my head spinning. It also makes me happy to have set up a recurring monthly donation to the ACLU.
“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” - Micah 6:8, NIV
A Little Plastic Surgery for the Body of Christ
As a musician and long-term volunteer worship leader, I have plenty of opinions when it comes to church music. So this morning when I came across a job posting for a Music Director position I was brought up short. And boy, do I have opinions.
Here’s the job posting. On The Gospel Coalition website, it’s for Paramount Church of Jacksonville, Florida. It’s hard to tell from their church website how large their church is, but there appears to be one paid staff pastor and about a dozen deacons.
So here’s the job posting, which comes in 3 sections. I’m bolding the things that stick out to me:
A. General Description of Position
Paramount Church is a gospel-centered church in Jacksonville FL. The Director of Music is responsible for designing and implementing a style of music that is contemporary and band-driven yet not contemporary for the sake of novel, innovative creativity. The ideal candidate for this position will be committed to the centrality of the gospel in all things and possess a solid knowledge of and commitment to the historic Christian worship of the church. The Director will coordinate music plans with the Preaching/Teaching elder, and recruit, direct, and train a team of volunteer musicians. Significant musical experience in performing and directing a contemporary band along with experience in songwriting and production is ideal.
I’m still trying to figure out what “not contemporary for the sake of novel, innovative creativity” means. How exactly do you have un-novel, non-innovative creativity? It is OK to be contemporary as long as we’re copying others and not doing our own thing? But that’s just a small quibble.
“Significant musical experience in performing and directing a contemporary band along with experience in songwriting and production.” That’s a lot. Wow.
B. Position Duties and Responsibilities
OK, that’s fairly straightforward. Aside from the “gospel-centered” buzzwords that add more branding than meaning any more, that sounds like a standard music director position.
But here comes the big list. Hold on tight!
C. Position Qualifications
Holy cow. Really? Must be able to incorporate strings, percussion, other instruments into a contemporary band. Oh, and also incorporate backing tracks and loops. And also be able to direct and orchestrate the instruments in the band.
And what the heck is a “sanguine stage presence” anyway?
But here was the kicker to me:
(Part-Time, pay commensurate with experience)
This is a PART-TIME position.
That’s right, you need to be able to write songs, orchestrate, build and lead a team, plan and arrange services including tracks and loops, rehearse, perform, meet with the church leadership on a regular basis, and in the best case would have an MDiv. For a part-time position.
Now, maybe I’m just 39 and out of touch, and there will be a hundred qualified candidates beating down the door of Paramount Church to audition for this position. But really? Are these wise expectations for church music leading, or wise leadership burdens to place on a part-time leadership position?
I fear that so often in the evangelical American church we have set our music performance and production standards so high that the focus is on the production more than the actual act of congregational worship, and that none save the already-professional musicians need apply to participate as a part of the worship bands.
Job posts like this feel like we’re signing the Body of Christ up for plastic surgery when what we really need is just to get it to the gym for regular workouts.
The church should be the incubator for and encourager of the young musicians coming up in it. I am biased here but can speak from a lifetime of having had that experience in the church. From singing special music with my dad and brothers when the youngest was so small he had to be held so he could be seen above the pulpit, to playing Bach for Sunday night offertories when I was just learning the piano, to leading worship teams in college when I was not nearly experienced enough, my musical development has been the product of a multitude of churches that didn’t want professionalism so much as service.
Yes, some standards are appropriate. Some talent is needed. But let’s not set our production standards so high that none but trained professionals can meet them. And let’s not set our job expectations so high that we eliminate the talented amateurs from the conversation. The church can and should be developing these leaders from the inside. To always be searching for professionals from the outside is both unhealthy and unsustainable.
Words matter
O. Alan Noble has a really good piece over on the CT website about the importance of Christians being careful about the truth, especially when it comes to political debates.
I heard a story recently about a fairly well-known evangelical figure who was confronted about public statements he had made in writing and interviews… When the facts became overwhelming, this influential evangelical conceded that he had been playing fast and loose with facts. However, since his overall message was true and important, he reasoned, it was justifiable to fudge the details in order to motivate voters to make the right decision. … The belief that American voters must be manipulated rather than reasoned with if we want to institute any meaningful change is endemic. But this belief is essentially nihilist because it makes all political discourse a matter of coercion, a matter of who is doing the coercing and to what ends. I call this nihilist because it makes power, not truth, goodness, or beauty, the foundation of politics.
As I like to say: words matter.
I am sure I’ve been guilty of this sort of generalizing and overstating positions of people I disagree with - so here’s my renewed commitment to not do so. Let us speak the truth, be honest about the facts, and trust that God is at work.
Especially in this election year.
Oh, and go read the whole article. It’s worth it.
Fiet: Wheaton College and the Fear Machine
Midwestern pastor (and Wheaton alum) April Fiet has some really good thoughts today about the Wheaton College brouhaha around professor Larycia Hawkins' comments about Muslims and Christians worshiping the “same God”.
Fiet doesn’t tackle the comments themselves, but rather our approach to them, regardless of our position.
What troubles me the most deeply about what is happening at Wheaton has very little to do with statements of faith, and more to do with a hermeneutic of suspicion. More narrowly, I am troubled by the fear that seems to be driving much of the conversation. It seems to me that too many conversations within the church are being powered by fear rather than by love for one another.
She talks about some of the fears she sees, and some of the really good things she has seen happen when fear was not so prevalent. And I really like this reminder:
Fear cannot be the motivating factor for the way Christians live, move, and exist in this world. When writing about the Christian life, the author of Hebrews put it this way: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:1-2a) We run as people motivated by the cloud of witnesses all around us, and we run with our eyes on Jesus. We are not running because we’re afraid. We are not running because there’s something scary chasing us. We’re running as part of a group that has all eyes fixed on Jesus.
I really appreciate her focus here. It dovetails nicely, too, with something one of my pastors has been saying recently on this topic, which is that even if we disagree with Professor Hawkins' position, we can make good progress in not “othering” our Muslim neighbors simply by remembering and adhering to God’s command to love our neighbor.
Anyhow, Fiet’s piece: recommended reading.
Meador: on Intervarsity and Black Lives Matter
Jake Meador over at Mere O has a really good piece today on the white evangelical response to the messages at Urbana last month, and more generally to the Black Lives Matter movement:
We do not have to endorse everything about the organization Black Lives Matter. We shouldn’t feel like we cannot ask questions—even critical questions—about speeches like the one given by Michelle. But we also should not be instinctively suspicious of the claims of our black neighbors. Our nation’s history is such that we should have no difficulty believing our black neighbors when they tell us about what life is like for black people in America today. Indeed, given our nation’s appalling history it would be more surprising if they didn’t have any problems.
Definitely worth reading the whole thing.
Too much knowledge about the Bible a bad thing?
In a recent update of Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal they interviewed Josh McDowell about, among other things, current trends on the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. Here’s how the first bit went:
Q: Trust in the inerrancy of Scripture, even among some evangelicals, has waned in recent years. Why do you think this is? There is no one reason. I think one of the major reasons is the information glut on the Internet. The Internet is so gigantic. It has leveled the playing field. Atheists and agnostics have such ready access to our kids. It didn’t use to be this way. Now, information—good and bad—is just one click away. Pastors, youth pastors, professors, and others are being confronted with deep theological, philosophical, and historical challenges to the Scriptures that no one would even hear about until their fourth year at a university. Believers are being confronted with so many opposing positions on the Scriptures—issues the majority from past generations simply didn’t confront. This has tended to undermine people’s belief system. That is why we need to redouble our efforts to communicate biblical truth.
"Gutenberg Bible" by Raul654. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I think McDowell’s point is valid, but I’m a little disturbed about what it seems to imply. If I were to boil the Q&A down, the reasoning might go like this:
Now, McDowell doesn’t go fully there - he says that we just need to try even harder to communicate biblical truth - but I get wary any time I hear an argument that says the problem was caused by people knowing too much.
If you have an argument that you’re fully confident is true, shouldn’t you welcome the fact that people want to understand more about the Scripture, where it came from, how God uses it, and so on? If there are “deep theological, philosophical, and historical challenges to the Scriptures”, shouldn’t Evangelical leaders be addressing them head-on rather than decrying their broader availability?
Am I overreacting here?
I’m a bit put off by the phrase “trust in the inerrancy of the Scripture”. Of all the things Christians are called to trust in, that’s not one of them.
It seems likely to me that Evangelical leaders have often briskly asserted “inerrancy” as a linchpin for maintaining beliefs about other things (young-earth creationism, homosexuality, complementarianism, etc, etc) either without fully teasing out the difficult nuances of what “inerrancy” means, or (more likely) without dealing with the reality that many preachers will teach on “inerrancy” without any appreciation for those nuances.
Generations of Christians before may have gone through life without ever really stopping to think about what “inerrancy” meant, but as the internet broadens our social and intellectual horizons, the right response isn’t to decry that broadening, but to teach with more detail and nuance what we mean by the word.
For those of you still reading this post who are getting concerned about me putting the word “inerrancy” in quotes: I believe that the Bible is God-breathed, and profitable for doctrine, correction, reproof, instruction, etc. I also agree with John Piper’s nuance of “without error in the original manuscripts”, given his understanding of “error” [emphasis mine]:
A writer is in error when the basic intention in his statements and admonitions, properly understood in their nearer and wider context, is not true.