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.

A passion for Jesus and for justice

Justice is inherent in justification.

This understanding of justification will have enormous effects on the church’s understanding of mission. Like Paul, the church that lives by this account of justification will not merely be trying to “save souls” but will want to be God’s agent in the creation of a justified and just people - transformed and participating in Christ and his current work in and through the church.

Evangelism - sharing the good news - will be a message about liberation from all sorts of sin, including hatred and violence and injustice, and into a new life. Centrifugal activity, or outreach - embodying the good news in the public square - will mean siding with those who are neglected and mistreated, whether in the neighborhood or in another part of the world. In fact, the differences between terms like “evangelism” and “outreach” will in part collapse, not because Jesus is being replaced with justice, understood in some generic, secular way, but because Jesus is justice, the justice of God incarnate. The result will be a deeper spirituality, not a lesser one, a closer walk with God (the God of justice), not a more distant one. In fact, the result will be a passion for Jesus and for justice.

-- Michael J. Gorman, from Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission

Painful but true words about gifting

If you are entrusted with a certain gift, most of the people around you won’t be similarly gifted. They won’t be able to see as clearly because God has not equipped them to. But being gifted with discernment does not give you permission to be spiteful, arrogant, or judgmental toward them. It is your responsibility to help the community by raising uncomfortable questions and then waiting patiently while it struggles with them. And more than likely, you’ll have to wait much longer than you want.

-- Hannah Anderson, from All That’s Good: Recovering the Lost Art of Discernment

The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Having read very few black theologians over my past couple decades of reading theology, it was far past time for me to get to the late Dr. James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Dr. Cone, a longtime proponent of black liberation theology, makes a forceful case for the parallel between the cross of Jesus Christ and the hanging trees on which so many black people were lynched throughout American history.

Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.

The book came with great reviews and reputation, so I was a little bit underwhelmed by the first few chapters. But then came chapter 4, “The Recrucified Christ in Black Literary Imagination”, and Cone introduces us to the vivid poetic imagery that black writers have used to parallel Jesus’ suffering with those of black Americans, and I found myself heading off to the internet to better acquaint myself with Countee Cullen, Robert Hayden, and Langston Hughes.

The concluding chapter, though, was worth the entire book. Dr. Cone shares his own experience and then explains his beautiful theological conclusions.

The Christian gospel is God’s message of liberation in an unredeemed and tortured world. As such, it is a transcendent reality that lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one…
…And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly”. It is also an immanent reality - a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst… Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky”.
And so the transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, must be held together in critical, dialectical tension, each one correcting the limits of the other. The gospel is in the world, but it is not of the world; that is, it can be seen in the black freedom movement, but it is much more than what we see in our struggles for justice.

I could quote the whole last chapter but I won’t. It’s really worth picking the book up to read the whole thing.

Or maybe just one last paragraph.

As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the re-enactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. Thus, the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today…
Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor. “Do not fear those who kill the body’s, and after that can do nothing more” (Lk 12:4).

Simply wonderful.

Chaplain Mike: Exiting the Evangelical Wilderness

Oh man, I really appreciated this summary from Chaplain Mike over at InternetMonk.com today. While my path isn’t exactly the same as his has been, I resonate strongly with several of the moves he describes. He summarizes his move from the left-hand column to the right-hand column in a little table:

It’s worth reading Mike’s little summaries of each of those movements, but I found his concluding thoughts particularly interesting:

Here is what hit me earlier this week. The differences can be summed up in two letters. “J” and “P”. You may recognize them as the final letters in the Myers Briggs personality type indicator. While Myers Briggs has been somewhat discounted, it got me wondering. Have my theological choices been largely been a product of my personality or personal preferences? Is it just coincidence that many denominations are largely in one column or the other?

Then Wednesday’s Post came along with this humdinger.

Haidt (along with Richard Beck) have convinced me that when we take a stand for “truth” or “morality,” we are primarily revealing deep, fundamental visceral and emotional feelings and then using rational arguments to justify our “righteous” position. Furthermore, those who are on the more “liberal” end of the spectrum react intuitively to different things than those on the “conservative” end. (Chaplain Mike)
…
[I]t makes me wonder if most of my reasons for the theological changes I have made are because of the way I am wired. If I had been wired differently maybe I would have been quite happy to stay in the church of my youth. Conversely, perhaps those who are raised in traditions like the one I am currently in, and who crave certainty in their innermost being end up in those churches that promise more of that. And perhaps there are those who find they do not fit, and chose to chuck the whole church thing altogether.

Lots for me to consider there.

A good word from Jonathan Martin

From a recent sermon on his Son of a Preacher Man podcast:

The fake good news only sounds like good news to me and my tribe. The fake good news only sounds like good news if you go to my church. If they’re in another village, it’s bad news for them. But the real good news is not just good news for us, it’s good news for them.

It’s a sermon worth 40 minutes of your time.

You are always more ready to hear than we are to pray...

Wow, Proper 22 from the BCP this week:

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us of those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worth to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Being Christians above all else

Really good piece from Father Thomas McKenzie yesterday about living as a Christian in these divided American times. This bit is worth it alone:

Have your political opinions. Seriously, you have the right to your opinions. You also have the right to voice them. Remember that other people have the same right. Challenge your own opinion. Where does your opinion match up with Scripture or the teachings of the Church. How does Jesus inform your opinion? Be humble enough to change your mind to match your faith. Because someone has a different opinion, they are not your enemy. They aren’t stupid, heartless, or evil. They are likely a normal person, a sinner, just like you. They may well be someone who loves Jesus, someone you’ll live with forever in Heaven. Treat them as you would like to be treated, remembering Jesus words to “love your neighbor as you love yourself,” and “do to others as you would have them do to you.”

His call for us to be Christians first, striving for healing and peace above all else, is a challenge to me. Worth reading the whole thing.

-- Living as a Christian in our Divided Nation

Three dimensions of salvation by allegiance

I’m reading Matthew W. Bates’ Salvation By Allegiance Alone this week, in which he argues that the word the Apostle Paul uses that is usually translated “faith” (pistis in the Greek) is better understood as “allegiance” in relationship to salvation. It’s an interesting way to look at things.

Bates argues that the essential proclamation of the Gospel in the NT doesn’t culminate in Jesus’ death and resurrection but rather continues to his ascension and reign as king and lord. He outlines it in eight points:

Jesus the king

  1. Preexisted with the Father,
  2. Took on human flesh, fulfilling God’s promises to David,
  3. Died for sins in accordance with the scriptures,
  4. Was buried,
  5. Was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,
  6. Appeared to many,
  7. Is seated at the right hand of God as Lord, and
  8. Will come again as judge.

This is pretty well in line with NT Wright, not an uncommon take. Bates then outlines three “dimensions” of allegiance that he contends are components of salvific allegiance:

  • Intellectual agreement - basic assent that those eight components of the Gospel are true statements;
  • Confession of Loyalty - leaning heavily on Romans 10:9-10 here
  • Embodied fidelity - what he describes as “practical fidelity” to Jesus as Lord, referencing heavily to Matthew 7 and the “not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’” text.

None of this appears to be hugely controversial at this point, but the reframing is helpful to me to get my head around how we might articulate salvation by grace through faith and yet still say that faith without works is dead.

More to come, I’m sure.