:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

You haven’t really lived until you’ve sat around the dinner table with a bunch of Catholics in their 50’s and up who braved the ruler-brandishing nuns of Catholic parochial schools. It sounds like they survived a military campaign or a long stint in prison.

“And then the nun slammed that kid’s head smack into the chalkboard…”

I kid you not. That is a real story.

There are lesser offenses, such as the nun who paraded the aisles with a ruler and whacked every single kid on the knuckles because one person talked. Even the Catholic school I attended used the same policy of punishing everyone for the offenses of the few—this was a world where ADD and ADHD remained relatively unknown.

Of course there were some kind nuns about, but they never make it to the dinner time story selection.

After escaping something like Catholic school, it’s awfully tempting to mock what you once feared. That’s why the scene in the Blues Brothers is so hilarious and over the top. Anyone who has ever cowered before a nun loves the idea of a nun who exchanges her ruler for a sword and who can levitate when angry.

When we move away from the power of someone or something we used to fear, it feels really good to mock it. It’s like you’ve confirmed that it no longer has power over you because you can laugh at it. We swing away from one extreme of fear into another of joy and humor.

A lot of former fundamentalists such as myself have done our fair share of “swinging” as well. We swing in our beliefs over the end times, the nature of truth, judging others on appearance, the authority of the Bible, politics, ethics, and who knows what else.

I have a lot of friends who are swingers—that is, former fundamentalists who have swung away from their former beliefs into  a different notion of Christianity altogether.

One of the problems with swinging, is you alienate yourself so completely from your past, that you don’t understand how it has shaped you. I can call myself a progressive-ish evangelical all I want, but at the end of the day, I’m always going to be tempted to choose the non-fundamentalist path.

When I swing away from fundamentalism, I don’t understand how it impacts me or where its beliefs come from. Swinging leaves me vulnerable to blindsides, especially in my history of theology.

And this is nothing new for Christians. The fundamentalists did their own swinging away from liberalism, not realizing they were operating within the same confines set up by the agenda of the Enlightenment where all knowledge had to be grounded in scientifically verifiable facts—hello inerrancy.

I am pretty happy to swing away from fundamentalism into the relatively undefined world of progressive-ish evangelicalism, but I’m often reminded that swinging brings its own problems. I need to not only understand the impact of fundamentalism on my own life, I need to appreciate the ways God is working among fundamentalists today.

The truth is, if the Gospel I believe in is really true, then God has not swung away from the fundamentalists, evangelicals, progressives, or any other Christian camp. If we’re all devoted to the same God, then he is, in a sense, immovable.

God does not swing and shift with the times. Our perceptions of him will shift because we see in a mirror dimly, but God sees things as they truly are.

The amazing thing is that despite seeing us all as we truly are, God will not swing away from us. And even better yet, God is not afraid of nuns.

When I met Julie, I was extremely cautious and deliberate in my approach to dating her. I wanted to take every step carefully so that I didn’t mess anything up. From my perspective, I was correcting some mistakes I’d made a few years before in some loosely defined relationships that eventually went down in flames.

I’d learned from my mistakes, and so far as I could tell, things were now awesome.

At the time, Julie was a little confused. I was overcompensating big time, and we didn’t clear things up until years later when I described where I was coming from.

In a sense, those former romances were tagging along into our relationship, impacting how I acted around Julie. Thankfully we didn’t have any major obstacles to overcome after dealing with my initial missteps.

As a wise woman once said, when you want someone’s love and you want someone’s revenge, you end up writing a bad romance…

These bad romances end up coloring how we interact in future relationships. When I look bad at what happened with myself and fundamentalist Christianity, it sort of colors my world much like a bad relationship that I simply can’t get over.

While I can still appreciate some things about my fundamentalist roots, I think I still treat them like a bad relationship that wounded me and comes up over and over again. I still react strongly against being judged and evaluated in church. I get really angry when people try to play heresy police with me, attacking my beliefs rather than engaging in a discussion. I get a knot in my stomach when someone turns the Bible into a simple black and white reference guide.

After my bad relationship with fundamentalism, I’m tempted to define myself according to what I’m not.

I want to point out what those other fundamentalist do, rather than addressing my own issues—which begin with not wanting to address my own issues.

Fundamentalists become “those people” who do everything wrong and provide the perfect foil for all of the good things I’m trying to do.

It’s like I can see how bad and destructive the relationship was, but rather than moving on with good things and asking God what he’d like me to do today, I need to keep beating up on the fundamentalists because of how they impacted my relationship with God and the church. It’s like I can’t let go of something that hurt me because if I let go of that hurt, I have to face who I really am and figure what I’m supposed to do next.

The cross and resurrection bring change to our lives, but only after the depths of our pain have been exposed to God. It seems that every time I think God has healed me from the judgment and fear of my past, something else comes up again. And then the cross and power of God have to be manifested in new ways.

And the point of it all is that God wants to write a new romance with us that replaces our old stories and will hopefully one day even overshadow the memory of every pop song, no matter how catchy it may be.

When Should Christians Part Ways?

Yesterday I mentioned that in our family relationships we can usually figure out when we need some distance from relatives who hurt us. When we withdraw from one another for a season, our long-term goal is healing and restoration.

Sometimes we need to cut ourselves off from ongoing conflicts in order to heal and to gain some perspective that will help us sort things out in the future.

I believe that Christians, especially evangelicals may be at such a point.

In my own evangelical family, there is a lot of concern about the warring of progressive and conservative factions.

The conservatives fear the progressives aren’t committed to the Bible and are tossing aside ancient doctrines in favor of the cultural flavor of the day.

The progressives have been damaged by some of the misguided theology and practice of their conservative pasts, ask hard questions based on their study of scripture, and fear that evangelicalism will be defined by the narrow parameters of the “truly” Reformed camp. They fear that evangelicalism will lose it’s broad consensus that has historically included both Arminians and Calvinists.

Both sides wring hands, worry, and write blog posts about some looming threat or danger.

Will evangelicalism split? Will there be even more division in the church?

Lately I’ve noticed so many blog posts where Christians are worried about being condemned or judged or excommunicated by someone else. From what I can tell, the minute someone sets himself or herself over me as a judge, that person is irrelevant to me.

If the leaders of some convention, coalition, board, or generative friendship want to pass judgment on me, I really don’t care. I have a diverse group of friends, pastors, and colleagues that I trust to confront me if I step out of bounds.

If someone wants to play heresy detective by evaluating how I interpret the Bible’s teachings on salvation, hell, women in ministry, homosexuality, war, inerrancy, or politics and then issues some kind of decree that I’m out of the family, I have no trouble ignoring that person.

There are plenty of Christians out there who should be ignored.

And here’s the thing, if reading what I write upsets you, you can ignore me too. I won’t take it personally. To be honest, if college-age me met 30-something me, both of us would probably need a time out.

God can use all kinds of Christians to do a lot of great things. God could use fundamentalist me to accomplish his work, and he can use progressive me to accomplish his work. The cross and resurrection retain their power even if my answers to the Christian theology quiz have evolved.

For who I am, where I’m at, and what God is doing in me, sometimes I need to shut myself off from those who are too combative and can’t see beyond their own narrow limits for the faith. I’m sure that I exasperate others who need to do the same to me.

As I mentioned yesterday, we find in the New Testament Paul and Barnabas separating over John Mark, and even in the case of Peter and Paul, there’s an understanding that each was called to a different people group. Given the ethnic tensions found elsewhere in the New Testament between Jew and Greek and Peter’s own waffling on the Jew/Greek issue, I think it’s safe to presume they could have been agreeing to disagree.

Everyone was reconciled in the end, but they needed the perspective that only time could give.

Though I see parting ways as a last resort, there are times when I think it’s necessary. If the evangelical camp is a kind of diverse and sometimes dysfunctional family, I think we’re at a place where certain parties need to keep their distance from other parties—at least for now.

If someone says I’m not a real Christian, I’ll continue to pray with prisoners, share the Gospel daily, read scripture, and deliver food to the local soup kitchen. Whatever some conservative watchdog says, nothing really changes. I’ll continue following Jesus, regardless of what label is being stuck on me.

Faithfulness to Jesus is what matters, and that’s why we sometimes need to ignore criticism.

When I prayed to receive Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I moved from my Catholic upbringing to a conservative Baptist church. Everything with the Baptists was new, sometimes intense, and oddly exciting—it felt like a big deal.

Everyone sang loud in church. I read my Bible and prayed sometimes. Sermons were double or triple the length of most homilies. The Baptists and other conservative Christians I knew followed some strict rules, generally voted for Republicans, served on missions trips, and tried to read the Bible as literally as possible.

In the early 2000’s things started to shift for me.

I lightened up on my rules. I reconsidered my politics. I read and interpreted the Bible differently. Prayer didn’t seem to be working all that great. I learned about the beliefs of Christians from a variety of traditions, historical backgrounds, and continents. I burned out on the megachurch ministry model. I began to wonder if there were other ways to serve others.

Around the same time Christians from a variety of backgrounds, who were rethinking either all or some of these matters, began to make changes in these areas and to share the process online. A number of groups have emerg… er… taken shape over time as Christians have tried to sort this out.

I’m not too concerned with labels right now. Once we start using labels, folks get defensive or offensive depending on their perspectives, and to be frank, I want to keep this series of posts as broad as I can within the bounds of American Protestant Christianity, even if such posts are limited by the scope of my anecdotal evidence and research—meaning they’ll have an evangelical slant for the most part.

In brief, I want to ponder two questions about American Protestant Christianity:

1. What is wrong?
2. What should we do now?

Each of these questions will be applied to four different aspects of American Protestant Christianity

1. The Worship Shift
2. The Practice Shift
3. The Belief Shift
4. The Service Shift

Some groups have their fingers on what’s wrong, but have no idea what to do next. Others are befuddled by both questions. A few may have figured out both.

In each of these areas, I believe we can notice some general trends of late. I’ll speculate on what’s behind these trends, but for the most part, there are a large number of Christians today, especially those in the Gen Y and X categories (but not limited to them), who know that the faith of their childhood needs a serious upgrade if they’re going to stick with Jesus.

Now, there are some in the Gen Y and X camps who don’t see the need for this. Great for them. I hope they’re happy and fulfilled as they follow Jesus. However, for the rest of us who are struggling with things that don’t line up, I think it helps to consider what exactly is wrong and what we should do now.

I’ll be honest, when I realized that the rules and church meetings of my teen and college years left me feeling far from God and burned out, I grew angry and resentful. I complained a lot. The early years of this blog chronicle that quite well unfortunately.

In my early 20’s I was going through a kind of Christian puberty where things didn’t make sense and my frustrated confusion came out in the form of negative self-righteousness. Some good things happened too, but I can see in retrospect that I had no idea what was going on or what to do next.

I don’t think I’ll be able to untangle the state of American Protestant Christianity in four blog posts, but let’s be honest, Protestants, Evangelicals especially, have a terrible track record when it comes to knowing their past. I think some of the restlessness and discontent we are experiencing today is a direct result of that.

We can’t figure out the healthy future that God has planned for us if we can’t diagnose the root causes of what ails us. I don’t intend to be comprehensive or final in my assessment. I only offer my thoughts here as one piece of what will hopefully be a much larger process.

Tomorrow we’ll begin with the worship shift.

Lately I’ve been realizing that I’m not comfortable describing myself as a “conservative” evangelical. Nevertheless, I’m still pretty committed to the Bible and even have many conservative traits in my reading of scripture. So while I have departed from the conservative end of evangelicals in part, I find myself trying to figure out what it means to have a high view of scripture from the evangelical left or center.

If I want to sound trendy or at least charitable, I’d describe myself as a “progressive”. Now doesn’t that sound catchy. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be progressive?

Here’s the thing: I’m cool with there being a broad range of evangelicals. Whether right, left, or center, our movement has thrived by focusing on the Gospel message of cross and resurrection, Christian activism (I’m going with David Bebbington’s word here for Christian service and volunteerism in ministry), conversion, and the Bible. Therefore, as an evangelical who sees himself somewhere in the middle to left of this movement, I’d like establish solid credibility for my end of things.

I’ve been trying to think of the most evangelical thing I could do—something that would demonstrate my commitment to scripture in particular. How could I show that one need not cling to the right of this movement to be a Bible-loving evangelical? The folks on the left and center still take the Bible seriously—generally adhering to the accepted evangelical methods of historical-cultural interpretations that deal with the complexity of scripture, while not disregarding biblical revelation.

What’s an evangelical to do?

The answer: Study the book of Romans!

When all else fails evangelicals traditionally dig into the good ole’ book of Romans for spiritual sustenance. If I only had a denarius for all of the Bible studies that have started with the hefty book of Romans.

And so that is exactly what I’m going to do. I’ve been reading through Romans and hope to post a series of meditations on the book. I promise an especially exciting exegetical and hermeneutical adventure for the part about homosexuality in chapter one.

Seriously, when was the last time the words exegetical and hermeneutical were linked with “adventure”? Epic this will be. And with such promises of exegetical excellence, let’s jump in…

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I recently had a number of conversations about Christianity and the Gospel with some folks who would most likely not self-identify as followers of Jesus. In fact, they may have been a tad suspicious of Christianity and evangelicals such as myself. However, I had a chance to talk about not only my beliefs, but my practices—how I join in God’s Kingdom work on earth.

I can’t recall how the conversation went down exactly, but I mentioned things like protecting the environment, visiting prisoners, and supporting ministries that serve others as well as sharing the Gospel. I talked about the ways that God wants to restore and heal our world.

When sin becomes a problem infecting all of us, rather than just this thing that separates YOU personally from God, there’s a lot of room for conversation. We all feel the effects of sin in this world, both personally and corporately, and so speaking of a God who wants to reconcile us and the rest of the world makes good biblical and common sense.

After chatting for a while about these things, the person I spoke with said, “Well, if that’s what it really means to be an evangelical, then I suppose you could call me an evangelical too.” 

In that moment I realized something:  Living out the Gospel makes Jesus more accessible for others. When they realize they too share something in common with God, they no longer view themselves as alien to these evangelicals trying to “save” them.

Don’t get me wrong here, I certainly made it very clear in the course of the conversation that Jesus must be Lord of our lives and that we must make a commitment to follow. I’m not sure where this person ended up with all of that. However, I was encouraged to see the light go on, to find that God isn’t so distant and foreign, and that the people representing this God may not be so strange after all.

I’m far more interested in entering conversation by fostering commonalities, showing people where they are close to God’s Kingdom. In the process of discussing commonalities differences will no doubt be unearthed and discussed. We can’t afford to gloss over sin and the evils of this world, however we can still engage in discussions about common ground, and then move from there to the places where we are different.

We all know this world is screwed up.

We all have felt the effects of sin.

We all want to do try and do something about it, whether for ourselves alone or possibly for others as well.

We need to talk about solutions and the ways forward.

As an evangelical, I believe the way forward is through the loving rule of God in our lives.