Posts tagged Evangelical

Janel forwarded me an article this evening which is an interesting look at some of the “revolution” that is nascent in evangelicalism. It’s nice to get confirmation now and then that this is something larger that’s brewing and not just a little pocket of people I happen to know. God knows that the church in this culture could use a little revolution. See below for a taste and a link to the full article. 

Preaching Revolution
A new evangelical movement offers lessons for the left
By Zack Exley, March 14, 2007

Recently, I blogged a series of essays titled “The Revolution Misses You,” in which I called for progressives to revive the forgotten dream of practical yet radical change. Friends and colleagues immediately scolded me for using “extreme” terms such as “revolution” and “radical.” “You’ll only alienate people,” they said. “This will come back to haunt you.”

At first, I was surprised by what felt like a dramatic overreaction. But I soon realized why I had fallen out of sync with the progressive mainstream on the use of the “R-words”: I had been spending time listening to and reading evangelical Christians who are preaching revolution.
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But this movement is still barely aware of its own existence, and has not chosen a label for itself. George Barna, who studies trends among Christians for clients such as the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Focus on the Family, calls it simply “The Revolution” and its adherents “Revolutionaries.”

“The media are oblivious to it,” Barna wrote in his 2006 book Revolution: Finding Vibrant Faith Beyond the Walls of the Sanctuary. “Scholars are clueless about it. The government caught a glimpse of it in the 2004 presidential election but has mostly misinterpreted its nature and motivations.” According to his research, there are more than 20 million Revolutionaries in America, differentiated from mainstream evangelicals by a greater likelihood of serving their community and the poor and oppressed within it, a more “intimate, personally stirring worship of God” in daily life, and a much greater chance of studying the Bible every day.

One indication that this movement is new, nebulous and spontaneous is that Gregory Boyd, a like-minded mega-church pastor two states away in St. Paul, Minn., knew nothing of Rob Bell’s theology until recently. He only heard of the pastors’ conference after the fact because his book Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church was distributed to conference participants.

“There’s definitely something going on,” says Boyd. “I’ve only become aware of it as people have responded to my book. It’s not organized — it’s amorphic. It would include the ‘emerging church movement,’ but it’s bigger than that. It’s a vision of the kingdom [of God]. It’s a new kind of Christianity.”

Read the entire article

Without you, Mr. President, Darfur doesn’t have a prayer.
We come to you from across the evangelical spectrum. We beseech you to act on your faith and do the right thing by leading the world to stop the genocide affecting “the least of these” in Darfur. To date, more than 400,000 people have been killed. 2.5 million displaced. Countless more have been raped, maimed, and tortured: Men, women, and children created in God’s image, innocents all. Ending the atrocities will require your personal leadership in supporting the deployment of a strong U.N. peacekeeping force and multilateral economic sanctions. While we often disagree on matters of politics, we are united in the belief that your intervention can make the critical difference in Darfur. We join together now to urge you, in the words of Proverbs 24:11-12, to “rescue those being led away to death.” We pledge to do everything we can to rally support in both Congress and the U.N. to support your leadership in ending the horror in Darfur.

Evangelicals for Darfur

From NRDC’s OnEarth Magazine, “The Gospel of Green” by Bill McKibben (photo illustration by Glen Wexler): 

IN THE BEGINNING (SAY, THE REAGAN ERA), ALL WAS DARKNESS. To liberal American Christians, the environment was largely a luxury item, well down on the list below war and poverty. “I remember one Catholic bishop asking me, “How come there aren’t any people on those Sierra Club calendars?’” says one of the few religious conservationists of that era. To conservative Christians, environmentalism was a dirty word — it stank of paganism, of interference with the free market, of the sixties. Meanwhile, many environmentalists were more secular than the American norm, and often infected with the notion spread by the historian Lynn White in his famous 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” that Christianity lay at the root of ecological devastation. Everyone, in short, was scared of everyone else.
But there were a few lights starting to shine in that gloom. Calvin DeWitt carried one lantern. A mildmannered midwesterner with a Ph.D. in zoology, he helped in 1979 to found the Au Sable Institute in northern Michigan. The institute devotes itself to organizing field courses and conferences that teach ecology, always stressing the Christian notion of stewardship, the idea that, as it says in Genesis, we are to “dress and keep”the fertile earth.
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Other evangelicals are less political, but at least as subversive. A former emergency room doctor named Matthew Sleeth, for instance, quit his job to preach the green gospel and says the reaction has been far greater than he could have guessed. His book Serve God, Save the Planet was published last spring, and he has been traveling to churches ever since. Everywhere his message is the same: God asks us to surrender some of our earth-wrecking wealth.”Biblebelieving Christians have confused the kingdom of heaven with capitalism and consumerism,” Sleeth says.
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The critique from all quarters will need to get sharper too. Calvin DeWitt pulls no punches:”We’ve spiritualized the devil,” he says.”But when Exxon is funding think tanks to basically confuse the lessons that we’re getting from this great book of creation, that’s devilish work. We find ourselves praying to God to protect us from the wiles of the devil, but we can’t see him when he’s staring us in the face.”
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In one recent poll, three-quarters of Christians said they thought the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” came from the Bible, when in fact it derives from Aesop via Ben Franklin and expresses almost the exact opposite of the Gospel injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Says DeWitt, “By accommodating to a new philosophy about how society works, we’ve flipped Matthew 6:33 on its head. Instead of ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all the rest shall be added unto you,’ we’re looking out for number one. “Which makes it a lot harder for politicians to start talking about carbon taxes or other measures that might actually start to bring our emissions under control.
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In the end, it’s clear that this battle is not only for the preservation of creation. In certain ways, it offers the chance for American Christianity to rescue itself from the smothering embrace of a culture fixated on economic growth, on individual abundance. A new chance to emerge as the countercultural force that the Gospels clearly envisioned.

Click here for the entire article , or download a PDF . 

Randall Balmer was interviewed on NPR a few weeks ago and they’ve included an excerpt from his latest book. Thy Kingdom Come claims that the religious right did not form as a direct response to Roe v. Wade, but rather as a response to an attempt by the IRS to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University due to policies of racial discrimination.

From the NPR write-up:

President Bush and the Republican Party find strong support among evangelical voters. But in his new book, Thy Kingdom Come, author Randall Balmer says that allegiance is misplaced.

“I don’t find much that I recognize as Christian” in the religious right, says Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University and contributing editor to Christianity Today.
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“They have taken something that is lovely and redemptive and turned it into something that is ugly and retributive,” Balmer says.

From Thy Kingdom Come:

In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and “secular humanists,” who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court’s misguided Roe decision.

It’s a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn’t true.
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The Religious Right’s self-portrayal as mobilizing in response to the Roe decision was so pervasive among evangelicals that few questioned it. But my attendance at an unusual gathering in Washington, D.C., finally alerted me to the abortion myth.
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In the course of one of the sessions, [Paul M.] Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

Bob Jones University was one target of a broader attempt by the federal government to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to penalize schools for failure to abide by antisegregation provisions. A court case in 1972, Green v. Connally, produced a ruling that any institution that practiced segregation was not, by definition, a charitable institution and, therefore, no longer qualified for tax-exempt standing.

The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school’s regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983 (at which time, the Reagan administration argued in favor of Bob Jones University).

Initially, I found Weyrich’s admission jarring. He declared, in effect, that the origins of the Religious Right lay in Green v. Connally rather than Roe v. Wade. I quickly concluded, however, that his story made a great deal of sense. When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture, there was an unmistakably defensive cast to evangelicalism. I recall many presidents of colleges or Bible institutes coming through our churches to recruit students and to raise money. One of their recurrent themes was,We don’t accept federal money, so the government can’t tell us how to run our shop—whom to hire or fire or what kind of rules to live by. The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, then, represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it.

For his part, Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers.

Click here for more.

Last month, an Onion article disturbed me because of the nagging feeling that I had read it before, only in a non-satirical setting. I searched through some old magazines but couldn’t locate it. Yesterday I found it…and as a friend said, “that Onion piece is so depressing.  Especially since it’s so accurate it’s just not funny.”

First, the Onion:

Poverty-Stricken Africans Receive Desperately Needed Bibles
MARADI, NIGER—More than 60,000 urgently needed Bibles arrived to allay suffering throughout the famine-stricken nation of Niger Friday, in one of the largest humanitarian-relief operations ever attempted by a Christian ministry. (Full text)

Then, the clip I was remembering (from a collection of stats in Mother Jones):

FOCUS ON the Family’s $2.2 million in tsunami aid included 1 million copies of Dr. Dobson’s When God Doesn’t Make Sense. 

Yes, depressing is a good word for this. No wonder we are angsty about our evangelicalism.

Philip Yancey has a good article describing the global “evangelical” community, to some degree focusing on the life and contradiction present (now and historically) in the U.S. evangelical community.

(I’ll quote a few clippings from it here, with a link to the full article at the bottom.)

“When I return from [trips abroad] and read profiles in Time and Newsweek about U.S. evangelicals, I feel sad. Many Americans view evangelicals as a monolithic voting bloc obsessed with a few moral issues. They miss the vibrancy and enthusiasm, the good-newsness that the word evangelical represents in much of the world. Evangelicals in Africa bring food to prisoners, care for aids orphans, and operate mission schools that train many of that continent’s leaders. There, and in Asia and Latin America, evangelicals also manage micro-enterprise loan programs that allow families to buy a sewing machine or a flock of chickens. About a third of the world’s 2 billion Christians fall into a category to which the word evangelical applies, a large majority of whom live outside North America and Europe.

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Many U.S. evangelicals, of course, share in that vibrancy. We staff many of the 500 Christian agencies that have sprung up since World War II to combat social problems. Megachurches based on the 17,000-member Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago and Saddleback Community Church in Southern California are replicating in major cities. A new, hard-to-classify emergent church has evolved to minister to the postmodern generation. In fact, one recent survey revealed that 93 of the top 100 rapidly growing churches in the United States identify themselves as evangelical.

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Evangelicals, according to the New York stereotype, will propagandize and proselytize. You can’t trust them. They’re judgmental. They have an agenda.

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Until the 1960s, evangelicals were as likely to be aligned with the Democratic Party as the Republican. Evangelicals led the fight for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery?and also the opposition to it. (Revivalist George Whitefield in the 18th century justified slavery, and Southern Baptists formed over the right of missionaries to own slaves.) [etc]

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In short, evangelicals have taken political stances that sometimes appear quixotic, sometimes heroic, and often contradictory.

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Increasingly, U.S. evangelicals have allied themselves with conservative politics. Many rallied around Ronald Reagan, the nation’s first divorced President, who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, while viewing with suspicion Jimmy Carter?a devoutly religious President who taught a Baptist Sunday school class throughout his term in office.

To complicate matters, many evangelicals in places like the United Kingdom and New Zealand align themselves with liberal political parties, believing their Christian commitment enjoins them to seek government help for the poor and to oppose war. And in China, many whom we would identify as evangelical see no contradiction in their support for the world’s largest Communist government.

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After spending several decades working within evangelicalism, I would summarize its essential tenets in three statements:

This is our Father’s world. Evangelicals believe that God created the world and lavished it with care. Any residue of goodness on the planet reflects God’s “common grace”: the sun shines and rain falls both on those who believe and on those who don’t. All pleasure, including beauty, sexuality, art, and work, are God’s gifts to us, and we look to God’s revelation for the pattern in best ordering our desires so that in them we may find fulfillment and not bondage.

As an expression of love for the world, God entered its history (the Incarnation) and gave the Son’s life as a sacrifice for its redemption (the Atonement). Its emphasis on Jesus and the Cross separates Christianity from all other religions, and evangelicals hold fast to that distinctive.

In the mystery of the Trinity, God was “in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” (the apostle Paul’s words). Evangelicals recognize that the world has been invaded by evil and believe that Christ began a process of reclamation. In that thrust the church plays a crucial role that will culminate in a final victory.

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Through the power of the Spirit, followers of Jesus advance God’s kingdom in the world. Karl Barth also said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” Yes, and in recent years evangelicals have increasingly recognized the corresponding need sometimes to unclasp those hands and lead the uprising against that disorder.”

Click here to read the entire article in CT

Are we evangelicals?
We began with a theological definition of “evangelical” which Janel had taken from her studies:

1. Christ-centered
2. Belief in the infallibility of scripture
3. Belief in the importance of evangelism
4. Belief in the need for a personal “conversion”

It was quite telling that as soon as these four points were mentioned, hesitations were voiced, clarifications were requested, and nuances were added. (For example in reference to #2, distinctions were made between “infallibility” and “inerrancy.” Some of us voiced a preference for the more general word “authority.” Regarding #4,  “conversion” was replaced with language indicating that there had been a turning or that our lives were lived differently because of our faith.)

The conversation seemed to move away from definitions that fit into the “fundamentalist” stereotype and toward more Mainline Protestant phraseology (because we’re not fundies), and then back again in the other direction (because we believe stuff). [Related: read “Death by ice or fire”]

Most of us, leery of identifying ourselves as evangelicals, were also hesitant not to identify ourselves as evangelicals. While the trend among evangelicals seems to be to define Christianity too narrowly, the trend among Mainliners is to define it so broadly that it no longer means anything.

Is there value in trying to redeem the term “evangelical” or do we need to form a new term because of the baggage that has become associated with it?
We discussed the historical definition of evangelicalism too—from its roots in 18th century Pietism, through the Second Great Awakening, the fundamentalist/Modernist controversy, and the “neo-evangelical” movement of Billy Graham to its present buzz in the media. The term “evangelical” has been conflated with the religious right, especially in recent days. Is there value in trying to redeem, or reclaim that term?

There is a history of social justice activism (e.g. abolitionism, suffrage) stemming from evangelicals and evangelicalism. (This is Jim Wallis’ take on it—he’s “a 19th century evangelical” born in the wrong century). Janel points out, however, that it isn’t often acknowledged that 19th century evangelicals, as postmillenialists, were trying to usher in the kingdom with their progressivsim. (“If we make the world good enough, Jesus will come back”). They weren’t necessarily motivated by a sense of justice or because people are made in the image of God.

The term “evangelical” is so problematic that in some ways it would be easier to scrap it and start again with a new term. It wasn’t easy to even find a term that we could agree on, however. Denominational identity seemed too fluid or irrelevant, especially in a “post-denominational” age. “Orthodox” seemed like it had potential, but it is easily confused with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Also, the linguistic background of the term—“right thinking”—seems too Modernist. Just “Christian” was suggested, but then again most people in north America identify themselves as Christans, so the term says very little about someone’s worldview and commitments.

After several hours of discussion and little consensus, one of our friends came up with a simple distinction that surprised us with its profundity. “What it all comes down to,” she said,” is whether you are a ‘sex Christian’ or a ‘no-sex Christian.’” Although this statement was obviously a joke, it rings true in some respects. Angsty evangelicals  may have more in common with Mainliners or non-Christians than other evangelicals in some areas, but we aren’t willing to identify with the religious left in other areas. (For example, when it comes to sex, we angsty evangelicals believe, with other evangelicals, that our “personal lives” also matter to God and that sex should be reserved for a marriage relationship.)

Needless to say, it was pretty clear that calling ourselves “no-sex Christians” was not the solution, especially considering that some of us are married. Besides, claiming a new identity for ourselves could create the appearance of cutting ourselves off from a community of believers with whom we want to dialogue and with whom we in many ways identify. It would be a variation of a church split, which always leaves hard feelings and defensiveness on both sides.

What are some problems with stereotypical evangelicalism, and what other positive aspects are missing from it?

• Evangelicalism in our culture seems to be rather entrenched in both Modernism, individualism and consumer culture and it fails to acknowledge its cultural blinders—let alone beginning to search for them or remove them.
• It comes off as too formulaic and dogmatic—as though God and faith are equations we can calculate.
• It doesn’t often address the complexities of reading a document like the Bible so many milennia after it was written. Rather than acknowledging that Scripture is rooted in history and culture, evangelicals often assume that the Bible is a book of propositions that can be easily extracted and pasted directly into a completely different cultural situation.
• Leadership is often too hierarchical and overly dominated by white male Baby Boomers, without recognizing other voices within the church or dialoguing with the community of faith.

Not wanting to dwell on the negatives, we also came up with some suggestions to redeem evangelicalism. Our “emergent” evangelicalism (to borrow from Brian McLaren) sees the need for the following:

• more humility, nuance, and mystery.
  Instead of what comes off as arrogance and pride (e.g. [Loudly] “This is how it is. End of discussion.”), the church needs to be humble and acknowledge that the Spirit moves in mysterious ways. We also need to recognize that we are finite and creaturely, that there is nuance and shades of grey—not just black and white, and that the moment we strip away the mystery and awesome unknowableness of God, we have a dry dogma, not a living faith.
• more of “love your neighbour as yourself.”
  The tendency of evangelicalism in recent decades has been to focus almost exclusively on “love the Lord your God” in an individualistic, dualistic fashion (“myspiritual life”). We need more genuine concern, evidenced by our action, for our neighbours, both local and global. We also need to realize that faith is about more than our personal relationship with God—it is communal, and it comes through in all of our life decisions, which need to be made out of love, in a way that fosters justice and right relationship between people. We need to acknowledge that what we do (or do not do) to and for “the least of these” is the strongest evidence of our relationship with God.

What now?
None of the angsty evangelicals gathered around our table were over 35, and we collectively recognized that it is much easier to criticize something than to do it better ourselves. Besides, we each have our own lenses that we see through—and our vision of how the church should be redeemed isn’t necessarily God’s vision.

Although we had a lot of complaints about how the evangelical church has messed things up, our conversation was ultimately hopeful. Especially in light how the press has recently eaten up the unconventional evangelicalism of Brian McLaren and Jim Wallis, we sense a certian ripeness in culture for a fresh evangelical vision. And as the emerging church movement continues to grow and develop, we are encouraged that the term “evangelical” will grow along with it, developing into a more full and complete embodiment of the church. It’s exciting to think that maybe we can be part of this development.