These conversations, of course, are not new. Most of the rhetoric I hear today is indistinguishable from the way my great grandfather, the Fundamentalist evangelist and author John R. Rice, talked about these issues. His book Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers, written in 1941 and perhaps his best-known title, carried this subtitle: Significant questions for honest Christian women settled by the Word of God – making it clear that anyone who disagreed with him wasn’t honest and certainly didn’t care about the Bible, allegations that are very much a part of the rhetoric today.

“The pulpit is a place for the strongest men that we have,” he wrote, building his argument. “The preacher in the pulpit should speak with an authority that is absolutely forbidden a woman to exercise.” In a sermon Rice preached on the 7th of December, 1964, he claimed that “man is in God’s image in a sense that women are not,” and so, “a man is nearer like God than a woman.”

As an argument against this way of thinking, this kind of idolatry, I turn to the work of Walter Brueggemann, who, in an interview last year with Krista Tippett for On Being, explained the reason for the abundance of metaphors we find for God in the scriptures this way: “The Biblical defense against idolatry is plural metaphors. If you reduce the metaphors too much, you will end with an idol. So more metaphors gives more access to God, and one can work one metaphor for a while, but you can’t treat that is though that’s the last word – you’ve got to move, and have another, and another.”

In that same sermon by John R. Rice, later published in the booklet “For Men and Women,” in 1979, by his Sword of the Lord Publishers, he expands on his argument about the proper place for women:

“God bless good women. I am not blaming them. I am blaming you sissy-men, you panty-waists who have no conviction, no backbone, no character, no principle, no standards. You don’t live for God. You don’t have the convictions necessary to live for God. You don’t stand. You don’t have manhood enough. What we need these days in the matter of religion is godly men to take the place God assigned them in the church. 
Men, do you see how serious is your responsibility? If God is going to win this country, He must do it through men. It is a strange thing that people have got more sense in matters of government and business than in matters of religion. We would not elect a woman president, nor follow a woman in business, but we leave church work to the women! No wonder the Bible said, “The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).

If one cares to try and place this kind of thinking in an historical context, I recommend Margaret Lamberts Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, as a good starting point. In it, she argues, in part, that “Dispensational premillennialism embedded the principle of masculine leadership and feminine subordination in salvation history itself and, perhaps more important, uplifted order as the highest principle of Christian life and thought.” Her thoughts and historical analysis are worth taking into consideration.

But as I said at the start, I’m tired. I’d prefer to focus on the good that is being done today, rather than rehash old arguments. To that end, let me turn your attention to another book, one that has some connection to this topic.

There are many reasons to commend Amy Frykholm’s new book, See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity, the exquisite writing and tender way she gives voice to stories from people who have been wounded by their childhood beliefs among them. The book is organized, rather brilliantly, I think, into three parts: Wilderness, Incarnation, and Resurrection, with Amy sharing three personal stories she has been told in each part, and ending with her conclusion, “An Alternative Ethic.”

I hope to devote more time in another blog post to some of the other stories she tells, but for now, I want to focus on what my reaction was to reaching the end of the book, particularly the last two stories. I happened to first read these stories the same week another evangelical pastor ignited a discussion after declaring that women are not allowed to take part in the public reading of scripture in a church service, because that would fall under the banner of teaching.

After reading the story Frykholm tells of Genevieve, a former prostitute rescued from the destructive path she was on through the work of Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest here in Nashville, and the last story, that of Becca herself, recounting how the sexual abuse she experienced in her childhood at the hands of a church leader shaped her and informs her ministry today, I found myself challenged by a reflection from Amy, after Becca asked her what she was giving back, in exchange for being told all these stories. “While seeking our own healing is good and necessary work,” she writes, “there is much more to be done. In concrete and tangible ways, we must be extending hospitality and healing to others. Telling stories is wonderful, but working to heal the rift in our church and our society that daily damages precious human beings is better.” This is work that requires all of us, male and female, and leaves no room for petty arguments about who is allowed to do what. God is made manifest in our actions, in our caring for the least of these, the broken and hurting around us, without regard for the sex of the one extending a helping hand.

When I reached the end of Amy Frykholm’s book, moved by the work that Becca Stevens is doing, I resolved that, in the future, every time I hear another pastor claiming that Christianity has a God-given masculine feel, or opining about women staying silent and knowing their place, however explicitly they articulate those thoughts, I will make a donation to an organization like the one Becca runs (Magdalene/Thistle Farms), helping women like her to live out their God-given calling.

This, at least, is a step in the right direction.

In January of 2007, Kevin Roose walked on to the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, ready to join 25,000 other students for the start of the spring semester. But there was one thing that set Kevin apart from his classmates, something his new friends wouldn’t know about until after he left Liberty at the end of the semester. Kevin was a transfer student from Brown University, a school every bit as secular as Liberty was religious, and had decided to spend his “semester abroad” in Lynchburg, VA, instead of England or Italy. After spending a couple days on the campus of Liberty several months earlier, on a research trip with an author he was working for, he had realized he didn’t know anything, really, about evangelical Christians, and found that trying to carry on a conversations with “them,” even with his peers, was like trying to communicate with someone from a completely different culture, someone who didn’t even speak the same language. He wanted to get past the stereotypes, beyond what the culture wars tell us about who our enemies are, and so decided to spend a semester at an Evangelical university, with plans to write a book about his experience. The decision to attend Liberty, then, was an easy one: he couldn’t imagine a more conservative institution, and he wanted to get the full immersion experience.

When I read The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, Kevin’s story of his time at Liberty, just after it was published a couple years ago, the first thing that struck me was how different our stories were. While Kevin chose Liberty because of how conservative and extreme he thought it was, I chose not to attend Liberty for the exact opposite reason.

When I started looking around at different schools as a junior in high school, I briefly considered attending Liberty, in part because of the friendship Jerry Falwell had with my great grandfather, John R. Rice. The one time Falwell preached at my childhood church, he spent several minutes of his sermon talking about my great grandfather and the way he looked up to him as an example. I remember this because the only other times Rice was mentioned at that church (a church he had his membership at for several years in the 70’s, due to his friendship with long-time pastor Lee Roberson, even thought he didn’t live in the same city), was to make sure that people knew that although John R. Rice was “a great man, he was wrong about storehouse tithing.”

I’ve read that Falwell was “called to preach” at the age of 18 while listening to Rice preach, although I haven’t been able to find the source of that quote. (A similar story involves a 26-year-old Rice counseling a 12-year-old boy, during a revival meeting he was leading with a friend, confirming what the boy thought was a calling to be a preacher. That boy, W.A. Criswell, went on to be a be a highly influential Southern Baptist preacher and two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he and Rice remained friends for the rest of their lives. And just to continue this line of thought a bit further, an example of why it helps to understand the history of Fundamentalism and see where our beliefs come from, there’s another story about a 19-year-old Bible College student, Rick Warren, who was “called to preach” after listening to a sermon from W.A. Criswell.) What I do know about Falwell is this: one of his first books, American Can Be Saved! (1979) was published by my great grandfather’s Sword of the Lord Publishers, a collection of sermons that had first appeared in the Sword of the Lord newspaper; they spoke at each other’s conferences; and Falwell was a member of the cooperating board of the newspaper, appointed in 1971 after Bob Jones, Jr. and Bob Jones III were dropped from the board due to the controversy over secondary separation. Rice also provided support for the founding of the Moral Majority, including giving Falwell access to his large mailing list of fundamentalist pastors to help spread the word about the new organization.

But all of that happened before I was born. By the time I graduated from high school in 2000 and was ready for college, things had changed. When I said earlier that I briefly considered attending Liberty, by “briefly,” I meant that I thought about it seriously for about thirty seconds before quickly deciding that there was no way I could attend a school that was so liberal. I knew that God wasn’t pleased with the way Jerry Falwell had led his school to abandon Biblical principles – the all-important principle of separation being a chief area where they had turned away from God – and their dangerous slide toward complete liberalism meant that no one who truly feared God and wanted to honor Him and grow closer to Him could participate in that kind of unrighteousness. (If someone needed more proof that Liberty had abandoned the path of righteousness, all one had to do was mention that the Christian rock group dc Talk had come from there, and their fate was sealed.)

With Liberty out of the picture, I found myself torn between two good fundamentalist schools, Pensacola Christian College and Bob Jones University, and leaning toward the latter, my mother’s alma mater, despite her forbiddance of my attending there because she didn’t want me to develop the kind of judgmental attitude she was sure I would leave there with. I’m more glad than I can say today that I didn’t end up at either of those schools.

Back to Kevin Roose’s book, The Unlikely Disciple. What I found most fascinating about his story – and I read the first 250 pages in one sitting, the first time I picked it up on a Sunday afternoon, finishing it the next morning – was that when Kevin described his bewilderment over some of the rules and attitudes he found at Liberty, or his surprise at the way certain unquestioned presuppositions shaped the way they viewed the world, I was a little surprised to find that I felt exactly the same way, that I shared his bewilderment. Several years after stepping out of that world, it can be hard to remember how sure I once was of the convictions I held and positions I advocated, and, more importantly, my forgetfulness can lead me to selectively apply what Jesus said was one of the two most important commands, the exhortation to love our neighbor, by excluding those who believe the way I was taught to believe growing up.

That leads me to the other book I want to talk about here, Andrew Himes’ The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family, which was published this week. (You can order it from Amazon here.) As I mentioned in an earlier post I wrote about my uncle Andrew’s book, it is filled with stories of many of the fundamentalist leaders of the 20th century, such as Falwell, J. Frank Norris, Jack Hyles, the Bob Jones family, and of course Billy Graham, documenting his friendship with Rice and what led to his split with fundamentalism. Andrew’s book is helpful, I would say, not only for those wanting to understand fundamentalism better, but also for those wanting to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in America. In his excellent work Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation, author Rodney Clapp suggests, “by way of broad and rough contrast,” that, “American democracy is composed of two dominant strains: the democracy of the parade, based predominantly in the North; and the democracy of the revival, predominantly of the South.” It doesn’t take much work on his part to go on and assert that America today speaks with a southern accent.

In an essay published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, Redefining Christian Fundamentalism: Following the Example and Teachings of Jesus, Andrew gives us a brief overview of his book and explains why he thought it was important to write it and how we can move forward today, living under the weight of history. “ As I try to follow the example and most fundamental teachings of Jesus,” he writes, “I come to better understand my grandfather’s motivations, his own all too human attempts to follow Jesus. I find myself having more compassion for my neighbor, and slower to condemn those who don’t understand the world exactly as I do. Following Jesus requires more than right belief. It requires right practice: placing Christ’s incarnation of love and justice at the center of your life and practice. Fundamentalism that recalls the unearned grace proclaimed by Jesus will be open-hearted, generous, kind, and hopeful, and will seek the Kindom (my intentional spelling) of God on earth.”

Link to buy book on Amazon.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to know who you are without knowing where you came from, without knowing the history of your people, your place. For me, that story revolves around my great grandfather.

My mother’s grandfather, John R. Rice, was an Independent Baptist preacher and evangelist. Although he died fifteen months before I was born, his shadow loomed large over my childhood. My identity came from him, and he was, first and foremost, a Fundamentalist. From a sermon preached in 1928, early in his ministry, “Why I Am a Big F Fundamentalist,” to one of his last books, published in 1975, just five years before his death, “I Am a Fundamentalist,” that remained his most important identifier. With two hundred books and pamphlets to his credit (more than sixty million copies in print) and a biweekly newspaper he edited, the Sword of the Lord, that had a circulation topping out at over three hundred thousand, he was sometimes called “America’s Mightiest Pen.” His role as a principle player in two of the defining moments of 20th century American Fundamentalism – the 1957 split with Billy Graham over his ecumenical New York crusade, the end of a long friendship between the two, and the very public disagreement with Bob Jones, Jr., over the issue of secondary separation in the mid 70’s – cemented his role as an elder statesman of Fundamentalism. At his funeral service, one mentoree of his, Jerry Falwell, called his death the “passing of an era…He was God’s man for the hour. I looked on him as the guardian of fundamentalist truth for this generation. More than any other person, he was the most trusted man in fundamentalism…”

In the last couple of years, in an attempt to better understand my own history, the reasons why I grew up believing what I believed in childhood, beliefs that still shape me today, I’ve started reading through my great grandfather’s books – I currently own about 40 of them, I think – a process that is both difficult and often times frustrating, to put it mildly. I’ve read through the various Ph.D theses written about him, like Howard Edger Moore’s The Emergence of Moderate Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and The Sword of the Lord and Keith Bates’ Moving Fundamentalism Toward the Mainstream: John R. Rice and the Reengagement of America’s Religious and Political Cultures, as well as other books that focus on his role in shaping the beliefs of fundamentalists (and, consequently, evangelicals), like Margaret Lamberts Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, in an attempt to help me place his work in a larger framework, to better understand the context in which he spoke and wrote.

More importantly, though, for the past three or four years, I’ve walked with my uncle, Andrew Himes, through the process of his writing a book that is part memoir, part history of fundamentalism, viewed through the lens of our family. Drawing its name from the newspaper my great grandfather started, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in One American Family, it is finally nearing publication, with a street date of May 15th.

The book opens with a story about my great grandfather’s funeral, where my uncle, at that time the “black sheep” of the family, was seated next to Jerry Falwell at the post-funeral dinner for family and friends. Falwell, one of the speakers at the funeral and fresh off the recent success of the newly-formed Moral Majority, spent most of the meal bragging to Andy about his friendship with Reagan, glad that “for the first time in a century we have a fundamentalist living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” My uncle did his best to avoid serious questions and actual conversation, content to let Falwell carry the conversation and stay on safe ground. “Fundamentalism was a difficult and painful topic for me, to say the least,” he writes, “and I had no idea how to talk about it without getting into an unseemly and angry debate with Jerry Falwell, with all my family as witnesses.”

The rest of the book is, among other things, his account of coming to terms with his story, coming to a place where he could talk about fundamentalism and his own history without solely reacting to the worst parts of the story, able to see the many facets that made up both his own history and the history of fundamenatlism. In the forward, Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach, writes, “Andrew went from worshipping his grandfather to hating him to loving him. So the arc of this story has ancient and archetypal power: it moves from the neediness that leads us to cling to false gods, to the anger that fuels rebellion and individuation, to the love that strives for understanding and communion.”

That is where I see this story having value. Remembering Frederick Buechner’s oft-quoted observation that the story of any one of us is the story of us all, Andrew, by telling his story, creates a space for us to look at our own stories, maybe even pointing out the way for how we can arrive at that final stage Parker Palmer points out, a love that strives for understanding and communion.

Before the book officially releases on May 15th, we’re looking for bloggers interested in reviewing it, with a goal of having a strong push of people buying the book from Amazon on release day to help spread the word. If you’re interested in reviewing it for your blog, click here for more details. We’ll have more info when the book releases.

Here now is Andrew, telling one story that appears in the book.

I was, then, as you might imagine, happy to hear President Obama allude to another Niebuhr quote in his recent speech in Tuscon, and so wrote up some thoughts about it for Jesus Needs New PR, along the way tossing in quotes from Wendell Berry, David Dark, and Frederick Buechner.

In his address in Tucson on January 12th, for the memorial service remembering the victims of the gunman who opened fire at U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords open meeting, President Obama exhorted those gathered, along with a listening nation, to “use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” His choice of words – “expand our moral imaginations” – was deliberate. He has used that phrase at least once before in a speech, in his Nobel Lecture delivered in December of 2009, where he encouraged “the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there is something irreducible that we all share.” In both cases, President Obama was undoubtedly referencing the work of the greatest American theologian of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr – whose work has been an influence upon Obama – and his book Moral Man and Immoral Society, where he wrote the following: “The most perfect justice cannot be established if the moral imagination of the individual does not try to understand the needs, interests and feelings of his fellow human beings.”

Read the full post here

(This is a part of my Why I Stopped Going To Church series. You can read part one here, part two here, part two point five here, and part three here.)

Before I move on to the next part, I wanted to expand upon a point I made in part three: stepping away from the Sunday morning expression of church-for now-does not mean that I have stepped away from community, nor do I think one can easily do so while still claiming they are following the Christian tradition in any discernible way. The decisions one makes when they are left alone with their own neuroses and what they think their Bible is saying to them on that day, in what is often a strange historical vacuum, do not tend to be in accordance with the Christian witness.

As an example of what I’m arguing against, I’ll reference here the case of Sheila Larson, who is well known among sociologists of religion for this statement: “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith is Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”

Not long ago, I had the misfortune of sitting through a sermon where the speaker uttered the phrase “Jesus, who lives in my heart,” or some variant of that line, probably fifteen or twenty times. And went on to talk about what he could do “with Christ, who gives every bit of himself to me.” Leaving aside the bad theology of the latter phrase, I’m more perturbed by the repeated use of the phrase “Christ living in my heart” in his message with its focus on a private faith, and what that means in how we make decisions and convince ourselves of the rightness of our actions, at the expense of “working out our salvation in fear and trembling,” in community. Granted, there are four or five verses that could possibly be used as the basis of such an idea, such as Paul writing about “Christ in me, the hope of glory,” or “Not I, but Christ, who lives in me…” But those references all have something to do with the fundamental change that Paul (and other writers) say happens when we “put on Christ,” and you would be hard pressed to use them as proof-texts for saying that Jesus living in your heart means that you can ___ (fill in the blank).

I owe a debt to David Dark, both in his book The Gospel According to America and to conversations over coffee, for giving me the language to express my thoughts as it relates to this subject. So instead of trying to re-articulate the problems I see with the catch phrases used by the aforementioned speaker, I’ll let you read David’s words from chapter two of his book, Song of Ourselves: Narcissism and Its Discontents in a Bipolar Nation. This paragraph starts by referencing a claim by then-Texas Governor Bush that it would be hard to explain how Jesus “changed my heart” if people didn’t already know exactly what he was talking about. David writes:

[H]e’s right. It’s what millions of Americans are referring to when they say that they know or that they’ve “got” Jesus as their savior. I don’t mean to imply disingenuousness on the part of anyone when I suggest that this way of talking isn’t necessarily faithful to the traditional Christian confession. Harold Bloom has suggested that “knowing” Jesus, believing yourself to have a one-on-one relationship with him (unmediated by tradition; “in the garden alone”; impossible to explain to anyone who doesn’t know him like you do), is a recently developed form of gnosticism that is probably the real, most-often-practiced, American religion. Minus the obligation to aspire toward continuity with a historic, visible, practicing community (based on some recognizable fashion on what Jesus of Nazareth said and did), we’re left alone with what we believe in our hearts our personalized Jesus is telling us. The nonpolitical, fully spiritualized Jesus is on the rise in America.
As a cautionary measure against our tendency to tell ourselves the Jesus in our heart of hearts is telling us to do whatever we’ve already decided to do or that the Bible somehow buttresses whatever we feel is right, the Christian prayer of confession affords us the opportunity to recognize ourselves as fallible discerners of whatever it is the Spirit is saying to the churches. Trying to be faithful to that word, perceived with fear and trembling, is what the church does. But to the Christian mind, the individual human heart, far from having a direct line to God, is, to borrow the language of Jeremiah, both deceitful above all else and desperately wicked… Is our talk of our knowledge of Christ divorced from an apprenticeship to his way of doing things? When we say we know him (or that someone else doesn’t) are we making reference to the historical Jesus or are we simply talking about some well-meaning, inarticulate heart longing? This is why communal accountability, discernment, and confession of sin will, traditionally, save us from the tyranny of a “personal, private faith” and the clear and present dangers of Sheilaism.

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

“The greatest lie believed today,” my friend, and my pastor at the time, Tom, told those gathered that morning, quoting Larry Crabb, “is that one can know God without being known by someone else.” This statement, even if one chalks it up to hyperbole, is one way of getting at a truth we all instinctively know: we can’t do life alone. Whether one is speaking of life in general or of what we sometimes call the religious parts of life, as if there were a clear dividing line, we were not meant to be solitary creatures. In an attempt to explore reasons for spending time with fellow believers in a deliberate, structured context, Dr. Harold Best, in Unceasing Worship, writes:

Christ in us demands that each of us seek out who the rest of us are. It means realizing that we actually have each other, that we are already at one with each other, greeting each other, blessing each other, settling on acceptable ways to express ourselves to God’s glory. Then we craft these into a liturgy, knowing that it is at best a passing reference to the one who abides from the eternities and lights our path wherever we walk. If we were to concentrate more on the sheer joy of getting together on a Sunday – people made holy, people yet to be made holy and people not sure of the difference, all banded together around the Lord – we would then more fully understand the depth and width of “the communion of the saints” in the Apostles’ Creed.

It should be evident, then, that I think an in-depth discussion of church and the reasons we go or don’t go needs to include some consideration of the larger question of the reasons for church gatherings and what is gained or lost through making a priority of larger gatherings of a body of believers, and including a discussion of the church visible vs. the church invisible, but, for various reasons, I’ll leave more of that discussion for another time.

One question that has been asked of me by friends and family over the last six months or so is this: if the way certain words are used at the church I was involved with bother me to such a degree that I find regular attendance impossible, why do I not find another church to attend? The answer is community.

I occasionally visit another church near my house, an Anglican church where a friend of mine is a priest, and there is much in the liturgical nature of their services that I find restorative and life-giving. There is a lot of truth in the statement that we see the shortcomings of the traditions we were raised in better than those that are new to us, which is one way of explaining why people change denominations. Like many before me, who, after being raised in a strict, fundamentalist tradition, found a home in a tradition they had been told was dead and lifeless – the stated purpose of my great grandfather’s newspaper was to oppose “Modernism, Worldliness and Formalism” – I suspect that one day I’ll end up in a church community grounded in history, with worship services built around an ancient liturgy. But because certain factors mean that I am unable, or unwilling, to make that transition today, partly because I love, and am deeply grateful for, in ways that I find hard to express, the community I live life with each day, a community brought together by the church I was attending (and including members of the staff there), and partly because I don’t have the energy or desire to invest in a whole new set of relationships, I am left without a place to call home.

I’ve written before on Matthew’s blog about the degree to which our past experiences shape what we hear and how certain ideas and phrases affect us in ways foreign to our neighbor, quoting Peter Rollins on how he gave friends, who were attending the same church, different council about their involvement there – telling one to leave and one to stay – because they way they interacted with the teachings of that community depended so heavily on what they brought to it.

Rollins’ story is helpful for explaining why one reason I have encouraged friends to stay in the church that I left – a church that has many reasons to recommend it, not least the community it fosters and the content of much of the teaching (previously quoted examples excluded) – and also why I don’t attend there any more. To put it another way: when I hear that a new foreign film is coming to my local indie theatre and I suspect that I will be alone out of my friends in liking it, I will see it by myself, knowing that the way my friends respond, be it with boredom, indifference, or even actively disliking it, will affect my enjoyment of it. In the same way, when I stand next to my friends on Sunday morning, and my body language, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, betrays my frustration with the language and messages coming from the front of the room, it affects how they experience the service. With the likelihood being that the things that bother me are not even on their radar, and maybe shouldn’t be.

While acknowledging the importance of doubting and asking questions in community, as David Dark explores so eloquently in his book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, there is another aspect that Marilynne Robinson gets at in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, where the elderly Reverend Ames, writing to his son about not trying to find proofs for faith, says: “I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.” When I start to think that everyone needs to have the same “mustache and walking stick,” questions influenced by my own personal experience rather than being the fashion of a moment, when everything else is drowned out in their noise, it reaches a point where it is not helpful to those around me. That is when I stepped away.

Part four coming next week

Here are a couple paragraphs that stood out to me (emphasis added):

The first order debate on ecclesiology is where Ballor’s most innovative work is done: are churches competent, technically and ontologically, to make policy prescriptions?

But first, pause and consider why churches and their ecumenical superstructures feel compelled to make otherwise technical prescriptions. Global events have saturated the public imagination for decades now, with the advent of ever-globalizing relationships and instant information. Christians in churches have also experienced this expansion. The conscious awareness of social justice issues must surely be greater now than at any moment in history.

So we can certainly sympathetically see Christians latch onto the first institution they know and trust to speak into the apocalyptic captions on the evening news. For most of us, the church is the most immediate, accessible, and organized institution we know. With Ballor, we might agree the church as institution is not the best platform—but it is at least an understandable one.

I might argue that this recognition should inspire us to ecclesial charity, because while globalization raises awareness broadly, it does not educate deeply. Simplistic call and response on complex economic and political issues may be inadequate, but at least it’s a conversation on justice. And I can get into that.

and

Ballor is spot-on when worrying that narrowly framing the debate this way can obscure the fact that globalization is about a great deal more than economics or politics. Isn’t it ironic that the ecclesial conversation is essentially a thinly-baptized version of exactly the same disagreements in the secular world, but with less technical capacity and more theological abstraction? This is Ballor’s most important point.

Here’s the link to Robert’s full review, which I recommend reading even if this book’s subject does not lay within your primary area of interest.

Read part one here and part two here.

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

I am still working on part three of this series, so in the meantime, I thought I’d post a passage from Frederick Buechner’s sermon Two Stories that a friend just reminded me of, from the same collection – Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons – as the Buechner sermon I mentioned in part two. I realize this means I’ve quoted Buechner four or five times in these posts so far, but one reason I do so is because I count myself among those who say they still call themselves Christians, at least in part, because of the writings of Frederick Buechner, and I’ll do everything within my power to convince others to read his work, especially his sermons and his memoirs – The Sacred Journey, Telling Secrets, and Now and Then are great introductions.

This passage quoted below has something to do with the stories of where we came from and where we are going, of where home is. When I first read it, I was reminded of sermons I’d read and heard recordings of by my great grandfather (like this one) about what it took to be “a real Christian,” the first kind of person in Buechner’s story. And I was a bit surprised at how completely I identified with the second kind of person in the story. Two years later, and I’m still feeling the same way.

The Jehovah’s Witness appears on the doorstep, or somebody who’s gotten religion corners you at a party, and embarrassing questions are asked in an embarrassing language. Have you been born again? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior? And yes, yes, you want to say—half humiliated, half appalled and irritated, torn in a dozen directions at once by the directness and corn of it, tongue-tied. You wouldn’t be caught dead maybe using such language yourself, but oh Jesus, yes, in some sense your answer is and has to be yes, though to be asked it out of the blue that way, by a stranger you’d never have opened the door to if you’d known what he was after, makes the blood run cold. To be reminded that way or any way of the story of Jesus, where you came from, is like having somebody suddenly produce a picture of home in all its homeliness—the barn that needs cleaning, the sagging porch steps, the face in the dusty window—when you’ve traveled a thousand miles and a thousand years from home and are involved in a thousand new and different things. But the story of Jesus is home nonetheless—the barn, the steps, the face. You belong to it. It belongs to you. It is where you came from.

Read the full article here.

Read Part One here

This essay cross-posted from Jesus Needs New PR

Earlier this year, on the first Sunday in Lent, I walked into church hopeful that I would hear something of whatever it is we are all looking for, whatever we hope to find when we gather together with other believers, or, as Frederick Buechner says, at least would-be believers, part-time believers, believers with our fingers crossed.  And instead the congregation was treated to a bad morality tale.  The sermon delivered that morning to those hoping to hear some whisper of grace, some reason to believe or to keep on believing, some exploration of those big questions we all have, even the ones we are more often than not afraid to ask, was instead built around everyone knowing how “right” the speaker was in his opinions.  Like thousands of sermons I heard growing up, the speaker opened his sermon by assuring people how bad of a preacher he was, that whatever the sermon was about came from God and not from him.  It’s a brilliant set up, if you think about it.  It means that people know up front that if you disagree with anything they say, you are not disagreeing with them, but with GOD.  Using the phrases so familiar from my childhood, the words that provided the comfort and assurance that come from knowing you are absolutely right in everything you think, that not only is there absolute truth but that you have a complete grasp on it, the speaker that morning left no doubt that God was on his side – and you would be too, if only you weren’t so intent on rebelling against God (or him; the distinction was a little blurry by this point).

I walked out of the building that morning, squinting into the bright Nashville sun, shaking.

With anger.

With an overwhelming sense of loss.

Mourning, once again, the loss of a place I could call home, the realization growing inside of me that the religion of my childhood, a way of looking at the world that I had left behind, and the way I was asked to look at the world that Sunday, in a church far removed in most ways from the one I grew up in, were more alike than I had wanted to admit.

Returning to my house – breaking several traffic laws on the way – I poured a shot of Tennessee whiskey and downed it in a gulp before starting lunch.    And in the following months, I spent long hours engaged in thought and conversation with friends about the reasons we go to church, reasons beyond the comfort and familiarity of a weekly tradition.

Over lunch one Tuesday afternoon at a Mexican restaurant a couple weeks after the above incident, a friend told me that one of the reasons he makes space each Sunday to gather with fellow believers is to see the hand of God.  He knows the music will be bad, he knows the pastor hasn’t – and won’t – read the kinds of books he reads, and the phrases he hears from behind the pulpit will likely be trite and clichéd.  It’s been years since he learned something from the guy up front on Sunday morning.  But when he looks to his left, he sees a guy standing with his family, his arm around his wife and his children by his side, and knows that only a short year earlier, that man was battling multiple addictions, his life spiraling out of control.  And even though there have been stumbles along the way, he is here today, with his family, taking the next step.  Looking to his right, my friend sees more couples whose stories are similar, lives that had been destroyed and are now in the process of rebirth.  And he knows of no workable explanation, other than the hand of God.

Even so, today, I search for reasons to go to church.  I know the warnings about not going, I know the importance of taking time to be still and be reminded of what is truly important, but the contradictions – and even more, the similarities – the sermons I hear have with the sermons of my childhood, and with a religious culture that I have left behind, prove to be more than I can process.   The cognitive dissonance between past and current beliefs and doubts makes it hard to live in that world.

But still, I hope.

Early on Easter Sunday morning this year, I was reading a sermon by Frederick Buechner, something that has become somewhat of a Sunday morning tradition for me, when I came across this phrase, a reminder of why I still struggle to believe, why I haven’t walked away from everything that bears a resemblance to my childhood religion: “To lose faith is to stop looking.  To lose faith is to decide that all you ever saw from afar was your own best dreams.”

At least one reason we gather together once a week – or a couple times a week, or once a month, depending on the practices of our local communities and our own inclinations – is out of our need to be around others who have also seen glimpses of the holy, others who, at least, find reasons to hope for something more.  And maybe one reason we say the creeds, one reason we sing the hymns and recite the prayers, is because we hope that by doing so we will come to believe the words we are saying, believe them with a part of ourselves, even, that we usually hide.  And on those days when we can’t believe, maybe we add our voices to the chorus of those around us in hopes that they might be able to believe, at that moment in time, on our behalf, those sacred moments when we don’t have the strength to hope for anything more.

That, more than anything, is what I miss.

part three coming soon