Tag Archive: America

Rolling With Evangelicals

November 18, 2020 2 Comments

The freedom afforded to Christians in North America would probably be considered miraculous by the first disciples of Jesus and the churches initiated by the witness and ministry of the Apostles. I really have little to complain about. I am so grateful; this gratitude only grows as I intercede for sisters and brothers in Christ who are pressured and oppressed, tortured and killed, because of their witness to Jesus as Lord today in other places around the world. 

I am not saying that pressure and social exclusion doesn’t happen in North America because of our confession of Christ; but I am saying that in spite of the fear expressed by some of my brothers and sisters within evangelical institutions, we are enjoying immense amounts of freedom. 

Our inclination within in protestantism is to find something to resist. But the main goal of evangelical resistance has unfortunately become protection of our freedoms rather than a persistent resistance of the kingdom of darkness and its intent to kill, steal, and destroy the precious lives of people through greed which is idolatry and apathy, exploitation and violence, hate and the accompanying shadow of unbelief cast over the knowledge of God. People who don’t know Jesus still have a longing for righteousness, so they protest. But we refuse the protest because we have alienated ourselves from and envisioned ourselves as above or better than the crowd. (1. Jennings)

Not only have we have forgotten how to protest, but we have situated ourselves in enclaves of power so that any protest not initiated within our own institutions must be resisted. For the past year I have pleaded with some evangelicals to abandon the following: the exaltation of  patriarchy over women, the demonization of anyone who acknowledges the reality of racism and violence towards other humans, a rage towards those who plead for creation care by calling for limits to our consumption, and a contempt of the poor and those who seek refuge because their own countries of origin have become inhospitable toward them.

In my own pain and in my own impulse to resist I am left to wonder at times, “Who am I?” I have degrees from three institutions whose histories are inextricably linked to racism and the idolatry of slavery. I have been a part of and served in six congregations in this Southern Baptist stream and now lead a seventh. Sometimes I sort out the pain I feel by saying, “I’m a little b baptist.” Other times I answer the question of who I am by retreating to the answer formed by the question, “Who loves you?” I am loved by Jesus, and so I belong to Him.

I rarely use the word evangelical to describe myself. Yet, I am located in this stream. I am evangelical. (2. Foster)

Some folks would like to distance themselves from evangelicalism, especially the American Patriot variety. Dear Andy, I get it! (3. Green) Perhaps what we really want to do is distance ourselves from the tribalism that has centred around allegiance to one political figure or party. Perhaps what we want to do is distance ourselves from meanness. Perhaps what we want to do is distance ourselves from undisciplined emotional lives and unmitigated hostility toward the complexities uncovered in the study of history, theology and science. Perhaps what we want to do is distance ourselves from white christian nationalism.

The challenge of locating myself within evangelicalism doesn’t have anything to do with my love for Jesus, high view of Scripture, delight in the Church, or zealous participation in the mission of God for the salvation of people in all their relationships. Actually those impulses keep me there as a messenger of the Evangel — Jesus Himself. He is good news for the poor and for all who will see. I don’t want to give over the word evangelical. The challenge comes when the very institutions located in evangelicalism and from which I came would spit me out. 

My ethics professor, Dr. Bill Tillman (4. Tillman) said that institutions are like rock tumblers. You come in as an unfinished rock with lots of edges. But the institution rolls you around and likes having you there as long as your edges will be knocked off. If you retain an edge, the institution will spit you out. It wants you to be smooth.

Confession — I’m a 9 on the enneagram. Hiding my edges is how I deal with the world. But here’s the thing, Jesus keeps chiselling away and He doesn’t just go after the edges. He goes after the smooth places and says, “Hey I don’t want you to conform to the world’s mold!” So Jesus seems to make me crossways with the world and with the institutions with whom I roll.  Somehow being with Jesus in His Word compels me not to hide, but to engage with the hostilities and enmities abounding around me so that the transforming power of the Spirit of God might be released in our lives.

I have a few friends who roll. That is — they practice some form of Jiujutsu. They love it. They roll. There are rules for engagement. There are communities that roll more generously and less viciously than others. My friends roll even though they have separated a shoulder, bruised a rib, pinched a nerve, and torn an ear. They stay and they roll because they have found a circle of friendship that fuels their desire for improvement.

Somehow I think I’m going to keep rolling with evangelicals. I find myself in-between a rock and a hard place. Even though I have sensitives shaped by histories of living at the edges of my Georgia small town society, of Catholic parents who landed in a baptist church, of serving in Vancouver, Canada as an immigrant, and of listening to lots of diverse university students, I’m going to keep rolling with evangelicals because evangelism matters to me. Sharing my life and making proclamation of Jesus and even entering into persuasive speech about life in Him, is restlessly generated in me by the Spirit of God as I read the Bible and try to locate myself in it and in the world.

There’s a common calling available here for evangelicals. We share this calling with so many followers of Jesus, so let’s roll! (5. A note about the metaphor.)

Notes: 

1. Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. See his discussion of how discipleship begins with the crowd.

2. Emma Green, writing about Andy Stanley in the Atlantic; The Evangelical Reckoning Begins.

3. Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith.

4. Dr. Bill Tillman, discussed this during an ethics class at SouthWestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1991.

5. A note about the metaphor. “Rolling.” Perhaps this combative metaphor for evangelical fellowship is appropriate but is also critiqued in Jennings work After Whiteness, especially in his discussion of the “right kind of theologian” sought out by the seminary and the academy. But I am after the sense of familial friendship I observed among friends who roll. At the end of the day they are not training for combat with each other, but for life in the world. For truly, we wrestle, but we wrestle “not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:12) I would rather that together we would wrestle in prayer like Epaphras who was a prayer wrestler. (Colossians 4:12-13 — “he is always wresting in prayer for you, that you may stand firm in all the will of God, mature and fully assured. I vouch for him that he is working hard for you and those at Laodicea and Hieropolis.”) I would rather that our rolling prepare us to be active with God in the world He loves. (Like Jacob who wrestled with God and became Israel but was received by Easu, his older brother who acted more in keeping with the Father’s Heart as shown us by Jesus in Luke 15 and thus participated in God’s transformation of Jacob.)

Church, Relationships

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Thanksgiving as my culture

November 28, 2019 0 Comments

We the people by Danh Vo on display at the Guggenheim

It’s Thanksgiving in America. I am thank full. I’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving twice each year now for 25 years. My Canadian day comes in October and the American day comes — well today in November. That’s half my life, yet I still miss the way life is organized around this holiday in November — in America. At least I miss how it was organized in my family.

I realize that in 25 years even Thanksgiving in America has changed. The anticipation of shopping on Friday after Thanksgiving has given way to a whole week of ads and sales meant to agitate us because we are missing out, or there are new gadgets we really need, or our stuff is wearing out, and the special persons in our family need to know they are special to us and that is only possible if we buy them something — a lot of things. It’s not Thanksgiving in Canada, but this script is the cultural language of this very week in November!


So now I find myself asking, how do we make this week a genuine set of holy days?

Reckoning

I find the mythology of Thanksgiving to be insufficient for the demands we experience today to reckon with history as it’s told to children and to reconcile with peoples whose ancestors experienced the rush to occupy the land by whatever means. As hopeful as some settlers may been that settling could be a peaceful endeavour, their venture was often prepared through some kind of violence.


I don’t bring this up to generate guilt. Rather I bring up the rough centre of our history so as to generate humility and mercy.

The wealth enjoyed today came at someone’s expense. Not only did someone work hard, but someone else may have been displaced or denied an opportunity. The belief that we are each a self-made people is fundamentally flawed. Our economy has a context. For there is in our enjoyment of liberty in America (and in Canada) an idealism formed of complex thought and fundamental views of human rights. The ideals have many sources and can be traced to indigenous people in North America, to British and European philosophical streams, to the tradition of decision-making councils of North Africa and to biblical ideas extending back to Jesus and then to Israel. Yet, this idealism is fragile; it can be overtaken by blindspots, and it may even be dismantled. Our ideals have been selectively applied. If we are to name the blindspots one of them would be hubris.


When hubris and amnesia runs it course justice gives way to dehumanizing language and then oppression, slavery, and exclusion. Thanksgiving days have become for me an inescapable marker for hubris and selective amnesia and a counter play: the deliberate and desperate attempt to treasure what is more important in our relationships to God, to self, to people, and to the stuff of earth. These plays take shape as reckoning, receiving, repenting and remembering. And then hopefully rejoicing.

Receiving

Last night at a birthday celebration for one of my children we reviewed the gift that is in each person’s name. Two of my children have names that are derived from Micah. The question generated in the name “Micah” is “Who is like God?” The question is meant to generate humility and an attentiveness to God’s call by a people who historically had journeyed from a place of enslavement to a place of liberation:

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8

Early in the history of Israel God warned them of the deathtrap created by hubris and its accompanying amnesia. In Deuteronomy he says, “When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the LORD you God… Otherwise when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your hearts and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you… He brought you… He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, to humble and test you so that in the end it might go well with you. You may say to yourself, ‘My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.’ But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth…” (Deuteronomy 8:10-18)

Repenting

Hubris is a terrible burden. It has many sources. One of its sources is greed. Some in our congregation were recently surprised by the power of four words, “greed which is idolatry.” Writing to the church in Colossae, The Apostle Paul assigned greed as one of the powers of our earthly nature that we must put to death, otherwise it will dominate our lives (Colossians 3:5). One of my friends was stunned by connection of greed with idolatry. But that’s how it is — our hearts will follow our treasure and our treasures will define our hearts. Our relationship to the stuff of earth is fundamentally a question of worship. It has been noted by others that you know some thing is an idol the moment someone tries to take it from you and you feel crushed at the core of your person. Such idolatry leads to the death of justice.

Sadly our histories and therefore many of our collective holidays are shaped by greed and by hubris. When holidays are shaped like that humility and mercy and then justice will slip away. Let’s redeem the holy days.

Remembering

Perhaps a good way to start is the very way we see Jesus dealing with the temptation to meet the desires of his body with a self-directed act of power. You may recall Jesus was compelled by the Spirit of God to go from His baptism in the Jordan to meet with God in the wilderness. After a long season of fasting and prayer we get to listen in on the devil’s temptation, “If you are the Son of God tell these stones to become bread.” Jesus defeats the devil by recalling the work of God in the wilderness, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:3-4). What has Jesus done? He has remembered.

The context for Jesus’ quotation of Scripture is Deuteronomy. He recalls the call Moses gave to the people of Israel to remember God when they are no longer pilgrims but have become settlers. The call goes this way:

“Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” Deuteronomy 8:2-3

Three questions to evaluate our memory

Thanks giving requires remembering.
Who are we remembering?
Who are we forgetting?
Does humility and mercy and then justice flow from our thanks giving into our relationships?

And then comes rejoicing.


Notes on the picture: For more on Danh Vo’s work, We The People, read his story in the notes provided by The Guggenheim.

Change

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