personal

In 2005, Melissa and I packed up our necessary belongings into two big suitcases and boarded a plane with one-way tickets, leaving behind our home town in suburban Pennsylvania to start a new life in the UK.  In doing so, we left behind our reformed, independent, non-denominational evangelical church and found a new spiritual home in our local Anglican parish.

Looking back, finding a new church was a really good thing.  Not because one tradition was better or worse than the other, but because it broadened our spiritual awareness.  The liturgy they used was a refreshing change from ‘anti-liturgy’ we were used to.  The people we connected with represented a different set of questions and answers, a different perspective than we knew before.  And our faith benefited because of it.

Fast forward almost five years to the present, and we find ourselves in a similar place, having moved (for the fourth time since coming into the country) too far away to feel we could continue being a part of that parish community.  (Though I hasten to add that our friendship and deep ‘fellowship’ with several people there will survive the transition!)  And again I find myself thankful.  For many people I’ve met, their whole spiritual life has been in connection with one church, one denomination, one culture, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, theological insights and practical blind spots.  I don’t wish to look down on such people.  With those roots, they must have access to spiritual water that I can’t hope to reach any time soon.  And yet I am still thankful because I think that our path as Christian ‘travellers’ (not by choice, but a result of circumstance) has given us a broader perspective.

In particular, I’ve been increasingly reluctant to engage in the debates, power struggles and turf wars that are a natural part of church life.  I’ve been deeply grieved by the intensity of these ‘tug of war’ battles, and the passionate emotion that people invest in these life-and-death contests.  For me, the world’s too big and life’s too short for that.  Most things matter so much less than people think they do, and in our devotion to the minutiae we can easily miss the big picture of what God might want to do through us in our little corner of the world.

So another chapter begins.  From the Catholicism of my childhood to the evangelicalism of my adolescence to the Anglicanism of my mid-20s to… what?  I hope to begin to answer that question over the next few months.  I would appreciate your help!

For many reasons it seems that the more I grow in faith, the more difficulty I have with my evangelical church background.  These difficulties tend to be more cultural than doctrinal.  I believe that God made us, that Jesus died for us and rose again, and his Spirit works in everyone who follows him.  Perhaps that sounds a bit too fundamental to people on the outside (I don’t mean it to), but even so you may ask, ‘So what’s the problem?’

My struggle is not with theology, but with the way that Christian faith is often translated into real life spirituality and lifestyle.  Religious doctrine, after all, is nothing more than words and abstractions.  What really matters is how that doctrine is fleshed out in practice.  When I look at the practice of the contemporary evangelical Church, I am deeply disappointed.

It is comforting, then, to know that I’m not alone in that feeling.  ‘Chaplain Mike’ at internetmonk.com just provided I really good explanation here which I find really helpful.  Instead of duplicating his thoughts, I’d like to highlight a few that I find especially relevant to my experience:

‘A “solo Scriptura,” literalistic, precisionist view of the Bible that does not adequately grasp hermeneutics, literary genre, history of interpretation, and church authority’ — Of course there’s the silliness of ‘Left Behind’-style Biblical interpretation.  But it also takes a subtler and more dangerous form when Christians naively assume that a 2,000-year old text (or 4,000 in the case of the Old Testament) should be immediately accessible and relevant to contemporary life.

‘A continual confusion of means and ends, and the inability to see that changing methods can and does alter the message’ — This is a huge issue in worship ministry.  It’s what happens when church leaders try to be ‘hip’ and ‘cutting edge’ without taking on the more difficult task of examining, adapting and refreshing the culture and life of the church.  Just throw in a few trendy songs and an overhead projector, and distract people from your impoverished theology and dysfunctional practice.

‘Preaching that sets forth principles to help us live as good, moral people, rather than proclaiming what Jesus did and does for lost and sinful people’ — The message of Jesus is radical and revolutionary.  It’s also difficult to swallow.  On the other hand, most of us are already trying to be ‘good, moral people’, so if we talk about that, more people will stick around.  In the public sphere, this translates to an obsession with the culture war and issues that are wholly unrelated to the Gospel: abortion, sex, evolution and conservative politics.

‘A “temple-oriented” approach to the Christian life wherein everything revolves around the church and its programs (“churchianity”), so that churches are turned into family-friendly, religious activity centers rather than places of true discipleship’ — This is by far issue number 1 for me right now.  Instead of the church being a means to develop spiritual life, we make it the object.  This saps us of our strength to do anything really meaningful, and at the same time fuels conflict within the church as everyone fights tooth and nail to shape the organisation into one that fits their personal ideal.  This really is a remarkable form of idolatry.

‘“Worship” that is more about the worshiper and his/her preferences and emotional experiences than about giving honor to the true and living God and reenacting the story of Christ’ — Contrary to the Bible, church tends to teach that Christianity is about personal salvation, rather than world-transformation.  This leads to intense self-centredness, which churches respond to by helping individuals to feel that they are on the fast-track to heavenly bliss.

‘An inability to see the dangers of power and greed as clearly as the dangers of immorality’ — What would happen if churches cared as much about its members’ bank accounts as it did their sex lives?

I find these to be very serious concerns, and I have to find some way to reconcile my faith with the evangelical tradition that gave birth to it.  I could turn up my nose in disgust, as many have done.  But, after pronouncing the church guilty of hypocrisy, I find myself unable to cast the first stone.  Neither am I content to live with my discontent.

I suppose, then, that I am a post-evangelical wanderer.  Not that it really matters what I call myself, of course.  But the great thing about cyberspace is that it makes it easy to share your concerns with a wide audience.  On the map of Christian culture and history, this is my ‘dot’.  Where’s yours?