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Theology

doubting my salvation

Picasso_Pablo-Crucifixion
Picasso, “The Crucifixion”

One of the phrases I heard quite a bit in the fundamentalist church I grew up in was “You need to check up on your salvation.” It usually followed a long diatribe on sin, or wordliness, or unrighteousness, and the church-cult leader would say it to make sure we all understood that real Christians feel convicted when they hear sin being preached on. Real Christians feel crushing guilt. Real Christians have the Holy Spirit pricking their conscience day in and day out. If we could get through an entire sermon on sin without feeling a single twinge? Well, then, we needed to “check up” on our salvation, because we probably weren’t saved.

Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, I got a completely different message about “doubting my salvation.” Real Christians didn’t doubt their salvation, because real Christians could point to a specific time, a specific place, a specific prayer; and any time the Devil assailed them with doubts (and it was always the Devil doing this), a real Christian could point to that moment and say “get thee behind me, Satan!” That moment gave us “assurance of our salvation.” That moment became our testimony.

My first “moment” was when I was five or six. It was around Halloween, and my Sunday school teacher told a horrifying story about druids going from house to house flaying little children alive and burning pieces of their skin inside of pumpkins. He finished his lesson by telling us that Jesus could protect us from the demons if we “asked him to come into our heart.” Terrified, I spent the entire night curled up in my dark bedroom begging Jesus to protect me from the demons I was positive were going to snatch me out of my bed.

Later, when I was around eight, I realized that Christians got baptized, and when I asked to be baptized the lady I spoke to at church asked me when I’d “gotten saved.” Initially I was frustrated because I didn’t know what the heck she was talking about, and it took a few weeks to communicate my confusion to my mother. When I finally understood what “getting saved” meant to a Baptist, I explained to the woman about that night when I asked Jesus to come into my heart to save me from the demons. She wasn’t entirely convinced by that story, so she led me through a “sinner’s prayer.”

When I was eleven, I was in a revival service listening to an evangelist describe the horror of the crucifixion. The next night he preached a message about the difference between “profession and possession.” He explained how people can walk around saying they’re a Christian but who aren’t “saved” at all. In a sudden burst I realized that I had never really “gotten saved,” so I decided I’d go down to the altar at the end– but wait, what if the Rapture happened before the end of the service? I’d be “given over to a reprobate mind” for not getting saved before the Rapture and go to hell!

So, I walked myself through the Roman’s Road and prayed another sinner’s prayer in the middle of the sermon.

Those were my moments. Those were the times I could point to and declare, definitively, that I was saved. I didn’t have to worry about “doubting my salvation.” I had a rock-solid testimony. Any time I felt conflicted, or unsure, or afraid of hell, I could point to that moment and tell myself there was nothing to worry about.

~~~~~~~~~~

There are moments when I wish for the simplicity of my childhood. When I long for the comfortable black-and-white of saved and not saved— it was so quantifiable, so objective. Saved people had repented of their sin and asked Jesus to save them during a sinner’s prayer. Unsaved people had never done that. It was simple. Easy.

Now, though, that things have become far more complicated and far more gray, I find myself struggling again and again with questions.

Is God real?
Does he love me?
Was Jesus God?
What is Election?
What does the Atonement mean?
Does God send people to hell for no other reason than they’d never heard of Jesus?
Do I want to be a Christian anymore if the answer to that is yes?

And, when I’m asking these questions, you better check up on your salvation comes flitting through my head, unbidden and unwanted. I wish I could banish that phrase from my memory. I wish I’d never heard it once– let alone the countless times it was screamed at me. I wish I could get rid of it, because it makes these questions so much harder. There is a part of me– and sometimes this part of me is big, sometimes it is small– that wonders if I could possibly be a real Christian if I am plagued by these sorts of doubts. How can I call myself a Christian if I’m putting myself into the position of “judging God by human standards”? How can I call myself a Christian if I doubt his existence– or, if not his existence, then if he cares about human reality at all?

How can I be a Christian and doubt?

I know, most of the time, that doubt isn’t the antithesis of Christianity or faith. I know having serious questions about my religion doesn’t disqualify me from embracing it. But, I’m still, sometimes, terrified of being sent to hell– eternal conscious torment–  for my unbelief. Somehow strangely sure that not feeling constant nagging guilt means that I can’t be a real Christian. That my new-found comfort of dwelling in the gray means that I no longer “know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” I am comfortable questions, with perhaps never knowing what it means to be “saved” or “one of the Elect” and that must mean that I’m not. Because surely real Christians know that.

There is still a little girl inside of me curled up on her bed begging Jesus to protect her from the demons.

February 20, 2014 by
Theology

church statistics and abuse

sadness

[trigger warning for child sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence]

I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but from the reading I’ve been doing, sometime in the last 30 or so years there’s been a subtle shift in how churches talk about growth. What my reading tells me is that this is at least somewhat connected to the rise of the “mega church,” with it becoming impossible for pastoral staffs to simply look around their churches and understand who their congregation is.

There’s a certain appeal to evaluating church growth by the numbers, especially when church sizes seem to be ballooning. Applying business models that are intended to bring growth can be extremely useful for a variety of organizations, and churches are, really, just organizations. Organizations that are almost totally defined by “growth,” for better or for worse. Even in Acts, as my partner pointed out yesterday, the apostles tossed around a lot of numbers. Peter, especially, has one famous speech about Pentecost and how many were saved.

In the churches I’ve been in that have talked numbers– “X many people were saved! X many people were baptized! X many people have joined our church in the last year!”– the focus has almost always been hope. Numbers are real, concrete indications that we’re headed in the right direction, that what we’re doing is making a difference. Numbers are people.

But, in the last year, my perspective has changed quite a bit. I used to hear those numbers shouted from pulpits all over the country and exult right along with the preacher. And, in some ways, I still do. But, when I hear about how many people regularly come to church, and how many children are in Sunday school, and how many babies are dedicated, a completely different set of numbers starts spinning around my head, and it makes my heart ache.

My heart has been especially broken this week, since Bob Jones University decided to terminate the investigation they’d hired GRACE to do. I wasn’t a student of BJU, but I did grow up in that world and I know many people who were– and I know how important the GRACE investigation was to them, how much hope it had given them that maybe, just maybe, BJU could turn over a new leaf.

But, just like the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, and just like Sovereign Grace Ministries, and IBLP, and just like countless other churches and ministries all over the globe, BJU has decided to do what far too many other Christians have done: turn a blind eye to the abuses happening under their watch– abuses they are allowing to happen through their silence, abuses they are complicit in.

I know how hard it is to face the bleak reality that there are so many people willing to hurt others. That abuse in so many forms is commonplace. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to be a pastor and stand in front of your congregation and know that there are abusers and victims in your church. That you could be shaking the hand of a pedophile or rapist after church. That you could be eating dinner in the home of a batterer. That you can’t know. Not for sure.

But, this is a reality that does need to be faced. We need to look it dead, square in the eye and let it change us. We need to keep in front of us, always, that people are hurting and desperate and don’t know a way out. That most victims don’t even know they’re being abused, that abusers cloak themselves in forgiveness and grace and redemption, that some abusive husbands will use “I am the head of this home and you are my wife, so you must submit to me” as a weapon.

So, because this needs to be something that we know, something that changes how we talk, changes the advice we give, changes the way we love the people in our churches– I’ve broken down an average church size by the most reliable statistics we have.

Most churches in the United States have an average church attendance of around 500 adults, 125 children. Most congregations are dominated by married adults, so in this “average church,” there are 200 married couples, 275 women and 225 men, 64 girls and 61 boys. This means that in this church:

That’s a possible 256 people– 40% of this “average” congregation— who have been violently wounded by some kind of horrific abuse. This isn’t something we can afford to ignore. This is something that should utterly break us and radically transform everything we do as a church body. We can’t be dismissive of hurt. We can’t ignore that there’s darkness and pain and suffering. We can’t preach messages filled to the brim with ideas that can be turned into weapons by abusers. We can’t afford the blithe, non-committal “if you’re being abused, you need to get out,” and then move past that as if it doesn’t happen here. We have to stop burying our heads in the sand with our “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle!” and our “faith like a mustard seed!”

We have to be the ones who love the hurting and the broken, who acknowledge their pain.

February 13, 2014 by
Theology

fundamentalists, evangelicals, and certainty

question mark
photography by Marc Domage, installation by Robert Stadler

My small group is a little shy of your run-of-the-mill “Bible studies” and other evangelical-culture-approved curricula, so for the past year we’ve been reading through different religiously-oriented books, and for the next couple of months we’re going through Gregory Boyd’s Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty. I’m only to chapter five, but I think I’ve already recommended it around a dozen times. I think Boyd addresses an incredibly important question I’ve heard so many people asking: what does it mean to have faith, to believe? The typical evangelical teachings about faith usually involve this nebulous idea that “faith” equals “certainty”– that you feel sure. That if you can just convince yourself that God will heal a loved one . . . that God will heal that loved one.

It’s a crazy idea, and I really do think the book is worth reading. I’ll let you know for sure when I finish it.

But, as I was reading it last week, something he talked about jumped out at me: that this approach of “feeling certain” is incredibly attractive– he describes it as “blissful.” It didn’t take me more than a second to connect this to fundamentalism, because if there’s one thing that unites fundamentalists, it is how incredibly certain they are.

When I did my series on defining fundamentalism, I asked all of you to explain what had drawn you to fundamentalism in the first place, and almost unanimously the response was that fundamentalism was comfortable– that the black and white nature of how fundamentalists approach questions made things simple. Fundamentalism is straightforward. Fundamentalism is easy, and given that we live in a world filled with horrible suffering, that this one approach to faith means you don’t have to struggle with soul-deep questions is compelling.

It occurred to me that this “certainty model of faith,” as Boyd calls it, might be what’s fueling Christian fundamentalism in America. Because, if certainty really does equal faith, and Christians are spending most of their energy trying to convince themselves, then it almost seems that becoming a fundamentalist is inevitable. It’s unlikely that evangelicals are going to go gung-ho and they’ll all start touting KJV Bibles or giving up their Christian rock, but when it comes to the practice of faith, how can fundamentalism be avoided if what we’re seeking is certainty?

There’s a term I’ve seen popping up in different conversations– fundigelical. From watching conservative evangelical culture over the past few years, I’ve noticed that there’s been a slow blurring between evangelicalism and fundamentalism. It used to be that evangelicals were insanely liberal by fundamentalist standards, but now? I can barely tell the difference anymore. And maybe that’s just because I’m a progressive Christian so everything to the religious or political right of me all looks the same, but I think I have a little more discernment than that.

I’m looking at things like the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and The Gospel Coalition, and I paid close attention to the Southern Baptist Convention last year . . . and what I’m seeing disturbs me. When men like C.J. Mahaney, whose sermons are indistinguishable from any fundamentalist diatribe I heard growing up, are the leaders of entire evangelical movements, when they are closely connected to one of the largest American denominations, it forces me to ask if whether or not fundamentalism is creeping into evangelical culture. When men like Mark Driscoll draw mile-wide lines in the sand, separating “us” and “them,” I start wondering– how truly different is modern evangelicalism from the fundamentalism I grew up in?

They certainly look different.

But are they, really? Once you get passed the haircuts and the ankle-length skirts, they don’t seem to be. Ideologically they’re practically inseparable– both sets hold to The Fundamentals:

Inspiration and Inerrancy of Scripture
Deity of Christ
Virgin birth
Substitutionary atonement
Physical resurrection and physical Second Coming

As a progressive Christian looking back at what I used to believe, this list seems a little… interesting. None of these things are what anyone would define as “the essentials for salvation,” but this, apparently, is the Hill Worth Dying On to fundamentalists. A specific and relatively new atonement theory, selected from among at least a half dozen others? An approach to the inspiration of Scripture that cannot be proven, not now and not in the future, since we have never had the autographa— and an approach that is, in practice, absolutely useless? A single, solitary approach to eschatology that is a massive departure from almost two thousand years of church teaching?

These are what fundamentalists in the historical sense of the term decided that they were going to be absolutely certain of– and they are the core ideas of evangelical theology. When I poke around some of the evangelical blogs that I read consistently, they tend to make it clear that in order to write for them you have to believe The Fundamentals.

When I first started writing here, when I created this blog, almost all of my focus was on the Christian fundamentalist mindset that I grew up in. But, over the last year, there’s been a slow shift in the language I use– from fundamentalism to conservative evangelicalism to evangelicalism, and it was not a conscious decision. Part of it was that I moved on from talking about my childhood to things I’ve noticed as an adult in mainstream evangelicalism, but another part of it was that as I became more and more exposed to American evangelicalism I stopped being able to make a clear delineation. There just . . . wasn’t enough of a difference for me to treat them as clearly separate things.

And I’m beginning to think that it all goes back not to what people believe, but how they believe it.

February 11, 2014 by
Feminism, Theology

myths I believed about women of the Bible

One of my blogging friends, Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism, has been going through Debi Pearl’s Created to Be His Help Meet a few pages at a time– she’s where I got my idea to break down Fascinating Womanhood. Libby Anne’s gotten to the part of the book where Debi uses Bathsheba as an example of everything a woman shouldn’t be, and blames Bathsheba almost totally for everything that happened– both to her and to David and his family. She’s the biblical face that sunk a thousand ships, as it were.

Reading over Debi’s description felt oh-so-familiar. It was exactly what I was taught about Bathsheba. A quick review of church history– its art, its commentaries, its sermons–  reveals that it’s how most Christians talked about her, too. Bathsheba, to many Christians, was a slutty whore. As I’ve grown into egalitarianism and feminism over the past four years, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with that interpretation. There’s no crystal-clear explanation in II Samuel 11 that Bathsheba didn’t consent, but that’s hardly surprising since Bronze Age cultures had no (or little) conception of female consent. Regardless, David was the warrior-king, the warlord, and how exactly was Bathsheba supposed to say “yes”? Consent matters very little when there’s no real possibility of saying no and having that no be respected.

But then, Libby Anne pointed something out that I had completely missed: that the text actually does make it completely and utterly clear that Bathsheba had absolutely no part in what happened to her and she was not to be held responsible. It says it, plain as day, when the passages specifies that she was “purifying herself from her uncleanness” in verse four.

Bathsheba wasn’t bathing on her roof.

Bathsheba was in the mikveh. In the communal pool, the one designated for ritualistic cleansing, the one constructed for privacy, and the one David would have KNOWN naked women went into at least once a month, as the Law commanded.

And not only that, any time David’s actions are discussed anywhere else in Scripture, it is always to place the full, unmitigated blame totally and squarely on David. Never, not even once, is Bathsheba mentioned. She did nothing– nothing— wrong. Considering how severely the Law treats women who “play the harlot in their father’s house” or commit adultery (ie: stoned to death), that any supposed wrong-doing on her part is never even mentioned is pretty strong evidence that David raped her.

Reading that this morning was… beyond mind-boggling. I read that passage my entire life, have heard countless sermons preached on it, and what I walked away with was that Bathsheba was a slut.

The same thing has happened to virtually every other women in the Bible.

Deborah? Just a punishment for men being cowardly and lazy. Huldah? Huh, who’s that? Oh, just some random woman that read the Torah. Forget about how she was a contemporary of four other male prophets. Obviously she’s just there to prove how ungodly Judah had become. Junia? Nope, not an apostle. Dude, she’s not even a woman. Mary Magdalene, the person the Resurrected Christ appeared to first? Also a whore– she was obviously a prostitute. Please ignore how there’s not even a single shred of evidence to support that.

What’s the only thing we know about Sarah? That she mocked God. What did Rebekah do? She manipulated and lied. Rachel? Was a whiny little brat that stole her father’s idols. Dinah? Also a slutty slut, nevermind that she was also raped. Eve? Weak and easily deceived, also responsible for the destruction of the human race because she was a fool. Satan knew that Adam was much too smart, much too good, to be deceived. The song of praise and honor meant for all women in Proverbs 31? It’s a list of commands now, you have to do all of it or you’re a worthless good-for-nothing wretch. What do we remember about Hannah? She was discontent with her husband and needed a baby to be happy.

Over, and over, and over again it seems that most Christian theologians over the past few thousand years have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy doing anything possible to discredit and destroy every single last positive example of womanhood in the Bible. It’s so deeply buried in Christian culture at this point that it seems incredibly rare for someone to even bother to show women in the same light that the Bible showed them: as human, yes, but also as glorious, courageous, magnificent, brave, intelligent, dedicated, loving Daughters of Abraham, Heirs of God.

February 7, 2014 by
Theology

and yet ANOTHER internet controversy!: going to church

battle
by Wolfgang Hohlbein

Honestly, when all of this hubub showed up on my facebook feed on Monday, I was quite honestly just … bored. I read Donald Miller’s original article, “I Don’t Worship God by Singing, I Worship Him Elsewhere,” and my only thoughts were, “oh, that’s neat.” And then I read a dozen buzzfeed articles on cats. I really like Donald Miller, and Blue Like Jazz has been on my wishlist for ages, but this article didn’t say anything radical– at least not to me. Another person has discovered that– spoiler— God doesn’t just exist in church. Yay for everybody.

But then I saw so many conversations spring up– on facebook, on twitter, in comment sections– and it took me by surprise. Why are people talking about this? Some dude doesn’t regularly attend his church and this is worth talking about? Ok, then, world, you’re a strange beast.

And then this happened.

And this.

And… this.

And then The Gospel Coalition threw their hat in the ring.

And Donald Miller responded.

Even after following all of that, and reading through a number of conversations, I still don’t get it. Mostly because I think that most of the people having these conversations deeply misunderstood Miller’s original point, which was that church hasn’t been the best way for him, personally, to have a good relationship with God. Since that’s been true for me basically my entire life– and true for mostly everyone I know– it just seemed… ho-hum. Like he was just saying out loud what everyone already thought. Most Christians go to church, that’s true, but I think if we were all being honest with ourselves we’d admit that nope, church attendance isn’t really the cornerstone of my relationship with God.

I guess not.

Miller’s already addressed anything I would say about the general arguments, but there is one path in particular I wanted to follow, because it especially leaped out to me because of my religious background. It’s encapsulated pretty well in “Donald Miller’s Prescription for Spiritual Suicide” by Denny Burk:

I don’t know what else to say except that this is profoundly disappointing. Not only that, it’s also dangerous. It’s a recipe for spiritual suicide. I am not denying that people have different learning styles. I am denying that different learning styles in any way trump what God has said to us about His church. The scripture is very clear that the local church is the matrix for Christian discipleship. In short, you cannot be a follower of Jesus and be indifferent about the church.

First, and you all probably know I’m about to say this: anything that comes after “The Bible Clearly Says” is not something I’m going to give a lot of attention to. Burk almost lost me at that paragraph, but I finished the rest of the post, which he ended with how “nothing could be more dangerous to your soul” than … not attending church regularly.

I don’t attend church regularly, and I don’t for entirely different reasons than Donald Miller. A huge part of it is that I’m just not the healthiest person, but the biggest part of it is that almost nothing is more damaging to my faith or my relationship with God than going to church.

Seriously. When I muster up the strength to face a church service, I sit through the entire thing cringing most of the time. Most of my negative experiences have little to do with anything happening at the church service I’m in, to be clear. Most of the time, it’s because my pastor occasionally does or says something that reminds me of them— my abuser, my cult-leader– and, although it’s nothing really to do with this pastor, or this church,  I spend the rest of the sermon fending off a panic attack.

Rarely, though, something happens in a church service that makes me walk out of the building saying fuck it I’m not putting up with this shit anymore fuck it all to bloody hell fuck God fuck his church fuck all these bloody people I’ m never coming back to this fucking place.

Welcome to the inside of Samantha’s head when she’s disturbed by how blind the church can be to how evil the world is and how the church can hurt people.

Anyway, what I think most of Miller’s critics have completely and utterly missed is that a traditional church service is not the same thing as community, as worship, as anything like what’s described in the New Testament. I mean, it doesn’t take a Bible scholar to read Acts of the Apostles and see that church services mostly consisted of everyone getting together for dinner and then talking about Jesus. I don’t exactly need song leaders and sermons for that.

But, again, in all these conversations about “church” there’s a huge part that’s missing: there are people who have been abused by churches, by pastors, by religious teachings, and that most of what’s hurt them happened during church services. Telling people like us that avoiding our triggers, that staying mentally healthy, that struggling to have any faith at all outside of the environment that causes us so much pain is a recipe for suicide is wrong. That all of the people who don’t go to church for whatever reason are horribly bad, neglectful, uncaring, un-spiritual Christians– if we even get to be Christians at all, which according to people like Denny Burk, that’s not even an option.

No, I don’t go to church very often. But, honestly acknowledging that church is not a safe place for me, and overcoming all the mountains of guilt and shame I feel when I don’t get out of bed on a Sunday morning has been the best thing that’s ever happened in my relationship with God.

February 6, 2014 by
Theology

a peculiar people

relativity
Escher, “Relativity”

Salt of the earth.

City set on a hill.

A peculiar people.

In the world, but not of it.

Called out.

Separated.

~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote a post for Convergent yesterday talking about why I think legalism exists, and part of what I was thinking about the entire time was a concept that’s consistently bothered me over the last year. In an e-mail I received a long time ago, someone asked me why I had such a big problem with “the biblical doctrine of separation.” My initial response was that they’d missed the point, that it wasn’t separation at all that I was talking about– that I had a problem with Christian fundamentalism. Except, to this person, “fundamentalism,” which they proudly claimed, and “separation,” go hand in hand. To this person, and to a lot of the people I know, they’re really the same thing.

As I wrote about the “why” of legalism, I realized that there was an audience I was likely not going to be able to reach: fundamentalists. Because fundamentalists have an essentially ironclad reason for their legalism, and it comes down to the very definition of church: ἐκκλησία comes from καλέω and ἐκ, and means, literally, “called out.” Fundamentalist Christians take this incredibly seriously: if we’re the Church, we’re “called out.”

I have a book sitting on my shelf: Biblical Separation: The Struggle for a Pure Church by Ernest Pickering. It’s a textbook for one of the Bible classes at my old fundamentalist college, and it lays out an argument for the necessity of separation. We must be separate, because if we’re not, we risk apostasy and corruption. We must keep our theology and our ideology pure, untainted by “wordliness” or “godless philosophies.” It’s the reason why Christian fundamentalism began, when the early leaders wrote and compiled The Fundamentals. They were worried about attacks on doctrine, about new and disturbing theologies that accommodated early post-modernism and higher criticism.

They would even go on to make the same exact argument I did yesterday: that God’s holiness demands his followers to have the same abhorrence to sin. That we must hate sin, and do whatever it takes to remove it.

Which is where legalism enters.

Every time, growing up, I heard a messaged preached on “sin,” it always, always included this reasoning. God hates sin, so we must hate sin. Except . . . I’ve never been able to really understand what “sin” is, not even when I was a fundamentalist doing my utmost to avoid it. I had this nebulous understanding that sin was “doing something God told us not to do”; but then “drinking alcohol” was a sin, and when the Bible includes “drink wine for your stomach’s sake,” that shit gets confusing.

And as I got older, and the pastor and the people in our church fell deeper into “separation,” more and more things became sin. Things that were obviously not in the Bible, and therefore could not be something God told us not to do– things like going to the movie theater or doing yoga.

Which is where “biblical principles” come in. The Bible might not explicitly condemn movie-theater-going, but we are supposed to “avoid the appearance of evil,” and some movies have all sorts of things in them that are clearly evil– how could anyone tell we were going to see Finding Nemo and not Saw? Better just to avoid the whole thing all together. Or what about dancing? The Bible has lots and lots and lots of dancing, but that wasn’t modern dancing. Modern dancing is always sexual, and doing sexual things in public is clearly not “avoiding the appearance of evil,” but embracing it. Or rock music– rock music comes from demon-summoning-African-tribal-music, and listening to it means that we’re not avoiding listening to the same “beats” that witches use to summon Satan from the depths of hell, therefore it’s sin.

If it wasn’t avoiding the appearance of evil, it was “becoming a stumbling block.” Don’t celebrate Christmas– it reminds some people of their secular/pagan days, before they were good and holy. Don’t listen to rock music– it could remind someone of when they used to do drugs. Don’t discuss philosophy– it could remind someone of when they were an atheist.

There’s no end to it. When you get into this mindset, there’s no place to stop, no place to draw a line, no way to have a healthy conversation about individual responsibility. And once you start thinking like this, it’s incredibly difficult not to get sucked deeper and deeper, and there’s no bottom. There’s always something else that can be avoided, another step you can take to become more holy, more consecrated, more set apart.

I think it’s because Christian fundamentalists have deeply misunderstood the meaning of holy. They’ve lost what it means for something to be sacred, and they’ve cheapened these glorious, beautiful things into a list.

January 29, 2014 by
Theology

God doesn't need our legalism

scales

I have a guest post that went up today over at Convergent Books! This is my second post for them, and I’m proud to be a part of the community. I very much appreciate what Convergent is doing– they’re willing to ask hard questions, and coming from an religious imprint that’s rather incredible.

Legalism is so pervasive it has become invisible. Growing up, I would have denied any accusation that my church was legalistic. We didn’t force our rules on anyone; they were simply our personal convictions. But as I moved into less conservative environments, and as my definition of legalism changed, I kept running into the same claim: I’d be at a church, and if I saw legalism coloring the way the community approached things, I would be told, “we’re not legalistic! They’re legalistic!” “They,” of course, would be some other church that was seen as having more—and more restrictive—rules.

To many people, legalism means “excessive adherence to law,” and that is the central part of the problem. “Excessive” has a different meaning depending on whoever is making the rule, whether it’s a church leader or an individual. In the church my family attended when I was a child, we followed a long list of rules: women couldn’t wear pants, men couldn’t wear shorts, we couldn’t go to movie theaters, girls couldn’t sit next to boys, and we couldn’t use any version of the Bible besides the King James. The rules made us stand out. Other residents of our town could easily identify people who attended our church.  We were “that crazy church.” You know we were extreme when even the Southern Baptists on the north side of town would condemn us for our legalism.

You can read the rest here.

January 28, 2014 by
Theology

hoping to help bring change at church, part two

church building

An . . . interesting . . . thing happened on Sunday. If you follow me on twitter you probably already saw it, but in case twitter isn’t your thing, I gathered it all up here. You should probably go read it real quick in order for the rest of the post to make sense.

A lot of the responses I got to what happened were along the lines of “WTF” and “wow, you should really get the hell out of there.” To an extent, I don’t really disagree. What happened on Sunday was, in a word, wrong, and it should not have happened. I’m still deeply troubled by it, and me and Handsome are figuring out what we could do– and if we should do it, especially since we’re already approaching the elder board and senior pastor about two other things, which I’ll talk about in other posts.

I’ve reached out to this pastor before about an inappropriate joke he’d made and his response to my e-mail bothered me. I did my best to be gracious– he is incredibly busy, he was responding to my e-mail among a hundred others, and he probably wouldn’t have said what he did if he’d had more time. However, his “I’m sorry that’s what you heard– here, we have a counseling ministry” was off-putting because it implied that you only think what I said was wrong because you have issues. Because of that, I’m hesitant to send him another e-mail that’s nothing more than a critique of his sermon. I don’t want to be the congregant that has nothing encouraging to say, and since I’ve never interacted with him outside of shaking his hand occasionally, I’m not sure how to proceed.

So, the question I have right now– and a question I’ve heard echoed from many of you– is why do I stay here? Why bother? Why keep going? It’s a question I’ve seen all over the place– and usually not directed at me and my situation. It pops up in comment sections all of the time– if your church is doing something like this, why do you stay? Why not just walk away? Sometimes they advocate to drop church entirely, but most of the time they recommend a different denomination.

This is not intended to be disparaging toward anyone– leaving church altogether is, depending on your situation, could be the absolutely best thing for you. Trying another denomination can be spectacular and life-changing. I read a lot of blogs that are actually dedicated to this transition– women who grew up Baptist that are now Catholic, men who grew up evangelical that are now Anglican . . . and it can be a beautiful, refreshing thing. Those blogs have had me running to the ELCA, UMC, PCUSA, and UU websites looking for another option. In those moments, all I can think is surely a denomination that ordains women would be better. Going to a denomination that ordains LGBTQ people? Wow, sign me up.

But there are things holding me back from making that transition right now, and I wanted to explain why. Simply switching denominations sounds so simple, so straightforward; after all, if you don’t like where you are, there’s nothing really keeping you there. But, for me at least (and I think many others), it’s not really that simple.

multi-ethnic volunteer group hands together

The biggest reason, up front: Handsome has been attending this church for three years now. I’ve been attending for a year. We’re involved in this church, and we are both well-known to the leadership. Handsome has been serving in two separate ministries practically from the moment that he started attending, and now we’re both involved in two others. We facilitate one of the theology classes (it’s a video course, so we just manage discussion and occasionally prepare notes), and we’re both consulted on church organization and structural development (it’s a young church). The leadership that we know trusts us, and I cannot overstate how valuable I find that. The fact that we are as young as we are– I’m 26, Handsome is 25– and we’re respected and our insight and advice is sought? I don’t know how rare that is, but it’s certainly nothing I’ve ever experienced.

And, what if we do go to another church? We’d have to start from scratch. We’d be strangers- nobodys. No one would have any reason to trust us, or listen to us, and what if there was something that was just as problematic in this new church? At least, at this church, I know that the elders and most of the leadership is willing to listen to me.

diversity

Second, and there is no possible way I could overstate how incredibly important this is to me: this church is racially diverse. There are black men and women in highly visible leadership positions. Black men serve on the elder board. I look around the auditorium on Sunday morning, and I see black, hispanic, Indian, and Asian people– and not just a light sprinkling. There have been a few mornings where I have been almost completely surrounded by people who aren’t white.

The most interesting thing about this is that I live in an area that is deeply, deeply segregated. The first week I lived here I went shopping for the house (Handsome didn’t have a broom!). The first place I went was Big Lots and Ollie’s and a few other discount stores, looking for floor mats and potholders. The entire morning I was the only white person anywhere. That afternoon I went to Wal-Mart and Ross (which are in a different part of town), and I didn’t see a single non-white person for three hours. In this county, white people and brown people don’t eat in the same restaurants, shop in the same stores, go to the same bars, or attend the same churches. When I look at the websites for the ELCA, UMC, and PCUSA churches that are “nearby” (read: 45 min+ drive), every single last picture is of a white person. All of them. Even the group pictures that seem to be most or all of the congregation. Even the ELCA church, which is in an almost-nearly-black neighborhood, every single last church member is white.

It is amazing to me that this church managed to overcome that monumental barrier in this community. They were deliberate about being diverse– on one occasion when the church was first starting and one of the staff, a black man, was considering leaving, the senior pastor and the elder board begged him to stay, because they knew that if he left, the church was doomed to being just another white church. He stayed, and now I see an Indian family in the lobby every Sunday and a black woman sings and shouts behind me every service I’m there.

elephant
by Rachel Hestilow

Third, I live in an extremely conservative county. It is Southern, and it is redneck, and it is Tea Party Republican, and the overwhelming majority of the churches are outright fundamentalist– or at the very least “fundiegelical.” Even in the churches that belong to progressive denominations, the people who attend the church are going to be overwhelmingly conservative, and that is going to affect the entire church culture.

In the church I attend, though, even though I’m a heretic by most Protestant standards (between the universalism-ish and the Pelagianism . . .), and even though I’m a pro-choice Democrat, I can talk about that with the people I go to church with, in my small group and in my theology program, and not face any condemnation or judgment for that. And it’s because, right along with racial diversity, the motto “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity” is taken pretty doggone seriously. There are Quiverful families in this church, and there are single working mothers, and there are politics of all stripes, and we all go to church together– and we’re led by people who have no patience for self-righteousness and judgment. I’m sure I could probably find another church that has this, but I know I have that here, and I’m not willing to risk it yet.

~~~~~~~~~~

I know this has been a longer post than normal, so thank you for your patience. This post, although it’s about my experience, isn’t really about me, either. Everyone has reasons for being where they are– even in church situations that are questionable and troubling. I very much appreciate the insight, the concern, and the life experience here in this community, and I always take your advice seriously. And, this post was really directed at myself, as well. Why do I stay here? Well, I may eventually get to the point where I just can’t do this church anymore– and that day may be coming faster than I’d like.

January 14, 2014 by
Theology

hoping to help bring change at church, part one

church building

I’m a millennial.

There’s been a lot of stuff written about us and church– if we’re going, why we’re leaving, what people can do to get us to come back, why we should just come back on our own. . . and there are as many different opinions about this as there are people writing about it. I’ve even written about it a time or two (ok, maybe three).

I spent a good chunk of time over my Christmas vacation trying to explain my frustrations about church to a few people from different generations– even people who aren’t “church people” and never have been. It’s a grueling thing trying to unpack it, and it can be exhausting just trying to dredge up all my thoughts and feelings and trying to present it in a way that someone else who doesn’t have these struggles can understand.

A lot of my energy, right now, is going toward — I don’t even know what to call it. “My church”? “The church I go to sometimes”? It seems like I haven’t been to church at all in months, and it’s been a mixed bag as to why. My health is a big part of it, but so is an overwhelming apathy on Sunday morning. But I am doing what I can in order for church to be a safe place for me to go.

I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I should either find a different church or just stop going entirely, and both options are incredibly tempting. But, there are reasons why I go to this church, even though it can be difficult at times. When I was talking about this process of trying to work with leadership in order to express my concerns and hopefully bring about change, however, this question frequently came up: “what will you do if nothing happens?”

I had to be honest. I’d leave.

And it would be because I’d be bone-tired exhausted. I would have fought as hard as I could for as long as I could, and in the end, if nothing happened, I’d be… I’d just be done. That would be it. I would have given my all, and I would have nothing left. Not even to try again somewhere else. My biggest fear is that I’ll spend the next months, the next year, doing everything I can, but that I’ll face entrenchment and resistance. That the leadership will do me the kindness of hearing me out . . . and then make it clear that nothing will change. I don’t know how I’ll really react if that happens. What I do know is that I’m already weary thinking about it.

But something that seems to have been a theme in a lot of the conversations I’ve had in the past year, in a lot of the articles I’ve read, what I’m doing — trying to help bring change — is expected of my generation. If we leave a church before we’ve gotten to the point that we physically cannot drag ourselves inside the building, then we just haven’t done enough. We haven’t given enough. If we leave before we’ve poured every last ounce of ourselves into our churches, then it just wasn’t good enough. We don’t deserve to complain, or criticize. We haven’t earned the right.

And that . . . makes me sad. And tired. And frustrated.

In some ways, I understand this sentiment. Throwing your hands up before you’ve even begun to try does come across as a little immature (which just plays right into how my generation is perceived. After all, we’re all a bunch of narcissists). But, this idea, I think, comes from a pretty basic misunderstanding of the critiques millennials tend to have about the American evangelical church.

When I hear people my age talk about the struggles they face with church, it’s usually after an entire lifetime of devotion. We’ve already poured nearly everything we had into our churches. We’re already exhausted, and the thought of facing elder boards and church leadership– of possibly, or even likely, being ignored and dismissed– it’s so far beyond our capacity. We’re already barely hanging onto our faith, and somehow we’re expected to show up, serve, and try to change church institutions that have been deeply engrained over thousands of years? We’re supposed to do everything we can to undo the rampaging damage of the Culture Wars? We’re supposed to hammer our swords into ploughshares?

And, it seems like, we’re supposed to do this on our own. We’re to face the bearded lion of entrenched and overwhelmingly powerful ideologies, to walk boldly into a den that has proven itself to be oh-so-nicely hostile to any sort of change.

I’m doing it. Most of my time today is going to be spent putting together presentations for my church leadership and the elder board. I am fully expecting this to take time, to be hard. I’m expecting a battle with depression and anxiety, to have to spend every single minute fighting with all of the well-trained impulses I have to remain silent for I am not permitted to teach. I have self-care methods already planned out– I am stocked up on coloring pages and fuzzy blankets and favorite shows and rooibos tea. I have Handsome by my side– an amazing man who understands my need for a support system before, during, and after.

But while I’m doing all of this, I know that I’m unique. That what I am doing is hard and I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to survive until the end. It doesn’t make me more brave, or more tenacious, or better in any way… it just means that I’m a little less exhausted.

Just because there are people like me, who are able to put in the hours, to take a few body hits, it doesn’t mean that anyone should judge my generation based on what I’m willing to do. I’m doing it because I’m able, and there isn’t anyone else here who can. That is not a reflection of anyone else– it should be nothing less than a reflection on the evangelical church culture. It’s not the millennials’ fault that, by and large, the American evangelical church is– and I’m not using these words callously– bigoted, racist, hateful, sexist, and deeply politicized. We didn’t make it that way. Our grandparents did. Our parents did. And the attitudes that seem to be firmly fixed in place aren’t going to change over night. We all know that. But, only some of us have the energy to fight.

This is the first post of a series on my efforts to help bring change to my church. I don’t know how long it’s going to be, or how many posts it will have. But, I do have a few reasons for writing about this process and then posting it on the internet.

First, despite the tone of this post today, I’m hoping for this series to be encouraging. That will be largely based on how my interactions with church leadership go, but even if they go badly I want to be hopeful, and to model hope. It would be amazing if someone with the energy and ability could read this series and try to do something similar with their church.

I’m also doing it in order for people to understand what it’s really like to go in front of church leadership, or an elder board, and advocate for massive changes. I’ll be telling my story of what it’s like– hopefully it could help the church leaders dealing with shouters-and-shakers like me to have more understanding of where we’re coming from and what we’re going through.

I’m also going to be hoping for input from all of you. I am young, which means that I have passion and enthusiasm to the point of being reckless. But, I have a lot of older, more experienced readers, and I would love for my energy to be molded and directed in the best possible way. I don’t want to just pick fights– I want substantial, essential, structural change. Being passionate and loud isn’t going to do that all on its own.

So, let’s see where this goes.

January 10, 2014 by
Theology

the magic book

magic book
by Colgreyis

I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently neck-deep in a two-year theology program (“seminary for lay people” is how it’s described). Probably one of the most shattering ideas I encountered was in the Bibliology and Hermeneutics class, when the program’s teachers were talking about how many/most evangelicals approach the Bible: they treat it like a “magic book.”

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what they meant, but as the course went on I realized that there was something stopping me from understanding it:  I thought of the Bible as a magic book. It was an embarrassing realization at first, because I have an MA in English!* I know how to read books! And once I started seeing the Bible as a library, and each book it contains as a whole book instead of something I could chop up into soundbites (seriously, the more I think about how I used to do that, the more and more it feels insane and ridiculous) … I started realizing that my understanding of the Bible being “inspired” or having “divine authorship” had twisted the Bible into something it can’t possibly be.

I’m not trying to say that there’s no possible way the Bible could be “God-breathed,” I’m just not entirely sure what that means. All I know is that being “God-breathed” doesn’t make the Bible immune to the sorts of problems that all other books have– especially books written thousands of years ago.

But, the most dominant way of interacting with the Bible in American culture is the evangelical way. There’s a huge breadth of ways on how to interact with the Bible, especially in the Mainline Protestant denominations, but, unfortunately, those aren’t the ways that most Americans seem to see. When they see Christians interacting with the Bible, they see, largely, people quoting individual verses and occasionally twisting those verses so far beyond their context that they take on a new life, new meaning, of their own. They see Christians walking around with signs that have individual verses slapped on them about drinking, or homosexuality, divorced from their books and the overall argument of their writer. They see us celebrating Tim Tebow and John 3:16. They see references and not their corresponding verses on our bumpers. They hear us casually sprinkle our conversation with half-remembered phrases.

During my Christmas vacation, I was hanging out with a few friends who are not particularly religious. One of them laughingly threw out a phrase that I found hilarious considering it was a Bible verse (“the time has come to set aside childish things”)– and when I laughed “nice Bible reference!” he just sort of  . . . stared.

“That’s from the Bible?”

It was my turn to stare, although I wasn’t starting at anyone in particular. I was just suddenly struck by the number of phrases and sayings that come from Scripture that are now American cliches … except no one has any idea where they come from. Considering the influence the Bible has had on American rhetoric, it’s not surprising that our language is littered with biblical phrasings, but it bothered me because I realized that this isn’t much different from how Christians treat the Bible even when they know they’re quoting from the Bible.

It’s continued to bother me– at times, it outright irks me– as I traverse the internet. I’m a loyal reader of a few non-theist and atheist blogs, and when I’m feeling brave enough to wade into the comment sections, I see this happen over and over again. A Christian and a non-theist/agnostic/atheist get into a debate, and they start throwing Bible verses at each other. Usually it’s the non-theist that starts quoting specific verses, and then the Christian responds with arguments so tired they practically whimper– and they usually have something to do with “you have to take those verses in context!” And it irks me because I feel sure that this earnest Christian probably rips verses out of context on a daily basis– they’re just not usually from Numbers 5.

After the Phil Robertson/A&E/Duck Dynasty debacle, I saw a meme pop up in my facebook feed:

phil robertson

And it just made me shake my head (even as I chuckled) because they’ve done exactly what Phil Robertson did in his original interview– took a verse out of context and even paraphrased it a bit. For starters, Leviticus 10:6 is specifically addressed to Aaron and his sons, Eleazar and Ithamar (and, possibly by extension the Levites), so this is one of those times when a commandment is definitely limited and not meant to be applied to all of humanity— or even the Jewish people, for that matter. But, Robertson was also ripping I Corinthians 6:9-10 out of context and divorcing it from any historical context (not that this is his fault, he was just parroting fundamentalist/evangelical interpretations). ἀρσενοκοίτης, literally meaning “man beds” is a complicated word with an interesting history, and forcing it to mean “homosexuality” when its most common historical meaning was the enslavement and purchase of temple prostitutes is… well, wrong.

But we (evangelicals) do this all of the time.

And we dare to get frustrated when someone on the internet starts doing the same thing to the Bible that we’ve been doing for a hundred years? We dare to become angry with those who learned how to treat the Bible from us and are shocked and dismayed when they are merely modeling how they’ve been shown the Bible is to be treated?

For the last hundred years or so fundamentalism and its daughter evangelicalism have fervently sought to have a “high view of Scripture,” to defend its status as inspired and inerrant. But, in discussing these concepts, one of the common results has been to see the Bible as inherently magical. It’s ceased being a book– it’s become a tool, a sword,  and many Christians have used it to “divide asunder” all sorts of things, including ourselves.

*(full disclosure: I still have to learn French in order to get the degree. I’m working on that.)

January 9, 2014 by