jonathan stegall

To take a small break from my current series, like most of us I’ve been thinking a lot about the screwed toilet scum really awful status of the American economy and what caused it and what is being done about it.

Several nights ago, I watched Jon Stewart discuss this with, among others, Bill Clinton. I was struck by the wisdom in what he said about the economic choices that we as Americans have made in the last several years. He spoke about our choices to pour money into the housing market in unreliable ways when, if we had had the foresight, we could have poured it into, for example, renewable energy. The difference that could have been wrought in our economy is mind-boggling to think about.

Now, of course this was an unveiled reference to the fact that Al Gore did not become president in 2000. Many of us agree that we would be better off if he had, but if you write off the words simply based on partisan politics I think you miss the wisdom that is there. We - we as Americans - chose to be the materialistic, selfish, pathetic slaves of the American Dream and we went after things that we knew we didn’t need and couldn’t afford, and now we are paying for it.

We can lay some of the blame for this at the feet of the companies who’s names are now in the obituaries, and we can lay some of it at the feet of governmental priorities and selfish interests, but we cannot escape from the fact that some of it is our own fault.

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, Bono reminds us that, as our government asks us to let it dig into its pockets to bail out the corporations that helped give us our materialistic fix, we still don’t care enough to meet our own promises to the poor and oppressed of the world; promises that in their totality are a fraction of what we will spend to bail out corruption. We are morally bankrupt.

Morally bankrupt. We don’t care.

At Revolution, for what it’s worth, we have started to look into the book of Jeremiah. I believe we’ll be spending a good amount of time with it. These messages will be posted on the website, if you have interest in this. Parallels can be made, of course, between various parts of our current situation and various parts of the text. But the one that I’m the most interested in at the moment is Jeremiah’s relentless care.

Jeremiah spends almost 60 years speaking the heart of God to the people of Judah and taking the people of Judah to the heart of God: defending the poor and the oppressed, rebuking the worship of other gods and the false worship of the true God, vying for wise political and cultural decisions, and praying for the people of Judah, asking for mercy on and from them, and trying to be a consistent presence on their behalf. God tells him to stop praying for them, and yet he continues to cry out for them.

Many of the bloggers in post-charismatic circles are spending the month of September looking at what apostolic leadership should look like; I want to present a reminder that we need to look at what prophetic leadership looks like as well. We need to be reminded of the passion that Jeremiah had to bring God and a group of materialistic, oppressive, selfish, and morally bankrupt people together.

Notice, finally, the almost complete absence of a Jeremiah to speak to our time. High profile religious leaders in our country have been almost silent as our moral bankruptcy has continued to grow and our financial bankruptcy has begun to manifest itself. Thank God for Bono.

• PolitiFact | A service of the St. Petersburg Times and CQ
  Great tool for tracking truth in the presidential campaign. Includes "The Attack File," "The Truth-O-Meter," and "The Flip-O-Meter." Good stuff.
  (tags: politics mccain obama)
• The EMC as an NSM « Tony Jones
  Strong look at the ways that the emerging church is part of larger cultural changes, regardless of whether it is called emerging, emergent, or something else.
  (tags: culture theology emerging emergent)

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This post is part of a series that looks at some of the ways that movements in church history stop moving and die. If you are unfamiliar with the term “pneumatology,” when it is used in Christian theology it refers to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

It is well-documented that the early church sought a very active engagement with the Holy Spirit. In today’s church, this engagement and what it means for today is viewed in, basically, the following ways:

1. During the early church, the church was being built in preparation for the completion and canonization of the Bible. After this happened, there was no need for spiritual gifts, miracles, and most other tangible manifestations of the Spirit’s activity. Because we have a completed Bible today, we should not expect or desire these things.
2. The early church was trying to legitimize itself as something distinct from Judaism, and so it invented miraculous stories to suggest that God was on its side. These recorded occurrences never happened, and that’s why they are not happening today.
3. The early church began to lose its desire for these manifestations as it became institutionalized, beginning in the third century and intensifying in the fourth century. It traded the Spirit’s power for accommodations to culture, the desire to build doctrine, a hierarchical structure, sin, and tradition. The church does not see these things on a widespread level today because it is still making this trade, and it does not want to change bad enough.
4. The early church lost these things as indicated in #3, but they are not seen today because there are too many fakes, or because God mysteriously chooses not to engage us in these ways.

Certainly there are nuances and exceptions to these ways, but the basic principle stands. The scholarly and popular support for #1 has dropped significantly, but there are still denominations that hold to it. #2 holds strongly in traditional liberal theology, which again has dropped significantly in the last half century or so. Modern liberalism typically has more respect for the supernatural than that. #3 is typically what is believed by the modern Pentecostal and charismatic churches, and #4 is held by many who have grown bitter from watching the excesses of the modern Pentecostal and charismatic movements.

In the book 2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity, there is evidence presented through quotes and narratives that this kind of experience of the Spirit never truly died out of the church. Rather, it has been present in every significant movement of church history, from monasticism to the Reformation to the American Great Awakenings and Methodism, leading to the birth of the modern Pentecostal and charismatic movements. The book contains an incredible selection of things that are often not taught in church history classes.

So, if the supernatural life of the church did not die, but rather died out of specific movements as they developed, what does that mean? My contention is that this supernatural experience died out as the movements were unwilling to continue moving.

They developed traditions, doctrines, and explanations that rendered this kind of work of the Spirit either irrelevant, unneeded, or sinful in the eyes of members. Remnants have always existed in all of these movements, and some of these remnants have gone to start other movements and some of them have stayed to try to challenge their existing ones. In their developments, the majorities of these movements have traded the power of the Spirit for other kinds of power.

At the moment, I’m not dealing with any specific doctrines, such as initial evidence or divine healing, as they are for other discussions and have not necessarily been constant parts of charismatic experience through the centuries of the church.

However, I fear underestimating the importance of the overall idea: that as movements cease moving and changing, they lose their supernatural life, whether it is sudden or gradual. This is, again, not something that is entirely unique to me. As this series continues, though, I want to look into the consequences of this loss, and how these consequences relate to the decomposition of movements, and their regression into things like the approval of torture and baptism of political parties.

• Shedding Light On “The Dark Side of God” » Blog » Greg Boyd (Christus Victor Ministries)
  "Is it possible to believe that the whole Bible is divinely inspired and yet believe that God never engages in violence?" Questions concerning the actions attributed to God, and how they reconcile with the God revealed in Jesus.
  (tags: theology bible new-testament old-testament greg-boyd)

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I’m hoping the blogosphere can help in a current search my wife and I have begun.

As I’ve mentioned, she is a graduate student, and thus is very busy. She is also a fairly high-stress person, and thus being very busy and very stressed is an interesting combination for her.

When she gets stressed, she likes to get out of the house and have a place to sit. Naturally, this is one of the reasons that she loves coffeehouses. We both find them wonderful places to spend time, provided that they are local, independent coffeehouses. However, in order to spend time in a coffeehouse one has to spend some money. Thus, it is impractical to do on a daily or semi-daily basis when one is on a limited budget.

So our question is this: where do you go, away from your house, where you don’t have to spend money and are able to hang out for a few hours? Maybe do some homework, or writing, or something similar? We’d love to get some ideas.

• YouTube - "Plan for Change" Ad
  A two minute advertisement in which Barack Obama speaks to the state of economy and what can be done about it. Worth a watch in itself. From a broader perspective, two minute advertisements that actually say something are really refreshing.
  (tags: video obama politics)

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Recently, I wrote a brief post that relayed some of the pain I believe we should feel at the current state of much of American Evangelicalism.

In light of this, I am interested in looking into why this happens to movements in the church, including but not limited to Evangelicalism. Part of this is brought about by my experiences reading Jesus for President and another book I read in college, and part of it dates back to a sermon I heard when I was in high school.

In this sermon, a guy who, when asked what his title was, replied with “Brian”, spoke about the trend of movements to “move” to a certain place, and then stop moving and resist further change. If you are inclined to see this kind of thing, it is present in various ways in every major movement that has happened in the history of the church. In the words of the sermon, if we as Christians during most of church history were following Jesus around, we would build churches at the sites where he performed miracles instead of continuing to follow him and see what he might do next. Logically of course, this would keep us from seeing both the Cross and the Resurrection, among other things.

Over the years that concept has stayed in my head as I have developed my own ways of looking at the church, and I think there is great power in it. As our movements stop moving, they die and decompose.

The reason that I mention the books that I do above is that I think there are many manifestations of this concept, and they are not usually looked at together. Over the next few posts, I want to look at some of these, and will link to the posts as they appear.

• Pneumatology - specifically, the expectation and experience of the activities of the Spirit.
• Politics - namely, the role of the Christian with regard to the State.
• Culture - referring to the relation that the church is expected to have with culture.
• Further suggestions are welcome.

There has recently been a bit of talk surrounding a poll by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University. The results of this poll indicate that almost 60% of white evangelicals in the South believe that torture is often or sometimes justified. This is more than the percentage (48%) of the general public who believe the same.

Take a moment and read that again.

Now. Does that hurt? When I was in college, I had a professor who would tell us to

Take on the pain of the world each day.

Take a moment, and take on the pain of the people that we have hurt, and will continue to hurt. Do you see the power of this kind of thought? We have nothing to say if we will not take on the pain of the Other, whoever the Other may be.

• For-Benefit Organization and The Fourth Sector
  "Over the past few decades, the boundaries between the public (government), private (business), and social (non-profit/non-governmental) sectors have been blurring, while a Fourth Sector of organization has been emerging. The archetypal Fourth Sector model is sometimes referred to as a For-Benefit organization, and the sector itself is also referred to as the For-Benefit Sector."
  (tags: social-entrepreneurship business-activism business activism)

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From RobbyMac:

Brother Maynard has suggested that September should be a month of post-charismatics giving voice to what apostolic leadership could/should look like. I’d like to propose a synchro-blog to get the ball rolling – namely, as I’ve just shared my earliest “charismatic” experience (after becoming a Christian, that is), let’s remind ourselves and tell each other our stories of how we first became acquainted with, and eager for, the felt presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Should you be unaware of what a post-charismatic is, give the above blogs, as well as Mike Morrell’s, parts of this blog, and several others, a perusal. In any case, I had actually been planning to give an account of my first encounter with the Spirit. In the near future, I believe I will be telling my story, in a very broad way, for the people of Revolution.

I spent a good part of 1997 and 1998 diving into various occult beliefs and practices, especially Wicca. I found good and bad there, and in addition to that it brought out good and bad that was already in me. One of the things that has always been a part of me for better and for worse is a desire for things to be supernatural, but authentic and life-changing at the same time. I grew up in the church, and did not find it to be any of those things.

In light of this, I wasn’t expecting anything in particular when I visited my first Pentecostal church, which was, and is, an Assemblies of God church in Salisbury, North Carolina. I visited because I had been bribed by a friend, and found myself sitting in a chair watching teenagers clap and sing to God, standing in front of an empty stage while a sound system played CDs. This in itself was radical to me, considering my particular upbringing, but certainly not enough to interest me.

My friend, in what I now understand to have been an incredibly perceptive moment of contextualization and maybe some syncretism, explained to me that I could try to invoke God and see what might happen. Being very familiar with invocations and the interesting experiences that they could bring about, and having never thought about the word in connection with this kind of God, I thought it was worth a try.

When I did this, it was as though I was entirely engulfed and surrounded by tangible power. I had no idea what to do about it, and decided not to do anything but sit there and experience it. I have no idea how long I sat there, and I remember getting up at some point to listen to a youth pastor preach, but I honestly don’t remember anything he said.

As an aside, that is not to devalue people who preach and teach well, but it is to say that for myself as a teacher, a preacher, a theologian, or whatever; my task is to chase after the heart of God and help others to do so as well. If that involves discussing the demise of Christendom and why that is a good thing, or discussing the relevance of Leviticus to postmodern minds, that’s wonderful. If it involves shutting up and getting out of the way, that’s also wonderful.

Anyway. That night, I learned that I wanted to go after God with my life, and be wherever God was and do whatever God was doing. It is this that has placed a drive in me to be at the cutting edge of things I’m involved with (be it design, theology, ministry, or social action), because that’s where change happens. A couple of years later, when I was in college seeking to learn more about all these issues, I was introduced to the writings of Brian McLaren and others like him, some who are known and some who are unknown. I mention him because this introduction occurred through the book More Ready Than You Realize, a book about sharing Jesus with postmodern people. In it, he writes this:

Then he [a friend of Brian's] became serious and said, “Really, Brian, I want you to remember that you’ll never stop growing in Christ. I don’t ever want you to get comfortable. I want you to always find the curl of the wave, the place out in front where things are happening. Go to the cutting edge of things, and throw your energies in there. That’s where you belong.” Now, nearly thirty years later, I remember that moment vividly, and I realize that God was speaking to me through Dave that day.

I believe that at that moment, in a medium-sized church in a small town, I was given a drive for this. A drive to be at the cutting edge, always moving, always changing. I have not always lived up to this, any more than I have always lived up to the desire to be where God is, but these two desires have combined to be the shaping forces in my life.