jonathan stegall

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.

Before you do anything with this post, visit www.zoecarnate.com and bookmark it. For several years, it has been an amazing resource for anything outside mainstream Christendom, and it continues to improve.

Now. Mike Morrell is one of the founders, and blogs at zoecarnate.wordpress.com. Currently, as part of a wide-ranging conversation that is occurring among emergent bloggers related to Pentecostals and charismatics, he is hosting a dialogue with John Crowder, a prophetic evangelist who wants to be “wasted on Jesus.” The dialogue is respectful, insightful, and is really a blessing to read.

An aside on the “wasted on Jesus” part of John’s message. I have often described experiences with the Spirit with that term, depending on who I was speaking with. I think it really is a valid, powerful metaphor for intense, life-changing encounters with the Spirit, and I never want to discount, forget, or stop desiring those encounters. Being a Post-charismatic should never negate the desire for these encounters, and I hope we who look at that term as a valid term will always make that clear.

On another note, though, I believe that one should not expect one who follows the Spirit to always exist in a “wasted” state. There are times of wilderness and darkness and suffering, and those times do not negate the presence of God even though we may be gripping with our fingernails for evidence of it. I have spent time in the wilderness, both because of the leading of the Spirit (Hosea 2:14) and because of my own laziness and stubbornness, and I have learned wisdom and patience and peace from those times (not that I am always wise, patient, or peaceful, but more so than I would be otherwise).

Pentecostals and charismatics have often struggled in leading a balanced life in the Spirit. They have often sought to live in the clouds, wasted, above the messiness and pain of real life. Non-Pentecostals and non-charismatics have often resisted intoxicating experiences with the Spirit because of this (and other, less noble reasons). Both sides have lost, and both sides have much to learn.

Like some others, I do see a link between the worldwide pentecostal movement (counting Pentecostal denominations, and charismatic churches and movements, it now numbers more than 500 million people) and the emerging church. I believe that the emerging movement, as it develops around the world alongside postmodernism in the West and postcolonialism everywhere else, has the potential to be one of the steps that the Holy Spirit takes to resolve this tension and lack of balance that exists in the church.

Recently, I’ve been reading Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change.

I have also read The Secret Message of Jesus, which is meant to be read as a companion volume. If you have not read The Secret Message of Jesus, feel encouraged to click the link and pick it up, as it is on sale for $6.99 at Amazon.

In any case, as I have been reading Everything Must Change, I have found much to be challenged by, to remember, to share with others, and to allow Jesus to shape my life by. Most of the things that he presents are at least familiar to me, if not things that I’ve thought, prayed, discussed, taught, been taught, and been convicted by. Often, though, he expresses these things in ways that I have thought but not expressed, or have forgotten, or particularly in ways that bring up new implications for my life.

As an aside, there is a review of this book that Jonny Baker wrote several months ago, and it is worth reading. Jonny Baker is one of the people that is most aware of what God is doing in Western culture, and he has a brilliant mind and spirit. The post indicates that much of the thinking is already established in the U.K., although it is certainly radical in the United States. Brian McLaren has an insightful comment on the post, as well.

The strength of this book lies in the insights that it presents into what powers the world, especially America and those who are impacted by the American Empire, and in the insights that it presents into what Jesus has to say to that power. The “framing story” that Jesus offers really can and should change everything, in my life and your life and in the ways we interact with the world around us.

There are countless examples and quotations (and misquotations) floating around on the internet, and a quick search will bring up many of them. But there are a few things that have really shaken me, and inspired my imagination.

Communism, [Rene Padilla] says, specialized in distribution but failed at production. As a result, it ended up doing a great job of distributing poverty evenly. Capitalism, he says, was excellent at production but weak at distribution. As a result, it ended up rewarding the wealthy with obscene amounts of wealth while the poor suffered on in horrible degradation and indignity…

The twenty-first century began in the aftermath of the defeat of Marxism. The story of the coming century will likely be the story of whether a sustainable form of capitalism can be saved from theocapitalism [the religion-like seeking of prosperity], or whether unrestrained theocapitalism will result in such gross inequity between rich and poor that violence and counterviolence will bring civilization to a standstill, or perhaps worse.

There is an amazing amount of depth in that paragraph. and it helps introduce the “suicide machine” and its systems that this book is attempting to deconstruct. Certainly it is not an optimistic statement, but the book is constantly balancing it with statements like this:

If we believe, the decadent and self-indulgent West can be converted from overconsumers to creative stewards, from empire builders to community builders, from sex-obsessed and self-indulgent couch potatoes to people like Graciela, Luiz, and Leticia and their family - who along the way through their life, discover a magnificent vision and a sacred mission that give their lives unimagined meaning.

And this is the kind of statement that challenges everything about the way I live, and inspires my visions about the way I want to live. This is the kind of thing that makes the book a valid challenge to those of us who claim the story of Jesus.

From Emerging Pentecostals:

…a conversation about emergence within a pentecostal framework would be helped greatly if we took some time to share our stories of emergence.

This is a wonderful idea, and I want to be a part of it. Thus, consider this my story of emergence, or of how I came to be involved with both the pentecostal church and what is commonly called the emerging church.

I met Jesus when I was just shy of fifteen years old, and met him through what you could call a dramatic encounter that took place in an Assembly of God church in Salisbury, North Carolina. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a part of the supernatural actions of God in the world. I wanted to be close to him in tangible ways, and I wanted to bring others to be close to him as well.

As my faith developed, I began to grow in some very specific ways that together have shaped the person I am now, almost ten years later. First, I began to seek out how I, specifically, should serve Jesus with my life. I looked into being a pastor, a missionary to an obscure country, and a number of other things, because I felt strongly that I was called to reach out to people that were far from God.

Finally, I found confirmation in the idea that I was called to reach the outcasts of our own society. The people who did not fit in with the traditional church, whether because the church rejected them, because they rejected the church, or both. This manifests itself in more ways today than it did ten years ago. At the time, most of this kind of ministry was happening in the various underground subcultures, and it still is. But now, it has moved significantly further into the mainstream with organizations like Emergent Village. In any case, my heart was inextricably linked to the underground, and it remains so now.

As I began to learn about this calling, I also began to learn that I had a passion for being at the cutting edge of whatever I could. I can still remember a message I heard that described the church of today as the kind of organization that would build a church at the site where Jesus performed some great feat, rather than following him to see what he would do next. I passionately want to be involved in the current mission of God in the world. I don’t want to be where God was five years ago. I want to know where his heart is today.

In addition to, and as part of, these previous things, I began to have a deep desire to communicate with love, grace, and power to people who did not yet know Jesus, that they might see him as he really is and give consideration to the kind of influence he would like to have on their lives.

These areas have been molded and shaped through education, experience, prayer, thought, and conversation over the last several years, but at their core they remain the same, and they are derived from a desire to live in intimacy with Jesus, thus my involvement with the pentecostal and charismatic church. I am well aware of the shortcomings of the movement, and at this point I identify far more closely with the term Post-Charismatic than with pentecostal or charismatic, but I am also aware that there is much good in the movement.

As for my involvement with the emerging church, it began through my desire to be a voice to the underground. For most of my life, I have fit with the underground, and I’m comfortable with this. I feel at home there. It’s natural that I would want to share what I believe is commonly hidden about Jesus from these unique people.

As I’ve said before, I have been blessed to be involved with the Underground Railroad and learn from and be in community with the wonderful ministries that are part of it. Many of these ministries have been around for decades, and have been doing the kind of ministry that is now known as “emergent” for longer than I have been alive.

Thus, I have come into the emerging church, and thus into Emergent itself, from what you might call a back door. I have learned ministry by grace, unconditional acceptance, and the power of authenticity from the underground, and have sought to learn how it fits with my personal theology, my personal experiences, and my personal areas of calling. Many other leaders of the emerging church, including Andrew Jones, also came to be involved in similar ways.

I feel that this is one of the most valuable facets of the emerging church and the Emergent conversation: that people who spend their lives reaching out to the darkest corners of western society can come together with people who study postmodernism in universities or painting in art schools, with people who understand that colonialism is dead and its obituary is the power of the non-Western world, with those who do research on the effectiveness of modern Christianity in the Western world, and with those who simply feel like something is missing from their normal church experience.

More interesting still, than these examples, is that no one fits into only one of these areas. For example, I have a passion for walking into dark places as a shadow of Jesus, but I also have a ministerial education from a pentecostal university, an art degree from a secular art school, and a weird job history of discussing theology and politics and philosophy for hours at a time while cleaning toilets and mopping floors. Emergence indeed.

At Josh Brown’s blog, there is a series of posts that I began to link to yesterday that are challenging some of the common critiques leveled against Emergent (and in this sense, I do mean, at least predominantly, Emergent Village, not the global emerging church).

One of the posts deals with the conception that Emergent consists of white guys, sitting around talking about theology. The post itself is well worth a read, as are the comments. One of the comments, from Julie Clawson, is what I want to look into, at the moment.

Part of it reads like this:

“Nice Christian women” are taught to be polite, respectful, and submissive - very hard things to be if you ever want to get a word in edgewise in a conversation with men.

I saw this firsthand during the first year we led the local Emergent Cohort. The group consisted of mostly younger men and single women (wives never show up, what family shells out babysitting money just so the woman can participate in such things???). The group nearly fell apart after all the women left. They left because they never got a chance to participate in the conversation and constantly received the message that they weren’t wanted. If they tried to speak up, some guy would jump in and talk them down, and as nice Christian women they were “trained” to let that happen. The guys weren’t doing it intentionally or generally even aware of what they were doing, they were just holding a conversation like they had been trained to do.

I feel like there is something deeply significant in that statement, as it pertains to things like Emergent, or theological and church-related discussions in general, and also as it pertains to life in general. At this time in the development of Emergent, many of the people who are attracted to it do have a history of involvement with the evangelical church. For a number of reasons that are related to everything from serious biblical misinterpretation to simple selfishness, evangelicalism has not, especially in the last fifty years, welcomed the voices of women. There is a certain “training” that Julie alludes to that women receive in modern evangelicalism that leads them to be quiet and let themselves be shut out of conversations with men.

As a man who has both formal and informal experience in evangelicalism and training in evangelical ministry, I read this comment and was immediately struck by how true it is. I recognize guilt in myself of shutting women out from conversations, because I have spoken as I learned to speak. I have unintentionally expected women to speak in the same ways that I do, and I have neglected to recognize the differences between the framework that I have been given and the framework that they have been given.

The implications of this thought really hit home when I began to think about my marriage. I recognize guilt in shutting out my wife by expecting her to speak like I do. This occurs in public conversations as well as private ones. She has a longer, and in general far more negative, history with the church in general and evangelicalism in particular than I do, and thus this framework has been drilled into her even more than it has into me, and many times I have failed to recognize this.

I believe that a comment like Julie’s has the potential to teach guys like me how difficult it can be for a woman to get past that framework, and the damage that it can cause. This kind of learning is essential for the development of the Emergent conversation as more than a bunch of white guys discussing theology.

A couple of days ago, the Charlotte Observer had this interview with Brian McLaren, in preparation for his visit to the city this weekend. It covers a variety of topics that he has discussed, or questioned, or looked at, in his various books.

I took note of the fact that many of the questions that were asked in the interview are questions for which many in the evangelical world have already decided what his answers are. If one reads his books, there is a constant willingness to question things, far more than there is a willingness to give answers. Typically, the evangelical world doesn’t like this.

When he talks about the idea that we should question our doctrines and our theology, he automatically wants to throw out everything that we consider to be non-negotiable. For example:

Q. You say that many Christians should start by replacing the idea of getting themselves and others “saved” so they can go to heaven — the evacuation plan, I think you call with — with this idea of getting out there, in the here and now, and healing the hurts of the world. So when Jesus said, “As the father sent me, so I sent you,” he was talking not really about conversions but about tackling the world’s crises — Is that right?

In this example, because he questions the idea that Christians need to be telling everyone that they’re going to hell and need to be saved so they can go to heaven (the classic, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”), he apparently doesn’t want people to meet Jesus. His answer, though, is great:

Actually, I would put the two together. If we keep recruiting people to evacuate the earth, then every person who gets saved is, in some ways, taken out of the action. It’s like going to the bench of people who want to play in a football game and trying to recruit them to leave the (stadium) altogether.

A better image would be: What Jesus is asking us to do is go into the stands and recruit some people to come on the field and join us to play. The recruiting of new disciples is really connected to wanting to make a difference in the world.

And this is a perfect example of the misunderstanding that is often applied, not just to Brian McLaren, but to all things involving the emerging church. A similar thought is later in the article:

Q. What do you say, though, to conservative Christians who say, “What about the Great Commission? These (non-Christian) people are doomed and we need to save them through conversion.”

His answer:

First of all, I love to help every person I can to become a follower of Jesus Christ.

A lot of people don’t want to become followers of Jesus Christ. And when they don’t want to, they are not disqualified from being my neighbor. In fact, they still are my neighbor.

Because it looks for something different than what most of modern evangelicalism is looking for, it boils down to modern liberalism. Things like this show that the idea is really far more significant, and that it offers a challenge both to modern liberalism and modern evangelicalism.

The above examples are only a couple of the things in the article that, I feel, show more of a look into Brian McLaren’s own answers to his questions. He deals with issues of sin, basic doctrine, the prosperity gospel, and a number of other things. In various books and articles, he’s questioned many of these things in brilliant ways, and it’s nice to see a little bit of his own thinking about them.

I’ve been doing a good amount of ranting about false dichotomies and wanting a third choice, and so on, lately. I want to draw attention to this post by Mark Van Steenwyk that reminds us Emergent types that we have our own tendencies that it is wise to keep in our minds.

We should be careful not to draw lines in the sand - even if “they” drew it first. We should always be VERY careful when we use us versus them language - especially within the Body of Christ.

I’m guilty of this.

The emerging church as a whole can be guilty of this and the other points, just like the underground church was guilty before it, and continues to be guilty. I’m sure every other significant change in theology has struggled with this, and humanity is not any better at it than it has been in the past.

The other points in this post all fit various people at various times. I don’t think any of them fit all of us at all times, and don’t think they were intended be seen as such. But in looking for a third way, or a higher way, or a both/and way, or even a neither way, it’s essential to do it with the best possible heart.

We as the church humanity are not good at being told that whatever we were doing or thinking or believing isn’t what we should be doing or thinking or believing anymore. We who want to do the telling have to remember that when someone else tells us, we may not be good at it either. I believe that God is always changing the ways he interacts with humanity. His character is always consistent, but the ways he does things is always changing. There are people who grasp that, and have a passion for being wherever he is. I want to be one of those people.