#post-evangelical

On Being a Post-Evangelical, Missional, Neo-Lutheran Pastor and Theologian

Labels are a necessary evil. On the one hand, we need them. I am very thankful when a bottle is labeled “poison” for example. That label can save lives. Yet, labels are more often harmful when applied to people. Labels reduce people to abstract ideas and make it easier for us to dismiss or misuse others.

However, it is impossible to function without labels, because the act of language itself is a…

-11-year-old me was amazing at creating fantasy names. Also she had a story idea about stick figures in exile and their apparently all-stickwoman army. Go, little me!

-I actually love 5th grade me's impatience to be done with elementary school, even if 6th grade me found it naive in retrospect. I understand her wistfulness too: middle school was a nightmare of anonymity and sadistic scheduling. Let the record show that, 8 years after leaving it all behind, nowhere else besides grades 6-12 have I encountered anything remotely as convoluted as a 6-day rotating schedule with 7-10 classes per day. Seriously, what the fuck was that meant to prepare us for?

-In writing, if not in life, 5th grade me seems to have had the attention span of a caffeinated hummingbird. (Impressive vocab, though.) There was marked improvement by 6th grade.

-The heteronormativity was strong with this one: unmarried adults over 30 were pitied or labeled "eccentric." I wish I could tell her dating's not worth it if the primary emotions it evokes are apprehension, avoidance and guilt. As for what her obsession with her favorite teacher's pregnancy means to her own nascent sexuality, well, I don't know if I could break it to her gently enough. (That pregnancy obsession goes away when you admit you like women's curves, glowing faces, and great hair at other times.)

-The Mean Girl-esque social bitchery adolescent girls are often accused of, and that I cringe to hear coming out in traces from my little sister's mouth, was second nature to little me. I may have been a weirdo, but I knew other girls who were even bigger weirdos and I was callous towards them in my diary.

Dear Post-Evangelicals: Here goes, an update, of varyong sorts.

Here is a post from Red Letter Christians that I’ve been mulling on for a little. I don’t know if I can claim to come from “Evangelical” circles the way people talk about the term here in the states, but I very much resonate with the pull to leave, if not the mainstream church, then many of its expressions, practices “laws” behind. I’m looking towards more of a lifestyle and community than a…

"When people ask if you and I are together, I’m going to have to start answering them honestly and telling them that we’re not an item anymore. For now, I need to take some space from churches that overtly claim to associate with you, because going to those churches at this time just further reminds me of our painful, sometimes abusive, relationship– and I just don’t have the emotional energy for that.

So, Evangelicalism, I don’t think this relationship is going to work.

You can call me an Anabaptist, an Emergent or Emerging Christian, you can call me a “Progressive Christian” or you can even call me a heretic (I get that a lot), but I just don’t think I wear the name “evangelical” anymore.

In High-school I remember reading about this guy in Puritan-era America who believed all churches to be in some state of apostasy. Now, I wouldn't say apostasy, but I think most, if not all, churches have gone so far off target. This guy was called a "wanderer". And I resonate so much with that. He was wandering for Koinonia. And the sad part is, I don't remember what happened to him. I think he died in America. I don't remember if he ever found what he was looking for. Probably not to be honest.

Super legit Christians whose names are waved around like NT Wright, Tim Keller, Greg Boyd, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Henri Nouwen, and CS Lewis, I still find myself disagreeing with them on so many issues. The "conservatives", I tend to disagree with over "positional issues" like homosexuality, women, hell, etc... The "progressives" I tend to disagree with over the emphasis of the Gospel, the place of Scripture, and a flippant disregard for orthodoxy, etc...

I seem to find myself in a camp that very few people occupy. Part of me wants to keep on searching for maybe a hidden obscure denomination that has the same values as I do. Another part of me wants to just go out and create my own. 

But then I sadly realize not many people would join. Because I would somehow piss off the conservatives, and I wouldn't be progressive enough for some progressives. 

Maybe I look for perfection to much in the church, when I should be striving for God amidst the broken and fucked up Church and finding God there regardless.

Christ was not meant fulfill us.

I once was at a revival event, complete with altar call and frenzied prayers for revival. At one point, the leader went as far as to say, "I sense that someone in this room has a torn left meniscus. I just want you to know that if you pray with all your heart, God will hear that prayer and answer that prayer and heal you!" Given that this was a room of 200 people, many of whom were sports fans drawn by some football player's endorsement, I figure he probably wasn't too far off the mark.

The overarching theme of the night was, "God will fufill your desires!" That sex, drugs, money, posessions, these all would leave you wanting, but that God will fufill that inner desire. A theme reflected in their claims that those who trusted God would even recieve fufillment of their immediate desires for healing.

God satisfies your desire. God satisfies you.

It sounds really nice, but it completely misses the point of the Gospel.

Christ does not satisfy us. How long has it been since Christ came? 2000 years, give or take a few. Does life feel satisfying? Christian or Atheist, life is not satisfying, God or no God. There are bills to be paid. Work is monotonous. Relationships, no matter how much we try to pull God into them, are still broken. We are still broken.

Then we go to our friends who are not Christians and promise them that Christ does satisfy and that with Jesus, our needs are fufilled more than any worldly things do! And no one mentions that in reality, something is still lacking. In Christ, we are just as broken as we were before, no matter how much we pray for redemption. No matter how much we have experienced redemption. It's still there. We are still hurting just as much as we were before. We are still broken.

The traditional Church answer we're told is that this is because Christ is yet to come to complete his work. And maybe that's followed with an exhortation to meditate stronger on the Word, or to pray harder. Or maybe we're told it's because God has chosen not to completely heal us. But what an unfulfilling answer this is! Do I have to try harder to overcome my doubt? Or has God passed me over when it comes to my struggle?

As long as we focus on ourselves, this tension will always gnaw at and tear at our hearts. As long as we think that we shouldn't be feeling incomplete, we will never see what Christ has done.

The focus is not on us. The Christian faith is not about the fulfillment of our desires. Jesus did not come to fufill our desires. He came to destroy them, to free us from our broken human wants so that God's desires might be fulfilled instead.

In the Old Testament, the Jewish people were commanded by God to make sacrifices in atonement for sin. In essence, these sacrifices were the giving up of things of worldly value to God -- grain, livestock, money. And in the act of sacrifice, worldly things were irrevocably given over to the Lord. In the Bible, the NIV translation notes that the term "destroyed" is frequently used in a way that "refers to the irrevocable giving over of things or persons to the Lord, often by totally destroying them" (found in Deuteronomy 20:17, only one of many examples of this word).

In the Crucifixion, Jesus, the substitute for humanity, was destroyed on the cross. And through him, not only destroyed are our sins but also the root behind them: our desires.

We do not inherently desire good. What we desire, even when we desire "good" is evil -- sin, in the sense that our desires are not Godly desires regardless of how good they may seem. In the very beginning of the story of humanity, it is written that "The Lord saw that the wickedness of huamnkind was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually," (Genesis 6:5). And in Romans 3:10-11, Paul cites Old Testament texts proclaiming that, "there is no one who is righteous, not even one; There is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God." It isn't a sense of absolute "evil" that these texts rail aginst. Rather, it is this inherent brokenness in ourselves, our inherent depravity that prevents us from turning to serving God rather than ourselves that Christ came to overcome.

Christ did not say he came to fufill our desires. To say so twists the gospel into a false religion about a wish-granting deity who furthers our hedonistic desires. Christ came to destroy our desires. Rather, in him, these desires and their inherent sinfulness have been handed over to the Lord irrevocably. We are no longer our own. In 1 Cornithians 6:19-20, the Apostle Paul exhorts believers to not be ruled by their own sexual desires. He draws from Roman cultural practices: that a slave whose freedom was bought with temple money was now owned by the God of that temple, and that likewise, Christians were no longer mastered by themselves, but by God. And as such, we are no longer ruled by our desires. We are ruled by the desires of God.

In Christ, we have been freed from the self-serving order of this world, of ourselves. We are no longer ruled by our desires and their sinful and self-centered nature, but ruled by the love of God that destroys our realities of self-serving desire, freeing us to be ruled not by our desires but by his desires instead. Christ is not about us. He is about him. And that is good news.