Posts tagged ‘Rachel Held Evans’
Must Christianity Change or Die?
Credit: Rudy Tiben
Sometimes, it can feel as though the sky is falling and the bottom is dropping out all at the same time. It seems like I can go barely a day without reading a dire report on church attrition, especially among the younger generation. Between high school and turning 30, 43 percent of once-active young adults stop attending church.[1] As of 2012, almost one-third of young adults were unaffiliated with a religious institution.[2] In one survey, researchers found that nearly one-third of young adults left the Christian faith because of its “negative teachings” related to gays and lesbians.[3]
Such gloomy statistics lead to predictable calls to fix the Church by changing its teachings, lest the next generation, discontent with the Church’s antiquated morals, leave her altogether. Take, for instance, this call from popular Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans:
Young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people …
Young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity, between compassion and holiness …
The evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little more than sticking to a list of rules, and … millennials long for faith communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with doubt …
What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.[4]
Evans’ last line is striking to me. In response to changing cultural norms, Evans maintains that the Church must change the substance of her message. In the words of the famed Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong, “Christianity must change or die.”[5] How must Christianity change? Evans offers some suggestions:
We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against.
We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.
We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation.
We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.
We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.
Evans’ words here are fascinating – and confusing – to me because, understood one way, they are commendable, orthodox, and necessary. But understood another way, they are deeply troubling. For instance, if a “truce between science and faith” means understanding the respective spheres of each and welcoming scientific discovery while at the same time remaining faithful to Scripture’s narrative, I’m onboard. If, however, it means dumping the historicity of Scripture’s creation account, I’m troubled. If having “our LGBT friends feel truly welcome in our faith communities” means showing love, compassion, and going out of our way to listen and learn from the LGBT community, I’m more than all for it. If it means calling what is sinful, “just,” I’m troubled. Sadly, I can’t help but think that, all too often, it’s the latter understandings of these statements that are insinuated. Otherwise, it is feared, a whole generation of young people will leave the Church.
But is this really the case?
Take Rob Bell. Here is a man who has, at least in part, bought into Spong’s motto, “Christianity must change or die.” In his book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, Bell asks candidly, “Can God keep up with the modern world?”[6] He fought to build a community – Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids – that would lead the way in this new Christianity. Until he left. In an interview with Oprah, he says his Sunday mornings are now regularly filled with he and his 13-year-old son surfing.[7] Rob Bell was leading a changed church. But even a changed church wasn’t enough to keep Bell around. And he isn’t the only one.
For decades now, churches that have changed the substance of the Christian faith have not been gaining members, but losing members. And now, even as young people are leaving traditional churches, they are not joining these changed churches. They are leaving altogether.[8]
It would seem that if a church is willing to “get with the times,” so to speak, and embrace our culture’s zeitgeist, its pews should be filled to overflowing with the ranks of the enlightened, all breathing a collective sigh of relief that, finally, the offensive, narrow, bigoted Christianity of yesteryear has been relegated to the scrap heap of history. But this has not happened.
The problem with changing the faith of the Church – even the parts of the faith that are not particularly palpable to our modern ears – is that such changes inevitably displace Christianity’s eschatological hope with an evolutionary drum.
What do I mean?
Whether it’s the so-called “war” between science and faith, or the question of gay marriage, or the role of politics in faith, many Christians have simply traded one side of Rachel Held Evans’ despised culture war for the other. They desire to evolve beyond what they perceive as a restrictive, judgmental, intellectually archaic Christian faith. So they laugh at those who take Genesis’ creation account historically, or cry “bigotry” against those who express concern with gay marriage, or look down on those who argue for a more traditionally moral politics. These are old ways that must be done away with, they think.
But what happens is that they become so animated by grievances from the past and trying to right them right now that they forget about – or at least relegate to the background – any sort of ultimate hope for the future. They wind up fighting for a certain kind of culture rather than finding their hope in a different type of Kingdom. They become so obsessed with what’s next that they forget about what’s last.
When you dispel the Christian faith down to nothing more than a fight for this or that cause célèbre, more often than not, you end up with nothing – or at least with nothing that can’t be found elsewhere. And why would anyone go somewhere for something they can get anywhere? This is why changing Christianity’s substance doesn’t gain people; it only loses them.
So what course of action can a Christian take? In a world full of cultural convolution, Christianity’s answer is elegantly simple: “Stand firm in the faith … Do everything in love” (1 Corinthians 16:13-14). Don’t change the faith. Love others. That’s it. And really, who can improve on that? Some things don’t need to change.
_____________________
[1] Melissa Stefan, “Have 8 Million Millennials Really Given Up on Christianity?” Christianity Today (5.17.2013).
[2] Vern L. Bengtson, Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 148.
[3] “A Shifting Landscape: A Decade of Change in American Attitudes about Same-Sex Marriage and LGBT Issues,” Public Religion Research Institute (2.26.2014).
[4] Rachel Held Evans, “Why millennials are leaving the church,” cnn.com (7.27.2013).
[5] John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1999).
[6] Rob Bell, What We Talk About When We Talk About God (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), 8.
[7] “Super Soul Sunday: Oprah Goes Soul to Soul with Rob Bell,” Oprah.com.
[8] Rod Dreher, “The Dying (No, Really) Of Liberal Protestantism,” The American Conservative (7.25.2013).
Millennial Morality: Thoughts On A Generation’s Thoughts On Christianity
Credit: urbanfaith.com
Last weekend, popular blogger Rachel Held Evans, writing for CNN, offered an account of why she thinks those in the millennial generation are leaving the Church. Her comments are worth quoting at length:
Armed with the latest surveys, along with personal testimonies from friends and readers, I explain how young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
I point to research that shows young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity, between compassion and holiness.
I talk about how the evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little more than sticking to a list of rules, and how millennials long for faith communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with doubt.[1]
Rachel Held Evans certainly has her finger on the pulse of contemporary culture. Research does indeed show that millennials describe Christianity as “too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.” In other words, many millennials view traditional Christian teachings as repressive and regressive. What Rachel fails to ask, however, is, “Does this popularly held perception of Christianity match its reality?”
There’s a whole army of research out there about how people feel about Christianity. But what about the research that reveals what is actually being preached and taught from Christian pulpits? How many sermons on politics are actually preached week in and week out? How about sermons on sex? How about sermons that are openly hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people? Here, the research becomes much more scant. And, I suspect, the sermons themselves might just be much more scant as well.
Now, I know it’s not hard to skew popular perceptions of what the Christian Church is all about. After all, it’s usually not the sermon on John 3 and God loving the world that makes the rounds on YouTube; it’s the sermon on Leviticus 20 with the sweaty pastor yelling about the abominations of sodomy that gets 500,000 views.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if the objections that many millennials have to some of the teachings of Christianity aren’t so much objections as they are excuses. In other words, the reason many millennials object to particular Christian tenets is not because they are “too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people”; it is because they simply don’t like parts of what Christianity teaches. So they accuse Christians of absolutism so they can live in libertinism. Nathan Hitchen explains it like this: “When people don’t want to believe something, they ask themselves, ‘Must I believe this?’ and then search for contrary evidence until they find a single reason to doubt the claim and dismiss it.”[2] In other words, they find that YouTube video with the sweaty, yelling pastor and say, “No way.”
From a theological perspective, C.S. Lewis offers keen insight into the objectionable character of Christian morality:
Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality … Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.[3]
C.S. Lewis minces no words about how tough the task of teaching Christian morality really is. It’s tough because the “old simple principles” of morality are ones “which we are all so anxious not to see.” Yet, Jesus, as a teacher of morality, among other things, preached these “old simple principles.” Of course, such preaching didn’t make Him popular or unobjectionable. It got Him killed.
So perhaps popularity is not in the cards for Christianity. This should not come as a surprise. It wasn’t in the cards for Jesus. And yet, as Rachel Held Evans finally notes in her CNN article, “Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus.” Maybe that’s because, deep down, even if our depravity rebels against it, something keeps telling us Jesus is right. And if Jesus is right, that means He can make us right with God.
That’s our message as Christians. And I, for one, intend to keep sharing it.
[1] Rachel Held Evans, “Why millennials are leaving the church,” cnn.com (7.27.2013).
[2] Nathan Hitchen, “Marriage Counter-Messaging: An Action Plan” (The John Jay Institute: 2013), 4.
[3] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1952), 64.
What We Say (And Don’t Say) About Homosexual Practice
When President Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage in an interview with ABC News on May 9,[1] I knew I would get a lot of questions. And sure enough, I did. This is why the pastors of Concordia have prepared a Christian response to same-sex marriage specifically and homosexual practice generally. You can find the response here. This response will also be published this week in a booklet along with an appendix which will answer some of the questions we have received in response to the document.
I have found this whole brouhaha (to use a technical, theological term) to be fascinating – not so much because of the common, perennial questions I have received concerning same-sex marriage, but because of the way many prominent Christians have responded to this now top-of-mind topic.
It saddens me that when questions are asked, so many Christian people have responded in a breathtakingly nebulous way. Take, for instance, popular Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans. In her blog, “How To Win A Culture War And Lose A Generation,” she decries the way in which the Church has responded to homosexuality:
Every single student I have spoken with believes that the Church has mishandled its response to homosexuality.
Most have close gay and lesbian friends.
Most feel that the Church’s response to homosexuality is partly responsible for high rates of depression and suicide among their gay and lesbian friends, particularly those who are gay and Christian.
Most are highly suspicious of “ex-gay” ministries that encourage men and women with same-sex attractions to marry members of the opposite sex in spite of their feelings.
Most feel that the church is complicit, at least at some level, in anti-gay bullying.[2]
Here, Evans has no problem being sharply specific. Evans places her finger squarely on the pulse of something profoundly tragic: Those who are not Christian feel belittled and berated by the way traditional, orthodox Christians have often responded to homosexuality. They have come across as judgmental, self-righteous, bigoted, and they have even contributed, at least in a complicit way, to the heart-wrenching stories of anti-gay bullying we read in the news. Tragic.
So what is Evans’ way forward? Her last sentence, “Stop waging war and start washing feet,” seems to present itself as her proposed solution, but I am still left puzzled. Though I know there are some bigoted, self-righteous, mean-spirited Christians who delight in waging culture wars, brandishing about the word “sinner” like a weapon of mass destruction while refusing to serve and love according to Jesus’ call and command, I know many other Christians who make it their life’s work to humbly call sinners to repentance while serving them in love. I see the service part of a Christian’s vocation in her statement, “Start washing feet,” but what about the calling to repentance part? Are we not supposed to do both?
Interestingly, Evans wrote a follow-up post where she proposes yet another solution: “We need to listen to one another’s stories.”[3] People’s stories do matter. And listening is terrific, yes. But to what end? Do we have nothing other than our own stories to share? Isn’t the glory of Christianity that it is extra nos, that is, “outside of us” – that we have a righteousness not our own to save us from sin all too tragically our own (cf. Philippians 3:9)? We need to come to grips with the fact that what Jesus says about us is far more important than what we say about ourselves. His story matters more than ours because His story redeems ours.
There’s an old country song by Aaron Tippin where he sings, “You’ve got to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything.”[4] I fear that, when it comes to homosexual practice and same-sex marriage, we have abdicated our duty of standing – not charging, not belittling, not berating, not politicking – but just standing – standing in the truth and speaking that truth with grace.
The apostle Paul writes, “Stand firm in the faith” (1 Corinthians 16:13). Notice the definite article in front of the word “faith.” We are to stand firm not just in any faith, but in the faith. This means that we say what the faith says: Homosexual practice is a sin. It is one of a million ways that humans have invented for themselves to break God’s law, just like I invent for myself a million ways to break God’s law too. But God loves sinners. God loves you. That’s why He sent Jesus to die and be raised for you. So repent of your sin and trust in Him. And please allow me to walk with you and love you as do so, or even if you do not.
There. Was that so hard?
[1] “Obama Affirms Support For Same Sex Marriage,” ABC News (5.9.12).
[2] Rachel Held Evans, “How To Win A Culture And Lose A Generation” (5.9.12).
[3] Rachel Held Evans, “From Waging War To Washing Feet: How Do We Move Forward?” (5.11.12).
[4] Aaron Tippin, “You’ve Got To Stand For Something,” RCA Records (1991).
Pastor Zach's Blog 