Stuck in the middle…with you?
I’m starting to think that there is very little middle ground in North American Christian circles.
It seems that you are either a social and economic conservative, intent on ‘keeping to a literal interpretation of the Bible,’ and espousing a very strong set of convictions (see my posts on Evangelicalism),
or
you are a social and economic liberal, with a low-view of Christ (e.g. not divine, etc.) and God (Deism),
or
you are a part of a Christianity that is primarily cultural (i.e. family-tied) and is very closed on almost every respect.
I’m not any of these. And I feel alienated because of it.
It’s difficult, because for the last 3 years I’ve had a exhilirating time delving deeply into the Word: learning the original (or as close as we can understand) languages, defining contexts – both historical and literary, redefining my theology to align with what I truly and utterly believe is the biblical theology. But, because of this, I’ve had to make some concessions. Concessions like, maybe the Old Testament isn’t entirely a factual, scientific document; maybe only the Gospel of John calls Jesus divine; Maybe the Rapture doesn’t exist (ok, that was an easy one); maybe there isn’t a soul separate from the body and that heaven and death and end times as we commonly understand them have little to do with each other?
I’m not a Liberal. I believe in the Creeds and all that they entail. But, as you see, I’m not a fundamentalist by any modern sense of the Word. I can’t adhere to any determinist view of God, but I can’t hold to any true open theism either. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle. A magical middle that doesn’t entirely seem to exist.
I’ve said from the start that I keep finding the Jesus and the Christianity I’ve always been looking for – a robust, intellectual, revolutionary, ancient and transcendent Christianity. Sadly, I’ve been losing a hold on how to understand our Church – its culture, place, and meaning. I see so many things that are contrary to what I now hold to believe the Bible is saying, and that people are creating part of a cycle that has little to do, and is often contrary to, the call to usher in the Kingdom of God.
So why am I worried about this? Why couldn’t I just start ignoring other Christians and live my own life, apart from them? Well the thing that I’ve learned more than anything else from God this year is how important faith community is to the Christian life. We need each other, consistently and constantly. We need to eat meals together, join in praise together, mourn together, hold each other up, hold each other accountable, save each other from trials and tribulations and be unified in love, because I believe that these things are good and well for our beings and our walks with the Lord. Strike that, it is imperative to our Christianity.
So how do I do that when I’m not sure about most, if not all of it, any more?
Suggestions would be great.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on December 30, 2008 at 9:24 am, filed under Christianity, Church and tagged Church, Disillusionment, Evangelicalism, North America. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Evangelicalism Then and Now: Activism
So we’ve come to our last of the quadrilateral, activism.
Bebbington defines it as: the belief that the gospel needs to expressed in effort. I define it as: the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort to make Christianity the predominant Culture, ridding the evils of any one else’s point-of-view.
Out of all 4 points of the quadrilateral, this one is probably the one that would brand me a liberal by our more conservative brothers and sisters, but I feel this needs to be said: We do not live in a Christian culture, and the former ‘Christian’ culture of Canada was of face-value at best. A culture war is an exercise in futility.
And there you have it. North-American Christianity, though far more prominent south of the border (though that seems to be changing), seems to be deadset on winning some cultural war against sex, homosexuality, postmodernism, religious plurality, and, it seems, the political left. All of these contribute to the downfall of society, or so I was to believe, had I listened to the late Jerry Falwell, or even Pat “Assassination’s cool with God” Robertson.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of these things are wrong. Some of these things aren’t bad, they are just reality. I’m not going to tell you which, but I am going to say what I think are the two things Christians do in response to culture that is bogus: wholesale condemnation, followed by a really crappy, ‘cleansed’ copy.
First off, the condemnation. I don’t understand how we can condemn a culture that is devoid of the Word for doing things against the Word? Yes, there are things that are bad that need to be brought to justice and renewed (television standards and practices), and there are things beyond redemption that we need to just condemn outrightly (abortion), but we are doing it in just the dumbest way possible. Scare tactics, guilt, and even outright hatred are not the ways of how Christians are to respond, let alone how Christ responded to things he that were wrong. Where is the love for our fellow man in saying “God hates Fags,” or “Abortionists are Murderers?”
Secondly, we really suck at creating an alternative. Contemporary Christian Music tends to be about 4 years behind realities tastes and flavours, not even mentioning how mediocre most of the talent is, and don’t even get me started on Kirk Cameron and his Left Behind movies (or for that matter, Tim Le Haye and Jerry Jenkins for coming up with those pieces of trash). We North-American Christians, by and large, seem to hate to be innovative or creative. What happened to 2000 years of Art History centred around Jesus? What made Christians hate good art so much that they would create all this garbage? For the sake of the Lord, make something decent.
Solutions: First of all, I think we need to cast off the ‘Christian’ label we have attached to everything in our God-fearing households, and replace them with socially-responsible products (which I’m pretty sure Jesus would appreciate it more than you may think). Second, we to interact and dialogue with our communities, to not feel better abour oursevles, but to serve the needs of those seeking out the kingdom, wherever they may be.
So that ends this cycle on Evangelicalism. I think I may write one more post on implicatiions, but we’ll have to see. I hope you’ve gotten something out of thise.
WK
This entry was written by , posted on December 2, 2008 at 7:05 am, filed under Activism, Christianity, Church and tagged Activism, Christianity, Church, Evangelicalism. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Emerging Church Vision Made Easy.
(Originally Published April 21, 2006 on http://www.wkinchlea.blogspot.com)
After strolling around on the internet the other day, I found myself upon the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.
Some of my regular readers (and by some I mean the vast majority) have no idea what Web 2.0 is, and for the matter at hand, that’s ok. The point is, I found it funny, and I thought others would too.
So I emailed the Tall Skinny Kiwi, thinking he would get a kick out of it, too (he does know what Web 2.0 is). A week later, I get an email saying he enjoyed it as well and thought there should be one for the Emerging Church too. (Y’know, lighten the atmosphere, add some humour….for kicks) He then asked me to see if I couldn’t hack it and come up with my own.
Having never touched Javascript before, naturally I said “why not?”, and began to reverse engineer the website to create The Emerging Church Vision Generator. Originally, I had just sent Mr. Jones the html file for his own amusement and usage, (I didn’t have my own extra website hanging around) but I got impatient and decided to publish it for free at Bravenet.
For those at all involved with talking about Emerging Church junk, I hope you find this funny!
This entry was written by , posted on April 8, 2008 at 3:08 am, filed under Church, Humour, Internet and tagged Church, Emerging, Humour, Vision, Web 2.0. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
The Thing About Doing Church.
For the sake of clarity, let’s define church in a really narrow way today; in about the same way that we say we are going ‘to do church (insert descriptor here) today.’ In other words, today, church is going to mean communal times of worship, fellowship and learning, the norm being the Sunday service.
Depending on your faith tradition, church can mean something very different to you compared to your christian neighbour (whom you are to love) down the street. Take, for instance, the difference between your general post-brethren community bible chapel vs. your general Canadian Reform church. Big difference. At the former, you will generally find full-band worship music (generally contemporary works by Hillsong, Matt Redman and a whole slew of others worship artists), lots of talk about evangelism through community projects and maybe, if you’re lucky, a drama before the sermon. At the latter, on the other hand, you’ll find organ-and-piano-singing of the psalms (with a few hip new hymns that were written 60 years ago), rigid liturgy, lots of talk about the covenant and piety, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get out after an hour, to come back after lunch for round 2.
Are they both right in the way they do church? Yes. Wholeheartedly Yes.
People do what their traditions and passions guide them to do. I’ve run the gamut from attending Roman Catholic Mass weekly to attending Conferences at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (the Toronto Blessing, for those in the charismatic ‘know’). I’ve found meaning and a love for our Lord in both. Personally, I like new takes on hold hymns – the re-working and refining of tradition to blend the old with the new. Now, few people do that in their entirety (well, none as far as I have seen, at least), but it works.
What doesn’t work, however, is when people impress form on others to suit their own views. A Presbyterian goes on about those heretical Pentecostals. The Heretical Pentecostal goes on about those dead Baptists. The Dead Baptist goes on about the Devil’s Roman Catholic. You can see where I’m going with this. This impression of form on others oppresses the content as a whole.
The thing that people should keep aware of, when being concerned with another faith tradition laying claim to Christianity, is through adherence to doctrine (Nicene, Apostolic or Chalcedon – take your pick) and through the fruits of their labours. And the latter you can’t really weigh too heavily upon, as each tradition has their own preconceptions involved with that as well, but that’s another post. Let’s go with love as a standard, that’s a good one.
Ultimately, I’m just saying that everyone needs to leave each other alone and quit griping about the church down the street. Do your thing; they’ll do theirs. Maybe you guys can get together and bowl or something. Bowling is a neutral, christian standard for fun.
Or so I have been told.
-WK
This entry was written by , posted on April 5, 2008 at 1:53 pm, filed under Church, Essays and tagged christians, Church, denominations, worship. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
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