Category Archives: thoughts from reading

The Perils of “Wannabe Cool’ Christianity

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Like most of our culture these days, Christianity in the U.S. is undergoing a great deal of change.  There is a lot of angst around the changes within our culture and society that show that we are no longer a predominately Christian nation (implicitly or explicitly).  In addition, our current church culture caters to a philosophical and theological perspective that proving itself to not be very popular among emerging generations.

This article from the Wall Street Journal, entitled “The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity‘, touches on some of the machinations going on within the Christianity right now in order to try to be “relevant” with changing culture and young people.  As the author concludes, this jump to trendiness and shock value will probably not work for much longer.

From the article:

Statistics like these have created something of a mania in recent years, as baby-boomer evangelical leaders frantically assess what they have done wrong (why didn’t megachurches work to attract youth in the long term?) and scramble to figure out a plan to keep young members engaged in the life of the church.

Increasingly, the “plan” has taken the form of a total image overhaul, where efforts are made to rebrand Christianity as hip, countercultural, relevant. As a result, in the early 2000s, we got something called “the emerging church”–a sort of postmodern stab at an evangelical reform movement. Perhaps because it was too “let’s rethink everything” radical, it fizzled quickly. But the impulse behind it–to rehabilitate Christianity’s image and make it “cool”–remains.

and the conclusion:

If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that “cool Christianity” is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken. As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don’t want cool as much as we want real.

If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular. It’s because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true. It’s because the world we inhabit is utterly phony, ephemeral, narcissistic, image-obsessed and sex-drenched–and we want an alternative. It’s not because we want more of the same.

Read the whole article!

The Imago Dei Initiative doesn’t seek to employ trendy artifacts that become so 5-minutes ago in 2 minutes flat, but seek to understand and receive the enduring, ancient Faith experienced in new ways.  We seek to understand and experience the enduring faith and learn how to pass it on.  We seek to find simply ways of living the profound Faith in ways that get to the heart of the longings of emerging generations in every changing contexts.

This is your brain on iPad

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ere is an interesting article from the New York Times.  Entitled, Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime, the article describes findings concerning the affect of digital technology and its constant use on the brain, particularly on the brain’s ability to actually learn, to form permanent memories, to synthesis what has been inputted previously, and to be creative.  Devises like the Blackberry, iPhone, iPad – the entire digitial cornucopia – are used to fill up even small amounts of downtime. Our purpensity to not simple be is a real hindrance to our own well being, it seems.  We are coming to the point where we allow no downtime, no time to “clear our heads,” and we are robbing ourselves of simple rest. Perhaps we are even hindering our own ability to effectively learn. 

What does this do to feelings of tranquility, our ability to not be bored, or our ability to actually engage with people in ways that are deeper than relational “sound-bites”?

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s
had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,”
said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at
the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he
believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent
this learning process.”

HANNOVER, GERMANY - MARCH 02: A man, wearing ...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife


At the University of Michigan,
a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in
nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that
processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

I’ve often thought that a growing and now significant hindrance to our faith and relationship not only with God but with one another revolves around our inability to be still, quiet, alone with our own thoughts, and simply be with someone without the need to be entertained or occupied. 

A strategic triumph of the Enemy of our Faith is to so distract us that we no longer give time to sit quietly with God, to study the contemplate the Word of God, or meditate on what it all means for life and love.  We cannot know God without being still, but if we are so conditioned and culturally malformed to avoid those times of stillness and quiet, we will never know the depth of relationship that is possible with God.  We will not know the depth of relationship that is possible with one another, but rather we allow ourselves to be conditioned for the superficial and the temporary.

We in the Church will need to be intentional and determined to give ourselves to periods of downtime, quiet, and stillness.  We, as followers of the Christ, will need to be examples to a world that will grow weary of this form of life.  When people begin looking for an alternative, will they see examples of a way of life that doesn’t shun technology but also is able to singularly focus for a lengthy period of time on the person sitting across from us, a life that is content and at peace without distraction?  What will be the witness of the Church?  Will people see the imago of God and an image of life that is substantially different and compelling for a good alternative, or will be look just like everyone else? 

This will be a coming mission of the Church – to reintroduce to the human experience, in the U.S. at least, examples of real, tactile relationships, a peace that comes from within and not determined by outside circumstances or influences, creativity, and a whole list of other things.  This is a common proclivity to the human experience from time beginning – we do harm to ourselves.

The “E” word

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This recent article from the Episcopal News Service has prompted me to think again about the “E” word – you know, “evangelism”.  The article is entitled, “Mobilizing for mission: Seminarians organize for young adult evangelism.”  I have a lot of respect for this group of Episcopal seminarians in their effort to engage in evangelism, but to what are we calling people?  Is there an enduring aspect to what we are calling these young adults?

When I ask myself that question, here is what I keep coming back to: The Church needs to reclaim one of its primary purposes – to be about the Cure of Souls.  That means we call people to God through Jesus Christ first and foremost.  But, why should anyone be compelled to heed such a call, particularly if they take an account of our lives as examples of what we are calling them to?  How is our witness?

Within certain circles of the Christian Church in the U.S., and I suppose everywhere, the “E” word is avoided with a passion or simply redefined to fit particular sensibilities.

Growing up in American-Evangelicalism/Pentecostalism, evangelism was supposed to be at the center of my experience of the Faith.  We believed that we and all Christians are charged by God to “go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” We believed this because, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16). 

While I certainly upheld this call to us all to preach the gospel, the problem I had with all the evangelism stuff was the preferred and accepted method most often used by American-Evangelicals, particularly in my context, which was the college campus.  The method used was often refereed to as “Confrontational Evangelism”.  In a more crass and defamatory description, some people referred to it as “bible-thumping.”

I was uncomfortable with evangelism all together because this was all I knew.  This method to me seemed fake, contrived, and forced in a way that didn’t leave room for dealing with real and honest questions and doubts.  To me, it did not seem to respect there object of the effort.  Paul, as described in Acts 17, often said something like, “Come, let us reason together…”, but there was no real reasoning within confrontational evangelism.  It seemed overly superficial.  Yet, I personally knew people who came to be reconciled to God (“saved,” in good Evangelical verbiage) through this method – God works as God will work!  Who are we to get in the way of the Spirit because of our own likes and dislikes!

I was drawn to another concept of evangelism during those days – “Friendship Evangelism.”  This method seemed more natural and respectful.  We befriended people simply because we wanted to be friends, although added to the mix was our desire for the person to also be a friend of God.  The problem was the constant tension between being “in the world,” but not “of the world.” 

Being friends with a “worldling” sometimes seemed to ran counter to God’s demand that we, “come out from among them”. (2 Corinthians 6:17)  How could one just hang with a non-Christian and be okay with that when being with him/her may be a bad influence on one’s own struggle against sin and striving for holiness?  Besides, their eternal soul hung in the balance and it was up to us to do something about that.  Pressure!  Pressure that made real friendship nearly impossible.  That’s why these “friendships” rarely lasted.  When the object of our efforts didn’t get saved, we dumped her/him and moved on to another prospect.  This was our witness of “friendship” among many non-Christians.  Some kind of friendship, eh?

This was why I hated “evangelism.”

Within American Mainline Christianity, there took hold among some an idea that “evangelism” wasn’t so much converting people to Christianity, but doing things that helping the poor and down trodden and then hoping that those helped would like us.  I remember while in seminary a representative from our Church’s Foreign Missions office declared that we no longer try to convert people, because that is disrespectful of their culture and religion, but we simply help them be all that they can be.  To what are we calling people? 

Today, for much of the Mainline, the “E” word has been redefined. “Evangelism” is simply helping, and then perhaps someone might like to help us help other people.  Helping others is a very good thing, but is it that to which we are to call people?

I can’t get into this kind of “evangelism,” either.

Within the Imago Dei Society, we center on Formation and Witness.  The Imago Dei Initiative is the means for helping us to live lives that reflect God, that reflect the transformational nature of God’s work within us, and that reflect something compellingly different within the surrounding contexts of our lives that get people’s attention.  What we hope gets people’s attention is not due to marketing, gimmicks, or manipulation, but simply the way we live – “There is just something compellingly and delightfully different about these people!”  The difference, if seen, is due to our relationship with God first and foremost and the re-formation of heart and mind that results. 

In a society and culture that is increasingly similiar to  the pre-Constantinain environment, “evangelism” comes about because something about our lives and example attracts the attention of those seeking something other than the status-quo.  If we can be the “image of God” with integrity, with honest, and with humility in our everyday lives among the people we encounter regularly, we will be doing “evangelism.”  We will be a good witness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We do “evangelism” whether we want to or not.  The question we have to answer is whether the image of God and the Christian life we portray is on target (as best it can be in success and failure) and whether we call people to be reconciled with God before anything else.  Do we?

We hope to call people to two things consistently – be reconciled to God and with one another.  Take up your relationship with God and discover how you are transformed to live “life to the full”. (John 10:10)  It isn’t easy, and that is why we need one another to keep on. 

 

Our Times

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Thomas Chatterton Williams in his book, Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,00 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, wrote: “Nietzsche believed the greatest deeds are thoughts. ‘The world revolves around the inventors of new values,’ he wrote.  For more than thirty years the black world has revolved around the inventors of hip-hop values, and this has been a decisive step backward.” (p. 218)

In his book, Williams describes his experiences growing up with increasing allegiance to those inventors and the hip-hop culture, until discovering a much broader world when he went off to college – and more importantly due to his father’s constant influence and love.  Certainly, not all of hip-hop is negative, but much of it is.  For many, many black people, according to their own testimony, the more gangsta forms have had a devastating effect on black culture and those forms are the “new values” taken up decisively by a generation.

Williams goes on to write that his generation, in order to pay the debt they owe their ancestors for all they suffered through in order to make possible in his generation a black President, who is a counter example as a “nuanced thinker” of hip-hop culture, his generation must take up the challenge to do things differently and make things right for the sake of the new generations coming.

I see in Williams’ description of his experience and the “new values” of the hip-hop phenomina a similiar experience of another generation and another racial group – the overwhelmingly white Baby Boomer generation.  The “1960’s” generation proclaimed a new morality with a whole set of “new values.”  In their belief that their generation’s purpose was to usher in a Brave New World, the age of Aquarius, they have been relentless in overturning anything they perceive as getting in their way.   As Nietzsche said, the world has revolved around this new morality and their new values.

Like hip-hop, not all that this generation has done is wrong or bad.  Many aspects of white, 1950’s culture needed to be upended – racism, the “Stepford Wives” expectation of women are examples.  The proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater, however, because of an unnuanced rejection of all that came before them.  We are beginning to reap the whirlwind. 

One predominate characteristic of this generation is their rejection of the notion that their ancestors, or even their parents’ generation, have anything worthwhile to say to them or to teach them, and as a result their generation is known as the first one to cast off history and lessons from the past as informants of how things should be. This may be a bit of overstatement, but not by much.  What is even more sad is that the generation in the aggregate does not acknowledge or perhaps even realize the tremendous sacrifice and denial of self past generations have endured for their generation’s existence.

I am hopeful when I read the demographic trends of younger generations.  They will have their own problems, of course, but there seems to be a reclaiming of history and past experience as informants for figuring out how to live life.  As Williams claims it is up to his generation to overturn the very negative influences of hip-hop on African-American culture, so is it up to his generation, including all races, to overturn the negative aspects of the Baby Boomer zeitgeist for all Americans.

Noble purpose

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“And what if it was true that the Sisterhood no longer heard the music of life?” (p. 342)
“Without noble purpose we are nothing.” (p. 344)
Quotes from “Heretics of Dune,” part of the Dune series by Frank Herbert.
What is the Church? What is the noble purpose presented to the Church? Has the Church lost its ability to pursue the noble purpose? Does it no longer understand what resonates within the hearts and desires and pain of the world? Does the Church no longer hear the music of life?
Again and again, when we so entangle ourselves within the systems of the world, mistakenly thinking that they are the conveyors of the noble purpose, the justifications for the noble purpose, or the reasons to continue in the noble purpose, we have already lost, already failed.
It is first the discovery of the One behind the noble purpose, and in so discovering firstly we will understand true and not contrived justifications of, reasons for, and ways to convey the noble purpose that prove that we have not lost the ability to hear the music of life.
There is no real solace in thinking that our purpose rests in purely temporal form or purpose. The Cure of Souls is the first priority. All else, while vitally important to the noble path, are secondary. The second cannot occur without the first, and the first cannot be fully realized without the second. We try and try and try to reorder the process differently according to our own design born of limited understanding, but in the end we get no where. The noble purpose is clouded and diminished, stripped of its power, and we are left deaf.

Authentic service

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I’ve heard from time-to-time that much of the “social justice” work done and the “social services” given by “White folks” to the “needy” (who in these instances generally mean Hispanics and African-Americans) are nothing much more than attempts at expunging their “liberal White guilt” and in the end accomplish not so much the “empowerment” of these groups but actually contribute to continued “dependence” on these “good White folks.” The “good White folks” feel all good about themselves because they’ve helped the “poor people who cannot do it for themselves due to so much institutionalized injustice and oppression” (which does exist!, but perhaps not as the imaginations of those suffering from liberal White guilt conjure up).
As I’ve heard, what these “good White people” do is not so much enable poor or disadvantaged people to fish, but just give them fish so that the downtrodden people have to continue being dependent on and accept the “good White people’s” pity. This kind of thing, this way of “helping the poor and disadvantaged,” smacks too much of paternalism and “liberal White hubris!”
Is there truth in this kind of accusation? Well, that is debated, but when “good White people” suffering from “liberal White guilt” need ways to alleviate their guilt feelings and find ways to make themselves feel good about themselves, it isn’t beyond the pale that even subconsciously there are devised methods of keeping the status quo as it is in order to continue to provide relief for “liberal White guilt” for those who suffer from it.
I really don’t know, but I wonder! I have seen such things in action, particularly in Academia. I do think there is legitimacy in the idea, whether or not a majority of “Liberals White people” act out in this way is up for debate.
But, the question arises – What is authentic service, or Good Works, from an enduring Christian understanding? The following is quote out of the book I’m reading entitled, Growing Souls: Experiments in Contemplative Youth Ministry, by Mark Yaconelli. The particular chapter, thus the quote, is actually by Frank Rogers, Jr. as he details the real-life experience of the Youth and their sponsors from Lake Chelan Lutheran Church. They were on a youth ministry trip to Nicaragua.

Their first three days in the Nicaraguan capital only solidified their concern for the poor. They saw firsthand the insidious web of social structures, bureaucratic process, and cultural prejudice that conspired to bar the peasants form access to universities, opportunities in the business world, or voice in the government. By the youth were bused to the countryside for three days of living with peasants in their homes, their indignation was high and their sympathy deep as they burned to made a difference.
When they pulled into one struggling settlement, the teens were horrified to see a group of women, some pregnant, some elderly, hacking through hardened soil in the day’s heat to dig trenches alongside withering coffee plants. Moved by their plight, the teens swarmed over and insisted that they relieve the women and dig the trenches themselves. The women, surprised at the youthful zeal of the Norte Americanos, stepped aside. Some of the teens were athletes strengthened by modern regimens of weight training, most were amply well-nourished on North American abundance; all were bolstered by the nobility of their Christian convictions and the invigorating rush when taking care of those in need. Within an hour they were ready to pass out. Exhausted by the labor and beaten down by the heat, they guzzled draughts of water, then napped in the afternoon shade. The peasant women smiled as they refilled the teen’s buckets. They they retrieved their tools, and dug throughout the rest of the day.
Their discussion that evening reflected upon the paternalism that permeates U.S. attitudes toward the poor, particularly within the church. A conversion of thinking took place among the teens. Their notions of poor and wealthy, service and empowerment, were turned upside down. They saw how taking care of another, however well intentioned, can mask arrogance and reinforce dependency. For the rest of the trip, the young people allowed themselves to be served by the vibrant Nicaraguan people, sharing in the wealth of the Nicaraguans’ culture and sense of community, their dreams for a better world, and their hopes fueled by festive faith and active organizing. The teems no longer tried to rescue the peasants. They simply asked how they might become their allies. They were learning about authentic action – action spurred by visions of justice and mutuality, chastened by the shadows that motivate us all, and energized by a commitment to birth power, not dependency. By maintaining hearts that were attentive, open, and vulnerable to the Nicaraguan people and their situation, the youth of Lake Chaelan gained a new awareness of both the struggles of the poor and their own privilege.” [Yoconelli & Rogers, pp. 175-176]

What can and should we learn from this? When I think about Good Works for the Red Hook Project and the Imago Dei Society, it is authentic ministry coming from a Christian perspective – not fueled by “Americanisms” but as much removed from our American enculturation as possible. How are our Good Works to come out of the Kingdom of God rather than the Kingdom of Man?

Other than Constantinian Christianity

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I keep saying that in the coming decades our society will look far more pre-Constantinian than post. Actually, among emerging generations, particularly Millennials (those 29 years and younger) this is already the case for all practical purposes. Even though among Millennials there is not a call for persecution, their negative attitudes and perceptions of American Christianity and the institutional Church (even if justified in many ways) causes a culture predisposition against Christianity and the Church.
From this article entitled, “Fighting Words: the politics of the creeds,” by Philip Jenkins in this month’s issue of Christian Century (my first issue), I might more accurately say “other than Constantinian Christianity” rather than “pre-Constantinian.”

“That story [history of persecution and growth of Churches in Egypt, Syria, etc., during the early Patristic period] tells us a great deal about the nature of Christian loyalties in the centuries after the Roman Empire’s conversion. If your emperor or king was formally Christian, then self-preservation alone dictated following his lead, so that we need not think that church members actually had any high degree of knowledge or belief in the new faith. But if the church was itself in deadly opposition to the state and faced actual persecution, then people had no vested interest whatever in belonging to it – quite contrary. Why risk your life by Hobo Jake [Archbishop Jacobus Baradaeus]? Through most of the Middle East and for long centuries after Constantine’s time, then, people followed these dissident churches for exactly the same reasons that their ancestors would have adhered to the beliefs of the earliest Christian communities. They followed because they thought they would obtain healing in this world and salvation in the next; because they wanted signs and wonders; and because the ascetic lives of church leaders gave these figures a potent aura of holiness and charisma. Ordinary Christians followed not because they were told, but because they believed.”
(Philip Jenkins, The Christian Century, March 23, 2010, p.24)

As we continue into Post-Christendom, people will be drawn to Christ and the Church because of what they witness in the lives of those who claim Christ – in their strengths and weaknesses, in their honesty and integrity. We become the imago Dei for those we encounter in our everyday lives.

Kerygmatic Vocation

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“Our Christian faith — and correlatively, our account of apologetics — is tainted by modernism when we fail to appreciate the effects of sin on reason. When this is ignored, we adopt an Enlightenment optimism about the role of a supposedly neutral reason in recognition of truth. (We also end up committed to ‘Constantinain’ strategies that, under the banner of natural law, seek to build a ‘Christian America.’
“To put this in more familiar terms, classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; ‘presuppositional’ apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true. For this reason, postmodernism can be a catalyst for the church to reclaim its faith not as a system of truth dictated by a neutral reason but rather as a story that requires ‘eyes to see and ears to hear.’ The primary responsibility of the church as witness, then, is not demonstration but rather proclamation — the kerygmatic vocation of proclaiming the Word made flesh rather than the thin realities of theism that a supposedly neutral reason yields.”

James K.A. Smith, PhD., Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?; p. 28.
I wonder whether a lot of this modern/postmodern stuff is a replying anew the differences between Platonic and Aristotelian thought? Between Augustinian and Thomistic thought?
The latter is being played out in this new world of Post-Christendom, particularly within the context of the American Culture-War dynamic. What do we make of this?
Frankly, as I continue to move into the idea of re-formation out of the “Systems” (City of the World) and into some sort of “other than” (City of God) — perhaps a move out into the desert, metaphorically speaking — the rethinking of how we perceive and live out this Christian Life in our changing national context (really this ground shift of perceptional foundations within the culture), the more I am drawn to pre-Constantinian examples of Christianity. A “kerygmatic vocation.”

The future looks like the past…

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“The future is around all of us, and it looks very much like the past.” – Mother Superior Sheeana, at the founding of the Orthodox School on Synchrony
[From: Sandworms of Dune, by Brian Herbert & Kevin Johnson; pg. 539.]
In the context of the book, the above is a positive statement. Again, in my mind, it brings up aspects of our present culture that work contrary to our future well-being. One of those aspects is a generation’s disposition to believe that the past is bad or a least a negative. I keep coming back to this 2,009 year-old thing we call Christianity. The past is full of horrific atrocities and glorious accomplishments, but all that humanity has been through over these past millennia within the Christian experience presents to us today, from that which has survived and still speaks, a wisdom that we need to pay attention to.
In my context, with our gasping attempts to save this Church we flail around with the same attitudinal mistakes that led us to this place. We think that in our modern and sophisticated age we can create with our own new thoughts in our own way the solutions for a new dawn, a new order, a Utopian vision of our own making. We fail to realize that the Tradition provides us with what we need as a solid foundation upon which to build, because within the lived experiences of people over thousands of years is wisdom. That which speaks to the deepest part of us remains, survives, and calls out deep to deep despite our tendency to look upon past understanding and experience as pedestrian, antiquated, primitive, unenlightened, and not up to the challenges of 21st. century existence. What has survived for 2,000 years will survive another 2,000 years. Technology changes (and I’m glad of that), but the human “heart” remains the same.
Our challenge is to see the wisdom in and understand the ancient-future process of steady re-formation within ourselves as we give ourselves to this faith, die to ourselves and live to the life God sustains. How do we do it in this time, within this culture, recognizing that our lives are of an ancient-future dynamic – we receive from ages of ages and pass onto world without end.

Oh, those Moravians

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The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops is meeting. On the agenda is the subject of full communion with the Moravian Church. They are an interesting Church. According to their history, they began 60 years before Martin Luther and 100 years before the establishment of the Anglican Church (CofE). I first remember seeing the Moravians when I helped a graduate school colleague move to Allentown/Bethlehem, PA. The Moravians have a school and seminary, as well as their U.S. headquarters, there.
Like religious Quakers and Anabaptists, there is something that I am drawn to in Moravian “systems” or disciplines or ways of thinking and doing.
From the Wikipedia entry for them:

Spirit of the Moravian Church
An account of the ethos of the Moravian Church is given by one of its British Bishops, C H Shawe. In a lecture series delivered at the Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Shawe described the Spirit of the Moravian Church as having five characteristics. These are simplicity, happiness, unintrusiveness, fellowship and the ideal of service.
Simplicity is a focus on the essentials of faith and a lack of interest in the niceties of doctrinal definition. Shawe quotes Zinzendorf’s remark that ‘The Apostles say: “We believe we have salvation through the grace of Jesus Christ ….” If I can only teach a person that catechism I have made him a divinity scholar for all time’ (Shawe, 1977, p 9). From this simplicity flow secondary qualities of genuineness and practicality.
Happiness is the natural and spontaneous response to God’s free and gracious gift of salvation. Again Shawe quotes Zinzendorf: ‘There is a difference between a genuine Pietist and a genuine Moravian. The Pietist has his sin in the foreground and looks at the wounds of Jesus; the Moravian has the wounds in the forefront and looks from them upon his sin. The Pietist in his timidity is comforted by the wounds; the Moravian in his happiness is shamed by his sin’ (p 13).
Unintrusiveness is based on the Moravian belief that God positively wills the existence of a variety of churches to cater for different spiritual needs. There is no need to win converts from other churches. The source of Christian unity is not legal form but everyone’s heart-relationship with the Saviour.
Fellowship is based on this heart-relationship. Shawe says: ‘The Moravian ideal has been to gather together kindred hearts … Where there are “Christian hearts in love united”, there fellowship is possible in spite of differences of intellect and intelligence, of thought, opinion, taste and outlook. … Fellowship [in Zinzendorf’s time] meant not only a bridging of theological differences but also of social differences; the artisan and aristocrat were brought together as brothers and sat as equal members on the same committee’ (pp 21,22).
The ideal of service entails happily having the attitude of a servant. This shows itself partly in faithful service in various roles within congregations but more importantly in service of the world ‘by the extension of the Kingdom of God’. Historically, this has been evident in educational and especially missionary work. Shawe remarks that none ‘could give themselves more freely to the spread of the gospel than those Moravian emigrants who, by settling in Herrnhut [ie, on Zinzendorf’s estate], had gained release from suppression and persecution’ (p 26).

In all of our Episcopalian and Anglican fighting over the last 6 years, what battles within me comes from two angles. The first comes from my American-Evangelical-Holiness and Arminian upbringing that says that belief in what we know as traditional Christian teaching and concepts are vital to real faith and relationship with God. There can be corruption of belief and a self-caused falling away from grace and salvation. We must guard against such corruption and be holy as much as it is possible with us.
The second comes from my knowledge of the effects of cultural inculcation upon our ability to understand Scripture and God’s instruction to us, and of the co-opting of the Way of Christ by the Systems-of-this-World. We so easily mistake cultural conviction for the Gospel. The Culture assimilates the profoundly contrary message and call of Jesus Christ and warps it so to justify its own existence. We fall prey to its allure. So, most of the Christian experience in most of our churches tends to be profoundly deficient. (And one wonders why fewer and fewer people find the Church to be compelling or a something worth much attention.) Given all that, our human fallibility, and our tendency to need to justify our own desires and proclivities, we tend to want to impose our myopic concepts upon all, demanding that all others capitulate to our sectarian theological precepts (or our national interests). We tend to loose trust that God will be God, God will be judge, God will be saviour, God will be sustainer, God is perfectly capable of managing His Church, and that the immediacy of NOW does not impinge upon God’s ability to do as He pleases, when He pleases, how He pleases. We are so short-sighted. We are so insecure in our faith. We lack trust in the very God we proclaim.
I fight between wanting to demand people believe “this way” (force acceptance of a check-off list of doctrines or tenants that makes things nice and neat) and the freedom realized from a willingness to allow people their own way and for God to make His own judgments about who is in and who is out. (Surely, God does make decisions based on His criteria alone about who is in and out – the choice is given to us and by our decisions we opt out ourselves.)
What do I want to say? I find it hard to let go! To let go of the fear I have of being wrong, the fear I have of the corruption of the Gospel, the fear I have that other souls will be lost because false teachings concerning the necessities of the Gospel overwhelm us. There are reasons for such fear, truly. But the question is the response to the reasons! The battle for the right response rages within me. Sign this covenant, this declaration, use these exact words, accept this precept, or else… or realizing that God works beyond my ability to rightly categorize, philosophize, theologize, and all that.
Beyond my Evangelical background and the experience of God I discovered through it, I have learned of the vital importance of the Tradition. That which survives over time, over millennia, among a vast array of cultures, can be trusted. I am becoming a Traditionalist, not because I demand conservation of prior institutional systems and doctrines of the Church catholic, but because that which lasts and changes lives is worthy to be proclaimed and intensely listened to.
We are too American. We are too haughty. We are too insecure. So, of the details of the Moravians above, I draw into myself ideas of a quite simplicity, happiness, un-intrusiveness, fellowship, and add to it Anglican comprehensiveness and a willingness to trust God that He will sort out our differences – differences that are probably based on internal stuff that doesn’t really come close to Jesus’ simple and profoundly difficult command to love God with all of my being and to love my neighbor as God enables me to love myself.
It isn’t that I have a problem with the traditional beliefs of the conservatives or the latitude and rebelliousness of the liberals, but I have a problem with either side demanding that they “really know,” that they are “absolutely right,” and their propensity to condemn outright the other side. The joy of the Lord is my strength, not my ascendancy to the 39-Articles or the Jesus Seminar. Anglicans used to strongly believe that “fellowship is possible in spite of differences of intellect and intelligence, of thought, opinion, taste and outlook.” We are loosing our ability to be in the via media. I fear that in full-communion with the Episcopal Church, we may infect the Moravians with our disease of vainglory, division, and hatred.