So, about 5 years ago I turned in my membership card and resigned. I am NOT an evangelical Christian. Which left me in a quandry - what am I?? Oh yeah, I am a Christian. An orthodox Christian if I have to be labeled - one who believes and attempts to follow the central tenets of the religion of Jesus with all others who affirm the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds. Of course, this meant I had to do something concrete to ratify my self-definitive decision. So I concretely canceled my subscription to Christianity Today magazine - a fine publication, but I will no longer spend any time, energy, or brain space on things evangelicals fight and argue about intramurally. Because I am not one.
I was. When the word 'evangelical' meant Christians who trust the Scriptures as normative for faith and practice, and who believe the core of Christianity is about 'the good news concerning Jesus.' I still think that is the basic historic use of the word (out of the Reformation). But as I began to allow myself to read and converse with Christians and theologians from different traditions than mine, I realized that in the past few decades the word 'evangelical' came to acquire the meaning of a particular politico-religious segment of America (usually joined with the word 'conservative').
That is not me. That is one side of a two-sided, obnoxious political and religious fight that increasing numbers of us simply refuse to buy into, join, or allow ourselves to be defined by. Both politically and religiously, 'evangelical' came to be defined as this shopping cart of beliefs and views, which if you included one item in your cart that belonged to the word 'evangelical' (such as believing in the resurrection of Jesus), then ipso facto all the other items must be in your cart (such as being for the death penalty, against environmentalism, hating homosexuals, and getting red-faced angry when Hillary is mentioned).
Bull. And if I had grown up religiously on the other side of the blue and red state cultural war, I hope I would now be just as disgusted with the other supposedly-complete set of items in that shopping cart.
So I guess this may sound like the start of an 'anti-evangelical' rant. Nope. Its simply an ackowledgement of the location and nature of conventional thought from which I attempt to unmoor myself, in search of a fresh positive practice of the religion of Jesus. A new imagination of people following Jesus that will perhaps be freshly winsome to those in new millenium culture who've given up on Christianity/Jesus (because they thought the cultural subset of evangelical Christianity was the whole Christian religion), but haven't given up in their hunger for transcendence, beauty, meaning, maybe even for God.
I pray that I conduct such imagining, thinking, and conversations in the freedom of the children of God, under the wise counsel of God's Scripture. This is what I wish for my own spiritual community as well as myself. In other words, "Blog on, Wayne." "Blog on, Garth." (sometime soon - a blog on my monastic vow to live out 'The Heretical Imperative)
