the parish

How to be White and Christian, or Story-Formed Ethics from a Damn German

When I was in grad school, our instructor forced us to slog through all 368 pages of Hans Frei's labyrinthine, grammatically-irritating study in hermeneutics called The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. We had only a few days to read it, but a few weeks probably wouldn't have helped a whole lot. German philosophers and theologians can't write. At all. Surely there is a correlation between a language that just crams nouns together, not portmanteau style, but rather like compound words, and in such a way that there is no reasonable limit to how many nouns can be conjoined so as to form more complex or specific nouns and to a writing style that is so complex and circuitous related to the actual point that the reader is often left wondering if she took the wrong exit.

Frei's rather dense prose hid a very simple (to understand) thesis: Christians have not allowed the Biblical narrative to shape them because they have not inhabited the narrative. Instead, the narrative has been eclipsed by competing narratives, all vying for the designation of primary metanarrative. Yes, I'm going to unpack all this, and trust me, I just made Frei really simple. You're welcome.

Evangelicals are not likely to embrace Frei because his thesis does not require that the narrative be referentially true, but his thesis is the only hope for evangelicals and fundamentalists to embody a particular ethic, and that ethic is the only hope they have for witness. That right there is everything I learned in grad school distilled down to something pretty damn simple. That it is problematic only highlights Frei's thesis.

To inhabit a narrative, you have to believe that the narrative somehow has power to actually shape your life. For you non-theists, that is not magic talk. It simply means that to allow a narrative to shape your life only requires the embodiment of ideals extracted from the narrative, and by extension, the demand that hermeneutics be done with an eye toward ethical embodiment. The Bible itself presents competing narratives in the tradition of midrash, but Christians at least agree the narrative leads somewhere, such that there is a metanarrative contained within the text, somewhere, even as it is demonstrably clear, except to fundamentalists who hold to inerrancy, that the entire text cannot be the metanarrative.

The postliberal tradition offered the idea of a lens through which to view biblical hermeneutic. There are times when Jesus, Moses, Paul, and James cannot be right at the same time. In those moments, what lens do you use to decipher the text. That lens will determine your narrative arc, and ultimately, how and if the narrative shapes you. While this will, again, be problematic for fundamentalists and evangelicals, there really is no other way to read the Bible if coherence and logic actually matter and are not themselves eclipsed by an artificially literalist reading of the text. Frei did not mean that the inhabiting of the narrative would create an unreal world or necessitated the reader project literalist categories onto her experience of reality. Rather, the narrative is to shape people into a certain kind of person, specifically, those who are redeemed by God for the purpose of embodying an ethic that is contrary, not to reality, but to the principalities and powers that, for now, have power in the world, including racial, political, and religious hegemonies.

The eschatological reality of redemption is not deferred to the eschaton; rather, the redeemed live the eschatological reality of resurrection right now. The narrative informs the ethical imperatives, and, if Jesus is to be taken seriously, overcomes the fear of violence and death, because Jesus has overcome death on behalf of all with benefits that extend to all, such that an ethic that puts the believer at odds with the powers and principalities may lead to death, but death does not get the last word. This is the soteriological significance of the narrative, and while evangelicals may readily agree to the soteriological aspect, it is the political aspect shaped by the ethical imperatives that will be most troublesome.

The events in Ferguson offer a perfect panopticon of the weakness of current evangelical and fundamentalist narratives to shape ethical imperatives related to politics, not in the governmental sense, but according to a more expansive understanding of the term, to wit, that politics is the science of getting along with others in the world, and for people of moral conscience, the imperative to live redemptively. What I find to be universally true at times like this is that for many, many white, religio-political conservatives, the political narrative has eclipsed the religious narrative, and in such a way that the same group tries to read back their political narrative as non-religious, as if such a thing is even possible.

Religion, even Christianity, is political, but the politics of Jesus don't look like the politics of America's religio-political conservatives, and somehow, they have never noticed. You cannot promulgate a political narrative scrubbed of religious significance; such a thing does not exist if you are a person of faith. In the same fashion, you cannot promulgate a religious narrative that has no political implications; this thing, too, does not exist. The modern lie of conservative politics and conservative evangelicalism is that both are possible.

The narrative arc of the African American churches in the U.S. has been toward justice. Dr. King spoke eloquently of the arc of the universe bending toward justice; he would have preached similar themes and heard similar sermons many times growing up in church. The narrative was shaped by slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, ghettoization, segregation, and the manifold ways white culture reinforced their hegemony using police, legislation, terrorism, and the pulpit. The narrative arc of the white churches in the U.S. has tended toward morality, or a cynic might say, maintaining cultural control. This partially explains the inability of white evangelicals and fundamentalists to empathize with the protestors in Ferguson. Rather, they cling to whatever "news" emerges from white conservative blogs or FoxNews in hopes of discrediting a people they don't even pretend to try to understand. The narrative shapes us all, but our experience of the same place on earth can be radically different.

That the white churches have never noticed is related to the weakness of their narrative to shape ethical imperatives across a broad spectrum of human institutions, desires, and systems. Evangelical and fundamentalist narratives eclipse the biblical narrative by offering a competing narrative of culturally appropriate behavior (morality) or, quite possibly worse, a "gospel" of individual salvation. One need not disbelieve in individual salvation to agree that the atomistic approach to the Bible has resulted in the loss of a robust witness based on ethics, not on the sharing of testimonies or the "truth of the Gospel."

Somehow, the American evangelical church has come to believe that Jesus was deeply, profoundly wrong in his insistence that adherence to the gospel would lead to death. Rather than treat his words literally—the irony, too, is profound—they make of them a metaphor of discipleship, as if discipleship is something other than the possibility of death as a result of embodying an ethic that will stir up the principalities and powers. The new "cross," is the willful surrender of appetites or desires, or getting up early to read the Bible, or preserving virginity until marriage, or giving ten percent, or choosing unpopular cultural positions, or... The list is almost never-ending, but the cross is never the instrument of death that Jesus endured because of his brazen disregard for the principalities and powers. Rather, it is a construct that allows me to be Christian without risking anything other than disapproval or the loss of an orgasm or two, and it will apparently never lead me to empathize with brothers and sisters of a different race whose experience of this country is radically different than my own.

 

 

Where All the White Folks at? or, Church Planting for Fun and Profit

Edmond, Okla., is a suburb of Oklahoma City at the metro's northernmost limit. After Edmond, it's I35 North, and you start to hit increasingly smaller towns on the way to Kansas and Mssouri. The 2010 census counted just over 81,000 humans in Edmond, of whom 82 percent were white folks. The next largest demographic was African American, coming in at a whopping 5.5 percent. Mixed race, presumably some of whom are at least partly cracker, was over 4 percent of the population.

Why all the demographics about Edmond? You should know that the median household income in Edmond is a little more than $70k. Some of you from major American cities might not be all that impressed with that figure, but it's roughly 75 percent higher than Oklahoma City, and that kind of money goes a hell of a long way in Oklahoma's economy. Edmond is not the wealthiest community in the metro; that distinction goes to Nichols Hills, a small municipality just north of midtown where most of the city's old money lives. The nouveau riche live in and around Edmond in gated communities with names that sound like erstwhile sex tape-famous faux celebrities chose them in the midst of Cristal fugues: Gaillardia, Esperanta, Crackertown.

Why all this analysis of one of Oklahoma City's whitest, wealthiest areas? Many years ago when I was a staff pastor, our senior had deep roots in the Edmond community. He lived in Edmond and marveled that I did not choose to move "up there"—Jeffersons anyone? It would be north instead of east, though—but more on this later. At the time, OKC's northwest quadrant was experiencing tremendous Caucasian, upper middle class growth, but everyone knew that it would be far more sensible to move north than west, and that's where the development money went, facilitating a bizarre white flight in the late 90s and early 00s.

I say white flight, because OKC went through a strange period before downtown and midtown were gentrified. Prior to the improvements that came as a result of three downtown/midtown funding plans (called MAPS, for Metropolitan Area Projects), most of the white folk were escaping the rapid expansion of suburban sprawl by moving to bedroom communities north and west of the city, or they moved to new developments in west and north Edmond. The gentrification of downtown/midtown has created an interesting effect around town in that the formerly "important" communities where the wealthy whites congregated are now so far from the prosperous and rapidly-developing city center that they are basically marginalized. Nice businesses that rely on more than local traffic have no hope of surviving in those communities. The money and nightlife and food culture and the NBA and arts are all moving toward the center of the city or they are already there.

However, the property values in downtown, Midtown, Mesta Park, and other areas near the center are escalating rapidly and no one wants to issue a new permit for a church because there is no tax revenue in churches, even if they could afford the location. The bizarre anomaly of shifting regions of geographical importance has made Edmond important once again, and this time it's important specifically for churches. Because the property values in Edmond proper are nowhere near as expensive as comparable areas of the city's center, churches are making their way to Edmond to "reach the city."

Remember that senior pastor I mentioned. He was brazen enough to say, "Jesus loves rich people, too," aloud. After he nearly destroyed the church, he took a "core group"—the phrase still makes me slightly nauseous—north to start a church in Edmond. We had been meeting in the city's NW quadrant, and I pastored there for another two years before closing the church in an all too familiar and all too well-known personal/moral failure. That sort of brazenness is not likely to happen these days, though. Gone, almost, are the days when anyone took the prosperity gospel seriously, if we mean a statistically significant sample of people who call on the name of Jesus.

What is not gone is the idea that Edmond represents money, lots of it. A recent video announcing that an Acts 29 church will be planting their fourth Oklahoma campus in Edmond said that Edmond has good churches, but that the city needs more. According to ChurchFinder.com, there are 89 churches in this "city" of 80,000. I have no idea if that number is correct, but I assumed the number was close to 100. Either way, what that city does not need is another church. The only churches that thrive in that area are churches that practice what David Fitch calls cannibalistic practices. They take members from other churches, and the most egregious offender has been LifeChurch.tv. We now have four large churches with active plants in and around the Edmond area.

The newest LCTV plant is just a few miles south of Edmond on the main north/south corridor between OKC and Edmond in an area with scant residential property, and please don't even try to tell me if you're a local that they mean to reach the black community just east of Broadway Extension. That is laughably naive or just an outright lie. Crossings Community Church, already located in Edmond in a facility that cost more than 18 million dollars to build about 15 years ago, will be planting another church in Edmond. Yes, in the same town where they currently occupy a Six Flags Over Jesus-sized facility. At least one Methodist church has a plant going on in Edmond. Finally, Frontline, the Acts 29 church, has likely staked their financial future on an Edmond plant. There are likely other churches headed that way that just haven't hit my radar yet.

Frontline produced the video in which soon to be campus pastor David Adair opines that Edmond needs more churches. Edmond needs more churches like it needs more white people. These churches, especially LCTV, have done a fantastic job of planting churches in the most obviously white places around town: Norman, Mustang, Yukon, NW OKC, Shawnee (taking advantage of Oklahoma Baptist University's student population?). LCTV has specialized in planting in areas that are notoriously white, even planting near thriving congregations, some of which are little clones of LCTV, which is itself a weird hybrid of evangelical, fundamentalist, and revivalist traditions (Hybels, Warren, Graham, etc.).

Oklahoma already has one of the highest church attendance rates in the country, maybe the damn world. Outside of the former slave-holding states, we beat nearly every state, with more than half our citizens attending worship services at least once a month, and I think that’s a conservative estimate. That doesn't even come close to taking into account those who don't attend but call themselves Christian (a subset of the pesky nones). The idea that Oklahoma needs more churches is ludicrous. We have thriving churches, healthy churches, growing churches, churches that are nearly defunct, some with minimal attendance, some with bivocational pastors who can't scrape together a real salary, some in houses (who is counting those in these polls?), some in shopping centers, some borrowing space from another church, and some renting from a school. We have hundreds of churches, maybe more than a thousand. No way to really know. Those numbers aside, the idea that any church is going to plant in a wealthy, predominantly white area for the sake of evangelism is the worst sort of lie, especially when the numbers clearly indicate that they are growing, not through conversion growth, but through cannibalizing smaller, more traditional churches.

The next LCTV plant will be in Mustang, a 36,000 square foot facility that will only serve to pull white folks out of traditional churches in the Mustang and Tuttle area west and south of Oklahoma City. There is absolutely no reason to plant another church in Mustang. Mustang is so white that I lack the bona fides to be allowed into the city, and I’m the crackeriest cracker I know.

In the 2010 census, there were 17,000 people in Mustang, of whom 88 percent were white. The next largest demographic was two or more races at 4 percent. Again, some of those folks are presumably part white. Less than one percent of the population is African American. It also functions as a bedroom community for Oklahoma City, and it is the closest thing we have to a country-ass suburb. In fact, much of the town proper is country. ChurchFinder.com lists more than 20 churches in the area, and I know that number is way too small. Ask yourself a very simple questions: why the hell would a megachurch with more than 20 campuses in 5 states want to plant in a community of 17,000? If it was a standalone community thirty miles from OKC, would they plant there? The idea is absurd.

The primary reason these churches plant in these areas is to create a revenue stream. (It’s also entirely possible that the expansions meet some ego-driven need of the senior pastor and leadership team.) I don’t know how any reasonable person denies this. Dressing it up in the language of evangelism only serves to the make the lie respectable to the current membership, most of whom want to believe their church is doing great things. No one outside the particular tribe believes the bullshit.

Just once I’d like to see a pastor stand up and say, “We’re planting another church in the next year. We figured out where the upper middle class white folks are clustering, so we’re going to plant along one of their main commuting corridors. We’ll need some of you white folks to join us so that we can attract other white folks. However, we need the rest of you to stay here and keep giving while we create this new revenue stream. By the way, all programs, especially benevolence, will suffer during this expansion. We regret that. Well, not really, but we feel like we ought to say that. Amen.”

Rise Up Pussified Nation! or Acts 29 and Humpty Dumpty Methodology

It is impossible at this point to find a good guy in the Acts 29 dispute with Mark Driscoll. The organization has now separated from their founder and erstwhile rockstar preacher. The man who became an icon thanks to the dreadfully unoriginal Blue Like Jazz, has now become a parody of maleness, which is the final, hysterical irony since he thought to reimagine masculinity for this "pussified nation," a nation that included churches and pastors with whom he disagreed. "They will know you are my disciples by your love." Silly, Jesus. They'll know it because I write books about sex, all kinds of sex, and I yell at men for not having Mars Hill DNA, which is to say they must believe leadership is about having literal and metaphorical testicles.

Before proceeding, it's fair to inform readers that I am not criticizing from a pristine history. I was a staff pastor at a church in the 90s that was, by any definition, spiritually abusive. I, too, participated in behaviors I later regretted, primarily because I did substantial harm to some people who trusted the leadership of our church, a leadership team that included me. I have apologized to some, but not all; many of them I will probably never see again. This critique, then, comes not as a jeremiad, but as a lesson learned at the expense of others.

Driscoll has always been Driscoll. He did not suddenly become the abrasive, abusive, misogynist whom Acts 29 now conveniently repudiates. That his own board responded to the Acts 29 decision with the dubious claim that, "There is clear evidence that the attitudes and behaviors attributed to Mark in the charges are not a part and have not been a part of Mark’s life for some time now," only highlights how aware they were of the behaviors going back many years. Driscoll has been verbally abusing people in a multitude of ways, and according to charges filed by his own network of pastors, actively working to destroy lives and reputations for years.

Those are hideous charges against someone in any field, but for a pastor to engage in those behaviors only shows that he knows some perverse form of the message but ignores Jesus, "You read the Scriptures because in them you believe you have eternal life, but they testify about me." And it's painfully clear that Driscoll and many of his followers never met Jesus, and I say that as someone who believes the idea of relationship with Jesus is absurd, but I believe it's possible to be transformed by an ideal or a persistent belief in a relationship with a god, just as I believe a commitent to the 12 Steps can change an addict's life. The 12 Steps have to be followed, much like the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism, but Mars Hill and Driscoll seem to practice a Christianity devoid of actual practice. It's the most bizarrely cultural expression of faux Christianity I've seen. Liberal churches, which are often accused of being cultural compromisers, actually do something besides believe a 500 year old strain of European theology, one that is tainted with an American Psycho style masculinity and obsession with image. 

No one at this point should be surprised by Driscoll's long-overdue fall from rockstar status. There will be defenders; that is the nature of celebrity. Many will be compelled to defend this man for reasons we have discussed before, but the board of Mars Hill and the board of Acts 29 are both actors in bad faith in this situation, even as the board of Acts 29 put out an exasperated-sounding letter divorcing Driscoll and Mars Hill. They sought to seize the moral high ground, but it's been unavailable to leaders in Acts 29 since they signed on for Driscoll's methods and signed those idiotic, clearly-meant-to-hide-ugly-shit nondisclosure agreements. Seriously, how could they not see what was coming? A business has you sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect proprietary products, processes, recipes, etc., and parties in a lawsuit will sign them to protect plaintiff or defendant or both (and, yes, I know they can be sketchy, too), but why in hell would a church ask a minister to sign one? Why not just put an explanation at the top: "We do bizarrely bad shit here that is completely antithetical to the faith we claim, so sign this just in case you find your conscience; we'll help you find your balls."

The problem with Acts 29 is not going to be solved by removing Driscoll. His DNA is the grammar of Acts 29, as in his methods, his haranguing, his taunts, his mockery, his misogyny, his abusive tactics, his obvious sexual pathologies, all are built ino the system, and the DNA won't be removed by removing its creator. He's already replicated himself and his model hundreds of times in young men who wanted to be just like the "Cussing Pastor." He is obsessed with power and control, and why not? Acts 29 believes in a God who is equally obsessed; they simply give it a theological term, sovereignty, and then add it to "grace" to create one of the most untenable theological phrases of all time. The desire for power and control have been passed onto the leadership; indeed, the whole model attracted insecure males with power and control issues. All that was left was to convince the wives that they needed to open their uteruses and close their mouths, unless the latter was necessary for other things, and no, I don't know which chapter that was in How to Have Reformed Sex Like Your Favorite MMA Star, or whatever his book was called.

Two questions remain. First, why did Acts 29 wait so long to make this move? You don't get to pat yourself on the back for being patient and gracious with Driscoll if you knew all along he was hurting people. You don't help an abuser get better by working with him to be incrementally less abusive. That just allows the abuse to continue, and the ones who suffer are supposed to be the ones this message of grace is helping. It's perverse by any standard, and to call it graciousness is to get the Bible wrong yet again: "Woe to them who call evil good." Seriously, read the book. 

Second, is this smackdown of Driscoll because the others are tired of taking his shit and now want to be the ones who dispense it? I hear good things about some of the leadership of Acts 29, but I've also seen mini Driscolls right here in Oklahoma City. One local church is basically an homage to his methods. Clearly, several pastors in the Acts 29 network in Oklahoma City understood what Driscoll was saying. How is it not inevitable that this is true in every city? Acts 29 is not a church network; it's very bad, very destructive viral theology and praxis. Getting rid of Driscoll just cleared the way for mutations of this virus. 

The Divine Conspiracy Continued, or How to Repair the World?

I had lunch with another reverend today, not the Reverend of record, mind you, but another remarkably bright pastor committed to a tradition and a place, in this case a Holiness tradition that I'll leave unnamed for now. We were discussing the idea of a non-material Christianity, which is to say, the ability for people like myself to practice redeeming the world without being beholden to a particular narrative. Four and a half years ago, I wrote this little parable because I was frustrated at the lack of cooperation between theists and non-theists, primarily from the resistance generated by theists. Many seemed more concerned with a form of theism tied to a particular narrative than in actually repairing the world. 

I understand that much of fundangelical theology is not concerned with repairing the world; instead, they opt for a wait until the end approach to eschatology that is borderline triumphalist and despondent at the same time. "We can't fix it, but Jesus will really fix it when He comes back." It is this sort of despondency that gets a full critique in Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy, and now, even more so, in the continuation of that work, co-authored after Willard's death by Gary Black, Jr., The Divine Conspiracy Continued: Fullfilling God's Kingdom on Earth. 

I read Willard "religiously" as a young minister, but it wasn't the theology that attracted me to him. Rather, it was his role as professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, an unapologeticaly secular school, that helped me choose to pursue my love of philosophy. Willard's thesis in the first Divine Conspiracy was that "God's 'divine conspiracy' is to overcome the human kingdoms of this world with love, justice, and truth." It's clearly more detailed than that, and for my non-theist friends, it is not a theocratic call to arms. Willard was no theocrat, and though I have zero experience of Black, I assume if he and Willard were friends, he is no theocrat either.

The thesis behind the new work is that this divine conspiracy must be carried out by (unfortunately) Christian leaders. I say unfortunately because the task of healing the world need not be limited to one sect of theists, but I don't fault the authors for extending their own narrative into additional arenas of life, specifically "government, education, business or commerce, the professions, and ethics." The authors flesh out the thesis a little on the same page (34):

When leaders, spokespersons, and professionals...become organized with the critical institutions of our society to most positively influence contemporary life for the common good, blessing, goodness, and grace will flow over the land as the waters fill the seas (Hab. 2:14).

Much of the book is concerned with delineating these professions and their attendant responsibilities to help bring about God's divine conspiracy in the world, but not before the authors touch on something that the reverend and I discussed today: moral authority. Willard and Black rightly point out that leaders without moral authority cannot lead; unfortunately, the Church as a whole is flagging in the area of moral authority. Witness the recent plagiarism scandals that caused the celebrity pastors' congregations to simply shrug their shoulders. How does an institution founded on the importance of ethical witness not call leaders to account in those situations? 

When the Church has been the de facto hegemony for generations in this country, identity formation ceases to be important. In fact, only the churches that work with minorities and the marginalized will develop a solid Christian identity, and as segregation and slavery taught us in the South, that identity will often be necessary in the face of the hegemonic forces of cultural Christianity so as not to be robbed of moral authority or effective witness. In short, identity formation in fundangelical circles, especially the predominantly white church, will not take place because their identity as the dominant culture combined with their inability to recognize privilege will carry them wherever they want to go, and it's a very short step to relegating ethics to textbooks so that the insitution can survive even as its witness dies a gasping, wheezing, powerless death. 

Willard is at his best when discussing ethics, and the chapters on authority are worth the price of the book, especially for leaders in any field. Black mentions that Willard's class on business and professional ethics was always popular and full at USC, and that is a credit to his clarity and honesty when dicussing ethics. If the narrative you are shaping your life around does not produce practices consistent with that narrative, what use is the narrative?

On the other side of that, though, is the idea that if the narrative leads you to focus on the narrative as important above praxis, as in you insist on basic beliefs before repairing the world, then you might just as well put your narrative on a pole like the bronze serpent and worship it. Repairing the world is the task of all, not just theists, and it is at particularly this point that I have to disagree with Willard and Black. I don't care about the theological justification for tikkun olam, I care about the repairing of what is broken. The creation was good, is good, and can be good, and that requires the work of all of us.

Progressives get no pass here, either. It's no good to fashion new progressive theologies while deconstructing the text when it's convenient, and then quoting the text when useful from the other side of the coin of convenience. You are constructing a theology in midair. Why hold onto the narrative at all?

The narrative, if it's to be useful at all, must generate practices based on a particular identity, and in this case, Willard and Black at least understand that Christian narrative ought to form Christian character. That is more than the multicampus purveyors of spiritual McReligion understand, and the authors rightly call them out near the end, especially those who run their churches like a business. The "kingdom of God" is not a business, and one will look long and hard to find Jesus making any such reference to it in his parables. But if the narrative creates a special class of leaders whose task it is to bring about the kingdom, then it will miss the larger possibility that a non-material form of the same desire, which is to say those of us outside the narrative who care about redemption, can be an effective ally in the task of tikkun olam.