MER Christianity

I.

You have said the righteous is like a tree
planted in a garden by a river.
Your river runs its course from spring to ocean
carving its slow and deep mark in the earth;

rushing its way through the wild lands,
stone gorges and meadows painfully green;
looping back and forth the valley like a string
in frozen fall to the mouth of the sea.

Where the river is most deep and slow
channels divert to water Your trees
and surround them as far as they might grow.

They grow tall from Your care and their roots
entangle for theirs is not to journey.
But the world passes by scoffing under their shade

Intellectualism has long said, to coin a phrase, “Everything must change.” Will emergent intellectuals be any different from the utopians of the past? Not so far. Their knowledge seems enslaved to ideology:

Evil is built into our social structures. Racism is systemic. Economic inequality is institutional. War is the result of the military industrial complex. Poverty in the developing world is the legacy of imperialism, imposed first by Western colonial powers and then by cold war superpowers. So, if we’re serious about addressing all these problems, the world has to be reorganized.

Fortunately, this is now possible.

A new generation has outgrown the confines of the Enlightenment and is emerging into postmodernity. We no longer think in outmoded ways. We’re no longer shackled by the prejudices of ye olde puritanism, or the bigotry of Western thought, or the obsession with proving others wrong. We know that we can change everything because we have what previous generations lacked: dialogue about theoretical models.

And all God’s people said, “Yes we can!”

Utopianism of this kind has a pretty well-documented history. Michael Burleigh’s recent book about the decline of Christendom, Earthly Powers (HarperCollins, 2005), narrates how political schemes for restructuring society gained religious authority. Among the vast collection of intellectuals Burleigh sketches is Auguste Comte (pp 229-230):

One of the fathers of modern social “science”, who in 1839 coined the term “sociology”, Comte sought to establish the philosophical basis for the sciences and for the scientific ordering and reform of society, a formula calculated to appeal to the right as well as the left. . . . [Comte's] Positivism was supposed to be a third way between the outmoded theologically grounded world of the ancien regime and an abstract, critical rationalism that had become anarchic and incapable of creating anything.

Burleigh continues:

The essence of his Religion of Humanity was to redirect mankind’s spiritual energies away from the transcendental and towards the creation of a happier and more moral life here on earth through the worship of the best in man himself.

The idea that science must direct cultural change led to an array of horrors.

Burleigh narrates the course from Saint-Simon and Comte, among others, to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century. Turning to older scholars, Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, showed the many responses of Anglo-American thinkers to the destruction of culture by utilitarian reformers. In The Road To Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek argued that centrally planned economies lead to tyranny. Jane Jacobs documented the dehumanizing impact of urban renewal dogma in The Death and Life of Great of American Cities. Paul Johnson scandalized the chattering classes with his book Intellectuals, which did the extreme disfavor of comparing the ideals of famous thinkers with their actual behavior.

And the emergents?

Infatuation with causes on the left is deepening, especially among younger evangelicals. It is now God’s work to protest the war in Iraq, to bring about world peace, to end poverty all over the world, and to advocate environmental regulations. A renewed identification of the gospel with social justice can be heard in many churches, as well as impatience with the idea that salvation is for heaven and not for this world.

I am not saying that emergents are simply latter-day versions of Comte. But I will say that many of them are intellectuals in the old style. Their obsessive theorizing about the course of history and their absorption with grand political change are characteristic of alienated model-mongers. I see two problems with their leftward tilt, just as I see other problems with populist conservatism among evangelicals.

1. The evils of this world are not systemic, but spiritual. Reorganize, restructure, reform all you want, but the power of wickedness will merely shift. A culture is only transformed as the individuals who live in it are reborn in Christ. The reason evangelicals are failing spiritually in America is not that they have ignored progressive political causes, but that they have ignored the Holy Spirit’s call to their own souls.

2. Evangelical pastors should not surrender their authority to intellectuals. Every generation since the French Revolution has seen vicars of “progress” emerge. These parsons, whom Malcolm Muggeridge used to call “tame clergymen,” bow from their pulpits to the greater authority of Comte’s social sciences, giving their benediction to whatever totalist model has favor this year, whether it’s emissions caps or a UN war crimes tribunal. A pastor’s authority is in his fidelity to the Bible, not to the consensus at Davos.

The linkage between the Kingdom of Christ and earthly power is an old, old folly. If emergents are unable to shake the euphoria of knowing how to change everything, they will end in the enclaves of bitterness, and nothing will have changed.

One night during my first year of college, I was riding with some fellow believers, all from the same InterVarsity group at Willamette University, and we were talking about the megachurch we attended.

Willamette is a secular liberal arts school (its historical connection to Methodism is now purely notional). It’s the oldest on the left coast, and has the ivy of the Ivy League without the pedigree. It is not the preserve of the wealthy, necessarily, but let’s just say I was only there because of a scholarship. And, at that time, Willamette had little interaction with the surrounding community of Salem, Oregon.

The megachurch we all attended had a dynamic preacher and up-tempo music. It was known as a relatively wealthy church, the cars in the parking lots being a major indicator. Because of its youth group and extensive children’s ministry, it was also the place in town for families, especially white ones.

My friends and I went there for the preacher, who was smart, likable, and passionate. But the wealth of the congregation, or maybe the display of it, was somewhat embarrassing. And the music was irritating. In all, my friends in the car were conflicted about the church, frustrated with it.

At last, one guy said, “It’s just so middle class!” The rest laughed bitterly.

I was taken aback by the hostility in his voice, and by the others’ identification with it. Even though I felt the same frustrations with that church as the others, I couldn’t understand the contempt they were expressing for being bourgeois. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of myself as having risen beyond my origins. My thought was, “All of you are middle class.”

In that year of 1989, there wasn’t a name for young evangelicals who went to liberal arts schools, took books, cinema, and ideas seriously, and explored such exotica as liberation theology. There wasn’t a name for graduates who followed their passion for the poor into work with Habitat For Humanity. There wasn’t enough momentum for politically liberal evangelicals at the start of Reagan’s third term to gain a label. Nor was the suburban megachurch the object of scorn that it is now.

But today my friends would be called emergents.

I have spent time on this blog exploring the barren flats of evangelical populism. Now it is time to take a look at the swamp of evangelical intellectualism.

I should be clear about my use of the term. I’m not using intellectual as a synonym for scholar. A scholar is removed from ordinary life and work to pursue an academic discipline. An intellectual is not so much removed from ordinary life as disaffected from it. He is embittered by the lives other people lead, contemptuous of their lack of sophistication, and resentful of their lack of attention to his accomplishments. The intellectual class sees itself as society’s critic, wrote Robert Bork in 1996 (Slouching Toward Gomorrah, p 83):

Its members are generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, bourgeois society and culture. They are, moreover, susceptible to utopian fantasies.

Not all farmers are populists. So, too, not all scholars are intellectuals in the sense I am describing. And, truth be told, very few intellectuals are scholars. Most are merely glib with general knowledge.

Think Al Gore. Tortured, complicated, afflicted by a sensitive conscience — and proud of all three. He is not trained deeply in any academic field. He studies science not for knowledge but for advocacy. His career trajectory is typical of an intellectual: liberal arts training, journalism, politics. His intellectualism, at least in many people’s eyes, redeems him from grubbiness. He’s more than an advocate, more than a politician, because he’s about ideas.

Some of intellectualism’s cultural characteristics:

1. Urban, not rural.

2. Scornful of business and money. Money is corrupt, and the businesspeople who pursue it are all animated by greed — all of them.

3. Contemptuous of patrimony. Wherever an intellectual came from, whatever class or location or religion, that is the seat of hypocrisy and sick living.

4. Patronizing toward the middle class. All those poor, narrow people who just work, work, work in their office cubicles and then go to Applebees, all those parents with massive strollers and screaming children, who’ve never even met a poor person, who’ve never gone to Guatemala, who only care about money and their 401Ks and the prohibitive cost of filling their SUVs …

5. Able to evoke positive emotions only with abstractions. Obama.

I see all of these characteristics among emergents. Now, the emergent phenomenon is about many things — theology, history, abuse by authority figures. Emergents target many legitimate evils: consumerism, a mistaken identification of Christ with the Republican party, the neglect of the arts. Many stories are coming together to make the emergent stream. But it’s intellectualism that I am finding over and over again. Many emergents are about class.

Here’s a funny thing. Both evangelical populism and intellectualism, even though they have the opposite cultural characteristics, lead us to the same place: grievance. I doubt that resentment is going to advance the Kingdom of Christ, whether it comes from self-satisfied middle class Americans or self-hating middle class Americans. So why do so many evangelicals seem to seethe with it?

My friend’s outburst that night in 1989 showed me early signs of the splintering of evangelicalism, and nearly twenty years later I’m still trying to figure out what it means.

The headline in the New York Times on Sunday read, “Anglican Conservatives, Rebelling on Gays, Will Form New Power Bloc.” Conservatives from Africa, South America, India, Australia, and the United States met in Jerusalem to “create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions.”

The story put my week at the conference of the Evangelical Free Church of America in perspective. As we debated a thorough revision of our statement of faith in St. Louis, there were none of the Anglican agonies.

My Episcopalian brothers and sisters have endured a crisis of doctrine, conscience, and fellowship for years, a crisis induced by an American leadership determined to remake Christianity in their own image. Only now do conservatives have a chance to emerge from the crisis with a communion they can embrace. My friends with Episcopalian parishes would affirm the work God has done among their people, but the strain in their voices when they describe meeting with machine-driven bishops tells some of the cost of that work.

I continue to be inspired by their example while thanking God that I don’t have to carry their burden. I am blessed by the godly leaders of the EFCA.

When I first heard about the proposal to revise the EFCA statement of faith, I was suspicious. I have little confidence in organizations. One of my largest challenges as a leader is my own cynicism about institutional goals: I can’t bring myself to use the lingo of teams, which I associate with conformism. So when the word unity shows up on banners, I’m chiefly interested in discovering the agenda behind it.

But now I can honestly say –

I interrupt this repentance just to emphasize that my suspicion of many leadership practices in institutions is unchanged. I don’t like grand visions, glossy marketing, rah-rah speeches, videos, ads disguised as magazine articles, groupthink disguised as fellowship, the exaltation of the team player as the ultimate example of godliness, or the permanent smile of the mass communicator. Just so that’s clear.

I like networks of people in relationship with each other. I like to see those people, as unique individuals interacting with other unique individuals, make corporate decisions on the basis of biblical principles and their shared history. I like leaders who understand that this kind of process can’t be reconciled with marketing, but only thrives on good old deliberation.

The reason I was won over to the revised statement of faith is that the EFCA’s leaders — President Bill Hamel, the board of directors, credentialing director Greg Strand, and the Spiritual Heritage committee — showed that unity was not their slogan but their goal. They showed their integrity with patient engagement and transparency.

To strengthen our unity, we need a statement of faith that stirs us with its truth and timeliness, and the proposed revision certainly delivers. Its statement on the doctrine of God slams the door on open theism, letting the Lord’s full glory out:

“We believe in one God, Creator of all things, holy, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself and to make all things new for His own glory.”

The new statement on the Bible is specific and sweeping:

“We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.”

Paragraph #4 on Jesus Christ is filled with terms evoking the biblical narrative of redemption, and paragraph #8 on Christian living is a needed affirmation of God’s purposes for salvation. As a confession of the biblical heritage of Evangelical Free churches, this statement will deepen our unity for decades to come.

But more important than producing a strong document was how the leaders produced it. A key issue for many pastors and lay leaders around the country was whether an affirmation of the premillennial return of Christ (#10) should be included in the new statement. At first, the spiritual heritage committee recommended that the term premillennial be dropped. They had good reasons, and at first I agreed with them. It is not an essential doctrine for a person’s salvation, and it does pose difficulties for our cooperation with outside ministries.

But as I listened to older pastors in the movement, the significance of my own commitment to premillennialism deepened. This particular teaching was a passionate focus of the fathers of our movement more than a century ago. It has relevance today as evangelicals decide whether their engagement in politics is a matter of Christianizing the State or evangelizing souls. The EFCA is not among those calling for Christian laws in order to hasten the return of Christ. Christ will set up his own law, in his Father’s time.

The EFCA leaders said they would listen to input from the churches. When that input showed a strong desire to retain premillennialism in the revision, the leaders did listen. They put the term premillennial back in the statement. Then they won over most of those who had originally supported dropping it. They impressed me with their reverence for history and fellowship.

The 2008 conference adopted the revision by an 86% vote. I am proud to have been a part of it. I’m grateful for the consistent orthodoxy of our movement. And I’m encouraged to have witnessed the deliberation of a network of people, not the operations of a machine.

We were desperate to get out of the apartment,
even that late in the day.
Storms roved east,
disillusioned gold miners headed back into the desert,
and we rode under as far as the mountains
until the pines were thick
and the rain fell faucets
between gapping lace work of needles.

Gray light deepened.
Darkness crept down the ridges,
grew in soft spaces amid the trees
and covered the swollen creek its mad rushing-
and the pool.
The mist of the water fall
raised its slow, cold heart to the rain.

We walked the paths along the creek
and rain ran down our hooded coats.
Cold undeniable forced us in.
Squares of light opened out into the night
and the fire touched our faces and our clothes-
those that we finally shed to the floor
to feel the waver of heat set free on skin.
Did we finally know
what we had been waiting to know all our lives?
And now? When I shiver?

I sit in a suburban St. Louis hotel room trying to understand my own reaction to the dust-up between James Dobson and Barack Obama. Admittedly, I’m in the haze that results from a day of conference meetings. I’m also irritable because travel destroys the daily rituals on which I depend for well-being, and because travel to a denominational conference is particularly charmless. More importantly, I am worried about my dad, who had stoke-like symptoms on Tuesday.

I freely admit, I may not be thinking clearly.

Nevertheless, in my hotel room — which has that twenty-year menthol smell, yet has been declared “non-smoking” — I slog through several articles about the controversy.

It appears that, in order blunt Obama’s outreach to evangelicals, Dobson attacked him for misusing the Bible. The AP, which received an advance copy of Dobson’s broadcast remarks, reported, “Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, ‘a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.’”

Dobson said, “I think [Obama is] deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology.”

While I listen to the guy shouting into his cell while he gets ice in the hallway, I wonder if the AP might alert its writers that Leviticus is a book.

Next, I gather that Obama attacked Dobson for attacking him. The speech Dobson had cited, Obama argued, was saying that people of faith should ”try to translate some of our concerns in a universal language so that we can have an open and vigorous debate rather than having religion divide us.”

Obama said, ”I think you’ll see that [Dobson] was just making stuff up, maybe for his own purposes.”

Then lots of religious spokespeople started attacking Dobson and Obama.

After I find all this on the Internet, I realize that I could’ve just listened to the TV in the next hotel room, which has been bellowing about the fight with perfect clarity.

What is my reaction to Dobson vs. Obama? I regard it as an imposition, a bother, another of the 24-hour news cycle’s pestilential contretemps that I would ignore if it weren’t for the politicians’ blundering into the pastoral zone.

So, while vainly striving to ignore various aspects of my fellow guests’ lives — their children, their dogs, their gastro-intestinal dramas — I try to understand my lack of partisan fervor. Don’t I care when the Bible is abused by public figures? Don’t I have an opinion about whether Obama’s Christianity is legitimate? Shouldn’t I offer some guidance for my flock as to which man is right? Or am I just resigned to the ultimate equivalence of all political and doctrinal positions?

Partly, I am reacting to Dobson’s salvo as a pressure tactic, as a way of forcing every evangelical pastor to line up with him against Obama. We have created a culture of complaining, in which the loudest and most abrasive player drives others from the field. I feel this culture is degrading, no matter what message is being pushed, and I am not going to participate in the game.

Further, I am less than inspired by the wording of Dobson’s attack. He says that Obama is “distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible.” I’m not sure what Dobson means. The traditional understanding? Does he mean that Obama is using a straw man instead of dealing with real evangelical positions? Or does he mean that Obama is distorting the Bible itself? He doesn’t quite say either. And what does he mean by saying that Obama makes these distortions to fit “his own confused theology”? And that Obama is doing it all deliberately?

I fear that Dobson has fallen into the populist habit of stringing words together for their connotations rather than crafting them for meaning. The tactic makes insinuation sound direct. In this case, it certainly communicates Dobson’s feelings to evangelical insiders, but it draws no blood. Obama’s theological problems are other than Dobson insinuates.

Even further, I am dismayed by the strategic imbecility of making Leviticus an issue in a political campaign. The people at Focus just didn’t think this one through. Are we really going to win a public argument with Obama about hermeneutics, the relation of the Old and New Testaments, and which portions of the Bible “apply today?”

Obama’s rhetorical questions about which Bible passages should determine public policy were sophomoric, just what we have come to expect from politicians trying to sound highbrow. But no matter how you choose to answer such things, it’s not safe to take the tone lower. A little irony goes a long way.

Finally, I’m not convinced that Barack Obama’s theology is, as Dobson charged, “confused.” Obama’s theology is banal, the sort of spiritual generalizing one hears on NPR, as if “translating our concerns in a universal language” is a self-explanatory aspiration, as if having “an open and vigorous debate” is not by definition living with ideas that “divide us.”

I will continue to fight such clichés disguised as profundities from my pulpit. I’ll do so because doctrines are not ultimately equivalent: Obama’s Christian zen is just a repackaged modernist liberalism. I’ll try to fight with better weapons than Dobson wants to hand me.

But for now, I put in my earplugs and go to sleep.

Thelonious used to call life and death play things.
Rocking mirth on his knee,
he spoke in dissonant bursts.
He led us to the night sky lake
where he sent out accusations
to bob on havoc-rippled reflections of the moon
and to float ashore to the line of us.

I watched him
like a man watches the gauge go to end,
gripping the wheel and steering
though he just as well stop.
It will stop here
or it will stop there,
and here or there
are both a thousand miles from towns and borders
in a waste of dry words
split before and behind by a long black line.

Death is easy.
It paints what it has heard of beauty
and then describes the painting
while shadows pool in its sallow cheeks.
Death’s words are severed hands
that scratch and scatter like November leaves
on cracked and gray, forgotten streets.
Death hobbles down empty halls on broken feet,
calling for the doctor with a bitter back to God.

Yet hasn’t my heart found definition in words?
None other than the tongue can lift up this confession:
I stood with him by the lake pronouncing accusations
until I became dizzy from the hazard alterations of light and dark,
hypnotizing into memory with a permanence
that seemed not to weigh on the others.
Their words were tossed about to someone else’s shore,
but the wind brought mine to my feet.

Death is easy, yes,
but life is hard.
We struggle, my friend,
and always have.

Last week, someone showed me a review of my novel Fallen on Amazon. The reviewer, Keith Hammond, made my day with some very generous praise, and then raised an issue that I’ve encountered often:

My only complaint is that the story seemed too personal and allegorical to be completely fictional. I would have preferred the book to have an addendum where the author directly talks about the issues or situations that caused him to write such a compelling book.

The first person to make this kind of comment to me was one my editors at Kregel, who, during our line-by-line slog through the manuscript, said that the dialog was “a little too good.” He wondered what experiences I had plundered. After the novel was released, my secretary gave it to a relative, who finished it and made the hair-raising assertion, “Obviously, Raley’s had an affair.” Then there are the youth at my church, who have dissected the story with frightening precision, tracing eccentricities and obsessions from my habits into my narrative.

If only they were so devoted to their schoolwork.

So I guess I’d better tell all.

From start to finish, Fallen is invented. I didn’t model any character on a person I’ve known, nor have I ever had to endure what Jim, the narrator, goes through. I’ve found that fictionalizing real-life scenarios and personalities almost always yields a flat story because there is too much authorial judgment on the characters and too little sympathy. A novelist needs to keep his cool.

Yet, for me, Fallen is a personal book. Mr. Hammond and others are right. The book is personal in this sense: almost every vile act I portrayed in the story was invented from what I have seen in my own soul.

When I drew characters for the story, for example, I tried to load them with contradictions. Jim loves his wife and daughter, but also treats them with selfish disregard. He wants to be gracious, but gives favor with calculation. Pastor Dave is an emotionally driven man, yet he disguises his motives by intellectualizing. Also, Dave wants to see himself as compassionate towards others, yet his core motivation is self-pity.

Each of these contradictions — and many others in my characters, male and female — has its origin in some struggle of my own for integrity. I simply implanted my hypocrisies within the quite different personalities of my characters. I hate confessing this procedure, because it makes the story feel like public nudity. But that’s what I did.

The same is true of the relational struggles that the book portrays. I put my follies into all of the marriages and working partnerships. I invented the male characters’ misconceptions of women, from their flippant infatuations to their ordeals in marriage, out of similar misconceptions of my own. While the power struggles among church leaders in the book grew out of the invented scenarios, my own anger in sympathy with each character showed me how the struggles would deepen.

The crimes in Fallen, then, were not written as veiled reports but as shame-faced extrapolations.

There are two important differences between my approach and the method of fictionalizing personal experiences.

First, as a matter of technique, memoirs-as-novels start with scenarios and create characters to fit, which yields a false story. A human being is not a robot. Fictional human beings cannot be robots and be true. So I started with characters and then shaped the scenarios. Every day I wrote, the characters surprised me.

Second, I would only write a memoir-as-novel to vent bitterness. I may be unusual in this tendency, and other authors might have other motivations. But, as a matter of repentance, I don’t write to vent. I used to. Creating a little world in which all of my judgments are validated can be satisfying. But writing such things does not edify anyone. I found the method of spreading my darkness among many characters to be sanctifying. Instead of judging the sins of others, I was able to examine my own.

This is a method that I feel bound to follow. The subject matter of Fallen does not need more angry scribblers. But, I hope, a repentant one might do some good.

Your lover sits in the straight backed chair
with her old lady’s shawl,
draped over the green cushion,
and her old lady’s charms
within her acoustic body.

Years ago you made those climbing notes
in the dark halls of tall stone
when the thousand associations held out palms of echoes
and gave to thunder.
You were the master facing his slavery.

Now, with the mysterious halls abandoned,
with all associations left there
and your mind forced into the words
that people hang on for grace or for condemnation,
your lover waits to speak.
But when she does,
will it matter what she says?

Sometimes I find a post that hits me in the gut. On Tuesday I saw “Confused Christian” on the new and anonymous My Bloggerings, and read expressions of what many evangelicals feel these days. It made me ask whether God’s eye has left his people.

MB, the blog’s creator, wrote that she grew up charismatic but turned away from the sign gifts movement after she got married. “I just didn’t think that is what the Bible was all about.” But now she feels that she can’t replace it with anything.

At her current church, she says, “I am so unsatisfied with watered down preaching and ‘anything goes’ philosophy because God after all will still love you.  I want more than this.” She sees professing Christians living as immorally as non-Christians, being focused on their careers rather than their children. “My church has lost the art of mentoring younger people and feeding them spiritually.  Instead, the goal is to make friends who drink and have poker games at their house and hit on girls at the Champs restaurant in our city.”

MB says she wants a deeper community where life with Christ is more vibrant. “But I’m afraid that this is only a dream.  For I have visited so many churches only to be let down by them all.  Am I just expecting too much?”

Her experience is depressingly common. I often look at the demands of ministry and echo her question, adding another of my own. Is there any tool for nurturing spiritual life that works?

Morality doesn’t work. Parents and church leaders who focus on raising standards of behavior only have scare tactics to motivate people. There’s a wealth of material to use — a culture that is spiraling into anarchy, case after case of self-destruction, evidence from medicine and social science about the effects of vice. But the reality is that people are not primarily motivated by fear. If future danger and immediate pleasure compete for people’s attention, who wins?

Community doesn’t work. The old line that embers burn when they’re close together is true as far as it goes. But a pile of sticks won’t make its own spark. Strong community without vibrant spirituality just strengthens people’s selfishness under the cover of love and loyalty.

Family doesn’t work. The fumes of human sin are most toxic when inhaled up close. The flame of the tongue, the heat of anger, the slow burn of bitterness have a way of suffocating all godly aspirations. Far too many families, if we’re honest, have a well-preserved skin of faith, but their vital organs have been pickled.

Doctrine and preaching don’t work. Neither do programs, buildings, or media. Truth be told, I can’t think of a single spiritual tool that makes any impression on a heart that refuses to seek God. The tools only make that heart worse. Which means that, when people will not listen to the claims of God on their lives, the tool that is so useful at so many other times, the church, doesn’t work.

There is only one thing that affects hearts like we have among evangelicals today. It is a single moment, the moment when the presence of Jesus Christ becomes frighteningly real, when a professing believer raises his face and discovers that God’s eye, far from leaving him, has been locked on him all along, and has seen everything.

For that, MB and the rest of us have to pray.