Conclusions & Convictions: if ‘believing’ the right things is a prerequisite for belonging, then you are not free to ‘ask the question behind the question’ and follow the path wherever the inquiry takes you. You must arrive at the predetermined conclusions or you are not evangelical. This is because the nature of evangelicalism, whatever it has been in the past, has become a set of conclusions (homosexuality, the Bible, Jesus, salvation, hell, end times, etc,)
Individualism: Evangelicalism was born in the Enlightenment and thus the individual is primary when it comes to piety, salvation, and holiness. It is part of why Evangelicalism is so deeply wed to consumer capitalism which was born at the same time. One odd manifestation of this personal holiness (individualism) is called “double insulation”.
Scholarship: The previous two obstacles limit the type of scholarship that Evangelicals can participate in – which is why they have go to other fields (chemistry, Russian poetry) to find people to speak against Critical Race Theory. The problem with this is that if you are not a practitioner who employs CRT then you are only on the platform to speak against something that you have a limited understanding of.
Marxism: The specter of the Cold War looms large in Evangelicalism still. Russia was the enemy so any reference to Marx brings up ‘guilty by association’ thoughts of communism, dictatorship, atheism, Stalin and Lenin, and the slaughter of millions. Marx’s solutions proved to be faulty (wrong) but his analysis (diagnosis) of the problems of industrialized capitalism have valid critiques that have been integrated into different types of Christian theology around the globe.
The categorical dismissal of the ‘Masters of Suspicion’ – Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx – is a cynical scare tactic that still really works. It is the simply (one line) dismissal of each of them by evangelicals that concerns me.
Freud: I don’t want to have sex with my mother.
Darwin: I didn’t evolve from a monkey.
Nietzsche: God is not dead.
And scaring people off from CRT by associating it with cultural Marxism is a false-flag type of dog whistle that unfortunately still works.
Watch the 10 min video and let me know what you think.
Today’s sermon (10 min) with full transcript below
50 days after the events of Easter, religion changed forever.
In the cross of Christ, god had identified with the brown body that was murdered by state violence and had vindicated the victim who cried out ‘it is finished’ – let this scapegoating mechanism be exposed for what it is. Jesus unmasked the unjust nature of the powers the be.
The nature of god’s presence in the world was trans-formed as well. The temple curtain was torn in two and the glory of god was exposed to come out from man-made structures and institutions to find its home in the new body of Christ – the people of god.
The event of Pentecost was radically illuminating, thus the symbolism of the tongues of fire. God’s spirit had come to all flesh. This is the decentering of God’s power to the margins, the democratization of religion.
The church is essentially Pentecostal.
I’m not talking about the gift of tongues only, the miracle of Pentecost is not in the speaking but in the hearing. People heard the message of God’s love in ways that they could understand (as if in their own native tongue).
God was communicating through ordinary women and men – not just those with religious titles or theological education. God was pleased to speak through the children of God by pouring out Holy Spirit power on all flesh in a fulfillment of Joel 2 that daughters and sons dream dreams and prophesy.
Pentecost is my favorite day of the church calendar. Not just because of its liturgical flare or because it is ‘the birth-day of the church’. Pentecost is my favorite because it holds the very DNA of the church being contextual in its message – speaking in ways that people of different tribes and nations can hear and receive that good news of God’s work in the world.
As Methodist we take this very seriously. God’s presence in each person means that they are vector of God’s ongoing work in the world and their experience is a valid location for revelation and reflection. We added to the inherited Anglican triad of scripture, tradition, and reason the fourth component of our Wesleyan quadrilateral: experience.
We let that experience inform, form, and transform our mission and ministry. That is part of why the historical commitment to the abolition of slavery was spearheaded by Methodist around the globe.
We expect to experience the things that we believe and we believe people’s experiences.
This is especially true for liberal Methodists. To our religious commitment we also add a layer of prioritizing the inherent worth and value of every individual. Every life matters.
When we see an atrocity repeated over and over again of certain demographic of our population – in this case, unarmed black men – being victimized and disproportionally targeted we cry out in lament at the injustice built into the legacy of racism in the country. We rail against the nature of our whiteness in being complicit with the historical policies that police black bodies differently.
We can not stand idly by at the systemic nature of racism in America and it makes us sick to learn about the experiences of whole communities of color being targeted for different treatment for the last 400 years (actually over 500 years in the legacy of colonialism).
We teach our kids to sing “Red and Yellow, Black and White”, all are precious in Jesus’ sight.
The Bible says that if one part of the body suffers, that we all suffer. Jesus said that if even one sparrow falls to the ground, the God’s concern is there. Well more than one part of our body is hurting and we are experiencing the convulsions of that sickness.
Dr. King famously said, ““In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
We can keep silent no longer. We must speak up and stand with our sisters and brothers who are hurting. On this Pentecost Sunday we must also embrace our prophetic voice and speak in tongues that are not our own so that all may hear the message of God’s love and justice in ways that they can hear it. Not just in the langue that we are comfortable speaking but in a langue foreign to ourselves so that the dignity and worth of every soul can hear and receive it in ways that matter to those who hear our utterances.
Black lives matter. Every black life matters. Red lives matter. Brown lives matter. And if that is not true then we can not say that every life matters. So we raise our collective voice to say that we will stand against the systems of injustice and marginalization that have been put in place in order to expose the continuing scapegoat mechanism that plagues our country and unmask the powers that be which perpetuate the ongoing persecution of our sisters and brothers who bear the image of God (imago dei) and on who’s tinted flesh god’s Holy Spirit has been poured out.
The importance of every single life and every single person and community is infinite value and worth to the God we cry out to.
Hear the prophet Amos speak to us again today:
14 Seek good, and not evil,
that you may live;
and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you,
as you have said. 15 Hate evil, and love good,
and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts,
will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
16 Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord:
“In all the squares there shall be wailing,
and in all the streets they shall say, ‘Alas! Alas!’
They shall call the farmers to mourning
and to wailing those who are skilled in lamentation, 17 and in all vineyards there shall be wailing,
for I will pass through your midst,”
says the Lord.
18 Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light, 19 as if a man fled from a lion,
and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
and a serpent bit him. 20 Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
21 “I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. 22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them. 23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen. 24 But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
In this Easter series I have been using the notion of différance used by Jacque Derrida to illustrate how hope, faith, and love are always both different in some sense than we expected and also deferred to a degree.
Today I want to talk about the future.
For years as I have taught seminary courses I have tried to convince my students that the saying, “the more things change the more they stay the same” has never been less true that it is today.
In the 21st-century, the saying should be: the more things change the more rapidly they will continue to change.
We live in a time of unprecedented change that happens not at an incremental rate but at an exponential pace. This can be very disorienting and even discouraging for some.
This rapid rate of change affects everything from the economy and environment to technology, our families and our religious communities.
In the last 100 years we have moved from being a largely rural and agrarian society through an industrial and onto a technological society. These changes are profound and cannot be understated.
I recently found a saying that I really like
“the future was better yesterday.”
Many feel like this is too true. The future used to be bright and full of hope whereas now it feels uncertain, chaotic, and even concerning. We can no longer promise to our children that if they just apply themselves they will get a good job and be able to take care of their family.
The future seemed better yesterday.
This is where the notion of différance really pays off for me. The future will both be different than we expected and in some sense our hope will be deferred.
Know this may seem like an odd thing for a Christian minister to say. Some people may think that it is the job of the church to say “everything is going to be okay.” Well I’m not that type of preacher and that is not my understanding of the gospel.
In the post-World War II era many churches took on a very therapeutic rule to help people be well-adjusted citizens in a stable society. In many instances, and I would say mainline churches like the United Methodist in particular, became so overly identified with the surrounding culture but the culture actually took on many of the virtues and values from the gospel individually no longer needed the institutional church because the culture itself had become inseparable to large degree from the ecclesiastical community.
This is the secular age we now live in.
That shift was probably a good thing and largely inevitable. Of course the downside is that the mainline denominations fell into a steep decline narrative and it has caused a real identity crisis. In that context the role of the church became Little more in some cases then embracing sentimentality and the warm fuzzies. We were chaplains to the empire.
I came of age in the era of the Cold War and I remember with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Berlin wall and communism in eastern Europe that many assumed we were in the end of history. We had reached our final form. Between capitalism, democracy, and nationalism you can hardly imagine a better way.
It became so impossible to imagine that there would be an economic form after capitalism or a government better than democracy or day when the nation-state was no longer are primary identity.
A famous saying States that for many Christians it is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism.
But we now live in a time of crisis. We are plagued by ongoing and perpetual problems: environmental, economic, political, educational, psychological, medical, and relational to name just a few categories.
So as a person of faith I have no interest in promoting some pie in the sky starry-eyed optimism. If that is your brand of faith that is fine and I’m not trying to burst your bubble.
For the rest of us however there is a growing concern that the answers of the past will not satisfy the questions that are present moment is asking about us.
I agree with my favorite philosopher, Zizek, when he said that the light at the end of the tunnel may be another oncoming train.
I know that may seem disconcerting but as a person of faith I want to deal with reality in the clear about what we are dealing with. As people of faith I want to be prepared for the fact that it may get worse from here.
I am uncomfortable with many of the conversations I hear during this global crisis of Covid-19 and the hope to return to normal in the near future. If that happens that I will be glad to say oh thank goodness.
But I keep asking myself what if we get hit by a second emergency? What if there is massive earthquake on the west coast? What’s there’s a terrorist attack? What if there’s an armed uprising by the second amendment crew?
I just want us to begin having a conversation about life beyond what has become normal.
So to begin that conversation I just want you to think about these ideas that I’ve presented today.
The saying,” the more things change the more they stay the same” has never been less true than it is right now.
The future was better yesterday.
The light at the end of the tunnel maybe another oncoming train.
If this is true, what changes should we make during this global pause to come out of this different than we went into it.
This is probably the most daring sermon I have tried. Enjoy the video – my sermon notes are below.
We live in a very strange time. The old Chinese proverb” may you live in interesting times” was a curse originally and many of us feel like we live under that curse.
It is an interesting time of reversal. For instance, just a couple months ago grocery stores all over the country banned plastic bags and wanted you to bring your own reusable cloth bags. As with anything in modern consumerism, this became a form of both utility but also virtue signaling. It caught my attention in March when grocery stores no longer allowed reusable bags. This is an interesting reversal.
We are seeing so many reversals! From which workers are considered essential to our definition or restriction of who is in our inner circle.
Even love is being reevaluated. It is a unique type of love that says I care enough about you and your wellness that I will distance myself from you. Strange times indeed.
I thought it would be good for us to continue on our journey as Easter people with looking at hope two weeks ago, face last week, and love this week. This triad of terms comes to us from the famous wedding passage in 1 Corinthians 13:13 that says “faith, hope, and love but the greatest of these is love.”
In the Greek language that the New Testament in our Bible is written in, there are several vocabulary words that all gets translated into English as love. Agape, eros, philia, storge, mania, pragma and ludos are examples. They cover a wide array and variety of loves.
We live in a time where some in our society have felt emboldened with what can be viewed as un-love. This manifests in animosity, racism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. It is a sad development in what many of us had previously viewed as a time of progress and open-mindedness for acceptance and openness towards differences. (Some of our cultural opponents may, view this as permissiveness, pandering, political correctness and moral weakness.)
In contrast to that progressive churches like ours have become advocates for tolerance and justice issues. We view this as a type of love for the other.
I want to take this opportunity, as long as we are reevaluating things during this difficult time, to say that our notion of love for the other maybe flawed in a really dangerous way.
A common sentiment I hear from caring liberal kinds is the notion that “they are just like us except…”.
They are just like us except they were born in a different country.
They are just like us except that they have different skin color.
They are just like us except that they are attracted to people of a different sex.
This seems kind and caring on the surface, but there is a concerning misunderstanding underneath this seemingly open and accepting ideology.
We need to be careful that we don’t love other people because they are like us.
Do you see the danger? When we love people because we imagine that they are just like us except… this is certainly better than our opponent’s un-love (hatred) but as followers of Christ I want to be clear: that is not exactly love.
Love for others because they are like us concerns me because what if it turns out that they are not actually like us? Will we still love them despite the difference?
What if they value very different thing? What is they view the world very differently than we do? What is their goals and teams deliver them to a different destination then we had hoped for, what is they have different priorities or spend their money differently or raising children differently or have different sexual appetites?
Do we only love them because we are imagining that deep down inside they are exactly like us?
That is quite a dangerous fiction and ban become a very disappointing fantasy.
This is why as Christians we need to be careful and clear about who we love and why we love them.
1 John 4 says “7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
You see it clearly here: God does not love us because we were like God–but for the very opposite reason! Because we were far from God, we were not like God, we did not prioritize what God did or value the things that God values.
This is love. Not because of similarity but exactly and precisely because of difference.
There is a sentiment in our culture that says, ‘an enemy is just somebody whose story you haven’t heard yet.’ As if to say that if you knew what made them tick or what they have been through in the past that they would no longer be your enemy.
Do you see the flaw here? As my favorite philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out that the problem with Hitler is not that we didn’t know his story. Knowing someone’s story does not make them any less your enemy.
This is why Jesus calls us not only love our neighbor as ourselves, something that liberals pride themselves on, but Jesus calls us to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute us.
Enemy love is not based in similarity but indifference. This is where I like to quote GK Chesterton who said,
“It’s not that the gospel has been tried and found difficult, it’s that it has been found difficult and left untried.”
Now in contrast to the un-love of anti-immigration sentiment, anti-gay rhetoric and the legacy of racism in our country… we may view our liberal and open-minded acceptance and tolerance as a form of love. And it is a kind of love. But I want to be clear that it is not Christian love.
Christian love is not rooted in similarity because deep down somebody is just like us. The spirit of Christ calls us – no, compels us – and empowers us to love across difference and even to love those with whom we disagree. It calls us to love our enemy.
If we love people because they are like us we have done Little more than the average republican. Everyone loves people who are like themselves. Even lawyers do that. Sex-workers do that. Elementary school teachers do that. Nurses do that. Everyone does that.
No, what we are called to is a greater love. Not because deep down somebody is like us but in spite of the fact that they’re very different from us.
This is the love of God that we are called to. This is the higher calling and as long as we are in this time of global pause before we come out of social distancing and stay at home restrictions it is a great time for us to reflect and adjust our trajectory for how we want to emerge out of it this time. Let us be people of real love across difference in spite of disagreement even to those who may despise us into work against our values, undermine our convictions, and even those who seek to destroy the things we hold dear.
As progressive types and liberals, we may be disappointed in the ways of the world is going… but that is exactly why love is so deeply needed in our time.
In this short sermon we look the separation of faith and belief.
Faith and Belief
Let’s have some fun with words. In English, faith and belief have become somewhat interchangeable. I would like to pull them apart a little bit this morning to make some more room for what I believe it is a helpful distinction.
I want to decouple the two concepts.
Beliefs are often held as mental agreements like very strong opinions. We see this in things like doctrinal statements or the creeds that say things like,” I believe in God the father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son, Born of Virgin Mary…”
But we also use ‘believe’ to mean to trust in something. So for instance, if I ask you, “do you believe in the current administration?” And you said no… you would be telling me that you don’t trust in their project or program or character or truthfulness. You’re not telling me that you think they don’t exist.
This use of the word ‘believe’ actually comes to us through the Latin language that much of Christendom was couched in. Belief in Latin is credo – and it means something like I trust in or I give my loyalty to. It was much more akin to be-love that our current use of believe. The same would be true for the Greek (biblical) word doxa from which we get doxology and doctrine. It is a catalogue of strongly held opinions.
But words migrate and take on new meanings so our current use is much more of an intellectual assent or agreement. So if you told me you don’t believe in the current administration’s competence you mean that you don’t agree with it or trust it.
So I want to concede that newer usage and say that beliefs are ideas that you hold dear.
Faith, on the other hand, needs to be distinguished from that. Sometimes fate is used as a noun as in,”I have faith”. But since we are going to allow beliefs to be in noun– things you hold. Faith then should become a verb: something you do.
Having faith is an action. Sometimes we will talk about faith in action but Faith is in action! To make it over would be to say that we are ‘faithing’.
I think that this is an important distinction for two reasons:
The first is that in the biblical language of Greek, faith comes from ‘pistus’. It is both faith in something and the faithfulness to something. We are saved both by faith in Christ and the faithfulness of Christ.
The second reason is that we are a church where people are free to believe many different things. We do not require doctrinal agreement on every point. Exactly are trying to foster as a spiritual oasis a safe place to ask difficult questions.
Faith is not about agreeing on all of the answers but living into the better questions.
In American English, believe can be both things you hold dear–and those beliefs may change over time or adapt and evolve due to new information or evidence.
I find this distinction helpful because you can believe what the medical experts are saying about this virus like you believe in global warming or that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as humans… but that’s not what it means to be a person of faith. Those are more like strongly held opinions–and I am willing to concede that usage in modern English.
Is a faith that acts. To have faith is an action – it is faithing. It does something. It is active and we participate in it.
It would be like if you want door to door this Summer on behalf of a candidate and you said, ”I really believe in this person’s positions.” Your belief has propelled you into action ended his become the verb that I’m looking for – that is faith.
We can hold beliefs in our head but it is when it becomes a passion of our heart and moves our body into action–in word and deed–that we become people of faith.
Something a little different today: here is a reflection that I wrote and below is the video of me trying to present it on the live-stream Sunday morning (with limited success).
I would love to hear your thoughts.
There is a wonderful and often quoted passage in Galatians chpt 3 that I wanted to flesh out a little today.
26 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
It is important to understand what Paul is saying here and what the possible implications are for us in the 21st century – since this verse has sometimes been used in a harmful way.
In the first century that Paul was writing in, there were 3 divisions of identity (if you will) and this passage addresses them all.
Political
Personal
Religious
Paul is saying that in Christ these divisions are ruptured or transcended. In the political realm, slave and free would have had very different lives. In the personal (gendered) realm, males and females would have completely different rights and obligations. Life would have looked very different. In the religious realm, Jews and Greeks were vastly different categories – especially under Roman religion regulations.
What Paul is saying is that in Christ those categories are complicated, called into question, and transgressed.
It is not that those categories ceased to be or ceased to be important. It is that they no longer were totalizing. They lost their power to be ultimately determinative. They did not completely define or confine you.
This is an amazing implication of the gospel – the good news of life in Christ. You were not the categories that you were born into and that society placed upon you. There was now something else about that transcended those external categories and transformed who you are in the world.
You might be able to say in our day: there is no republican or democrat, no gay and straight, no citizen and immigrant.
This is a very transgressive thing to say! It violates the very categories that we have set up for sorting out who is us and who is them.
Now here is the important part: those categories still exist. It is just that they don’t define us, limit us, contain us, and restrain us.
Transgressive issues can be very powerful. They call into question the entire structure of the inherited system and undermine (or subvert) the very way that we categorize society.
This is why I prefer to talk about transform instead of reform. It is not enough to us and we need to transcend these limitations in divisions. The danger is that we will come in times of great tension and social upheaval, redress when we should transgress.
Those are my words for the day:
Transform
Transcend
Transgress
I have been fascinated over the last several years to watch and listen to the heated debate around bathrooms and who gets to use which bathroom. As somebody who lives between two established communities having been raised Evangelical but now operating in Progressive circles, I have been astounded at the amount of attention and contention that issues of Trans people has received.
In the LGBTQAI+ formulation the T is only 1/8 of the signifier. It is notable that when looking at the millions of people who would identify by this series of signifiers that percentage wise trans people are a microscopic percentage. Not even one percent – a fraction of one percent. And yet, in the social imagination, their presence has drawn overwhelming amount of attention.
This is the power of the transgressive category. The presence of the ‘other’ calls into question the entire system, the whole configuration. It is one thing to be gay or straight, male or female– That’s contentious or confusing is the debate surrounding those to be –it is another thing to call the entire concept of genderization into question.
We live in very contentious times where any issue can you become instantly aggravated an divisive. I have been amazed at the outsized amount of attention that this issues who can use which bathroom has received in both my current liberal circles and in the evangelical circles that I get to visit. There is something very telling about the disproportionate amount of attention that this issue has drawn.
It is telling. And it is a good thing because it questions or interrogates the entire structure. And the structure needs to be examined!
I became aware of how big of a problem our gendered categories were when I moved to LA and I inadvertently picked up some new hand motions. Apparently they were a little too feminine for a large man to be using and people would point it out to me. When someone would say that they were not very manly, I would protest by saying, “no. I am a man who uses these hand motions–that makes them manly”.
We also categorize colors by gender. It is interesting to know that 100 years ago pink and blue were used in the exact opposite way for baby boys and girls as they are now. In fact both the yellow and purple were acceptable. It was not until the first color addition of the Sears Roebuck catalog in the early 1920s that our current pink and blue category was formalized.
I recently read a story that my friend posted on social media about being confronted by somebody because her male dog had a purple harness.
Listen, if hand motions and colors and dog harnesses can be gendered then the entire enterprise needs to be called into question.
Our gender categories are too overly determined and totalized.
So that brings us back to our text. It is not that there is no such thing as a male and female, Republican and Democrat, citizen and immigrant… it’s that there is a category which transcends, transforms, and transgresses our understanding inherited categories.
I might say to you today that in Christ your identity it’s so much bigger then any of those external signifiers that society places upon you. It doesn’t mean that we are no longer males or females, that we are not Black and white and Asian And Native American, that we are neither gay nor straight–we continue to be all of those things. It’s that they are not final or total in their capacities to define us and divide us.
There is something much bigger about Life in Christ (the gospel) that subverts, undermines, and interrogates the ways that the world has been divided up for us and changes the ways that we are called to participate in the world.
What would it look like for you to be fully human?
Is Jesus a good model for that?
If Jesus was less than human because he was actually God in disguise (bad theology) then what do we lose with him as an example (or exemplar)?
I like to ask people a series of questions:
How did Jesus heal?
Was Jesus good at math?
Did Jesus even have diarrhea?
Did Jesus know people’s futures?
The problem with answering “he was God” too quickly is that we make Jesus something less than human or un-human – the opposite of what we are trying to do.
We are missing something vital about the incarnation because of easy answers. This is not trivial because Jesus models for a life that is open to God’s presence in our lives.
The invitation of Christ is to be open to the divine in a way that brings about our full humanity.
Being fully human is a complex web of overlapping and intertwined elements:
Family
Personality
Culture
Nationality
Religion
Sexuality
Language
Here is a 10 min video with some of my thoughts about being fully human. I would love your feedback.
There are three types of churches when it comes to their ‘relationship to power’: [1]
Messianic
Therapeutic
Prophetic
Messianic churches look for ‘help’ from outside the system. Whether it is the 2nd Coming of Christ or intercessory prayer, there is an expectation of an intervention (even salvation) from a source outside of (or beyond) the current order. This is often an unseen realm.
Therapeutic churches help you adjust to the system the way it is. These churches want to help you have your best life now. The priority is to help you be the best citizen you can be (at minimum) or to excel in your field so you can be an influential person within your networks.
Prophetic churches are looking to change the system. They want advocate for those on the margins and the disadvantaged. They utilize advocacy, community organizing, and protest to leverage those in power to change public policy and legislation toward justice and equality.
Here is where it gets more interesting:
Each of the primary expressions has a secondary emphasis … and an unfortunate neglected element.
Messianic churches (change from the outside) seem to have a therapeutic element where they help people to adjust to the system as it is while they wait for deliverance from above (or beyond). Unfortunately, these churches often neglect the prophetic aspect (changing the current system) because it seems like ‘rearranging deck chairs on the titanic’. There can be a resignation or ‘other-world-liness’[2] as a side-effect of this approach.
Therapeutic churches (helping you within the system) seem to have a prophetic element which focuses on issues of ‘social-justice’ in order to change certain givens in the equation to variables that can be adjusted. Unfortunately, these churches often neglect the messianic component which believes that there are any resources available from outside the system (or established order). This can result in a generational (or personal) crisis that asks “who or what is it exactly that we believe in / pray to ? And what exactly are we hoping for here?”
Prophetic churches (changing the system) seem to have a messianic element which looks to a power ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ that will supply a needed element of transformation in order to bring justice and deliverance to those in need. Unfortunately, these churches can neglect the therapeutic component of religious belief and practice. This lack often leads to participants feeling worn-out or burned-out, depleted and discouraged. Hope in the messianic aspect, without the therapeutic, becomes even more vital.
When I present this in the seminary classroom I give examples of each:
a Therapeutic/prophetic church (like I am at currently) that struggles with messianic spirituality because the ‘interventionist’ view of god seems problematic.
a Prophetic/messianic church that does protest and ‘action’ but struggles with therapeutic spirituality because it is soft or too ‘me’ focused.
Messianic/therapeutic church (like I use to be) that struggles with prophetic action because of ideas like the ‘2 kingdoms’ which has the spiritual realm (or kingdom of god) as over and above the kingdoms of this world.
Here is an introductory video. Please let me know you thoughts, examples, concerns, and questions.
[1] Power is alternatively known as: the ‘system’, the powers that be, the man, institutional power, and the status-quo, among other things.
[2] NoTW – ‘Not of This World’ is an odd consumer expression of passages like Romans 12:1-2, John 15:19, John 17:14 & 16, John 18:36, Colossians 3:2, Philippians 3:20-21, Ephesians 6:12, and 1 John 2:15-17.
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 