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Evangelicalism

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Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, and the King David Defense

The bad jokes about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump have started: “There’s a storm a-brewin’.” Evangelicals, who voted for Trump at around 80 percent, face their own storm and continue to stand by their candidate despite the recent growing allegations that Trump had an extramarital relationship with the pornographic film star. Trump has largely been silent on the issue despite proclaiming his innocence in the Russian election meddling investigation on Twitter. To add fuel to the fire, Daniels (her real name is Stephanie Clifford) passed a lie detector test regarding her sexual relationship with Trump. A recent poll revealed that 40 percent of Evangelicals believe the stories about Trump’s infidelities. The share of Evangelicals who believe Trump’s claim is fake news? Continue Reading…

Christianity

Why Rachel Held Evans is not that controversial

rachel_held_evans_feature

Many in the Christianity community have followed Rachel Held’s Evan’s blogging and writing due to her journey of questioning of her upbringing within conservative evangelicalism. As a powerful female voice, Rachel Held Evans created a niche of disenfranchised and exiles from the evangelical community. She has taken on issues such as women’s roles in Christianity, LGBT rights, and challenging traditional evangelical doctrine.

Many on the evangelical right believer her to be a heretic. Other celebrate her ability to question the normative ethos of evangelicalism. Despite her popularity on social media, speaking tours, and as an author, Evans writing and new book, Searching for Sunday is not controversial.

Let me take a full stop here. Rachel is great example of someone who turned their questions of faith and shared those questions with a broader audience. I like Rachel and admire her strength and courage. She is a faithful Christian trying to figure out her faith in a complex and changing world – as all Christians should be doing. She is a very good writer. I like her sense of honesty and humor.

In her new book, Searching for Sunday, Evans writes about her progression towards a more sacramental and orthodox Christian experience. She remarked to Jonathan Merritt of the Religion News Service,

Continue Reading…

Culture, steve jobs

Steve Jobs, the Modern Prophet?

This past Sunday a private memorial service was held at Stanford University’s chapel for Steve Jobs, the juggernaut of the personal computing world.  Jobs’ passing has many of us reflecting on the work of one man’s life. His leadership provided for many visionary changes that have affected the world. Like the prophets from old, one man, albeit with blue jeans and a turtleneck, could prophesy the future. Unlike a prophet foretelling of doom, Jobs showed the world that the future was encased in a neat, clean, and powerful package.

He gave people something to hope for… even if it was just a product.

Connecting Steve Jobs to the concept of a “prophet” may cause some consternation in the Evangelical Christian community, but it is there.  Much like prophetic leadership guiding people to an unknown place and time, Jobs was able to motivate people into action and embrace the future. The iPhone, iPad, and other “i” products enabled people to take their relationships with them and put their interests, music, pictures, and friends in their pockets and backpacks.

Like a Moses or Joshua, Jobs was able to lead people to a promised hope. Steve Jobs had the ability to encourage people to change, and that’s a hard thing to do.  People followed Apple and Jobs into a new era of computing and personal electronics. That’s great and all, but what makes Jobs so prophetic?

His speech in 2005 to graduates at Stanford illustrates his prophetic ability:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but some day not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

What profound cryptic philosophical and religious language. Death the single best invention of life? Jobs is preaching a gospel that so many know, but few want to admit.  American Christianity has a lot to learn from Job’s words.  We Christians believe in a faith of death and resurrection, but we cannot let churches die. In biology, the death of one organism means life for another.  We are afraid to close churches for fear people will lose their faith. Yet, letting one church die can mean life for a new church. Resources, ideas, and property can be given for a new faith community to form.

Steve Jobs may have not been a believer or even religious, but he sure acted like a prophet. What more can we glean from such secular individuals in order to better Christianity?

One definition of a “prophet” in Christianity is someone who speaks the truth about God. Steve Jobs spoke the truth about death and its ability to change, but can we embrace this message?

liturgy

Liturgical Evangelicals

I’ve made the case many times on this blog that several Baptist/evangelical/congregational churches are becoming more liturgical: printed prayers, responses, confession, creeds, lectionary, robes, candles, and hymns.  Evangelical and Baptist churches are following the Liturgical Calendar and worshiping in several non-traditional worship styles.  Notably Taize and Iona. Robert Webber wrote in 1985 that Evangelicals were beginning an attraction to the liturgical church.

What are we to make of this? Are these Evangelicals trying to be something they are not? A gimmick? Two articles are worthy of your attention on this trend to answer these questions.

The first is by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (fellow Eastern University grad) who writes in Christianity Today: Continue Reading…

christians

Three Things You Need to Know About Evangelicals

There is a developing movement within literature to chronicle an outsider’s perspective on the strange land of Evangelical Christianity.  It seems that the world sees all Evangelical Christians as fervent, ignorant, and misguided by a holy book.  Being an Evangelical myself, I can see how the outside world can group all Evangelicals into this stereotype.  The media tends to pick up on the extremes of any group, ideology, or religion and usually tries gives us the most radical angle.   You would think that I would NOT recommend books about non-Christians views on Christianity, but there are two books that are worthy of your consideration about strangers in a strange land that yield some surprising insights.

In the first book,  A Jew Among the Evangelicals, by Mark Pinsky, he provides a brief introduction: a religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, uses his unique position as a Jew covering evangelical Christianity to help nonevangelicals understand the hopes, fears, and motivations of this growing subculture and breaks down some of the stereotypes that nonevangelicals have of evangelicals.  “I hope you’ll find laughter, perhaps puzzlement, and heartfelt interest in how people just like you wrestle with feelings, values, and beliefs that touch the core of their beings. And I hope you’ll catch a glimpse of someone learning to understand and get along with folks whose convictions differ from his own,” Pinsky writes in the introduction.

The second book, The Unlikely Disciple is by Kevin Roose.  Roose leaves his Ivy League setting to spend a semester at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college. The book gives this description: “His journey takes him from an evangelical hip-hop concert to choir practice at Falwell’s legendary Thomas Road Baptist Church.  He experiments with prayer, participates in a spring break mission trip to Daytona Beach (where he learns to preach the gospel to partying coeds)… He meets pastors’ kids, closet doubters, Christian rebels, and conducts what would be the last print interview of Rev. Falwell’s life.”

Both of these books provide 3 things you should consider before judging Evangelical Christianity:

Continue Reading…

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