Why I Am No Longer An Evangelical Christian!

Like so many young evangelical pastors I entered the Christian ministry full of preconceived beliefs about what it means to be a Christian. I was pretty confident in what I believed . . . quite certain in fact.

I believed passionately in the so-called “Rapture”, a future event in which true Christians are going to be snatched up from earth into the heavens.

I believed in hell, a postmortem place in which Christ-deniers would spend an eternity in conscious torment and that this punishment was well deserved and reflected how just and righteous God really is.

I believed that Christianity was the only true religion and that all other forms of faith were doomed to eternal destruction.

I believed that homosexuality was a deep and dark sin and that those within the LGBT community were also doomed and beyond the pale of God’s saving grace (unless they repented and ceased practicing their homosexuality).

I believed that any true Christian would embrace correct doctrine and those who differed from me on doctrinal issues were suspect. If a Christian author deviated from my own core beliefs he was removed from my bookshelf (consider the latest episode involving author Eugene Peterson).

I believed in Just War and unquestionably supported our nation’s wars: Romans 13 was important to me, at least in the way I interpreted it back in the day.

I believed in a male clergy only. Period. End of discussion.

I believed theological certainty was a badge of honor to be worn without apology.

I believed that all liberals were anathema and could not be trusted.

But something happened along the way.

Life happened.

The Spirit happened.

My personal experiences happened.

My circle of friends beyond my own native tribe happened.

An awareness of how the church believed in the past happened.

My old beliefs just didn’t make any sense to me any more, no matter how hard I tried to make them fit into my new life reality.

Now this isn’t to say that my journey of growth has been easy. Change is disruptive as well as dangerous. Any kind of personal change or growth is painful to some degree and in the Evangelical context it can be excruciatingly painful.

Perhaps the most painful dimension of growth is the loss of old friends and colleagues. When I moved my tribal affiliation to another denomination the response of my former tribal natives ranged from guarded understanding to outright rejection.

As I have grown older and as many of my views on certain social and theological issues began to shift I have sensed push back from many of my former colleagues and friends I once thought I could rely on no matter what.

But I press on and I welcome future shifts in my thinking on some of the most crucial issues of our time such as what it means to be prolife, economic justice, same sex marriage, the death penalty, patriotism, and war, to name just a few.

Salvation may be free but growth is expensive. 

But I wouldn’t change a thing from where I sit at this moment. I have nothing for which to apologize or defend. I love where I have landed and expect to touch down in fresh and new places for the rest of my life.

Growth is crucial for any Christian. God does not expect us to freeze dry our belief systems in such a way that it becomes an idol we worship.

I am thankful for my former native tribe and for the way they introduced me to the Christian life and nurtured and supported me in the early days of my ministry.

Many of them, in my mind, are saints of whom I have very fond memories. But I just could not stay put. I was compelled by the Spirit to move to a new and different place.

This is called growth.

Growth is not a crime friends. It doesn’t mean that I am less of a Christian nor would you be if you were in my shoes. Don't be afraid of growth. Don’t be fearful of embracing different and newer ideas about what it means to be a Christian.

God is much bigger than all our beliefs and ideas of him combined.

He's much bigger than our tribal pens in which we place him.

Yes it's Time for Universal Healthcare!

I resonate with the family of Sen. John McCain. I know what it’s like to hear the word “Cancer”—the utter horror of it all. 

Thirty-six years ago my father and I heard that horrid word from a surgeon who had just operated on my mother. “She has cancer and has maybe a year to live” he told us. It’s the first time I had ever seen my father cry.

Our whole family was devastated.

I know what it’s like to lose a parent to the most equal opportunity disease we know: Cancer!

My mother lived two years but during that time she received the best healthcare available to her at that time. But what if she had not had access to that healthcare? What if John McCain is not able to afford the care he needs? Of course he will as well he should.

I am blessed to have been given the opportunity to provide for my family by having accessible healthcare for them when they needed it. Not once did they have to sit in an Emergency room waiting to be treated for the flu or chicken pox.

I was not born into poverty. I was born on the right side of the tracks. I was given opportunities to make a good life for myself that so many others do not have. Doors were naturally open to me that are otherwise closed to so many others. I recognize this now.

John McCain’s brain cancer is horrific and sad. So was my mother’s cancer that took her life. 

But the real tragedy in this great country of ours is that access to healthcare has become a political football kicked around mostly by those who already have healthcare for themselves and their families. 

I believe it’s time for universal healthcare for all Americans. Healthcare is indeed a moral issue. The only reason it should be associated with politics is for the common good of all Americans and not as a football to be kicked around for political gain.

We are one of the greatest and most resourceful countries the world has ever known.  We were the first to land a man on the moon. Chances are we will land humans on Mars sometime this century. We have led the world in scientific innovation and medical research. We have some of the best universities and research facilities in the world. 

And yet, for whatever reason, we cannot look past our own partisan politics and agree on a system that would provide healthcare for all our citizens.

Canada does and so do most all other developed nations of the world. But not us!

Shame on us.

Shame on those politicians living in their own insulated bubbles of affluence while enjoying access to their own healthcare programs. Shame on those Washingtonians who have lost touch with their humanity for the sake of political expediency!

Shame on me for not speaking up sooner. Shame on me for not wanting to offend anyone’s political sensitivities. Well this isn't about partisan politics folks, it’s about discovering our moral compass as a nation. Healthcare is a human life issue.

Let’s quit playing games. Let’s tell our leaders that we will no longer allow them to use healthcare as a political football in order to make political hay. I don't care what you call it or what name you attache to it—Just do it!

What have we become for God’s sake? Are we that morally bankrupt? Do we not care? Is healthcare really all about dollars and cents? 

I find it morally reprehensible that Americans do not quiver over a fifty billon dollar defense budget but will scream foul over the costs of universal healthcare.

Yes it will be expensive but so is the loss of human life. Wake up for God’s sake!

Where are our priorities?

Do I sound a bit angry? Hell yes I am angry. I am angry over the way our leaders are acting towards what should be one of the most important things they can provide for us all: Universal Healthcare! 

I am praying for John McCain and his family. I feel their pain. I’ve been there and done that, but so have so many other Americans who were not afforded the care he will receive; nor the care my mother received that extended her life for another year. 

That was a big deal for our whole family. It should be for all.

The time for Universal Healthcare has arrived. 

Let’s just do it!

Why I Can's be an Evangelical . . . Anymore!

Like so many young pastors I entered the Christian ministry full of preconceived beliefs about what it means to be a Christian. I was pretty confident in what I believed . . . quite certain in fact.

I believed passionately in the so-called “Rapture”, a future event in which true Christians are going to be snatched up from earth into the heavens.

I believed in hell, a postmortem place in which Christ-deniers would spend an eternity in conscious torment and that this punishment was well deserved and reflected how just and righteous God really is.

I believed that Christianity was the only true religion and that all other forms of faith were doomed to eternal destruction.

I believed that homosexuality was a deep and dark sin and that those within the LGBT community were also doomed and beyond the pale of God’s saving grace (unless they repented and ceased practicing their homosexuality).

I believed that any true Christian would embrace correct doctrine and those who differed from me on doctrinal issues were suspect. If a Christian author deviated from my own core beliefs he was removed from my bookshelf (consider the latest episode involving author Eugene Peterson).

I believed in Just War and unquestionably supported our nation’s wars: Romans 13 was important to me, at least in the way I interpreted it back in the day.

I believed in a male clergy only. Period. End of discussion.

I believed theological certainty was a badge of honor to be worn without apology.

I believed that all liberals were anathema and could not be trusted.

But something happened along the way.

Life happened.

The Spirit happened.

My personal experiences happened.

My circle of friends beyond my own native tribe happened.

An awareness of how the church believed in the past happened.

My old beliefs just didn’t make any sense to me any more, no matter how hard I tried to make them fit into my new life reality.

Now this isn’t to say that my journey of growth has been easy. Change is disruptive as well as dangerous. Any kind of personal change or growth is painful to some degree and in the Evangelical context it can be excruciatingly painful.

Perhaps the most painful dimension of growth is the loss of old friends and colleagues. When I moved my tribal affiliation to another denomination the response of my former tribal natives ranged from guarded understanding to outright rejection.

As I have grown older and as many of my views on certain social and theological issues began to shift I have sensed push back from many of my former colleagues and friends I once thought I could rely on no matter what.

But I press on and I welcome future shits in my thinking on some of the most crucial issues of our time such as what it means to be prolife, economic justice, same sex marriage, the death penalty, patriotism, and war, to name just a few.

Salvation may be free but growth is quite expensive. 

But I wouldn’t change a thing from where I sit at this moment. I have nothing for which to apologize or defend. I love where I have landed and expect to touch down in fresh and new places for the rest of my life.

Growth is crucial for any Christian. God does not expect us to freeze dry our belief systems in such a way that it becomes an idol we worship.

I am thankful for my former native tribe and for the way they introduced me to the Christian life and nurtured and supported me in the early days of my ministry.

Many of them, in my mind, are saints of whom I have very fond memories. But I just could not stay put. I was compelled by the Spirit to move to a new and different place.

This is called growth.

Growth is not a crime friends. It doesn’t mean that I am less of a Christian nor would you be if you were in my shoes. Don't be afraid of growth. Don’t be fearful of embracing different and newer ideas about that it means to be a Christian.

God is much bigger than all our beliefs and ideas of him combined.

Growth is good! 

I Want America To Be Great . . . But Not Again!

Karl Barth, the famous Swiss theologian once told his students: “Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.” 

In other words, interpret current events through the lens of Biblical revelation. 

Unfortunately many Christians today take the opposite approach. They interpret their Bibles from their newspapers and thus create for themselves a cultural driven Christianity rather than a biblical based faith. Thus the teachings of Jesus, for the most part, are obscured by a nationalistic brand of Christianity.

When Christians take this approach they open themselves up to disappointment, disillusionment, and false hopes. It is also very dangerous.

For example, the well known political slogan, “Make America Great Again” is clearly incompatible with the Gospel and with God’s vision for the world. The first question any Christian should ask of this slogan is what does being great “again” mean? What exactly would a great again America actually look like? 

The qualifier “again” implies something in the past was better than it is now. What would that be?

If I had access to a time machine how far back must I go to discover a "great" America? To what time period? What set of conditions must exist for America to be great again? 

Truth is we all harbor some version of an idealized past. For whatever reason we seem to think that the “good ole’ days” were far better than the present.

This appealing slogan may represent good political strategy as a means to win over the hearts and minds of voters yearning for a return to an idealized past but it clearly contradicts the fundamental nature of the Gospel: 

God’s vision for the world (and America) is oriented towards the future. 

Quite frankly Christians ought to know better. Making America Great Again will not happen by going back to a time and place we think still exists. It doesn’t exist. Never has. I am thankful that God has moved us towards a future that is so much more promising and hopeful than our past. It is promising and hopeful because he is guiding us in that direction rather than back to some imaginary time.

One of the most surprising things I learned about the Bible when I first began reading it seriously was just how future oriented it really is. From Genesis to Revelation we discover God guiding his people towards the future.

By the time we get to the last chapter in the last book of the Bible we clearly see just how slanted the Bible is towards the ultimate future. It becomes clear that the Divine momentum throughout the Scriptures is moving forward and not backwards. 

Christianity is a future driven faith. I am convinced that many of our churches are dying today because they have failed to grasp this Biblical truth. Like the political slogan implies they are trying to Make the Church Great Again by somehow recapturing an idealized past (say the 1950s Mainline church). 

“If only we can restore the church to its former days all will be well” is a common mantra among many church members.

Well such a notion contradicts the very heart of the Gospel and the decline of many churches is the proof in the pudding. 

America will only be great once she gets in step with God’s future driven plan. As the American theologian Jonathan Edwards so aptly noted: “The task of every generation is to discover in which direction the sovereign Redeemer is moving, then move in that direction.” 

God is not retreating into some idealized sanitized version of the past but rather he is advancing into a Divinely designed future. Greatness is not and will not be found in the past.

As British missionary and missiologist Leslie Newbigin so insightfully observed: Christians are at their best when they get in step with God and follow him into his future.  

I want America to be great, I really do. But not “Again!” There is no future for us in the past. Making America Great Again, or even the church for that matter, is a pipe dream that is out of step with the forward moving Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

So when one places the mantra “Make America Great Again” alongside the larger future oriented story of the Bible one begins to see just how flawed such a political concept really is for Christians.

Perhaps Karl Barth was on to something we need to embrace.

Who Can We Believe?

There’s a spin doctor around every corner today. There seems to be one behind every bush.

They appear on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, Facebook, Twitter, emails, and other social media platforms. Everybody is spinning a narrative of what the world is like and what must be done to fix it.

I spin, you spin, we all spin and are spun by the masters of spin.

The problem of course is whose spin should we trust? Who has the better grasp on our national or global situation? Who has a firmer grasp of the big picture and who doesn’t?

Can we trust one news network over all others? Should we? Can we trust the professional spin doctors who are so good at weaving believable narratives? Do these spin doctors really believe what they are spinning for mass consumption?

Who can we trust? Who can we believe? Is there a limit to our naiveté? 

We make our choice of who to believe each time we dial up our favorite cable news network. We trust either Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow, Lou Hobbs or Lawrence O’Donnel or Wolf Blitzer.

Really, isn't all this spin simply entertainment? Are these talking heads reporting facts or are they spinning the facts to fit a narrative they are paid to deliver? Is this the real world in which we live? Are they shooting straight with us? How can we separate the truth from the spin?

America is a conflicted nation. We are conflicted mostly due to the professional spin doctors that come into our living rooms each night on our HD color flatscreen televisions. They offer up a well rehearsed narrative, smooth as silk and quite believable in fact.

For Christians this should be especially troubling.  

It should be troubling because we Christians have inherited a far superior narrative that should shape us in the way we think, and the way we live.

Franciscan Richard Rohr offers some interesting insight. Says Rohr:

Paul believes that corporate evil can only be overcome or confronted with corporate good. He uses primitive yet powerful words for the negative side of corporations, institutions, and nations: he calls them “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” (Colossians 1:16). These are not “bad angels” as much as collective attitudes that are almost impossible to break. Because they are so widely shared as mass consciousness—the way we’re programmed to think—they no longer look like evil and are hard to resist. Murder is bad, but war is good; greedy people are bad, but capitalism is going to save the world; ambition and pride are supposedly major sins, but not in the good ol’ USA. Do you see the problem? 

In Paul’s thinking, those big cultural blind spots can only be overcome by a group of people living and affirming and supporting one another in an alternative lifestyle. Smaller groups like the Quakers, Amish, Mennonites, and some Catholic religious orders were able to create actual alternative cultures.

For Paul, community is the living organism that communicates the Gospel message. Paul, like Jesus, wants to change culture here, not just send people away to a far-off heaven later! If Christ’s cosmic message doesn’t take form in a concrete group of people, then, as far as Paul is concerned, it is an unbelievable message. An autonomous Christian is as impossible as an independent arm or leg. Arms and legs exist only as parts. No single one of us is the whole Christ, and “the eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you” (I Corinthians 12:21). Believers exist as parts of the whole, the Body of Christ.

Is Paul on to something here? Is this a narrative we can trust?

I believe it is. 

What do you think?

The Gift of Imagination!

Recently I was enjoying lunch with my older grandson and as usual our conversation shifted to politics. We almost always end up talking politics (even though we differ in our opinions) and I am thrilled that he is interested in such topics.

At one point in the conversation I asked him: “Can you imagine for a minute  what a world at peace would look like?” The thoughtful look he gave me was priceless. I seemed to have sparked his imagination, if not for a brief second.

The Biblical prophet Isaiah possessed an imagination that ran wild. He shared that imaginative vision with us in this stunning vision:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him- the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the LORD-and he will delight in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist. The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra's den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper's nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

The Biblical prophets were more than mere predictors of the future (as so many assume they are); they were most of all men who allowed their imaginations to be captured by the Spirit of God. They used their prophetic imagination to see a world others could not see.

Author and activist Shane Claiborne suggests that God desires for us to participate with him in the “restoration of our world” and imagination plays a crucial role in how we do this. Yet we must first and foremost imagine what God may be doing.

For example:

Imagine a world in which everyone had enough to eat.

Imagine a world driven more by compassion  than it is by competitiveness.

Imagine a world in which justice means more than revenge and flows down the social ladder like a river.

Imagine a world in which war is categorically rejected, let alone justified.

Imagine a world in which guns are no longer necessary for personal protection.

Imagine a world in which we begin treating health care as a moral issue rather than as a political issue.

Imagine a world in which we didn't kill people to teach them killing people is wrong (capital punishment).

Imagine a world in which religious intolerance is anathema. 

Imagine a world in which income disparity is unacceptable.

Imagine a world in which skin color or sexual orientation or gender are not reasons for exclusion.

Imagine a world in which we could learn to be self-critical of our own views.

Imagine a world in which the care for the earth is second nature and not a  political hot potato.

Imagine a world in which Christianity and nationalism are not bedfellows.

Imagine a world living in peace!

It’s not too far a stretch for us humans to imagine a much better world and then act on our imagination. Unless we can imagine what God can do through us the world in which we live may be in grave danger.

Yes Isaiah’s vision looked forward to a better world. His vision was not intended to be understood as some “other worldly" kingdom that occurs after the end of time. Isaiah’s vision has real world and real time implications.

Is it too much of a leap for us to share in his vision for a better world?

We had better hope and pray that it is not an impossible leap.