letter from America
Well, it’s been a long – and dramatic – few years. Last time I penned this column for en, I had fairly recently moved from pastoring a church next to Yale University to pastoring a church in Chicagoland next to Wheaton College.
There were huge ministries, if occasionally controversial but mega-famous, scattered throughout America. A significant number of them then fell foul of what you might call the ‘church-too’ (aping the ‘me-too’ movement at the time) and well-known household names in the evangelical bubble were exposed, and scandals ensued. And then there was Covid… It’s hard to make sense of the last few years. What is God up to?
Usually, when you analyse these sorts of things there are emerging schools of interpretation of the state of play that you can then balance, assess, modify, and come to your own mind. One of the additional, shall we say ‘interesting’, elements of the current state of the church is very few seem to have secure and certain viewpoints as to what they think is going on. Obviously, God is in charge: ‘God is our refuge and strength…we will not fear though the earth gives way…be still and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46). With a doctrine of God’s sovereignty, we can claim peace in the midst of the storm. Still, it’s helpful to know what to do, and what do is usually best discovered through analysing the problem that can lead to potential solutions. We must trust – that’s for sure. Here are some of the interpretations that I’m hearing, and their strengths and weaknesses.
Some are saying that this is all a result of ‘celebrity Christianity’. Large churches are bad. Big ministries are intrinsically suspicious. While, indubitably, there have been problems with some so-called ‘celebrity Christians’, that way of analysing the issue seems to me to be problematic. Part of the unfortunate/fortunate reality of being a pastor is that you’re not only aware of the headlines, but the things that go unreported. While everyone was railing against ‘celebrity pastors,’ I was also aware of similar things in much smaller churches or ministries. They just didn’t make the news.
(Josh Moody)
Others are saying that it’s a day of reckoning for the evangelical church. I have more sympathy with this analysis. Let judgment begin with the house of God. Are there parts of how we do church from which we need to repent? I’m sure there. Semper reformanda. We should always be bringing our life and thinking back in line with God’s word. But while I have more sympathy with that theory, it also strikes me as insufficient as a total explanation. After all, it’s not as if similar events are not happening in other non-evangelical churches, and for that matter in non-Christian organisations as well. The me-too movement itself, for instance.
Still others say that this sort of thing was always going on, but now with contemporary tech (the internet and its various minions) what was previously hidden now is more obvious. Perhaps. Certainly, then, no one should leave the church because they discover there are sinners in the church. A careful perusal of the New Testament (or even a superficial one) would show you that churches have always had moments of struggling, along with the glory. Again, I’m sympathetic to this approach, but to me anyway it feels fairly obvious that what we are dealing with cannot be sufficiently explained by the prevalence of social media. There’s more than simply saying it’s the same old stuff but now being shown up.
I suppose another approach would be to say it’s a mixture of all these sorts of things, a kind of perfect storm.
However, as helpful as all these typical ways of thinking about what is happening may be, I think there is a more substantive, and prevailing, interpretive grid that leads to a more practical and spiritually powerful solution. Essentially, I think what we are facing in the Western world, including America – and I am told by my many friends also in the UK (where of course, lest my readers forget, I grew up and worked until my late 20s) – is a change of prevailing ideology that is reaching a tipping point. It is always dangerous, some ancient pagan said, for a society to change its gods. How much for a society to reject the God. We are in the midst of a massive social experiment where one set of values, rooted in the God of the Bible (however poorly and inadequately), is being replaced with another set of values. Space does not allow me to expose the roots of that other set of values, but it is basically postmodernity’s fruit: analysing everything as a power move has allowed other ideologies to go to battle. Neo-Marxism versus the Alt-Right, and more. This puts huge pressure on Christians, at work, and at home. It puts massive pressure on local churches, and national and global ministries. It heaps almost unending pressure on the leaders of those ministries. It piles confusion upon confusion, and leads to rancour, anger, and acting out in sinful ways.
The solution? I’ve just finished working through the book of Ephesians with a group of pastors. I was struck again by how Paul solves the paganised scene in Ephesus with the gospel. Our unity in Christ. Our peace in Christ. And then having established that truth, he then urges them to maintain their unity through the proclamation of the gospel via word-gifted ministries and speaking the truth to one another in love. If the problem, at its very core, is a shifting change of the West’s ideology to the scandalous fruits of postmodernity, the answer, at its very most simple, is the Bible and its message delivered to each other in a context of love. More on this could be said, but I hear the word count of the column coming to its stretched-out conclusion.
