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If MAGA’s political appropriation of 2 Chron. 7:14 leverages fear of contamination to justify nativist and exclusive policy, the New Testament provides a direct theological counter-narrative. While MAGA’s reading uses disgust to construct boundaries to bring about a ‘healed land’ or an American made great again, the ministry of Jesus and the movement of the Holy Spirit in the early church redefines purity by showing a better way. If perfect love casts out fear, then that seemingly also includes the fear of contamination by others.

If people with low thresholds of disgust are more likely to experience prejudice towards others, how can people’s disgust tolerance grow? If disgust towards things like “wearing used but clean sweaters, sitting on warm bus seats vacated by strangers, and sitting on clean public-toilet seats” are viable predictors of people who are more predisposed to prejudice,1 then part of God’s work in reconciling all things seemingly includes helping followers of Jesus become less disgusted (or not disgusted at all) by other humans.

Jesus does not fear contamination. Disgust is in large part fear of contamination, and disgust theorists posit that it evolved from a need to protect ourselves from pathogens and contagions. Jesus, when presented with a man carrying one of the most disgusting and ‘unclean’ diseases of his time (leprosy), Jesus touches the man (Matthew 8:3). Jesus touched Jairus’ daughter’s dead hand as he brought her back to life. Jesus frequently interacted with, and presumably touched, those around him who would have been ritually or ceremonially unclean. He did so with compassion. Jesus’ interpersonal disgust threshold seems to have no limit, and Jesus never seems to be disgusted or repulsed by the people his culture would have treated as a plague on society.

‘Clean’ and ‘unclean’ are not inherently evil labels, and are present across human cultures. These labels are sociologically useful for regulating “the moral boundaries of a cultural group and express the moral integrity of a larger narrative that shapes and guides human action.”2 These labels nevertheless inform what a culture finds disgusting or contemptible, however. Jesus frequently violated the lines that demarcated ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ in his culture, extending his hand to reach out and touch the sick, the demon-possessed, and the dead.

While Jesus never treated his culture’s objects of disgust with anything less than love, Jesus did employ disgust language on occasion. In Matthew 23 Jesus launches a full-blown critique into the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Hypocrisy disgusts us, Miller says, because “our world makes purity transient, vulnerable, and ultimately unmaintainable … it means that the boundaries that separate vice from virtue, good from evil, pure from polluted are permeable, and worse, necessarily permeable.”3 In other words, the people Miller labels “moral menials,” such as lawyers or politicians, benefit from the permeable and inverted nature of virtue and vice in our world, and this moral compromise repulses people who seek true justice.4

With this in mind, we can see that what disgusts Jesus is the cruel appearance of virtue, sometimes inverted for personal gain, by the Pharisees. Jesus opens his exposition of the Pharisees’ hypocritical behavior by telling the crowds to continue to do what the Pharisees say, but not to do what they do, critiques their desire for places of honor, for slamming shut the door to the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces, and for giving a tenth of their spices while ignoring justice, mercy and faithfulness. In the wake of all of this, Jesus employs disgust language against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees – they are cups cleaned on the outside, but that remain filthy on the inside. They are whitewashed tombs – unclean places of the dead painted to look nice. Lastly, Jesus calls them snakes and vipers, hearkening the Pharisees back to the serpent in the garden.

Hypocrisy should repulse us. We, like Jesus, should be critical of hypocrisy when we encounter it. When MAGA movements call for repentance from wicked ways in others, but fail to address the predatory sexual immorality that is rampant within its party’s leadership (among other things), followers of Jesus should be able to point out the hypocrisy and admonish the whitewashed tombs. Speaking against hypocritical behavior in leaders should not be a struggle for followers of Jesus. It is only when we acknowledge our wicked ways that we can repent of them. However, in following Jesus’ example, it seems we can no longer fear being contaminated by others. Disgust for people is not permissible for God’s people.

Learning to overcome our disgust towards others is not a simple matter. Disgust is durable. It would seem, however, that part of the formational work of following Jesus entails learning to see others not through the lens of disgust, but through the eyes of God. These lessons are not easy to learn, and it’s why Miller writes that those who are insensitive to disgust are suprahuman, like the saints.

Despite spending years walking with Jesus, social disgust and the fear of contamination continued to operate within the life of the early church in Acts. The Jewish early church continued to operate within the confines of religion and ethnicity. Willie James Jennings points out that their logic in this was not “evil or immoral,” and in some ways “resemble Jesus’ words to seek after the lost sheep of Israel.”5

The work of the Spirit in Acts works against the fear of contamination by the other by constantly bringing new and unexpected people into the family of God. Jennings illuminates this point beautifully when he writes about the Samaritans receiving the Holy Spirit in Acts 8; he writes, “Disciples of Jesus must be convinced not only of God’s love for the world, but also God’s desire for people, especially peoples we have been taught not to desire.”6 God’s desire for undesirable, or disgusting people, is a common theme in Acts. We can see God’s desire and love for people who exist beyond our sense of boundaries in his lavish grace for the Ethiopian eunuch in his encounter with Philip. The Ethiopian eunuch “is the outer boundary of the possibility of Jewish existence, and there at that border God will bring that difference near, very near, to hearth of home in the Spirit.”7

The Holy Spirit’s leadership does not seem to care about our discomfort with people who might make us uncomfortably squirm; the Spirit continually propels the early church across the boundaries of social contamination as God pulls together a new family made up of every tribe and tongue. God is truly doing a new thing in the Church, and as Jennings says, “The strange and new wrought by God will now bind together Philip and the eunuch in a new paradigm of belonging. They will now forever travel the same road.”8

God’s desire to rework human relationships beyond the fear of contamination is most clearly displayed in Peter’s vision and subsequent interactions with Cornelius in Acts 10. As Cornelius’ dispatched emissaries make their way to Peter, Peter falls into a trance and has a vision as others prepare the meal. Jennings writes:

The revolution descends on a sheet. The sheet contained the known (culinary) world and unknown tastes. It contained animals, clean and unclean, appropriate and inappropriate, appealing and repulsive, desired and despised.9

Peter sees that which is good and that which is disgusting. He sees what he has been taught to view as unclean, contaminating, and defiling. In Miller’s words, we remember again that so much about disgust has to do with two holes on the human body and the tube that connects them. God calls to Peter, issuing a command, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”10

Jennings reminds us that these animals on the sheet are representative of people, and that God’s call to Peter is not to consume but is to enter in, to join in and become part of a new kind of community.11 Peter’s reticence is natural. Eating unclean animals was a violation of the Law, but God is now inviting Peter into something higher. Jennings writes:

Peter obeys, but now that obedience must take flight with the Holy Spirit into an uncharted world where the distinctions between holy and unholy, clean and unclean have been fundamentally upended. Yes, this is a moment when old word of God connects to new word of God, a moment where purity is expanded to cover what had been conceived as impure … The word that God continues to speak to us is to accept new people, different people that we had not imagined that God would send across our paths and into our lives12

Peter realizes in the episode that God has put a higher Law into place than the one that kept Jews from associating with Gentiles; God has shown Peter “that [he] should not call anyone impure or unclean.”13 In Peter’s encounter with Cornelius and his household, Peter witnesses the Spirit arrive in an incredible way, definitively bringing Gentiles into God’s family as a sign that God is doing something completely new in humanity.

Disgust is a strong emotion, and its role in our lives is impeccably explained by the movie Inside Out. Disgust keeps us safe from being poisoned, physically and socially. Disgust is, simply put, a fear of contamination.

As we continue to explore MAGA’s understanding of wickedness in 2 Chron. 7:14 (and how such a wickedness prevents America’s greatness), we have to examine the role of disgust in the movement’s view of wickedness.

Many of MAGA’s policy positions, ranging from immigration to stances on sexuality, and even artificial colors, hinge on a fear of contamination, either physical, moral, or social. This fear of contamination is evident in Trump’s remarks in 2023 when he said that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.”1 These remarks, which stoke fear of contamination, play on the visceral human emotion of disgust, and much of MAGA’s construal of wickedness in America is an emotional manipulation of disgust towards the end of policy change.

Disgust is both simple and complex. In one sense, much of it has to do with the things that happen around two holes in the human body and the tube that connects them,2 but disgust is first and foremost a potent emotion, and is perhaps one of the most basic and universal human emotions.3 It “occurs when an individual rejects contact with an object, action, or event that is perceived to be impure,” and it can “expand to the soul and social order: particular groups of people, such as strangers and outsiders, and to social behaviors that are culturally deemed to pose contamination hazard to the self, spirit, or society.”4 We can experience disgust as a response to a wide variety of events, people, or objects, and disgust is universal within human experience. William Ian Miller writes, “Disgust surely has a feel to it; that feel, however, is not so much of nausea as of the uneasiness, the panic, of varying intensity, that attends the awareness of being defiled.”5

It is common for people to think of morality in terms of disgust. Actions that violate a person’s sense of morality ‘disgust’ them. Miller writes that disgust, “drags the moral down from the skies toward which it often tends to float, wrests it from the philosophers and theologians, and brings it back to us with a vengeance … The disgust idiom puts our body behind our words, pledges it as security to make our words something more than mere words.”6 As MAGA continues to conflate ‘wickedness’ (matters of morality) with disgust towards the actions and people of out-groups that repulse them, their drive to purify society, or ‘heal the land’ (Make America Great Again) only grows.

When used as a motivation for morality, disgust is inexhaustible. Consider how Trump ran on a platform of ‘drain the swamp’ in 2016; the image evokes disgust as a feeling by comparing the federal government to a smelly, repugnant wasteland, and continues to be a significant way for the Trump administration and MAGA to talk about federal government as late as 2025.7 When disgust is the motivator against wickedness, the risk of contamination from wickedness is always high and remains a perpetual threat to purity.

When 2 Chron. 7:14, though contextually misapplied, serves as an ideological framework, that which is disgusting (or wicked) will always contaminate the land and prevent its healing. Contamination, whether it is a federal swamp, Red Dye 40, or immigrants must be dealt with or the land cannot be healed.

When anyone becomes an object of disgust -especially to a group in political power- and is conflated with being wicked, wrong, or evil, there is great risk for those persons. Research has found that disgust plays a significant role in shaping public policy, and not just food-regulation laws. Individuals who are more easily disgusted also tend to hold socially conservative beliefs; white Americans with low disgust thresholds are more likely to be against interracial dating and approve of more profiling of illegal aliens, more restrictions on abortion, and more restriction on what ‘counts’ as marriage.8 Disgust has a certain durability to it; it is so hard-wired into us that it is difficult to change what we find disgusting. This can have dire ramifications for people when disgust of the other becomes the guiding principle for public policy. Once something, or someone, becomes disgusting to us, it’s nearly impossible to change our very visceral feelings about them.

The contemptible may be ignored; the disgusting cannot. When MAGA points out the evils and wrongdoings they perceive in society, they do so through language that evokes disgust. Wickedness is not simply those out-of-line with the teachings of Jesus or the Torah; the wicked are those who disgust, those who contaminate American life, and they must be eradicated to make way for American greatness.

If this seems exaggerated, then we only need to look to the treatment of Haitian immigrants. During 2024’s presidential debate on ABC, Trump said, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”9 This is a disgust-evoking claim. ).10 Trump’s words about Haitian migrants in Ohio caused a visceral reaction of disgust in the people who hear and read them, and as previously demonstrated, people with lower thresholds for disgust are more likely to endorse profiling of illegal immigrants and have stronger racial resentment.

As other researchers put it, “Heightened interpersonal disgust predisposes individuals toward ideologies and intergroup representations that impede positive group attitudes.”11 By using disgust language and images to describe Haitian immigrants in 2024, Trump paved the way for the removal of temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants on June 25, 2026.12 Disgust language is consequential for the shaping of public policy, and unfortunately Haitians are not alone in being the targets of disgust-based language and metaphors.

One of the main ways that MAGA has construed wickedness in the United States is the lawlessness at the border (America First Policy Institute), and the continued use of disgusting comparisons, such as referring to immigrants as ‘infesting’ or as ‘animals,’ has paved the way for harsher treatment of immigrants, leading to deadly camps and brutal policing tactics. These tactics, fueled by disgust rhetoric are aimed at the perceived purification of American blood or soil, or in MAGA’s viewpoint, a healed land. Disgust is an effective tool for bringing about policy change, but it is inherently risky. Kam and Estes conclude their work on disgust with a worrisome concern, “If disgust is such a visceral reaction that can potentially be evoked by strategic political elites and attached to specific political issues, individuals, and groups, we worry and wonder if the connection between disgust and public policies, political candidates, and social groups, once forged, can effectively be extinguished.”13

So how are Christians to live in such a world, where rhetoric intentionally cultivates disgust within us? We’ll move towards a New Testament understanding of disgust and the way forward for followers of Jesus in Part 3.

It’s 2016, and the presidential campaign is in full swing. Mike Pence, in an interview with CBN, recites 2 Chronicles 7:14:

Pence told CBN that our country was in need of a “spiritual jolt,” and that if Americans prayed and humbled themselves, then God would “again hear from heaven and he’ll heal our land.” Pence said that he believed that Donald Trump’s rise was part of God’s providential plan for America, and seemed to believe that Trump’s presidency was an essential piece for the healing of the United States.1

Soon after, Donald Trump was elected president. Anne Graham Lotz, again referencing 2 Chron. 7:14, said “it was a sign that God was answwering the prayer of his people, just like in 2 Chron. 7:14.”2 Lotz (Billy Graham’s daugher) attributed Trump’s election victory as God’s providential path for the healing of the United States, while framing his presidency as a safeguard against secularism and totalitarianism. She believed that God’s people had been an instrumental part of 2016’s election results, and those results would protect America from catastrophe. She ended her speech by saying that God had placed Trump in office “for the blessing of the American people if we continue to seek Him with all our hearts and humble ourselves and turn from our wicked ways,” and she affirmed that Trump was to be God’s agent in healing the land.3

Throughout Trump’s first presidency, 2 Chron. 7:14 continued to surface at podiums and events, but it notably resurfaced on January 6, 2021.

Founder of ‘Cowboys for Trump,’ Couy Griffin grabbed a bullhorn and prayed 2 Chron. 7:14 over the throng as skirmishes between the crowd and the police happened in the background. He said, “Let us pray, let us pray Second Chronicles, chapter 7, verse 14 over our nation. Let us pray. Our father says that if we will repent and pray he will hear our prayers, and he will hear us.”4 While hand-to-hand brawls with the police raged in the background, Griffin called for repentance and peace, seemingly hoping that God would hear the prayers of the insurrectionists and reinstate Trump to continue to heal the United States. It’s unclear who is supposed to repent, but it seems that Griffin was not calling for the insurrectionists to repent of their unrest or violence – he perceived some other wicked way from which people must turn.

2 Chron. 7:14 dominated Scripture usage on the 2024 campaign trail. Bryan Kaylor analyzed seventy minutes of prayers over the course of six months, studying only the prayers where Trump’s campaign controlled who was at the podium. In those instances, 2 Chron.7:14 was the most frequently used passage of Scripture.5 2 Chron. 7:14 was notably quoted at the 2024 Republican National Convention.6 Most recently the verse was a focal point of 2026’s “America Reads the Bible” event. Trump read from 2 Chron. 7:14 in a pre-recorded video from the Oval Office.7

This verse has played a significant role in shaping the religio-politcal imagination of a movement, and it’s certainly fair to admit that the MAGA movement isn’t the first US group to use this verse to talk about the role of government. 2 Chron. 7:14 seems to be a verse that captures political imaginations around the world, with scholars like Lawrence Nchekwube Nwankwo reflecting on its usage in his Nigerian context.8

Even though 2 Chron. 7:14 has played a prominent role in politics throughout history and around the world, it seems to have taken a particular hold within MAGA’s rhetoric. Over more than a decade of use, the contextual meaning for MAGA seems to be:

• America is sick, diseased, and unwell because of wickedness.

• If we repent (turn from our wicked ways, or remove the source of wickedness), God will heal America (the land).

• Donald Trump is God’s providential agent for the healing of America.

It’s clear that MAGA is reading the United States (though not all of the US) as the land and the people, but to understand their use of the verse we also have to see their contextual reading of ‘wicked.’

The America First Policy Institute puts their social issues of concern in close proximity with 2 Chron. 7:14, which include “lawlessness at our border and in our once great cities,” (immigration) and “increasingly radical agendas that seek to indoctrinate our children.”9 Wickedness, for the MAGA movement, seems to focus on external groups instead of the the wickedness within their own ranks.

When MAGA pundits cite 2 Chron. 7:14, the “wicked ways” of which America must repent are never the sins of MAGA themselves – the verse has been used, after all, as brawls broke out at the January 6^th Insurrection in direct violation of conservative interpretations of Romans 13. No one within MAGA has called for Trump’s repentance in his thirty-four felony convictions, and no prosecutions of anyone named in the Epstein files have occurred to date. MAGA has plenty of wickedness of which it should repent, but it is primarily concerned with the wickedness of out-groups. For MAGA, repentance is a task evildoers in the out-group must do, and when they finally change their ‘wicked’ ways, America may be ‘healed,’ or once again made great.

How should people read 2 Chron. 7:14? Who are the people? What is the land?

1 and 2 Chronicles occur at the very end of the Hebrew Bible as a recap to everything that has come before, beginning with genealogies that go back to Adam, the hope for the Messianic king (that even David didn’t fulfill), and the people returning to the land after exile to rebuild the Temple.

2 Chronicles 7:14 is part of a larger portion of text in which the Lord appears to Solomon at night after the completion of the Temple. God is speaking to Solomon, so who are “my people,” and what possible extension of meaning can there be for this phrase?

In context, this phrase refers specifically to the Israelite people, who have a covenantal bond with God.10 Scholar Jonathan Taylor asks if it is possible for the meaning of “my people” in 2 Chron. 7:14 to gain a broader meaning in light of God’s expansive work of Gentile inclusion in the New Testament, to which he says, “No, because the temple was specifically reserved for God as his ‘house of sacrifice’ (7:12) … prayer and repentance were not a private affair; worship was expected to take place among the people who were called by God’s name.”11

In decontextualizing this verse, MAGA misunderstands who God means by “my people.” Taylor writes, “The phrase ‘My people’ is often understood to mean either ‘Christians’ or a designated nation, though the context clearly shows that it relates to Israel.”12 The decontextualization of God’s people in this verse is further accented by the phrase, “who are called by my name,” emphasizing the covenantal relationship of God with Israel.

In its historical context, 2 Chron. 7:14 is an internal covenantal promise given to Israel, framing wickedness as a collective failure of God’s chosen people to maintain right worship. This is not a mandate focused on other groups.

MAGA’s interpretation requires an inversion of the text by reassigning the burden of wickedness away from the self and onto politically expedient out-groups.

How does MAGA come to understand wickedness, and why reactions to those MAGA perceives as wicked so visceral? In Part 2, we’ll explore how understanding disgust helps us see the ways MAGA conceives wickedness.

From time to time, I’ll get asked, “What’s contextual theology?” I’ve realized that it’s not always an easy question to answer, and in part, that’s because the average church person isn’t even really sure what theology is, or how it works as a discipline.

So, before we can truly describe what contextual theology is, we have to make it clear what theology is (and what it isn’t).

what is theology?

I used to teach a general education, college level introductory theology class for a private Christian university. Many students at this university weren’t Christian, and many of the Christian students at the university came from diverse denominational backgrounds that spanned Catholic, Baptist, non-denominational, and even the descendants of the Charles Parham revivals in Topeka (the antecedent of the Azusa Revivals), and we all came together in a historically Quaker setting. My theology class satisfied a general education requirement, and so my theology class contained people who cared a lot about their Christian faith and people who had absolutely no Christian faith, and people who had competing views on what constituted the Christian faith.

I really could not assume what anyone knew or believed about Christianity, and we had to start from scratch.

At its most basic, theology is the study of what Christians believe.2 More eloquently, it’s faith seeking understanding.

Theology is not biblical studies. Biblical studies is essentially3 the study of the Bible itself, and it’s a whole field of study that encompasses language study, history, literature, and more.

While theology uses the Bible as a source, the Bible isn’t the only source theologians use. This is often alarming to people who are studying theology for the very first time. Even your favorite sola Scriptura theologian, if you have one of those, has theological sources apart from the Bible. There are different ways to talk about these sources of theology, but for the sake of clarity, I’m going to use what’s often labeled the "Wesleyan Quadrilateral.” The Wesleyan Quadrilateral names four “sources” of theological reflection: the Bible, tradition, reason, and experience.

The Bible seems obvious. Theologians4 use the Bible as a source to understand what we believe about God. Some would say that the Bible is the “norming norm” of Christian theology. There are some who’d like to say, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” which sounds confident, but isn’t very reflective. Unless you’re a native Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek speaker, you’ve never experienced the Bible apart from the very human act of interpretation. Your understanding of the Bible is mediated by translation, which is an interpretive act. Interpretation is part of every communication process. So what do we do about the fact that we don’t always agree on interpretation?

Tradition steps in to help us here.5 Essentially, it’s the affirmation that we don’t just get to make this stuff up and we stand on the shoulders of 2,000 years of Christian history and reflection. Everyone, including the non-denominational church down the street, is dependent on tradition. First and foremost, it was the reflection and work of early Christians that put the Bible together for us. Second, it’s the reflective activity of early Christians in the first several hundred years that help us understand what we confidently assert about God and Jesus: that God is triune, and that Jesus is fully God and fully human. We never see either of those doctrines explicitly stated in the Bible, though we can infer them from the Bible. Tradition helps us navigate what we believe when our interpretations on the Bible may vary, and it’s what helps us when someone’s interpretation of the Bible is completely off the rails.

Reason as a source for theology refers to how we can logically think through our theology. We use reason to make sure that our theology is coherent and consistent.

Experience as a source includes how we experience God’s activity in our lives today and how that shapes and informs what we believe. Generally this source has classically focused on how our religious experiences shape our theology.

Different groups of Christians will use those sources in different configurations, but theology is a reflective activity on those sources to navigate questions of belief. These questions have a broad and vast range, and the answers to these questions can be significant for shaping what we believe and how we live our faith both as individuals and communities.

Because this question helpfully shows the way Christians process theology in different ways, it’s helpful to think through the varied responses to a very grim question: What happens if and when children die; surely God doesn’t send them to hell, so what happens?

If you’re a confessionalist (meaning people need to make a decision to accept/follow Jesus), then you might believe in something called ‘the age of accountability,’ or that God doesn’t condemn children before they’re able to make a rational choice to follow Jesus. That’s not anywhere in the Bible, so these Christians use reason to process an answer based on what the Bible teaches us about God’s character.

Or you might think infant baptism is the solution to this problem. You might use tradition, or teachings developed by the Church over centuries, to resolve this tension. Babies are born guilty of sin, but if God can cover them with grace through baptism (a sacramental view), then they won’t be condemned because God’s grace will have covered them in baptism.6

so what’s contextual theology?

Contextual theology is concerned about the context and how it and theology play a role in shaping each other. The context is a whole host of things - culture, economics, race, gender, language, ideology - that shapes people and what they believe about God.

One contextual theologian, Clarence Sedmak, said it this way:

theology is always done with a backpack. And in this backpack, we find all the things that our family and friends, our culture and tradition, our training and experience have packed for us. We have packed only a few things ourselves. We hardly know about all the things we carry. No question. It is a mess. Our backpack is full of things we do not use and it lacks other things we need. It contains Proverbs we’ve heard, the books we’ve read, our memories of people and encounters and experiences, and our favorite words and ideas. No two theologians have the same backpack.

Contextual theology is, at its most reductionist, an attempt to study the contents of the backpack, either at the individual level, or at a broader cultural level; from there it moves on to ask how the Gospel of Jesus Christ can be best represented to these people who have filled their backpacks with these sorts of things.

One Catholic theologian, Stephen Bevans, talks about how it’s easy to think about theology as some sort of objective science, like chemistry or physics, with some unchanging tradition and reading of the Bible, but really all theology, as a human activity, is done within and through the framework of culture. Early Christians used Greek philosophical categories to make sense of Christ’s divinity and humanity; they did theology out of their Greek cultural framework.

Doing theology contextually doesn’t mean that we throw out what we’ve inherited from thousands of years of Christian reflection.

Bevans writes:

Doing theology contextually means doing theology in a way that takes into account two things. First, it takes into account the faith experience of the past that is recorded in scriptures and kept alive, preserved, defended - and perhaps even neglected or suppressed - in tradition …

Second, contextual theology takes into account the experience of the present, the context.

We do contextual theology to help the Good News continue to make sense - or to make sense for the very first time - in a context, even as that context continues to change.

Contextual theology was born primarily out of missionary7 and global church concerns, but it’s important to think contextually about theology in every context because contexts are always changing, and with that change new theological questions arise, while also taking seriously the ways that culture shapes how and what people believe.

Contextual theologians focus on learning to pay attention and listen to a context. They learn to ask good questions of people and about culture so they can study the contents of a context’s ‘backpack’ with the ultimate goal of continually incarnating the Good News of Jesus in every time and place.

You can read about some of my initial forays into thinking through this here.

Over the past year or two, I’ve experienced God through dreams and prophetic words and discerning ministry of others in some astounding and amazing ways. I can’t always explain what’s going on in these instances, but God is good, and I’m thankful that I still get to be surprised about the ways that God relates to me.

Because I grew up in a modernist, sort of secular, Southern Baptist cessationist framework, this post feels vulnerable to write, but feels important to put out regardless, even if it isn’t coming on Pentecost Sunday like I’d originally planned.

So we’ll rip off the band-aid at the beginning, and then I’ll work on the theology behind my experiences.

I started praying in tongues on Maundy Thursday.

This doesn’t make me special. It’s a gift, a grace from God, and it surprised me just as much as it’s likely surprising the Baptists I minister to. I don’t write this to brag, like I’ve achieved some extra-special spirituality.

Nor am I writing this because I think what happened at Pentecost in Acts is an experience primarily for individuals. Pentecost is a global reality, like Frank Macchia says, “Pentecost is the culminating event of Christ’s identity and mission, because he is to baptize in the Spirit and fire, as John the Baptist announced.”1

God can encounter us in new (to us) ways though.

I’ve spent the last couple of years in the company of charismatics and Pentecostals who I’ve come to deeply respect, and they pushed me to read Paul again, and I came to realize that this ‘praying in the Spirit’ that Paul references is something Paul wanted for all believers, which is not to say that every Spirit-filled follower of Jesus will pray/speak in tongues/the Spirit. But according to 1 Corinthians 14, I couldn’t discourage it.

Maundy Thursday I was in a time of worship with my colleagues in our sanctuary. We had spread out to worship, and then to pray. The day before, I had spent time talking on the phone with a dear friend who had received an image from God for me that involved me letting go. I was praying about that image as we were worshipping. Before I knew it, my mouth had started moving and making sounds I didn’t understand. It was automatic. I pride myself on being a rational person, and was delightedly surprised that this had happened. I felt a deep connection with God in that time. As we were directed to pray for our church leading up to Easter, I continued to pray in the Spirit. Some other things happened in that time that I don’t feel are mine to share, but it was an amazing time with God.

I’ve prayed in the Spirit a few times off and on since then, and I continue to be bewildered in the best way that God has done this to me.

Coming from my Baptist2 framework, I needed to grow a theology that could catch up with what I’d experienced.

Some books I’d already that had been helpful to me are ones I’d recommend to anyone (The Familiar Stranger, How to Hear God ). I read John Wimber’s writings on praying in the Spirit. For those, like me, who were (or are) largely unfamiliar with what this is, Wimber writes:

Studying through 1 Corinthians 14, you’ll discover that praying in the Spirit is a way of communicating and edifying yourself in an intimate connection with God. Scripture says, “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6:18a). Paul, here, is saying that we should pray in a spiritual language as well as pray under the anointing and the initiation of the Holy Spirit …

Now, I have found there is a fascinating relationship between praying in the Spirit and the revelation of God. There are times when God reveals to me things he wants to change or bring to pass in my own development, as well as my loved ones. As I pray in the Spirit, I fix my mind on needs of people and their situations, and I pray all that is in my mind and heart. Then, when I have exhausted all I know to pray about, I’ll begin praying in the Spirit again, fixing the person and his or her need in my mind. As I move back and forth from my spiritual language to my natural language, many times, I find revelation comes.

I also found Andrew Arndt’s post on the history of tongues, and it was a wonderful insight into this historical practice.

I’ve also been encouraged that I’m not the only person in recent Christian history who has been startled to receive a gift that they previously thought wasn’t possible. NT Wright was going through a big move and change in career, and he shares his experience of the gift:

I remember sharing this with a cousin of mine who was, in a quiet way, a charismatic Christian. And she said: “Well, it may be that God will give you a gift like the gift of tongues.” She prayed with me and, the next thing I knew, I was praying in tongues. I was very startled...this wasn’t supposed to happen!

I’ve never exercised this gift in public, and I’ve no particular desire to, but my cousin was absolutely right. Many, many times, when I have needed to pray into a particular situation, but had no idea of what I should be praying for, the use of tongues in private prayer has enabled me to hold people in situations within the love of God.3

My own experience with tongues has matched this. There have been moments, including during the initial giving of the gift (what a surprise it was) when I haven’t known what to pray, and so I’ve turned myself over to the Spirit of God, let go of my own sense of control, and prayed in the Spirit. I know that the Spirit is at work in ways beyond my own expression.

I don’t know that I have ‘more’ of the Holy Spirit than I used to. ‘More’ is a strange and difficult concept when you’re talking about the infinite. Infinity plus anything is still infinity. I am, I think I can safely say, more open to the Spirit than I used to be.

Nicky Gumbel of Alpha has given a very helpful metaphor that’s helped me wrap my own head around this. He says:

Every Christian has the Holy Spirit living within them. Paul says if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ they do not belong to Christ but not every Christian is filled with the Holy Spirit. Some Paul writes to people who are already Christians in Ephesus, so he says be filled with the Holy Spirit. The original Greek he uses there is in the present continuous tense. It means go on being filled over and over and over again, so it’s possible to be a Christian and not be filled with the Holy Spirit.

I sometimes use this analogy: we have an old gas boiler with a pilot light. [The] pilot light’s always on but when the heat comes on the boiler goes 🔥💥🔥4. And some Christians are kind of like pilot light Christians, and other Christians are kind of 🔥💥🔥 Christians and you can tell the difference when you meet one.

I don’t know that I’m a 🔥💥🔥 Christian (what an amazing, theologically technical way of putting it), but I do think that I’ve become more open to the source of power in life, which is the Holy Spirit.

Ultimately, I think this is what God wants for everyone - a life fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit. I don’t think tongues are everything, and I don’t expect everyone to do it. However, I do think God wants everyone to go on being filled by the Holy Spirit.

It hardly feels possible that seventeen years ago, I was scornfully joining summer campers in dancing the “Hoedown Throwdown” week after week while working as a summer camp counselor.

It was easy to mock.

But Hannah Montana is twenty, and I’m now a father of young girls. Will they watch Hannah Montana? Maybe, or maybe not, but I don’t scoff at the joy of young girls like I did in my late adolescence or early adulthood. Cynical parenting doesn’t seem like the correct course of action.

It’s easy to poke, to prod, to deride. I’ve been there, and not just regarding Hannah Montana.

It’s easy for me (and based on what I read and hear in various sectors) to cynically poke at targets ranging from contemporary worship music to the spiritual experiences of others.

We maintain distance, and probably a false sense of safety, by hiding under cynicism’s mask. From our constructed cynical divides it’s hard to experience joy.

Cynicism is hardly conducive to a joyful life.

When I look at Jesus, I never detect cynicism. He takes ridiculous people, garish people, boorish people, laughable people seriously, and in taking them seriously, he loves them. He went to parties others avoided. He went for proximity.

Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin from The Idiot, a literary antithesis to cynicism, said it well:

“Do you know I don't know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it? How can one talk to a man and not be happy in loving him! Oh, it's only that I'm not able to express it...And what beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most hopeless man must feel to be beautiful! Look at a child! Look at God's sunrise! Look at the grass, how it grows! Look at the eyes that gaze at you and love you!”

Cynicism misses the joyful beauty of the world.

Dallas Willard once talked about how he realized that God must be the most joyful being. Willard was awed by the amazing splendor of creation, and got an inkling of what God’s experience must be like. He wrote:

“Gradually there crept into my mind the realization that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being. It is perhaps strange to say, but suddenly I was extremely happy for God and thought I had some sense of what an infinitely joyous consciousness he is and of what it might have meant for him to look at his creation and find it “very good.”

“Now,” you might say, “that’s great for nature, but people make bad art, ridiculous worship songs, falsify religious experiences and more!”

But my kids make ‘bad’ art for me all the time, and I love it. One of my most treasured possessions is a card covered in the scratchy, stilted handwriting of my kindergartner that reads, “Dad, did you know God loves you?”

I love the drawings my girls make of various animals dressed in increasingly ridiculous clothing. It’s earnest. It’s joyful.

As my daughter reminded me yesterday, God still sees me as a kid (and you too, I assume), and my earnest attempts at creating something good, beautiful, and true must bring God staggering amounts of delight, great tidal waves of joy.

My bad, but earnest, writing must bring God joy, just as my daughter learning to plink a new song on the piano brings me joy.

Cynicism, veiled as critique, doesn’t change the significance of what a person has created. It doesn’t change the way God sees earnest attempts at goodness and beauty.

One of Pixar’s greatest characters once waxed poetic and said:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.

So rejoice in people’s attempts at creating. Resist the urge to cynically critique. The work itself is probably more valuable than your criticism. Put down your cynical armor and let joy sweep you off your feet.

When we moved into our home here some years ago, I set out to beautify our flower beds, which had been taken over by runners from our bermuda grass. The runners had punctured and enmeshed a plastic layer of weed block fabric. The weed block had effectively made sure nothing good could grow, but it was easily taken over by pernicious bermuda grass.

In the garden of my soul, cynicism is plastic weed block that will cut off the growth of the Fruit of the Spirit. Joy can’t grow in your soul when it’s covered in cynicism’s false protection.

Cynicism, in a particular way, may have a beneficial use, but it comes in the unmasking of falsehood.

Žižek writes about this in The Sublime Object of Ideology. Slavoj Žižek borrows a distinction from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and parses out kynicism from cynicism.

For Sloterdijk kynicism “represents the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm: the classical kynical procedure is to confront the pathetic phrases of the ruling official ideology—its solemn, grave tonality—with everyday banality and to hold them up to ridicule, thus exposing behind the sublime noblesse of the ideological phrases the egotistical interests, the violence, the brutal claims to power. This procedure, then, is more pragmatic than argumentative: it subverts the official proposition by confronting it with the situation of its enunciation; it proceeds ad hominem (for example when a politician preaches the duty of patriotic sacrifice, kynicism exposes the personal gain he is making from the sacrifice of others).”

In other words, kynicism points out that the Emperor has no clothes. It takes the position of the poem from The Book of Odes, a collection of ancient Chinese poetry. The poem “Big Rat” demonstrates the role of kynicism - the use of ironic, sarcastic subversion to unmask powers and ideologies. “Big Rat” decries the greed of over taxation by comparing an ancient Chinese emperor to, well, large rats.

Kynicism is the attitude of Ecclesiastes, or the ironic nature of Jonah.

Cynicism, for Žižek, acknowledges the distance between reality and its ideological mask, but leaves the mask unchallenged. It maintains the ideological mask for the sake of power.

Kynicism seems to be the unmasking and unmaking of ideology through humor and irony. It’s embodied in “metamodernism,” which balances post-modernism’s cynical doubt with modernism’s hope for the future.

It allows me to joyfully dance the “Hoedown Throwdown” with my girls while the world burns. It lets me sing a worship song others might find silly or irritating. It allows me to recognize that while something may be worthy of critique, it can still be utterly delightful.

It’s the attitude so richly described in Andy Squyers’ “Miracle Service,” which I’ll close this piece with:

Let’s work on heading out of our cynical eras together.

My 20th Century British literature class introduced me to the incredibly grim poetry that developed during and after the wake of two world wars, and William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” has lines that have haunted my imagination for over a decade (as good poetry often can, and does).

Composed following World War I, Yeats mourned the destabilization of “Christian” culture, and its replacement by a new bloodthirsty era. Here’s the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For Yeats, there is no hopeful end; he saw the anarchical, blood-dimmed tide washing over the world as everything that history had been achieved wobbled off center. Kingsnorth, as it turns out, isn’t the first person to observe a loss of Christian influence from the center of culture.

Like Yeats, I think it can be all to easy for Christians to view history in two ways:

1. Someone has been anointed to use the cause of violence to bring about the return of Jesus

2. We’re bewildered at the events happening in the world and like Yeats, feel that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

Ultimately, both views hinge on the same faulty theological premise: the ending is up to us. This faulty eschatological1 premise holds that ending is dependent on human agency. It’s a dependence on human agency if we believe that there’s some set of events of circumstances that we can do that cause God to bring about the end, and it’s a total belief in human agency if we believe that we’ve screwed things up so much that they’re hopeless.

Before I studied eschatology for the first time in college, it never seemed like the most important section of theological thought. Eschatology was the weird, cryptic territory of the Left Behind series, but it wasn’t an area of theology that had consequences for daily life.

Bad eschatology has bad consequences. Bad eschatology isn’t just misinformed; it’s destructive.

You can justify all sorts of terrible things under the guise of being anointed by God to usher in the end times, and you can become despondent without hope in God’s glorious future. You can think this earth is disposable, or you can anticipate its coming renewal in the return of Jesus.

While I was reading Yeats (and other bleak 20th century British poetry), I was also enrolled in a theology elective called “Church and Last Things.” My theology professor exposed me to two theological figures that reconfigured my views of the eschaton: Stanley Grenz and Jürgen Moltmann.

I encountered Grenz first. He helped me understand that eschatology orients our theology in such a way that it reorients everything. Eschatology shapes how we understand identity, salvation, the work of the Spirit, and more. For example, just read how eschatology shapes Grenz’s view of the church:

What the church is, in short, is determined by what the church is destined to become. And the church is directed toward the destiny God intends for humankind—participation in the consummated reign of God … the dynamic understanding suggests that the church is constituted by its future destiny as related to God’s reign. Believers enter into covenant with God and each other so that they might be an eschatological community, the fellowship that pioneers in the present the principles that characterize the reign of God. Hence, they point the way toward the kingdom.

What we think about how things end is just some incidental tagline at the end of a faith statement; our eschatology defines our relationships to one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, as well as how we relate to the world. As God’s covenant people living in the world, we already live as part of God’s eschatological community, not as agents in Yeats’ anarchist, blood-dimmed tide ushering in some end through violent means, but as people who pre-figuratively live a Revelation 21 vision of God dwelling with us in this world.

And this is what Jürgen Moltmann was getting at in Theology of Hope. He wrote:

It is not objective time that brings the progress. It is not human activity that makes the future. It is the inner necessity of the Christ event itself; the tendency of which is finally to bring out in all things the eternal life latent in him and the justice of God latent in him.

In short, who we are (or who we should be) as the people of God is shaped and pulled by the gravity of God’s good future. We know how the story ends, and as it turns out, that ending is like yeast working through dough2. This present age that feels so off-kilter has already been infected with God’s good future.

Hope isn’t some abstract wish for a better tomorrow; it’s a revolutionizing force for God’s people calling and empowering us to live differently today. This is what Moltmann is getting at when he says:

Christianity is eschatology, is hope, looking forward and moving forward, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present.

Hope in God’s good future calls us to live as God’s good people today.

As I studied the church and last things, my professor also exposed us to Stanley Hauerwas, and against all good writing advice, I’ll end on an extended Hauerwas quote:

The Sermon on the Mount begins as an announcement of something that God has done to change the history of the world. In the Sermon we see the end of history, an ending made most explicit and visible in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, Christians begin our ethics, not with anxious, self-serving questions of what we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right, because, in Christ, God has already made history come out right. The Sermon is the inauguration manifesto of how the world looks now that God in Christ has taken matters in hand. And essential to the way that God has taken matters in hand is an invitation to all people to become citizens of a new Kingdom, a messianic community where the world God is creating takes visible, practical form.

Nowhere in the Sermon are believers encouraged to abandon this life or the world. Rather, we are to see the world aright, to grab hold of the world wisely. The world is a place of trial and testing for disciples, but also a place of great opportunity for serving “the least of these” and thereby serving Christ. The urgency of the Sermon is not merely an urgency of time; it is a moral urgency brought about by our realization that an old world is passing away and we are the firstfruits of God’s new creation.

The eschatological context helps explain why the Sermon begins, not by telling us what to do, but by helping us to see. We can only act within that world which we see. So the primary ethical question is not, What ought I now to do? but rather, How does the world really look?

In God’s Kingdom, conflict is not the end.

Acts 15:36-41 tells us of a time when a conflict was so sharp, Paul and Barnabas ended up parting ways.

³⁶ Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” ³⁷ Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, ³⁸ but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. ³⁹ They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, ⁴⁰ but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the believers to the grace of the Lord. ⁴¹ He went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

To make sense of this breakup, we have to go back through the pages of Acts to understand how these people came together and what they mean to one another.

Barnabas

Barnabas is the first of these guys mentioned in Acts. We first meet him in Acts 4, where we learn that Barnabas is actually just his nickname – it means “son of encouragement” and his real name is Joseph. He’s a Levite – a Jew from the priestly tribe, but he’s also a Hellenistic Jew – he grew up in Cyprus around Greek speakers and Greek culture. We also know that he’s generous and faithful because we learn in Acts 4:36 that he’s sold a field that he owns, and he places the money from the sale at the apostles’ feet.

Saul

We first meet Saul (the Hebrew version of the Greek name Paul) in Acts 8:1 when we learn that he approved of the Jews who killed Stephen for following Jesus, and in Acts 9, Saul encounters the Resurrected Jesus on his way to Damascus, where he’s on his way to hunt down more Christians to kill them. Saul gets blinded and healed, and then when he tries to join the Christians in Jerusalem, they’re too scared to let him in. But one guy is willing to take a chance on Saul. Any guesses on who? Barnabas. Barnabas takes Saul under his wing and brings him into the community.

Barnabas & Saul

In Acts 11, something brand new that’s never been done before happens: Jews from Cyprus and Cyrene go to Antioch and start to tell Gentiles about Jesus. The Jews from Jerusalem are curious about what’s going on in Antioch, so they send their favorite Cyprian Jew to check it out – Barnabas. Barnabas goes to Antioch, and thinks, “This is AMAZING. You know who needs to be here? SAUL.” So Barnabas goes to Tarsus to find Saul, and brings him to Antioch, a journey that’s roughly five to six days one way. After a year of Paul and Barnabas teaching together in Antioch, the new Gentile believers in Antioch receive a word from the Lord that a famine is going to hit Jerusalem, so they send the Jewish Christians there money, and they send Paul and Barnabas to give it.

John Mark

In Acts 12, we read a story of Peter’s miraculous escape from prison, and he goes to the church gathered in Mary, the mother of John, also called Mark, or John Mark. That’s our first encounter with John Mark, who is related to both Peter and Barnabas in some way (Barnabas’ ‘cousin’ and Peter’s ‘nephew’).

Paul, Barnabas, and John Mark

We turn to Acts 13, where Paul and Barnabas are back from delivering the gift to Jerusalem, and they’ve brough John Mark with them to Antioch. The church there prays over Saul and Barnabas, and sends them off, and they bring John Mark along. In Acts 13:13, we learn that John Mark leaves Paul and Barnabas, and returns to Jerusalem. At the end of Acts 14, we learn that Paul and Barnabas return to Antioch.

To summarize what we’ve learned about all these guys:

Barnabas is a generous, encouraging guy who is willing to take chances on people no one else will. He commends Saul to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem when no one else is willing to let Saul in, and he recognizes how God has gifted Saul and realizes how important he can be to what is going on in Antioch. Barnabas sees people for who they are, and regardless of what they may have done before, is willing to take a chance on them.

Saul is passionate. Saul is brilliant. Saul is committed. He’s passionate about making sure the Good News of Jesus makes it as far as it can, and he recognizes that this work takes commitment. He’s all in.

(John) Mark is related to both Peter and Barnabas. He’s young, and for whatever reason, he ditches Paul and Barnabas on their mission.

Now let’s come back to Acts 15:36-41

This is one of those breakups where it’s hard to tell who was right and who was wrong, and tricky part is that Acts doesn’t tell us the entire story about everything that comes next.

As we read this though, let’s keep in mind In God’s Kingdom, conflict is not the end.

Paul is serious about the work; sharing the Good News in a hostile environment takes dedication and unwavering dependence on God. In Paul’s eyes, John Mark is a deserter who can’t handle what’s coming. Barnabas is serious about people. He’s willing to take John Mark under his wing just like he took Paul under his wing.

At the end of the day, the passage doesn’t really let us know who’s right and who’s wrong, and to get stuck on who’s right and who’s wrong in this situation is a bit of an adventure in missing the point.

Gospel work and people are both incredibly important. Paul and Barnabas both have great priorities.

And at the end of the day, conflicts over good things are some of the hardest conflicts we ever navigate in relationships. Conflict is never easy, but it’s so much harder when we have sharp disagreements over two good things. Barnabas and Paul can’t agree, despite the fact that they’re both Spirit-filled, God-fearing people, and they part ways as friends who just can’t get on the same page. Paul leaves Barna

BUT because God is good, in God’s Kingdom, conflict is not the end.

Because of this disagreement, Paul takes Silas, and they leave behind the guy who once commended Paul, but they’re now commended now by the church to go through Syria and Cilicia, while Barnabas and John Mark head to Barnabas’ home island of Cyprus.

So what do we do when we disagree, maybe even strongly, with someone, especially when we’re both followers of Jesus, and it’s hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong – and maybe it’s neither. Paul cared about the mission, and Barnabas cared about giving someone a second chance – both great things.

When it comes to disagreement we need to remember a few principles when we think about conflict in God’s Kingdom:

1. Jesus tells us that the world will know that we are His followers by our love for one another (John 13:35). Love should be our disposition towards one another, and as my good friend Connor says, “Love is desiring the best for someone and working to make it happen.” Love has to define all of our actions.

2. Revenge isn’t an option for God’s people. Even if we’re hurt in the process of conflict, responding with anger or wrath or spite isn’t something God’s people get to do. Paul himself writes in Romans, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends” (Romans 12:17-19).

3. Forgive freely and readily. Again Paul writes, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).

Sometimes, even if we’re loving one another, forgiving one another, and acting with compassion for one another, it’s still time to part ways. The Bible doesn’t tell us that Paul and Barnabas are wrong to split up, even though I’m sure it was incredibly painful for both of them. These are two dear friends who’d gone through so much together, but who now face disagreement to the point of breaking up.

When that happens, we’ve got to lean on another thing that Paul wrote:

And if we trust that everyone is doing their best to follow Jesus, to be compassionate and forgiving, and to work towards everyone’s good, and we still have to part ways, then we know that God is going to work some good out of it, even if it hurts to go our separate ways. And we can trust God, because In God’s Kingdom, conflict is not the end.

So how do you know if it’s time to part ways? Slow down. Listen to wisdom. Seek God in prayer.

Now, we if only looked at Acts, it’d be easy to come away thinking that this is it for Paul, Barnabas, John Mark and Silas. They don’t come together again throughout the rest of Acts, but Acts isn’t the full story. The Church kept moving and God kept working.

So to show you how God “works everything for the good,” and how this conflict in Acts 15 isn’t an ending, we’re going to have to turn to some other parts of the New Testament.

We know from the rest of Acts that Paul goes on to share the Good News, start churches, and have all sorts of wild, Holy Spirit adventures. His story is easy to trace, and we know that Acts ends with Paul’s first Roman imprisonment with him under house arrest in Rome for two years, where “Paul stayed in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ – with all boldness and without hindrance!”

Barnabas and John Mark are going to take a bit more detective work from us, but the trail is there.

Paul only references Barnabas one other time in his letters. In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul makes an argument to the Corinthians that he and Barnabas should have the same privileges as the Apostles when the Corinthians cast doubt on whether or not Paul is an Apostle. Paul writes to them:

“Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord? Even though I may not be an apostle to others, surely I am to you! For you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord. This is my defense to those who sit in judgment on me. Don’t we have the right to food and drink? Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas (Peter)? Or is it only I and Barnabas who lack the right to not work for a living?”

Even after Paul and Barnabas part ways, Paul continues to think of Barnabas as a coworker in the Gospel, and even considers him to be on the same apostolic mission has him. Paul doesn’t think less of Barnabas after they part ways.

That’s the only mention we get of Barnabas through the rest of the New Testament, and Church Tradition, or the writings and stories of things that happened after the Bible are fuzzy. He was either martyred on the island of Cyprus, his home region, or he went on to convert Clement, one of the early Christian theologians.

John Mark’s story though, has lots of threads for us to chase.

We should PRAISE GOD that Barnabas stuck with John Mark and gave him a second chance, because it’s clear that it changed John Mark’s trajectory.

When Paul was imprisoned in Rome for the first time, he wrote a couple of letters. The first is Philemon.

At the end of Philemon, Paul sends greetings to Philemon from Epaphras, who is in prison with him, but also from some of his coworkers in the Gospel, one of whom is Mark.

At some point during Paul’s house arrest, John Mark has come back to him, and is working alongside to share the Good News of Jesus. John Mark the deserter has now traveled from Jerusalem to Rome to partner with Paul in Gospel work.

Colossians confirms this. We can read in Colossians 4:10. Paul sends greetings to Colossae on behalf of Mark, and tells the Colossians to be ready to receive and welcome John Mark if he goes there. Paul was ready and willing to send John Mark!

We also know that around the time that Colossians and Philemon are being written during Paul’s house arrest, Peter is also in prison in Rome, and Mark is with Peter. In 1 Peter 5:13, Peter sends greetings to the churches from Mark, whom he calls a son. Peter and John Mark shared a close relationship, and were probably related in some way.

Sometime later, Paul is arrested again, but this time he’s not put under house arrest with some freedom. He’s put in the Mamertine Prison under harsh conditions, and he knows that he’s going to be killed. It’s in these harsh prison conditions that Paul writes one of his most heartfelt letters to Timothy. At the end of 2 Timothy, Paul tells Timothy to come quickly to him – he knows he doesn’t have a lot of time left, and only Luke is still with him. Paul writes about his isolation:

“Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry.”

Mark has gone from a flaky deserter that Paul didn’t trust to continue on God’s mission to one of Paul’s dearest coworkers – so useful to him in ministry that he wants Mark to join him at the end of his life and in his harshest imprisonment.

But that’s still not the end of John Mark’s story. John Mark went on to become the first writer of one of the four Gospels that now bears his name: Mark.

Isn’t it wonderful that in God’s Kingdom, conflict and disagreement aren’t the end?

What’s God’s invitation to us as His people in this passage?

For all of us, I think there’s a challenge here to approach conflict and disagreement differently – starting from a position of love, compassion, and forgiveness. As we see in Acts 15, that doesn’t mean that we abandon conviction, but it does change how we handle it. I don’t think Paul had any way of knowing who John Mark would become, or how important he would become to Paul, but I’d like to think that as he sat in prison at the end of his life, asking for John Mark to join him, that he looked back at that disagreement with Barnabas and THANKED GOD that Barnabas stuck to his conviction that John Mark deserved another chance, and laughed at how wrong he’d been about John Mark. So be convicted, but be open to being wrong about your focus and priorities.

I think there’s also an invitation here for us to take the long view – God’s Kingdom and purposes don’t work at our speed or on our timelines. Sometimes parting ways is good so something new can grow and take root. Throughout the rest of this series, you’ll learn about all the wonderful things God did through Paul, Silas, and Timothy. And we’ve learned about all the wonderful things that God did through John Mark. Sometimes our paths go in different directions, and that’s ok, because it’s in this parting of ways that God makes room for new things to emerge. But if you do part ways, do so out of an abundance of patience, love, and forgiveness – don’t part ways out of spite or ill-will, but if you do, be open to God proving you wrong.

This is a mistake, at least according to William Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry.

In his book’s introduction, Cavanaugh cites David Foster Wallace’s commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005:

[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.1

Cavanaugh’s main argument is that perhaps the West isn’t as secular as we thought it might be. His book pushes back on Charles Taylor’s magnificent tome A Secular Age; are we truly disenchanted - have we given up on worship, spirituality, or magic? Cavanaugh thinks not. We’re not disenchanted, he says, but misenchanted. We’re still worshipping, but we often do it badly, and subsequently, what we’ve come to worship is devouring us.

Paul Kingsnorth makes such an argument in Against the Machine. He writes, “The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died.”2 Kingsnorth advances his argument:

The dethroning of the sovereign - Christ - who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards … Cut loose in the post-modern present, with no centre, no truth and no direction, we have not become independent-minded responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the power of money, and worshippers of the self.3

Let’s be clear: Kingsnorth isn’t arguing for a return of Christendom Europe - there is no going back. This is a recognition that our culture experienced a power vacuum when religion was no longer the center, and money and power were all too happy to fill the void.

We live under a dark storm of idolatry, or the ‘principalities and powers’ that Paul writes about in places like Ephesians 6:12. Idolatry is alive and well in American culture. Lest you think thinkers like Cavanaugh or Kingsnorth are alarmist onto something new, the Catholic theologian Gerhard Lohfink noticed the devouring and destructive powers at work in the 1980s. He writes, “our world at present is coming ever closer to its own definitive self-destruction and [that] it evidently does not have the strength to question or abandon its social construction, one based chiefly on domination and mistrust.”4

It’s easy enough to mistakenly believe that idolatry is simply a matter of wrong or misinformed beliefs, but Cavanaugh follows Max Weber’s logic that “humans are oppressed by gods of their own making,” and points out this is how the Bible tends to understand idolatry. People make something - whether it’s an idea, an object, or something else, imbue it with power, and then it comes to have power over us.

Think about money as an example. Money is a human invention. We conceptualized it, created it, imbued it with value and meaning to the point that it became powerful, and now it has power over us. That’s not a new reality, either. Jesus points out in Matthew 6:24 that we can serve God or money. Jesus recognizes that money is one of the Principalities and Powers over human lives, and we can’t serve it AND serve God. Out of this, Jesus tells his followers to organize their lives in a different way - one free from worry. Money is an anxiety and worry inducing Power, propelling us to accumulate to build our own false sense of security (or to construct an identity through consumerism), but Jesus says not to serve this Power, and instead says:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?5

You can’t serve God and money, so don’t worry about whether or not you’ve got enough. Your worry is a product of life under the power of an idol, and Jesus has victoriously come to free us from those powers.

Idols are Powers that warp the organization of human life - in Wallace’s words, they devour us, and in Kingsnorth’s words, they enslave us.

Cavanaugh helps us understand that worshipping an idol like money doesn’t mean that we necessarily put it on an altar and sing praise songs to it. Instead, idolatry is a reorganization of our lives around it. He writes:

The key question underlying the matter of idolatry is not what people believe about the metaphysical status of gods but how people organize their lives and loves around what they worship. Idolatry is primarily a matter not of error but of betrayal ... The main difficulty with idolatry is not metaphysical error but disloyalty. Idolatry is not primarily stupidity but betrayal. To be clear, this does not mean beliefs are irrelevant. It means rather that belief and behavior are inseparable, such that what people actually believe is more accurately reflected by what they do than by what they claim to believe.6

Cavanaugh is also gracious and recognizes that the organization of human life around idols exists on a continuum, not a binary. I live in a world with money, and I will have to navigate my relationship with it. The idolatry of money though exists on a continuum of worrying about having enough to full-blown love of money, which is the root of all evil and causes individuals to dominate and exploit people and creation for financial gain.7

Humans create systems, give them power, and then they dominate us as false gods. We live in an idolatrous age, under a dark, turbulent storm of idolatrous power.

Cavanaugh’s main examples of idolatry in contemporary society are nationalism and consumerism.

If consumerism invites us to the unsplendid worship of self-gratification, nationalism invites us to a splendid, but misguided, worship of sacrifice.

Cavanaugh writes:

This is the most splendid type of devotion, the willingness to kill and, if necessary, die for the flag. The nation cannot live without it. Allowing God to keep our patriotism in check is a threat to the nation. Jesus offered to die for you; soldiers are trained to kill for you. This is not a small difference. Willingness to allow the Sermon on the Mount to override the demands of military preparedness and action is ultimately intolerable to the nation. The more splendid devotion to the nation becomes, the more it approaches the realm of what is called “religion” and therefore idolatry. It is precisely the moral seriousness of this type of devotion that makes it dangerous.8

Think about the ways in which violence is increasingly enacted and called for in the United States in defense of a vision of an us vs. them national identity. It’s all too easy to pick on one side as worse. There are actions on the Right for violent and extreme treatment of immigrants and protestors, but the political Left is not exempt from this critique, as increasingly people on the political left believe that violence is justified and may be necessary ‘to get the country back on track.’9 For Democrats, this is an 11-point increase from April 2025 to October 2025. Anecdotally, I’ve seen young, politically Left people from historic peace-traditions of Christianity remark that the time for violent action has come. This is the same idolatrous power of nationalism at work, reorganizing, corrupting, and devouring human life. Nationalism isn’t exclusive to one brand of politics or style of governance, but it thrives by establishing antagonisms between racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, or ideological groups.

Cavanaugh points out that Christians have to be a different kind of people - we have to repent of nationalism and the violence it calls us to because we follow a paradoxical God whose power operates out of weakness. He says:

To worship such a paradoxical God is to cultivate the virtues that make nationalism splendid - the self-sacrifical devotion to something larger than oneself - but to direct them toward the service of the true God, the one who absorbed the violence of the world and inaugurated a new type of kingdom, one of reconciliation, justice, and peace.10

These are the themes is currently exploring in his series of essays on Dave Fitch’s book The End of Evangelicalism, analyzing the idolatrous powers of the world through the lens of ideology. I love the way Gino phrases this:

Rather than catch phrases that no longer mean anything, but hold onto the nothing as something, what Fitch wants “to explore, with Žižek’s help, is how evangelicalism in particular has become this kind of ‘empty politic,’ driven by other things than our life together in Christ for the world.” (xxiii) Instead, Fitch wants to pursue “‘a politic of fullness,’ where our everyday way of life is centered (by these beliefs) into a participation in the Incarnate Christ and the life we have with the triune God in the world in and through him.” (xxiii)11

We need more than ourselves to save us from the principalities and powers at work in this world, and without Christ, this becomes a rather pessimistic picture of the human condition. Life under this idolatrous storm is dark, but as Isaiah and John remind us, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light, and this light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. The antidote to idolatry is incarnation.

This is how Cavanaugh ends his book:

Rather than human reaching up to grasp at divinity - and becoming oppressed by gods of our own making - the true God descends and pours Godself out into creation in order to invite all into participation in divine life. All creation is a sacrament of God’s presence without reducing God to creation … We are called not just to celebrate rituals but to live sacramentally, to practice the love of God we find in created things and in our unmanageable encounters with other people. Healing idolatry is not so much a matter of self-discipline, of getting our worship right, or coloring within the lines … healing idolatry is finally an act of grateful reception, a joyful response to being loved into being by God.12

The way out is Jesus, who breaks through the idolatrous storm to come walk with us and to show us a better way. Dave Fitch wrote on Facebook, “The only way out is the living presence of incarnate Christ breaking the hold, discerning the way, and following it in the astounding politic of forgiveness, discernment, faithfulness, inter-relational mutuality and transformation by the Spirit. This is the church. It not only changes the way we engage politics. It changes the way we engage racism, sexuality, class, gender, etc.”13

Our call as followers of Jesus in this idolatrous age is to point to Him as the only way forward, and to live together in community as a different kind of people, resisting and rejecting the idols that are so ready to devour us. Through the power of Christ at work in His people, the ones of who have seen His light shining in the darkness and have flocked to him like moths to a flame, we live under his power in this world as a “sign to the other peoples of what God plans to do with the world as a whole.”14 We cannot show people how live free from the power of idols “unless freedom radiates” from within us; Lohfink says, “it is not possible to preach social repentance to others unless one lives in a community which takes seriously the new society as the reign of God.”15

11

Following Jesus into the Ordinary

Introduction: The Need for Sunglasses

Where Was Evangelicalism Going…

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9 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Gino Curcuruto

Dreams have become a recurring part of my walk with God. Growing up in the Baptist tradition, I haven’t possessed a full theology for how to navigate that experience or make sense of it. Sure, my Sunday school teachers taught me about Joseph’s visions of skinny cows, but I wasn’t taught how to handle dreams as a lived experience. I lacked a practical theology for how to navigate them.

For someone who has spent so much of life conducting spiritual disciplines out of my own agency, dreams are a strange form of interacting with God, because I can’t make them happen, I can’t control what they are, or even fully understand what they’re about.

As a former dream skeptic, I find myself struggling to explain how I can tell the difference between regular run-of-the-mill dreams and dreams where I sense that God is up to something.

They’re just different.

They have a different kind of clarity to them - or at least that’s how I can attempt to express it. I’ve had dreams where I’ve woken up with Scripture set to music streaming through my mind, bordering on an auditory experience that kept me from going back to sleep. In a dream a few months ago, I had an experience where a friend from another country on the other side of the world showed up as I asked for a sign in the dream, and when I woke up, I had a message from her telling me that God had instructed her to pray for me, and asking what was up.

In my experience so far, dreams don’t always provide a clear next step, and this seems to be a biblical way of experiencing dreams. Dreams seem to require a relinquishing of my own agency, and cultivating a dependency on God’s agency instead.

I returned a few weeks ago from a cohort for Northern Seminary’s Contextual Theology program, where Alan Roxburgh taught on leadership, but really taught on the tendencies for us to rely on human agency instead of God’s agency.

Each day Roxburgh had two people read through Acts 16:6-15. Before the second reading, he’d have us listen for the place that “caught us.” “What caught you?” he’d ask before dividing into groups of twos or threes to discuss where we got caught by the text. Each day and reading held new insights for us.

I kept getting caught on Paul’s dream, his response, and the events that followed.

Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

After attempting to go their own way, Paul and his companions keep getting stopped by the Holy Spirit. Finally, Paul dreams of a Macedonian man standing and begging for help.

Paul and his friends obediently follow the dream, and make their way to the region, and eventually find their way to the leading city of the region, Philippi. They spend several days inside Philippi. Up until this point, Paul et al’s strategy has been to look for the synagogue, preach their, and then move outward. For those unfamiliar with the custom of synagogues, in order to form one, ten Jewish men had to be present. The implication here is that after several days in Philippi of looking for a synagogue from which they can begin their work, they can’t find one. They take the next strategic step to find a gathering of Jewish men:

On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer.

They go and look for a prayer gathering outside the city, hoping to find a small group of Jewish men gathered on the Sabbath for prayer. They don’t find what they’re looking for.

We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God.

Instead of a group of Jewish men, they find a group of women gathered by the river. Lydia, a Gentile who worshipped God, but isn’t a full proselyte or ethnically Jewish, listens to their message.

The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

Lydia responds. She is baptized, along with everyone in her household, and then she compels Paul and his companions to come and stay in her home, implying they had to be convinced to come with her - they were still reluctant.

Lydia becomes the first convert in Europe. She forms the first European church in her home, and this church becomes one that is dear to Paul and close to his heart, something we know because of how Paul writes to them. Read Philippians 1:2-11:

I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus.

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.

I’d like to think that “the first day until now” that Paul writes about is that day on the river outside of Philippi, where he’s led to the women he was never looking for, but who become joyous first partners in Gospel ministry in Europe, women like Lydia, Euodia, and Syntyche.

The church Paul loves so dearly is the church he never intended to plant. It wasn’t the result of clever missionary strategy; it was the result of God’s agency in spite of human strategy.

There’s a mystery here. God gave Paul the dream of the man, and God led them to the woman by the river.

The dream didn’t get them on the target, but it got them in the ballpark.

The dream’s divine origins were clear enough to Paul that he and his companions moved in obedience, even though the dream didn’t come with a clear action plan.

I feel a sense of relief that even Paul can struggle to grasp the full picture of what God is up to when He speaks in dreams, because I certainly don’t understand the fullness of what God is doing when He speaks to me in mine.

Obedience seems to be the proper response though, even if there may be fits and starts and misdirection along the way. Learning to listen to God through dreams seems to be an ultimate surrender of my own agency while learning to rely on God’s, and I am grateful that the infinite God of the universe sees fit to speak with me, be patient with me, and work in and through me.

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I think one of the peculiar things about being in a doctoral program is that I often don’t read things of my own choosing, so bear in mind that this list is highly reflective of life as a student in Northern Seminary’s D.Min. in Contextual Theolgy. I’m also a parent of a middle-grade reader, and we’re in the process of introducing her to more literature, some of which I read, and some of which I don’t.

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The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

by Tyler Staton

This was voluntary reading. After gaining exposure to more charismatic streams of Christian spirituality, and beginning to experience life in those streams, I picked this book up. If you’re not an academic, this book is incredibly approachable, and I’ve found myself coming back to it over and over again throughout the course of this year. It’s helped me begin to make sense of my own deepening life and experiences in the Holy Spirit, and it’s been a tremendous help to me. I think I’ll keep coming back to it for years to come.

What started in Acts doesn’t end there. The main character holding the plot together - the Holy Spirit - hasn’t gone anywhere. The divine breath in the lungs of the early church is alive in us. If you are a follower of Jesus you have been filled with the Holy Spirit, who pours the teachings of Jesus directly into your heart and enlivens you with co-creative power for the sake of the world.

New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism

by Wes Markofski

This summer I took an ethnographic research methods class at Northern with the sociologist Mark Mulder, so much of what I read this spring was in the field of ethnography, either how-tos or actual works of ethnography. This book surprised me in a good way, and I enjoyed A) learning about Bordieu’s field theory and B) seeing it applied in an ethnographic study of multiple neo-monastic communities across North America. I’ve never forgotten hearing Shane Claiborne speak in chapel during my freshman year of college, and neo-monasticism has captivated me ever since.

The Urban Church Imagined

by Jessica Barron and Rhys Williams

This was a very well done ethnography, and it’s a gripping read. However, it grabs your attention in the way that a horrible interstate car crash grabs your attention; you just can’t look away. This book was hard to put down, because I just kept thinking, “no way… no way!” There are so many fascinating issues that this work tackles, mostly along consumer identities in congregation and the ways that identity can become a commodity. Read it, cringe, and be a better person.

How to Hear God: A Simple Guide for Normal People & How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People

by Pete Greig

Both of these books are gems, and there are a lot of great nuggets of wisdom for a deeper life with God in prayer. These aren’t academic books, so if you’re a casual reader, enjoy. I found these to be helpful, and whether you’re familiar with the work of 24/7 Prayer or not, these are excellent resources.

Impossible Creatures

by Katherine Rundell

My oldest daughter is a voracious reader whose reading level exceeds her heart level, so we’re constantly on the prowl for good reads for her. I picked this one up on an impulse for her, and read it semi-alongside her. It’s got decent world-building, intriguing and fun characters, and the characters are generally positive models.

Jesus and Community: The Social Dimensions of Faith

by Gerhard Lohfink

I picked this up as an alternate text to take the place of some books I’d already read for an upcoming class with Al Roxburgh, and WOW, it had some lines that made my jaw drop. Lohfink was a Catholic priest and scholar, and some of his insights into the New Testament and the Church were just profound.

Perhaps it is a blessing that the illusion of living in a completely Christian society has been definitively and thoroughly demolished in our day. It may sharpen our vision that the church must go its own way. Even more effective, however, may be the fact that our world at present is coming ever closer to its own definitive self-destruction and that it evidently does not have the strength to question or abandon its social construction, one based chiefly on domination and mistrust. Precisely this dreadful need should finally force Christians to show the world that an entirely different form of society would be made plausible by God. This, of course, cannot be made possible through instruction, but only through concrete action.

This quote is just one of many amazing things that Lohfink had to say.

Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unraveling: Leadership in a Changing World

by Alan Roxburgh

This was one of the assigned texts for my upcoming class with Roxburgh this January, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve seen this come up in a few of them. If you’re leading in a church or ministry, or you think about leadership in churches or ministries, I’d encourage you to check this one out.

The more the Euro-tribal churches lost touch with their story of God’s agency in the world, the more they took on the methods and techniques of this seventy-five-year story. As it comes apart, they are adrift with little sense of another story beyond what this modern culture has given us. We’re in a place we’ve never been before with few resources to address the question of what to do.

Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire

by Kathleen McShane and Elan Babchuck

This book is a profound dialogue of how the shape of empire has formed the Church’s conceptions of leadership, particularly around hierarchy and power. It’s given me a lot of food for thought in what happens when hierarchy comes to church.

The ultimate point of leadership is not to impose a single voice and vision but to collectively breathe life into a broadly shared, living body of wisdom. The most effective leader is one who knows when he or she is not necessary.

God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook: 140 Connecting Bible Stories of God’s Faithful Promises

by N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright did a children’s storybook Bible, and yes, it is as amazing as it sounds. The stories are done so well, are written at an approachable level that maintains solid biblical interpretation and theology, and even helps connect stories across the Bible, helping children see the unity of the biblical story. If you have a child or know someone with a child, and you want to get them a children’s storybook Bible, get this one.

This isn’t even close to everything that I’ve read this year, but these have been some that I’ve especially enjoyed.

What have you read this year that’s stood out to you? Share and let me know!

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The wind blows where it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

John 3:8

Structure isn’t inherently bad, but somewhere along the way, western culture went on a wild goose chase for simple, clear, and ‘streamlined’ structures and systems. These systems and structures were often gross oversimplifications that ignored the complex realities of nature, both human and otherwise.

control is a wild goose chase

James Scott’s book Seeing Like a State uses the term legibility to describe this drive to create these structures, often aimed at producing measurable results, like increasing a state’s ability to identify its populace for clear taxation through the creation and standardization of surnames, or through Le Corbusier’s theories on how to create the perfect modern city (Brasília is a prime example of his urban planning philosophy), or through scientific attempts to convert forests into timber farms. Scott works through all of these examples (and more!) to demonstrate that in all of these attempts at create legible systems, oversimplification and and aesthetic preference for bureaucratic efficiency and control ended up wreaking havoc on people groups, countries, or ecosystems.

Control is tempting, especially in a world that is so uncontrollable. Ultimately, no matter how proficient our technique may be, or how elegant our systems may appear, control is beyond our grasp. The world is a complex, multifaceted thing full of complex multifaceted people.

James Scott writes about the trouble with legibility (a feature of belief in what he calls high-modernism):

Radically simplified designs for social organization seem to court the same risks of failure courted by radically simplified designs for natural environments. The failures and vulnerability of monocrop commercial forests and genetically engineered, mechanized monocropping mimic the failures of collective farms and planned cities.1

Monocrop systems are disease prone, people resist centrally imposed plans that defy their local knowledge, and the most streamlined cities have unintended (and unwanted) development.

Inevitably, as Scott works through various attempts of states to create legible systems, these oversimplifications, abstractions, and focuses on technique result in failure.2 The pursuit of control is a wild goose chase, despite our best and most technically proficient attempts.

This goose chase is part of modernity’s3 wager, which “posits that the primary characteristic of modernity has not been the great ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but what has undergirded these ideologies, a conviction that life can be lived well without God.”4 Alan Roxburgh talks about how churches and denominations formed in modernity possess its ideological undercurrents, which sometimes supersede their theological commitments. Throughout Roxburgh’s literature, he calls these ‘Euro-tribal churches,’ and “their organizational and leadership habits had been shaped by numerous cultural forces that were more powerful than their espoused theology.”5 Though these churches professed belief in God, they largely lived as though modernity’s wager is true, and have lived as though the church could operate well without God. Enough structure, enough technically proficient staff, and enough well-operated programming, and church should run smoothly. Euro-tribal churches, or churches that operate as though modernity’s wager is true, attempt to make church into a legible system. Even in churches that don’t espouse cessationism, we wind up with a functional cessationism in which human agency and skill are more significant for day-to-day life and ministry than God’s agency. Branson writes:

The pervasive assumption driving leadership within the churches is that with the right techniques, sufficient information, and metrics, we can break problems down into their simplest elements so that we can then design strategies for managing and controlling the outcomes we desire. The presumption is that good leaders must be well skilled in these methods of management, control, and predictability. Good leadership involves this capacity to name reality, create designs, craft plans, and write mission and vision statements that direct and control a preferred future … God’s agency has become a secondary, attendant, useful presence—baptizing and blessing decisions drawn, for example, from models in the social sciences or business world.6

This is the Euro-tribal leadership model.

disruption

But control, technique, and the functional cessationism of the Euro-tribal churches have fallen prey to the same pitfalls at other attempts at legibility.

Over the last fifty years, church leadership in North America has been shaped by multiple attempts to fix this unraveling and return the churches to the center of the culture. This effort to regain primacy is pursued through an increasingly intensive application of the methods of management and control, strategic actions of restructuring, the development of new metrics for measuring and assuring success, or the adoption of the latest methods from business schools—all with little or no reference to God’s agency, all of them forms of belief in Modernity’s Wager.7

Disruption has become the norm. We’re experiencing an unraveling of institutions, and a reshaping and reconfiguring of religious life. If you’re from the US, we live in a culture where 41% of those who identify as evangelicals attend church yearly or less.8

We’re at a point where we have to recognize that dependency on our own agency and our own skill has led us down a road we didn’t mean to go down. Our attempts at managing disruption through organizational tactics or professional savvy won’t be enough.

a different wild goose

If we can take the liberty of equating the religious equivalent of modernity’s wager as functional cessationism, we have to recover a lived theology of the Holy Spirit, and not just at an individual level. We have to discover a different kind of wild goose chase.

The Celts, the early Irish Christians, often referred to the Holy Spirit as Ah Geadh-Glas, or the Wild Goose. Kenneth McIntosh writes:

For them, the Holy Spirit was Ah Geadh-Glas

, the Wild Goose, one of those same strong fowls that fly in from who-knows-where, and then embark in formation for equally unknown distant destinations. The wild geese are like the wind of the Holy Spirit who “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8).9

What would it look like for us to abandon the wild goose chase of control, which takes us nowhere, and to pursue the Wild Goose? Our attempts at effective church management haven’t yielded the results we desire - we’ve found ourselves in decline management territory. We’re enthusiastic about signs of revival, but in many cases where these small signs of hope occur, they are beyond our technical capability, and often happen in spite of it. Zach Meerkreebs thought he had preached a dud of a sermon, and then the Spirit moved at Asbury. We can’t manufacture the movement of the Spirit - the Spirit goes where the Spirit chooses, and we don’t know where it comes from or where it goes.

For those of us who have been born of the Spirit, the call is to fall into its mysterious migratory pattern, and fall in line as it leads us beyond the borders of what we think is possible.

This isn’t a denial of skill or knowledge, but it’s an emphasis on a different kind of knowledge entirely. The shifting ground of culture requires different kinds of knowledge. Technical knowledge of universal principles isn’t a bad thing - I’m glad the Pythagorean theorem always works - but we need knowledge that can read signs of change, adapt, improvise, and apply rules-of-thumb. Old Testament scholar and jazz pianist Mark Glanville has helped me think through this. Music has rules, it has a tradition; jazz musicians spend hours learning a ‘vocabulary’ of riffs upon which they can then improvise. Mark spoke (and played beautifully) at the Innovation and Future Church forum in Montréal this September. He said:

Improvisation is a good story. Improvisation of the jazz tradition, both jazz and doing church following Christ are deeply embedded in a tradition. And those traditions, jazz and the biblical story, demand improvisation. It’s not an option. You’ve got to improvise your path with boldness and creativity because that’s the nature of the story. Just follow the lead of the biblical writers themselves.

Mark points out how the biblical writers remix the text within the text (just think about how New Testament writers ‘improvise’ in their usage of Old Testament prophecy and Jesus). He continued later by saying:

The biblical tradition is a tradition that’s improvised on it requiring boldness and creativity. And now, and having said that, we’re in this cultural moment where there’s profound need for creativity, because faith is so much more complex and so we have to be light on our feet pastorally and we have to be light on our feet as we imagine church. And the biblical tradition shows us that there’s plenty of room for that with the Bible improvising.

James Scott refers to this kind of improvisational knowledge and ability as “mētis" which for him, “represents a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment”10 We’re not left to our own devices in our pursuit of mētis though. For those of who lead churches, the call is to help our people grow, not just in their knowledge of the tradition, but in the development of mētis as they seek to live out the Gospel in their communities. We not only have to learn to be light on our feet as leaders, but we have to teach our communities how to be light on their feet.

Thankfully, we can chase the Wild Goose who can help us grow in spiritually enriched, tradition informed mētis.

There’s so much more to say on this, and it’s more than space allows. Look for a future post about the development of mētis in churches in the coming weeks.

To recap some of what’s happened to this point in Acts:

• God sends an angel to Cornelius, a Gentile

• God gives Peter a vision demonstrating God’s lack of favoritism

• Peter and his companions witness the Holy Spirit fall on a Gentile’s household

• Peter insists on baptizing those in Cornelius’ household

• The Jewish believers in Jerusalem criticize Peter upon hearing the news

• The Jewish believers rejoice after hearing Peter’s full story

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Reverting to the Familiar

Acts reminds us that the the Jewish believers are scattering in response to persecution, and with potential knowledge of Peter’s vision and Cornelius’ household receiving the Spirit, the Jews from Judea and Jerusalem, steeped in their culture, customs, and institutions, keep the news of the risen Lord to themselves. Acts 11:19 carefully notes that these Jewish believers spread the word only among other Jews.

God had worked hard to show that Jesus is for everyone, sending angels, imparting visions, and pouring out the Holy Spirit on all flesh (as promised). Persecution scattered the Judean Jews to other parts of the world. They felt the tumult of change and the ground shift under their feet as we commonly do in our own culture. We may feel part of what they felt in our own cultural unraveling and resonate with sentiments like Paul Kingsnorth’s when he says, “Sometimes the world seems to shift beneath you and you’re not quite sure what has happened, or why.”1

The Judean Jews migrated and found themselves living as a cultural minority like their diasporic siblings had for generations. Despite knowing that God had poured the Holy Spirit on Gentiles, and even celebrating that reality, they were keeping the word of God to themselves and to their own tribe. Mikeal Parsons points out, “In a pattern that will become familiar by the end of Acts, these dispersed believers were telling the message to no one but Jews (11:19).”2

There’s something uniquely human about the impulse of the Judean Jewish believers in their scattering; they cling to one another and stick to what they know. In their societal unraveling they fail to imagine new possibilities under God’s reign - a temptation the contemporary Church can surely relate to. Al Roxburgh writes about a different way of being that unraveling requires of us, saying:

Something else is required. It involves learning how to ask different questions than how to develop strategies to fix or reform our situation, or how to be innovative or engage the data more creatively. The more basic and transformative question we have to ask is what the Spirit is calling God’s people to do at this moment. The discernment question redirects our attention from technique or our own agency in making something happen toward the agency of God in this unraveling.3

Even with clear movement of the Holy Spirit among the Gentiles, these Judean Jews can’t imagine the new possibility of their inclusion in God’s family.

The Diaspora Impulse

Moving forward in Acts we learn about Jews who have grown up speaking Greek, living among Gentiles, conducting business and living as the people of God as a faithful minority presence in Greek culture. These Jews have been living in places like Cyprus and Cyrene, and these Hellenistic Jews begin to speak to the Greeks about Jesus the Lord. They share a common language and understand the Greek culture after generations of living alongside Greeks. These Jews, who live with one foot in the culture around them and one foot in Judaism, travel from Cyprus and Cyrene to Antioch and tell Gentiles about the Lord Jesus. As far as we know, they hadn’t had any visions, dreams, or angelic visitations to prompt them to do this work. They may not have even been aware of Peter’s experiences with Cornelius’ household. Regardless, they crossed a line their Judean siblings weren’t willing to cross.

They share Jesus the Lord with people who weren’t their own tribe, not knowing what would happen, but hoping in what could happen. Acts 11:21 tells us what comes next: God’s hand is on them, and a great number of people believe and turn to the Lord.

When the church in Jerusalem hears the news they send Barnabas to Antioch. Barnabas is not a random choice; he’s culturally strategic. Barnabas is a significant member of the Jerusalem church to send to Antioch. He’s a Levite from Cyprus, representing a highly-esteemed Jewish pedigree and Greek enculturation. He has feet in both worlds, and possibly knows the Jewish believing community from Cyprus that shares Jesus with the Greeks in Antioch. He’s bilingual. He can see the world through a Jewish frame and a Greek frame. He is an encourager, and in his introduction in Acts 4:36-37, his generosity is a counterpoint to Ananias and Sapphira’s giving. The church in Jerusalem gets it right in sending Barnabas; this action demonstrates a level of awareness and strategic thought. Barnabas is capable in this situation in a way that others in Jerusalem are not.

Barnabas recognizes God’s activity in the church at Antioch, and lives up to his nickname by encouraging them. More people come to know the Lord Jesus. Barnabas recognizes the role that diaspora Jews have to play in the life of this Church, and goes to get Saul. Barnabas leaves Antioch for Tarsus, traveling some 140 miles and back to bring Saul, another multicultural diaspora Jew with an impressive Jewish pedigree and a robust understanding of Greco-Roman culture. Barnabas and Saul spend a year in Antioch teaching and meeting with the church.

After that year, a prophet named Agabus arrives from Jerusalem stands up and through the Spirit states that a famine that will spread over the entire Roman world. The disciples of Antioch give as they are able, and send their gifts to the church in Jerusalem by Barnabas and Saul.

We can easily gloss over the gravity of this offering Antioch sends to Jerusalem. Just a few verses before, we read that the Judean followers of Jesus (who had scattered from Jerusalem) are keeping the Gospel to themselves and their tribe. They have a treasure they aren’t sharing with the Gentiles - the good news of Jesus. These Gentiles come to know Jesus, and within a year, are living generously and give as much as they are able for their brothers and sisters living in Judea. They followers of Jesus from Jerusalem and Judea had viewed the Gentiles as outsiders beyond the family of God, even though they knew the Spirit had poured on a Gentile household. In a twist, these new Gentile followers of Jesus at Antioch consider the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem their family, living out Peter’s words from Acts 10:34, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” The new ends up sustaining the old.

When the Judean followers of Jesus scattered because of persecution, life as they knew it unraveled, but it was also an opportunity. Instead of looking to new forms of life together, ones in which Gentiles were not only included in the family of God, but had an integral role in God’s mission, the Judean Jesus-followers stuck to what they knew. The existing Diaspora Jews who had been living multiculturally, with one foot in the historic Jewish community and one in the Greco-Roman world were used to navigating these complex realities.

From Antioch to Today

Though it’s an imperfect analogy, it’s not a far leap to think about today’s contemporary institutions of church as analogues of the Judean Jewish believing community. They had a mold for what the church was supposed to be, and it was bounded by conceptions of ethnic identity and religious belonging.

Roxburgh writes about the unraveling we experience in our contemporary cultural setting. He refers to this as the “seventy-five-year story,” and admits, as one has to, that the story’s roots are much deeper in history than the past seventy-five-years.4 Here’s the basic outline of Roxburgh’s rendition of the seventy-five-year story:

• Following WWII, society oriented around a story of self-actualization and consumption

• Society moved from cities to the suburbs (suburbanization begins)

• Suburban populations were largely white (remember, it wasn’t until 1965 that race-based immigration quotas ended, with Chinese exclusion only ending twenty years prior)

• Churches that descended from European denominations (what Roxburgh calls Euro-tribal churches) moved to the suburbs

• Suburban church members were part of newly-minted professional middle class

• Professionalization and education became standard for this class, and this extended to its clergy, who began to lean on technique over discernment

• “This system required a degree to be properly ordained and it formed trainees in a story that emphasized rational method, programs, and technique, along with the therapeutic skills needed to care for expressive individuals.”

• Leaders became educated elites

We can see the the end of the seventy-five-year story in church attendance decline or how many people never really returned to church after the pandemic. This unraveling of a story though isn’t unique to the church’s life though, it’s part of broader cultural trends that we all grapple with. We feel its tension when we live in heightened political turmoil, polarization, violence, economic tension, a worsening climate with accompanying extreme weather events, etc.

In our own time of unraveling, today’s Judean Jewish believers may face similar temptations to hold to what (and who) they know. The real disorientation, writes Roxburgh, “is that we don’t know what to do about it.”5 This class of educated and professionalized ministers were trained for eras of predictability, which made execution of technique a reliable pathway to some vision of success. But in the unraveling, churches are no longer in positions of prestige or power in western culture. Leaders were successful in the past because they were well-equipped to interpret the ‘maps.’ Roxburgh continues:

When our current maps (the stories we have about how things work) no longer describe where we are, we need to change our mind about the story in which we’re living. This is a big ask. The maps of our existing story were given to us through socialization, education, and credentialing. Our leaders are rewarded because they are good managers of the existing maps. The security these leaders brought to people and their institutions was, in fact, their excellence in maintaining the maps. Recently there has been a great resignation of leaders who know the maps that made them successful no longer describe the landscape.6

We need new maps, but in an era of unraveling, where there are no maps, we need people who are comfortable exploring.

Carrying on the analogy, these are the diasporic Jews, much like those from Cyprus and Cyrene who shared the Good News of Jesus with the Greeks. It’s no coincidence that it’s predominantly diaspora Jews and Gentiles who will carry forth God’s mission throughout the rest of the book. They were equipped to explore and to try. These are the leaders today’s church needs to discover, bless, and empower. These are people who have one foot in the way things have been done and who have one foot in the world.7 These are people like Paul or Barnabas, who understand the world that was, and are willing to dive into the world that is coming, even though they may not know where it leads. This may put them at tension with other leaders who stay behind, like when Paul has to address Peter’s behavior in Galatians 2.

These apostolic followers of Jesus exhibited Roxburgh’s three practices for cultivating communities of hope in this unraveling:

1. Dwelling - “this practice is about how we form a Christian community committed to the peoiple and the place where we live. Dwelling is a disruptive practice for those raised in individualism, self-expression, and the freedom to live unencumbered lives. Dwelling calls us to a different kind of discipleship.”8

2. Discerning - “In a place we’ve never been before, our first priority is to attend to what God is doing in the place we live so that we can know how to act. This is what we mean by discerning … The desire for a leader or expert to tell us what to do is strong. The default strategy is deeply embedded in us. Discernment steps away from the usual methods of decision-making. It’s shaped by the question: What is God doing here amongst us and in our communities? Attending to this question is not the work of professional leaders or a select group. It’s the work of all the people.”9

3. Exploring - “As we dwell with one another, in Scripture, in our neighborhoods, and in our stories, we will begin to detect the outline of what Jesus is doing and creating. There are no certainties. It is about learning to trust and and risk and explore. In this, we build new kinds of muscles - communal ways of hearing the Spirit together.”10

Where is God calling us in this cultural unraveling? Will we, like the Judean believing community, see the signs of God working beyond our current maps and stick to what we know to be comfortable, even if we can see it wearing out? Or will we follow the example of the diaspora Jewish believing community and explore the outline of where Jesus might be working?

I think I grew up cessationist.

It’s not a belief explicitly taught by the churches I grew up in, at least as far as my recollection goes, but I feel like at some point or another, a Sunday School teacher or a small group leader probably told me that the gifts of the Holy Spirit had ceased, and I was taught some version of a dispensationalist take on history and the eschaton. My church didn’t have people setting dates for the return of Christ, but the weird stuff or the ‘sign gifts’ of the Holy Spirit were for a different era. Speaking in tongues was what the confused Assemblies of God church down the street did. It wasn’t something our theologically superior congregation did.

I could, of course, still take a spiritual gifts assessment and figure out how gifted I was in giving or faith or administration, and serve as a spiritually enabled faithful giver in a position of administration.

But prophecy? Dreams? Miracles? Those things ended when the original apostles did and the canon closed.

Still, I had lingering doubts about the reality of cessationism. Occasionally we’d hear stories from missionaries returning from the field of their spiritual encounters that didn’t quite fit the neat mold of our Midwestern pragmatism. I think I had a dream as a child when my parents were evaluating a call to a different church; in it one of the church members at the church gave us a tour of the sanctuary of the church where my family eventually ended up. I didn’t realize what it was at the time, but it made the cessationist framework hard to understand.

When I went to seminary, we talked about the spiritual realties of the global Church in my world Christianity classes. Students would ask, “Why don’t we experience those things here?” Which cultural bogey man could be to blame for these realities? The Enlightenment? Secularism? Lives of comfort?

I caught shadows of the Holy Spirit - just glimpses - while I was going through seminary. I had an overwhelming awareness bordering on theophany of the global nature of Christ’s work while officiating my first communion during my ministry internship at an international church in Copenhagen. I heard God tell me to sign up for a class, and promptly told God “no” because the course included a trip to London that we didn’t have money for. The next week someone confronted me, asking if the only reason I wasn’t participating in the course was money. I signed up. The money appeared. I went to London. It changed my life, and I’ve never been the same.

Tongues? Prophecy? Dreams? Miracles? All so far-fetched still. I believed in God’s providence and care, I believed that the Holy Spirit was with me.

Without delving too deep into the philosophical underpinnings that have shaped my theological or functional cessationism, I was living as a secularized person. Following Charles Taylor’s thinking in A Secular Age my faith, and the faith of so many influenced by the rationalism and scientism of the Enlightenment, gave into a wholesale trade-off of the transcendent aspects of reality for the purely immanent aspects. If you can follow the threads of this for a moment, we can trace the lines of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationalism in how we perceive the Bible from a text in which we encounter the living God to an object of scientific study. Even fundamentalism, with its debates around evolution and creation, gave into the secularized view of the text as an object of study and engaged the debates from that perspective.

To paraphrase Adam Seligman’s premise in Modernity’s Wager, we swapped divine authority (the transcendent) for rationalism located with individual human minds (transcendentals), and “we have been struggling with the consequences - and reaping the benefits - ever since.”1

Cessationism emerged out of this rational and objectifying approach to the Bible. Cessationism is a relatively new feature of Christian theology, and it has roots in the Protestant Reformation, largely as a reaction against perceived phony miracles within the Roman Catholic Church. These reactionary attitudes continued into the early American theological landscape. Church historian Thomas Kidd writes:

Protestant critics saw the Catholic tradition as riddled with fake claims of miracles. Ridiculing the fake miracle claims of Catholics (such as icons bleeding a liquid that turned out to be cherry juice) became a staple of Reformed polemics against the Catholic Church. So when seemingly miraculous events happened in Protestant churches, even sympathetic observers warned against the threat of bogus miracles.2

Early American Protestants sought to distance themselves from the ‘irrational’ miracles present within the Roman Catholic Church (a group that despite its long and complex history is not cessationist). Kidd continues, “For New Englanders no worse aspersion could be cast on the revivals than to associate them with Catholic supernaturalism and gullibility.” Notably, the trend here was to treat the supernatural with skepticism, not to say that supernatural signs of the Spirit had ceased completely.

Cessationism may have roots in anti-Catholic attitudes, but it arose in full-flower in another scientific approach to the Bible, or when someone treated the Bible like an object to dissect and dismember. John Nelson Darby systematized this theology in the 1800s, which used a framework of different eras of revelation, or dispensations, to understand biblical timelines under the guise of a literal reading of Scripture. In this framework, the ‘sign gifts’ of the Holy Spirit were specifically for the era in which the church established in the age of the apostles, and the gifts ended when the canon closed. These beliefs took hold in the American theological landscape either in part or in whole.

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Either way, this thread of the emphasis on rationalism and rejection of the supernatural, which is a stand-in for Taylor’s idea of being a buffered self, or someone who has buffered themselves against transcendent (or spiritual) realities. Secularism went to church.

Pete Greig shares a moment where Nicky Gumbel of Alpha interviewed the historian Tom Holland (not a Christian, by the way), at a leadership conference. Gumbel asked Holland “what he would like to get off his chest in front of 5,000 church leaders.”

Without hesitation, Holland replied: “Oh, you need to talk more about the weird stuff!” by which I think he meant mystical experiences, speaking in tongues, gold dust at Bethel, healings at Lourdes, exorcisms, the Third Heaven, talking donkeys, words of knowledge, angels at the Chinese border, that kind of stuff.

“The thing is,” he enthused (and I paraphrase), “the Church has been way too successful!” (at which point, everyone looked a bit surprised). “I mean, you kind of invented care for the poor, but now we have the Welfare State; your monasteries pioneered healthcare and education, but now we have the NHS and state schools; your Bible uniquely teaches human dignity – the ultimate value of every individual – but now we have the European Convention on Human Rights. The State has basically stolen all your best ideas. The only thing you have left – because they can’t really take this from you – is the weird stuff. It’s the supernatural claims of Christianity that unsettle cynics like me. It’s your weird stuff that makes us sit up and wonder whether you might actually be more than just a sort of metaphysical alternative to the Liberal Democrats.”3

My journey out of functional cessationism and into the weird stuff has been a ride.

It began when I started learning from charismatically-inclined brothers and sisters in Christ in an emerging missional network for North America. I sat with these people. I respected them. I realized their experiences were radically different from my own. They were experiencing life in the Kingdom in ways that I simply hadn’t.

Like any good Baptist, I returned to the Bible. I read and re-read and read and re-read 1 Corinthians 14. On the plainest reading, it became clear that Paul believed the prophesy and tongues were normative experiences for the church; he didn’t stop them or prohibit them, but he did provide wisdom on how to do these things in the life of a church. At the end of that chapter, Paul writes, “Therefore, my brothers and sisters, be eager to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:39). On the plainest and simplest reading, I was left to conclude that ‘the weird stuff’ I’d been skeptical of for most of my life were the very things I was supposed to be eager for.

So I asked my charismatic friends questions. I prayed, and I asked God for these things. I prayed this prayer for a year.

I started having dreams. Not my normal, run-of-the-mill dreams, but different ones. I wrote them down. I sat with them. I prayed about them, and shared them with wise friends.

In March I went into a prayer room at a gathering for the aforementioned missional network. I had a healing experience. I experienced the Holy Spirit in a new way that broke all the schemas I had before. The person praying over me shared a prophetic word for me and my family.

In July, I went to Australia for the World Congress meeting of Baptist World Alliance. One day that week, I went to the prayer room. I received another word from a woman there that fit the one I heard in March. As I walked away from the prayer room to write that word down, a man stopped me to tell me that God had told him to talk to me. That evening in worship, a friend felt compelled to pray for me. When she asked what was going on, I simply said, “A lot.” She prayed for me, and this Tasmanian woman repeated verbatim the word that a woman in Virginia had prayed over me in March.

I don’t think I’m special. I used to think this sort of thing was for Christians on the other side of the world on the frontier edge of mission (a common semi-cessationist view), but wasn’t for followers of Jesus in places of comfort. Now I can’t help but wonder if this is the kind of life with the Holy Spirit that was intended for all of us - wild and wonderful and weird.

Pastor Tyler Staton writes:

What started in Acts doesn’t end there. The main character holding the plot together - the Holy Spirit - hasn’t gone anywhere. The divine breath in the lungs of the early church is alive in us. If you are a follower of Jesus you have been filled with the Holy Spirit, who pours the teachings of Jesus directly into your heart and enlivens you with co-creative power for the sake of the world.4

Why would I be shocked that the Holy Spirit, promised to all followers of Jesus, would want to work in and through me redemptively for the sake of the world? Why, now having experienced God’s wild and weird goodness in my life through the Holy Spirit, would I want to return to the tame and buffered frame of secularism?

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I signed my non-disclosure agreement, set up my payroll, and took my food safety course. The owner of the bakery was1 incredibly accomplished woman had designed dresses, had a PhD in psychology, had started a nationally ranked charter school, and written the AP Psychology test. She looked me dead in the eyes, and with all seriousness said, “I’m going to lose money on you in the first few months. You’re not going to get compliments to know when you’re doing well, but you’ll see a little increase in your paycheck when you are. And you’ll never learn the chocolate chip cookie recipe, so don’t ask.”

I vividly remember my first day. I was a perfectly adequate home baker. The owner of the bakery had me begin with pie crust. “Perfect,” I thought, “I’ve made pie crust plenty of times.” She handed me the recipe. It was less helpful and less informative than a recipe for a technical challenge on The Great British Bake Off. She demonstrated, told me to get with it, and walked away.

I thought I’d done well, but when she walked over to check my work, she told me to throw the unbaked crust away and start over again.

It was an incredibly difficult job. I spent nearly the whole of my work day on my feet, multi-tasking coconut cream pies (cream pies became my recurring project, and over the year I made the majority of the cream or custard-based pies we sold), working the register, and answering phones.

By October I was ready to quit. Every day was a new exercise in monotony and hard work, vacillating between feeling like things were going well and then being yelled at by the head chef. Something shifted in me in November though, and I became aware of how grateful I was to be part of this special place.

We had regulars. People who would come in on lazy weekday mornings when I had a few spare minutes to chat. They’d stand at the counter while I frosted a cake, and I’d learn about their lives. Some people joined us for breakfast or coffee every day. I learned people’s orders, and would start working on them as soon as they came in the door. Homeless customers would wander in every so often, and we’d feed them and greet them by name.

I realized that I was part of something special. I wasn’t just baking or taking elaborate orders for cakes; I was embedded in a highly relational community. I had routine conversations about faith, life, church, and Jesus with people who weren’t regular parts of church communities. I tutored a coworker’s son for his junior high English homework. I prayed with people and got prayed for. I made pies and cut pieces of cake for people. I watched plans develop for a multiethnic church plant, knowing now that has come to fruition. It was all so very ordinary, and incredibly special. I walked into that bakery feeling defeated, unsure if God was still calling me to pastor people.

Over the course of that year I came to see all the ways that God worked in a neighborhood bakery. I saw His goodness unfold in people’s lives, including my own. I had expected to see God work in my vocational ministry career. I had not expected it in my time as a baker. I learned then what Fitch and Curcuruto say in Presence Based Witness:

We should prepare ourselves therefore, to see with eyes that can discern God’s power made visible in and between people. Because He works often in the subtlest of ways that can be missed by people who only acknowledge power that works in one way, we must take care to recognize His power.2

I know that it can be all too easy for people to believe that ministry is best done by the paid professionals. I realized in that year I had more than enough opportunity to minister to people through simple acts of hospitality, kindness, and conversation.

Part 1: against over-professionalization

Part 2: against self-sufficient leadership

Part 3: mutually submissive leadership

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The role of the church as it seeks to nurture the fivefold gifting is to teach its people an alternative way of naming and understanding reality. We are not simply “individuals to be sent into the world to engage either individuals or social systems,” but we are ultimately part of a greater whole.1 According to Fitch’s interpretation of Scot McKnight’s ‘King Jesus Gospel’ the focus is “on the formation of a community in the world as a witness to the gospel. An essential part of this gospel is that individuals become members of a community, subjects of the King, who shape a politic of the kingdom-called church.”2 This politic of church requires people who “do leadership in a mutuality of gifts together.”3

Our ability to perceive reality is radically dependent on our ability to describe and name it. If linguistics has shown us that even the ability to perceive color is dependent on our ability to name it4, then the same is also true of our ability to perceive and name spiritual realities. If our people cannot name or describe spiritual realities, such as the fivefold gifting and other spiritual gifts, then they will not be able to perceive the presence in church communities.

The work that we do in teaching churches to understand reality through the framework of the fivefold gifting is an education aimed the cultivation of belonging.5 As we affirm the mutual leadership of the fivefold gifting, we affirm the essential truth that all of God’s people belong to His body, and as we lean into this way of seeing, naming, and understanding we realize the truth that theologian Willie James Jennings describes, “And in this thinking together we begin to see what we had not seen before: we belong to each other, we belong together. Belonging must become the hermeneutic starting point from which we think the social, the political, the individual, the ecclesial…”6 As we begin to name and describe the giftedness that the Holy Spirit has given our local bodies, we help our people gain an understanding of their true belonging to the Body of Christ that “drives life together with God.”7 Leonardo Boff’s conception of the basic communities as church help us understand a theology of the church as community or the church as a people of God in which the charisms of the Spirit are distributed to every member; in the basic community, everyone belongs. Boff says that the spiritual gifts are “actually constitutive of church-as-community.”8

This is a change in the way that we commonly think about and talk about church. The church is not just an organization that has been assembled together and which now must be managed towards the completion of a task, though churches will still have organization, and will still accomplish real tasks in the world. It is not merely a voluntary association, or a place where the Word is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered, though it certainly may be a group of people who have chosen to come together and a place where the Word is encountered in the words and the sacraments. Churches are communities of people who function together as the Body of Christ in their context, and they function together as the Body of Christ because the Holy Spirit has given them gifts that empower them to do so; some have been called to lead in this Body as apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers so that the entire Body may reach maturity in Christlikeness. The spiritual gifts are not just some interesting elective course or personality assessment; they are essential to the very nature of the Church.

Simultaneously, we must give people a framework for understanding and relating to the Holy Spirit, and exercising basic individual and corporate disciplines, including but not limited to prayer, reconciliation, and discernment. People who do not understand how to relate to the Holy Spirit will struggle to discern the presence of the gifts in their life. To begin to address some of these issues, I would suggest a cohort-based learning system in which church members can participate. Foundationally, I would start this module by teaching a practical theology of spiritual disciplines, both communal and individual. I would begin by teaching disciplines of engaging with Scripture; currently many people in my own tradition view the Bible as an object that we study, not as a place where we encounter the presence of the living God. I begin here because this is the theological bridge for bibliocentric people into seeing the dynamic and active presence of the Holy Spirit. Understanding the Bible as encounter instead of object is the first step in helping our people understand the language of the Holy Spirit instead of the language of buffered modernity. From there, I would teach practices of prayer oriented towards learning to listen for God’s voice. Then we would teach practices aimed at our common life: the mutuality we experience at the Table and at tables, reconciliation, discerning the work of the Holy Spirit, and witness through a neighborhood-oriented framework. A cohort of people will go through these practices together, learning, practicing, discussing, and debriefing together.

For those who wish to continue, the next leg of the journey will set a foundational knowledge for life in the church as the Spirit-empowered people of God. The lessons learned about mutuality, prayer, and discernment are essential to continue to learn how to operate the ‘grammar’ of the language of the Holy Spirit’s activity in the church. In this stage of the cohort, participants will learn about the role of the Holy Spirit in the church through reading about the experiences and outpourings of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts. Many churches have lived with a functional cessationism, though they may not be doctrinal cessationists. I believe that this is largely due to our people’s lack of exposure to stories about the work of the Spirit. Some congregations do not talk about those experiences, and so they do not believe that these experiences are normative for life today.

After building a vision for a pneumatic ecclesiology and lived theology of ‘the weird stuff,’ participants would learn about the spiritual gifts, take an assessment, and then discuss their results with the cohort and others who know them well. The assessment is not supposed to function as a definitive ranking of their gifts but is simply an entry into discussion and communal discernment about the giftedness of the people in the cohort. After that, participants would learn about the fivefold gifting.

For any who have been communally discerned to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds or teachers, they would be invited to a final stage in the cohort model in which they would learn more in depth about the roles and functions of the fivefold gifting, discover their function in the life of the church, create a communally discerned plan for the exercise of their leadership in the community on the basis of their giftedness, and then be commissioned and celebrated to exercise their giftedness as a leader in our community.

Seeking to identify, equip, and install fivefold leaders as commissioned leaders in our church is going to shift the way that we think about our leadership structure, and I foresee tensions in how we begin to make these transitions into enabling leadership out of the giftedness of the Spirit in the context of mutually submissive teams from corporate-style, top-down models.

If churches are going to become fully mature in Christ and equipped for every good work, it will be because they have moved away from top-down leadership structures that impose visions, goals, and tasks on a church and become churches led by teams of fivefold gifted leaders who make room to discern the Spirit’s leadership in the community, and empower the people of God to become active participants in God’s mission instead of people who are dependent on teachers and ministry technicians for the work of ministry. Instead of being guided by the priorities of efficient task completion towards ‘fill-the-building’ type goals, churches will be guided by the Holy Spirit and exist as pneumocratic entities. In doing so, we will be living stones who are being built into a spiritual house, where we are collectively a holy priesthood of Jesus Christ, demonstrating the good news of his kingdom to the world through our communally embodied practice.

The cultural forces that have shaped so many churches—individualism, clericalism, and bureaucratic efficiency—have deeply impacted our ability to fully recognize and embrace the gifts of the Spirit within our congregation. These forces have made it difficult to imagine a church where leadership is not centralized in a few who possess the ability to lead not because of their giftedness, but because of their hierarchical positions. We will have to learn to see a new practice of leadership where it is distributed among those that the Spirit has equipped for leadership as apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. The changes we need to experience will not be found in the latest organizational management theory but will come out of a theological vision that recognizes the presence and work of the Spirit in all members of the Body of Christ.

For this to happen, churches will have to make room for fivefold gifted leaders to grow and belong within our church and its structures. We will have to create spaces where we disciple people into an awareness of the Holy Spirit in their life and in the church, into living and practicing their spiritual gifts, and to their fit and function in the Body of Christ in this place. This will require us to not only name and affirm these gifts, but to commission and empower individuals to live them out in the context of mutual submission under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. This will be a disruptive change to historic assumptions about the roles of leaders and the place of leadership, and will require us to embrace a new, Spirit-led way of being the church together and to experience a somatic renewal in which every member is honored and esteemed for the role that God has called them to in our church.

Part 2 “against self-sufficient leadership”

The answer to this on-going crisis of self-sufficient leadership “is recognizing those among us who are gifted by the Holy Spirit to lead in their respective giftings and enabling them to exercise those gifts in mutual submission to one another.”1 A practice of the fivefold gifting can only thrive in the context of mutual submission unto Christ; here is a full affirmation of a somatic renewal: the Body of Christ will have to recover a practice of mutual submission, where every member has equal concern for the other, so that we can truly give and ascribe honor to all members of the body so that it is free from division (1 Cor. 12:24-25). We can no longer exist as churches that claim, “I don’t need you,” or “I can’t need you (1 Cor. 12:21).” Such a mentality will not lead us into the full measure of Christ.

Submission can be a painful lesson to learn. Sometimes it takes us places that we did not want to go, but if a church is going to move forward, all parties will have to learn how to submit to one another. In a church where leadership has been associated with higher offices within a hierarchy, and greater ability to voice one’s concerns, learning submission will feel like loss. David Fitch describes the experience of learning submission as a leader in church community, saying:

I have learned that it is essential to lead out of the posture of submitting myself to others in a community where Jesus is Lord. It is a posture both of vulnerability and of confidence in what God is doing in my life and where he has led me, and that he is also at work in this community I am sitting in as well. This posture opens the space for Jesus to work. Participation in the Spirit with one another makes faithful presence possible, which shapes a community. It is the opposite of coercive leadership.2

These models of coercive leadership, built on mastery, are so engrained in the psyche of church life that is difficult for us to envision a different way as viable, even as the hierarchical and coercive structures falter or crumble around us. There is a misconception that a community of mutuality has no hierarchy or leaders, and it is this misconception that causes us to continue to ask God for solitary leaders primed for self-sufficiency instead of relying on the Spirit-given, providentially present, gifted leaders that God brings into a church.

Leadership is a necessity for a church to flourish, but it holds a different function than the executive, top-down model. Missiologist Alan Hirsch would call this “missional leadership,” which operates “by building and nurturing networks of communications, creating a learning culture … creating a climate of trust and mutual support; and recognizing viable novelty when it emerges, while allowing the freedom to make mistakes.”3 Additionally, “the role of leadership within the church is to cultivate environments wherein the Spirit of God might call forth and unleash the missional imagination of the people of God.”4 In this kind of system, the church no longer gathers around one person’s vision, but creates a fertile ground where multiple people can be cultivated, discipled, and shaped into leaders who can help the church discern and become the kind of church God is calling it to become in that place and time. Such environments thrive on mutual submission because the people of God can now recognize the Spirit-centric leadership present in multiple people, and act accordingly.

A church organized around the fivefold gifting is a facet of a church’s life that can move it forward in the work of God in its context. Done well, it is the people of God cultivated, freed, and enabled to do the work of God. Hirsch insightfully says:

There is a remarkable ministry ‘ecology’ in a fully functioning APEST system. It provides us with a theologically rich and organically consistent understanding to help leaders and organizations become more missional and agile. In fact, it would be hard not to be missional if one intentionally develops the fivefold system into the life of God’s people.5

Self-sufficient leadership in churches cultivates systems, often unintentionally, that create dependency within God’s people upon the few to do the work of ministry. The result of which is decline at best and abuse of power at worst. Whenever someone becomes cognizant of God’s leading in their life and follows the Spirit, they are often not able to navigate that calling within such a leadership model unless they are embedded at the top of that structure. If the call they are experiencing is out of line with the self-sufficient leadership’s stated tasks and goals, more often than not, disappointment and disillusionment will follow.

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The fivefold gifting works against the infantilization of God’s people. Its very purpose is their maturity in Christ and guiding the people of God through mutual submission under Christ into the full and mature use of their God given gifts, which the Spirit gives for the good of the Church and the world. The church will still encounter problems, navigate conflict, and struggle even when leadership is defined by a full presence of the fivefold gifting, but as Fitch says, “I have noticed that when the leadership is functioning well, the rest of the church community becomes a fully orbed gifted community empowered for mission. When the first three to five leaders are functioning well as a team, they know how to recognize the gifts in others in the wider community.”6 These leaders, operating out of their giftedness in turn unleash the giftedness of the wider body and model the way forward for a collaborative and mutual life together. This renewed practice of the fivefold gifting and the exercise of the spiritual gifts is a reconfiguring of the way that the community conceives of and practices leadership.

Missiologist Darrel Guder writes about how the spiritual gifts are not just variable functions aimed at the completion of the church’s work, but they are in and of themselves the means of guidance within a church’s life. He writes:

The most characteristic setting in which the community receives guidance is when Christians assemble to share and evaluate the gifts given to them. Here in a variety of complementary ways guidance is conveyed through each to all, and through all to each.7

We not only need to learn how to discern the Spirit’s distribution of the gifts within our body, but we must also learn how to see and express that the gifts present in our community are in and of themselves a way that the Spirit guides the activity and direction of the church. The presence of the gifts also shifts the ways that leadership exists within the church’s life. Guder continues by saying:

Spiritual gifts are not distributed in monotonous uniformity but in rich diversity. The focus here is not on the prerogatives of designated leaders or on the equal privileges of members, but on corporate responsibility for discerning the wisdom and prompting of the Holy Spirit. Thus communities of giftedness are neither autocratic (the rule of one) nor democratic (the rule of the people) but pneumocratic (the rule of the Holy Spirit).8

I believe that one of the fears in moving towards a leadership that revolves around the exercise of the giftedness the Spirit places in congregations is that it will be flattened, anarchic, and devoid of leaders. Guder quells these fears and is quick to point us back to the leadership Paul describes in Ephesians 4, which is the fivefold gifting, of which he says:

These ministries of leadership are given to enable the church to carry out its fundamentally missiological purpose in the world: to announce and demonstrate the new creation in Christ Jesus. This purpose necessarily involves leaders in equipping and guiding the body in those ecclesial practices that form the community in a oneness that is a living demonstration of the ethics of God’s reign.9

Fivefold leadership is essential for the missional life of the church community, and it necessarily means that leadership will be done by a plurality of persons, not simply one person operating out of worldly power rooted in self-sufficiency. For Guder, the role of the fivefold gifting in leadership is essentially apostolic, meaning that it leads the church to encounter the world with the good news; because of this:

leadership is to be at the front of the community, living out the implications and actions of the missional people of God, so all can see what it looks like to be the people of God. This means that leadership can never be done in solo … Leadership that demonstrates this apostolic nature of the kingdom will take place through a plurality of leaders.10

Teams of fivefold gifted people should be the leaders of churches, not self-sufficient individuals. These teams of leadership are equipped by the Holy Spirit to respond to and engage the complexities of their contexts, and to discern the direction for their church in that place and time.

If we are going to respond adequately to the challenges facing our churches and communities, it will be through the cultivation of fivefold leadership teams, their ability to live exemplary lives of mutual submission in front of the rest of the church, and their ability to guide the entire body into the full exercise of their spiritual gifts. It is worth stating that these leaders may or may not be church staff, and we should resist clericalizing these roles.

There may be ‘spiritual gift assessments’ for these disenchanted individuals to take, but the only gifts that will matter (spiritual or not) will be the gifts of administration, teaching (for the efficient and ‘effective’ relay of propositional information meant to lead to action), and generosity (to fund the work that must be done). There will be little room, and likely no time, to sit together, listen for how the Holy Spirit is present, and to inquire who God has placed in the community to function as leaders in the roles of apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. If such people do manage to find their way into churches, how often do they struggle because they are unable to live out their God-given function because there is no room for it within the church’s structures that are optimized for efficiently filled buildings?

The formation of ministers (and people in general) for such a system has not aimed for interdependency on anyone or anything, including the presence of the living God. Theologian Willie James Jennings explains this pattern as the formation into “a way of being in the world that aspires to exhibit possession, mastery, and control of knowledge first, and of one’s self second, and if possible of one’s world.”2 This image “is the quintessential image of an educated person, an image deeply embedded in the collective psyche of Western education and theological education.”3 Leaders that work well in a system optimized for task accomplishment must be conformed into this image of self-sufficiency. A pastor must be able to do it all, to hold it all together, and lead flawlessly. He or she may believe that the fivefold gifting exists, but in a system such as this, it ‘exists’ only as part of an organizational management theory designed to accomplish the church’s task. Effectively, these systems of formation create leaders that can only say, “I don’t need you!” or more truthfully, “I can’t need you” (1 Cor. 12:21). To admit that a leader needs others, or to admit that a leader is an interdependent, interconnected part of the community would disrupt the individualist, Lone Ranger or Superman ideal of ‘mythic individualism’ that pervades Western (or more specifically, American) culture.

Forming self-sufficient leaders creates pastors that people view with a hero mentality, and “these heroes are people who always have to be on their own. They cannot be part of the community and submit to interdependent roles … The regular people can continue living in group innocence because these heroes choose to continue to live by themselves, always on the edge of life in community.”4 In their self-sufficiency, they become people who are not mutually submitted to life in the community of the church, because in doing so they would risk their positional power to drive the church towards its task-oriented end. For leaders who have been shaped to possess mastery over knowledge, themselves, and their world, mutuality and the exercise of the fivefold gifting is inherently risky; trading mastery for mutuality requires a new conception and understanding of the role of leaders within congregations.

Leaders of congregations must learn how to live and lead in communities of mutual submission. Diminishing the role of the Spirit-given gifts in the life of the community will inevitably keep a church infantilized and dependent upon the ‘self-sufficient’ leader. A full usage of the fivefold gifting is necessary so that “we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Eph. 4:15-16). In the inherited model of self-sufficient leadership, “no matter how servant-driven the leadership might be, there’s an assumed distance between the leader and those being led … It is leadership that runs on efficiency – the maintenance mode – as opposed to the presence, power, and authority of Jesus Christ in our midst.”5 These issues are not unique to the evangelical church, and Catholic theologian Leonardo Boff would hold that they have been part of the Catholic church’s structure for centuries. Boff says:

The power in this organization is concentrated along the axis of bishop/priest. The laity only receive. They do not produce in terms of the organization or structure, but only in terms of reinforcement of the structure … Further, this ecclesiological conception is governed by the category of ‘power.’ … Christ and the Spirit possess no direct immanence. Their only immanence is mediated by the ordained ministry.6

Church governance structures that bar the Spirit’s presence from the life of the people and their necessary contributions to the Body of Christ will focus more on the maintenance of the hierarchy and its tasks than it will on following the direction of the Holy Spirit.

In moving forward towards mutuality under the lordship of Jesus, a lived theology of the fivefold gifting can help move beyond the flaws that individualism and self-sufficiency have wrought in the life of churches. For churches like mine, which have been “framed by individualism,” the challenge “is to learn new ways of being church that invite people to relativize the self in relationship to the community, in the name of Jesus Christ.”7 We need alternative understandings of the way selves belong to communities under the lordship of Christ, and this will require alternative frameworks for understanding the nature of our mutual life together.

to be continued

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When we examine the New Testament we find a vision of the mutual nature of our life together as the people of God. We are living stones, “being built into a spiritual house to be a royal priesthood,” so that we may live compelling lives before the world and lead people to glorify God (1 Peter 2, New International Version). We are one body, knit together to share in the gifts of the Spirit as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12, NIV). Whatever the image of our mutual life may be, we are meant to fit together to build up the Church and to live the Gospel in the world. To do this, God gives the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers2 so that the church can grow in maturity and attain the full measure of Christ (Eph. 4:11-13).

The vision of life in the Church that the writers of the New Testament describe is one of mutuality, where everyone has a gift that is essential to the flourishing of the whole, which is built together for the sake of the world, and some are given the fivefold gifts of leadership for the purpose of helping the entire Body attain maturity3. No one who belongs to the people of God has the grounds to say, “I don’t need you!” and Paul clearly prohibits us from such an utterance in 1 Corinthians 12:21. We were made to be together, to function with one another, and to mutually exercise the gifts that the Holy Spirit has placed in our community under the leadership of the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers that God has placed in the Church.

Too often the importance of our mutual practice of spiritual gifts is diminished through the pursuit of efficiency or professionalism, or leadership disregards the spiritual gifts as churches attempt to navigate their common life through the force of winsome personalities, hierarchical power structures, or the subordination of giftings under one person’s perceived higher gifting or office. The moves away from an emphasis on the fivefold gifting or a full embrace of the spiritual giftedness of all believers were likely not the product of ill intent but more probably are the product of corporate leadership ideals, strategic management, conceptions of individuality, and a pursuit of increased efficiency for the sake of larger missional impact.

Churches can easily follow the patterns of denominational development described by theologian Craig Van Gelder; for Van Gelder denominations exist because they are “organized to do something, normally with a focus on doing something on behalf of God in the world … it must do something in order to justify its existence. It is essentially functional, or instrumental in its identity and purpose.”4 As churches began to associate in denominations in the United States, Van Gelder asserts that they underwent a “significant shift away from the identity of the established church that understood itself as the primary location of God’s presence and activity in the world.”5 When churches or denominations gather under an organizing principle of accomplishing a task, even if that task is good, then the decisions which that church, denomination, or group makes will always be in the service of greater efficiency in accomplishing the task.

This is due in part to shifts in our perceptions of reality. As James K.A. Smith describes the process of secularization, when we ‘disenchanted’ the world by buffering ourselves against the spiritual aspects of life and began to view ourselves as rational, buffered selves, we had to re-order reality in the absence of a sacramental, or enchanted, divine and ordered reality.6 These shifts in the construal of the self into a “disembedded, buffered, individualist view of the self seeps into our social imaginary – into the very way that we imagine the world, well before we ever think reflectively about it … to the extent that it’s very difficult for us to imagine the world otherwise.”7

Consequently such views shape the way that individuals are supposed to function in a church setting; in the shift of viewing the self as disembedded and buffered against spiritual realities, a coherent theology of receiving supernatural gifts from the Spirit, whom we cannot control or organize for the sake of efficiency or replication, becomes difficult to apply or believe. Spiritual realities are difficult to perceive if they are no longer feasible within one’s framework for reality, and the spiritual gifts are no exception.

If a church is merely an aggregate of disenchanted individuals who gather together for the purpose of accomplishing a task in the world, then there is little to no room to communally discern the gifts of the Holy Spirit present within the gathered community; the governing logic in such a group is aimed at increasing efficiency for task or program management, whatever that may be, and discerning the work of the Holy Spirit is not a process that can be managed, controlled, or aimed at task completion.

In this framework, hiring more professionals seems logical. They’re trained and equipped to solve problems, and they often do so with a degree of specialization. I’m all for churches having paid ministerial staff, and even specialized ones (I most neatly fit in a category of ‘missions minister’ after all), but what seems to be clear is that hiring professionals for task accomplishment at the expense of discerning the gifts of the Spirit and equipping the Body for ministry is a surefire way to lead to decline in your church.

It’s not just that churches who follow this paradigm experience attendance decline. I’d wager there’s more to be lost here than nickels and noses. What’s truly lost is the design of our common life together as the church, and our ability to attain to the full measure of Christ (Ephesians 4:13).

To be continued.

My oldest is learning to write in cursive, an art form that I though public schools had abandoned years ago, but one that I’m thrilled to see has made a resurgence. She’s frustrated by trying to perfectly execute a new series of movements with hands that have only been writing for a few precious years now. Eventually, she’ll adapt cursive into her own manner of expression and her handwriting will become a distinguished facet of who she is and how she expresses herself.

Shopping lists.

Notes to classmates.

Scribbled phone numbers.

Thank you cards.

Addressed envelopes.

It’ll be this unique little testament to who she is, and her handwriting will become as recognizable to me as her voice or her laugh. This little nod to her humanity.

I think about the churches around Galatia who got a peek at Paul’s handwriting when I imagine he took the quill from the scribe’s hand and stopped narrating and started writing for himself. “See what large letters I am using to write to you with my own hand (Gal. 6:11)!” Some of them would have known his voice from his visits to the region. Some of them would have maybe had a chance to see the letters he had written with his own hand during that time. I imagine the excitement some in those churches would have had when they recognized his humorously large kappas and gammas.

On the other side of the New Testament it’s easy to forget how human they all were, and how interconnected their relationships must have been.

Paul was a man. He had friends with whom his life ran deep. They were women and men he’d been imprisoned with for the Good News of Jesus. He’d stayed in their houses, and been taken care of by their mothers. We catch these glimpses of the human, familial side of the New Testament church at the end of these epistles, but we hurry past them, eyes glazed over as Paul spends precious parchment extolling Philologus or begging his co-laborers Euodia and Syntyche to put aside their differences and get back work on spreading the Good News.

This is part of what makes the church so beautiful then and now. We trace it in Paul’s letters and through notes of encouragement sent by ladies in the prayer ministry. The ideas that birthed transformative ministries that were initially just scribbles on Post-Its and in the theologically rich pages of Romans. It’s beautiful to trace God’s grace to us through these written records of our humanness and our love for one another.