So, it seems, that Eugene Peterson searched his feelings and discovered that the LGBT community can be spiritual too. Everyone brighter than me has already commented. What I found most interesting, besides RHE’s* passive aggressive Facebook post that no doubt Peterson would have an easier time of it than Jen Hatmaker because he’s a man and she’s a woman (I think I’ll circle back to this some day because it’s not true and I think it would be worth saying why), the thing that I found most interesting is that the news arrived for me right after I’d read this article–why millennials aren’t interested in church any more. It’s kind of long, so you might want to skim it.
Surely these two things have nothing to do with each other! I mean, gosh, the quiet drift away from the church of young people, that’s probably a random event that has nothing to do with all other events. What could possibly be causing it?
Not Eugene Peterson, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s not his fault. Any more than my particular sin issues caused me to have a wonky thyroid. But, I do think we might say that trends are trends. And whatever produced the drift of a younger generation out of the church is not unrelated to the popularity of the Belong Tour, nor the theological phenomenon of the Message. I have a theory about what it is. Indeed, I think it’s what probably made RHE reconsider her theological underpinnings. She hinted at it in her book. And that is….
Terrible Preaching. Let me lay out my case with breezy self confidence.
Some years ago I was handed a crumbling old pamphlet describing the missionary push West of the Mississippi by some Anglicans. They had gone to the frontier of North Dakota or somewhere, and planned to provide church, essentially, to the rough settlers of some hastily thrown together town. I savored the description of how they spent their day getting ready. First they had to find a room. Then they had to find some chairs or benches or something. Then they were flummoxed because there wasn’t going to be an organ and so they weren’t sure what to do. They eventually came to grips with their loss but then they had to go out into the highways and byways to compel, I mean, embarrassingly mention that there was going to be some sacred event of some sort, whispering softly that hideous word, ‘church.’ I read on, waiting for the priest, pastor, father, whatever he wanted to be called, to realize that in mere hours he might have a chance to crack open not Only his dusty prayer book, but his bible as well. Surely he would want to spend a few minutes reading a text or something. The account continued on and the poor gentleman never seemed to find the time. He just went from one activity to another, and in the evening, they had church. What he said when it came to that blank space after the scripture readings was not recorded.
Because, you know, it wasn’t that important. But I imagine that if I had been sitting there in my frontier bonnet, he would have told me to do good and not evil, amen. Fast forward to the description of RHE about the kind of preaching she endured–women be good women, men be real men–and you can see the aching hunger for the promise of Life Giving Speech at something like the Belong Tour. But when you get into that vast auditorium, filled with women similarly desiring to know God and their own place in his cosmos, you get to hear funny Jen Hatmaker whose mention of the divine, or even Jesus, intermingled as it is with hilarious women empowering anecdotes, turns out to be thinly spread. Trade the hard pew of Evening Prayer sans sermon for the lights, pep, and empowerment of the woman on the stage and you haven’t gone a very far distance.
So there you are, still bearing up under your ordinary life, and you one day wander the aisles of the bookstore and stop, chewing your nails, in front of the Message. And it’s fine. It’s nice. It gives you a sense that God is somebody or other. And that you are special and that He cares for you. But when you’re in a serious crisis…when you don’t even know if God exists, when you’ve been educated to be a lawyer but now you’re at home with three babies and you don’t know how to do laundry, or worse, you’re a single mother trying to get your kids to Head Start so you won’t be late for your grueling job at Walmart, well, in that case, the Message and the Belong Tour are too expensive anyway. But even if you did make it to church, and why would you want to, the sermon would be about your potential and also all the extra stuff you need to do to be a good person. Keep working lady! Make sure all those church chairs are in a straight line!
And so God, the author and savior of mankind, is forgotten in the gentle lapse of a hundred years. And everybody is hungry, and tired, and angry, or wistfully gazing at the beauty of nature with Bono, that great theologian of our times, and none of us really know anything of substance any more.
Have I painted too bleak a picture? The fact remains that language matters. God cares about it so much that he identifies his very self as The Word. Christians need to stop feeling like their deconstructed post post modern best is good enough. Don’t phone in your sermon on Saturday night. Don’t read the Bible and try to imagine yourself in the text. Don’t stand up and say that if the congregation is good, God will love them. Open the book and learn what the words mean and then relay that meaning intelligently to others. Don’t just pray stream of consciousness or chat about what you Feel like God might be like. He is a Being so vast, so profound, but so particular as to desire to be known. You can know him, but not just by being who you are.
Feel like I’m yelling and waving my arms? I guess I am. I’m praying for the Petersons, for Jen Hatmaker, for RHE, for the new owners of the Belong Tour. I mean, I’m even praying for myself–that I would be able to articulate the content of the Christian message, that I would be formed and shaped enough by the Bible that when I meet another person I wouldn’t fritter that moment away with empty and vapid words. And I’m praying for the generation that has decided church is not useful for them. It’s hard for me to argue their point. But it may be that God, so ill considered by us, will himself come to interrupt our arrangement of chairs and panic over the microphone popping.
*RHE is short for Rachel Held Evans who wrote A Year of Biblical Womanhood
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