Why Christian Faith Must Evolve—or Risk Dying

Last updated on: March 10, 2025 at 11:57 am By Tim Suttle

Brown Concrete Hallway, Gloucestershire, England, UK; Pexels — CCO

Deconstruction is normal. A couple times each year I remind my congregation that my job is not to speak as the expert proclaiming what is officially true for us, and to demand they accept what I say. That’s fundamentalism, which is dangerous. We have a different agreement goes something like this:

My job as a pastor—and as a writer and an artist— is to crawl on my belly up to the edge of the vast and endless canyon of the divine. I rally my fragile heart to find the courage to peek over the edge and stare into the mysteries of God as deeply and honestly as I can. I drink it in and wrestle with what I see. Then, I come back and tell everyone what I’ve encountered as creatively and compassionately as I can.

The task of the church member is not to uncritically accept everything I say, but to resist it, argue with it, and wrestle with it. Whatever is left standing over time, we’ll call the the work of the Holy Spirit. Then, we talk about it. We consider what is happening in our midst, and we bring it to speech. As we do, my job is to harvest the language that emerges from the group and crash it into scripture, tradition, and human reason all over again. Then, I come back again and teach more about what I am seeing, as we go back and forth in the long slow process of becoming.

Truly Christian Faith Evolves

As we’ve lived into to this new arrangement for the past couple of decades, a conviction has formed within me:

Any truly Christian Faith evolves.

However you define it, the Christian Faith evolves over time. It grows and changes, it unfolds, it ravels and unravels in large part because it’s not just about getting into heaven when you die. Christianity is very much about what happens to the world. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth,” that was Christ’s prayer. Our world is always evolving, so beliefs and practices have to evolve to meet the needs of a changing world.

The Christian faith evolves over time; it has to or it dies—from lack of oxygen, motion, circulation, lack of space to expand and grow, from lack of relevance to the world as we know it, or just from senility, as we forget why we exist and lose our vitality and purpose. Faith evolves or it becomes brittle and fragile, defensive and easily offended, condemning heretics and consolidating power, until eventually it violates even its most basic tenets to try and stay in control of a world that is always changing. Faith evolves over time or it becomes stagnant, static, until it dies of rigidification, calcification, the hardening of its own heart.

On some level we’ve all experienced this in the evolution of our childhood faith—often performing faith for our parents and mentors—to a more grown-up faith we can call our own.

Israel’s faith evolved from Egypt to Sinai, from the wilderness to the Promised Land, from the splendor of Jerusalem to exile and back again, from the destruction of temple to the Jewish diaspora. The faith of the Jewish tradition evolves to this day.

Christianity evolved from a subset of Judaism into a distinct tradition of its own. This didn’t happen overnight. Some of the most basic Christian beliefs—the Trinity, the two natures of Christ—didn’t find mature form until the third, forth, even fifth centuries. Perhaps no evolution was more profound than the church’s evolution from a persecuted minority sect to the official religion of the Roman Empire, an evolution many including myself see as problematic.

What Drives Evolution?

Often there is a cultural driver to an evolving faith. Science, medicine, and technology have all driven Christianity to evolve. The printing press drove the Reformation. Multi-masted sailing vessels birthed American Christianity which is, like it or not, a peculiar evolution of Christianity compared to the rest of the world and most of Christian history. After all, American Christianity evolved alongside manifest destiny. My community includes many whose faith was founded in revivalist traditions. As we crashed our faith into contemplative Christianity, missional theology, and the social gospel, it eventually flowered into an embrace of the gospel of the kingdom of God and Christ’s vision of the peaceable kingdom.

Today, cultural drivers are causing a rapid evolution of American Christianity. I’ve written more extensively about the drivers here. The church’s complicity in political corruption, racism, trauma, abuse, and endless culture wars is driving this evolution. The church’s inability to evolve around the dehumanizing tendencies regarding gender, sexuality, patriarchy, climate change, and Christian nationalism is driving many people to evolve their faith—just in order to find a way to keep on faith-ing it. This is natural. This is always been the case for the people of God.

Faith evolves over time. It has to, or it dies.

Part of me knows this is to be true, and part of me feels some resistance to this idea. There’s this tension involved in evolving faith. How do we balance our tradition with the realities of cultural change? How to we balance participation in our culture and continuity with our past? What must remain constant and what is negotiable? How far is too far in the evolution of our faith? How can we tell, and who gets to say?

The danger of traditionalism—worshipping tradition for tradition’s sake—is always lurking, blinding us in times when faithfulness to God and neighbor actually requires us to change. I think the most faithful thing we can do involves holding this tension and keep the question open. Yet, as we wrestle with balancing cultural change and leadings of the Spirit with the danger of breaking continuity with historic Christianity, isn’t there some kind of litmus test?

At this point, many will say, “Yeah. It’s called the Bible.” And of course they are correct. However, it has been my experience that most of the time these people have their own particular interpretation of the Bible in mind, and they are not open to discussion or even nuance.

A Simple Guardrail

Over the years I have found a simple tool that has functioned as a kind of guardrail for deconstruction and the evolution of faith. It’s rooted in the life and ministry of Christ, and summed most succinctly by Barbara Brown Taylor. When deciding where to draw the line between an ever-evolving faith and our desire to remain faithful to our tradition, Taylor says, “The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor… Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” I think she’s right.

Much of Christ’s life and ministry involved little more than walking around finding out who was excluded from the life of his people, then standing with the excluded, and compelling his people to find a way to choose their neighbor over their religion. This embrace of the excluded other required no small amount of faithful wrestling and evolving.

Lent as Wilderness

In the Scriptures, very often, the place where all this wrestling and evolving happens is the wilderness. The wilderness is a place of testing where the usual things we rely upon are stripped away. Everything gets pared down to the bare essentials, and we are tested—in part to see what we’re made of, in part to run little experiments to help us find out what has to stay and what has to go. What fits with where God is leading us, and what doesn’t fit anymore thus needs to evolve?

Lent is an intentional wilderness season during which we short-circuit our defense mechanisms and make ourselves vulnerable and uncomfortable. We engage in some kind of fasting, just to let God have a little more access to us, to mess with our settle categories, and give us a new imagination for life, the world, and what it means to be faithful in our time and place.

Don’t expect this to be fun. The wilderness is a pain, but it’s also a kind of grace. After all, “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” Jesus had not strayed. He didn’t do something wrong. He went to the wilderness because he was led there by God. Why? Because there was something about his mission that would require a new imagination than the one he was handed by his tradition to that point. This new imagination can only be formed in the wilderness.

Each year Christians spend forty days in the wilderness during Lent, wrestling with our own faith and asking God to evolve our faith. Maybe the wilderness is exactly what we need right now.

What About the Real Problems that are Driving People to Deconstruct?

Last updated on: December 14, 2021 at 8:18 am By Tim Suttle

It was a “Farewell Rob Bell” moment for the neo-Reformed harbingers of orthodoxy. I have always like Matt Chandler, but his recent assertion (in a clipped video posted to TikTok) that those who deconstruct their Christian faith just want to be in on the sexy thing, and that one cannot deconstruct an authentic experience of Christ (so your faith must not be authentic), has only amplified the deconstruction phenomenon. For awhile now, the hawkers have been cranking out books on deconstruction like fidget spinners, and Christian celebrities offer my story of deconstruction like spiritual advice columnists. It can be a bit cloying, but there’s no putting this toothpaste back in the tube. Deconstruction is the thing now.

Apart from being a dumb thing to say (which I can forgive, because I say dumb things all the time), Chandler’s remarks lack self-awareness. Consciously, he clearly believes he is defending the gospel, God, and Christian orthodoxy. But, as Hauerwas often says, “Anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.” In this case, the idol is the tight system of modern neo-Reformed Calvinism, and the incredible evangelical/political power its keepers wield. They are God’s theology cops, policing the borders of orthodoxy. Their power is rooted in their authority over theology, and their ability to dictate and even control not only beliefs, but bodies—especially with regard to women in ministry, and sexuality.

This control over beliefs and bodies is the key to understanding the true (and likely unconscious) reasons Chandler said what he did:

The neo-Reformed camp is uncomfortable with deconstruction not because it is a danger to the gospel or to a person’s soul, but because deconstruction represents a threat to their power over people’s beliefs and bodies, exposing their own culpability in the issues that are driving deconstruction in the first place, some of which are embedded in their own theology.

When I sit with people who are deconstructing, nearly all of them are driven by some version of the same concern, and it has nothing to do with what’s sexy. They are looking at the fruits of American Christianity—what Christians are about, what they fight for, who they embrace, who they hate, and how they treat their enemies—and they’re saying: if that’s what Christianity is about, I don’t know if I can be part of it anymore. They speak these words through heart-wrenching sorrow and tears, because they love Jesus but have real problems with what the church in America has become.

Unsurprisingly, the real issues driving this season of widespread deconstruction have everything to do with the church’s relationship to power over other people’s bodies. The top ten issues I hear are:

Politics: The embrace of Donald Trump by 80% of evangelicals deeply damaged the reputation of Christianity as a whole, exposing evangelicalism as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party.
Sexuality: Many Christians think that if the church’s stance on LGBTQ issues is causing students from our youth groups to commit suicide, then we should probably rethink our stance.
Patriarchy: The segment of American Christianity that is synonymous with patriarchy is being rejected, even as they continue to cling to power .
Racism: The church has been, and still is, complicit in all manner of racism and racial injustice and is not doing nearly enough to change.
Climate Change: Christianity has tended toward the exploitation of creation, rather than its stewardship.
Culture Wars: American society is riding a rocket of cultural division and conflict headed for the side of a cliff and Christianity won’t accept a course correction.
Injury & Trauma: The church has abused its power in many ways—up to and including the horrific sexual abuse of children—and it has not adequately confessed or repented.
Character: As a group, Christians are seen as morally inferior to the culture at large. The corruption, hypocrisy, immaturity, nationalism, violence, arrogance, and cruelty so often on display leaves many feeling that they no longer want to be linked to this group by a common religion.
Relationships: Many who desire relationships that are rooted in hospitality, justice, forgiveness, fidelity, sacrifice, honesty, and virtue no longer see Christianity as a viable pathway to those things.
Truth: In the name of dogma (which seems to be a thinly veiled desire for power), Christians would rather embrace magical thinking, deny science, and use coercive tactics to enforce conformity, than to change and adjust to new knowledge of the world, and what humans collectively think of as true.

These are the legitimate concerns which have thrust many sincere believers into the wilderness to deconstruct (atonement theologies, and how to read the bible should probably get an honorable mention).

If you ask me, the defensiveness around deconstruction exposes a deep insecurity. Chandler’s video is a signifier, revealing that—at least on some unconscious level—fundamentalist and neo-Reformed leaders know the very source of their strength and power is now undermining the church. My sense is that neo-Reformed leaders are defensive about deconstruction because have too much power riding on the issues of patriarchy and sexuality alone to ever risk entertaining even the most legitimate theological and exegetical challenges to their dogmatic stances. I expect their attacks to intensify as this pressure grows, and it will only grow.

Maybe I am wrong. Either way, I don’t think the driving force behind most deconstruction is a desire to be sexy and cool, or to be free from religious constraint. The deconstructors are trying to hold onto faith, not let it go. They are bravely chasing a deep intuition that the church can do better, and they are right. Their persistence is commendable, and we ought to be equipping them for this project instead of dismissing or condemning them.

One last thing. Most of what is called “deconstruction” isn’t really deconstruction at all. True philosophical deconstruction (as pioneered by Derrida) is a very particular thing, and it’s not what most of these people are doing. Deconstruction, in the popular sense of that word, should be a normal aspect of growth toward maturity. In a less insecure era we would just call it: discipleship. Christian beliefs always change and develop over time. If you don’t believe me, ask the critics of deconstruction why they don’t require women to cover their heads, or wash each other’s feet. Everyone picks and chooses. Everyone evaluates and changes their beliefs over time. This is not a problem, that is, unless your power is tied to something which is being called into question.

If you are deconstructing, I want to encourage you to keep going. I’ll tell you what I often tell my own congregation: If the you of today doesn’t call the you of five years ago a heretic on at least one or two issues, then you’re likely doing it wrong. Find a graceful (small) congregation, embrace some basic Christian practices, and keep on faithing-it.

The Ragamuffin and the Walking Wall

Last updated on: September 12, 2019 at 5:10 pm By Tim Suttle

At the Nelson Atkins museum right now, there’s an exhibit by an artist named Andy Goldsworthy called the Walking Wall. Goldsworthy is a world-renown artist who works almost exclusively with natural objects: rocks, trees, flowers, and leaves. Usually, when his work is completed, they film and photograph it and it floats away downstream or succumbs to the forest and the wind. Goldsworthy is teaching us to see the beauty of the moment—of things that are here for a moment and pass away—the way that things are constantly changing. The Walking Wall is a variation on that theme, and it’s teaching me what it means to be part of the church at the end of Christendom.

Disorientation

We are living in a time of deep disorientation, as a culture, and as the church. Huge aspects of life and faith we used to take for granted are being called into question. Old structures of belief and meaning are breaking down, and the faith our parents and grandparents seemed to effortlessly rely on is being reformulated and reconsidered. As a pastor, I am in constant conversation with intelligent, caring, wholeheartedly faithful people who can, frankly, no longer tell up from down. I hear the constant refrain: “What in the world is going on?” The ground ahead of us is nearly unrecognizable, but we have nowhere else to go but here.

Navigating the wilderness can be incredibly disorienting. It’s an ugly and often painful thing to watch. It can be easy to feel like we’re doing something wrong, like we’re heretics or traitors to the cause… like we used to be pretty good at Christianity, you know? It made sense to us, and helped us navigate our lives. But that all seems to be breaking down now.

I recently asked my church how many would say they are in a season of de-slash-re-construction. Nearly every hand in the place shot up. Thank God. I’m not alone.

Confirmation that you are good and seriously lost usually comes in the form of that familiar shot of adrenaline, the one that tells you when you’re about to fall, or get hit by oncoming traffic. For me, there’s always a twinge of embarrassment. Shame—my favorite affect—floods over me like I just violated some rule everyone but me seemed to know about, and I just cost my team fifteen yards. Is there someplace I can hide? Perhaps there’s another option besides making ourselves as small as possible and waiting for the crowd to stop booing.

What if we choose to mine for this tension like it’s solid gold, precious, and powerful, and for our benefit? After all, tension is nearly always the path to growth. What does faith look like in a season of disorientation?

Losing Christendom

Christendom was that supposedly wonderful time when Christianity was the default setting for all of Western Culture. Society was rooted in common beliefs, language, symbols, and practices that gave us all a sense of certitude. For most of the world, Christendom all but disappeared after Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, the loss of Christendom is just now coming for many privileged white American Christians. Some trace the beginnings of their disorientation to the election of Donald Trump.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has an interesting way of illustrating the dramatic loss of Christendom. He says, four centuries ago one could walk the streets of Prague, Paris, or Amsterdam, and it would have been virtually impossible to find a person who did not believe in God. Today, the opposite is true. Walk those same streets and you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who does believe in God, much less a bonafide church member. It’s a massive change in a short time, and can feel like a major loss.

Taylor says, however, the loss of Christendom was about addition, not subtraction. To their Christian faith, Western believers had to suddenly add a truckload of new material—Darwin’s evolution, Einstein’s relativity, migration from towns to cities, the Industrial Revolution, modern medicine, consumer capitalism, World War I and II, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, mass media, television, and the digital age—all to an ancient faith that was already beleaguered.

At some point it simply became too much, and certitude went out the window. People could no longer believe in God and still believe everything else they were learning. This massive period of deconstruction began. That’s the terrain for us. That’s why we feel such disorientation.

The loss of Christendom can register as a kind of danger, and from there it’s usually fight, flight, or freeze. The Fighters wage the Culture Wars, embracing politicians who promise to bring back the good old days of certitude. The Flighters bail on God, or bail on culture. The Freezers either maintain a vague, sentimental belief in God, showing up to church only on Christmas and Easter, or they join the ranks of the spiritual but not religious.

My friends and I are trying to imagine a fourth option beyond fight, flight, or freeze, one we just call faith—only in its verb form: Faithing. We are trying to stay engaged with God, the church, and the culture, and do the long slow work of reimagining our faith on the new terrain of culture.

The Ragamuffin

During the long night he wrestled with God, the Old Testament patriarch, Jacob, made a powerful transition. Up to then, Jacob had been kind of a scoundrel. He swindled his brother out of his birthright, his father out of his blessing, his father-in-law out of his fortune, and had always managed to stay one step ahead of the consequences. But there in the middle of the night by the River Jabbok, the bill came due. Jacob wrestled with God in the form of a man.

It was as if there was no way for Jacob to move forward in life unless he learned to change, and grow up. His old brash and unrepentant ways made him a fortune, but ruined nearly every relationship he had. So, there in the dark he contended with God. Apparently it was a fairly even match, which means that either Jacob was incredibly strong, or God was limiting God’s strength to keep Jacob in the game. Either way, God seemed pleased with Jacob’s tenacity.

As morning broke God touched the socket of Jacob’s hip and injured him (confirming my suspicion that God doesn’t fight fair). But, instead of quitting, Jacob put God in a clinch and said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And that’s exactly what God did. “You shall be Israel—the one who wrestles with God.” God named and blessed Jacob right there by the river as the sun came up.

The transformation Jacob underwent is the same transformation we’re trying to make here in the midst of our own disorientation. At first Jacob was all bluster and bravado. He was fighting to win, to come out on top, to maintain his current way of being. After the injury, however, the game changed. From that point on he was just holding on for dear life, begging for God’s blessing, hoping for some sense of his true identity.

The story ends, fittingly, with a peculiar detail. We’re told that Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his life. With his new strength and identity, would come a new weakness. Jacob had lost the match but won his soul. It was what Frederick Buechner has called, The Magnificent Defeat. A little less of a scoundrel, Jacob finally knew who he was: the one who wrestled with God and lived to tell the tale.

What the people of God have come to believe is that everybody has to wrestle with God eventually. And, if you do, you’ll walk with a limp for the rest of your life. Of course you will. Faith will become even more confusing than before, less simplistic, less in control, and just all-around harder to navigate. If you want to cling to God you will have to let go of the certitude and easy answers to which you cling. And this is the only way to be named by God, and receive our true identity.

Here in the midst of disorientation, our struggle cannot be a fight to win, to control God or maintain the status quo. Our struggle can only be to cling to God, to somehow receive a blessing, and a new and deeper sense of our own identity. The only ground on which this can happen is the ground of disorientation. Change almost never happens in safe, comfortable spaces. Only when we step out in faith into the mystery and danger of the night—only when we come to the end of ourselves and wrestle with God—do we learn who we truly are. Only when we are completely confused about everything, do we finally begin to know a few things as they truly are.

But, if you wrestle with God, you’re going to walk with a limp. It’s ragamuffin faith from here on out.

The Walking Wall

So what does faith look like at the end of Christendom? What does it look like to keep walking with God, even if we walk with a limp? The Walking Wall is teaching me.

Goldsworthy and his team built their beautiful rock wall about a hundred yards long using ancient methods, without cement, fitting these stones together using smaller rocks and pebbles to fill the gaps. Then, when they finished, they began to walk the wall forward. Taking the stones from the tail and adding them to the front, they just kept building the wall onto the ground ahead, about twelve yards a day, as if the wall was walking.

This Walking Wall is an amazing metaphor for the Church, here at the end of Christendom. The church is heading into new terrain that is always changing. Our task is to keep this walking wall of the church moving forward. And in order to do this, we have to return to the foundations of our faith and deconstruct them. We have to pick up these old stones and measure their weight. We have to learn their contours—what they’ll do and what they won’t—and then carry them forward, faithfully reconstructing them onto the new terrain.

Not everybody is up for this task. At one point, Goldsworthy’s wall blocked a nearby street, stopping Kansas City traffic for a few weeks. It’s incredibly inconvenient this work we are doing. That’s when you find out who the artists really are. Some people want to build the wall into a fortress and fight. Some will want to reject the whole enterprise and take flight from it. Some want to cement the wall in one place and freeze it in time. But the fight, flight, freeze responses mistake the very nature of the wall. It’s a walking wall, after all, always on the move, exploring the new terrain of culture. Cement the wall together, and it’ll never move again. Build it into a fortress and you’ll only fight about who’s in and who’s out. Flee the enterprise altogether, and you’ll miss out on the beauty and artistry of the work.

Our task is the task of faithing, picking up these ancient stones, the very foundations of our faith—scripture, tradition, reason, and experience—holding them in our hands, studying them, learning their shapes, feeling their weight, and carrying them forward as we wrestle with God thru this process of de-and-re-construction. Never losing track of even the smallest pebble, we know that all of this wall must be carried forward because there might be some terrain ahead where this exact rock is needed.

Isn’t that a beautiful picture of the church? This is what we do. We wrestle with God and with our culture as we slowly, faithfully, move the wall forward. That’s our life’s work. You can see it as a huge waste of time, or as a beautiful work of art.

We are living in a time of deep disorientation. You are not imagining it. It’s real. But, we are not in danger. God has us. God invites us to stop trying to win, stop trying to maintain, and instead to cling to God, wrestle with God, and ask God to name us and bless us. And if we do, we’ll walk with a limp. There’s no getting around that. We’ll be ragamuffins for the rest of our lives. But this is the only way to come to know who we really are, to know what it means to be human as human was meant to be. And generations from now, when we are all dead and gone, this walking wall of the church will continue moving forward. Our lives can be part of that legacy.

(This is adapted from a sermon I preached at Redemption Church last month. If you want to follow the series called Ragamuffin, you can listen here, or on the Redemption Church KC Sermon Podcast)

Follow me on Twitter: @Tim_Suttle

2015 Missio Alliance North American Gathering

Last updated on: July 1, 2015 at 6:11 am By Tim Suttle

Missio Alliance just posted the audio files from their North American gathering held in Alexandria, VA last May. You can find them in the Resources section of their website: www.missioalliance.org. I cannot recommend this resource highly enough, & I thought I’d take this opportunity to post a few thoughts about what I experienced at this gathering.

It has been years since I have gone to a seminar or conference—really any wider gathering of Christians—without experience that square-peg feeling. I realize this says more about me than about the groups that sponsored the gatherings. Still, it has seemed like my love affair with Post-liberal and Missional theologies had put me at odds with many evangelicals, while my persistent evangelicalism has made me feel out of step with many progressives.

Too conservative for the liberals, and too liberal for the conservatives… I was starting to think that I would be a permanent outsider. So, I flew to D.C. for the 2015 Missio Alliance North American Gathering with at least a bit of nervousness. I’m happy to say that, from the first moment to the last, I felt completely at home.

Cherith Fee Nordling and Brian Zahnd both spoke during the opening plenary session, and both were stellar. At some point during this opening session I realized that I had been listening to speakers at a Christian gathering for well over a half an hour and hadn’t so much as rolled my eyes or cringed a single time. I had, however, been moved to tears more than once, and had been squarely called into question in several ways. It was beautiful. I was beginning to let my theological hair down.

One of the most important aspects of the gathering was the cultural, racial, socio-economic, and theological diversity I experienced. One could not help but recognize a very intentional engagement with voices from the margins of society, but the thing is it was very natural, as in genuine, uncontrived. Women and minorities were not simply represented. Their voices came from center stage, and their personalities had obviously shaped the gathering from top to bottom. White educated men did not dominate the stage.

Lisa Sharon Harper from SoJourners, knocked my socks off in the very first workshop I attended. Nikki Toyama-Szeto from IJM was on her game in that same session as well. You can purchase all of the workshops, including theirs, in two bundles online here: Bundle 01, Bundle 02. Efrem Smith had the headlining spot on the first night. It was my first time to hear Efram speak, and I’m so glad to have found this prophetic voice. The first night ended with a short concert by the Royal Priesthood, the young adult choir from the Alfred Street Baptist Church. It was a fitting way to end the day.

Overall, I found the culture of Missio Alliance to be capacious, generous, and smart. The word that keeps coming to mind is genuine. They were serious but didn’t take themselves too seriously. The event held none of the bombastic deconstructionism or cynical elitism that I’ve grown to expect from the leading edge. From conversations in between sessions and over meals, to coffees, and late night beers… the camaraderie I experienced was a gift. I haven’t felt that sort of kinship for a really long time, no kidding, and I realized that isolation of the past decade had become a source of real loneliness for me. It was good to find a place to belong.

Here are a few of my favorite random (approximate) quotes from the first two sessions. You can purchase all of these talks bundled together with the other plenary speakers here:

Brian Zahnd:

Empire always finds a way to hide the bodies… usually draped by flags.

Easter & Christianity have been commandeered to serve the interests of Empire… & empires love the word security… I’ve been asked to take off my shoes in mosques & temples all over the world. The only place this happens in America is in security at the airport; where we stand in tiny sacred space & raise our hands.

At the tomb the angels say what heaven is always saying… do not be afraid.

At the tomb Jesus’ first word is peace… peace is the first word of the new world… Shalom… Total human flourishing.

A Christianity untethered from empire is free to imagine new ways to be the kingdom.

I’m fine with the National Day of Prayer as long as it doesn’t become the Day of Prayer for Nationalism.

Cherith Fee Nordling

In order to enact our true humanity, we must understand Jesus’ true humanity.

A crucified messiah was no good to anyone… A resurrected crucified messiah? Now that’s a different deal.

Jesus was executed because he pissed off every human power, just by his obedience to God.

Participation in Jesus’ suffering became the norm… the only way you get there is by dying over & over.

There will be no disembodied followers if the incarnate son… the only one to ever pull off being fully human.

Why do we lay down our life for a friend? …because ‘in this world we will be like him.’

This is but God the father as a man; this is God the son: a man…”

Jesus has a penis & the best word I said right there is has… so talk to him… he gets it.

Participating in Jesus’ kingdom will cost us our lives… but our death will not be the final word.

Efrem Smith

I don’t think the church is dead… it had a stroke, so part of the body is not functioning.

We skip over the parts of the scripture where women are business leaders & prophets, but you find a prostitute? …”

Where there is deep desperation in the world revival takes place. We’re to satisfied for revival.

We’re also holding onto a mythology of a Christian past we’re trying to get back to.

Where there’s deep desperation in the world revival takes place. We’re not desperate enough…

I offer myself up to God daily so that God can love my wife, my kids, my enemies through me.

Most evangelicals are more instructed in their political beliefs by cable news than by a pastor.

Book Review – MORE or LESS: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity

Last updated on: April 30, 2013 at 9:47 am By Tim Suttle

“So you have no frame of reference here, Donny. You’re like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know…” – Walter Sobchak (The Big Lebowski)

It’s a cliche right? The thirty-something hipster wakes up one day and realizes that there are actually other people on the planet. So they set out to make sense of it all, feeling as though they are the first ones to the party, the first ones to have these thoughts, the first ones to experience these emotions, all the while ignoring the fact that a whole generation of trailblazers and guides have been doing this for decades, dying in the process. I’ll be honest: in the back of my mind, I really thought this was what I was in for in More or Less.

I was so pleasantly surprised by this book. It’s a humble, vulnerable, memoir-like glimpse into author Jeff Shinabarger’s (and his wife’s), earnest attempt to live like Jesus called us to live.

More or Less: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity is a field guide for those who are attempting to dismantle a consumerist lifestyle and reach for something that is real. I wish I had 25 copies. I’d hand them out every time somebody in my community hits a certain critical moment that I see over and over.

The critical moment I’m talking about is that point when somebody has worked through cycle of production (work your tail off for money), and consumption (purchase stuff that is supposed to make your life better/complete), enough times to figure out that it’s a game they can’t win. The game is rigged to entice with the promise of fulfillment that it can never deliver. The promise is “more.” The con-game is that “more” will always leave us with less of what we truly desire and need for our lives – less contentedness, happiness, richness, energy, and so on. The game feeds off our discontent and will consume every single part of our lives that we are willing to give it – down to our very souls. It’s a serious work of grace to hit that critical moment and push through to what awaits us beyond… If we do decide to push through, then the adventure begins, and its time to dismantle everything we’ve been building in our consumerist life.

This book is the field guide for that deconstruction.

Ideas: I say field guide because it is very practical, but it is not a five step plan for how to change the world and your life in the process. The book makes no grand promises (except that you’ll find your life by losing it). Field guides are full of stories, information, ideas, practical solutions, warnings, and especially insights for navigating the environment, identifying all of the indigenous creatures… a field guide helps you to locate yourself in your environment, and to make the most of what is already there. It helps you to name the things that live in your world, to avoid the things that can harm you, and to learn how to work with the natural resources you didn’t know were at your fingertips all along.

Stories: Shinabarger has banked a ton of stories, each of which can help us make sense of our own story. For instance, he tells about a time when he and his wife overspent on presents one Christmas. When the Visa bill came they knew they had to tighten the family belt. So they decided to try and eat for a whole month only on the food they already had in their house. They made it seven weeks without grocery shopping. The book is one story after another like that: adventures in messing with your small vision of the world in the hopes that if you’ll start to shed some of the dead weight in your life, then you might actually become more of a human being than you ever thought possible.

Stats: A few times while reading I had the thought that this book is a little bit like Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger for hipsters. This is one aspect of the book – it does do that stark contrast thing that Ronald Sider’s been doing for decades. EX: If you make at least $2,500 a year, you are in the top 14.93% of the richest people in the world. EX: If you make $40,000 a year then one day’s wages is $160 – compare that to half the world’s population who lives on less than $2 a day. We can never see our lives clearly if we are only comparing ourselves to our affluent neighbors. There’s a helpful amount of that in here.

The book doesn’t over promise, which I really appreciate. And it’s not stunt-journalism. It is just an honest guide for those who aren’t afraid to go walking around in the wilderness for a few years, in the hopes that God will give them a new imagination for what an abundant life could be like. If you are approaching the critical moment of disillusionment with consumerist culture, if you are already in the turn… moving away from consumerist values and pursuits, if you are already well on your way toward this goal, then you should get More or Less for your library.

It’s pretty clear that Shinabarger is not trying to write a book, he’s trying to foment a movement. I hope it works. If you are interested in learning more, they’ve built a kind of interactive experience with videos to watch after certain chapters. You can watch them here: http://moreorlessbook.com//#videos

Monday Morning Confessional

Last updated on: July 9, 2012 at 1:13 pm By Tim Suttle

I confess that I’m at Conception Abbey for a bit of solitude until Thursday. I confess that the abbey is one of my favorite places on the planet. As a part of my spiritual rule of life, I typically spend around 25 days a year up here. I confess that I miss my family terribly for the first 12-24 hours. Then I can actually give myself to the solitude. I confess that I once went 48 hours w/out speaking here. I confess that this will not happen this time.

I confess that this is the first time I’ve decided to blog while at the abbey. I confess that I’m not sure that this should be allowed. Doesn’t it break the spirit of a private spiritual retreat? Praying with the monks and blogging? It’s a little weird. I confess that I’m going to give myself a pass on this one and try to keep my posts limited to the topic at hand: retreat and prayer.

I confess that I was well into my late twenties before someone pointed out to me that my prayers (despite my ACTS training… adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication), were mostly about asking God to do stuff I wanted God to do.

I confess that I’m staying in the new guest house at the abbey which is nice like a brand new hotel. I’m a little thrown off because I’m used to the old dorms which are a bit more austere. I’m not complaining. I can control my own room temp…

I confess that I pray better when I am walking or singing (chanting). I confess that the sound of the psalms being chanted does something crazy to my soul.

I confess that last night’s “The Newsroom” was my favorite episode thus far. Sorkin’s deconstruction of the media is genius. I confess that I think all of the Kansas references owe to the fact that Alex Graves is from here. I confess that I think last night’s slam on Manhattan, KS owes to the fact that Graves went to KU.

I confess that 1:05 prayer is perhaps my favorite office. It’s the most subdued, no instruments, and it’s almost always from ps. 119.

I confess that as an evangelical Protestant, I am very aware that I still have no idea what to do with the psalms. I feel so inferior to the Anglicans and Catholics on this one. I’ve been praying the psalms daily since 2003, and more recently my rhythm has been taking me through them every 2 months. All I know right now is that they are tethering me to something vast; something I don’t yet understand. So I just keep praying them 3-4 times a day. I have this feeling that they are making my prayers conform to a new pattern – something like seeking first the kingdom of God – and making them less about getting God to do stuff.

I confess that when I pray lament psalms, I learn what it is to intercede for those who are really suffering. My pseudo-suffering is drawn into harsher focus. I have it really, really good.

Okay, I made my confession… you make yours!

Art in the 21st century

Last updated on: July 6, 2011 at 10:18 am By Tim Suttle

Cornell West fired off an interesting tweet today. It read: “The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.” I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit as an artist/musician and as a writer. Can we escape the commodification of dang-near everything? Case in point – West’s deconstruction was instantly published via twitter. The moment he did it became a sort of commodity. How can he maintain his iconoclastic pose when he can publish his every thought to thousands with one click of the button. Is there a point at which information/content becomes so ubiquitous that the most profound things will once again find us from our own neighborhood (the underground)? And even if that is all true, does that make what West said wrong? I don’t think so. I think he’s still right, and that we are all a part of the same hypocrisy.

I’ve always said when something is marketed, it dies a little bit. Does it die or just fundamentally change? And, is it ruined forever? One thing is for sure, the evaluation of art has certainly evolved – or perhaps devolved – into pure commerce. Most art now behaves much more like a commercial enterprise than an evocative force. Even indie-art is not impervious to the forces of commercial success. When Arcade Fire became the first indie band to win the Grammy for album of the year, you can be sure that hipsters everywhere felt validated. Will anything Arcade Fire does after that sort of recognition be the same? They were perennial underdogs – that’s over now. They are going to be millionaires several times over by the time it’s all said and done. Will that make it so they no longer struggle enough to produce something real?

Struggle is essential to good art. Artists are like mothers: they carry something inside them for months while it gestates. They birth their creations through intense pain. The end result is that they put something new into the world – something unique which the world has never seen before. And the world depends on them for its very survival. If mothers stop bearing children, that’s the end of the human race. The stakes are every bit as high for the artists. We must have people in our society who are set apart to consider the nature of our existence, and who have the courage to creep to the edge of the abyss on their bellies, come back and tell us what they saw. When we force artists to become good capitalists, then we ruin the artists and ourselves as well. When we tell ourselves its only valid when it sells a hundred thousand units… check that, when we first call them “units,” we have already derailed. We make it harder for them to provoke us to see ourselves and the world around us in a new light.

If you train this line of thinking in on Christian music, which is where I made my living for so long, you create an impossible ethical paradox. This paradox has been an important part of my journey for the past few years, and it’s still going on for me. I have not great wisdom, only the conviction that we are going to have to renegotiate the role of the artist and once again find room for them to practice their art for us…

Also, if you’d like to buy a book or some music, click on the links to the right.

Intuitive Leadership – Session Three

Last updated on: April 25, 2008 at 9:58 am By Tim Suttle

SESSION THREE

How to find yourself if you are lost is sort of like GPS – it works by triangulation. He has three points on the triangle which have big circles around them which form rings.

– Context and Culture
– Gospel and Theology
– Structures and Church

Context and Culture:
Who are we? What is our language, what is our social setting. Most of us cannot talk about our lives. We have now we are actually living our lives and how we talk about it are generally very different things.

Gospel and Theology:
These are always mediated through social tools. Unless you read the bible in original Greek and Hebrew – you are making interpretive decisions. You have to use context and culture through which you look at Gospel and theology.

Structures and Church:
How does the stuff we believe become embodied in the life of our community? This is the hardest of the three things to change. The reason this is true is because this circle holds an incredible amount of power. If we use 3 to triangulate our position at any given time to figure out where we are and how we perceive reality overflows into our structures.

This is the process of deconstruction which is NOT destruction we always deconstruct but we don’t need to destroy. Jesus did this – “you have heard it said this but I say this” – If Jesus accepts the premise of the questions he received then he’s only locked into a certain few answers, so he reframes the questions. But Jesus says, “your criteria are too small for what God is doing and wants to do in the world.” Hermeneutic of suspicion or humility is what is needed.

We need to celebrate mistakes. We need to have contests that celebrate the biggest mistakes in our organizations, vote on it, and give them a prize.

AT JACOB’S WELL:
We live in a “post” world. Post does not mean “anti.” The fact that you are “post” teenager doesn’t mean that you are anti teenager, just that you are past that time in your life. Post should be understood in this way. It just means, “what comes after.” Post-modern does not mean anti-modern, it’s just what comes after.

Post modern and post enlightenment is just a new way of living and being the people of God because as we’ve mapped our environment, this is just the new reality that is coming to be. The culture is just going this way. Those who grip tightly to Modernity say “this is reality,” and the rest of the world increasingly sees them as out of touch and ignorant.

“The old story asserts that resistance to change is a fact of life. Bound by a worldview that seeks stability and control change is always undesirable. But the new story explains resistance not as a fact of life, but as evidence of an act against life. Life is in motion constantly creating, exploring, discovering. Nothing alive, including us, presents these great creative motions. But all life resists control. All of life reacts to any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself.” – Meg Wheatley

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollack?

Last updated on: October 31, 2007 at 6:47 am By Tim Suttle

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Jackson Pollack is one of my favorite artists. I don’t know why but respond very emotionally to most abstract expressionism. De Kooning is another favorite. There is a De Kooning here in town at the Kemper Museum that I like to go see. There is also a Pollock at the Nelson in the new wing. It’s nice, but not one of his more important works. I love the deconstruction of forms and the large scale…I just think it’s beautiful.

Anyway, I just watched this film (documentary) called Who #$&% is Jackson Pollock? about an eccentric truck-driving grandma named Teri Horton who thinks she bought an authentic Jackson Pollock painting in a thrift shop. The movie documents her quest to authenticate it, but the real topic of the film is the obtuse egoism of the art world. It’s pretty funny and very illuminating – worth watching.

The film made me consider a question: Why do I like Jackson Pollack? Is it because someone told me his work was good so I started to appreciate it? I really never paid attention to abstract expressionism until I spent some time in the Moma in NYC. After a few hours in the Jackson Pollack room I was really hooked. But part of that experience was learning about the form and philosophy behind the genre. It was also very different standing there in front of a canvas measuring 10 feet by 20 feet.