Well, here is Friday again, and another ice-storm to mark the occasion. In honor of this completely unremarkable situation, I have a couple of things to say, beginning with the fact that I am woefully behind in all my podcast listening because of all the nothing books I’m binging on audible. But I finally pulled myself away from yet another dumb mystery novel to click on the first installment of the Stand Firm Podcast interview with the Rev. Dr. John Shuler. For anyone who is any kind of Christian in America–though all the particulars in the podcast are Anglican–I think the discussion will be most eye-opening. If you think that you can just quietly go to church on Sunday and hope for the best, I pray that by the end of the hour you will begin to see that that is not how any of this works.
What I particularly find so helpful about listening to Dr. Shuler is…well, I can’t just put it down to one thing. Let me do several.
One
The truth one must admit is that Christianity in the West is best described as a Long Defeat, but that God is provident. The seeds of chaos are sown a long time before the whirlwind starts ripping through all the warm and comfortable structures that shelter ordinary people from death and sin. There are a lot of times that you might reasonably walk out of a bad sermon, or a bad meeting, or say to all the assembled people and their clergy, “this is not ok, we have to do something.” The moments come and pass you by, over and over and over, and your conscience starts to chafe. Will there ever come a time when you might finally stand up, even if you are the only person in the room, and say No?
But there is still time. There will be a lot more meetings and sermons to walk out of. Also, and this is astonishing to me as I think about it, God will keep bringing along people to take a stand.
When Matt and I took our first faltering steps into, to all appearances, insignificant ministry in a languishing, forgotten local church, we understood we were standing in a desolated place, a long-loved sanctuary holding a tiny assembly of people who had been coming faithfully every Sunday for generations but didn’t know that Jesus was both Savior and Lord. There were a lot of reasons that they didn’t know, and God will judge a lot of people for that fact, but for some reason, he decided to proclaim once again the Good News of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and so some of those people were saved. Actually, by my numbering, some of the dearest who were saved that year went home to be with that Lord in the era of covid, and for that alone–my goodness, God is a gracious and merciful God.
Two
Dr. Shuler’s description of what it was like to live through the election of Frank Griswold as Presiding Bishop of TEC (seriously, listen to the whole podcast) was exactly what it felt like–for me–to learn that our seminary had hired a partnered lesbian to teach homiletics, and then what it was like to listen to our bishop say that “his Jesus” loved everyone in a different kind of way than the actual Jesus does in the Bible, and then what it was like to live through the consecration of Gene Robinson…and all the intervening heresies along the way.
Three
The reason that I’m bringing this all up isn’t because of Anglicanism, though. It’s because another thing has astonished me over the last five years. That is that ordinary American “Evangelicals”–too difficult a word to pin down–appear to be complacent. Unworried. Or rather, worried about all the wrong things. There is a big hue and cry, for example, about the tone of people like John McArthur, but The Making of Biblical Womanhood is lauded as a deeply important work. This is entirely backward, and it betrays the same kind of confusion that destroyed what was once a faithful and good Christian denomination.
Four
It is why Revoice needs to be taken more seriously–painfully seriously. Again, listen to the podcast. Anglican Niceness was–and too often is–valued more highly than anything else. “Charitable Assumption”–I think that’s the phrase. We assume the best about everyone because that is what love requires. We don’t want to examine what love really is. We take a culturally acceptable view of love and then go back to the Bible and find that we don’t have to do anything other than what we are already doing. The “we” here is important. We do this all together. The person who says no, that love demands a clear articulation of the truth, is branded as divisive, or, in the words of TEC, “schismatic.” It isn’t the person who is introducing new doctrine into the church, who is saying different things to different groups of people, who is committing heresy right under the very nose of the church who is causing the division. It is the person who notices what is happening who is the big problem.
It is in this spirit that I beg Christians to pay the money and listen to Misty Irons speaking at Revoice. Should you take her “at face value?” Should you apply the “Charitable Assumption” that a “gay identity” is something that St. Paul would have accepted and promoted if he had just happened to think of it? Though I may be screaming into the void, let me encourage, recommend, implore Christians to go listen to her talk, read her blog posts, listen to what she is saying. If you can’t hear the problem, your biblical ear isn’t properly tuned.
Five
I know I’ve already recommended it a bunch, but Alissa Childers’ Another Gospel is a great resource no matter your ecclesiastical situation. Wherever you are, there’s time to turn to the person sitting next to you at a church potluck and, in the friendliest way possible, inquire into that person’s spiritual health. What do you believe about Jesus? Who do you read and listen to? How many times have you worked through the whole Bible? Get on church committees. Go to church meetings. Say the thing out loud that no one wants you to say. Take the time to understand thorny theological issues. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has power. He came to seek and save the lost. That work won’t be done until he returns again in glory.
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