Features > March 14, 2007
Preaching Revolution (cont’d)
Wallis agrees. “The religious right is being replaced by Jesus,” he says. “They’re just really digging into Jesus, and what they read in [the Book of] Acts doesn’t correspond to their churches. And so they’re changing them or going out and creating new communities.”
The Revolutionaries’ faith in the Bible leads them to a gospel of social justice, but it also leads to a morality that is far out of step with mainstream American culture and the left. Sex outside of marriage, divorce, “lust,” “sexual immorality” and homosexuality are all things Jesus or other New Testament voices spoke about with varying degrees of intensity.
According to Wallis, the Revolutionaries are “breaking away from the Right in droves — but they will never be captured by the left. They’re going to challenge the left on a lot of things: For these Christians, sex is covenantal and not recreational. And they oppose abortion and they are not going to move away from that.”
Where Revolutionaries most part ways with many mainstream evangelical churches’ interpretation of the Bible is in their embrace of women as leaders, elders and preachers. Mars Hill’s lead elder (board chair) is a woman. A similar process of reversal of the restriction on women in leadership is taking place in many evangelical churches across the country.
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Boyd’s Myth of a Christian Nation is based on a series of six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” he delivered at his St. Paul church in the politically-charged atmosphere of the 2004 presidential election, in which Minnesota was a heavily-targeted swing state. In those sermons, which made national news, he said:
Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state. … I am sorry to tell you, that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.
He also spoke out against the exclusive focus on abortion and gay marriage by many evangelical leaders. “Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”
His not-very subtle rebuke of Republican electioneering caused around 1,000 members of his congregation to leave. “Close to 700 left during the six-week ‘Cross and the Sword’ sermon series,” he says. “Another 300 or so left when I ‘didn’t have the good sense’ to back off the topic but rather returned to it once again just prior to the election.” But 4,000 stayed. And he said he had never received so much positive feedback in his career: “Some people literally wept with gratitude, saying that they had always felt like outsiders in the evangelical community for not ‘toeing the conservative party line.’”
Yet the Revolution is not primarily a reaction to Republican attempts to politicize the church. What sets it apart from mainstream evangelicalism is not a liberal rejection of Republican politics, but rather a more radical rejection of conservatism and liberalism, and anything else that is not the “kingdom of God.”
To the Revolutionaries, what seems righteous or commonsensical to humans does not matter; all that matters is what God wants. Boyd writes in Myth of a Christian Nation: “To the extent that an individual or group looks like Jesus — dying for those who crucified him and praying for their forgiveness in the process — to that degree they can be said to manifest the kingdom of God. To the degree that they do not look like this, they do not manifest God’s kingdom.”
And that is where anticapitalism and anti-imperialism come in. Capitalism doesn’t look like Jesus. Empire doesn’t look like Jesus. In their critique of the political and economic institutions of the “kingdom of the world,” the Revolutionaries are following in the tradition of early Christianity. In Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, pastor and theologian Brian J. Walsh and theologian Sylvia C. Keesmaat write:
Just as in the ancient world, the [Roman imperial] images of peace and prosperity masked the reality of inequality and violence, so the contemporary images projected by advertising mask the reality of sweatshops, inequality, and domestic and international violence created by our lifestyles. And in the face of the ubiquitous imagery of the empire, Paul proclaims Jesus as the true image of God (Col 1:15) and calls the Colossian Christians to bear the image of Jesus in shaping an alternative to the empire.
For the Revolutionaries, the new “temple” — from which Jesus chased the money changers in the Bible — is the shopping mall. They write:
Globalization isn’t just an aggressive stage in the history of capitalism. It is a religious movement of previously unheard-of proportions. Progress is its underlying myth, unlimited economic growth its foundational faith, the shopping mall its place of worship, consumerism its overriding image, ‘I’ll have a Big Mac and fries’ its ritual of initiation, and global domination its ultimate goal.
In the shopping mall liberated by Mars Hill, the Colossians Remixed authors — a married couple who home school their children — discussed their work during an all-day forum attended by a thousand suburban, white, middle-class moms and dads. How many authors from the anti-globalization left have presented their ideas to a willing mass audience of middle-class suburbanites?
The thinking and dreaming of this movement is as utopian as the most far-out sect of antiglobalization anarchists, yet they are living it right at the heart of mainstream America. And they are organizing with unbelievable success, attracting thousands of new participants every week and spawning hundreds of new churches and thousands of new small groups and house churches every year.
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At the “Isn’t She Beautiful” conference, the non-theological sessions were devoted to one of the secrets of this movement’s success: leaders — identifying them, recruiting them, “loving them” and letting them lead. The pastors at the conference all seemed to view their church memberships as seas of under-utilized leaders, and spent as much time as they could learning from each other and the Mars Hill staff how to be the best “fishers of men” they believe Jesus called them to be.
This high-density leadership organizing model stands in stark contrast to anything I’ve ever seen working in unions, progressive organizations and Democratic political campaigns. On the left, recruiting and mobilizing leaders has become devalued work that is typically left to inexperienced recent college graduates. The pastors at this conference, however, saw recruiting and inspiring leaders as one of their central callings. Too often, the left pays lip service to the grassroots, but lacks faith in grassroots leaders. The result is that too many of our organizations are one person deep and stretched impossibly thin. At the conference, I tried to imagine what Kerry campaign field offices (where I spent a lot of time in 2004) would have looked like if we had recruited leaders instead of “bodies” and expected them to be “faithful, committed members of a team” (words included in Mars Hill volunteer job descriptions). Some organizations on the left do include “leadership development” in their organizing models. But churches seem to assume that there are already plenty of “developed” leaders in their midst and go straight to giving them as much responsibility as they can.
Andrew Richards is the “local outreach pastor” at Mars Hill, charged with driving the Mars Hill house church program to reach people in need in the greater Grand Rapids community. “We’re not only taking care of the needs of our own community, but we want to respond to the needs that are in the greater community,” he said before a recent Sunday service while trying to recruit more leaders. He laid out five areas of focus: urban at-risk youth, refugees, poverty, community development and HIV/AIDS.
Rob Bell and other church leaders seem to be building up to a big challenge. It is unclear exactly what is in the works. (Bell does not give interviews.) But he has been preaching more and more about “systemic oppression,” poverty, debt and disease — not just locally but globally. And other leaders have indicated to the membership that the current level of sacrifice for others in the community and the world is not in line with Jesus’ teachings.
On Dec. 10, 2006, Bell kicked off a series of sermons, titled “Calling all Peacemakers,” during which he said:
Never before in history have there been a group of people as resourced as us. … Never before has there been a group of people who could look at the most pressing needs of the world and think: well, we could do it … History is like sitting right there, in the middle of war, and great expenditure, and violence, and the world torn apart in a thousand directions — [waiting for] a whole ground swell of people to say, ‘Well, we could, we could, we could do this. We could do what Jesus said to do.’
But, as of now, the Revolutionaries seem to be embracing person-to-person, “be the alternative” solutions to the exclusion of advocating for social policy that is more in line with their vision of the kingdom. Boyd says, “I never see Jesus trying to resolve any of Caesar’s problems.”
Wallis believes this reluctance comes from the recent experience of being dragged into the mess of partisan politics on the terms of the Republican party.
“But the prophets [of the Bible] don’t talk about just being an island of hope — they talk about land, labor, capital, equity, fairness, wages,” says Wallis. “And who are the prophets addressing? Employers, judges, rulers. On behalf of widows, orphans, workers, farmers, ordinary people. The gospel is deeply political. It’s not partisan politics, but a prophetic politics. It is what the prophets and Jesus finally call us to.”
“Take any big issue we’ve got: Politics is failing to deal with it. They see that,” Wallis continues. “But I’m saying that we need to change politics. Social movements change politics — and the strongest social movements have spiritual foundations.”
I asked Wallis if leaders like Rob Bell were part of a rebirth of the Liberation Theology movement that took root in Latin America in the ’60s and ’70s. “This movement is in a sense liberation theology in the best sense of the word,” he says, “but it’s more personally faith-based, more street-based and finally more community-based. I remember you’d go to a [liberation theology] event and it would be analysis, analysis, analysis — and there would never even be a prayer.”
This new generation of Christian Revolutionaries most definitely places prayer above analysis. But where will their prayers lead them? Will they forever restrict themselves to person-to-person, “relational” solutions? Or will they choose to influence political leaders on issues they share with the left — poverty, war, environmental destruction — with the same force that the Christian Right exerted around abortion, gay marriage and other areas?
All that’s certain is that they will keep praying for answers with a desperate yearning and remarkable openness — as Rob Bell did recently:
God, give us a vision for a new kind of world. We grieve, we honor, we condemn. But we want to move through that. We want to have asked the hard, hard questions. But we want to move though that too. And we want to be people of a dream, which we believe is your dream for the world. But then, God, we want to move past that. We want to move to action. … God, what would this look like? Show us millions of different ways to bless — to bless in such a way that it would literally shake the foundation of the Earth and capture us with this kind of dream. … Please, God, open our eyes.
And 10,000 American suburbanites replied, “Amen.”
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