Everyone reading this editorial will be dead at the turn of the next century. What will we have left behind?
There is a British television show called 'Can't Cook, Won't Cook'. At the beginning of this millennium the slogan of many western evangelicals might well be 'Can't Think, Won't Think'.
Jesus instructed us to worship God also with our minds, as he contextually expanded the Hebrew into the Greek influenced culture of the first century.
Can we now challenge Christians to use their minds? 'Science is on the cutting edge of theology,' says theologian Penelope Hall. And from science we can learn many new thinking tools. Their application to evangelicalism is frightening.
When we understand systems and stay out of the trap of causality we can understand how information infused into systems by evangelicals has changed the political climate and system. Not that many decades ago Billy Graham was calling for a stronger FBI. What happens when Christians uncritically trust non-Christians to administer seemingly Christian state structures? Billy's support must surely have helped shape the mentality that produced Waco and the subsequent response in Oklahoma. Violence begets violence. Christians are not in the violence business.
Evangelicals largely backed the Vietnam war. I was a Canadian student at Gordon Conwell at the time and any discussion of whether Christians should be involved in killing was stomped on. While evangelicals preached on about the justness of the war, thousands of oriental girls became prostitutes to service American servicemen. We heard plenty of sermons and public speeches from evangelical leaders and clergy supporting the war against Communism, although never a call for America to sign the Geneva Convention. But the collapse of Communism came from the inside, catalyzed by a visionary atheist Russian leader. To this day, has anyone heard a sermon or a speech from an evangelical leader or clergy decrying the now traditional association of prostitution with the military? Has any of them spoken out prophetically, courageously and persistently about this evil? Has any been at the forefront of reaching out to these women? Or do evangelical male dominators, like some television ministers, deep down have this view of women?
When we understand self-similarity as a powerful tool for sociological analysis we see the self-similarity of evangelical male dominators with other male dominators in this world. Self-similarity over scale is the key. As the branchings of the smallest twigs at the top of a tree are self-similar to the largest branching of the trunk, so the male dominance of some evangelicals is self-similar to the male dominance of fundamentalist Moslems. And now Campus Crusade has joined the Southern Baptists in the push to drive Christian women back into the seventh century. Christians are not in the business of suppressing and dominating women.
Naive evangelicals, focusing on the ideological window dressing of the Vietnam war, were blissfully unaware that the American administration was illegally bombing and to this day America has not cleaned up the ordnance dropped on Laos, ordnance that continues to blow up tens of people every month. Collateral damage. In the latest bout of destruction it wasn't just the Chinese embassy. During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia a Christian member of Mensa in Novi Sad reported that a school near his home was taken out by a NATO 'smart' bomb, barely twenty minutes after the children had left for the day. Collateral damage. Christians are not in the collateral damage business.
Perhaps the pivotal verse for how Christians behave towards others is Romans 12:2. The contrast and the call are clear. Resist mould pressing, be transformed by the renewing of mind. Much of the political influences and much of the church structures of evangelicals in the second half of the last century have come from the wrong part of Romans 12:2. Evangelicals have become artists at mould pressing. It is a quantum leap to go from submitting to the state to lusting to become it. Christians are not in the mould pressing business.
Salt. Light. Yeast. Not politics, law, armies.
I can tell you of three Christians in Mensa who have been obedient to their cost.
One was a school teacher for an African country for 26 faithful years. At the age of 55 she was told by the government that they were retiring her and they had come to the decision that she had only been a temporary employee and was therefore not entitled to a pension. There was no appeal. What did she do? She simply switched gears, joined with a few nuns and opened a home for homeless children. The home now has more than a hundred children rescued from the streets. And she has some stories, my goodness! Not a pension in sight but the Lord provides and she influences lives without force or pulpit art.
Another and her husband were missionaries until stopped by health problems. She with a virulent form of malaria, he with a form of hepatitis that left him with brain damage. Before being given twenty minutes to leave when Saigon fell, they had seen the damage to the Vietnamese church brought by American militarism. In the upper Amazon on another posting they had closed brothels. Now they scrape by on his disability pension. She, however, soldiers on. A bible translation consultant who works in 22 languages she should be paid by the European Commission for her participation in the development of a computerized theological library database. But her cheques have been deposited by a corrupt official into a numbered Swiss account and she is probably years away from being paid.
The third is the man who, exposing the deeds of darkness, blew the whistle on the European Commission corruption. A lone Christian, he is now without a job and blacklisted.
These are the Christians of the future. The unresourced who fling themselves fearlessly into the breach, knowing full well that beyond the horizon there is no heroic cavalry thinking of them.
There are notable exceptions like the British TearFund who rush Christian aid to disaster areas. But who is working on preventing disaster? Certainly not those evangelicals who support male dominance and state militarism.
Our church structure was imposed upon Christianity by a Roman dictator who boiled his wife. Buildings, pulpits, sermons, clergy and laity come from Emperor Constantine, not from scripture. It is the structure that sets the system. The post-fall pseudo-ontological needs of controlling, planning and predicting inevitably rise disguised as male dominance and state militarism and lurk behind their theological justification. Can anyone in a pulpit really claim to be sola scriptura? Contemporary Christianity has become an art form with pulpit artists strutting the lead. Seen 'Christian' television lately?
What is it in the psyche of big name preachers that makes them want to toady up to kings, queens and presidents but not to the mentally ill living on the streets, the abandoned living in the hell-holes of our prisons or the wretched doomed on death row, whose swelling numbers now increasingly include children. The ancestors of today's kings and queens differ little from the thugs now fighting for wealth and dominance in Russia. The measure of a minister is not in the great people s/he knows or the memorable sermons but that s/he is in obedience to the Lord's instruction in Luke 14:13. How many evangelical leaders and ministers invite into their homes the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind?
What could possibly be more sad than the appearance of the archaically robed Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey at the Millennium Dome in London New Years Eve? Did you hear what he said? 'For Christians, Jesus is the light of the world.' For Christians? George, wash your mouth out with a very coarse and foul tasting soap. Jesus is the light of the world. Full stop. No wonder such a wishy washy church leader's pulpit gets invaded by a gay rights activist - perhaps the most significantly symbolic event in the Anglican church's twentieth century. Are gay men dying from AIDS among those invited to banquets at Lambeth Palace? The pulpit invasion was even more symbolic than the sorry sight of one of his predecessors who the British government trundled out at the beginning of the Gulf War to proclaim with sincere, religious and convincing face, 'This is a just war'.
Just war? Well, what else would we expect to hear when the basement of St Paul's in London is filled with the glorious tombs of military mass killers.
Haven't we got it yet? We aren't in the prosperity business. We aren't in the justice business. We aren't in the prostitution business. We aren't in the patriotism business. We aren't in the killing business. We aren't in the collateral damage business.
We're in the gospel business. Jesus has something to do with Christianity. And there's a pretty good chance that Jesus got it right.