Note from CM: We are devoting this week to reviewing some recent books that have caught my interest and attention. Thursday will be an Open Forum day for you to share what you have been reading.

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IM Book Week
Book Three: Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, by Rachel Held Evans
We make the way by walking

• • •

It has become cliché to talk about faith as a journey, and yet the metaphor holds. Scripture doesn’t speak of people who found God. Scripture speaks of people who walked with God. This is a keep-moving, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, who-knows-what’s-next deal, and you never exactly arrive.

• Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans has written a classic post-evangelical wilderness tale. It is a bit different from my story, or Michael Spencer’s, or from others of our generation. That’s because we built and operated the church she left.

She is our children — a megachurch millennial, a church growth child, a culture war kid. Whereas our evangelical/fundamentalist journey may have started in a mainline Protestant church or in a traditional Southern Baptist or Independent Baptist hymn-singing congregation, or perhaps in a Scofield Bible-toting group of doctrine lovers, Evans grew up when church had become cool, when evangelicals had gained a measure of power and public exposure. Her generation was taught to have a Christian worldview, to pray at the pole, vote Republican, acquire the fire, go on the annual mission trip, and worship with uplifted hands before praise band populated stages.

Rachel emerged from the program church, the church with more access to information, technology, and affluence than any in history. Yet the evangelical church world in which she grew up, though it became bigger and more prosperous, hipper and more slickly marketed, became the church many of our children decided they don’t want anymore.

I can’t provide the solutions church leaders are looking for, but I can articulate the questions that many in my generation are asking. I can translate some of their angst, some of their hope.

At least that’s what I tried to do when I was recently asked to explain to three thousand evangelical youth workers gathered together for a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, why millennials like me are leaving the church.

I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be know by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff — biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice — but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.

I explained that when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and that not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people. And I told them that, contrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans. We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.

Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity, I said. We’re looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we’re looking for Jesus — the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he’s always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.

No coffee shops or fog machines required. (p. xiiif)

This book is about the ongoing search for that kind of faith and faith community, and not about finding the destination. Rachel Held Evans tells us plainly that she is still in the “adolescence” of her faith and that she is one of those who is still “hanging on by her fingernails,” not one who is holding up a sign and pointing the way to a clear “answer.” It’s about living in that time of day when we sense the possibility of dawn, though the light has not broken through yet. Though many of us are preparing spices to take to the church’s tomb, we are hopeful of a resurrection story to come.

Searching for Sunday is organized according to the seven sacraments: baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, anointing of the sick, and marriage. Each sacrament forms an imaginative “world” in which she can talk about various parts of her journey in the church, leaving the church, and finding the church again. Like many of us who have ventured out of the church and into the wilderness, Evans has found in the sacraments that God is not absent from the ordinary. Indeed, “Christ plays in ten thousand places” (Hopkins).

The One we formerly thought confined to doctrine and Bible study guides and being “right” actually comes to people more indirectly, through the common “stuff” of life. She quotes Barbara Brown Taylor with approval: “In an age of information overload . . . the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.”

The Holy One will not be confined to temples made with human hands — or doctrinal statements or church programs. By meditating on her journey through the lens of the sacraments, she finds wonderful ways of weaving meditations upon the simple things of earth — water, oil, bread, wine, wind — with biblical stories, tales from church history, experiences she has had among various Christian groups, and personal reflections on the journey she is taking.

That journey takes us from the church of her upbringing to various small groups of supportive friends and fellow seekers to readers on her blog to those she has met on her various travels and speaking trips. She, like many, became part of a new “church plant,” hoping to create an authentic Jesus-shaped community. She visits a Benedictine monastery. At times she returns to her evangelical roots and there are many Sunday mornings she pulls the covers back over her head.

In the end, it seems she’s found a place in an Episcopal congregation where the focus is on the story (as embodied in the creed) and the sacraments. At a confirmation service she attended Evans experienced a moment of resolution.

In the silence that followed, it was as if all the amorphous vagaries of my faith coalesced into a single, tangible call: Repent. Break bread. Seek justice. Love neighbor. Christianity seemed at once the simplest and most impossible thing in the world. It seemed to me confirmed, sealed as the story of my life — that thing I’ll never shake, that thing that I’ll always be. (p. 194)

However, she recognizes that this was only a moment on the way, a way that will go on.

Mine is a stubborn and recalcitrant faith. It’s all elbows and motion and kicked-up dust, like cartoon characters locked in a cloudy brawl. I’m still early in my journey, but I suspect it will go on like this for a while, perhaps until my last breath. The Episcopal Church is no less plagued by troubles than deny other, but for now, it has given me the room to wrestle and it has reminded what I’m wrestling for. And so, with God’s help, I keep showing up. (p. 194)

To be continued.

Like a pastor she quotes, Rachel Held Evans has learned at least this key bit of wilderness wisdom: this faith-church thing is a journey, the way is not always clear and is marked by fits and starts, and we make the way by walking.

“What you promise when you are confirmed,” the pastor told his doubting daughter, “is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever.”

• • •

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
Rachel Held Evans
Nelson Books
2015

Note from CM: We are devoting this week to reviewing some recent books that have caught my interest and attention. Thursday will be an Open Forum day for you to share what you have been reading.

????

IM Book Week
Book Two: Everlasting Is the Past, by Walter Wangerin, Jr.
A pastor’s preparation and first church family

• • •

My past is so heavily present that I can scarcely bear it. But I am my past.

• Walter Wangerin, Jr.

I can testify that there is a special place in a minister’s heart for one’s first church. God bless those first call churches, who pastor us and teach us to take our first baby steps in pastoring! In my case it was a Baptist congregation tucked in the mountains of southern Vermont in a village of two hundred people. White clapboards, ringing bell, one-room schoolhouse attached to the back end for classroom space. Our parsonage stood across the road, a plain two-story white house with no heat upstairs to keep us warm in the Vermont winters and a dug cellar for the furnace that flooded each spring when the brook out back swelled with melting snow and rainfall. I walked the hills and gravel roads of that village to visit folks, walked to the post office each day to get our mail. I preached from the Bible, sang in my wife’s choir, made more than my share of youthful mistakes, doubted my calling constantly, and made lifelong friends.

Walter Wangerin, one of my generation’s best writers, tells his story in Everlasting Is the Past, a memoir of personal and pastoral formation. Winner of the National Book Award for his novel, The Book of the Dun Cow, Wangerin wanted to be a writer from the time he was a schoolboy. Son of several generations of Lutheran pastors and seemingly destined to follow in their footsteps, his college years were marked by depression and loss of faith. Walt was raised in a devout home and memorized his catechism diligently as an adolescent, but, as many of us do, began to question the vitality of his faith in his later teens.

Was this my own true faith? My own fearing and loving and trusting in the Almighty Father? Not really. It was the faith, that which I could deliver word for word. A static thing. I had learned about the commandments and the creed of the Church. I believed they were true — as I believed the stars are true. But I did not cling to this creed. Rather, I wore it like a badge. My father’s son on his way to fulfilling my father’s dreams.

…Finally, it was in the snows of Oxford, Ohio, when all the trappings and the external forms of faith no longer acted as the shape that shaped my soul, that I learned that to believe in something — as opposed to believing something about something — was not my truth after all. Not the truth of a personal trust. (p. 17f)

These years of studying and training to become a teacher were marked by loneliness and depression, homesickness, frustrations at trying to write poetry, indecision with regard to his educational path and personal identity, and many, many questions about God. Wangerin writes about these personally tumultuous days with a gentle honesty, weaving formative episodes from his childhood through the story of his young adult wilderness wanderings.

Near the end of this section he recalls a time reading the Bible that was of particular help to him on his journey. It was the story of the man born blind, healed by Jesus in John, chapter nine. He observed that the story gradually strips away all the connections that give the blind man identity until he is nothing. But he is free because Jesus healed him. Wangerin realized that he too had come to a place of nothingness.

But Jesus meets the man born blind (which means that he who lived in darkness is given light again. Jesus names himself, and the man falls down and worships him.

By this act alone is established a relationship between him and the Son of God. Christ raises him up with a fresh and everlasting identity. He is, as it were, born again.

That is what I prayed for. To be free. To be one sheep of the shepherd. to give over what tatters I had left to Christ. (p. 53f).

In the next part of his life, Walter Wangerin married, served as an assistant pastor in Lutheran congregation, and went through a process of determining that he was called to ministry. These were years of turmoil and schism in the Lutheran church, when conservative leaders at Concordia Seminary ousted those they considered too liberal, even heretical. Those who left founded Seminex (Concordia Seminary in Exile), and Wangerin got his degree from there and was ordained in the newly formed Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches. This caused problems for many young ministers as they sought placement in churches that were also in turmoil.

But he eventually found his first call congregation: an inner city black church called Grace Lutheran in Evansville, Indiana. They’d had white pastors before, and the children the Wangerins had adopted were African-American, but Walter’s early experiences there still forced him to confront the racism in his own heart and to deal with many cultural divides that both he and the church members had to bridge. He also learned, over the course of his ministry, that his own loss of faith in youth and the “resurrection” he experienced in Christ enabled him to sympathize with his congregation’s struggles.

The characters and stories that make up the second half of Everlasting Is the Past, are marvelous. We meet Odessa, a woman in the hospital for whom the children of the congregation sang Christmas carols. When she died soon after, Wangerin writes about the delicate task of shepherding his own young daughter through her first experience with death. We meet Arthur, a retired policeman who loved to fish and used to ask his pastor, “Reverend? You want to toss a line t’mornin’?” He introduces us to Allouise, a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, who had to face losing her landmark home in a gentrification project.

We also watch as Rev. Wangerin learns to negotiate various aspects of ministry in the inner city: how to deal with needy folks, how he learned a storytelling style of preaching, how he dealt with an outbreak of gossip in the congregation, how he focused on counseling people, something few other ministers were doing, and how he had to learn to deal with domestic violence in homes. We learn about how the church developed a choral ministry and traveled around, not only to spread the gospel, but to help white congregations understand their black brethren better.

Walter Wangerin was the minister of Grace Lutheran Church from 1974 into the late 1980s.

I baptized their children and confirmed them. I confessed, communed, and married them. I preached weekly. Even the ones I had catechized grew up and had babies of their own.

. . . I visited the sick. I sat by their beds, touched their brows with the sign of the cross, sang soft hymns in unhearing ears. I shoveled the snow from the church porch and the walks that went down to the street. Kneeling at the rail in the chancel, I prayed for the souls of the people whom God was pleased to place into my care. I cried out against the Devil who sought to oppress them. At their gravesides I spoke the words they knew by heart:

“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. . . .”

And I followed their young men to the courtroom and into their prison cells. (p. 171f)

God, always give us faithful pastors like this. And grant them congregations that become their families to nurture and support them in your work. Amen.

• • •

Everlasting Is the Past
Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Rabbit Room Press
2015

Note from CM: We will devote this week to reviewing some recent books that have caught my interest and attention. Thursday will be an Open Forum day for you to share what you have been reading.

????

IM Book Week
Book One: Accidental Saints, by Nadia Bolz-Weber
A review and a review of a review

• • •

This is why we have Christian community. So that we can stand together under the cross and point to the gospel. A gospel that Bonhoeffer said is “frankly hard for the pious to understand….”

• Nadia Bolz-Weber

This chick makes me want to be a real Lutheran.

I mean, a grace-alone, non-pietistic, beer drinking, Luther-tongued, damn the religious authorities, desperate for Word and sacraments kind of Lutheran, as down and dirty in my faith as the streets of 16th century Wittenberg.

This girl gets it — the gospel, that is.

And when I read self-righteous, ranting reviews of this book like the one Tim Challies wrote, it quite frankly ticks me off. He seems to mistake having proper manners for the resurrected life and dismiss the kind of rough-hewn faith and obedience that Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about.  So, I run straight to the Luther Insult Generator and say this to the likes of such critics: “You vulgar boor, blockhead, and lout, you ass to cap all asses, screaming your heehaws,” which was Luther’s nice way of saying, “You just don’t get it.”

But more about that later.

Nadia Bolz-Weber knows how to write about grace, raw, honest grace, and grace in the rawest of places. Which means in my heart and yours, as well as in the lives of those who, to some, may look like spiritual misfits and losers. She also curses, which bothers not a few people. To which I say, with all due respect, tough shit.

Seriously, her style is not mine. I don’t like cursing and consider it a bad habit I’d like to eradicate from my life. I despise tattoos. I’m not thrilled with a lot of progressive politics and the animus it generates in the name of inclusiveness and tolerance. But I hope the reality of Bolz-Weber’s rock solid Lutheran theology of grace and the poignancy with which she writes about real people with real problems (including real pastors) in a real world that is really messed up will never cease to move me.

This book moved me. Not just because Nadia Bolz-Weber is such a good storyteller, but because the stories she tells are gospel stories. These are true tales of death and resurrection, failure and forgiveness, brokenness and renewal. Jesus walks the streets of Denver!

And too many of us have forgotten that the gospel is for the pastor as well as the parishioner. For example, she tells about an excruciating experience in which she messed up her calendar and deeply disappointed a couple in her congregation for whom she was to officiate a wedding. When they graciously forgave her and freed her from the commitment, it made Nadia recognize what she really needs all the time as a minister:

And receiving grace is basically the best shitty feeling in the world. I don’t want to need it. Preferably I could just do it all and be it all and never mess up. That may be what I would prefer, but it is never what I need. I need to be broken apart and put back into a different shape by that merging of things human and divine, which is really screwing up and receiving grace and love and forgiveness rather than receiving what I really deserve. I need the very thing that I will do everything I can to avoid needing. (p. 179f)

Never trust a pastor who is unaware of his or her desperate need of God. If you ask me, that’s the standard.

As for the pious and how they react to such raw honesty, in Tim Challies’ scathing review of the book he pronounces judgment on Nadia Bolz-Weber in no uncertain terms:

Let me say it candidly: Bolz-Weber has no business being a pastor and, therefore, no business writing as a pastor. She proves this on nearly every page of her book. Time and again she shows that she is woefully lacking in godly character. Her stories, her word choice, her interactions with her parishioners, her temper, her endlessly foul mouth, her novel interpretations of Scripture—they lead to the alarming and disturbing picture of a person who does not take the office seriously enough to ask if she is qualified to it.

Apart from the appalling idea of casting this kind of judgment on someone from a safe and comfortable distance, I am really not sure what book Tim Challies read. What I see here is a woman who takes her office as seriously as life and death! She reaches out to people in neighborhoods where folks in many middle class evangelical churches would never step foot. Her book is saturated with scripture and worship and an understanding of the place of community that middle and upper class white evangelical churches regularly and consistently ignore, preferring individualistic routes of “discipleship.” These tend to produce moralistic, mannerly people, but few who would wash the feet of drug addicts or follow up a Good Friday service with a congregational march to a dark alley to lay flowers and pray where a woman had recently killed her children and then herself.

This is a book for the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, and those who hunger and thirst for God to make things right. It is not a book for the rich, the satisfied, the privileged and the moral guardians of polite society.

But we’ve lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning. It’s like if you were stuck in a subway tunnel during a sudden blackout. You can respond to the fear and darkness either by using the remaining battery on your cell phone to entertain yourself with Candy Crush or by using that phone as a light to see others around you, to see the contour of your environment, and maybe even to walk toward a light source more reliable and powerful than your own. Religion can be a way to hide, numb, or even entertain ourselves like a spiritual Candy Crush, either through the comforting blandness and predictability of mainline Protestantism or through the temporary lifting of our spirits and hands in Evangelical worship. Of course, there are many ways of pretending shit ain’t broke in ourselves and in the world, but escapist religion is a classic option, and churches have seemed to turn into places where we have endless opportunities to pretend everything is fine. (p. 75)

Many of Nadia’s stories have a kind of O. Henry quality to them. They’re full of surprising epiphanies and a kind of “karma” that speaks of God’s grace coming back on the unsuspecting pastor in ways she doesn’t always like.

The sting of grace is not unlike the sting of being loved well, because when we are loved well, it is inextricably linked to all the times we have not been loved well, all the times we ourselves have not love others well, and all the things we’ve done or not done that feel like evidence against our worthiness. Love and grace are such deceivingly soft words — but they both sting like hell and then go and change the shape of our hearts and make us into something we couldn’t create ourselves. (p. 180)

By telling these stories, mostly on herself and about the ways God “gets” her with lessons of grace and mercy, this book puts the lie to another of Challies’ charges in his review. He criticizes Accidental Saints for giving Christians a free pass on Christian growth, saying it is “…meant to appeal to those who want to bear the name of Christ but without becoming like Christ.” Basically, he is bringing out the old charge that Lutherans are “weak on sanctification,” saying, “Her God calls us to himself but then leaves us to be whoever and whatever we want to be.”

Really? Tim, you’re better than that.

But I guess Tim Challies couldn’t get beyond the tattoos and curse words to see the bigger picture. This is a story of a woman who by any measure of sanctification is growing leaps and bounds in Christ, who keeps going back to Jesus and to his Word and to the church community and to brutally honest confession and to the sacraments again and again and again in good times and bad. This is a story of the transformed life of an alcoholic and drug abuser, a person with a deeply dysfunctional and broken past. Now she’s leading worship, preaching the Word, building “truth in love” relationships in a congregation, reaching out to the poor, visiting the sick, and helping us all understand grace better through a book like this.

But the greatest evidence of her sanctification is that she knows she needs Jesus every minute or she’s a goner.

I’m sure if Pastor Nadia were here with me right now, she’d say, “Remember, Mike, Jesus also died for Tim Challies. You have a little anger problem there, huh?”

And then I’d probably start cursing too.

• • •

Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Convergent Books
2015