Yet There is Hope

I am going to follow-up the last three posts with something I read recently in the New York Times. The title of the piece was:

Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock

In Maplewood, Minnesota, there is megaplex church called Woodland Hills in suburban St. Paul. The pastor, Gregory A. Boyd is leading this thriving evangelical megaplex. And he is frequently asked to give his and the church’s blessing to conservative political candidates and causes like many other pastors of the megaplex churches.

These requests came from church members and visitors alike. Some of them mentioned in the article were:

• Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services?
• Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit?
• Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work?
• Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates?
• And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

To my surprise, Pastor Boyd refused each time. And he finally became fed up. Even more surprising, Pastor Boyd, before the last presidential election preached six sermons called The Cross and the Sword in which he said that the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming that the United States was a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

I read this and went whoa! And even better was a quote from him:

When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses. When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.

It is important to point out that Pastor Boyd is not a liberal. He opposes abortion and believes that homosexuality is not God’s ideal. So we are not dealing with a liberal megaplex church that is conducting gay marriages and gives abortion as an option during counselling for someone who has an unwanted pregnancy.

Yet it is the response from his congregation that is telling and ties in with the previous posts I have put together. Keep in mind that Pastor Boyd’s congregation is packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class “Christians”.

The response from his sermons was passionate. Some members walked out and never returned. By the time the dust settled, Woodland Hills, which Pastor Boyd founded in 1992 had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

Yet there were congregants who thanked him, telling Boyd that they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns that they had but were too afraid to share. Sharon Staiger, a church member and psychotherapist is quoted as saying:

Most of my friends are believers and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.

What is interesting is that Pastor Boyd’s sermons is starting to reflect a common concern that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Part and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

And grass-roots churches, even the megaplex ones are starting to question this. And it isn’t easy when you have the airwaves filled with people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson whose words are dire and threatening. Or the feel good theology of people like Joyce Meyers. And it doesn’t help when you have moronic pitbulls like Ann Coulter who spew invectives laced with religious wordings. Just look at the title of her last book: Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Yet amongst these strident voices, some others are trying to counter the movement. As the Times points out, at the time of the article, at least six books had been published on the Christian message being compromised. Pastor Boyd published The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, based on his sermons.

Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.

The article turned to Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church”. This movement is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment. He is quoted as saying:

There is a lot of discontent brewing. More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right. You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.
Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’

But let us go back to Pastor Boyd because the more I read the more his church is an interesting case study which reflects on my previous posts.

Pastor Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board. Yet his words left some in his congregation completely stunned. Some felt he was disrespectful of the President and the military. Some felt he was soft on abortion. Some felt he was telling them not to voice. A telling quote comes from William Berggren, a lawyer who had joined the church with his wife six years ago. He is quoted as saying:

When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker. But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.

The article continues to give a little history and detail about the church. It seems that Pastor Boyd, who is 49, preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts. The church is in a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church started with 40 members about 12 years ago. The article says that the church’s growth was because Boyd is not just because he is an electrifying preacher. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary. And taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul.

It was at Bethel that Boyd created some controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Bapist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Pastor Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post but in the end, he won.

Thing is, Pastor Boyd said that he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party to the religious right. He will not share his party affiliation, if he has one. He believes there are Christians on both the left and the right. And both have turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry”.

In an interview, Pastor Boyd explains where this is all coming from. It seems that he first became alarmed years ago visiting another megaplex church during a worship services on July 4th. The service ended with the choir singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses. He says in the interview:

I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’

As was pointed out in the previous posts, politics and evangelical Christianity have become fused. Patriotic displays are mainstays in some churches. Across town from Pastor Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July for a “freedom celebration”. Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary. An enormous American flag slowly rose behind the stage. And a Marine major, who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending the parishioners hard-earned money on good causes.

What impresses me about Pastor Boyd is that in his six sermons he lays out a broad argument that the role of Christians is not to seek “power over” others. That is by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. He feels that Christians should, instead, seek to have “power under” others. That is “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did. He says:

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy. America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. 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.

As if this wasn’t enough for me, Pastor Boyd lambasts the sheer hypocrisy and pettiness of Christians who focus on sexual issues such as homosexuality and abortion. And lest we forget Janet Jackson’s little breast-revealing performance. He points out that Christians these days are constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public. He says:

Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act. And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.

What is interesting, as the article continues, is that some of his parishioners applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. The article focuses on one person, David Churchill who is a truck driver for UPS and has been a Teamster for 26 years. He said he was raised in a religious-right home but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union. Yet when Pastor Boyd preached his sermons, Churchill said:

it was liberating to me

What is fascinating and a telling aspect of the “Christian” nation of America is that Pastor Boyd gave his six sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. In the end, only $4 million came in. Which meant some staff members had be to laid off. But it doesn’t stop there.

The family pastor, Mary Van Sickle said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school. She says, of the volunteers who quit:

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way.’

It is too bad that the article never interviewed some of the 20 odd twits that quit. I would love to see them justify Biblical how it is the church’s job to support a political idealogy, let alone one that embraces bring violence and chaos to other countries.

I thoroughly adored a quote the article brings up from Reverend Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and teaching pastor at Woodland Hills:

Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.

The sad fact, the article continues, is that those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites. Yet in their place, the church added more members who live in the surrounding communities which include African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

What I applaud is that this suits Pastor Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation. A congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. And he now, about the upheaval his church had, he says:

I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.

Obviously the older members of his congregation needed time to digest his message. When Pastor Boyd organized his book, based on his sermons, he arranged a forum to allow members to sound off. The reception was warm but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed. They included.

• Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent?
• Are you saying Christians should not join the military?
• How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden?
• Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

During that forum, one woman asked:

So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?

Pastor Boyd responded:

I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.

For me, all of this is refreshing, yet not new. The church I occasion, VCC, I’ve seen Pastor Billy stand up and say things that makes the congregation uncomfortable. He tries to remind people what the Bible really says, not what people want to hear.

And after spending some time with the previous posts, I am glad I can present an exception to the rule. Yet the problem is that for one or two of Pastor Boyd, we have ten like Joel Osteen.

And someone like Boyd has the power to change things locally. The problem with the feel-good theologians is that be in their megaplex churches or massive services, they focus on the self not God.

The shows these pastors have are really just infomercials. They interview an author about his/her brilliant book about how God has a miracle for you today and then at the end of the show, offer it free for a one-time gift of $24.95. If you go, for example, Joyce Meyer’s website, with the blah-blah about her sermons and missions, there are ads for books like The Confident Woman and Look Great, Feel Great.

So people like Boyd have a long way to go if they are to impinging on the end time or self-obsessed creed of Americas. Yet at least there are some out there that are trying and not just small pastors for a congregation of 200. There is hope, albeit a small one.

With all of this said and done, I would like Pastor Boyd to have the last word. On his church’s website, speaking about the books that came from his sermons, it comes down to the following:

Sadly, many people today claim that if you’re really a Christian, you’ll vote a certain way, support a certain candidate or take a particular stand on a particular issue. But most political issues are ambiguous enough that sincere, intelligent and Bible-believing people can and do strongly disagree about them!
However, nowhere in the New Testament do Jesus or any of his followers weigh in on any of the many divisive political issues of their day. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t have political opinions. They did – and they were very different from each other! Matthew (a tax collector) and Simon (a Zealot) were much farther apart in their views about political issues than (say) a Liberal Democrat and a Conservative Republican would be today. Yet, we never read a word about which view was “better” in the Gospels. And the reason is that our widely different political views are insignificant next to the one thing we are called to do as followers of Jesus: express God’s love for others the sacrificial way God expressed his love for all of us!