I spend a lot of time in conversations that feature the words “risk” and “failure.”

“The church needs to start taking some risks.”

“The only failure is a failure to learn.”

“Fail fast.”

It happened again last night, at a table with consultants in a room of engaged church members. But this time, something clicked. There is no “church” when it comes to the failures we might risk at this juncture in our congregation’s life. In this conversation, there is only us. The risks that could be taken here will be taken my Jack or Jill, not by “the church.”

Maybe churches change as more and more people choose to take the risk for themselves. But, at the beginning, it’s only Jack and Jill.

And me.

I heard an evangelical leader say this a few weeks ago with respect to liberal protestants, and it further convinced me that posture, as much as belief, is what distinguishes evangelicalism from the historic mainline. I’ve heard mainline leaders say the same thing about their evangelical counterparts.

The posture of evangelical prayer is expressive, warm, personal, and rooted  in the cadences of New Testament epistles. Mainline worship is senatorial, polished, and sounds out the prophetic tones of King and Oscar Romero as much as Amos and Hosea.

To evangelicals, mainline preaching is Biblically illiterate and more about culture than Christ.

To mainliners, evangelical worship is overly emotional.

Of course, posture not only expresses belief but shapes it.

In September of 2014 The Synod of Southern California And Hawaii will begin its first ever cohort of The Youth Ministry Coaching Program. I’m very excited to be part of this project, and I hope lots of youth workers in our synod will apply. I’m an alum of this program (see here). It significantly changed my approach to youth ministry.

Click here or on the Synod YMCP Cohort link on the right of the page to learn more and to apply.

There are only 10 spots in the cohort, and priority will be given to applications completed by April 30th.

I’ll finish up my NEXT Retrospect series tomorrow, because today I want to say something about the World Vision controversy.

If you haven’t been following, World Vision announced earlier this week that it would lift its ban on hiring Christians in legal same gender marriages. Supporters reacted swiftly and vigorously, accusing World Vision of everything from harming children to not believing the Bible to trivializing the cross. Many supporters either threatened to pull child sponsorships directly or speculated that lots of people would (in one of those predictions meant to bring about the thing it predicts).

Amid that wash of evangelical furor, bloggers like Rachel Held Evans defended World Vision and gaped at the pitch of its now disillusioned supporters. Evans even urged people to sponsor a child through World Vision who never had before.

Now World Vision has reversed course and asked for its supporters forgiveness for what it is calling a mistake. 

In a statement that sounds like it was written at gunpoint, World Vision President Richard Stearns said

“What we are affirming today is there are certain beliefs that are so core to our Trinitarian faith that we must take a strong stand on those beliefs. We cannot defer to a small minority of churches and denominations that have taken a different position.”

Clearly, threatening to abandon children in poverty works. An international evangelical aid organization cannot hope to survive if the John Pipers and Franklin Grahams of the world are against it. In a culture that disdains clerical authority, these men function as the closest thing evangelicalism has to a pope, and their public denunciations are utterly damning. They know that.

But they’re wrong. They’re not just wrong in their threats and their contempt for gay people, but they’re wrong in their belief that the gospel is at stake in these disputes over sexuality.

It’s not.

It’s just not.

I’ve written about the gospel here, and what I want to say about it now is that it is both the good news about God’s salvation for all of creation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the good news of liberty for captives and sight for the blind that Jesus himself preached and called “gospel.” Neither of those things are threatened by a posture of acceptance towards same gender romantic relationships.

Is something critical at stake here? Yes. But not the gospel.

Evangelical leaders have chained their understanding of the good news of salvation to an edifice of Biblical literalism. That’s what is at stake in the church’s understanding of same gender affections–the fervent belief that, unless you uncritically import patriarchal, idolatry-fearing, and misogynistic Biblical prohibitions against same-gender sex into a contemporary setting full of committed, faithful same gender romantic relationships, you have no part in Jesus. What’s at stake is a posture that makes the whole of our “Trinitarian faith” hinge upon a context-free interpretation of seven passages of scripture.

Progressives make the same mistake when we claim that the gospel is at stake unless the church unconditionally accept homosexuality. That’s because both evangelicals and progressives have far less power than we think to put the gospel at stake. The gospel is gospel: good news– news. An announcement–that the oppressed are delivered, the last are first, the poor are made rich, the kingdom of God has come near, the dividing lines between Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free have all been overcome in God’s triumph of reconciliation over sin and death. That good news is not at stake in disagreements over homosexuality.

The church’s witness to the gospel is at stake, for sure. And here evangelical leaders have just done serious harm to the church’s witness to the gospel, and not just because they forcibly stomped down the humanity of gay people and held hungry children at gunpoint. But also because, more than the good news of little children being welcome and outcasts brought back in and the sick made well, these leaders have witnessed to the efficacy of bullying and financial threats to get what you want. That’s a witness to something, but it ain’t the gospel.

In reversing its decision, World Vision is equating truth and goodness with the volume of the majority. That, too, is a witness, although, again, not to the gospel.

 

 

I waited in the church parking lot for Barbara and Bill to return for Barbara’s purse, which she had left in the sanctuary after the service. Well, not left it really–she thought she had lost it, and, after about 10 minutes of turning over pew cushions to find it, she and Bill fled the Ash Wednesday worship–only just beginning–to find it.

I had noticed her searching, had heard the first rumbling of trouble before the quake, when she asked (as if to anyone within earshot), “Where’s my purse?” She was only in the second row. I was in the first, along with the three high school students and one Youth Intern who were leading worship. Several searching turns of the head did not produce the purse, and by the Call To Worship Barbara was in a panic. She stooped to scan the undersides of pews. She darted to the side aisle to pace the length of the sanctuary, back to front, broadcasting a desperate search. And then she was gone, so the contemplative peace of youth reading prayers and smudging ashes could resume as I’d planned it.

The purse showed itself from the opposing front pew shortly after the sanctuary had emptied. I put away the microphones, cleaned up the little dishes that had held our ashes, turned out the lights, and then scooped up the purse and proceeded to the office, where I called Barbara at home. As soon as I announced myself into the phone, she announced, “You have my purse! I’ll be there in 20 minutes!” She hung up instantly.

I drove a worshiper home who lived less than a mile down the street and then returned to the church to wait for Barbara and Bill. The night was warm and clear and quiet, and thoughts or inconvenience or irritation troubled me not at all. I was grateful for an unscripted interlude to stare dumbly at passing cars and sing “Come And Fill Our Hearts” to the moon. I was sad when it ended, when searching headlights found me and made straight for me.

I heard the tale then of the confusion surrounding the purse’s disappearance and of how Barabara and Bill had retraced the evening’s steps, from Target to Burger King, and had eventually used Bill’s phone to call and disable Barbara’s cell phone. They were moments from calling the bank about her credit cards when they got my call. Barbara was apologetic. She regretted the disruption to the service. I assured her it was no disruption (which was true; hadn’t the service continued anyway? Can worship be so easily derailed?). Then I excused myself, wished them a good night, and climbed back into my car as Barbara exhorted me to go home and play with my daughter.

“I will,” I said. Then, through the closed passenger side window, I added, “She wants me to bring her home some ashes.” There was an uncovered dish of them right there in the cup holder.

“Ahes!” Barbara exclaimed, testifying to just how far away from the night’s occasion she had chased her purse. “We didn’t get any of those.”

It was the most reflexive thing I have ever done to grab the dish in my right hand, open the driver side door with my left, and round the trunk to stand at Barbara’s window. She hadn’t noticed my approach and only saw my when she turned around to begin backing out of her parking space. When she did, she quietly rolled down the window and lowered her head in observation. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Then Bill leaned over from the passenger seat and received his ashes and his incantation.

“Have a good night,” I said and once again returned to my car.

“You too,” Barbara answered. And then, “We love you.”

“I love you too” I shouted as they backed away, staring forward across the church lawn through a streaky windshield. I paused one more moment to listen, then drove home in silence.

There’s more than one gospel.

Yesterday I listened to one of my most revered professors from seminary give a talk on the mission of the church in which he implored church leaders to shape congregations who live the gospel before a watching world. It’s pure Newbigin, and the kind of thing this professor has been saying for decades. It’s really hard to disagree with.

But I’ve come up against a problem since I sat at the professor’s feet 10 years ago. “The” gospel doesn’t exist. Even in the New Testament, “the” gospel means more than one thing:

“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the [gospel] of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.” (Matthew 4:23)

“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son . . .” (Romans 1)

The gospel is the good news that Jesus preached: “The time is fulfilled! The Kingdom of God has come near!” (Mark 1).

The gospel is the good news proclaimed about Jesus:  “the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1).

Many today urgently proclaim gospel to men and women with the aim of compelling faith, some variation of “Jesus died for your sins and you have reconciliation with God. Believe the good news and be saved.”

Many today urgently proclaim gospel to the church to compel a change of course. Last week a speaker at a national conference told the audience that “The gospel is at stake” in the church’s stance on marriage equality. Countless opponents have asserted the same thing while urging the opposite outcome.

It seems to me that step 1 in shaping a community to “live the gospel” is getting clear which one we’re talking about.