D. Michael Lindsay--author of Faith in the Halls of Power--has an interesting column about the phenomenon of evangelical leaders who don't actually go to church on any regular basis.
He focuses on how hard it is for the church to play one of its major social roles--bringing people of different classes together in a way that (potentially) finds them equally invested and equally empowered--when the powerful folks don't actually show up. A good point. He might also have made the more theological point that the trend smacks of that most destructive of evangelicals heresies,* the belief that the faith community's value is defined only in terms of whatever value it adds to the individual's experience. In other words, that's it's all about me.
*Standard disclaimer: That is, SOME evangelicals promote this, and not usually explicitly.
The prison writings of Alexei Navalny
19 hours ago
Steve, if I didn't know you so well, I'd say you were starting to sound like Rick Warren!
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It was great to see you over the weekend. I hear it's cold in MN.
Ouch!
ReplyDeleteOf course, when Warren says "it's not about you," he means (primarily) that it's about God. Which is helpful as far as it goes--but my point is that it's not about you, it's about US. (And God, too. But that's sort of a different point.)
Yes, you are right about that. But Truro is going through the 40 Days of Community right now (Saddleback's follow-on campaign to 40 Days of Purpose, all rights reserved). And in this Warren asserts "we're better together," which I totally agree with. It's his communal equivalent to "it's not about you," so that is what came to mind when I read your post.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I only wrote that because I noticed an absence of hecklers in this blog of your'n....
Huh. I didn't know that, though I'm not surprised--I've been very impressed by a lot of things I've heard from Rick Warren. But does "we're better together" simply mean each of us benefits from the other's presence? Because that still sounds fairly individualistic to me. (I don't know the answer--I'm not assuming that's what Warren/his people mean.) But I'm interested in the core theological differences between communal and individualistic faith--differences reflected, among other places, in different beliefs about baptism.
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