Page 2519 – Christianity Today (2024)

Dave White has found a way to present the Easter story to thousands of non-Christians in a public space. He uses tradition. It may sound impossible, but he represents a growing trend that blends historic Christian worship with contemporary forms. In Dave’s case, this means taking the traditional Stations of the Cross, which tell the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and recasting them for his community in Hamilton, New Zealand.

Dave began by gathering a group of artists to creatively reinterpret the Stations. With the support of the local city council, Dave and his team spent all night setting up experiential stations along a trail in the Hamilton public gardens. Four thousand visitors came through the breathtaking scene. At one station, each person was given a cross-shaped ice cube to carry on a leaf to help them reflect on the event. At another station, a lake was filled with hundreds of rubber ducks with a rifle aiming at them, symbolizing Jesus’ fate.

Dave and his artists were taking an old story and retelling it using very new symbols. And they managed to do it in a way that not only attracted non-Christians but actually got them participating in the story themselves. In a way, Dave was improvising with tradition—taking a very ancient ritual and putting it in a contemporary frame.

In one of his least known parables, Jesus suggests the Kingdom of God is like a teacher who goes to the cupboard and takes out both old and new treasures (Matt. 13:52). At a time when culture is changing so rapidly, we must not forget that old things have value and tradition can be good. Our own faith has been passed down over the centuries from one generation to another. With 2,000 years of tradition, Christianity offers a real sense of weight; it is a much needed anchor in a fluid world. But treasure may also be found among new things. It isn’t either old or new, but finding value in both.

Faithful improv

In the United Kingdom where I serve, something intriguing has been taking shape in the area of worship. It’s not uncommon to find communities practicing rituals, lighting candles, projecting icons, and regularly using liturgy around Communion, which is becoming more central in many gatherings. The irony is that many of these churches turned away from traditional worship a few decades ago when tradition became a dirty word.

Some reacted negatively to tradition, as many still do, because they saw it used to defend a flawed status quo and squelch innovation. But there is a significant difference between tradition and traditionalism. Christian tradition is living; it is not closed or completed, and it is not opposed to innovation.

Traditionalism, on the other hand, is dead and static. It is championed by those who want to do things “the way they have always been done.”

Part of faithfully carrying a tradition forward is keeping it truly alive. To keep reforming religious tradition is part of being faithful to that tradition. This reformatory impulse is at the heart of our Christian heritage. And when tradition is kept alive, it actually subverts the traditionalism that attempts to the choke life from a community.

Jesus employed precisely this approach when confronting the traditionalism practiced by the religious leaders of his day. He often drew from the past to move forward. But it takes leaders with a developed set of instincts to draw on their traditions in a creative manner. They must carry a deep respect for their tradition, but not a blind one. They recast the tradition for their present context by fusing old traditions with new innovations.

N.T. Wright calls this process “faithful improvisation.” He asks us to imagine the discovery of a previously unknown Shakespeare play. The script is complete except for one missing scene. To perform the play, the missing scene will have to be improvised by a group of actors. To improvise well, they must immerse themselves in the rest of the plot, the characters, and other Shakespearean works. Only those who know the play and the author well can judge whether the improvised scene rings true.

In a similar manner, Wright suggests that the Bible is a drama in five acts. The first four acts are Creation, the Fall, the calling of Israel, and Jesus. The fifth act begins with the birth of the church in Acts and ends with the new heavens and new earth in Revelation. But there is a missing scene in the middle of the fifth act—the scene in which we live. Our task is to faithfully improvise that scene. But not just any improvisation will do. Our improvisation will be judged by its faithfulness to the larger story and its author. Even so, there remains a wide range of imaginative possibilities.

Jazz is a good example of faithful improvisation. The better a musician knows his scales, instrument, written music, and jazz tradition, the more depth his improvised jazz performance will have. Likewise, church leaders with greater knowledge of Scripture, church history, mission, theology, and worship will find more freedom to improvise within their context without sacrificing depth. For them, tradition becomes a reservoir to be immersed in and a deep spring to draw from. Improvisation is a skill that requires taking risks and making mistakes, but it is undergirded by a desire to remain faithful to tradition.

Liturgy remixed

Most people see worship as a choice between two approaches. On the one hand, there is the traditional mainline form of worship with a set structure, liturgy, and prayer book. Positively, this form opens us to depth by engaging the richness of tradition and the use of the lectionary. But it can also be dry and leave people uninspired by its lack of passion.

On the other hand, the contemporary worship movement structured itself around bands that led blocks of singing followed by preaching and responses. In the 1970s and ’80s, this movement was an exciting recovery of freedom of expression in worship. But over time, in many places, contemporary worship has gotten stuck, and what once felt radical and alive now feels a bit past its sell-by date.

Thinking back to Jesus’ parable, it seems that liturgical worship has taken only the old treasures out of the cupboard, and contemporary worship has taken only the new. And both forms are poorer for not following Jesus’ wisdom and blending the two.

In the U.K. and elsewhere, a movement known as Alternative Worship has been growing for nearly twenty years. It’s an approach to worship that includes turning back toward tradition and its treasure. At the same time, it blends them with the newness of postmodern culture. Alternative worship rejects the false dichotomy between old and new that plagues so much of the church. This creative and artistic movement has sparked the imagination of people like Dave White in New Zealand and Grace, my community in London.

Grace is part of the Church of England. Taking the Anglican traditions and translating them for our culture has led to some wonderful improvisations. For example, a very popular Christmas service in Anglican churches takes a set of nine readings from the Bible with nine accompanying carols to tell the Christmas story by candlelight. The service was originally developed in 1918 in Cambridge when chapel liturgy was proving inaccessible to people returning from the war. (The service itself was an early example of improvisation.) Grace has used a modified version of this Anglican tradition, something we call “Nine.” We invite nine people to each take one of the traditional readings, select a piece of music to play, and create a ritual, story, or piece of art to accompany it. The music ranges from the Rolling Stones to Sufjan Stevens. It’s traditional, but with a twist.

Communion is another precious old gift in the treasure house. We have improvised by putting Communion back in the context of a meal in homes or around tables in a café. We explore themes such as hospitality, justice, and brokenness and have written eucharistic prayers around these themes. We may have a DJ play contemplative music and project images in the worship space. In the liturgy on brokenness, we invited people to take a piece of broken tile and place it on a table. The bread was then broken on the same table. Christ’s body broken for our broken community.

While people came forward to receive the bread and cup, we played a song by Leonard Cohen with the lyric: “There is a crack in everything—that’s how the light gets in.” It was a very powerful service. We have since grouted the tiles on the table and it serves as our Communion table.

Popular forms

The use of popular music from the Rolling Stones or Leonard Cohen reveals that popular culture plays a role in alternative worship, but the goal isn’t to be trendy. The gospel always comes to us wearing cultural robes, speaking the language of its own time and society. If it did not, communication would be impossible. Therefore, every tradition, if it is to be a living tradition, must continually improvise as culture transforms. Art opens us to new ways of perceiving the holy; it enables us to see with new eyes by functioning as windows into eternity. If language and images stop being grounded in the present, the dual dangers of nostalgia and otherworldliness prevail. This is why we use popular culture. It’s the water we swim in.

Along with incorporating something new from popular culture, we often construct a service with a responsive, multi-sensory, and embodied ritual. This might be something traditional such as lighting a candle, anointing with oil, sharing bread and wine, or walking a prayer labyrinth. Other rituals may not be rooted in the past, but simply a physical symbol of a deeper truth: placing a broken tile on the table, leaving a footprint in sand, or tasting something bitter and something sweet. Physical response, especially if it is multivalent—able to express a number of meanings depending on one’s circ*mstances—seems to open up a window in the soul for transformation. The response helps move worship from the head to the heart.

Jesus’ story about taking both old and new treasures out of the cupboard communicates the importance of balancing tradition with innovation. We need to recognize that a respect and knowledge of tradition is what fuels our improvisation, and adapting traditions for our present culture actually honors the traditions we value.

Where the old things are good, we should keep them going. And alongside the old, let’s develop something new. In this way, tradition can lead us into the future.

Jonny Baker is a leader and member of Grace, an alternative worship community in London, England.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Applause happens.

Right? Watch American Idol, and every performer receives applause—even Anoop. Regardless of singing talent, an expectation exists for the audience to cheer; it’s normal. And, let’s admit it, forgotten a moment later.

Attend a sporting event, and applauding becomes your job. An easy job, for sure, during the NCAA basketball tourney. Yet once again, cheering is expected and quickly dismissed.

Unique moments of applause exist, though, that make their way into long-term memory—especially when they happen unexpectedly and for a great reason.

I visited a church mentoring program that takes place in an elementary school. Steve, the church’s program director, hosted the tour. We saw volunteer men and women of all ages sit with children of all ages to read a book, color a picture, and most important, just talk. The common trait found in the kids: the school classifies them as at-risk. The shared trait of volunteers: Christ-followers who love children.

After chatting with several volunteers and kids, Steve opened the door to the staff lounge. Our tour stretched across lunch hour, so all the teachers sat at long tables eating and engaging in loud chatter. I followed my host into the room and swung the door shut behind me. Unfortunately, the heavy door’s anti-slamming hinge didn’t work, so our entrance included a large bang!

Lesson: You can easily gain teachers’ attentions by slamming a solid wood door.

Before their shock could turn sour, though, Steve started to introduce me. Before he could get much past “Hello,” another interruption happened.

The teachers applauded.

Unexpected? You bet. For a great reason? Absolutely.

Incredibly, these educators cheered for the work done by a church in their school. You read that right—a school applauding a church’s efforts. During all the years I served as a children’s ministry director, I never dreamt of such a thing. Is it even legal?

So I walked from table to table, asking for the reasons that made them clap their hands. Teacher after teacher told me the names of kids whose lives changed as a result of this church’s program. Kids from last week. Kids from last year. Kids from several years ago. Have you ever noticed how long people remember the name of someone whose life changes?

This shouldn’t have been such a surprise. Life change is the important work of a church, after all.

A forty-year Kindergarten teacher told me she planned to retire this year. “I’m leaving on a high note with this church’s program.

“Last fall, two girls arrived in my class after losing their dads. One went to prison, the other passed away. So I called Steve and asked him to find two additional mentors, and he did. Those volunteers filled a hole in each of those little girls’ hearts.

“I’ve been doing this for forty years, so I know who will make it and who won’t. These girls will make it.”

Seems like a modern day example of Matthew 25—because these servants worked to meet kids’ important personal needs. Imagine the chain reaction of love that follows. Specifically, think about the difference made in the families of these children. Friends certainly noticed, too. Teachers sure did. When something really good happens, people still notice. They also remember. Even cheer.

Or consider a children’s ministry in Canada that presented the salvation plan to their kids one weekend, and then the next weekend had a few moments of “up front” time during big church to share what happened. They used balloons to visually represent each child who asked Jesus into his or her life for the first time. The church erupted in a long ovation at the sight of 42 balloons.

Definitely a modern day example of Luke 15; a congregation joins the rejoicing of angels taking place in heaven. Every balloon represented a child with a name and a family. Again, when something really good happens, people notice and cheer.

Of course attracting attention or praise should not serve as the motivation to reach and serve people. But, it is pretty cool when people outside the church appreciate the work of Christ’s servants. Just as honor is shown when a church body acknowledges the love and passionate work needed to reach children with the salvation message. Yes, applause will happen when people see relationships form, watch hearts heal, and see lives change.

Life change is the important work of a church, after all.

Cheers!

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12).

David Staal, senior editor of Today’s Children’s Ministry, serves as the president of Kids Hope USA, a national non-profit organization that partners local churches with elementary schools to provide mentors for at-risk students. Prior to this assignment, David led Promiseland, the children’s ministry at Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Illinois. David is the author of Words Kids Need to Hear (2008) and lives in Grand Haven, MI, with his wife Becky, son Scott, and daughter Erin.

©2009, David Staal

On March 18, my friend Tim Morgan posted an article on Christianity Today‘s Liveblog called “Why the Pope Is Right about Condoms and HIV in Africa.” “You can’t resolve [the AIDS crisis] with the distribution of condoms,” the pope told reporters aboard the plane heading to Yaound?. “On the contrary, it increases the problem.”

Maybe the pope had to say that. He’s a spiritual leader, and it’s his job description to hold up the ideal, no matter how difficult it may be to fulfill in real life. Certainly sexual abstinence and fidelity are the best ways to prevent the spread of HIV. But such either-or idealism may be harmful to millions of people whose morality is exactly what the pope prescribes – the faithful wives and innocent children of HIV-infected men.

According to international AIDS charity Avert, in 2007, 22 million people were living with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Only 37 percent of these were men (defined by the survey as males over the age of 15). Women made up 55 percent of the total, and children the other 8 percent. Another grim statistic: 11.6 million children under the age of 18 had lost one or both parents to AIDS.

Granted, condom promotion alone will not stop AIDS. People don’t use condoms consistently. African men have strongly resisted using them at all, especially in long-term though non-monogamous relationships. And because many African men must work far from their wives and children for days and even months at a time, multiple families are very common. “HIV, many experts now believe, is spreading through interlinked sexual networks,” wrote Nicole Itano in the December 1, 2008, Christian Science Monitor. “And what’s needed is a concerted effort to educate people about the dangers of multiple partnerships.”

In a March 29 Washington Post article, “The Pope May Be Right,” Edward C. Green, director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Research Project, quoted researchers who concluded that “consistent condom use has not reached a sufficiently high level, even after many years of widespread and often aggressive promotion, to produce a measurable slowing of new infections in the generalized epidemics of Sub-Saharan Africa.” In a Christianity Today interview with Morgan, Green advocates for “promotion of monogamy and fidelity, and male circumcision” as the most effective public policy measures.

But moving from the statistical to the personal, what about the wife and mother who stays in the village to care for her family while her husband goes off to a distant city to work? Estelle, a friend who has worked for a relief organization in several African countries, points out that an African woman does not generally have the option to “just say no,” to insist that her partner use a condom, or to leave him and support herself. How can she and her children protect themselves from AIDS if he is not 100 percent faithful to her?

According to Itano’s Christian Science Monitor article, a CADRE study “found that many people thought faithfulness’ meant making sure your partner didn’t find out about your other sexual partners.” Karen, a missionary friend of mine who has worked for years in one of those sub-Saharan African countries, told me, “Over here, the difference between a bad husband and a good husband is that the good husband uses a condom when he’s with a prostitute.”

Until the pope sparks a religious revival powerful enough to transform every man and woman, Christian or otherwise, into a totally committed monogamist or celibate, condoms – if used – can help protect the innocent. Of course, faithfulness – if understood and observed – is better than condom use, and perhaps someday it will become the norm. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, how does the pope recommend protecting Africa’s women and children?

Every now and then, a new voice in filmmaking will be heralded as “breathing new life” into a particular genre—meaning, of course, that said filmmaker somehow invests a familiar set of tropes and trappings with a fresh creative spark, taking something we might think of as being tired or old-hat and showing us a new way to look at it. That phrase has been tossed around more than once in the breathless praise lavished upon Rupert Wyatt, a young, emergent talent from England whose fourth film, The Escapist, premiered at last year’s Sundance festival to considerable critical acclaim.

I admit that it isn’t hard to fathom why so many critics would praise the movie for doing something new with its genre—specifically, the prison break-out film. It’s not exactly the most flexible or complex of genres—after all, how many variations on The Great Escape can there really be? And Wyatt—to his credit—takes a familiar premise and makes it feel like something we haven’t seen before. The movie’s plot is simple enough: Brian Cox plays an inmate who enlists several fellow prisoners to help him bust out of jail. Wyatt takes that set-up and makes it into something more complicated and stylish than you’d expect.

And yet, as intriguing as it sounds on paper, it rarely jumps off the screen and becomes something truly engaging. Wyatt’s skills are unimpeachable—everything from the music to the cinematography to the time-warping, anachronistic storytelling speaks to his considerable prowess—but what it adds up to is merely an exercise in formalism: It’s a movie that exists to reward film buffs, and aficionados of the prison escape niche in particular, but for everyone else, its formal experiments are likely to seem cold and calculated.

Here’s the thing: If you’re going to invert and subvert the trappings of a particular genre, you first have to know what makes that genre work. I’m sure Wyatt has watched a lot of prison break movies, and I bet he can pick them apart and explain their construction with the confidence of a top film student. But I’m not sure if he understands how to reassemble it once he’s deconstructed it; The Escapist feels an awful lot like a bunch of spare parts that, had they been pieced together more carefully, could have made for a memorable movie.

With any film like this, the suspense is derived in large part from the desire to know exactly how they’re going to do it—and whether or not they’ll succeed. In The Escapist, however, the footage of the great escape is interspersed with footage from their time within the prison, leading up to their daring break—so, we know early on who all the key players are, what their plan for escape is, and, indeed, before the film is even halfway over, we know that at least some of them make it to the outside world.

Thus, Wyatt’s film needs to find its drama elsewhere, and though it tries to find it in character development, it simply never engages our emotions or creates characters we particularly care about. Cox plays the lead—a lifer named Frank—with a raggedly stoic bent, which is how the character is written; he does a fine job, but, by his very nature, Frank is someone we can never really warm up to. We hear early on that he wants to escape to see his daughter, who has apparently fallen on hard times, but we never meet her or even hear many details of what’s going on with her; in short, the film never fosters in us a real, burning desire to see this man succeed. Whether or not he escapes to see his daughter simply isn’t interesting enough for the viewer.

That leaves the ending, where Wyatt tries to draw together all the scattered puzzle pieces and give us a big, devastating payoff. And on some level it works—the big trick ending is indeed surprising, and it causes us to think back to what we’ve just watched and piece together how everything is supposed to fit—but by that point, most viewers won’t care enough about these characters or the story to exert that much effort.

That the whole movie is harsh and humorless only adds to the feeling that it’s not a film designed for our entertainment or edification; it’s simply an experiment in throwing a familiar premise into a blender and seeing how it looks once it’s all chopped up. On that level, it’s a success, but Wyatt lacks the mastery needed to turn a formal experiment into a worthwhile movie.

Note: The Escapist is showing in very limited release in theaters, but is also available on demand on cable TV through IFC.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. The film’s ending seems to subvert our expectations of what “escape” means. What are the different kinds of escape and freedom that the film presents?
2. Are Frank’s motives for wanting to escape prison noble? Why or why not?
3. Are there any good or heroic characters in the film? Discuss.

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Escapist is not rated by the MPAA, but would certainly have received an R rating for a heavy amount of foul language, rear nudity, and a couple of brief scenes of violence and gore. It is definitely not for children.

Photos © Copyright IFC Films

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What other Christian critics are saying:

1. Plugged In
2. Crosswalk
3. Catholic News Service
4. Past the Popcorn

Though Fast & Furious is the fourth installment in the franchise, it’s really the first true sequel to 2001’s The Fast and the Furious since it reunites the principal cast members. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) was little more than the next car-centric case for hotshot cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), while The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) offered nothing in common with its predecessors beyond fast cars and a cameo in the final scene by racer/thief Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). But then F&F begins with a heist involving a principal character from Tokyo Drift who died in that film, making this either a prequel to the third movie or else a sequel that begins with a flashback.

Call it what you want, but Fast & Furious lacks more than the the’s in its title. Things just aren’t nearly as much fun this time, illustrating the difference between a guilty pleasure B-movie like the original and the embarrassing junk typified with a direct-to-video release.

Recall that O’Conner let Toretto escape before the cops could nab him at the end of the first film. Since then, Toretto has been operating as a fugitive with his girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) outside of the States. F&F begins in the Dominican Republic with a tanker truck heist as exhilarating—and improbable—as the high-speed car heist that opened the first movie.

Before long, Toretto is back in America to grieve the loss of someone close to him, apparently murdered by the henchman of a shadowy drug lord. Turns out that O’Conner is after the same drug lord, and wouldn’t you know it, the two vow to bring him down. Though they start off as rivals—the drug lord just happens to be looking for the fastest drivers around—you can bet they’ll end up cooperating, especially since O’Conner still has the hots for Toretto’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster).

Saying anything else would spoil the small plot twists that the filmmakers have tried to keep secret, though a movie like this obviously favors dizzying action over storytelling. Fans can at least revel in the film’s plentiful car chases, ridiculous as they often are—especially since there’s nothing else to make this movie worthwhile.

The opening sequence is fun, but makes James Bond seem plausible by comparison. Better is a frenetic race through downtown Los Angeles traffic, guided by snazzy GPS graphics; I got a kick out the way the computers were constantly trying to reroute, compensating for the wild improvisation by the drivers. But the finale chase is a letdown by comparison, relying too much on quick and sloppy editing to make much sense out of such a crazy sequence. And like most of the movie, it shares more in common with watching a videogame than a thrilling cinematic action sequence.

The movie’s press materials say the drivers “push the limits of what’s possible behind the wheel.” Duh. Action movies must try to trump what’s been seen before, but they need to make it look believable. In this movie, the characters always steer clear of falling cars at the last minute, always spinning their vehicles with laser precision at full speed, and always seem capable of up-shifting for extra speed—there’s so much revving and gear-shifting, I imagine they’re in fourteenth gear by the closing credits.

But whether or not you swallow the action sequences, they’re simply not good enough to recommend this dud amid all its weaknesses, starting with the atrocious performances. Diesel underacts and Walker overacts, yet both do little more than posture throughout. The female leads add even less. Rodriguez and Brewster are glorified cameos, and Gal Gadot (a model and former Miss Israel) is hilariously robotic as the sexy new femme fatale, making a block of wood seem more personable by comparison.

And storytelling? This is one of those films where characters easily find people who should be hard to find—through lame efforts. O’Conner whittles down a list of 500 LA residents with the same name to just one suspect based solely on the car he drives. How does he know? “Because it’s what I’d drive.” Hmm, maybe the LAPD should investigate O’Conner.

Or try to explain how the cops visit Mia’s house in search of Toretto when he’s not there. Apparently they’ve not bothered to set up a stakeout since he later walks out of her garage in plain sight. “Everyone’s looking for you,” says O’Conner, strolling up casually to Toretto. “I’m right here,” he replies. Brilliant.

It’s not to suggest that director Justin Lin (who helmed Tokyo Drift) is incompetent; his filmmaking is brisk and vibrant here. But he drives this movie on a faulty engine (the script) and a flaking paint job (the reunited cast—rising stars eight years ago, struggling today). Moreover, Fast & Furious takes itself far too seriously compared to the sense of fun created in the first one—which was trash, but enjoyable.

This one’s not just trash, but trashy as well. There are scantily clad babes bumping and grinding at parties, and a shot of lesbians kissing. The main characters also have sex with women—implied but not shown.

This movie is fast and furious, no question, but it’s also noisy and dumb—and vulgar, derivative, and inferior to the original in every way. Remember to use your turn signal when moving into the pass lane.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Does Fast & Furious mix its messages? Does it condone theft and speedy chases (despite the “do not try this at home” statement at the end)? Or does it show the consequences of breaking the law?
2. Does Dom Toretto have any honor, or is he just a cool bad guy? Is he justified in his acts of theft and vengeance? Is Toretto redeemed at the end of the film? Why or why not?
3. What about O’Conner? Is he a good cop with “loose cannon” tendencies, or is he a tainted cop trying to do whatever it takes to accomplish good? Do the ends justify the means?
4. What do you make of the drug lord Braga’s act of repentance toward the end of the film? Was his confession to Christ genuine? Or do you agree with Toretto, who said he wasn’t forgiven? How can we gauge whether someone’s heart is truly contrite?
5. A character in the film says that one bad judgment call marks the difference between a copy and a criminal. Agree with that assessment?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Fast & Furious is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some sexual content, language, and drug references. There’s violent brawling and gunplay, though nothing particularly graphic beyond some bloody cuts and bruises. The most shocking scene involves the death of a bad guy when a car pins his body against another car at high speed. The sexual content involves scantily clad women bumping and grinding at various parties, lesbians kissing each other, and sex between principal characters (implied but not shown). There are drug references, though no one is shown using (aside from drinking alcohol). Profanity is plentiful, including misuse of God’s name, a cruder version of “wussy,” and one f-bomb.

Photos © Copyright Universal Pictures

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What other Christian critics are saying:

1. Plugged In
2. Crosswalk
3. Catholic News Service
4. Past the Popcorn

For years I served on the staff of a megachurch with a very contemporary style of worship. We had a state-of-the-art sound system, large video projection screens, pop-rock music, and a sophisticated lighting system. The worship services were programmed to the minute: predetermined transitions, upbeat intro songs, announcements backed with PowerPoint slides, sermons crafted with felt-need application points, and abundant video clips.

The church was growing as several thousand people connected with the presentations each week. But at the same time the church was thriving with one generation, I began to notice that younger adults were not engaging as well as their parents. So I began listening to these young people to discover why they were not resonating with this way of doing church.

I repeatedly heard that they were longing for something less “programmed.” At the same time, I began hearing questions about “liturgy,” a word I’d never heard before. I was not raised in the church, and my only church experiences at the time had been at an organ-led Baptist church and the megachurch where I was on staff. Even in seminary, I had never been taught about liturgy (literally, the “work of the people”) or ancient forms of worship. And ministry conferences I attended only seemed concerned with the newest, cutting-edge trends.

One young man left our church to become part of a small Orthodox congregation. I was curious enough that I decided to visit. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. From the quietness and sense of history to the use of incense and chanting – I was intrigued.

All of this led me to study the history of worship. I was suddenly made aware of the myriad ways the church has worshipped throughout history, and I decided to experiment with some of these forms in the young adult ministry I led. It sounds clich? now, but we started by darkening the room and lighting candles and incense. We began singing some hymns and the Doxology. We also recited readings and prayers from The Book of Common Prayer. One of the elders at the church was concerned. He asked me, “Are you going Roman Catholic on us?”

The older generation may have been confused, but the younger adults found the changes refreshing. All they had known in church was pop bands and video screens. The introduction of ancient practices helped them feel grounded and rooted to something bigger than themselves.

Then I spoke at a conference about our rediscovery of liturgy and tradition. The room was packed – by that time liturgy had become a very hot topic. During my presentation, a leader raised his hand and commented in a very disappointed tone.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You’re telling us that young adults are drawn to liturgy and ancient worship forms, but I serve at a liturgical church and our young people want to get away from liturgy and traditions. They think it’s boring. I came to this conference to learn new ideas from contemporary churches. I want to move forward, not back.”

I realized that worship trends among the young were complicated. Those raised in contemporary churches found practicing liturgy and following the church calendar refreshing and meaningful. But some who had grown up in traditional and liturgical churches saw these same practices as lifeless or routine. They were eager to incorporate more contemporary forms. One group wanted to rediscover the past, and the other was trying to escape it.

Several years later I worked with a team of young people to plant a new church. We decided that it would not help our goal of reaching the lost if our worship pretended it was stuck in A.D. 800. But we also did not want to dismiss the rich history and depth of ancient practices. So on any given Sunday our young congregation sings a mix of contemporary choruses and traditional hymns. We now celebrate Advent each year with candles, responsive readings, and benedictions. We draw from liturgical elements in ancient worship and prayer books. But we also display modern art, project videos, and use a variety of 21st century worship elements.

We have found that the goal shouldn’t be to maintain the past or to always be on the cutting edge. Our goal is to worship in a way that represents our community to God and God to our community. That means contextualizing worship for today, but not forgetting the family of God throughout history to which we belong.

Ten percent of Americans still believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, the same percentage of those who believed the rumor during the campaign. As a group, evangelicals (19 percent) are the most likely to believe he’s a Muslim, according to a new poll from the Pew Center for People and the Press.

Just 38 percent of white evangelicals and 46 percent of Republicans identify Obama as a Christian. During the campaign, Obama made frequent references to his Christian faith and fought smear campaigns that said he was a Muslim. But since he took office, Obama has made very few references to his faith.

In his decision to overturn former President Bush’s policy on stem cell research, he said, “As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering.”

He spoke more about his faith at the National Prayer Breakfast, when he announced the launch of his version of the faith-based initiatives.

I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck – no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose.

History is a great place to go to test “slippery slope” arguments ? claims that “Questionable Belief or Practice A” will inevitably lead us to “Horrifying Situation B.” One way to answer the argument is to appeal to precedent: “Let’s look back and see whether things like ‘A’ have led to situations like ‘B’ in the past.”

These days evangelicals with a heart for (1) ecumenical dialogue, (2) liberal education, and (3) cultural engagement are being told by fundamentalist watchdogs that they are leading good, faithful, Bible-believing people straight down the road to “liberalism.”

Let’s put this to a historical test.

Our focus: a small, persecuted, pietistic sect to which “father of modern education” and Protestant bishop John Comenius belonged in the 1600s.

This was the Unity of the Brethren, which descended from the pre-Reformation reformer Jan Hus. At a key point in their history, this pietistic Protestant group, exiled from its own lands (Bohemia and Moravia) during the Thirty Years War, made a decision NOT to pull in its horns and retreat into a culturally marginal fundamentalism. It decided instead to engage the culture around it.

It was this single decision more than any other that allowed Comenius to forge a highly effective Europe-wide program of Christian-based, ecumenical education that earned him the title “Father of Modern Education.”

Comenius’s educational plan transformed the way children were schooled, created an ecumenical vision for scholarship that inspired Britain’s Royal Society (which fostered “fathers of modern science” like Isaac Newton), and today is honored by a pan-European educational initiative that is named after Comenius.

Comenius believed that we are often involved in strife with groups culturally unlike us because we have not been educated to understand one another. He understood that lack of education as part of a larger pattern of sinfulness. And he integrated into that educational vision a priority for godliness and a distinctively Christian morality. Essentially, he brought Europe a new and effective plan for Christian liberal education, from cradle to graduate school.

Comenius’s Christian vision broke through what we might call “the Scandal of Confessional Education” that had contributed to the Thirty Years War, and contributed to the tolerant denominationalism that followed the Westphalian Settlement.

Now, in response to the fundamentalist “slippery slope” argument: To create this vision of Christian education, Comenius had to turn away from any bitterness he felt at his small sect’s persecution and exile during the religious wars that marred his youth. He had to find the resources turn to his persecutors in Christian love and show them a better way. Where did he find the courage and vision for this?

In my forthcoming book Patron Saints for Postmoderns (IVP, September 2009), I conclude a chapter on Comenius with these words:

The second paradox of Comenius’s life lies in reaction to the slaughter and exile of his small, fringe Christian community by others bearing the name ‘Christian.’ This sectarian leader certainly could have done what so many others persecuted Christians have done: retreated in rage and bitterness, licked his wounds with his people, and set up legalistic fences to keep outsiders out. Instead, he insisted on the ecumenical slogan: ‘In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.’ And he poured his life out for church unity and international peace.

Before his often tragic life was done, John Amos Comenius created a breathtaking vision of international peace and cooperation. At the heart of this vision was a comprehensive educational program that already, in his lifetime, began to transform the way Europe’s children were taught. We have asked how Comenius could possibly do this, given his background in a small persecuted group who were hounded, killed, and exiled by fellow Christians. It seems a paradox that a persecuted, pietistic sect could form a person such as this!

The key to this paradox seems to be something that had happened to the Unity of the Brethren by the early sixteenth century. Now flourishing and increasingly influential, the Brethren were forced to confront the perennial question of the relationship between Christ and culture. Many devout Christians believe growth and cultural power cannot happen without compromising the radical nature of the gospel. The church must, such folks argue, forgo all attempts to ‘transform culture,’ for such attempts inevitably suck the life out of the church. Was this the case with the Unity and Comenius?

Certainly in the decades of their peasant origins, the Brethren had distrusted all people of other classes and all trappings of culture. But as a new diversity of folks – even nobles such as Count Zerotin – were drawn by these people’s strong devotion and joined with them, the group moderated its views. Inevitably, some Brethren felt this moderation as a betrayal. They pushed the group to ‘hold up its ancient standard’ of enmity against all structures of worldly culture. But this group of world-renouncing conservatives did not win the day. Instead, a schism occurred, with the majority taking the progressive (though still theologically conservative and experientially pietistic) position.

? [H]ad this social widening not occurred among the Brethren, Comenius would likely never have developed his unique mix of deep piety and broad (‘liberal’) culture. Nor, very likely, would the European Union today be acknowledging Comenius as its teacher in this matter of international liberal education. But in fact, it is doing so: the European Commission of the EU has created a government-supported, pan-European elementary education initiative ?, named ‘Comenius’ after the Brethren bishop and educator. The program promotes the same values that drove its namesake’s reforms of the 1600s: pedagogical innovation, transnational cooperation, and equal opportunity for all students. Comenius, and his Lord, seem still to be at work.

Now, fundamentalist watchdogs of today who would look back at that key moment when the Unity decided not to go in a fundamentalist direction would doubtless trot out a “slippery slope” argument: “Any denomination that went in this liberal, culture-engaging direction could not last as an evangelical, pietist denomination. It would become liberal in theology and disappear from history as an effective gospel witness.”

So it’s worth asking: What did happen to the Unity of the Brethren?

Answer: the ragged, exiled remnant of this group showed up on Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf’s doorstep in the mid-1700s. Initially they found themselves not getting along at all with the other religious exiles at Zinzendorf’s estate. But through a kind of “Pentecost experience,” they joined with the German pietists and other exiles and formed the Moravian Church.

Was this a liberal denomination that sold out the gospel? Hardly. They started a 100-year round-the-clock prayer meeting, sent missionaries all over the world, and inspired John Wesley, who birthed evangelicalism in England. They did all of this while maintaining a strong ecumenical testimony. Zinzendorf used to talk about the many Protestant denominations as “facets of a gem.”

The Moravians, anything but theologically liberal, held to the dictum Comenius’s Brethren had espoused: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity.” And yet they believed and practiced an evangelical orthodox faith that affirmed Reformation essentials such as Justification by Faith and Sola Scriptura, and preached the need to be born again.

Engaging culture and opening the ecumenical windows are closely-related enterprises. Both require an openness to higher education and a desire to see our sons and daughters educated in a “liberal” mode – meaning not theologically liberal, but open to “all knowledge as God’s knowledge,” and seeking understanding across the boundaries that separate people and even drive them to violence.

Again, the heirs of the fundamentalists are criticizing evangelicals more and more for “selling the farm” theologically because they stick firmly to both an agenda of cultural engagement and an openness to finding true Christians within a broad array of denominations and churches – perhaps even among the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

Such critics tell us that by such openness we will cut ourselves off from essential truths of the gospel and cease being effective for God’s kingdom. Comenius’s Brethren and Zinzendorf’s Moravianism – two key genetic precursors of the evangelicalism that nurtured these very same modern fundamentalists – are proof that this critique is false.

And when we get to John Wesley, one of the two “fathers of evangelicalism,” we see him furthering this same impulse. As he said in one famous sermon: “If your heart be as mine, then give me your hand.”

A subtext of this fundamentalist critique: any attempt at liberal education will inevitably work against the gospel.

If this is true, then isn’t it odd that Oxford-trained John Wesley could pick up the ecumenical, evangelical pietist vision, which had its roots in Comenius’s vision of a liberal, educated, culture-engaged pietism, and start the most significant religious revival in modern history?

Did John Amos Comenius put us on a slippery slope?

Yeah, right down into evangelicalism.

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Related elsewhere:

Bethel University recently convened a conference on pietism. Read about it here and here.

Jan Amos Comenius was the featured topic of Christian History Issue 13. Find an index of online articles here. To purchase copies of Issue 13, click here.

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Public domain image of J.A. Comenius via Wikimedia Commons and taken from Aug. Schorn and Herm. Reinecke, Pedagogikens historia (1895)

An invitation to pro-choice President Barack Obama roils the University of Notre Dame. Stan Guthrie and Sarah Pulliam discuss the controversy, and the meaning of truth, with John Blok of Prime Time Florida.

There is no end to the flow of books written about Abraham Lincoln. But Allen Guelzo’s 1999 book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, is a solid part of the canon. An intellectual biography of Lincoln, the book won the Lincoln Prize for 2000 and the 2000 Book Prize for the Abraham Lincoln Institute. Guelzo won both prizes again in 2005 for Lincoln‘s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.

Now Guelzo has followed up with Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), a collection of essays on key (and sometimes conflicting) aspects of Lincoln’s thought. From 1998 to 2004, Guelzo was the dean of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. Since 2004 he has been the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.

In the introduction to Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas, you write about the way people frequently ask, “What would Lincoln do?” WWLD, if you will. Given the tremendous technological, political, and cultural gap between Lincoln’s time and ours, how realistic is it to ask that question?

It’s not realistic at all.The interest in WWLD is more metaphorical, more a matter of character questions. People are really asking what kind of a person Lincoln was. When we see intractable political or economic problems, we want those traits to be deployed and to succeed in the same way that Lincoln succeeded in facing the Civil War.

Since Lincoln was not a religious believer in the way that most other Christians of his time were, where did Lincoln’s morality come from?

It came from a number of sources, the most important of which is natural law theory. But Lincoln, not a professional philosopher, dabbled in a number of systems or theories about virtue. He didn’t really feel under any particular compulsion to be completely consistent in how he used them.One part of Lincoln embraced utilitarian ethics. And I literally mean utilitarian in the sense of 19th-century British liberal utilitarianism.

“The greatest good for the greatest number”?

Exactly. He even quotes that line of Bentham’s. And we know that Lincoln read very extensively in liberal Utilitarians like John Stuart Mill. In one of Lincoln’s most famous descriptions of the ideal economy, he says that the prudent penniless beginner works for someone else, then the next year, having saved that money, he works on his own account, and then the year after that he’s acquired so much success he hires someone else. Lincoln says that’s the ideal system.

From his earliest entrance into politics in the 1830s until the mid 1850s, Lincoln is dealing pretty much on the basis of liberal utilitarianism. But when he encounters the slave crisis, he has to find another base from which to operate, because liberal utilitarianism’s fixation on nonmoral considerations—on property rights, on economics, as the basis for understanding human relations—didn’t offer a very stable ground from which to criticize slavery. In searching for an alternative ground on which to base his opposition, Lincoln started reaching for natural law.

That’s significant for the religious part because the moment he does that, he steps into a circle that is shared widely in the 19th century in America by religious thinkers. The founding of the American republic is very much an epoch in the Enlightenment. And in the 1780s and 1790s, that meant the marginalization of religion, which in this case, really, was Christianity.

How do you get belief out of the prison of these marginalized religious institutions and back on the public square? The method for doing that is natural law because Christianity certainly had a long record of appealing to natural law as being the same message as that which is preached by Christian revelation. The one is natural revelation; the other is special revelation.This became a default position for American religious figures who no longer could get the attention of the American system by appealing to divine revelation.To appeal instead to natural revelation is not denominational, it’s not institutional, and it’s something that can appeal to everyone because the Enlightenment itself did a lot with natural law. With Lincoln appealing to natural law as a basis to oppose slavery, he suddenly finds himself standing side by side with Christian thinkers who are preaching natural law.

And he uses God language to do that.

Oh yes, he does. Talking about God is part of the overall constellation of natural law thinking.In natural law you talk about Nature and Nature’s God, but if you’re not watching the little cups on table, you can switch these around and suddenly that can become Christian God too.And that creates a commonality that puts Lincoln in the 1850s much closer to religious language and religious thinking than he was in his green and salad Utilitarian days.

Lincoln didn’t believe in moderation, middle-of-the-roadism, or compromise. But he did believe in the virtue of prudence. What is that exactly?

Moderation is a passive, tragic point of view. Moderation suggests that we really cannot reconcile the conflicting situations we’re find ourselves in. So we have to take a bit of this and a bit of that and hope that somehow they will cohere. Lincoln was instead about prudence. Prudence is ironic rather than tragic. It is ironic because it understands that there are unintended consequences of your actions, and therefore you have to chart your path toward your goal with exquisite care, having full regard for the integrity of means as well as the integrity of ends.

But charting your course toward your goals is difficult when you believe that there will be unintended consequences.

Exactly. It makes you aware that you may not be perfect. The immediatists of Lincoln’s day, the abolitionists, were perfectionists. As the heirs of Jonathan Edwards and the Awakenings, these people knew exactly what the answers were even before the questions were asked. They thought you didn’t waste time abolishing slavery any more than you waste time calling people to the anxious seat.The whole reason you’ve got the anxious seat is that you want an immediate response. That was the genius of Finney’s preaching. The abolitionists are a marvelous echo of that because they despised anything that was not an immediate, fully virtuous response.

Lincoln hasn’t got any time for those people or any other kind of reform movement. As early as the 1840’s in talking about temperance reform, he puts all of his chips on the Washingtonian Temperance Society—a secular alternative to most temperance organizations in the country. Lincoln would not have been sympathetic to Cary Nation. He favored the Washingtonians because they were gradualists.They believed in reasoning with people. They were aware of the possibility of unintended consequences. And he carried that attitude over to the abolitionists.

Abraham Lincoln is not a revivalist.And here is the third factor that comes into the making of his religious geography—the ancestral burden of Calvinism. His parents are members of the Separate Baptists, who are absolute, utter predestinarians. Even after he has long since untied himself from the explicit dogmas of Calvinism, the mental habit of fatalism and determinism sticks with him.

Lincoln wants nothing to do with revivalism because that smacks too much of the self-actuated will. He doesn’t believe that people can change themselves. You have to offer them motives. As soon as I say motives, we’re in bed with utilitarianism. See how this circle of ideas works in Lincoln’s mind.It’s not philosophically coherent but each of those clusters of ideas, Utilitarianism, Natural Law, Calvinism, each of them has a valence with each other.

So he didn’t believe that people could change themselves, and yet as a Whig, he thought that people could be definitely motivated to achieve and run after rewards.

Exactly.You respond not because of the self-actuating will, but because of motives appealing to your self-interest. So what is important as a Whig is to dangle the appropriate motives in front of people. This is how he explains the process of emancipation. In the letter he writes to James Conklin in September 1863, he speaks about black soldiers. He says, you people who are criticizing the war and emancipation, you would like the war to be won, yes?And everyone says yes, and then he says, Well don’t you imagine that emancipating blacks and making them soldiers is going to help us win the war? And they say, a little less enthusiastically, uh, yes. Well, you have to offer them motives, because Negroes, like all other people, act upon appeals to their self interest. So you have to dangle the greatest motive, freedom, out there, and they will enlist and help win the war.

You say the Lincoln was opposed to slavery on principle. But you also say that his hatred for slavery was very subjective. Was this the public Lincoln versus the private Lincoln?

Yes. Publically, he offers a variety of reasons for opposing slavery.A lot of them are linked to natural law considerations in contrast to Steven A. Douglas’s appeal to simple, raw, white majoritarianism. Privately, other things are burning inside Lincoln that are spin offs from personal experience. One personal experience, certainly, is his antagonistic relationship with his father and the experience of always having his father appropriate the wages that were paid to him. Lincoln later described his early youth by saying, “I was once a slave.” Lincoln conceived of slavery as any condition of economic seizure or confiscation of the fruits of someone’s labor. And that is the real fundamental origin of his opposition to slavery. It’s not a matter of racial empathy. A certain element of that later begins to work on Lincoln. But for much of his life, the origins of his opposition to slavery are not cerebral. They are not theoretical. They really are rooted in this very raw sense of indignation that he worked and someone else got the benefit.

Thank you very much for giving us a great book.

The cherry on top is the book jacket, because that portrait of Lincoln by W. B. Traverse, a European artist, painted from life, has never been reproduced.

It is privately owned. I’m not even allowed to tell you the identity of the private collector. The owners of the painting really don’t want a stampede of people coming to see this portrait.

This particular portrait had taken my attention many years before when I saw a black-and-white reproduction in a magazine, because it captures the man’s intellectual curiosity.So often the image we have of Lincoln is this simple, honest country bumpkin. He let people think that way because they would underestimate him. But Leonard Swett, one of Lincoln’s legal associates on the 8th judicial circuit said that anybody who took Abraham Lincoln for a simple-minded man would soon wake up with his back in a ditch.

I love the way that portrait captures Lincoln’s sharp, shrewd curiosity. It was so lifelike in capturing the man that when the painting was unveiled, Mary Todd Lincoln fainted from the shock of seeing it. It was him, and it is very rare that a photograph or a portrait completely captures Abraham Lincoln. He was such an elusive character.

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