You might say that I’m a dreamer. Well I’m not the only one.

Something I quickly discovered about myself when I became part of my Mennonite fellowship is what a blathering loudmouth I am.

Friends have responded to this observation mostly with a heartfelt: “Duh.” So, yeah, as an adult I’ve had to periodically face the fact that my own opinions are not golden coins showering from heaven on grateful fellow humans (marriage also has a way of bringing this into clear detail).

But previously, I never considered facing this fact to be an act of discipleship.

Mennonites try to be really good at conversation. Careful listening is critical to spiritual growth and community life. Lots of time at church is spent listening to each other. We’re encouraged to keep our mouths shut if someone else has something to say. We’re encouraged to not do that thing that people do – that I’ve developed as a practiced skill – to listen at half-attention while preparing my next statement for whenever I can make an interruption.

This revelation may seem like simple manners, but growing up in the church this had never been presented to me as part of the Christian life. “Letting others speak” and “being respectful of other points of view” were far down the list of Christian virtues, far behind “making sure you have the right answer” and “making sure everyone knows it.”

PROCLAIMING THE TRUTH was our highest call in communicating, and I remember many people cut off for the sake of God’s supposed need for Christians to be constantly proclaiming stuff and never listening. I was rewarded for that kind of behavior – until I became the one asking the wrong questions, and being shut out of conversation.

So I’ve been enjoying cruising the archives of Scot McKnight’s blog Jesus Creed. I’ve revisited last January’s posts about “Conversation” (part 1, part 2, part 3). He explains why emerging Christians value genuinely open and listening conversation in exploring faith, as opposed to the one-way didacticism many of us are familiar with.

But the “art” of conversation can’t be learned in such a context when everything is dominated by right vs. wrong or when it becomes whoever knows the most becomes the teacher. This isn’t conversation; this is lecture or information exchange.

I believe that the emerging movement wants “conversation,” and I believe evangelicals by and large are nervous about it because it has not learned to converse.

I see this as another intersection between the way of life in the Mennonite church and the kind of spiritual life many emerging Christians are looking for.

The Mennonites are not particularly fond of “committees.” But one committee structure involved in difficult community decisions is the “listening committee.” These committees are not engaged in controversy to debate opinions, but to pay careful attention to what people on all sides are saying. Then before the conversation moves toward resolution, everyone turns to the listening committee for their report: they simply report what they heard.

They tackle the most controversial issues in this way. There are listening committees for homosexual concerns, immigration issues, Catholic-Mennonite relationships, congregational diversity, or any kind of topical exploration dealing with multiple perspectives.

We live in hope.

I was thrilled to discover this month that one of my favorite emerging bloggers, Tall Skinny Kiwi (whose identity I still don’t quite understand beyond “some really smart Baptist dude with a blog everyone reads”) gave a positive review of menno pastor Shane Hipps’s book, The Hidden power of Electronic Culture.

I discovered the book this fall and it rang all my bells. Shane Hipps has a background in marketing and advertising, and left it all behind to follow the call. But he took with him his expertise in applying Marshall McLuhan’s genius for media studies to the life of the church.

Since I teach communication and digital art at a Christian college, this book is a treasure of insights and challenges for my classes, my students, and my own professional development. All the better that Shane Hipps understand emerging church and the cultural forces shaping and being shaped by the movement from within a Mennonite context. And this guy went to junior high with Tony Jones? What’s that about?

I plan a more extensive series of blog posts about Shane’s book and his Web site, and how this might all connect with Mennonite theology. So I’m thrilled the book is getting more exposure. I think it’s important.

“Speakerguy” is that guy who came to speak at the Christian college where I am on faculty.Because Speakerguy and I are old friends, we spent a lot of time together catching up during his visit to campus.

In the local coffee shop, I asked him about the evangelical leaders he knows: celebrity authors, megachurch pastors, evangelists and non-profit CEOs. I wanted to know what he’d observed doing so much traveling to churches and colleges and religious organizations around the country.

I’m going to try to paraphrase what he told me. This isn’t an exact quote or transcript, I didn’t record our conversation or even think about writing it down. But now a couple weeks later, this is the best I can recall the gist of what he said:

When I expressed skepticism, because those in power at influential churches and Christian colleges and publishing houses seem devoted to a way of expressing our faith that seems narrow, exclusionary, vengeful, and uncritical of things like empire. He responded by saying,

The statewide MC-USA “conference” (regional association of churches) our fellowship belongs to is an old conference, with close ties to some of the oldest conservative Mennonite leadership structures in the country.

Most of the other Mennonite churches we’re affiliated with are made of middle aged and senior citizens folks. They are comfortable in a traditional congregational church structure: a head pastor and pastoral staff, board of elders and deacons, a gentle mix of hymns with a few praise choruses on Sunday morning, sermon-focused worship service. Steepled building. Parking lot.

But my congregation is different, both in demographic and ecclesiastical practice.

• First of all, we don’t meet Sunday morning. We gather for worship late Sunday afternoon.
• Our chairs are arranged in a close circle, surrounding some kind of reflective visual element: a bowl of sand, candles, a vessel of water, or maybe just a brightly colored cloth-draped table.
• We sing from the Mennonite hymnal, a.k.a. “The Blue Book,” like many other menno churches. Singing is very important to us, and the congregation picks the songs ourselves, calling out page numbers and then accompanied by guitars and violins.
• We have no pastoral figure-head.
• No sermon.
• Our prayer is kind of liturgical, incorporating visual and tactile artistic objects.
• The young children stay with us until contemplative prayer time, crawling from lap to lap, making a fuss, or not, and requesting songs or asking for explanations for what we’re doing.
• We discuss together. We read a scripture passage, or magazine article, or look at a projected slide show, or listen to a personal testimony. All voices are invited to respond if they have something to say.
• Our building is a dilapidated storefront. Our money is spent mostly on mutual aid and service projects. We’re mostly in our 20s and 30s; the eldest is 50, the youngest are infants.

So what does the rest of the conference think of us – the state leadership, men in their 60s and 70s, and the other congregations with traditional worship services and conservative dress, still influenced by “ethnically mennonite” history and identity? How do they treat our ragged band of misfits and experimenters?

They have ever only been 100% affirming, supportive, and deeply encouraging.

At multi-church gatherings, they ask us to share our ideas or lead worship. They encourage our college students to go on to seminary and take leadership positions, especially our young women. They visit us and participate in what must seem to be weird ways of doing church. We’re invited to conference events. Leadership never offers advice unless asked. We feel welcomed and mentored.

Since joining with the Mennonites as a last try at organized religion before maybe giving up on it altogether, I’ve been inspired by the number of white-haired, plain-dressed, sometimes slightly baffled (by me!) church people who let me know that if I’m a follower of Christ working for Christ’s kingdom, they’re glad to have me and seek my growth and maturity as a reconciled child of God.

How is it that this very, very old tradition is a welcoming place for me and my friends and our kooky new ideas? This is a holy mystery.

Still reeling a bit from “Speakerguy’s” visit to the Christian college where I work.

Have had some great conversations with a group of students who recognize that his purpose in hitting the road to speak at colleges like ours is to (in the words of Heather the biology major), “Call us to work for justice for the poor and oppressed, DUH!”

Unfortunately, some here continue to call for rejection of his message and, ultimately, of him– apparently believing the wrong theology somehow disqualifies him from speaking about Christian mission as a call to radical service and counter-cultural living.

I’m still kind of stressed out about this, but instead of blogging my anger against this narrow, exclusionary religious perspective, I’ll instead praise the invitational and welcoming perspective of the Mennonite church I’m part of. I’m working on a post and will hopefully get it up tomorrow.

Postmodern expressions of traditional faith. We believe even this is possible!!!

What should I post about my friend’s (whom I’m calling here “Speakerguy”) invited series of lectures at the evangelical Christian college where I’m on the faculty? Why have so many here reacted with shock, anger, or offense? Why are members of the religion faculty throwing around words like “heresy,” “cult leader,” and “unorthodox?”

This is a guy who has devoted his life to calling Christians of privilege to reorder their lives toward working for social justice and solidarity with the poor. This is a message that resonates around here. It’s one of the reasons I like working here: for all of our inconsistency and hypocrisy, we still take these ideas seriously. What went wrong?

The problem as I see it is theology. Speakerguy’s final evening lecture touched on a challenging and surprising theological idea, prompting further questions from students in the follow-up Q&A. Then everyone went crazy. A few walked out. Students clustered together around the auditorium afterward, confused and angry. Our New Testament prof’s head looked like it might burst like an over-ripe tomato. My teaching assistant, who loved Speakerguy and made a big deal over our history and friendship, texted me from her phone: “Too bad about your doomed tenure review. It was nice knowing you!”

The dismissive accusations I’ve heard the last 2 days of “classical liberalism” and “old social gospel dressed with new arrogance” sound absurd to me. This is a man who wrapped up his lecture by declaring allegiance to and inviting worship for the resurrected Christ, God incarnate, savior of humanity from our sins. This covers a minimum of 2 or 3 creedal affirmations that would make a classical liberal choke.

I think what it really comes down to are four boundary-crossing theological opinions. They are not tightly held by my friend, and he never once invited anyone to abandon any theology of their own to accept his. As far as I can tell, in the eyes of many in my community, he simply believes “wrong” about the following 4 areas:

The Bible

• Speakerguy said that all Christians find the God they are looking for in scripture. Whomever expects to find a vengeful, capricious, bloodthirsty God will find scriptural passages that describe this God. Anyone who needs a non-violent, all loving, perfectly forgiving God will find that God in the same book. He says most people simply ignore the parts of the Bible that contradict the God they want. He included himself, and didn’t seem bothered by this.

Sovereignty

• He said the idea that God controls everything that happens in the world is observably false. It’s obvious to him that all kinds of things happen all the time which are in direct opposition to what God wants to happen. And he went on to say that the reason God doesn’t stop these horrible things from happening is because God can’t. God’s love for everyone prevents God from forcing them to make different choices.

Hell

• Speakerguy thinks there’s a Hell. He thinks he’s seen glimpses of it in the neighborhoods where he ministers to the sick and abused people of society. But he thinks one day Hell will be empty, that God’s love will never stop trying to save everyone, everywhere, living or dead, no matter what. He says the kind of God who would turn his back on people in Hell is not a God who deserves his worship.

“The Gays” (TM)

• Speakerguy says to stop obsessing about homosexuals, to just give up these unimportant battles. Homosexual people can’t live whole lives if they’re required to cut off all hope of connecting with a lifelong, loving relationship. Speakerguy says he would bless the marriage of a gay couple without a moment’s hesitation.

Provocative? Oh yes. Challenging and flamboyantly stated? For sure. But heresy? Outside the bounds of creedal Christianity? Give me a break.

This kerfuffle speaks directly to my earlier posts about what theology is for. When did we elevate believing the right theological propositions so far above the work of following Christ? We’re saved by faith through Christ, not by our theology. The evangelical obsession with narrow theological boundaries to the exclusion of people transformed by the saving grace of God expressed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (this describes Speakerguy perfectly) has really got me down today.

Not just because Speakerguy is my friend. He spends his days facing down drug dealers and working with kids in some of the worst situations a human being can experience. An indignant, judgmental college professor is not going to leave any marks on him.

Rather, I’m frustrated and discouraged because I live and work here. The people at this school are my friends and colleagues. And although I disagree with some of what my friend argued here this week, I don’t disagree with very much of it. Naturally, this worries me.

My.

That…

Was interesting.

Speakerguy, my friend I posted about last time, spoke on campus.

Things were going fine until a student during Q&A asked him what he thought about all the attention devoted to fighting gay marriage in American churches.

Oh dear.

More details after i catch a little rest.

photo from flickr by porkfork6

This week a guest lecturer is coming to my campus to speak about Christian mission. I work at a small private Christian liberal arts college in the Northeast, and I think this guy plans on talking about things I’d expect the students around here to be into: social justice and serving the poor. I know this because the “speaker-guy” (as I used to call him) is a friend of mine. I rented a room from and hung out with him and his family years ago before I was married.

I’m a little anxious. He’s been speaking publicly in recent months about ideas he’s previously kept to himself. Stuff about biblical interpretation, judgment and eternal damnation, gay people. In fact it’s a lot of the things I hear discussed by emerging Christians (and the traditionalists who loathe their theology).

But maybe it won’t be so bad. The students (and faculty and staff) at my college are pretty good examples of people without a 100% buy-in to the comfortable cultural system that rationalizes the hoarding of wealth at the expense of others. A lot of the students coming through my classes plan post-graduation lives of service. It will take many of them a long, long time to pay off their college debts because they will be working for development organizations that don’t pay jack (at least in dollars).

All of this is central to my friend’s typical message. Other Christian colleges that have been canceling his speaking engagements, even asking him to leave early in one case, probably don’t have the commitment to radical service to the poor that Speakerguy calls for in his sermons and lectures.

I mean, I hope not anyway.

[continued form yesterday's post]

C. Wess Daniels (Quaker-aligned, Mennonite-lovin’, recent Fuller Seminary grad) responded to McKenna’s post with his own observations, supportive of the idea that Anabaptism is a wide tent capable of organizing diverse emerging traditions, while connecting new movements with a powerful historical witness:

I too have witnessed in my interactions with people from various traditions that many … are looking for some kind of new (or different) lens from which to understand our faith …. Anabaptism as a tradition is all encompassing and contains within the intellectual framework to bear the weight of an influx of many traditions into it’s vision.

I particularly agree that new emerging Christians would benefit by articulating some connection with a specific tradition so rich in historical integrity. I know it’s been extremely helpful for me.

Legendary emergent blogger Tall Skinny Kiwi chimes in with a post around the same time reviewing the contributions he’d like to see from multiple international Anabaptist flavors. He’s especially enthusiastic about Canadian Mennonites. His post is also helpful because of the books (real, paper books!) he references.

Anabaptist-friendly minister and prolific Brit blogger Graham Old disagrees! Responding to McKnight’s original post in summer ‘05, he asks:

What of being a church for the poor? Or radical ecclesiology and anti-Constantinianism? Or communal hermeneutics, or a genuine committment to peace and nonviolence? What about being a church on the fringe, in a long line of such marginalised groups? (And not because it was cool to be “radical” and fly below the radar, but because you weren’t invited to the party.) I would have to say that such features are far from characteristic of the emerging church.

And then later, following up in his comments he clarifies:

I just completely disagree with the idea that the emerging church has an emphasis upon the poor. It may be that particular churches and/or groups of churches do - but I don’t see them doing so because they are emerging. That is, I don’t think it is characteristic of the emerging church.

Of course, I delight in those aspects of the emerging church that do seem anabaptist-ish, but I don’t think there’s enough of them to suggest that the two movements have a similar spirit.

This has been a summary of conversation I’ve found interesting and helpful. More of my own opinions at a later pint in time.

I’m not the first to consider the idea that emerging church finds particular resonance with Anabaptist traditions. This has been a topic discussed and debated in the last couple of years. I’ve been checking out the archives of bloggers I read and have found a rich and interesting conversation about this. I’ll try to summarize and link to the various threads in this post, and maybe comment myself on the points raised in them at a future date.

Back in 2005, Scot McKnight (beloved emerging academic brainiac from North Park) proposed the following in the conclusion to a blog post reflecting on the Brian McLaren book A Generous Orthodoxy:

Now I wish to make a proposal that changes the title of this post: the sort of evangelicalism the EM is striving for is anabaptist. As we in the EM seek to fashion a label and a category for what is going on, perhaps the only genuine label that comes close is “anabaptist.”

Great idea, right? The blog conversation resulting from this post has been rising and falling over the last couple of years.

In May, Jerrod McKenna did some blogging about movements of radical peace witness he’s encountered, and found the phrases “emerging peace church” and “open anabaptist impulse” to be helpful describing what was going on with this spindly branch of the emergent family sapling. He names emphasis on community, an invitational character open even to enemies, elevating non-violence as an essential expression of the spirit of Jesus, and a withdrawal from political forces that employ coercion. He concludes:

In a post-Christendom setting their may be no more important stories to draw on than this ‘Open Anabaptist impulse’ and other similar traditions such as the Early Friends. A witness to the reality of the early churches “power” not being found in positions of prestige but with those in a position of need.

Part 2 tomorrow!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about theology lately, exploring Anabaptist ideas amid Emerging church controversies. Much of the rageblogging done against people like McLaren and Tony Jones is filled with accusations about believing the “wrong” things about the atonement. So I’m glad that Josh Brown’s blog tipped me off last month to North Park professor Scot McKnight’s book in Abingdon’s series on emerging theology, A Community Called Atonement.

In evangelical churches for generations, the penal substitutionary theory of atonement has held a privileged position over other possible interpretations about why Jesus “had to die.” Not that I was ever told about it growing up evangelical, but there are a number of other, quite different, explanations of what could possibly explain Jesus’ execution (theologically speaking).

An easy spot for traditional church folk to pick at Emergents’ claims of “orthodoxy” (more on this weaponized word in a future post for sure) is to press the issue of penal substitutionary atonement – which Emergents are not particularly fond of (Lord knows, I’m not!). See Tony Jones’s recounting of his lunch with John Piper to get a sense of the conflict.

So I’ve been trying to learn something about Anabaptist theology’s work on the atonement. I’m happy to discover once again that there’s probably a reason why an emerging church-flavored person like me is so comfortable with the Mennos. They have a broader theological view of atonement, and don’t seem to equate penal substitution with the gospel.

It seems like the theological work being done these days is in two broad areas:

1. identifying the theological history of Anabaptism,
2. and some robust new thinking and interpretation by contemporary Anabaptist theologians.

The History

It’s not easy to get a clear picture of Mennonite theological history, for many reasons outlined in this helpful Frances F. Hiebert article from Direction journal. From my reading of Hiebert’s historical survey, I think emerging Christians would be right at home with Anabaptist thought on this subject. While most Mennonites (but by no means all) recognized some truth to penal substitution, this was by no means the whole story for them. Early Anabaptists understood this “forensic” model as only one facet of a complex and mysterious culmination of God-human relations. From Hiebert’s article [emphasis is mine]:

But to them, that model was inadequate or insufficient. It concentrated chiefly on Christ’s death and had been reduced to a passive or forensic doctrine which concerned only a change in humanity’s legal status before God….To the Anabaptists, however, atonement meant much, much more. According to Pilgram Marpeck it was far more than a legal transaction in the heavenly court. It … referred to all the ways in which God and humans have been reconciled through the work of Jesus Christ. It points not only to Christ’s death, but to all the various phases of his activity on behalf of humanity including his ministry, his death, and his resurrection…. This comprehensive view of atonement is in contrast to both Catholic and Protestant traditions that have held a forensic doctrine of atonement in which “all that is really necessary for the salvation of humankind is a qualified (pure) victim.”

The New Thinking

Some of the contemporary work on this subject I’ve read is from J. Denny Weaver, a professor from Mennonite school Bluffton College, in Ohio. This article outlines a modification he’s made to another historical atonement theory called “Christus victor.” Weaver’s so-called “narrative Christus victor” theology removes the contradictory blood-thirst from God’s role in Christ’s death, and sets the entire enterprise in an against-the-empire context that I hear leaders in the emerging church speak about often.

Boy, I sure am excited to get my hands on Brian McLaren’s new book, Everything Must Change. The blogosphere is a-buzzin’!

Baptist minister Chris Seay is one of those spicy young(ish) emerging church pastors who warms the cockles of my heart.

I first became aware of Chris Seay when someone pointed me to a Web site where he makes videos for his church. The Web site is extensive, with a lot of video and audio, most of it networked through YouTube and subscribable via iTunes. It looks like he is someone plugged into culture and interested in being engaged rather than withdrawn. Any doubt about this was eliminated when I read the reviews of his book, which argues that the Holy Spirit is at work in the HBO series the Sopranos, revealing Christianity’s deepest and most profound truths.

I love what he says in this Christianity Today interview about a Christian’s relationship to culture:

I still think one of the great fallacies of Christian thinking is this kind of garbage in/garbage out mentality…. Daniel was educated by sorcerers, magicians, pagan priests, and astrologers. It says at the end of chapter one that he became ten times wiser in those things than the people that taught him. And yet, clearly, he wasn’t a pagan priest or a sorcerer. Scripture was his guide through all of the mess of his own pagan culture that I find to be very similar to our culture.

And later he describes how culture spaces can be where Christians meet people and engage their spiritual questions:

I’ve found it as a place where people are longing and asking spiritual questions. In music and movies, you see all of these deep spiritual questions. And the people that are supposed to engage those questions have removed themselves. We pull away from culture to the point where we can no longer affect it. Somewhere right in the middle is a really healthy place, but it’s a difficult one to find.

I realize I don’t have a clear idea of what the Mennonite disposition toward culture is. I have a vague idea that this has historically been an ambivalent relationship, but where are Mennonite churches moving today in relation to culture? What’s the deep Anabaptist theological thinking on this? It’s something I plan to investigate for a while.

Ugh.

I’m coming late to this bit of online drama. Not sure how I missed it this summer, but the Christianity Today blog linked to an article by someone name Frank Pastore who thinks that the goals of emerging church and Al Qaeda are the same.

The emergent blogs jumped on this bit of horror-filled nonsense better than I ever could.

Steve Knight’s lack of “sputtering sarcasm.”
Mark VanSteenwyck is reminded of Anabaptism
Jordan Cooper calls it stupid, but gets some weird ananymous trolling in the comments.

There’s not much I can really even say about this. Even some emergent-unfriendly commenters condemn such lunacy (linked to by Steve above). But I do just want to say how sad and uncomfortable I felt reading some of the Christianity Today post comments. No one really defended Pastore. But a disturbing number of posters thought there was a grain of truth in his rant.

Ugh.

In my previous post, I tried to explain the anxiety and restlessness I sometimes feel working at an evangelical Christian college. It’s frustrating to me that people around here judge me based on my theological beliefs. What they are usually saying is that they think I’m not really a Christian, and therefore some kind of threat to the cohesion of this Christian community.

Next month a friend of mine is coming to speak on my campus who has been drawing controversy lately by publicly espousing theological beliefs that identify him as outside the boundaries of what many of the colleges he speaks at find acceptable for Christians.

I was telling this to a colleague at lunch this week, and he responded by saying that the word “orthodoxy” means “right belief,” and Christians have been protecting the faith by making judgments about one another’s theological beliefs for two thousand years. He said “If your friend finds it too hard to believe the right things, maybe he’s in the wrong religion. Being a Christian is easier than that.”

Obviously, I took this personally, because I’m assuming my colleague would say the same thing about me if he knew that I hold a theology that probably fails parts of his litmus test for believing the right things.

I don’t care how easy people say it should be for me to follow Christ; in my personal experience I find it very hard! I struggle with weak faith, confusion about the Trinity, laziness and bad character, the existence of evil, injustice and suffering. I work out my theological conclusions in response to these struggles, so that I can remain faithful. If I believed some of what people tell me I should believe about (theology buzzword alert soteriology, eschatology, divine ontology, etc., I wouldn’t be able to stay a Christian at all!

I’ve found tremendous hope and help in the Mennonite church. Fellow Mennos care about and frequently ask me about my mission. “Following Christ and building the Kingdom of God!” is my usual answer. They ask me what I need in order to do that. There are many things I need: discipline, humility, meditation, good advice, submission to God’s will, community support, and more. And also I believe theological ideas that people judge me for.

Parts of my theology is awkward, and unpopular, maybe even incorrect or incomplete. But what those beliefs do is help me be a better, more faithful Christian.

This is “what theology is for” in my life. It’s to help me understand and follow and serve and submit to the will of Jesus. Not to draw boundary markers for club membership. I care very little for the theological opinions in the heads of most of the people I work with at my college. I simply care if they are healthy and at peace following Christ and building the Kingdom.

I wish I had more of a sense that people around here could look at me that way if they knew all that I believe.

I take comfort in the confidence that the Mennonites will let me stay in their group if ever the college I work for tells me to leave. I’m still working out what this means in the long term.

A friend (someone who isn’t a Christian and doesn’t work in academia) asked why I feel so much stress and anxiety working at an evangelical Christian college, since:

1. I grew up an evangelical Christian,
2. went to Christian college,
3. and have an energetic and unapologetic love for Christ.

Trying to answer her was helpful for me in the clarifying process of putting a lot of jumbled thoughts and feelings into words.

My unease is generated by the question “What is theology for?”

In much of my experience of religious communities and organizations, theology (i.e. “beliefs”) is useful to the group by identifying and enforcing boundaries. Beliefs identify who is within and who is outside the criteria bounds for group membership. Boundaries aren’t crossed only by how someone acts or what someone does. They’re also crossed by what people think, what their opinions are, and what they believe.

For me – and all of my colleagues – Jesus is at the center of my spiritual life. We’re all in the game because of Christ’s love for us, because of the transformational new reality this love creates in us, and because of the love we have for Christ in return.

But there are many other religious beliefs a Christian might have, apart from being saved by Jesus. You know, there’s stuff to believe about the Bible, free will, evil spirits, miracles, economics, etc. Stuff related to Jesus, but not the same as Jesus. That’s why, even after we join the exciting journey of following Christ, there is still plenty of other theological work to do. The universe is a big place and we can ask theological questions of just about any part of it.

I worry that my personal take on these other theological ideas will serve the purpose of limiting my inclusion in the group. (What’s exclusion look like? Being endlessly argued with and judged, blocked in the college promotion process or, worse, eventually refused tenure – i.e. fired.)

One reason this is so frustrating for me is because I work out my theological ideas specifically to help me keep Jesus at the center of my life.

I guess I don’t think theology saves me. I think Jesus saves me. Obviously this is a theological idea, but Jesus isn’t a theology.

And I guess my Christian mission is not to follow some theology. My mission is to follow Christ. This mission is supported by theology, but the mission itself isn’t theology.

That’s why, when people imply I’m not a very good Christian because I have the wrong theology of [whatever], I don’t know how to respond. It’s in those moments I realize we are not even in agreement about what theology is for.

Max warned us about “the increasing tendency toward rationalization.”

Max Weber, the 19th century German sociologist, called the results of modern social organization “the iron cage” (or something close to that phrase in German). It’s a way of understanding the rational structures of human society as unmalleable, non-negotiable restrictions, that ultimately perpetuate their own existence rather than serving any legitimate human needs or desires. Chillingly, he insisted that the iron cage is inevitable.

This is what Mennonites and emerging Christians are afraid of.

The Mennos have loose hierarchical structures, distributing authority througout the congregation and doing a lot of theological work on “the priesthood of all believers.” Anabaptist history includes frequent run-ins with both Protestant and Catholic institutional structures, often resulting in drowning, burning, and chopping up the faithful.

Emerging christians are also very leery of authoritative pastoral figures and church hierarchy. Many of them are reacting to the worst expressions of rigid institutional structure in evangelicalism and the mainline. This is why emerging congregations sit in circular arrangements for worship, and make so many decisions through dialog, active listening, and consensus.

My own Mennonite fellowship (notice how for this post I even avoid using the word “church” in this sentence? Yes, Dave’s got baggage!) is just now struggling with how to organize leadership structures. Our numbers have grown, which led us to occupy our own building, which leads to further growth, which leads to a need for organizing ourselves in order to complete the additional tasks that come with more people and a building.

How do we do this?

• Do we ordain one of our members and put her in charge of stuff?
• Do we need a board, or a bunch of committees with chairpersons?
• Who’s responsible for sending out email updates with important information?
• Who has to make sure the building gets swept and locked up?
• Who plans the worship meetings?
• Who decides if we’re going to do a service project making blankets for North Korea or assembling health kits for HIV/AINDS clinics?

This is causing a lot of anxiety for many of us who recognize the need to be organized, but fear Herr Weber’s caution about how the structures we build to serve our needs eventually demand our service to perpetuate them.

Bureaucracy is scary.