I’m off to Seattle to the Inhabit conference tomorrow. Lookin forward to it.

I basically have one idea I’ll be trying to unpack: that it is only through “place” that we break the cycle of ideological church.

We see how the church gets ideologized all the time. “Oh that church is the Bible church – they believe in the Bible” implying the others don’t. Or we’re the church that believes in community. The others somehow don’t. That church? They’re the gay church and that one is the church that is against gay marriage. We all know this phenomena and have participated in it.

Generally speaking, it is the human tendency to form communities around ideas. People gather for certain reasons having to do with needs, whether economic, social or psychic. We articulate how to meet these needs in the form of ideas we are pursuing together. We rally around these ideas as common causes that enable us to organize to meet  these various needs. The study of ideology, in its various brands, studies how we come together in these ways – what holds us together.

I want to show how whenever we extract ideas like this from its context – where the idea makes sense and is practiced – it tends to become ideologized in a bad way. It not only takes on the quality of a banner around which we rally. It becomes the symbol by which we rally over against those who do not accept our idea. It becomes the means of negotiation for power. It becomes the means of cynicism. Most of all, it plays on antagonisms which set us over against those who aren’t subscribing to the same beliefs. We start to think in terms of “us against them” or “see we were right afterall” or “shoooo I’m glad we’re not them.” The idea which is good in itself (the Bible, community etc.) becomes removed from its meaning on the ground and in essence now becomes the means to hold current structures of power in place. In other words, becoming ideology in these terms turns us into a people incapable of being the church of Jesus Christ.

Again, what I want to put forth in my upcoming talk at Inhabit is : it is only through “place” that we can break the cycle of ideological church. It is only through engaging in the practices of being the local expression of Christ’s body that we can break out of the entanglements of ideological cynicism. It is only in being the church of Jesus Christ, whose belief and practice is grounded in the Triune relation of God in the world, that we can avoid being ideologized. It is only in building communities that have their own internal integrity built in the on-the-ground participation in the Reign of Christ – that we can escape the ideologization of the church.  No longer dependent upon ideological structure – we can then discern – resist- participate in the world in non violent non-antagonistic ways. This of course (I would argue) is the nature of the incarnation and incarnational communities.

In the book The End of Evangelicalism? I try to show how this has played out in the church of my upbringing – evangelicalism. I try to show how our core beliefs turned into ideological ideas (what Zizek calls Master Signifiers). The “inerrant Bible,” “the Decision for Christ” and “the Christian Nation” have all become these kind of ideological banners that set us in antagonism against the culture we seek to witness the gospel. In the process, we turn the world into enemies.

The proliferation of reviews on the book is much appreciated.  Take a look below at the latest. And oh, by the way, for one more month the book is available at a 40% discount here (just follow the direction and the links).

Scot McKnight’s review at Jesus Creed More posts follow this one

Greg Arthur’s Review

Englewood Review of Books

W David Phillips Review More posts follow this one

Homebrewed Christianity’s Review 2 more posts follow this one

Jeremy Paavola’s Excellent Review

Rick Davis’ Review

The Other Journal’s Interview on the Book

Mars Hill Graduate School’s The Other Journal has just posted an interview with me. In the interview I talk about several themes that have become important to me in the past year. I talk about how our doctrine has become defensive. The way we articulate our beliefs has turned against us – from shaping our life together into Christ to instead organizing us in hostile fashion over against the world God has called us into. In the interview I discuss two of these doctrines, a.) our doctrine of the authority Scripture (popularly known as Inerrancy) and b.) our doctrine of salvation (popularly know as the Decision for Christ). Here are the questions and answers.

TOJ: You claim that the evangelical belief in the “inerrant” Bible has not really been about the truth but about “being in control of the truth.” It appears that just as evangelicalism continues to fracture into different hermeneutical camps, large church personalities have effectively replaced denominations in defending doctrine. Over this next decade, how do you see the fight of inerrancy shaping up?

DF: There’s a splintering of evangelicalism, and strangely, I would say that the majority of evangelicalism realizes that “inerrancy” is an apologetic strategy whose time is over. It is a strategy that in fact undermines Scripture by defining its authority via a reference point outside itself, by what is an “error” and who gets to define “error,” as opposed to what Scripture is in its relationship to the Incarnate Christ. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t surprise me if the New-Reformed movement among evangelicals makes inerrancy once again a shibboleth to determine who is a true evangelical. Once this happens, I think we’ll all be energized to expose the defensiveness in this move and move on to a true faithfulness.

TOJ: Another hallmark of the evangelical is the “decision for Christ,” but you write that this decision has effectively been “separated from one’s embodied life.” Could you explain that further, particularly how such a deep and personal decision has found such tragic separation?

DF: I refer to it as a separation because speaking of a decision for Christ doesn’t mean anything anymore. I am sure that is an overstatement. But what I try to show in the book is that the decision for Christ has become a master signifier that creates a fantasy, as if to make a person feel good for what he or she has done. Yet it demands nothing of this person. In essence it does what any good master signifier must do—it enables us to “believe without believing,” in Žižek’s famous words. It allows us to be Christians without it meaning anything material to our embodied existence. Nonetheless, conversion is at the heart of Jesus’s call to follow him. We need to recover conversion. I go much deeper into this whole phenomenon in the book (The End of Evangelicalism?)

Tim Soerens, the interviewer, also asks for my observations on the Rob Bell episode of last month. He talks about the percieved split within evangelicalism and American Christianity as a whole. He asks what my take is on a third way alternative place for theological discernment beyond the Neo-Reformed and Emergent Christianities that have been so prevalent the past ten years in publishing and media. I think it’s a good question.

TOJ: You mentioned earlier that there is a growing desire for a third way beyond the Neo-Reformed organizations and what were the emergent organizations. I’m curious what role context and, specifically, place should have in this conversation. That is, how can we avoid having just another abstract theological battle that’s fought over blogs, conferences, and books but has no grounding in the reality of particular people, places, and cultures?

DF: I am convinced that the problem with the way the church is currently led theologically is that it lacks a sense of place, an understanding that theological issues are best worked out in real life on the ground. I cannot tell you how central I think this is! We in the United States (less so in Canada) work out our conversations over disputed theological matters in the media, via publishing empires, through grand provocations meant to elicit interest and sales of books. We hold conferences and invite superstar pastors and authors, many of whom have theological habits driven by pragmatics. As a result, our theological disputes do not bring us together. They polarize. In essence they do nothing but solidify the battle lines and inhibit our witness in the world.

In addition, there’s no sense of urgency to our theological conversations because they are not directly related to an actual situation being lived out on the ground. We therefore find ourselves going on and on, talking about the issues of pluralism or same-sex relations and never coming to a resolution. We can afford to do this because there are no hurting tragic situations awaiting direction. As a result, the conversation never resolves. It goes nowhere. This kind of theology talk is disingenuous and it’s a luxury that is only possible for people who have money and extra time without the urgency of ministry itself being the immediate pressing concern.

For both of these reasons, our theological development is stunted. Yet the issues of pluralism, salvation, hell, same-sex relations, and I could go, are absolutely essential and must be addressed within the theological orthodoxy of the church if we are ever to engage our culture for the mission of God.

The Anabaptist impulse leads us to work these things out on the ground in real life issues. The Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder wrote only occasional papers for most of his life, meaning he wrote papers in response to specific moral and cultural issues his church, and many times his local church, was confronted with. This is the way we must do theology: on the ground. The result of this work then moves into the wider church, but always from the individual location first. I cannot guarantee that this incarnational method for theological development will become part of this third way we’re talking about. But I aim to bring this Anabaptist emphasis to the effort that some of us are working on to create an alternative place (and I am calling it most often a place) for hammering out what it means to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The polarization and lack of resolution will lessen once place, actual church location, and real situations drive the way we talk and do theology.

You can read the whole interview here at the Other Journal. And of course you can buy the book by following the directions given here at a 40% discount for one more month.

Of course I’m interested in your take on these questions. Have you noticed the way evangelicalism’s doctrines have turned defensive? Do you see a need for an alternative third place for theological conversation, development and discernment for those of us who wish to see a new faithfulness for evangelicalism?

The inappropriate question “are you a church yet?”

Are you a church yet? If you are a missional person, you are not supposed to ask this question. It is presumptuous, assuming what you’re doing is not already church. Meeting in your house, eating together, serving in your neighborhood, studying the Scriptures, praying for each other and your neighbors – what could be more church than that? In addition, this question sometimes assumes you must first be a “self- sustaining congregation” of sufficient size that meets regularly in a building of some sort and can pay a pastor a full time salary in order to be a church. For many of us these assumptions are an anathema to the missional cause. Indeed many of us renounce the idea of a full time salary as the foundation for a church. We see no reason why a community is not sustainable from day one.

Yet is there some validity in this question

Yet I suggest there is still something in this question that might be worth a second look. If we define the church as mission, then a community only acquires the status of God’s church when it is in fact inhabiting God’s mission. The question “are you a church yet?” then forces us to ask about the community’s participation in God’s mission. And this I suggest is a good thing.

I’ve noticed that there are times in every church plant when we are tempted to enjoy community as an end in itself. I have seen it happen: people start gathering locally in a house community enjoying kingdom living. Kingdom living is rich. The relationships are incredible. The realness of seeking Christ can be a high for those used to programed church. We have been dying for this kind of community. And so we turn inward. And we lose the sense of our identity as God’s mission, that God is doing something in us only as it is part of something much larger that God is doing in the whole world. So it is good to ask “are we a church yet?” if we mean are we participating in God’s Mission?

How might we tell? The Necessity of the Community’s Political Manifestation

How might we tell we are a church on this sense?  Well, we could examine our lives in mission. We train ourselves, as members of a missional community, to pay attention to the rhythms of each others’ lives, to pay attention to what God is doing, to ask “what is God doing, saying? How will we respond?” We pay attention to the patterns of our week noting what God’s is doing as we are intentionally inhabiting – the coffee shop, the PADS center, the McDonald’s, the bar, the community center, the park. We establish a presence in the neighborhood out of the lives God has already given us in this community. We can certainly then check in on how well we’re doing in these practices.

And yet even here at this point I don’t think this community has developed to the point where I’d call it a church in the way we are defining it?

I’m convinced a second stage is necessary. This is where the community develops a political presence in the neighborhood or town. It establishes its public face, an identity as a political entity. This political manifestation is the manner in which our way of life is identified, made visible to those outside the gospel. When someone sees us engaging (as individuals) the homeless, or resisting the corporate takeover of the local school or ministering prayer to the hurting person at the local funeral home, they are able to understand what is going on as more than one person’s thing via that person being a part of a local visible social presence – the church community. It helps the person outside the church community make sense of why we do what we do. It is the social witness of the gospel.

Such a social presence builds credibility and wherewithal to engage injustice. With such a public presence, we can sponsor and participate in community events, resist corporate evil, muster financial assistance when needed. I suggest whether it’s a web site, a “church” name or an open meeting – this public face makes possible an incursion into the neighborhood not possible otherwise. I suggest such a political manifestation is essential to what it means to be church in the world whatever that might look like. (I know it’s different for every context – but even in Communist China – eventually the underground church has to have a way to make itself politically present in order to offer resistance to the powers).

If we take Acts 2:42-47 as a model of community formation we notice how much of the beginnings was about the formation of the community. And yet something about the words “and they enjoyed the favor of all the people” reveals they became known corporately in the community. Strangely, this early community took on the name “The Way” to identify itself, a name that sounds so cool that a current hipster church might have just as easily come up with.  (Acts 18:26; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22).

What do you think? What makes up for you the dynamic that establishes the political manifestation of your missional community? Is it OK to ask this question“are you a church yet?” in these terms? Is a political manifestation necessary for each community to truly engage the local neighborhoods for mission? How does your church, your missional community take on a political manifestation in your social context?

I’m going to be giving a talk at the Inhabit Conference in Seattle at the end of the month – April 29-30. I hope the conference is a dialogue that provokes us to think how to be church in the changing climes of the West. I’m going to be talking specifically about the political crisis in Evangelicalism and the showing how Christo-Anarchism (i.e. the radical living together in Christ in peaceful ordinary resistance to the dominant power structures) is the way out of it. I freely admit most people under the age of 32 in my world don’t care about the saving of evangelicalism. Nonetheless, we all can learn from its problems. And we probably should be concerned about what happens with the largest body of practicing Christians in N America.

As some of you already know, I’m convinced that N. American Evangelicalism is in a cultural crisis. Its political presence has somehow become shaped by what it is against as opposed to who it is or what it is for. This has led to a loss of credibility in the post-Christendom parts of our society. I contend there is much to be learned from how this happened within evangelicalism. We (I consider myself an evangelical) allowed our faith commitments to become ideological banners that we rallied around in opposition to those we were against. As a result, ideas like “the Christian Nation” and/or “the Inerrant Bible” now separate us from our culture and distance us from God’s justice/work in the world. The only way to break out of these bad habits is through local concrete on-the-ground practices which shape communities of Jesus in the contexts of our society. Here the Kingdom is made manifest in ways which cannot be ideologized. Here a politic is bred locally from which God’s reconciliation overflows into society infecting it out of God’s love as opposed to our self generated antagonisms. I offer a few communal practices of the radical ordinary (along with some good stories) that shape such communities for the transformation of the world in Christ. Some of this is a riff off my book The End of Evangelicalism? (which you all can buy for another month at a 40% discount by clicking here and following the instructions ). My hope, God can use us in a small way to work for a new faithfulness in evangelicalism before its too late (There are alot of statistics that argue for evangelicalism’s extinction within 20 more years).

I limit myself to doing this kind of thing once a month. No point provoking others to live for the Kingdom if you’re never home seeking the same. This conference is special. I look forward to hanging out with the people from Mars Hill Graduate School, Parish Collective and TransFORM. So if you’re coming, I’ll be around looking to shake hands and talk to whoever that day. Click on this link where you can get info on the conference.