Jason Clark

Trying to make safe spaces for diverse and healthy conversations about church, culture, mission, theology and motorbikes

Future of Evangelicalism?

My mate Antony Billington gave me a heads up on this resource.

Patheos have brought together some authors to write a series of articles on the future of evangelicalism.  The essays are organised by theme and are being released online over the next two weeks.  Scott McKnight is one of the contributors and you can find his paper which  'surveys the field, and finds the Neo-Evangelical Coalition is falling apart.'  All the papers ar here.

The blurb from their site says:

"A rapidly evolving tradition with deep historical roots, evangelicalism confronts abundant opportunities and abundant challenges. How will current movements within the church shape the face of American Christianity in the next ten years? What is the best way to influence culture while retaining the distinctive qualities of evangelical faith? How should evangelicals relate to other Christian traditions, and even non-Christian ones? How ought evangelicals to engage in politics? And how are evangelical ministries responding to the swiftly changing circumstances of life in the twenty-first century?

Patheos has assembled an extraordinary collection of essays addressing these questions. The essays are organized according to the themes listed below, and will be released on the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays of the next two weeks. Come back often!"

Is de-converion the new conversion?

I was re-reading an article by a friend Phil Harold, 'De-converion in the emerging church' (sorry it's behind a paywall, and I can't give out free copies) and I wondered if de-conversion is the new conversion?

Phil's article surveys a broad range of bloggers and writers in the Emerging Church, and highlights the stories of loss of faith, and belief.  Phil then makes one suggestion of how the work of John D. Barbour on de-conversion, might help us to understand what is happening within this.

There are four elements from Barbour that Phil correlates with his survey: 1) Doubt: the struggle for belief in a post-modern world 2) Moral critique: how Christians are tired with seeing Christians more concerned with the consumer dream than the Kingdom of God 3) New metaphors: the search for new ways of expressing 1 & 2 that don't use the mappings of previous ways of understanding faith 4) Self examination away from others in isolation.  There's so much to Barbour and Harold's use of him.  It's one way to see what is happening and how it's a healthy and simultaneously unhealthy, like all movements.

In my Doctor of Ministry thesis I used the work of James Fowler, to suggest that the loss of faith is a normal and necessary part of faith development.  I'm not unique in suggesting that, and I drew heavily on the work of Alan Jamieson for that.

But I also wonder if something else is happening, as I'm sure many things are happening.  Having just surveyed the history of evangelicalism, it's beliefs and practices, one thing stands out. The process of initiation into the christian faith through an intense emotional experience, of personal faith and assurance.

A large rump of the E/C are from middle of the road evangelicals who were brought up on certainties of faith and the telling of stories of conversion and finding faith in the evangelical tradition.  I remember hearing Nicky Cruz speak, and saw how evangelism was often about gathering people to hear dramatic conversion stories.

So all these christians brought up on this narrative and 'normative' experience, who did not have this experience having been raised in churches, have to come to terms with not having had dramatic conversion experiences, and the loss of certainties in a post-modern world.

Perhaps de-conversion, the telling of intense emotional stories about the realisation of not believing, of loss of faith, are functioning as the 'new conversion'.  We now confess our lack of faith and assurance, and the uncertainty that captivates our imaginations and actions.

I find myself in the middle of this somehow.  Not having been brought up in church, but having had an intense conversion experience, what was not around formulas and programs. I'n not sure if that's helpful or a hinderance in church life and mission.

In any event, the loss of faith, and de-conversion, as well as the certainties of the past, seem to offer little hope for seeing others 'find faith' and live out that faith with others.  What does a new 'new conversion' look like?

Evangelicalism: Dispensing religious goods and services?

I have a short blog piece/article on the Fuller Seminary blog, about a new D.Min course they have asked me to teach.  Text is also below, FYI.

Thomas Taylor (1738–1816) was appointed by John Wesley in 1761 (and is one of the few people who had an itinerant career longer than Wesley), travelling extensively over several decades, throughout Wales, Scotland, and England. He was able to observe evangelical faith in relation to a myriad of engagements, physical, cultural, political, psychological, ecclesial, within the emerging middles classes and the birth of market society. In all those engagements with faith, Taylor observed that ‘evangelical religion spread best where trade was growing’.

Taylor was able to observe not only the beginnings of the evangelical tradition, but also its nascent relationship to the rise and development of the market society. He was also well placed to discern the possibilities and captivities of that relationship in its intrinsic nature.

More recently, John Milbank has diagnosed the current relationship of evangelicalism to the market as being ‘quite simply a new mutation of Protestantism in its mutually constitutive relationship with capitalism’. Or, perhaps more crudely, we might combine and paraphrase Thomas Taylor and John Milbank using the words of Dan Kimball that the modern Protestant evangelical church has all too often become about the ‘dispensing of religious goods and services’ to Christian consumers.

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Re-imagining evangelicalism?

The next series that we are planning to explore at http://www.deepchurch.org.uk is on Evangelicalism.

We'll be taking some time with our guest authors to plan that series, and I hope it will start at the beginning of September.  Some of the initial questions I am asking as we plan that series are below.  What ones would you want to add, ask?

1.  What is evangelicalism?
2.  Why would anyone still want to be evangelical?
3.  Does evangelicalism have its own tradition to draw on for renewal?
4.  What might be being lost in the post-evangelical move?
5.  What has gone wrong with Evangelicalism?
6.  Is Evangelicalism just a passing fad of the last 200 years?
7.  Is Evangelicalism inimical to capitalism?
8.  Can Evangelicalism be renewed, should it be renewed?
9.  What understanding does Evangelicalism have of being 'Church?'
10. How might Evangelicalism be connected to the 'Great Tradition' of the Church?