I was going through an old file box last week and found the official publication of one of the schools I attended. I cherish a delicate hope that this school is concealing every record of my association with it. I'm fairly certain it is: enough time has passed and I have sent them no money. I feel reasonably certain that if I were to visit the campus today I would find no statue of me on the quad, and if there were a statue, I'm sure my toes would not be worn smooth from many kisses. But in spite of my mother's dying wish, I regard this as a good thing. The fewer people who know of my connections with fundamentalist and evangelical institutions the less stressed I'll be and the fewer pots of Taylors of Harrogate Organic Chamomile tea my wife will have to brew.

But that's about all of my shabby past I am prepared to concede today.

The school published a paper regularly which I read only occasionally and filed very rarely. I filed this one for sentimental reasons. I had friends who were commiserating over the way their service institutions abused their trust according to a schedule suggested to them by a cesium atomic clock. I remember listening to their reasons for thinking that these institutions were a good idea. I remember these as halcyon days filled with fervent diatribes, silly ideas and serpentine ambitions.

Following a short description of pros and cons, the writer of this article applied some lessons from history. One had to do with the nature of power, but he also wrote this:

History should remind us that when a society begins to drift, doctrine is usually the last evidence of that drift. The churches must not suppose that professions of orthodoxy are proof against drift.

(Ironic that that lesson should have found its way into that school paper while under the administration of that president. But that takes us down a very different unpleasant path.)

What we had here was a brilliant example of misdirection; illusionists and spies could have learned much from fundagelicals. Here was a movement obnoxious in its reminding everyone of its fidelity to a doctrinal statement even as it savaged some other necessary but undervalued virtue.

More than ten years after those words were published I heard a pastor recount a confrontation with the president of a mission agency over reports of adultery and embezzlement on the field. A decade later we have the plays of Wilde and the ditties of Pettit and a Bumpkin Hymnody.

It seems to have escaped our interest that statements of faith tend not to be acts of devotion. Of the two, the latter is more difficult to retrieve once it has been lost.

Hostile readers will now leap to the inference that we are cavalier about orthodoxy. These would be the readers who have not understood what we have already said about Machen or Tozer or Wells.... We are not cavalier about orthodoxy, we are dismissive of institutions intended to preserve it, institutions neglectful of what is good, true and beautiful.

How many ways are there to drift? and given a choice, which ways should have exercised our outrage first?  In this respect I think we are all being "amished". We are more and more excluded (or more and more withdrawing ourselves) from the eccentricities, abnormalities and deformities of this very American religion.

Whether it is Matt Olson or Tony Jones or Hugh Hollowell or Richard Foster, diversity is not really diversity, community is not really community, and faith is not really faith.

Willkommen! I hope you know how to hook up the horses and get where you want to be.

This week I found a doorknob hanger on my front entry. There was a picture of what looked like a hotel headboard and two sets of pillows. Below the photo was written: "DO NOT DISTURB—stay in bed on Sunday mornings! Attend Lake Pointe Church Saturday night at 6 p.m."

I thought this was most helpful. I find that after a week of lugging around a cross and repetitive self-denial I am sometimes too worn out to drag my weary bones into church for their 11 a.m. Sunday service. Clearly some dear shepherd of the flock is holding my needs close to his heart.

If it turns out that this church has adequate parking, reclining theater seats and cup holders, I think I might go hearken to some shyster telling me how to become all that God wants me to be.

Also this week I heard someone expressing his wish that the entire church be more diverse in its liturgy. This too sounds helpful. Diversity is something we all long for.

I was blessed to be born into a non-fundamentalist home where a respectful distance was maintained between the children and honky-tonk piano-bangers. (Emergence hadn't yet come into existence due to an insufficient number of idiots in the population.) It wasn't until I got a bit older that I realized liturgical diversity meant permitting the most banal twaddle in the church house.

It occurred to me that it would be a rich blessing if your kids were raised along the same lines I was raised, where diversity meant more than an excuse to savage tender sensibilities; where the pieties of past Christians were considered rather than the shallow self-interests of contemporary reprobates.

For those of you who might care to try real diversity, check this out: One Thousand Years of Ukrainian Sacred Music.

I don't imagine most of you will like it, and I don't suppose anything here will find its way into a contemporary "hymnbook", but it will leave you prepared to discuss diversity with the next kid you see in church with a bass guitar.

Monday we showed you one of the many dead-ends of modern Christianity. It would not be inaccurate to say that Christendom has become a maze with the exit boarded up, plastered over, painted, and holding a picture of Aunt Thistledrawers. You can go anywhere you want, but you will not get anywhere you want to be.

If you took the time to read "Magenta", you observed a resentful black woman share with us how, as a bisexual, she suffered the slings and arrows of outraged lesbians for what they called her hypersexuality. Magenta cannot make it as a spouse. She lacks what it takes to a) form the simplest, most intimate and most rewarding of communities, and b) exercise Christian graces toward one person of her own choosing. The Apostle taught us how to behave as husbands and wives even when the choice of a spouse is not ours. We have in Magenta a bi-sexual (perhaps even an omni-sexual) who is not limited to the members of half the population; she reserves the right to date and wed from among the total number of hominids. Still she cannot succeed.

That's gotta leave some nasty bruises on one's self-image.

And she's 45, so the chances of a success late in life seem remote, and the likelihood of a rewarding motherhood and grandmotherhood even more remote.

So this is the basket case that storms through a church door demanding love, approval and acceptance. And there are places—I will not call them churches—where the indigenous peoples think they have love, approval and acceptance to offer. Like here.

Here is Hugh Hollowell having his first communion. His first communion is not a remembrance of the violent death of his Lord and a symbol of a precious Covenant between God and Man but a place where "we sang songs of oppression and liberation together" on a Pride weekend.

One could almost feel sorry for Magenta if it is through the doors of Hollowell's church she should storm. Here is a place where they will celebrate—and even validate—her very real and painful failures, but not a place where she can find the greatest love and acceptance mankind has ever witnessed.

One could even feel sorry if Magenta should storm through the doors of Clif Boyce's church.

As it has turned out, Novelty Christianity offers precious little to anyone. Contemporary Christianity has no more to offer either to the sexual deviant or the dreamers of Clif Boyce's Honky-tonk Heaven than the New Testament extends: the washing that follows repentance. This is the one "personal reality" that matters.

Contrary to what Brian McLaren claims, everything cannot change: the only Christian community worthy of the name includes the saints of the past: the total number of degenerates who have thrown themselves on the mercy of a forgiving God and pilgrims slogging it out for the Celestial City.

It may be a narrow way, but it does have an exit.

We slowly drive by another of the many Emergent culs de sac.

Here is the end of "community". A movement that began as a plea for generosity, acceptance and diversity now decays into an adolescent demand for indifference on the part of others. Like Marie, like Trucker Frank, there is no personal deficiency the "love of Christ" must not endorse. The church must validate all their personal defects.

The problem is always other people and their "boxes". Here you have yet another resentful woman who cannot build a community with one other person in order to form a simple marriage. In this she has failed twice. And emerging from this personal failure she demands a new kind of community.

It is hard to imagine a more aggressive egoism. And there are precious few who can fully "appreciate her reality".

The problem is never their own, it is always "the paradigms people try to confine you to".

Finally, at the ripe old age of 45, i've come to accept that most people aren't going to be comfortable with the fact that I don't fit their boxes; and that I will never fit them. So be it. I've stopped proclaiming or explaining myself to people, unless they are among the precious few I feel can truly and fully appreciate my reality, whatever it is.

[...]

I have been in churches of all stripes, organizations, bands, and multiple intimate relationships, but I never found on anywhere near this scale the profound acceptance I have among these people whom I see only once a month, for the most part. It has been literally life-changing.

Our calendar has chosen to concatenate its horrors by putting Friday the 13^th and Valentine's on consecutive days. But I will not be intimidated; I shall return serve with a little heat.

Horror #1 solemnizes Maria's love for her sugardaddy god.

I purchased a beautiful 2-toned burgundy/gold pickup truck back in December. When I first saw it on the lot, I never dreamed it would be mine-but God has a way of spoiling me! The day before Valentine's Day, I was driving home from work and suddenly heard a loud CRACK. I knew that I'd taken my first rock and would probably have a horrible scratch on my vehicle. When I looked for the damage I found it on the windshield, just left and well below my field of vision. When I studied the hit, I realized it was in a heart-shaped design. What others may see as a fault is now an awesome sign to me-a reminder of my Savior's love. As I drive, I not only thank God for this wonderful truck, I thank him for this symbol he's etched in the glass just for me!

Horror #2 is the honky-tonk Blessed Hope of an influential fundamentalist church musician. It falls, unsurprisingly, a tad short of the ardent anticipations found in The Celestial Country, but it's a hit with east coast worshipers.

Horror #3 comes from Oaf & Twinky, two renowned American ecclesiolologistics experts known more commonly by their stage names, Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. This is a bit of imbecile improv in the shape of some post-platonic flossfy. As they astutely perceive, "all sorts of crazy stuff happens".

So there you have it, saintly reader: faith, hope and love in reverse order. Christianity American Style.

Happy Holidays.

For those of you who haven't been following the fortunes of the emergent church, you might want to give this a listen. But do pay attention, there's a lot of english on the ball. (You know the emergent church has already given up when its spokesblokes tell you it "is not giving up." I believe this is the moment the coroner hangs the toe tag on the corpse.)

More opinions can be found thither and yon. Most are amusing, but all are instructive. It's become the story of the incredible imploding deconstruction crew. It would be funny on its own merits, but on its own merits the part is not as informative as the whole. It was like watching a bunch of hippies trying to set up NASA. Nothing's been properly deconstructed yet, and what sprouted as an emergence has turned into a departure.

What began as a vibe, an ethos, a website, and a few cheesy YouTube videos has become a comical collection of knit caps and soul patches pretending to understand biblical narrative. Incidentally, if you want to sample their exegetical skills, read this.

I think for many of us we read the scriptures and pass over verses and sometimes whole chapters and not realize the explicit graphic sexual and violent content that is found within them. With the help of Queer Theory and a bit of Poststructrualist pizzazz, I seek to disrupt a normal reading of Revelation 17 as an attempt to bring about more dialogue and to help others to see the divinely inspired horror that lies within some of our sacred biblical passages.

Particularly entertaining is the complaint—I think it was from Tony—that, having refused to define themselves they can now complain that their opponents misrepresented their positions. Gotta tellya, that's about as poignant as a rubber crutch.

And we hear again the claim that it is not about the movement, it is about the idea.

Here we had a media fad, a collection of couches, some very stale philosophical pretentions, some wobbly insights into the doing of "deep church", and an open source theology...until differences of opinion began cropping up; then it started looking like a bunch of Baptist women arguing over whose Tupperware^TM it is.

But we should not be amused for long. Something new is coming and I'm sure everyone will again focus on the silly novelties and overlook the significant continuities in American evangelicalism. From fundamentalism's Billy Sunday side-show heyday, through evangelicalism's crazyquilt of agendas and programs to emergents' open-source apostasy, there is one line that haunts them all:

Despite all we can do, the desire to know and the love of beauty cannot be entirely stifled, and we cannot permanently regard these desires as evil.

There is a relationship between knowledge and piety that bears a second look.

Somebody really should get started on that, y'know.

Thirty years ago Richard Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline, and things have proceeded from there: the weathered saints who call CT the magazine of evangelical conviction with a straight face have published an edited version of a talk Foster gave to celebrate its birthday.

Bit of a hiccup, though. "Finally, a general cultural malaise touches us all to one extent or another." I must giggle at this point. Evangelical "culture" has been flat-lining for decades and Dr. Foster writes malaise on the patient's chart.

"We"—and by we I take it he refers to himself and the doddering chatterboxes at CT—have "become accustomed to the normality of dysfunction". They—and by they I mean not me—needed to "revive the great conversation about the formation of the soul" and "incarnate this reality into the daily experience of the individual, congregational, and cultural life".

(Usually when I am dealing with this much gas I like to have firemen standing by with their hoses all connected and their helmets strapped on, but today I'm feeling pretty lucky.)

It appears to Richard that this Thirty Years' Chat has been somewhat more successful than the actual incarnation of the reality into the daily experience of the individual, congregational and cultural life.

So, what they're asking you to do for the next thirty years is roll up your sleeves and give it a bit more wiggle. The trick, Foster thinks, can be found in what he calls "fellowship gathering power".

If in our churches we do not do the hard work of spiritual formation, we will not get spiritually formed people. So this is a vital arena of labor, and I am speaking of both congregations as traditionally understood, as well as newly emerging forms of our life together.

This will involve three things. Naturally.

First, you'll just have to do something about your "hurry sickness". Second, you have a Christian entertainment industry masquerading as worship. And finally, the consumer mentality dominates your American religious scene.

So there you have it! The "spiritual formation agenda" as articulated by Richard Foster in the pages of Christianity Today.

An agenda, for those who might have forgotten, is a list or program of things to be done or considered. We should remind ourselves, every thirty years or so, that spiritual maturation is not achieved by following an agenda. An agenda is the very last consideration of a genuine pilgrim.

The first refreshing thing about reading the Prophets, Apostles and Martyrs on the topic of spiritual formation is that they don't write like Richard Foster and they don't write for CT. Real prophets, apostles, and true witnesses of the disciplined life have a much firmer grip on reality.

So rather than suffer this symbiotic relationship between the piffle-mongers, movie reviewers, church growth witch doctors, and incessant advertisers on 465 Gundersen Drive, why don't we get down to brass tacks here?

Let's dump the dysfunctional prose, put forward a clear statement of orthodoxy and acquire a reputation for moral rectitude.

It'll surprise everybody.

Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab bobbed along on a beautiful lake, waxed romantic, and blithely misnamed a Beethoven sonata. I suppose a certain amount of dishonor should fall on his head for that, but I think what is even more dishonorable is that generation after generation after generation of performers should preserve that mischaracterization by simply not taking the composer at his word. Now what seems like a casual and harmless personal observation turns out to have obscured a great work of the imagination. Millions of listeners have imagined a nocturne when the composer described a death scene, and having misunderstood the part, they could not possibly have rightly understood the whole.

For most people this is a very small thing, and given the many other inhumanities pianists have inflicted on mankind, it seems hardly worth mentioning. After all, the pianist is just sharing what the sonata means to him.

Right?

I hope that by now we begin to get some sense of the horror of living among people who think this way: people who do not know what a composer intended because a performer stood in the way. People who choose a pretty falsehood over a genuine insight.

There is such a thing as a "thick layer of false tradition"—to use Schiff's phrase—obscuring the good. Misunderstanding a sonata is far more serious than most people might admit; especially religious people. But extend this mawkish nonsense to cover an entire liturgy and we get a sense of irritation that is perfectly natural when listening to people like Hamilton and Pettit and when we are being asked to sing to God what is not meaningful even to us.

We've had several generations of Christians who are quite smug in the knowledge that they attend a church with "traditional worship" and they never—ever—conceived of the possibility that their false traditions might be as corrupting as the novelties they condemn in others. I'm not defending the (equally unconvincing) novelties, obviously, but the solution to falling off the left side of the bridge is not to fall off the right side.

We are at a delicate moment in human history, I think. Especially religious people. We live with what we believe is true but what is also implausible to those around us.

Both. True and implausible. Beautiful and unattractive. Good and undesirable.

I really don't think we are yet serious enough to clarify what we've already obscured, but I do think we might give some thought to how we stand between the sinner and illumination, between the wretch and grace. There are some of us who are more horrified at what Steve Pettit and his faux-Celtic noisemakers are saying about our God than the infidel is.

Someone mentioned anger as a possible response. I suggest there is a certain cleansing of the Temple which is called for, but that requires an ability to distinguish worship from commerce.

And that's proved tricky.