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.