All for Jesus, all for Jesus; all I am and have and ever hope to be. All my ambitions, hopes and plans; I surrender them into your hands.
The other day I came across two gentlemen discussing faith matters. I’m not sure how the conversation got started, but as I got there one man stated quite emphatically, “There is no such a thing in our community that anyone follows Jesus with everything he has.”
It took me a while to absorb what he was saying. Was he speaking about himself? The people in his church? His friends and neighbors? Me? My mind wandered off to the conversation in the Bible in which Abraham bargains with God not to destroy Sodom – all the way from fifty down to ten righteous to be found in the city. Check out what happened to Sodom in Genesis 19:24.
So I got to thinking about what has brought us to this place where at least some see no full-fledged discipleship in the way of Christ in our community.
In his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World, Ron Sider summarizes the results of numerous national polls. (While the focus is on the USA, my assumptions are that the Canadian scene is not much different.) He notes that, “In survey after survey it becomes clear that evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general” (13).
After a painstaking analysis of the statistics, he summarizes as follows: “To say there is a crisis of disobedience in the evangelical world today is to dangerously understate the problem. Born-again Christians divorce at about the same rate as everyone else. Self-centered materialism is seducing evangelicals and rapidly destroying our earlier, slightly more generous giving. Only 6 percent of born-again Christians tithe. Born-again Christians justify and engage in sexual promiscuity (both premarital sex and adultery) at astonishing rates. Racism and perhaps physical abuse of wives seems to be worse in evangelical circles than elsewhere. This is scandalous behavior for people who claim to be born-again by the Holy Spirit and to enjoy the very presence of the Risen Lord in their lives” (27-28).
Hard to swallow? Indeed! But is there a chance that our community is exempt?
To get a perspective on how we got here it might be helpful to check out the road we have traveled. It seems to me that the heart of evangelicalism in Southern Manitoba has been shaped largely by a fundamentalism originating in the American South. An early contributing factor was the swath of fundamentalist Bible Schools fanning out across the prairies from Moody Bible Institute. And then, beginning in the 1950s, it was the theological mix that Golden West Radio brought our way.
What we ended up with was an over-simplified gospel, strong on piety and evangelism, but carrying with it a number of major impediments to a life of discipleship.
The first was The Penal/Substitutionary Atonement Theory developed by Charles Hodge in the 19th century: God was so angry at us humans for our sinful behavior that he meant to destroy us. However, to assuage his anger, God the Father orchestrated the crucifixion of his Son, Jesus – the second person of the Trinity. Once the Father was pacified in this way he was willing to let us damned sinners go free. In effect, God saved us from God, not from our sins.
In his book, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, Mark D. Baker, Professor at MBBS in Fresno, says that in our rush to acquire the “cash value” that came from Jesus suffering, this view allowed us to disregard Jesus’ call to discipleship. “Jesus suffering is effective, not exemplary; it is ‘for us’”(27). Apart from allowing our names to be moved to the correct side of God’s legal ledger, the cross has little significance for faith and life, aligns neatly with American individualism, and does not really inform our understanding of church, ethics, and discipleship.
A second impediment to discipleship was the notion that Jesus was irrelevant for social ethics. There was a marked preference for focusing on the writings of Paul over the Gospels. The value of the Gospels rested in proving to us that Jesus was an appropriate, sinless sacrifice that God required to appease his anger. In this view, Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom of God are not taken seriously and the Sermon on the Mount is relegated to a future millennial era. But, as Robert Morris asserts in Provocative Grace, “In contrast to other visionaries of his day, Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God in almost entirely immediate and relational terms (35). The Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21). How, then, could it be so easily disregarded?
A third roadblock on the way to discipleship was focusing too intently on the “Great Escape.” Tom Sine discusses this issue in, The Mustard Seed Conspiracy. “…when we look into the future all we see is the world ‘going to hell in a handbasket.’ This singularly dismal specter leads many to conclude nothing can be done to alter the growing plight of the world’s poor, to change unjust economic structures, or to end human oppression. There is the feeling that, while such suffering is undeniably tragic, God intended it to happen and there is no point in our working to try to alleviate it” (70). Another way of articulating this perspective is to say that it is useless to rearrange the chairs on a sinking Titanic: focus instead on the lifeboats.
To be fair, we all know of persons within the fundamentalist tradition who sincerely followed Jesus with all their hearts. The problem was that their theology did not serve them well in this regard. It focused primarily on piety and evangelism and only incidentally on a call to a life-transforming kind of discipleship that Jesus calls for in the Gospels.
