ken wilson online

This question of identity and how we understand ours as Jesus followers is important.  It’s fraught for a reason. We’d like to think it’s all about convictions.  If I have X convictions then I’m an X. If my convictions are Y then I’m a Y.  As usual we think we’ve got more control over this than we do.

Most of us, Catholics included, are the children of the radical reformation in Europe. We’ve all had our fill of state churches. We believe that we are born American but choose to be Catholic or Presbyterian, or none of the above, because the church is a “voluntary association of believers.”   And we are, but our volunteering is human which means mysterious.

who volunteers for what?

Did I volunteer to be an evangelical?  No. I fell in love with Jesus, but not in a vacuum because Jesus works through flesh and blood.  That’s the whole Jesus thing–God in flesh appearing: in flesh, to flesh, for flesh.  And blood.

And none of us volunteers to be flesh and blood now do we?   It’s not as though I asked my father and mother to couple and conceive me because I was ready to be born.  Once the coupling commenced their choosing was done.  The little sperm that made it to the ovum–my guy–wasn’t taking any directions from either of them once released in that Great Iditarod.

I opened my eyes and saw through a glass darkly because my brain was in the process of wiring itself (and still is.)  Before I knew I was an I, the unaware I saw this unidentified flying object passing before what were my eyes from time to time, until my brain wired sufficiently to discern that this piece of flying flesh was my arm and it was me who had the capacity to wave it.   And I found myself to be flesh and blood though I was never consulted.

Identify is given as much as it’s chosen.

So I fell in love with Jesus but as Jesus was presented to me by some credible witnesses. The first was a guy named Brian Martin.  I liked him.  I could identify with him and he identified with Jesus, and I could imagine myself being the kind of Jesus follower that he aimed to be.  I read The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis because Brian suggested it and I liked his taste in books.

And he invited me to a backyard Bible study led by Haskell Stone, this Jewish believer I’ve mentioned.  Haskell is sitting in a lawn chair in a back yard in Detroit, smoking a cigarette in one of those FDR cigarette holders. And teaching a yard full of hippies and young Detroiters from one of the gospels.  And I identified with Haskell.

cut to reaction shot

It’s the “reaction shot” in the movie. The director doesn’t show us the thing itself to convey it at first. The director shows a character beholding the thing itself and that shot reveals the thing to us at first.  So I saw Jesus first in the reaction shots.  In Brian and Haskell. I got the itch to love Jesus because I saw love for Jesus in their faces.

The first time I heard Brian pray at our dinner table I was stunned.  Oh you can do that? Talk to Jesus like he’s at the table? Before I heard Jesus, I heard Brian talking to him like he was at the table with us.

Which gave me a share in Jesus but also gave me a share in this phenomenon or movement that we call evangelicalism. Because Brian was the son of Harry Martin who went to a Plymouth Brethren church in Detroit before he became one of the teachers in the Jesus movement happening at that time.  And because Haskell, though Jewish–he was born Jewish, lived Jewish, and died Jewish–attended Fuller Theological Seminary.  One of the flagship institutions of the American evangelical movement.

I first saw Jesus, in other words, reflected in those who were seeing him through an evangelical lens.  That wasn’t the only lens, but one of them that brought Jesus into focus for them.

I bet the same  kind of thing happening to me was happening to them and they didn’t exactly volunteer to see Jesus through the evangelical lens.

if it walks like a duck

In time I came to trust John Wimber, in part, because I saw something of Brian and Haskell in him. As it turns out–I didn’t know it at the time–Wimber was heavily influenced by a theologian named George Eldon Ladd, who also had a big influence on Haskell Stone (and through Haskell on Brian Martin.)    Ladd taught at Fuller and Haskell was one of his students.

So there you go.  I chose to see Jesus through an evangelical lens like a duckling chooses to be a duck by opening his little duckling eyes and seeing his mother duck peering back at him and what the biologists call “imprinting” happens. And ever after the duckling walks, swims, and quacks like a duck and feels himself to be one, rather than say, a cat.

can’t shake it though I try

Many times, believe me, I’ve tried to shake that label, evangelical.  I want to shake things off me that I want no part of.  Maybe you’ve picked that up in this blog. But I can’t shake off and don’t want to what I saw first in Brian, then in Haskell: people seeing Jesus through this lens.

No, it’s not the only lens I see him through.  Because part of the evangelical lens says, Jesus is Lord, meaning it.  Loyalty to Jesus trumps every other loyalty.  Including the loyalty to evangelicalism.  Ain’t that cool?

but batman’s just a guy

So I’m at a five day silent retreat several years back and for lack of anything else to do, I’m getting pickled in Jesus brand love.  And in that state these words come into my heart then my mind as though I owned them before I knew them.  “I am willing to offend the phantom projected from below over evangelicalism.”

Say what?  Phantom projected from below?  The image in my head was from the Batman movie where there’s a huge image of a bat in the clouds, projected from below.  A small image of a bat placed over one of those high beam spotlights shining into the night to draw the crowds to the car dealership or whatever.

I’m willing to offend that.  Because that willingness is part of the lens through which Brian and Haskell saw Jesus–the director’s reaction shot that got me to look in Jesus’ direction myself.

So I don’t really care whether anyone in the church I serve as pastor calls himself or herself an evangelical. Actually I’d rather not have a bunch of people putting on their evangelical flag pin to get noticed by the voters. I would be pleased if they were evangelical enough to be willing to offend the phantom projected from below over evangelicalism.  But I don’t think that’s for me to decide for anyone else because I barely decided it for myself.

So my name’s Ken.  I didn’t choose that name.  When I was a kid, I didn’t like it because Ken was Barbie’s boyfriend and girls were yucky for a while.  They got much better as I got older, I noticed.  I wanted my name to be something else for a while. Lance.  Yes, I liked the sound of Lance.  There’s a guy who can make his mark on the world. I suggested that my friends call me Lance. They laughed and called me Ken.  So I answer to it.

Tags: barbie, batman, brian martin, c.s. lewis, convergent, converging, duck, duckling, emergent, emerging, evangelical, evangi-mergent, evangie, fuller theological seminary, george eldon ladd, haskell stone, iditarod, imprinting, Jesus, ken, plymouth brethren, radical reformation

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 10:50 am and is filed under jesus freak. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.