ken wilson online

What drives a concern for thinking about set theory?  This is a sub-text in this ongoing conversation.  Maybe set theory is a ruse for being soft on sin.  We don’t want to obey the Bible’s teaching on sin, so we are trying to find a way around it, and set theory is a convenient sin dodge.  The bounded set seems to be driven by a concern for moral rigor or moral purity. Therefore any attempt to consider a different approach must be driven by a concern to accomodate to the surrounding culture when it comes to sin.
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Many of you are cringing. Not to worry, this post won’t be a laundry list of American evangelicals at our worst.   There’s only one thing worth mentioning and it trumps all the others: at our worst, we’re more concerned with being right than being evangelical.  It’s the saddest thing about American evangelicalism today, how much passion we have for being right and how little for being evangelical.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being right, unless it keeps you from being what you are meant to be.  And in this case it does.
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I’ve owed you this post for a while.  Yes, I have a pebble in my shoe over the current state of the American evangelical movement of which my tribe, the Vineyard, is a part.   Yes, I think Phariseeism is alive and well in evangelicalism.  I’d call my own out if I saw it, but others are free to do so in the comments section.  And yes,  I’m bored by Christians who call out the sins of the world like it’s a worthwhile hobby.  Or like it’s news.  Been there, done that.  Spent fifteen years of my life in that mode, and I guess I got it off my chest.  I can imagine being wearied by this–hearing this, reading this– just as I am wearied, but not so much to stop.  So the first of a two-parter: evangelicals at our best (to be followed by evangelicals at our worst.)

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Words are very potent things.  They carry things like truth in them.  They can function as “memes.”  Memes are bits of cultural data that are analogous to genes.  They get transferred from person to person, outlasting persons and seem to have a life of their own.  They can be as difficult to shake off as your grandaddy’s DNA.   I’ve made my peace with that.  There are three words that I’ve accepted and despite pressure from many quarters don’t wish to relegate to the word bin of history: evangelical, religion, and love. 
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Advice to young pastors: to be a pastor in the context of the evangelical landscape is a privilege. By all  measures evangelical Christianity is the most vibrant form of faith in the United States. Evangelical Christians volunteer more, give more money to their churches and give more to non-church charities than any other group.  Nothing says “I love you” like time and cash.  Evangelicals get things done, so you could do worse than to be a pastor in an evangelical setting. But there’s also a cross to bear and your being truly evangelical requires that you bear it. You must be willing to face and confront religious hostility in the camp.
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Something’s happening in American Evangelicalism. We are waking up from a stupor. We are attempting to fear our founder more than we fear our movement’s group think.  Because He is asserting his proprietary rights over His brand–a brand which has been the subject of trademark infringement for too long.  We are standing up to be counted as  conscientious objectors to the evangelical culture war that has been distracting us from the evangelical mission.
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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.
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Evangelical, what’s in a name?  It’s funny how you get these names.  I don’t recall signing up to be an evangelical.  It just happened.  Well, not quite.  I was a Jesus freak.  But  you can’t escape history, especially not with a religion whose founder was God coming into history and wearing it like a tool apron.  Who would want to take off what he put on? So you find yourself or that community of people that you’re part of, I don’t know, slowing down just long enough to let history catch up with you.
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It happened again a few nights ago.  A news story on ABC World News Tonight.  Lead in video montage of a woman with eyes closed and hands raised in worship, cut to a group of three Southern Baptists standing outside of a SBC seminary: a white man, a youngish woman and a youngish African American man, all dressed up as if for church.  So they were trying to put a positive face on these Southern Baptists. The interviewer asked them all: “Do you think Sarah Palin is ready to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?”  They all nodded enthusiastically.  Then the follow up: “How would you feel about a woman serving as a pastor?” They all frowned and shook their head, no.  Somehow, according to their reading of the Bible, it was just fine for a woman to command the most powerful military the world has ever known, with a enough firepower to wipe out humankind, but it was not fine, and decidedly so, for a woman to pastor a church.  Despite Deborah, despite Priscilla, despite a woman being first witness to the risen Jesus, commissioned by him to take the message of his rising back to the other apostles, making her the apostle to the apostles. Throwing his lot and the lot of his religion in with a woman from the get go–entrusting her with the most authoritative message ever delivered by a member of humankind to humankind.

The views of the three Southern Baptists are representative of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, second in size only to Roman Catholicism (which similarly prohibits women from serving as pastors), and more to my point, the church home of the leading evangelical of our time, Billy Graham.  I ask you, if you were a thoughtful and inquiring young woman who had not been raised with any particular Christian convictions, how would you feel about attending an evangelical church in the hopes of learning more about the founder of Christianity?   Houston, we have a problem. 
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This is what I’ve learned to love about my hometown. Coming out of the Little Caesar’s Pizzeria with my hot & ready, and there in the parking lot is a lady–soccer mom kind of look–stepping into her Volvo with a bumper sticker, just one, carefully placed, black background, white letters: i’m already against the next war. I could drive through other cities, maybe even states and never find a bumper sticker like that. And I could drive through yet other cities and yet other states and find ‘em pretty easily. Places are particular. And if you happen to be a pastor in a particular place–which I personally think is the best kind of pastor to be rather than a roving one–it’s good, I think, to learn to love the particularities of your city. Even if maybe there are things about those particularities that rankle, I think it’s a good discipline to talk yourself into seeing the best in those things.
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