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Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back is a book I wrote as an evangelical, by which I mean, as someone who cares about communicating the good news (gk. evangel) among those who have not heard good news.  Right here, for example, where I live.  It is based on a certain reading of the culture in which I live.   We who have received and therfore have a responsibility to be and share good news, also have a responsibility to face up to the cultural context we operate in.  Here’s the challenge: we have a branding problem.  We who love, admire and seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth, must acknowledge that the Christian brand in America has sufferred something very like trademark infringement.
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Good pastors are about empowering people to do the Jesus stuff.  So there is a great need for pastors who can learn to trust others to do things better than themselves.  Clericalism, the view that pastors are the Christian professionals who can do Christianity better than anyone else is boo-honkey.

But it’s my belief that many pastors have been too passive in their leadership.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be cow-towed by other voices within the wider Christian community.  We let them take the lead because they have the biggest media megaphones, or the biggest mailing lists or they have somehow gained the ear of many people.  Which is fine.  It’s good to have a mix of voices in any movement.  But we’ve given too much of our pastoral leadership task away to some voices.
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Yes.  We may be witnessing the end of the culture wars as the primary cultural drama of American life.  I suspect that for a time, the pitched battle between cultural-political conservatives and their liberal counterparts may intensify after a post-election pause, but it is inexorably now drifting from center stage. It’s a simple and unrelenting matter of demographics.
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Paul, the old guy, advises Timothy, the younger guy, to be careful about empowering “new converts” too much too fast in the leadership department because they are more prone to “conceit.”  As Bob Dylan sang, “there’s a whole lot of people dying tonight, from the disease of conceit.”  Defined as “a high opinion of your own qualities or abilities, especially one that is not justified.”  And there’s the rub, right?  When we’re young, we’re worried about our qualities and abilities.  We fear that our qualities and abilities are inadequate for the pastoring task. Which means we crave confident assurance that we’re wrong about our fears regarding ourselves.
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Time arrived with this cover copy a while back: How to Win the War on Global Warming. Shall we confront a brutal fact in evangelical perspective? The thoughtful person on the outside of American Christianity looking in at its dominant form (evangelicalism) has every right to think: Evangelicals have been among the most dismissive of the effort to address global warming. If I am considering the Christian message, I should take this into account. If I support efforts to address climate change now for the sake of the vulnerable poor and future generations, I will be viewed as one of those environmental whackos by evangelicals. Life is stressful enough. I think I’ll get my spirituality on the golf course instead.
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I’ve had helpful conversations lately with some people pushing back on me for various things. Man, can you learn a lot from these conversations, especially when the people in question are mature, thoughtful, and friends. The kind of people you know are fundamentally for you. It’s what I love about being part of a church. A church is such a diverse place when it’s being true to its founder, so you find yourself loving, admiring, respecting people who have a very different take on the world regarding many different issues. So these conversations have helped me to zero in on the critique I have of the religious right. Sometimes in a sermon, I’ll make a passing comment, a sideways reference that impugns the religious right, and for those who identify with the religious right it can be quite annoying. So I’ve been challenged to state more clearly my concern. This post is one such attempt.
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