The first chapter in my book, Unarmed Empire, is titled ‘Burn A Church.’ I gives and overview of the ways, I believe, the American Church (American evangelicalism, to be precise) has driven seeking people away from the message of God, through its unholy alliances with power, politics, and prestige.
Publishing Unarmed Empire was a struggle.
Publishers liked the content, but one after another told me that people “aren’t interested in the church.” And they weren’t. But fast forward to today, with books like Jesus and John Wayne and The Making of Biblical Womanhood, and podcasts like The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the local church, and evangelicalism’s fault lines have indeed come more into view. And more people now recognize the corrosive nature of American evangelicalism (which I have written and spoken about for nearly a decade now).
This is — in part — what I wrote in chapter 1 of Unarmed Empire:
Burning the church (maybe even with a few Christians inside) has growing appeal to some. Others find Christianity so pitiful, anti-everything, and mean-spirited that the best cure is to ignore it altogether. Ignore it and it will go away.
When it comes to church, we’re all going to have to think differently. The church doesn’t need to be burned or ignored. It needs to be restored. And restored as a church, not like so many of our contemporary attempts to simple “live together,” whatever that means. We need a sweeping reimagining of what the church is in order to shed the political, cultural, and power-thirsty barnacles that have latched onto us.
What we have now, what many of our friends and family members who are striking their matches at the base of church buildings know of the church, is not church. We have lost our original glory and exchanged it for a bloc of predetermined cultural conditions.
When the Bible mentions “church,” it’s not talking about what we associate with church — buildings, pastors, programs, doctrinal statements and such. Rather, it’s talking about Christians living and loving the world together.
Both the vehemence and apathy toward the church have been created by a long, slow burn ignited — oddly enough — by Christians. For an extended period of time, Christians and vocal, public Christian leaders, in an ill-advised scheme to maintain cultural dominance and control, have twisted the church into an ever-restrictive knot. The first practitioners of Christianity would find what we consider church unrecognizable.
This tangle Christians created erupted from one central, misguided longing — the desire to possess an empire. An empire where certain races, genders, classes, lifestyles, and practices are privileged. An empire designed to maintain power and nurture a system of allies and enemies. An empire built by a populace armed with anger, vitriol, criticisms, and sometimes, weapons.
The temptation to power is as old as humanity itself. As Henri Nouwen reminds us, ‘Every time we see a major crisis in the history of the Church, such as the great schism of the tenth century, the reformation of the sixteenth century, or the immense secularization of the twentieth century, we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.’ Rather than the version of power that dominates, God’s church is called to dismiss power for the sake of the community and the Other. There’s never been another community of people dedicated to enfranchising and empowering others over and above themselves. History doesn’t record a nation or nationality who determined to appraise their standard of living by how they treated the poorest and lowest. Few are chronicles of communities that cared deeply for those on the other side of the aisle or the other side of the fence.
The archives of mortals only know one people — what Paul calls ‘one new humanity’ — instructed to care for all people, heedless of self-concern, power, or personal sacrifice. That group is the church.
At this moment in history, the church I love, the church that supported and nurtured me and my faith is in critical condition. Our supposed care-takers lost their concern for God’s priorities and turned their attention to constructing their own pyramids of power. We let a few vocal leaders agitate the rest of the church into a frenzy of behaviors antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.
For a long time, we’ve unwittingly played along.
We’ve played along when we were told that to be moral we should join a majority of the angry who believed in upholding an extremely narrow view of what Christianity was and who could be Christian. We kept silent for years as it was suggested to us that faith-commitments were limited to a set of ballot propositions and an approved list of candidates. The church has allowed ourselves to be lulled to sleep by the siren song of winning some kind of “culture war” and in the process we’ve lost both the culture and the church.
In 2012, Pew Research Center reported 1/5 of Americans, about 46 million adults, self-reported no affiliation with church. In those moments, it’s easy for Christian leaders to thrust our arms into the typical grab bag of excuses. ‘People aren’t interested in faith. It’s the gay agenda. Working moms. Democrats. The media. Fundamentalists. They took God out of school.’
All of this obscures the truth. It’s the church’s fault people want to burn or ignore us. We have failed to be the church, and folks don’t need highly sensitive failure detectors to know it.
It is time for Christians to go back to church. It’s time for us to rescue the alluring, compelling, and welcoming community Jesus intended. This is our opportunity to stop constructing edifices of division and federations of control. It’s time for hospitality. It's time for reconciliation. It’s time for an unarmed empire.
What do you think? Was I wrong then? Wrong now? Where do we go from here?