The great evangelical weakness, pt. 2

I thought I’d get back to this topic sooner. Part 1 was more than two weeks ago.

Whether the issue is racism, poverty, missions or even salvation, we in the evangelical churches in America have a weakness that keeps us from seeing the whole picture. The weakness is our ingrained belief in the centrality and power of SELF. Call it rugged individualism or self-sufficiency if you like. Just know that it is a belief about our place in the universe that is part of the genetic code of Western civilization, and especially American civilization. Some of the loftiness expressions of this perspective can be found in our formative documents. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unailenable Rights…” These are wonderful truths, and the more we apply them, the better America is (and the better the world is).

The problem for evangelicals is that we fail to see BEYOND self when we think about poverty, racism, discipleship, etc. Here are some examples from discipleship:

  • Communion: In our church we instruct people to take it as it is passed OR (for the extra-spiritual) to hold it and pray on your own to God before taking it at your own pace. But read through the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s Supper or look at Paul’s description in 1 Corinthians 11, and you’ll find communion primarily as a shared experience.
  • Bible Study: It’s a given that Christians are people who have a regular quiet time for Bible-reading (or at least pretend to). Hey, I believe in this and we’d be foolish not to read Scripture at home since we have the opportunity. But from the days of the early church until well after Gutenberg, Bible-reading was first and foremost a communal activity. It isn’t so today.
  • Gathering with the church: The congregation with the best music, preaching and youth activity gets the most business, so we at MHCC try to offer the best. Even so, in the consumer lifestyle (the ultimate expression of radical individualism) church is just one of many desirable weekend activities, and it’s only a small percentage who put the need of the Body to gather ahead of the right to choose among a hundred other things.

So how does this inform our thinking about race and poverty? Look for part three…

February 26, 2007 · Filed Under Culture, Discipleship, Poverty, Race

Comments

2 Responses to “The great evangelical weakness, pt. 2”

  1. Kristen on February 27th, 2007 4:31 pm

    The truth hurts! This post is loaded with truth. Now, the real test is making the changes that it encourages…

  2. Sam Clark on March 7th, 2007 12:56 pm

    good stuff. I was speaking last week before a congregation about the Psalms, just a study on the Psalms and Psalmists and how the form of most of the Psalms is echoed in the rythm of our own lives, evidence that the source of the Psalms and the source of all that is good in our lives is the same source. One man spoke up and asked, “Well when we pray and our prayers are answered isn’t that evidence of goodness coming from us? I mean its good that we pray, right?”. I love it when people ask things like this. I asked him simply, “how did you know you needed to pray?”. We forget how little of our “selves” we can truly lay claim to in our desparate cling to the individualism that has blossomed from Western philosophy. “I think, therefore I am” is found wanting.

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