Читать книгу The Intimidation Factor - Charles Redfern - Страница 8

One Man’s Journey

I blame my parents—and the church that wooed me to Christ. Neither prepared me for the bully onslaught. Maybe Mom devastated me once with an ill-timed frown and my opera-buff father played his music too loud; but, otherwise, our home was filled with hugs and laughter. The church, which I discovered in my teens, was the epitome of love and integrity. How was I to know that the big bad world was filled with stress-suckling tyrants? And who knew that evangelicals would morph into a tribe of partisan pit bulls?

I was reared in the Sunday morning religion of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s: Dress up the kids until they itch and hush them during dirge-like hymns and the ten-minute sermon. It was, in H. Richard Niebuhr’s words, a religion in which “a God without wrath brought men [and women] without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Imagine my shock when I met the Christ of the New Testament: God lived a human life, died for our sin, reigned victorious over death at his resurrection, and shares that victory with his followers in a sheer act of grace.

I discovered the real Christ in high school after my family’s final move (I was born in Minnesota in 1956, moved to California in 1960, then to New Jersey in 1969 and to Connecticut in 1972). I joined a group of teens who prayed before first-period classes and huddled in Tuesday evening Bible studies at the parsonage of a local Baptist church. My new friends were delightfully weird. They never swore or bad-mouthed each other or told dirty jokes—and they were hilarious, a veritable fit. True, they were fundamentalists (they strode great strides to disprove evolution), but they didn’t condemn everyone. We were all emulating our mentor, Rich Ainsworth, a 25-year-old graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, the hub for Dispensationalism—a theology popularized by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882) and Cyrus I. Scofield (1843–1921) and which segments history into distinct phases culminating in a climactic “Rapture,” when the faithful will be snatched up before a Great Tribulation and Christ’s Second Coming. The Left Behind series dramatizes Dispensationalism’s angle. Rich did not fit the Dispensationalist rap of grim preachers condemning an apostate church. Nor did he denounce tongue-speaking Pentecostals, who embraced the contemporary movement of the Holy Spirit and the application of God’s gifts. He disagreed with them (most Dispensationalists are cessationists: they believe the gifts died with the apostles), but he did not berate them from the pulpit or deny their Christian validity.

I leaned to the political left, but we did that in the early ‘70’s without fear. Two of the most popular evangelical politicians were Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, a moderate-to-liberal, and Democratic Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa. Born-again Christians rallied to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, which Newsweek declared “The Year of the Evangelical.” Almost all my friends saw that politics dwells in the gray area of a necessarily secular society, so we could agree to disagree between Bible studies.

I can’t deny it. We ‘70’s Jesus freaks were flaky. Dispensationalism seemed prone to that. There was Dallas graduate Hal Lindsey and his best-seller, The Late Great Planet Earth, which saw the oncoming rapture behind every headline. And the six days of Genesis One were literal, 24-hour periods—never mind that the sun and moon weren’t created until the third day. Women could not teach men or lead a church, which made for awkward moments when they were Sunday-morning speakers. They weren’t preaching, of course. They were sharing.

I want to be fair, so I’ll defend my church’s integrity even though I now disagree with its stance on women: Some biblical passages seemingly prohibit women from leadership—and I actually saw more esteem for women there than in a world plagued with sexual harassment. Women’s opinions were respected; men kept their hands to themselves; and the lewdest comment might be, “Betty looks pretty today.” Outright chauvinism does reign in many churches, but here—and elsewhere—believers were merely trying to obey the Scriptures. Many women were adamantly opposed to their own sex filling slots on the elder board.

And that’s the way it was through my college years (I attended Drew University from 1975–1979, with my junior year in Oxford, England) and first career as a newspaper reporter (initally for a Connecticut weekly and then a small Delaware daily): Bible-thumping born-again Jesus Freaks were gracious and fun. Most were suspicious of Jerry Falwell even if they voted for Ronald Reagan. My agnostic and atheist friends snubbed them as hypocrites, then mauled each other in stomach-knotting office politics in go-for-the-jugular careers while playing musical beds.

No thanks.

I was happy to dump journalism after a year-long soul search in which I found that I was worshiping my career. I prayed a prayer of repentance on my bed in the summer of 1984 and something like electricity invaded my head and ran through my body. I felt cleansed. God was God again and I felt born-again again—and, despite myself, I was convinced that God was calling me into the ordained ministry. Friends confirmed it (one said he’d enlisted several people to pray for me so I’d finally get it). Five months later, I was unpacking my bags at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary near Massachusetts’ Cape Anne Peninsula.

Gordon-Conwell is one of several seminaries spawned by the evangelical resurgence, which began in the early 1940’s and was led by Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and (most famously) Billy Graham, among several others. Each was reared in fundamentalism, which initially heaved intellectual heft in its summons back to basic doctrines, but quickly slid into a separatist, legalistic, anti-intellectual cacophony—especially after the infamous “monkey trial” of 1925: Darwinist Clarence Darrow humiliated creationist William Jennings Bryan on a witness stand in Tennessee. Fundamentalists retreated into a fortress of “no’s”: no drinking; no smoking (not a bad no, really); no card-playing; no mixing with those apostate, Modernist-Liberal-Progressive mainliners adoring Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), pastor of New York City’s Riverside Church. Most were Dispensationalists.

Ockenga began calling himself a “neo-evangelical” or “new evangelical” to distinguish himself from hotheaded fundamentalists. Henry, who emerged as evangelicalism’s informal academic dean, challenged back-to-the-Bible believers to abandon their cultural citadels in his 1947 landmark book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Graham ruffled feathers when he reached out to leaders in mainline and Catholic churches. Ockenga served as the founding president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 and, in 1947, the troika joined radio evangelist Charles Fuller in establishing Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. The school remains post-conservative evangelicalism’s intellectual Mecca. Again, Ockenga served as the seminary’s first president—and he graciously manned its board even after the school veered away from strict biblical inerrancy (more on this later; Fuller now describes the Bible as “infallible,” a slightly looser word). So did Graham.

But Ockenga also fixed his eyes on the east coast and launching a Fuller-like institution there. He helped merge Gordon Divinity School and Conwell School of Theology in 1969 and took its helm in 1970. The seminary clung to inerrancy while employing more sophisticated exegesis than fundamentalists (inerrancy is often mistaken for wooden literalism, which is not necessarily the case). He led Boston’s prestigious Park Street Church in his spare time.

Graham, of course, traveled the world and led mammoth revival meetings, founded a relief organization, and spurred the publication of Christianity Today, over which Henry presided as its first editor. Meanwhile, neo-evangelicalism’s influence spread to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois. Weslyan-flavored Asbury in Kentucky also played a key role, and The Evangelical Theological Society was launched in 1949 in an effort to deepen sound scholarship. The organization’s publication, the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, or JETS, does not fly at supersonic speed and is no thrill ride, but it’s learned.

The term, “evangelical,” opened new vistas and panoramas for me. I could study the Bible from different angles without falling off orthodoxy’s edge—and I needn’t be anti-Catholic, anti-science, anti-women, anti-democrat, and anti-education. My professors relished the life of the mind (many did their graduate studies at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton). They took a dim view of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and dismissed the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition as passing fads.

Would that they had been right.

Most were Reformed, or Calvinist. I never came around to their view. I substantially agreed with Dutch theologian Jacob Arminias (1560–1609), who probed the Bible and found more latitude for free choice. John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, popularized the Arminian view in 18th-century Britain. But I’m thankful for these Calvinists. They rid me of fundamentalism. The now-late Old Testament Professor Meredith Kline, for example, showed how Genesis One could be read as a prose poem, with its days interpreted symbolically. Others showed how the biblical genealogies are intentionally incomplete, which meant they couldn’t be used to determine the Earth’s age. And they opened my eyes to an entirely different approach to eschatology (the study of the end times) courtesy the writings of the late George Eldon Ladd (1911–1982). Ladd and others explored a slew of biblical texts and found that the blessings of the eschatological age began in the ministry of Jesus; they’ll become complete at the second coming. We live between the already and not yet. Believers are meant to be tokens of the end times, a people of the future dwelling in the present. We’re the future’s harbingers, a people of “realized eschatology,” to use a phrase coined by British scholar C.H. Dodd (1883–1973). Miracles, such as healings, point to a future of absolute health and blessing. Tokens of love underscore a future of absolute love. Holy lives point to a future of total holiness. Social and environmental justice prefigure an era of total harmony.1

The future is now. Eschatology invades through us—and, incidentally, there’s no “there” there on the so-called Rapture. All the biblical proof texts supporting it can easily refer to the Second Coming itself. Perhaps that’s why no Christian thinker mentioned the event before the rise of Dispensationalism. It’s not in the Bible, so let’s leave the Left Behind series behind.

My professors also showed me the biblical tension involving women in ministry. True, some passages seemingly prohibit it, but there’s also Deborah, a judge over all Israel about 1100 years before Christ, and Huldah the prophetess (2 Kings 22:14–20; 2 Chronicles 34:22–28) and Phoebe in Romans 16:1 and Junias in verse seven of that same chapter. Most of my teachers supported ordaining women. I gladly followed them.

I was fascinated by the history of revivals, first with the 18th-century Great Awakening, led by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield in the American colonies and Methodist founder John Wesley in Britain. Converts wept and swooned and displayed other signs and manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power. Church attendance plummeted in the later 18th century but sky-rocketed after an enormous camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Again, there were those manifestations: Swooning and weeping, even barking and roaring. Some historians dubbed the 19th century “The Methodist Century,” which gave the era an Arminian hue. Many of its leaders helped spearhead abolitionism and moved into slums.2

Calvinism, of course, did not die. Some followers joined the Wesleyan fun and mingled with Methodists while remaining Reformed; a more cerebral branch lauded the scholasticism of Geneva theologian Francis Turretin (1623–1687) and found a home at Princeton Theological Seminary. The Old Princeton theologians—successively Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), Charles Hodge (1797–1878), AA Hodge (1823–1886), and Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921)—lobbed critical shells into the revivalist camp. They frowned on altar calls, the manifestations, and all the exhilaration. To their credit, they were intellectually rigorous and personally charitable, especially the elder Hodge, but they demanded stifling tidiness.

Thanks for the brain power, Old Princetonians, but do yourselves and everyone else a favor: loosen up; chill out; join the party. And Warfield: Could you walk beside the Pentecostals instead of disparaging them?

Sadly, the union of high spirituality and movement for societal reform dissolved in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. Advocates of the Social Gospel, like Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), embraced Liberal Christianity, and Evangelicalism devolved into anti-cultural and anti-intellectual Fundamentalism, with Modernist leaders like Fosdick predicting its demise.

Fosdick did not foresee the influence of Henry, Ockenga, and Graham.

The threesome and their cohorts were not flawless. First, Henry and Ockenga extolled the Old Princetonians even while they shook hands with Pentecostals and admired Wesley (his portrait hung on Ockenga’s office wall). Pentecostal and Wesleyan churches joined the Reformed faithful in the National Association of Evangelicals, which would have prompted Warfield’s glare, but Hodge and Warfield emerged as the new ideal. Old Princeton no longer scowled on a predominantly Wesleyan-Arminian universe. An unspoken covenant brooded: Everyone’s a guest in Hodges’ manse. Second, historian George Marsden observes that most leading new evangelicals supported Republican Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, the guru of the GOP right in the 1940’s and ‘50’s3 (it should be said: Billy Graham was a registered Democrat and pushed for civil rights and social action).4 They did not baptize the Republican Party in Jesus’ name, but perhaps their political unanimity rendered them near-sighted to the 1980 emergency. They failed to see the invasion of a gurgling partisan idol.

Third, and perhaps the most shameful, the mid-century neo-evangelicals initially stood on the wrong side in one of America’s great moral struggles. Donald Dayton writes that Christianity Today panned the civil rights movement in the early1960’s. Its editors defended “voluntary segregation,” leveled socialism charges against Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for integration, condemned demonstrations and civil disobedience, and labeled the 1963 March on Washington a “mob spectacle.” They also scorned interracial marriage and hailed Mississippi when the state’s leaders blocked James Meredith from attending its university. The magazine changed its stance by 1965; but, very unwittingly, the genteel new evangelicals left the door open for subsequent intimidators.5

I would see that later. For now, I was lapping it all up and tagging myself with the evangelical label. It was a liberating insignia. I breathed in the whole Gospel.

I also met my future wife at seminary (the former Andrea LaCelle) and, in a strange twist, I contracted tongue cancer just before our wedding. I submitted to twice-a-day radiation therapy at Massachusetts General Hospital. I stood before the altar in the winter of 1987, pledged the until-death-do-us-part oath, and wondered if I’d render my beloved a widow in a year. The cancer wouldn’t return for another 27 years.

So I was ready and eager to pastor churches under the emancipating evangelical banner. I didn’t know Billy Graham’s gentlemanly image, which emblemized the movement for decades, was reshaping into a bruised religious boxer’s. My career gave me and my family a ring-side seat at the slug fest.

Intimidation: An Eyewitness Account

I signed on with the American Baptists (a smaller mainline denomination housing the full range of theological convictions) and took a church in Boston’s Allston-Brighton section, about a mile and a world away from Cambridge’s Harvard Square. The church itself was a lovable archetype of shrinking white urban congregations. Veterans fondly remembered its glory days while newbies brought in contemporary urban life: abuse, crumbled marriages, drug addiction, alcoholism and teen pregnancy—all wrapped in a Boston accent accompanying the city’s up-thrusted middle finger (The Hub cultivates audacity, as seen in its drivers). Our car was stolen on August 26, 1993, the day after our only child, Caleb, was born.

Welcome to the big bad city.

But the people could be uproarious and they tolerated my rookie mistakes. Tempers often flared, but there was little intentional intimidation. I saw bullying on the larger scene after I discovered the refreshing teachings of John Wimber and the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, then headquartered in Anaheim, California. The Vineyard drew me into deeper intimacy with God.

Wimber had been a cessationist Quaker pastor after he shelved his musical career when he came to Christ in the early 1960’s. He quit that church in the wake of burnout, signed on with the Fuller Institute of Church Growth, heard Ladd’s teaching on the present-day in-breaking of God’s kingdom and agreed with it. He saw the prevalence of healing and other miracles in the Gospels and viewed them through that already-but-not-yet lens. By now, he was shepherding a church again. He and other leaders prayed for the sick in earnest and flopped for ten months. Healings finally came and, on a fateful 1980 Mother’s Day, about two thirds of the church fell as the guest speaker cried, “Come, Holy Spirit!”6 Ministers baptized about 700 that summer.

Anaheim emerged as a center for signs and wonders and Vineyard churches sprang up across America and throughout the world. An informal network formed a wider Vineyard penumbra, so conferences were often populated with Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, and even some Catholics. They didn’t mandate tongues, repeatedly said not all were healed, and stressed holiness, social justice, and love for the poor. There was no naming and claiming or promises of health-and-wealth. The Vineyard staked its claim in the “radical middle,” encouraging a holy life and sound exegesis.7 Rick Nathan, a Vineyard pastor in Columbus, Ohio, described his colleagues as “empowered evangelicals” rather than charismatics.

I tried the Vineyard’s method for healing prayer: Remain calm; ask questions; don’t rush; let God be God. Shock of shocks, it worked. Several were healed. One woman gasped when jaw pain fled after she had visited a dentist with bad aim. Who would-a thunk it? Christianity’s fun. The thrill ride rolled on as I drove to Canada in 1995, witnessed the so-called Toronto Blessing, and returned with glowing reports (a Vineyard church, which later separated from the association, displayed various “manifestations” reminiscent of the great revivals; thousands flocked from over the world).

Then I saw the slug fest.

Many evangelicals embraced the Vineyard. Some responded with reasonable concerns, but others followed the irascible John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, who pastes the heretic label on good Christians everywhere. Both he and Bible-Answer-Man Hank Hanegraaff tossed unfounded charges like confetti: Vineyard and Toronto leaders supposedly mandated healing, favored experience over the Bible, and made manifestations compulsory. Some Reformed scholars—including the respected D.A.Carson—didn’t check their facts and leaped into the bully fray.

Of course the Vineyard made mistakes—and the alliance stemming from the Toronto church would eventually turn inward and mire itself in the teachings of the 1950’s Latter Rain Movement, a quirky Pentecostal offshoot granting inordinate authority to supposed prophets and apostles. But that was not inevitable at the time, and many faultfinders still fail to acknowledge Wimber’s separation from Toronto.

Okay, so some evangelicals weren’t so nice. But surely intimidation was confined to MacArthur’s narrow band . . .

How precious.

We left the Boston church on good terms in 1996 (I’m still in touch with many members; some still refer to me as “my pastor”) and moved to southern New Hampshire. An alliance of church plants within a Pentecostal denomination was implementing a Vineyard-like vision and allowing Toronto-like manifestations. One of the plants caved-in on its own unique array of dysfunctions (turmoil and feuds left it with only twelve shocked adults and a few kids), and the denomination asked Andrea and me to resurrect it. Any pastor with a shepherd’s heart would have pronounced the patient dead and guided those families to a more nurturing body, but I had lost that heart somewhere between Boston and New Hampshire. I was Mr. Visionary, the go-get-‘em church planter. I threw away five years of my family’s life in an attempt to resurrect a church that God was closing.

It finally did, which was an act of mercy.

I didn’t realize I was sitting in that ring-side seat to evangelical intimidation yet again—this time in its Pentecostal wing. I was witnessing the dawn of what the late C. Peter Wagner would hail as the greatest thing since Protestantism’s advent. He’d call it the New Apostolic Reformation. So-called prophets and apostles breezed through beleaguered New England and promised revival—as long as we saluted them as God’s end-times representatives. The potential for abuse, authoritarianism, and intimidation was obvious.

My next church—an intentional interim pastorate nearer to New Hampshire’s coast—was a veritable delight. An intentional interim actively brings healing and resolution to conflicted congregations, but these people healed me. They were hilarious—and they fawned over our son, loved my wife’s cello, and tolerated my long sermons.

I seemed fated to serve Hatfield-McCoy churches, so I learned all about toxic organizations and conflict management. I signed up for workshops and seminars everywhere. My favorite organization was Peacemaker Ministries, founded in 1982 by Ken Sande, a Montana lawyer saddened by all the internecine church in-fighting. Sande imported the insights of Alternative Dispute Resolution, which offers more consensual mediation and arbitration methods, while bonding himself to God’s Word. He wrote it all up in a book called The Peacemaker, which I recommended with enthusiasm and used as a basis for preaching.

I still recommend Peacemaker Ministries—with a huge caution: Conflict resolution must be seen as one stage in conflict transformation, where conflict is seen as an active agent in surfacing simmering diseases. Otherwise, bullies manipulate the ADR methods. Resolution becomes a euphemism for avoidance and feeds the beast. More on that in a later chapter.

Many were begging us to stay, but I felt it was best to stick to my word: Intentional interims promise not to apply for the settled pastor’s job, so it was on to Connecticut and a seemingly thriving church. True, it had a history of brawls and two splits—sure-fire danger signs—but one leader was implementing Sande’s approach while another advocated Vineyard-like ministry. Could this be the church of my dreams?

No. It wasn’t. We were tossed from the ring-side seat into the ring itself.

A slug fest

I’m not thrilled with criticizing a church I tried to serve. I really do love its individuals and I know I made many mistakes. They’d (correctly) say I was forever off-beat. I didn’t connect and didn’t fit. I can imagine their slackened jaws as they read my unflattering descriptions—especially since they welcomed me with open arms when I subsequently visited and many now pray for me. But there’s no way around it: I met evangelical intimidation here, in all its inglorious splendor.

The church was actually ailing. Many reeled at the loss of my mild-mannered and beloved predecessor, who rescued them from one of those splits and loved them back to life. Most were actually wary of the spiritual gifts and few knew about Ken Sande. Conflict resolution was the ministry of one influential and (deservedly) respected leader, who was wounded after attempting to resolve past controversies. He’s a good man, but he swung into full peacemaker mode at the first sign of disagreement, throttling friendly debates and the creative solutions they spawn—because, after all, debates spark conflict and conflict is always wrong.

And I seemed to stir controversy with every move. My wry humor fell flat.

So I was on precarious footing as current events piqued my dormant political interests. A PBS special on climate change forced me to look at my son and say aloud, “Oh . . . my . . . God.” He faced a possible future of droughts and rising seas and widening deserts. My a-politicism wasn’t helping him. Then there was Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential run. I was impressed. He spoke to American voters as adults. And I didn’t help myself in my quick, ad-hoc comment before a sermon: “The Earth is heating up.” One influential member blasted me after the service for my “liberal” environmentalism and another berated the scientific consensus during a devotional at a general board meeting. I soon realized I was serving a congregation of climate-change deniers, with the consensus deemed left wing and, therefore, anti-Christian.

Then there was a member’s eye-opening e-mail: Obama, apparently, was a Muslim terrorist. All the replies from church leaders were grist from the right-wing propaganda mill. No one commented on the unsubstantiated, implicitly racist charge.

One of my favorite members wondered if any liberal could land in heaven; others coupled Obama with the anti-Christ; one member, a leader in the local Republican Party, often stood in the foyer on Sunday mornings and loudly proclaimed his liberals-are-evil, science-denial views.

So much for inviting progressive friends to services in a blue state.

More startling, pastoral colleagues at a once-a-month breakfast meeting seemed to agree. Some froze when I challenged their assumptions. It was as if I breathed ice on their scrambled eggs—although a few pulled me aside later and muttered, “Thanks for speaking up. I’m a Democrat too.”

Keep it hush-hush. Monty Python might smash in and holler something about the Spanish Inquisition.

No one seemed to be aware of the late David Kuo’s 2006 book, Tempting Faith. The former Director of the Office of Faith Based Missions wrote of officials in the George W. Bush administration and their actual contempt for evangelicals. Kuo also opened a window into the power-hungry world of court evangelicals (the ones flocking to Washington) and confessed his own hypocrisy: He assailed President Clinton’s moral failings while his own marriage crashed.

I’d never endorse a given candidate from the pulpit, but I felt duty-bound to remind all that our advocacy must glorify Christ. Beware Proverbs 12:18 (“the words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing”); and James 1:19 (“My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry”). And we needn’t fear liberals.

Complaints rolled in as rumors spread that I wasn’t a Republican: I wasn’t preaching from the Bible; my sermons were too intellectual and too shallow. My popularity plummeted even as long-dormant dreams came alive. We moved out of the building and into a school to finish a construction project; we rallied church-wide home group studies on conflict resolution, accompanied by a sermon series; we returned to a new, expanded building. Nothing worked. Families left. Giving dropped—and I didn’t help my cause when I unknowingly quoted an off-color comment from the pulpit (Honest. The phraseology sounded innocent.). Two influencers told me I was not a godly man and the rumor mill spun tales of Obama endorsements from the pulpit.

God’s Word gave me no help in my quest for popularity. I now suspected Ken Sande was missing something, so I began reading the Gospel According to Mark with an eye for Jesus’ conflict-resolution methods. It became clear: Christ intentionally sparked grumbling when he healed on the Sabbath and challenged the religious leaders. I closed Mark after the third chapter and chose a different path: I took the criticism seriously—especially the one stipulating I didn’t preach from the Bible. I preached veritably verse-by-verse in a series on Psalms 120–134, the so-called “Songs of Ascents.” It didn’t work. One of the most prominent leaders pulled me into a side room and said he saw no sermon improvement.

I sat down after he left. It was obvious. Soon, the he-doesn’t-fits would ripen into we-gotta-fire-hims, with a shredded congregation as a result even if I survived. I had no choice but to gamble and submit my resignation—in mid-September of 2009, when the unemployment rate hovered at 9.8 percent and foreclosures thundered across the land. I’d give the church a three-month notice in which I’d confess my wrongs (“I should have taken more time to get to know the congregation during my first year; I should have been more patient and devoted more time to listening; I should have paid more attention to body language that was being conveyed to me”). The idea: I’d model grace under fire during my lame-duck months. Perhaps such modeling would pull the church out of its irascibility and—just maybe—I could rescind the resignation.

I conferred with Andrea and she agreed (Her comment: “Our life is surreal”) and, after notifying the general board, I read my confessional resignation aloud the following Sunday.

The board met that week and said I should step down at the end of the month—with a guarantee that I’d be paid through November. That made things awkward. I was already slated to take the last Sunday off because of a family obligation, so next Sunday would be my ignoble last. There’d be no grace under fire, no exit with dignity, no time for closure. I was out.

I was asked to attend a meeting the following week—after I was no longer the pastor—and slammed with a job review filled with personal invective.

Welcome to bully Christianity, where not even a resignation in the Great Recession is enough.

I admit it. I was angry, and I found no solace in the broader evangelical scene. I visited other churches and met other evangelicals. One normally reasonable and well-respected colleague stoked those Obama-the-Anti-Christ fears in an e-mail. He was serious. I nearly spilled my coffee on my laptop. I visited one church in which qualms about the Affordable Care Act were delivered as a “prophetic word,” which meant Obamacare’s defenders sided with the devil. All seemed to march to tea party’s drumbeat as they saluted Rush Limbaugh.

They needed a reply, so I swung partisan in the opposite direction as a balancing act. I joined my local Democratic Town Committee. I also joined my town’s Green Energy Committee, signed on with the board of directors of the state-wide Interreligious Eco-Justice Network, and volunteered for the steering committee for the Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs (a labor-environmentalist-clergy alliance advocating sound ecological policies). I wrote for an on-line religious journal in Connecticut before becoming a HuffPost contributor in 2011 (one friend described my columns as “rants”), then fanned out to other publications. I was even a panelist at conferences on climate change, both in Connecticut and in Washington DC.

What a thrill. I always wanted to be a panelist.

Meanwhile, my family hacked through the Great Recession’s brambles as I dropped job applications into the era’s black hole. Not even temp agencies wanted me. The bank account dried up. We missed mortgage payments, filed for relief, and threaded the lender’s maze: Bank representatives claimed they lost the paper work and asked us to re-file; collectors threatened foreclosure unless they received this month’s check. Our mortgage company was later cited for abuse.

I asked myself the dreaded question as I muttered on my neighborhood walks: Am I being evicted from my spiritual home as well as my physical home? Am I really a bona fide evangelical? I fit nowhere: Not with Pentecostals (tried that), not with right-wing evangelicalism, not with so-called progressive Christianity (I visited some theologically liberal gatherings; they felt like spiritual dead zones). I loved the Vineyard, but the association hadn’t planted any churches in the Hartford area.

Finally, I remembered the American Baptist Churches, the denomination that ordained me right out of seminary. They always treated me well. I scheduled a meeting with Connecticut’s executive director. Could I come back if I wolfed down humble pie?

Yes. They’d welcome me back—with open arms, even, especially since my ordination was still active (miracle of miracles: someone forgot to file the paperwork). Soon, I was the salaried, intentional interim at a church in a mid-Connecticut city. We caught up on our mortgage payments and silenced the bill collectors. The people of that church lauded me in job reviews while giving me helpful critiques and took no offense at my politics. I could even make those trips to Washington DC and hobnob with leaders in the evangelical environmental movement. I no longer walked in fear of bullies. The same was true at another intentional interim pastorate at a church near New London.

I eventually saw the weaknesses of today’s condescending Democratic Party (all pro-lifers and supporters of traditional marriage were “extremists”) and distanced myself from overt partisanship.

Then calamity struck: My cancer revived with a vengeance. Surgeons sliced out a huge chunk of my tongue in August of 2015 and rebuilt it with skin from my left arm. The disease struck my entire mouth in January 2016. We beat it back with rugged chemotherapy, complimented by radiation, but then it spread to an area near my sternum and returned to my tongue. Radiation burned it away from my sternum and more chemotherapy jailed it on my tongue, but I was told my cancer was incurable. I now speak with a severe speech impediment and can only eat soft food.

So much for preaching, speaking, and trips to Washington. I resigned from all the boards and helplessly watched events through chemotherapy’s haze. The unthinkable unfolded. In 2016, many evangelical leaders endorsed a philandering, thrice-married, misogynistic, science-denying, anti-Mexican casino owner and reality television star, and surveys indicated that 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals voted for him. That figure has since been questioned, but Trump remains popular among self-identified white evangelicals even as he plunges deeper into mendacity and obscenity. White evangelicals have slipped into an ethical vortex: In 2011, just 30 percent said a personally immoral politician can behave virtuously in a public role. In 2016, that figure leaped to 72 percent.8

I saw it now. The back-to-the-Bible people have drifted from the Scriptures, enticed by the allure of earthly power. But earthly power demands earthly weaponry. To put it in the Apostle Paul’s language, we participate in the “acts of the flesh,” among which are “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy” (Galatians 5:20–20). We emulate bullies instead of peacemakers and employ intimidation instead of sound argument and grace. We abandon Jesus’s operating motif, found in Matthew 20:28: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” We forget the insight of 2 Corinthians 12:9: God’s power is “made perfect in weakness.”

We’ll see how far evangelicals have drifted in the following chapters.

1. Ladd wrote his analysis in the scholarly The Presence of the Future and the more approachable The Gospel of the Kingdom.

2. See Smith, Revivalism and Social Concern.

3. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism, 62.

4. Griswold, “Billy Graham’s Striking Gospel of Social Action,” The New Yorker, 2/23/2018.

5. Dayton & Strong, Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage, 49–51.

6. See Wimber, “A Hunger for God,” in Springer, ed., Power Encounters Among Christians in the Western World, 3–14.

7. This “radical middle” terminology is used in Jackson, The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard.

8. Pulliam Bailey, “The Trump Effect?,” Washington Post web site, 10/19/2016; Jones & Cox. “Clinton maintains double-digit lead (51% vs. 36%) over Trump.” PRRI. 2016.