Telling Secrets

I was asked to respond recently to the "lowlights" of the "You Say You Want A Revolution" conference as summarized by Gary Shavey, a pastor in Mark Driscoll's Acts 29 leadership network. The conference was put on by the good folks at "Off The Map" (part of the Emergent Village network - to which you might call Acts 29 the antithesis) and headlined by Brian McLaren, George Barna, and Spencer Burke (from TheOoze.com and author of The Heretics Guide to the Bible).

You can read Gary Shavey's article at Driscoll's The Resurgence site. Here is my response:


I think that Gary Shavey went to the You Say You Want A Revolution conference skeptical and looking to pick a fight - so right off the bat his "summary" is suspect. However, most of his comments were fairly measured, and as he says, "all over the map." I do heartly agree with his "What the...?" about the $2.50 drip coffee - what the crap is that?! What a rip!

Honestly, these days what I am most interested in is helpful contributions to the overall conversation about the church and living in a way that pleases and serves God. I saw the ads for this conference and what the topics were and frankly I immediately pushed the delete button.
It's the same conversation I've heard over and over and over, not really contributing anything. If Shavey's experience is to be trusted, then my sense of the conference was right on. Shavey's summary doesn't really contribute anything either. It went from a "based on what I was looking for, here's what I agree with" to a "I knew it, these heretics are a bunch of freaks who are revolutionizing the "conversation" into a money-making Christianese venture." Not a particularly helpful position.

To be honest, I've grown tired of Jim Wallis and the "Sojourners" line too. I can't remember who it was that said this (it might be my current writer hero David James Duncan), but whoever it was said that anyone who claims to speak for God is missing it and basically more interested in propaganda than the whole truth, that Wallis is making the same mistake that "Evangelicalism" and the "Religious Right" has made, namely speaking for God (e.g. the title of his book God's Politics - or, on the other end of the spectrum, the ever popular "Growing Kids God's Way" by Gary Ezzo). Only Wallis comes at it from the "Religious Left" while trying to position himself as a centrist, something he is only partially successful at doing. Both he and McLaren have a tendency to let the more questionable aspects of liberation theology to serve as the backbone of their 3-second sound byte message (or the "Robin Hood" message as Shavey puts it). If I can wax prophetic, I think that Wallis' position will cause the decline of "Sojourners" influence to next to nothing over the next 5 to 7 years as their base of support grows older.

I have the same problem with the secularists who also criticize the Church and Christianity, like in that book Kingdom Coming. It tries to raise the alarm and serve as an expose of Christianity in exactly the same way that Dobson (and Driscoll and his crew) raises the alarm and exposes the evil secular/pseudo-religious feminist left. But, rather than a helpful contribution toward something better, we get instead the message that women need to support their husband's "ministry" by staying home and that the men had better start acting like men, gird up their loins, enter the fray, and come home to pork their wives whenever they want. These perspectives help to get us nowhere and they do exactly the same thing that the most recent round of political advertisements did - fling shit and piss people off. The language of war and battle can only get us so far. What we need now is to find more helpful language before Christianity gets to the same place that that language and perspective got the world in 1945 (and, for that matter, in 2006).

So, as I survey the land, I once again see that everyone is fighting and clawing away at each other as American Chrisitianity goes to Hell in a Starbucks holiday giftpack. I continue to see the "twilight of the saints" (as I wrote about earlier) and I'm not seeing anyone filling the vacuum that is forming.

Labels: acts 29, barna, christianity, church, driscoll, emergent, god's politics, mclaren, religion, resurgence, revolution, theooze, wallis, western