I wondered if it was too late to grow up to be Misty Edwards, and was surprised that I even wanted to be Misty Edwards. I say this, by the way, not from the pew, but from behind the microphone on Sunday mornings and afternoons, during the seven years in high school and college I served as a vocalist on the worship team both for the church services at two major evangelical churches in California college towns (UCC in Davis and First Pres in Berkeley) and various youth and college fellowships throughout the week. (Going only by the latter, I’ve sung in worship teams in large group settings for a total of ten years.) Though, I couldn’t say something from behind a pew lately. I haven’t attended church regularly since May 2010, despite the fact that weirdly I still appear in photos on several church websites, including one I only attended for two months in 2011, though I suppose it’s not that weird, as since the age of probably fourteen, I’ve never been involved in less than three ministries at any given time. That’s another thing I could have called this post, “How I Became A Twenty-Something Statistic of Evangelical Disaffection.” Believe me, I was as surprised as you might be.

I think I want to be Misty Edwards, or have had moods in the past day during which I sort of wanted to be Misty Edwards, because I think leading worship might be one of the things I’m the best at, that comes most effortlessly to me, if not naturally, then certainly after a decade of experience. During a very tumultuous and surreal coming of age towards the end of college, singing worship music of various kinds and in various settings (I’m a classically trained chorister and have performed gospel as well as “four chord wonders” backed by electric guitar) was one of the few ways of relaxing and feeling good that I could engage in without feeling guilty – after all, I was doing it for God, not myself. In fact, leaving the church has meant leaving music-making to a large extent as well. I keep getting together with guitarist guys I know to try and write music, but such efforts have been as spotty and inconsistent as my church attendance. I don’t even sing in the shower anymore. I don’t know why this doesn’t bother me more, but it sort of makes sense: I sing in choirs, I sing in bands – I sing with other people for other people. I don’t sing alone, so recently I rarely sing at all. I guess I’m saying that when I left the church, I lost a big piece of my life and self-understanding too: I was not a passive consumer of evangelical Christian spirituality or culture, and I didn’t leave because I got bored, or wanted to have lots of sex with lots of men, and leaving wasn’t easy or without personal consequences. So why did I leave? Why can’t I go back? I’m trying to find some understanding for myself by writing these words, and I think part of the reason is that I left the church for matters of conscience. I left the church because I had to: I couldn’t have the parts of being a Christian in Christian community of the evangelical flavor that felt good and worthwhile without having the parts that made me furious, alienated, sad, and profoundly disgusted.

For a long time, I simply felt an almost physical force keeping me away from going into a sanctuary. There were actually Sundays when I still lived in Berkeley when I’d walk to First Pres, hesitate outside of the narthex for ten minutes, fully intending to go in, and then turn around and go read a book in Starbucks instead. One time during Advent in 2010, I attended a service at Christ Church, a Presbyterian church down the street from me that quite a few of my friends had attended in college, and I felt so disconnected from what should have been the most familiar rhetoric and actions of my life that I became increasingly internally agitated. When I got up for communion, I clipped my hip on the edge of a pew, and without thinking, slapped the cross-embossed pew, hard, in “revenge.” I slapped the pew! With a cross on it! (“Bad pew!” said various people unprompted when I told this story, and pointed, as though at, I dunno, an invisible dog.) I hunched into my peacoat, cheeks red, and took communion in great embarrassment and consternation at my uncharacteristically and fruitlessly (my hand being the only injured party) violent outburst. I feel like this might have been the low point for me in my relationship to organized religion.

More recently, I’ve had to walk out of sermons at two churches I tried out with friends in 2011, and breathe with my head between my knees in the ladies room, feeling deeply panicked and surreal, though most recently, I instead walked up to the pastor afterward and argued theology with him for about ten minutes, much to his surprise and perhaps incomprehension, as I didn’t really make an impact. I got the impression when I talked to the pastor, the way he talked to me (calling my point of view “western” and “individualistic”) and unloaded more Bible verses on me than I could answer back with, that to him I was a type: the liberal young San Francisco skeptic, maybe unchurched, but seeking, and reading the Bible for her own, on her own, needing to be shown the light, which explained my idiosyncratic and probably secular way of interpreting the Bible. What?! I found myself thinking afterward: perfect church attendance, church choir, bell choir, Sunday school, youth groups, mission trips, Vacation Bible School, teaching Vacation Bible School, Christian camp at Mission Springs and Mount Hermon every year, watching kids in the church nursery, leading kids’ youth groups, Bible study, worship team, Urbana, college fellowship, leader in college fellowship, Bible study leader, years of faithful daily quiet time and Bible reading, having actually read every book in the Bible, Stephen Minister, being the designated prayer person for the prayer room after services, joining a Christian journal at Cal, being Editor in Chief of that Christian journal, studying Christianity and theological developments in the middle ages for freaking my major, and I come off as the great unwashed hipster girl dilettante now?!

The answer is: yes, yes, that’s how I come off now. I was on the inside of the evangelical Christian experience, and I am now outside of it. I am still the girl who did all those many, many Christian things, but now there’s an addition to my worldview that has accompanied the loss of my lived experience in the evangelical cocoon: the ability to look at all the things I did and saw from the perspective of a person who no longer does them. I can name now things I took for granted then, both the positive and negative. Having accepted that reality about myself right now, I am no longer afraid of entering a church, and I can also tell you bluntly why I was so overwhelmed by negative feelings at the sight of one these past two years. I’ll make a list:

1. Have you ever noticed that a church service consists mostly of men standing in front of you telling and singing to you about things like they know more about life and God than you do while you remain seated? I didn’t notice that. Has it ever occurred to you that no matter how many times an evangelical church talks about equality and freedom and power for believers, that the rigid and often masculinist hierarchy and form of the service directly contradicts this message?

2. Have you noticed how most of these men are white and all of them are straight, even when the congregation isn’t mostly white?

3. Have you noticed that no matter how many times an evangelical church talks about feeling connected to God, having a personal relationship with him, and avoiding legalism, that at the end of the day they will legislate their actions (and yours) according to a literal interpretation of a Bible verse? As in, they will answer any question if you get right down to it, with a quote from the Bible, as though this automatically means something and settles it? I don’t have relationships where I point to a founding document about our relationship to settle what I or the other person in that relationship can and can’t do. I also don’t have relationships with invisible people that I talk to in my head and hear from ultimately through ancient texts written over thousands of years in languages I don’t read. Other than Jesus, apparently.

4. Speaking of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and going along with the last point, I’ve often gotten the message that it’s “not my will, but your will, God, be done,” and that all our priorities and decisions and even thoughts, feelings, and gut reactions and perceptions should be turned over to God’s ultimate veto. This was the second biggest factor in me leaving. It’s the most central idea of the evangelical ideology and way of life, and it simply doesn’t make sense. I’m not even talking about whether God exists or not (I tend to think he does) or whether God’s ideas about your life ultimately trump yours (I believe they do, and thankfully so) or whether it would be good to seek out God’s understanding (I feel like that’s what I’m doing…), I’m saying how do you freaking claim to know God’s will in every instance, and how is not knowing willful defiance of his authority that necessitates gratuitous and indulgent self-hatred? Evangelical Christians don’t claim to hear voices in their head proclaiming to be God, or only on rare occasions, and we’re encouraged to question such occasions with scripture and in community. So really what they’re saying is that your priorities and thoughts and feelings and perceptions should take a backseat to a Bible verse or to a very rigid organization of value and ethics animated and supported by a series of Bible verses. That is what they’re saying! Which, to me, sounds like a very ineffective and dangerous way to go about living one’s life, and furthermore is not a personal relationship with a Living God, let along a living person! Or if it is, it’s an abusive personal relationship!

5. What Christians who advocate this are doing is called gaslighting, a way in which another person undermines another person’s beliefs and feelings about themselves and the world by presenting false information, thus making them think they’re crazy, which is a kind of emotional abuse, most notoriously defined this past year in an essay from a man named Yashar Ali that went viral called “A Message to Women from a Man: You Are Not Crazy.” I want to reiterate this definition, and its origin, from the essay:

The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull off this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.

In this case, pastors or congregants parroting pastors, are presenting the false information that the will of God is directly accessible at all times, and that a legalistic lens through which to view all human experience is a spiritual and noble and grand thing, and that if you happen to perceive things differently, it’s as a result of your sinfulness. If God doesn’t make sense – or really, if the evangelical church’s version of God doesn’t make sense – then it’s your fault, and is a failing not even or only of understanding, but of character. In fact, the vast majority of evangelical Christian rhetoric revolves around your existential at-fault-ness, your ontological suckitude, as it were. A very common prayer I have heard is, “Oh Lord, please let us not forget how broken we are before you, and how we aren’t right, except for your help, please let us know we are dependent on you, that we are the worst of sinners before you.” This is a very common prayer! People murmur piously when this prayer is prayed in front of them! I was one of those people!

6. On a related note, have you ever noticed how self-deprecation is NOT one of the Fruits of the Spirit? This isn’t just sarcasm: take a look at the fruits of the Spirit, the virtues of a soul being redeemed by God outlined in Galations 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not even humility: not even humility, is on this list of virtues. Elsewhere, Paul also discusses what he thinks appropriate for Christian contemplation: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things” (Philippians 4:8). Whatever is true! If anything is excellent or praiseworthy! I mean, the quality of a Christian, someone redeemed by Christ, is that although they were in their sinful state as scarlet, now they are white as snow! (Isaiah 1:18 – this is the deal even in the Old Testament!) Right now! Otherwise what is this so-called power of your so-called God? I’ve also often heard this weird little idea batted around by evangelicals that some people need to hear less grace, that some Christians are afflicted with believing too much in grace. They need more “truth.” (About how they suck!) Too much grace! Oh freaking really?! This is an ugly thing to say, a mean and arrogant thing to say! Grace is the truth! Grace is the truth. Evangelicals are mostly Protestant – have you never heard of sola gratia? By God’s grace you are saved? That. Is. The. Religion.

You may note that I am throwing around Bible verses like that automatically means something, which was one of my earlier complaints. I apologize, my inner Bible trivia nerd is getting the best of me. I did win so many ring pops in a Scripture memorizing contest as a small child when visiting a church in Granite Bay, beating out everyone else, which I dutifully felt like a sinner about though, that I felt dizzy with triumph and sugar poisoning for the rest of the day. Also, I’m trying to point out that there are perfectly adequate hermeneutics that look enough like common evangelical-speak in the way they approach scripture that can advocate for the unconditional saved state of a Christian (a person determined not by you, but by God) and thus require a worshipful focus on things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and talking about true, noble, right, pure, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy things like Portlandia. As opposed to the puny, snotty, naughty character of humanity. Oh, and also! I can totally talk about scripture however I want, and emphasize whatever message I get out of it, and pay less attention to things I don’t find helpful! What are you going to do about it if my theology doesn’t take into account every single verse on everything all the time? Shun me at Bible study? Guess what, I don’t go to Bible study! Muahaha.

7. And this brings me to the main reason why I found evangelical life unbearable: the evangelical Christian God is a bully and a narcissist. Apparently, we only exist to give God glory, and that is the only point of us (never mind God calling us “good”). Furthermore, we need to understand that sin is bad because it offends God’s sensibilities, because it offends his ego. It is a personal affront to his power and his authority. If we don’t fall in line, we will be sent to hell, because God freaking feels like it. Sin isn’t wrong because it’s bad, but rather because God doesn’t want you to do things he tells you not to, because it hurts his feelings. God is more offended than the victim of another person’s wrongdoing. Everything is always about him. I’m writing this in an air of angry and incredulous disbelief, but very similar statements to the ones I just wrote are preached on Sundays with complete seriousness, and accepted as such.

I don’t care if God is the God of the universe, I don’t want to be part of a religion that bases human life around assuaging someone’s ego, as though that’s the best and most righteous thing you could be doing with your time. I don’t want my religion to be co-dependence. And this version of Christianity particularly angers me because from what I know of God, he doesn’t seem that way to me. I feel the presence of God both as a loving comforting assurance of my value and as a continual challenge to broaden my spirit’s limits, to understand more, to acknowledge new things that I didn’t know or want to admit and then show me how necessary and good and interesting and compelling the truth always was, not to lead me back to the point of desperation and knock me down again just to show he can, and how useless I am without him. I think that God cares about how we treat ourselves and others because he cares about his creation, and loves us, not because he’s so concerned with how our actions reflect upon him. Why would that matter to him? He’s God! Who would he have to impress? I’d like to be more like him, actually.

The most revealing and surprising thing I’ve learned since leaving the church is that God, embodied in Jesus and elsewhere in human history, hasn’t seemed to change all that much: I’m the one who changed. I spent so many years in the church trying to be worthy of my salvation, to act like it had really happened, that I was really saved, and I heard so many messages that reinforced my feelings of deficiency, and drove me to work harder and harder. What I couldn’t admit to myself is that God wanted me, that God loved me, and that I could only come to him and know him as myself. The problem was, I didn’t know who that was, and going to church every week wasn’t helping me figure that out, wasn’t helping me be closer to God, or even genuinely closer to other people, so I stopped going. I’ve also found that knowing myself and letting yourself be known is less about coming up with the right adjectives or experiences for one’s identity, and more about listening to what you’re really saying and thinking and feeling, and being less afraid of telling others directly what that is, spending less energy trying to out-guess their reactions and calculating your self-representation to your idea of their expectations. I don’t know how good I am at that yet, but I do know where I’m going and where I’ve been more consistently, and lose less days to an internal frenzy of anxiety and confusion and shame.

I like the lyrics of Misty Edward’s “You Won’t Relent”: “You won’t relent until you have it all: my heart is yours – come be the fire inside of me, come be the flame upon my heart” interspersed with the “love is as strong as death” passage in Song of Solomon. But I don’t want to be Misty Edwards. I watched a testimony she recorded for IHOP’s Onething conference, in which she had a nightmare that led her into the epicenter of a nuclear blast in the middle of a warzone, and she saw the Lord in the form of a man, or the angel of the Lord running to her. She asked God how he could be there in this place, that if he were causing all the bloodshed, then what was evil? He pointed at a Buddhist monk, calmly tilling a beautiful garden, in a space the bloodshed couldn’t touch, and said something like, “In those days, I will call what is evil good, and what is good evil, and woe to those who are offended!” She told him she wasn’t offended, and he told her, in response, to praise his name.

I think this dream is a perfect illustration, among many other things (it’s kind of a huge dream), of the crazy version of God we are expected to praise in the evangelical faith tradition: a bellicose, frightening and even kind of evil deity, who is capricious and jealous and bloody-minded, and feels compelled to dictate morality in ways that don’t make sense, just so long as he can be acknowledged as the only person who can dictate it. But Misty doesn’t seem like a prophet: she seems like a medium. Mediums are instruments that gods and demons speak through. I like to think that prophets can hear what they’re saying, and remember who they are, even and often grumbling about the difficulty the call to prophesy causes them.

I had a dream a few weeks before Christmas that I and a few others were meeting in a church to have an encounter with the angel Gabriel. He was awesome to behold, raiments of blue and green and gold, phasing in and out of the form of man and the form of man carved in living stone, with a sword, more the angel of strength and less of annunciation, though considering the timing, maybe I had just had more pastel impressions of Gabriel meeting with Mary before and he was always like that: he did have to tell her not to be afraid. We had all met together to receive an object of great power from Gabriel that the church had stolen, and we were to divide the power among all people. I don’t know what it was. I woke up.

Even under Congregationalist church polity (a thing I see as fundamentally flawed), there was not in former times such splintering of the Church, and such hyperindividualist idolatry, as there is today. Now, especially without denominational ties, each congregation in a given area tends to itself without much heed for the others. As congregations tend also to be segregated along lines of cultural similarity – a largely Charismatic-pietistic Korean congregation versus a Presbyterian white congregation – this insulation extends the walls that divide the rest of society.

Even with attempts at unity cobbled together by such umbrella organizations as Unity in Christ, there is far less real unity in heart and action than there is of what others, perhaps a little pessimistically, have characterized as ‘a vague, sentimentalistic and aphoristic “spiritual” unity on the terms of a “Gospel” that maximally excludes the “sinners” of other “corrupt” traditions’; or else, the Church disregarded and discarded, there is an all-inclusive atmosphere of non-judgement (better known as lack of judgement). In our quest for unity ‘in spirit’, even the Body we have, practically speaking, is largely but a virtual figment.

In the current climate, much can be learned, or at least recalled, from the Cambridge Platform, a document adopted by the Massachusetts Puritans in 1649. Even if Berkeley’s various assemblies of Christian worship belong to different denominations, some even to what in truth is a denomination of one, it must be possible to have at least the minimal unity that the Cambridge Platform prescribes in Chapter XV, ‘Of the Communion of Churches One with Another’:

Although churches be distinct, and therefore may not be confounded one with another, and equal, and therefore have not dominion one over another; yet all the churches ought to preserve church communion one with another, because they are all united unto Christ, not only as a mystical, but as a political head; whence is derived a communion suitable thereunto.

In other terms, the Church ought to be united visibly as well as invisibly, a commonwealth joined together by more than common traits. ‘The communion of churches’, the document continues, ‘is exercised sundry ways’.

I. By way of mutual care in taking thought for one another’s welfare.

This is perhaps the basic task on the individual level, that each Christian should learn to take thought for other congregations than his own, the duty most often known by the name of love. This love cannot be sustained merely by the common pep rallies that we call InterPraise, valuable as that venue is as a way for Christians from all over Berkeley to see other Christians gathered from many other congregations. I wish this care were more robustly urged both in the pulpit and in private speech.

II. By way of consultation one with another, when we have occasion to require the judgment and counsel of other churches, touching any person or cause, wherewith they may be better acquainted than ourselves; as the church of Antioch consulted with the Apostles and elders of the church at Jerusalem, about the question of circumcision of the Gentiles, and about the false teachers that broached that doctrine. In which case, when any church wants light or peace among themselves it is a way of communion of the churches, according to the Word, to meet together by their elders and other messengers in a Synod to consider and argue the points in doubt or difference; and, having found out the way of truth and peace, to commend the same by their letters and messengers to the churches whom the same may concern. But if a church be rent with divisions among themselves, or lie under any open scandal, and yet refuse to consult with other churches for healing or removing of the same, it is matter of just offense, both to the Lord Jesus and to other churches, as bewraying too much want of mercy and faithfulness, not to seek to bind up the breaches and wounds of the church and brethren; and therefore the state of such a church calls aloud upon other churches to exercise a fuller act of brotherly communion, to wit, by way of admonition.

Indeed, how often is it that the various assemblies consult with others rather than either falling to pieces or stifling controversy with a sickly sweet hand? How often do they work through debates graciously but firmly, ordered by holy Scripture’s lawful ways? Rarely, when the lack of outside recourse keeps each assembly too concerned for its own face to endure any unmasking of its weakness, its unease, its disturbance lying beneath. The Persian city of Isfahan may have been ‘half the world’, but here each assembly is a world unto itself.

III. A third way, then, of communion of churches, is by way of admonition; to wit, in case any public offense be found in a church, which they either discern not, or are slow in proceeding to use the means for the removing and healing of.

Then follows a description of proper procedure, based on Christ’s instructions for admonishing an impænitent sinner (Matt. 18.12–18):

Paul had no authority over Peter, yet when he saw Peter not walking with a right foot, he publicly rebuked him before the church; though churches have no more authority one over another, than one apostle had over another, yet, as one apostle might admonish another, so may one church admonish another, and yet without usurpation. In which case, if the church that lies under offense, does not hearken to the church which does admonish her, the church is to acquaint other neighbor churches with that offense, which the offending church still lies under, together with their neglect of the brotherly admonition given unto them. Whereupon those other churches are to join in seconding the admonition formerly given; and if still the offending church continue in obstinacy and impenitency, they may forbear communion with them, and are to proceed to make use of the help of a Synod or counsel of neighbor churches, walking orderly (if a greater cannot conveniently be had) for their conviction. If they hear not the Synod, the Synod having declared them to be obstinate, particular churches approving and accepting of the judgment of the Synod, are to declare the sentence of non-communion respectively concerning them; and thereupon, out of religious care to keep their own communion pure, they may justly withdraw themselves from participation with them at the Lord’s Table, and from such other acts of holy communion, as the communion of churches otherwise does allow and require.

The Platform also provides for innocent and dissenting members of an offending congregation, that they may be received in other congregations:

Nevertheless, if any members of such a church as lies under public offense, do not consent to the offense of the church, but do in due sort bear witness against it, they are still to be received to wonted communion, for it is not equal that the innocent should suffer with the offensive. Yea, furthermore, if such innocent members, after due waiting in the use of all good means for the healing of the offense of their own church, shall at last (with the allowance of the counsel of neighbor churches,) withdraw from the fellowship of their own church, and offer themselves to the fellowship of another, we judge it lawful for the other church to receive them (being otherwise fit) as if they had been orderly dismissed to them from their own church.

But we are too enlightened and too much in unity already to care for such harsh dissension. Instead will we let parishioners drift to and fro as they please, voting with their feet as to which parish is most to their taste. Far be it from the Church of Jesus Christ to confront herself with the word of God and bring up the issue of (gasp!) sin. For as long as we pursue our own pieties, let us live in pieces peace.

Meanwhile the Protestants, practically pretending that the Romanists are utter pagans, plunder Mexico with their missionaries for the mere fact that Mexicans have not had conversion experiences in which they accepted Christ into their lives as Lord and Saviour. By the same token might a Baptist missionary society poach from a uniformly Presbyterian region in which catechesis rather than revivalism was the norm.

IV. A fourth way of communion with churches, is by way of participation; the members of one church occasionally coming unto another, we willingly admit them to partake with them at the Lord’s Table, it being the seal of our communion not only with Christ, not only with the members of our own church, but also of all the churches of the saints; in which regard we refuse not to baptize their children presented to us, if either their own minister be absent, or such a fruit of holy fellowship be desired with us. In like cases, such churches as are furnished with more ministers than one, do willingly afford one of their own ministers to supply the place of an absent or sick minister of another church for a needful season.

This one, it seems, most of us do most abundantly but most meaninglessly, admitting to the Lord’s Table anyone who sees fit to call himself a Christian. What we have is not interparticipation but chaos and sacrilege: in one congregation an impenitent adulterer can come to the Lord’s Supper despite his unbelief and in another congregation a believer can be shut out for not belonging to that particular congregation.

V. A fifth way of church communion is by way of recommendation, when a member of one church has occasion to reside in another church; if but for a season, we commend him to their watchful fellowship by letters of recommendation; but if he be called to settle his abode there, we commit him, according to his desire, to the fellowship of their covenant by letters of dismission.

Not using this practice nowadays, we leave ourselves constantly in doubt, or else in false security, about fellowship with members of another assembly. The former makes for no unity, the latter for a false unity.

VI. A sixth way of church communion, is in case of need to minister relief and succor one unto another, either of able members to furnish them with officers, or of outward support to the necessities of poorer churches, as did the churches of the Gentiles contribute liberally to the poor saints at Jerusalem.

But surely each assembly hath too many of its own concerns and too little of its own money to furnish others with. How rich we are, and how self-sufficient, to lack the money to stop to help another congregation! for instead we will go on with our own programmes, too indifferent to see any but our parochial needs and our parochial outreach and our parochial pet projects overseas.

It is my hope that we may rise to the challenge of maintaining visible unity in the local Church across sectarian lines, holding rather to peaceable familial bonds than to the seeming peace of quiet divorce. Let us pursue the unity that our Lord once pled for his Church militant on earth.

A friend once told me the most romantic gift a boy could give her would be the perfect engagement ring. Considering the limited scope of what an engagement ring is, her wish reveals to me the inherent quixoticism of modern marriage: how to uniquely be like everyone else. The highest expression of devotion a man can make to a woman, taking her to wife, is also the most intense expression of conformity to a certain kind of social ideal that makes her as herself deeply irrelevant: the woman you love will take your name and lose her own. Considering the historical reality of what this ideal is, it’s no wonder that so many men are intensely nervous about getting married, and so many women share and reinforce a collective obsession with the idea that legitimizes the compulsive mistreatment of themselves, their lovers, their families, and their friends. This is a disingenuous distraction from the traumatic reality of how men and women have treated each other throughout time, giving up and taking control of choices that can only belong to another person.

The reality of marriage underneath the dress, and I think the sacrality of marriage as well, consists in this: a woman is not given in marriage, not by her father, not by the church, not by the law of the land or the goodwill of her family and friends. The sort of Christ who wins a wife for a man is not a God you can pray to while ignoring the woman before your eyes. A woman gives herself in marriage. And it is a man who receives her. And when this truth is ignored, men and women get hurt. I think it’s inappropriate to continually refer to some other authority when you have a woman in your arms, instead of taking your instructions on honorable behavior towards her from her. It is my observation that as the man enters the body of the woman he would wed, she is the officiant and no one else, regardless of what theology, convention, law, and other sayings of words may suggest. In marriage, there is no church but the church of your wife. This is good news. What a relief to believe that men are not responsible for women’s sexual choices, able to be the hero or the villain by a single step or misstep, subject rather to invitation or dismissal. What a matter of honor and delight, for a woman who takes a man to bed is doing so because she wants and loves him!

In a real relationship, there are two people actively making decisions rooted in their embodied experience. Marriage is finally a parallax. What to a woman may be an act of power, drawing a man towards her on her own terms, may, from a man’s point of view be a woman who is particularly attentive and receptive to his advances, before which she gives way. The woman who from her perspective indulgently praises and fondly supports the man through various trials he cannot always articulate, enfolding him in her arms at night, may, from the man’s perspective, be a woman he indulgently shares himself with and zealously shields from harm she sometimes can’t see, holding her fast in arms his at night. We catch glimpses of these differences, misunderstand them: they disturb us, amuse us, intrigue us, drive us once again into each other’s arms looking for answers, to find only the bodies of our lovers. We forget about the existence of questions for a time. At daybreak, the search continues, the inevitable return also.

Any woman, whether physically virgin or not, married in the eyes of the law or the church or not, has the power to allow and deny this joining, marriage, a power that she may invoke at her discretion. This is the unveiled face of chastity, I think, not following rules or delaying gratification or focusing on a mark that will most soothe and quiet the tumult of one’s heart, whether one lives in a state of celibacy or monogamy or debauch. A chaste woman is one who will not deny or forget what’s she’s worth independent of what the world thinks of her, what men have done to her, what other women ask of her. A chaste woman does not deny the wholesomeness of the female body. This virtue is at the root of her decisions about with whom she will share a bed and share her life and in what ways, and it is as evident and feared a virtue in the life of a cautious and thoughtful girl who has done everything right according to the dictates of Christian religion as it is in the life of a great-hearted and generous girl who has had many loves and boyfriends because no one ever told her to wait.

I think this way of looking at things could ease the suffering of countless women of good conscience, women of any conscience and feeling at all, really, who have been cast outside the sexual narrative in which their identity has been cultivated by circumstances outside of their control. While the pain and grief of varied losses of community and relationship take time to resolve, the exile may end this very instant and every instant following this instant if she would hold onto her identity beyond identity itself, her beloved body. What wonderful things her body means about who she is and what’s possible for her, always, till death parts her from this world, the bride, the maiden in the springtime flush of a first love, the goddess clothed in white always available to her: those forms of life and fashion, the veil, tiara, and gown, are manifestations of the beauty God wrought in women from the beginning! There is no shame in allowing a man you desire and respect and love to delight in who you are, no matter what anyone else thinks about your timing. Covered by law, covered by crosses and steeples, only a woman can choose the time when she will be uncovered. The rest is fancy dress.

In Ephesians 5, Saint Paul speaks as though in a reverie about the mystery of marriage, of Christ and the Church, and says that in marriage, a wife’s body no longer belongs to her but rather to her husband, and a husband’s body no longer belongs to him, but to his wife. I think this could refer to the depths of an unconditional love, and bears a direct relationship to Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The most direct way of reading this divine injunction is not simply to love everyone as though they are you, but rather refers to the human precondition: we are finally inaccessible to ourselves, and no representation or psychology can remedy this lack. So we feel a yearning to love and be loved, but cannot ourselves be an object of our own love, because we can’t see or hear or touch ourselves the way another person can. So God in his mercy has given us each other, as a substitute for what we never had and never could: a self-contained world sustained by perfect self-regard and self-reference. God observed that it is not good for man to live alone, and made woman. A couple, then, a loving pair, is characterized by a friction caused by the fact that one simply can’t keep track of oneself while at the same time dwelling intensely upon the character and qualities of the other. How dare you distract me with your love and regard for me, when that leaves me less of you to love and regard for the duration in which I must suffer your scrutiny and commentary! Don’t pay attention to me, be with me, you impossible glorious creature!

This attraction and disconnect in the dynamic of a true couple, a back and forth, deep to the point of nonsense, underpins fights and even separations, inspires the most touching or hilarious exchanges of words and tokens of esteem and censure, and provokes the most comforting and passionate sessions of lovemaking. A woman’s identity is not lost and dissolved in the man’s, nor does it become a cross for him to bear, a double-weighted oppression that forces him to greater material or moral development, but it is perhaps the case that when in love, one’s individual priorities are suspended now and then in some ancient rhythm one can’t help slipping into, like the overawed and effervescent feelings, respectively and alternatively, that flow freely in an expressive partner’s dance between the lead and the follow. In this sense, marriage is uniquely being like everyone else. This is the humility and humor of romantic love. This is the condescension and radical innocence of wives and husbands.

Notes:

1. When I completed a draft of this essay, it was over 4,100 words long. This essay is a condensed version of the final draft, in four parts, entitled “Say Maybe to the Dress,” which you can read on my WordPress blog – Part 1: Do you take this dress?, Part 2: Undercover Marriage, Part 3: Chastity and narcissism, Part 4: True Love. This version, though similar to the above essay, is more informal, contains more qualified statements, wider-ranging speculations, and jokes. My blog, Artemisia, is also where you can read other essays, reflections, and reading responses of mine that will be similar to my column on the Unknown Blog, but more eclectic: expect Shakira, theories about giant robot armor and Sailor Moon, solemnly and irreverently imprecise uses of psychoanalytical terms, and very intense thoughts about the music of Sufjan Stephens.

2. My interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself” was inspired directly by a short story in The New Yorker: “Backbone” by David Foster Wallace. My meditation on this command has recently been informed by the psychoanalyst and critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek. My thinking on outcast women, discussed in more depth in “Say Maybe to the Dress,” has recently been heavily informed by the essay “The Sobbing Girl, Or, On Hysterical Time” in Hatred and Forgiveness (2010) by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva.

3. In this essay I only spoke of heterosexual marriage as a given for stylistic simplicity and elegance, and because I wanted to make some specific points about heterosexual unions and embodied sexual difference. I imagine that many of my statements could resonate with members of either gender or any orientation or gender identity. I would rather address and process my thoughts and observations about other kinds of marriages and sexual relationships more slowly than attempt to address everything every time I write about marriage. In my desire to include and support, I do not want to undermine and efface difference when finer and hopefully increasingly thoughtful distinctions may pay greater homage to the beauty of many forms of love. 

Last week, I saw a link on my Facebook newsfeed to a Wall Street Journal article about a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that would ban churches in New York City from using space on Sundays to hold services, going counter to a Supreme Court decision in 2001 (Good News Club v. Milford Central School) that opened the way for something like 60 schools in New York City, at least, it seems to become houses of Christian worship on Sundays. They did so because they thought churches holding services at public schools was a credible threat to the separation of church and state, and that there was a difference banning an activity from a public space that contained the expression of a certain viewpoint and banning the viewpoint itself, and that the latter, not the former, was something called “viewpoint discrimination.” At first, I thought this ruling was mean.

I thought this ruling was uncalled for because I was thinking about my experiences attending churches in California that met  or have met in local public schools. The churches I was thinking of were Bayside Church (a Covenant Church) in Granite Bay and Oakland City Church in Oakland (a Reformed Chruch). As far as I knew, or know, these churches were local to the community, paid rent for the facilities or the city itself waived rent, they cleaned up or paid the custodial fees, and it was very clear that meeting at a public school was a temporary solution during the church plant phase. Bayside moved into their own campus while I was still in high school, and OCC only used the school for a month as part of a summer tour to different venues so the congregation could experience different areas of Oakland while they tried to find a more permanent location. I think beyond perhaps offering up a prayer for the children or school generally during the service (though I don’t remember that happening), there was no particular encroachment into the educational world of the school and I know that Bayside, at least, has always taken an interest in the educational well-being of schoolchildren in greater Sacramento area, and often bought school supplies for poorer districts, possibly related to the schools they originally met in. Bayside, actually, has so many charitable community outreach programs that it’s kind of hard to keep track of when or why they started any particular endeavor, other than the fact that some congregant saw a need and spoke up. I thought of schools meeting in public schools as this positive expression of Christian charity and participation in the local community, a way to put their best foot forward, and give to everyone in town, the good news in action.

So I assumed that the churches in New York City had behaved in a similar manner, and that perhaps the court had over-hastily barred a potentially great community asset out of an over-zealous application of the separation of church and state at the expense of what the actual communities actually wanted. I gave them the benefit of the doubt in my mind, and had an extensive argument with someone when I reposted the link myself and opined, in which I argued that it was probably good for children to be vaguely aware that a church met at the school, just because it was good for them to be aware of the politics of the greater adult social world of their community, and that there were a lot of different groups of people who made up their town or neighborhood who had different beliefs. Then, my companion in this argument found and shared the following link with me, an editorial from The New York Times.

I suggest reading the editorial, but briefly, the author writes about her personal experience and research about churches who meet in NYC, how they in fact don’t pay rent, make use of photographs of the children at school to “pray for their salvation,” and use their position to approach schoolchildren during the school-week, and use the facilities beyond Sunday mornings, confusing one child, who asked her father if the church “was part of her school.” These churches, furthermore, aren’t even necessarily local church plants, but evangelical groups who came to take advantage of the Supreme Court ruling and NYC’s rent-free policy. I’m shocked, though not surprised. Mostly, though, I am furious. I mean, I hope there are some churches that meet in NYC public schools that actually respect the school as a school and actually contribute positively and concretely to their local community, but shame on the churches who took advantage of their judicial leeway and very understandably, from the judges’ point of view, ruined the arrangement for the rest of the churches! Still, some might say that this ruling is too harsh, as it may mean the actual closure and end of somewhere around 50 churches.

To which I say: Good!

Unless there’s even more information I’m missing about this ruling, I don’t see how on earth the churches could have justified their behavior. They have no right to assert some sort of privilege for themselves when it comes to local public facilities, either as the dominant religious group in the U.S., or, weirdly, as some sort of outcast “sticking it to the man,” undermining that nasty government that advocates teaching children to think according to something that isn’t a totalizing reading of Christian scripture and a reductionistic view of human or at least western history. You know, the heathens. I think a lot of this clearly inappropriate behaviors stems from a bizarre attitude I see in Christian communities or churches, where they seem to believe themselves somehow fundamentally outside and estranged from their larger local, historical, and sociological contexts, and therefore beleaguered, when in fact they represent the most dominant strain of a very, very long history of a western ideology of values and beliefs the invocation of which still remains the shibboleth of choice in the halls of American political and economic power. I mean, like, “God Bless America”? You have to be able to convince the public you mean that in order to be the president. Everyone knows that, but somehow Christianity is an excluded minority group in the public sphere and can therefore cut corners due to its “persecution,” ignore the rules that have been set up to privilege them if they become inconvenient? Come on!

As Jesus once asked in the Sermon on the Mount, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not what I say?” (Luke 6:46). Reciting a statement of belief, even if you close your eyes and look soulful about it, is not the same thing as preaching the gospel, and just because you identify yourself with the name of Jesus Christ, that doesn’t necessarily you have aligned your life in accordance to a growing, personal understanding of the Christian gospel, the message, the revelation of God Christ represents, which no one really gets fully. That’s why Christians go to church services and read the Bible, and have Bible studies, right? Just saying and doing stuff and getting other people to say it and do it too doesn’t necessarily mean you’re contributing a positive good to the world that should be privileged by the tax-paying members of the school district. You have to look at the consequences, or as, again, Jesus said: “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6: 43-45). What great fruit, exactly, have these churches been seeing from their violations of the spirit of the law? I’m not seeing it. If I were Stephen Colbert, I would give the NYC churches a wag of the finger and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit a tip of the hat. Way to justice it up, that was some solid lawyering.

There’s something else, though, that caught my eye about this whole ruling, and that was the use of the term “viewpoint discrimination” as a new form of invidious discrimination. Or at least, it was news to me. What the court meant was there was a difference between a church service at a public school and a conference of religious studies professors presenting papers and seminars on Christianity at a public school, I think, and that allowing the former was a violation of the separation of church and state, and banning the latter would be “viewpoint discrimination.” This seems a fairly straightforward, common-sense distinction to me, but I think it’s very, very important to note that the term used was “viewpoint discrimination” and not “freedom of thought” or “freedom of speech.” That what I would assume would usually or formerly being seen as a matter of infringing or violating freedom of speech and freedom of religion has become conflated with the idea of invidious discrimination. All of these are unconstitutional, but are unconstitutional in different ways that I think shouldn’t be confused.

The reason why is that the concept of “viewpoint discrimination” has implications for the future robot apocalypse. You think, you hope, I kid, but I’m not really, though I am really having fun using the phrase “robot apocalypse” in this post. Maybe it’s not the robot apocalypse, but there is a strong strain of thought at the moment that has been building in the twentieth century and especially since the creation of the internet, and especially since the beginning of so-called Web 2.0 technologies and platforms that a time is coming when the machines or certain ways information is being concentrated on the internet, called “clouds,” will become something like sentient or at least self-organizing and self-sustaining, if the time hasn’t already come, partially, and this will have huge implications for the rights and self-experience of human beings who depend on robotics, robots, and cloud computing.

The reason why the idea of “viewpoint discrimination” is potentially sinister is because it suggests that a viewpoint can exist independent of a human being, that viewpoints can exist from which no one is viewing. Think about this for a minute. Or, think about a security video camera near an ATM. This security camera has a “viewpoint.” We use footage from security cameras as evidence in criminal trials. The “viewpoint” of an inanimate object can be used to incarcerate a living human being. We have, in our dark genius as a species, created devices that can simulate an organic point of view, either as a visual or audio-visual representation, or as a self-organizing system of information as in the case of cloud computing, which can, like any person with a point of view, focus in or focus out on various trends and details. (Think about the ads on the side of your Facebook profile, or how Gmails tailors advertisements to the contents of your private and professional correspondence.) However, unlike a human being, the cloud’s organizing principles, like those of a video camera, are static and fixed, no matter how accurately they may simulate the workings of the human eye and brain (which they don’t very), they aren’t the same thing because they can’t grow, change, suffer, and die. They just continue doing what they are programmed to do and update themselves according to some very, very simple principles that were locked-in at the beginning of the internet fairly arbitrarily and haphazardly in great geekish enthusiasm to get the information superhighway up and running. (For more on this, check out You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier, which I’m currently reading.) But, being people, we tend to assume that the machines and virtual eyes and ears we encounter have human-like qualities, because the reality is too alienating and scary. It’s more comforting to believe the machines are like us, that the human brain is like a computer too, or our governing principles and assumptions can be fixed and static, that our psychologies can be programmed like software. Because otherwise we are forced to consider the possibility that our lives are governed in very concrete direct ways by forces that frankly aren’t of this world, of the world of human people, that can adapt, reflect, and understand our needs.

Like, you know, the economy, and how no one’s running it? Eesh. It’s especially creepy, because as Augustine once speculated, evil is the absence of good, or, as C.S. Lewis describes horrifically in his science fiction novel Perelandra, the demon-possessed man tempts and torments the hero, Ransom, by calling out “Ransom! Ransom!” and when Ransom finally asks “What?” in irritation, the un-man, as Lewis terms him, always answers, “Nothing.” And then giggles. And then continues the torment for hours so that Ransom cannot sleep. At least in this case, however, Ransom can kill the one man who Satan has possessed. How do you save a whole generation of people, of which I am a member, from our unintentional, currently ideological and psychosocial but nonetheless real and increasingly embodied cybernetics? (Smartphones, anyone?)

Anyway, it’s a little disquieting to think that someday the judicial system may be forced to recognize the rights of viewpoints as though they’re equivalent to the rights of people. This may seem a little paranoid, scifi, or a tangent from the issue of churches at public schools, but I think it is deeply related to what fruit these churches are bearing, what they are revealing about the state of things in this day and age. They’re treating Christianity as though it’s a viewpoint, a point of view, with fixed principles that demand conformity and can sanction the sort of slides and slips on the ethical frontier of privacy and hitherto common-sense separation of personal/public/private spaces that are elsewhere reflected in our “Facebook stalker” culture, and odd expressions of admiration such as “I was just creeping all up on your wall and thought I’d say hi!” when really such information was apparently in plain sight, as though the attention given to a certain piece of public information is what is to be judged, when usually “creepy” behavior has referred to a clear and physical transgression of privacy. Such as, someone actually following you low to the ground: creeping and stalking is a physical, attacking behavior from behind (“the cat stalks the mouse through the high grass”), not seeing or even seeking out someone’s online “face” and reacting internally or externally. That’s something else. Something even, dare I say, positively human, even if it ends badly. One may be scared, terrified even, in a fight or assault, but one is rarely creeped out, a new word, by the way. We get creeped out by the un-manned viewpoints that watch us, which is why the specter of the stalker is the man with a camera hiding in the bushes, and why, when you, the TV detective, find “the shrine” of stolen images in the man’s house, he’s rarely there. The real villain is the wall of images watching you, the truly vacant eyes of a woman watching him when you’re not there, a viewpoint from which no one is viewing, that which will necessarily require of him some nefarious deed within our imaginary and sometimes true narratives of crime and transgression, and why obsession originally, in the middle ages, referred to the condition of a person possessed by a demon.

The use of the childrens’ photographs, their access to these images, and the almost totemic power these images hold for the church-goers and the author of the editorial, therefore, is particularly telling. What could and perhaps should be a straightforward matter of freedom of religion and freedom of speech has become a matter of who can be where and who can see what. Who. It’s not a matter of viewpoint discrimination. It’s a matter of the discrimination and social control of kinds of people and their behavior: who can do what where. People cannot be alienated from their viewpoints! People only have one set of eyes and one brain apiece! Controlling information, whether as an evangelical or as an educator, is not the same thing as doing something good! Or bad!

Morality is silently and not so silently shifting to mean seeing the right thing and reacting the right way, to being an effective and harmonious cloud accessory. People are judged good or bad based on their interpretations and reactions, not their actions, because this brave new world of ours is too cowardly to stop and think about how to develop a positive ethics of viewing, a positive internet ethics, and this laziness is bleeding into every aspect of our lives and creeping us out. Do this, don’t do this, or you’ll look “like an undesirable whatever” from some abstract viewpoint from which no one is viewing, which will then come attack you in some scary way, scary precisely because your bad end is left up entirely to your own imagination. Comport yourselves as though the demons are always watching and as though the angels have left.

The demons are watching, this is true, but so are the angels. They always were, since the human race began imagining things and became human. But that’s all beside the point. The point is to love your neighbor as yourself, and not trouble yourself, overmuch, about the end of the world. Maybe Jesus came to save us cyborgs too.

I wrote an article for the Spring 2010 print issue explaining why To An Unknown God does not have a statement of doctrine. Darren Hsiung has challenged some of the arguments I made in that article, helping me clarify a few thoughts. The exchange also makes me believe it would be worthwhile to publish a post explaining my understanding of what a statement of doctrine is and what its proponents hope it will accomplish. (Again, within the context of explaining why To An Unknown God does not have a statement of doctrine.)

A statement of doctrine, statement of faith, confession of faith, creed, or other similarly-titled document is a summary of the beliefs subscribed to by a particular organization or church. The most famous such creeds (from credo, Latin for “I believe”) are the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. As summaries or explanations of beliefs, creeds may be helpful, but my concern is that they often become something more: a means to stymie discussion and silence opponents.

The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed

The church existed — and flourished — for a long time without the aid of any creeds. The Apostles’ Creed, despite its name, did not originate with the apostles but rather was first formulated around the year 150, several generations later. The Nicene Creed was not formulated until the fourth century.^[1]

The earliest creeds were developed in response to contemporaneous beliefs that were considered heresies. Those creeds were originally baptismal vows intended to distinguish true believers from the heretics. For instance, a close examination of the Apostles’ Creed shows that it was constructed as a reaction to the Marcion and Gnostic heresies, which accounts for many of its particular phrasings and explains why certain statements were chosen for inclusion in the creed.^[2] Likewise, the Nicene Creed was a reaction to Arianism.^[3]

Those gathered at the Nicene Council who opposed the Arians found that they were unable to clearly reject Arianism using only Scripture.^[4] The Arians relied on verses such as Colossians 1:15, John 14:28, and Proverbs 8:22 to argue that Jesus was not God himself but rather was the first created being. Although many of Jesus’ claims about himself do point to his divinity and to the doctrine of the Trinity, nothing in Scripture clearly explains that doctrine. The Nicene Council was nevertheless determined that Arianism had to be soundly and forever rejected. Those at the council therefore considered it necessary to adopt a statement of doctrine that went beyond Scripture.

The Nicene Creed states that Christ is “begotten” of the Father and that he is “of one substance with the Father.” Both of these beliefs were hotly debated before, during, and after the council. For instance, some feared that the Nicene Creed came close to denying the doctrine of the Trinity by proclaiming that Christ was “of one substance” and they instead suggested the phrase “of a similar substance.” Their opponents countered that “of a similar substance” suggested the existence of three gods and thus rejected monotheism.

Even today, there are important controversies about what it means that Jesus is the “Son of God” or “begotten” of the Father. For example, the February issue of Christianity Today reported on the active debate over translations of the Bible that refer to Jesus not as the “Son of God” but as “the Beloved Son who comes (or originates) from God.” The latter translation is more palatable to some Muslims who viscerally reject the notion that God had sex with Mary to give birth to Jesus. Christians, of course, also reject that notion, but do we really understand what it means that Christ is the Son of God? Or could we explain how our conception of “Son of God” is different from the translation “the Beloved Son who originates from God” that Christianity Today reports many Christians have rejected as heretical?

Although many Christians mouth the words in church every Sunday, few could give even a passing explanation of what it means that Christ is “begotten” of and “of one substance” with the Father. I might go so far as to argue that those statements lack meaning except insofar as they were once helpful to declare certain beliefs heretical. Can we humans really presume to describe the substance of God?

As the above examples show, even the earliest confessions were reactionary efforts to delineate between true believers and heretics. I do not object to creeds insofar as they represent attempts to summarize or explain certain Christian doctrines. The problem is that creeds have never been used simply as summaries or explanations — they have consistently been used to exclude, and in that capacity, they have often gained more weight and authority than Scripture itself. Some of the beliefs codified in these creeds are not clearly contained anywhere in Scripture, yet these creeds are used to marginalize and silence those who oppose them — even if the arguments of those opponents are rooted entirely in Scripture. It is to this reality that I object.

The Westminster Standards and a Contemporary Example from the PCA

A significantly longer statement of faith that has achieved particular prominence within certain Protestant denominations is the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Westminster Confession itself runs about 12,000 words, not including the two catechisms, the Shorter and the Larger (together, these documents are referred to as the Westminster Standards). As would be expected of such a long document, it draws significantly more inferences from Scripture and makes more judgments about theology than the much shorter creeds. Yet it is still primarily used as a reactionary document. It was for allegedly violating the principles of the Westminster Standards that Peter Enns was suspended and later dismissed from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.

The Westminster Standards have their roots in a political compromise reached during the English Civil War. In 1643, the parliaments of England and Scotland signed the Solemn League and Covenant. Part of this agreement pledged to “endeavour to bring the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of church-government, confession of faith, form of church-government, [and] directory for worship and catechising.” A group of more than a hundred clerics was assembled by the English Parliament for the purpose of writing a statement of faith that could be agreed to by both the English and the Scots. The underlying purpose of the English Parliament in signing the Solemn League and Covenant was to secure the loyalty of the Scots against Charles I.^[5]

The confession written by the assembled clerics was eventually adopted, with amendments by the English Parliament (including an amendment that followed Parliament’s request for the clerics to add Scripture references to back up their statements). As originally adopted, it declared that the Pope was the Antichrist and that civil rulers have the authority to root out heresy in the church. Of course, it was nonetheless an admirable distillation of many important theological concepts, albeit in much longer form than some of the earlier creeds.

In light of its history, the contemporary reverence some denominations accord the Westminster Standards strikes me as particularly odd. As with other creeds, it has often come to supplant Scripture as the final arbiter of religious disputes. For instance, it was not against Scripture that the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) recently measured the work of theologians such as N.T. Wright, but rather against the Westminster Standards. Although acknowledging that the Westminster Standards are subordinate to Scripture, the committee charged with evaluating N.T.Wright and the Federal Vision theologians reiterated that the Westminster Standards have been adopted by the PCA “as standard expositions of the teachings of Scripture in relation to both faith and practice.” From their treatment of the Westminster Standards, it appears the committee actually viewed those Standards as superseding Scripture, since the report (which was eventually adopted in whole by the PCA General Assembly) used only the Westminster Standards to critique the views of N.T. Wright et al., on its way to concluding that those views were incompatible with the Westminster Standards and were thus not to be taught by pastors in the PCA.

I’d like to take a moment to examine in detail the apparent logic of the leaders of the PCA. They acknowledge that the Westminster Standards are subordinate to Scripture. When some well-respected theologians, however, make sound arguments from Scripture that seem to be at odds with the Westminster Standards (at least as interpreted by one committee — others took issue with their analysis), they instruct the pastors in their denomination not to preach the views of those theologians, warning them that it is their duty “to condemn erroneous opinions which injure the purity or peace of the Church.” Why? Because the views of those theologians disagree with the Westminster Standards, not because they disagree with Scripture – as noted, the committee did not even attempt to address whether the theologies subscribed to by N.T. Wright and the Federal Vision theologians were consistent with Scripture. So, what is subordinate to what in the PCA?

The above incident in the PCA is ironic in light of the fact that the Westminster Confession itself declares: “The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.” (I.10). In other words, the Westminster Confession itself commands that the Westminster Standards are not be used to determine religious controversies. Instead, the Westminster Confession commands that the Bible is to be used.

Conclusion

As I hope the examples above demonstrate, statements of doctrine are often, in practice, used to silence or ostracize opponents. It is because these are the primary uses of creeds and statements of doctrine that I believe they are particularly unsuited for a Christian magazine whose purpose and very name dedicate it to being an open forum for discussing Christianity.

When Paul confronted the Athenians, he stood before an idol dedicated “To An Unknown God” and declared: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” He proceeded to engage the Athenians in dialogue, even quoting their own philosophers and poets. Likewise, we will not silence those with whom we disagree but will rather engage them in conversation, hoping that it may help them, and us, better understand the mysterious gospel that we proclaim.

Footnotes

[1]Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: Volume 1, The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 78–79.

[2]Ibid., 77–78.

[3]Ibid., 188–189.

[4]Ibid., 188.

[5]Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: Volume II, The Reformation to the Present Day (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 204.

My Love Wins reading experience began in the checkout line at the student store. The girl behind the counter asked me, as she rang up my copy, “What’s this book about?” I registered that she had a cross around her neck.

“Well,” I said, “they say the author is going to argue that no one goes to hell at the end. It’s actually pretty controversial, because Rob Bell is an evangelical pastor, not just a liberal or something.”

“Just looking at the back,” she said, her voice rising somewhat, “I mean, I want to know more.” The back of the book has a picture of Rob Bell in profile, wearing a black suit vest and a white dress shirt, with unbuttoned sleeves scrunched up and the collar undone. His head is shaved, his glasses are those same heavy black frames as usual, he is wearing what – at my church in Berkeley – the pastoral staff calls “the Britney mic,” and he is under a spotlight. The rest of the cover fades into black. Beside the figure of Rob Bell is the following text: “‘God loves us./ God offers us everlasting life by grace, freely, through no merit on our part./ Unless you do not respond the right way./ Then God will torture you forever./ In hell.’/ Huh?”

“Oh, yeah, well, it’s pretty talked about,” I responded.

“Okay,” she said, “if you have a problem with your purchase, you have thirty days to return it. And —” she hesitated, “if I’m on shift when you come in, could you tell me more about the book?”

“Okay,” I said.

Commentators, ranging from Mark Driscoll to John Piper to Donald Miller to, well, everyone with a Christian hat, it seems, have been anticipating that Rob Bell was going to make a universalist apology for the non-existence of hell from an evangelical perspective.

Love Wins isn’t that. It’s something far more complicated and far less interesting than that.

I thought about writing a post, when I began reading this book last night, about several different ways of reading Bell’s sermon/poemish/apology thing, but I’m not sure that this text is amenable to that kind of treatment. So this post isn’t a review, it’s not a position, it’s my thoughts after reading. So far.

1. This book took me four hours to read at a leisurely pace. At two hundred pages, it goes down easy. At first, anyway. At first, I found the book pleasurable. I knew what it was, a highly accessible affirmation of God’s grace and ultimate restoration of all things that finally found a way to gloss hell in such a way that it was no longer offensive or surreal. He kinda did this: I mean, really, it was more or less The Great Divorce and maybe “The Weight of Glory” by C.S. Lewis, just more “postmodern” and less well-written. Then I found the book irritating. Then I disagreed with a position he took, and then became even more irritated because later it turned out that he hadn’t actually meant what he meant when he said what I disagreed with, and had in fact just been unclear. Then afterward I felt greatly perturbed and angry, and found more and more to take exception to.

2. For one thing, as a book, as a book-artifact, Love Wins displeases me. I think the cover design is unappealing. Also, I really dislike the font, and the paper quality is terrible. I mean, the paper-grade is hardly better than that of a trade paperback, and this book is priced as a regular hardback. And I really dislike the font, I think, especially because Rob Bell uses a similar font in every single book he’s published. It tends to be a sort of unremarkable but large sans-serif that disturbs the flow of reading because it looks unlike most fonts used in mainstream books, but at the same time is unlovely, so its difference is more an irritant than a point of aesthetic composition of the book as a book artifact, which clearly Rob Bell has always been interested in. As can be seen in the way which he often has the paper in his books gilded on the edges not with… um… gilt, but dyed in bright primary colors. Or the way Sex God is printed on pink paper in pink ink, which really grossed me out when I picked up a copy when he came through Berkeley my sophomore year. I didn’t buy that copy because of the way the book looked, even though I had found his talk interesting, particularly his reliance on Jewish ritual. It was all… cream and pinks and made me feel uncomfortable.

3. This isn’t me nitpicking, or there’s a reason why I’m nitpicking. If this book really were about its message, then I don’t think he would have made all these blatant choices about its packaging that are so clearly supposed to be aesthetic choices. I just don’t know why. I mean, I am completely unmoved by it, except to be kind of irritated and puzzled.

4. Does anyone know what is up with the constant line breaks? It’s like he thinks he’s writing a poem if he puts every new clause on the next line, and will do it at regular intervals, but to be perfectly honest, the cadence and rhythm of doing this is very much lost on me. I read poetry for fun and such, write it occasionally, so usually I pick up on why line breaks like this are supposed to be meaningful or at least have a musicality and affective power to them. Even a reviewer referred to this as a “poetic masterpiece.” How so? I wouldn’t even call this a prose poem, even though there are a few lines that made me stop for a second. Here, I marked a few:

“That’s why wealth is so dangerous: if you’re not careful
you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.” (pg. 44)

“Paul [...] mentions Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom he has ‘handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.’ (Something in me wants to read that in a Darth Vader voice.)” (pg. 89) [This is sort of funny, but he did use “whom” wrong, which is one of the more pretentious of fails. (Or wait, is that the correct usage of “whom”? Because a more pretentious fail, of course, is to incorrectly correct someone’s use of “whom.”) Did HarperOne even care about this book? Did it even get copy-edited?]

Actually, those were the only two lines I marked, and they’re not that good. I mean, not really poetic masterpiece, in my opinion.

5. Speaking of how much HarperOne put into this… there are other odd things about this book. For one thing, Rob Bell took a photograph of some super-tacky, mass-produced painting his grandmother had (because he wanted to make fun of Thomas Kinkade and also, I guess, Dante) and discuss its creepiness. This was sort of interesting, but apparently HarperOne or HarperCollins couldn’t find the painter or the copyright holder, so they just stuck it in with a little blurb under permissions that said “if anyone happens to know what this is, let us know, and we’ll correct it and put it in future editions.” Almost literally, they said that. I mean, maybe it is difficult to pinpoint where a painting like that would come from, but are the standards of attribution in a hardback book from an imprint of a mainstream publishing house really equivalent to those of, I don’t know, Tumblr? (Not to knock Tumblr: it’s just that it’s, you know, Tumblr. And I didn’t pay $22.99 for Tumblr.) Also, in the acknowledgements, Rob Bell thanks some of his friends for giving “perspectives and feedback” on drafts. (He uses the word “perspectives” a lot in this book.) Not suggestions, not criticism, not assistance. Perspectives. Also, there were no end-stops after each of the acknowledgments, as if each person’s contribution were a floating sans-serif thing unto itself in pulpy off-white space.

6. Words he uses a lot: brilliant, beautiful, unnerving, disturbing, multilayed, multi-BLANK, perspectives, streams, intricate, “love wins,” “Which is it?”, here, now, mechanism, etc. He uses a lot of adjectives. I wanted to take him aside at the end and say, “you know, just because you repeat a set of adjectives about the thing you are talking about, that doesn’t necessarily mean that what you are talking about corresponds to those adjectives.” For example, I’m not sure the gospels are beautiful and brilliant, or that the biblical Jesus is either of those things. This comes up a lot in Christian contexts, “beautiful Jesus.” Why exactly is Jesus beautiful? I was under the impression that he was sort of uncultured, short, and unattractive. I think this actually kind of bothered people at the time when he claimed to be the Messiah. Didn’t add up.

7. This book doesn’t particularly add up, either. For one thing, I found myself highly confused as to how extensively Rob Bell reads. There are no footnotes, which I guess is okay for this kind of thing, but I found myself writing in the margins: “Hegel, Hegel, René Girard, Donald Miller, Buddhism?, that sacramental theologian who wrote For the Life of the World because he also repeats the phrase “for the life of the world” a lot when speaking of the Eucharist, Hegel, Talmud?, Marx, Jean Baudrillard?, Huh?” But mostly Hegel, or a highly simplified Hegel, flavor of Hegel, which made me wonder, “is this guy dumbing his ideas down, or is he just sort of picking up on some ambient intellectual vibe, or am I just really reading into this too much?” This is particularly confusing because at the end of the book, he suggests for further reading Tim Keller, C. S. Lewis, and N. T. Wright among others (but not many others), who are all fairly vanilla sorts of Christian writers. Did he do this in order to shore up his evangelical street cred to make his controversial book somehow not controversial? And if so, is he not aware of how this book is being sold in the first place? As controversial? Is he really suggesting he came to this position via Timothy Keller?

8. Also, I didn’t miss the fact that Bell did not gender God. He gendered Christ, obviously, but did not use a pronoun to refer to God at all. This is sort of cool, but it’s so sneaky, and annoys me.

9. I find it rather telling that I simply cannot engage with his central argument. I’ve written seven paragraphs on style, technique, and execution, and I am simply loath to actually try and say something about his argument. I keep on thinking, any number now, that I’ll get to it, but really I just want to criticize this book as a book and as a piece of writing. I want to find his little distinctions and choices and point out how I think they fall short or make me feel weird. This is, actually, exactly what Rob Bell does in this book to the dominant evangelical narrative of heaven and hell. He introduces doubt, problematizes a totalizing hermeneutic by pointing out inconsistencies in scripture, reframes and redeploys all sorts of concepts, such as hell itself, so that… well, it’s just hard to really hold on to any one strand of thought, which he says is his intent. At the same time, his final word is that we should trust God – who at one point he actually compares to The Force in Star Wars, by the way – and God’s love for us. That’s nice, but after having read the book, I don’t feel trusting. I feel uncomfortable, because his whole approach was to knock his reader off-center to get them to come to a new perspective, any new perspective, as along as it’s different from the one they already hold. I don’t know what that has to do with trust.

10. I think what really bothers me about this book is that the questions he is addressing are serious questions I want an answer to, that I want engaged with in great depth. And he gives slick, unequivocal answers and gives me little evidence as to why I should trust them. And that bothers me.

In conclusion, I leave with you a question: Do they have better fonts in hell?

Left to my own psychological devices, I often find myself leaning either towards feelings of inferiority or feelings of superiority, in comparison with others. It is a rare but blissful moment when I feel balanced and completely at peace with who I am, who God made me to be, without the need to compare myself to someone else. Well, a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to feel both inferior and superior at the same moment.

Every morning, I go for a swim at a nearby pool. The earlier I arrive, the better chance I have to get a whole lane to myself. But as I arrived late on the day in question, the pool was full; I was forced to share a lane. Huffing and puffing in frustration, I descended into the water. Mind you, this pool is mostly utilized by those falling into the elderly category, so even though I am no Olympic swimmer, I usually am the fastest guppy there. On this day however, there was one other young girl, though she was also very slow. But she was beautiful. And since she was in a swimsuit, as we all were, her outfit didn’t leave much to the imagination – she really was exquisite. Immediately, I felt a jolt of insecurity. I mean, I’m there to swim, not to show off, and so I’m sure I look pretty ridiculous with my violet swim cap and rainbow suit (hand-me-down, courtesy of my mother). Anyhow, I suppressed the feeling, and began to freestyle. At least I’m faster than her, I thought, subconsciously.

There were three of us there in the lane: me, the beauty, and a woman of age (and I mean a lot of age, to put it delicately). The lane was very narrow, and so it was very hard to avoid contact as we passed each other. I had to choose between being kicked or swimming into the wall to avoid human touch. I would have had to slow down my pace to let someone pass without bruising.

Yet I refused to alter my routine. I needed to swim 1000 meters (50 lengths) in 25 minutes, or someone was gonna get hurt (probably me)! My frustration grew with each stroke, as I had to continually (and uncomfortably) rotate my head to check if one of them was in my way. Each time I passed one of them, my subconscious would utter either ah, what does this old lady think she’s doing! or why does the prom queen have to come to this pool? The older woman was a bit on the large side, so I resented the fact that she left me so little room. And the young girl, in contrast, had such beautiful legs, that I was full of envy every time we crossed paths. Then, there were times when they were both at the end of the lane, leaving me no room to touch the wall and keep my momentum on the round-about! So I would instead stand up, turn around, and start flopping towards the other side, obviously demonstrating my anger.

I realized though, as I neared my 1000th meter, that the reason I am so much happier when I have the whole lane to myself, is because I don’t have to share or accommodate anyone else. I can swim as sloppily as I want, without having to consider anyone but myself. But instead of getting that from the get-go, I harbored anger towards them both, feeling superior to the elder, because I’m younger and stronger, and feeling inferior to the young lass, because she was so beautiful, even in a swim cap.

It’s interesting how, often, we are more prone to sin when in the context of others. There is no opportunity to compete when we are alone, but in community it is so easy to feel either inferior or superior, and we hold so much at stake in our egos, that we forget about God, that He created us as we are, and that it is not arbitrary that I look as goofy as I do in a swim cap.

I read an article, or most of an article that a commenter on my first post suggested about Rob Bell’s new book and Christian universalism, and it is twenty pages long. It suggests that Love Wins is rightly understood as an apology for Christian universalism. Whatever that is. This writer’s criticism is based on the assumption, it seems to me, that eventually a person’s beliefs must wear the appropriate label. Christian universalism actually has a history as a religious sect, and one with, you know, traditions, and I’m not sure how a pastor who does not personally participate in that tradition can be labeled as an exemplar of that tradition. Unless religious orientation really is that abstract and open to such disembodied asignations. In which case, Rob Bell is as “orthodox” as this writer is, by this writer’s own standards. I also have no idea what this book is like from this twenty-page “review” as the reviewer is more concerned with pointing out how wrong Rob Bell’s theology is.

This post is not going to be very long, and it’s not intended to be all that formal, or to take any kind of extreme or even fully articulated position. I think I’ll be posting my reponses to this book (once I get it) and the controversy surrounding it for a while, and probably with less sarcasm, though maybe not. I have a simple question I want to pose to whoever reads this. I don’t know if it’s too simple or not, but it’s something I wonder a lot:

Orthodoxy means going the right way, and heterodoxy means going a different way. It has to do with being “in” a certain current of thought within a certain group of people, or being “out” of it. It has to with being part of a group, or being outside a group (or part of another group, vaguely designated as, for example, Christian universalism).

So my question is, what’s so particularly Christian about that?

Over the past year, I have written several articles and blog posts encouraging Christians to think more carefully about stewardship when they make donations. (See here and here.) Unfortunately, my writing on this subject has occasionally been misunderstood. A few readers have also confessed to me that they do not understand the urgency of stewardship, that they do not see why it is so important.

For these reasons, I am going to make yet another attempt to explain why I think stewarding our donations carefully is important and why I think it is imperative that all Christians, even those who are only able to give a little, make an effort to investigate whether the organizations to which they give actually use their donations wisely.

I think there are several reasons why some have struggled to understand my arguments.

First, many of us feel that our own contributions are so insignificant that our influence is but a “drop in the bucket.” These thoughts make us feel powerless and voiceless. We may even believe that we are excused from culpability for donating unwisely: after all, what difference could we really make?

The problem is that if every donor thinks this way, no one will ever investigate what a charity does with its contributions, and charities that misuse their money will never be held accountable. I hope we can agree that there are ministries that do misuse contributions. For instance, in recent years, there have been news stories about a pastor who drives a $350,000 Bentley and receives a salary of almost $1 million per year. Or about another pastor who receives a similar salary and owns a private jet. In addition to their financial excesses, one of those pastors has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and the other of taking illegal “kick-backs” from a housing program associated with his church. If no one did any investigation before making donations, such ministries might continue to flourish while those whose leaders are so committed to their missions that they live in poverty so that they can serve the poor might receive nothing.

On the other hand, if all donors believed that their voices did matter, donors could profoundly influence how organizations steward their contributions. As I have suggested, donors who discover that an organization does not use its money wisely should consider several courses of action:

• Write a letter to the organization expressing concerns about how it uses its resources.
• Spread the word. Write a blog post informing others about how that organization uses its money. Encourage others to also express their concerns directly to the organization’s leadership.
• Withhold donations in favor of other organizations that make better use of such money.

Over time, if all donors followed these steps, organizations that misuse donations would either reform themselves or cease existing. At the same time, organizations that steward their donations well would flourish, bearing much fruit for the Kingdom of God.

Even if the ways some organizations “misuse” contributions are less extreme that the examples I give above, I still think Christians should follow these suggestions when giving. These suggestions will help keep organizations accountable to their real missions: serving God by meeting the unmet physical and spiritual needs of a hurting world and thus spreading the gospel. When we consider that almost 3 billion people in this world live on less than two dollars a day, we realize that small decisions about how organizations use their money really do matter. Even several dollars can make the difference between life and death for people who are living in extreme poverty. Likewise, small amounts of money can go a long way toward spreading the gospel in such areas.

Second, some misread my arguments because they do not understand the concept of “opportunity cost.” Opportunity cost is a term borrowed from economics to describe a simple concept that we all apply every day, whether we are conscious of it or not. The basic idea is that we all have a limited amount of resources (time, money, etc.). Whenever we use a given resource, we are forfeiting opportunities to use that resource to do something else. The opportunity cost of a given choice is the next-best alternative that we pass up in order to make that choice.

For instance, think about what you did last Saturday night. What would have done had you not been doing what you actually did? The answer to that question is the opportunity cost of doing what you did. So, if you watched a movie instead of going to a party, going to the party was the opportunity cost of watching the movie.

This concept applies when we think about donating money because the choice we make is not simply a choice about whether or not to give to a certain organization. Rather, the real choice we often make is whether to give to Organization A or to Organization B. Therefore, it is necessary that we not just ask whether Organization A does some good. We must instead ask: is giving to Organization A a better use of my money than giving to Organization B (or C, or D, etc.)? This question is unavoidable: every time we give to one organization, we are forfeiting the opportunity to give to another. There is no way around this fact.

As I have argued before, Jesus gives us a clear command that we are to think wisely about how we use our money. ^[1] (See Matthew 25:14-30 and Luke 19:12-27.) I therefore believe it is sinful to blindly give to an organization without conducting at least a cursory investigation of that organization’s ministry. Such an investigation should include questions about how the organization spends its money, what its mission is, how it accomplishes that mission, how central its mission is to the gospel, who its leaders are, etc.

Third, I think a few have objected to the application of the principles I advise because of a gut reaction: well, I know this ministry, I’ve seen that it does good in the world. For instance, I have criticized Franklin Graham for taking a salary of $1.2 million. People may object to my criticism of Franklin Graham because they have been to his crusades or participated in Operation Christmas Child. I’m not denying that such ministries may do some good. I’m saying: let’s help them do more with the resources they have.

How? Well, the pressure that the Charlotte Observer put on Franklin Graham led him to cut his compensation in half and to restructure other parts of his ministries’ finances, including eliminating such wasteful expenditures as spending $1 million per year on lawn care. That’s a lot of money that the Charlotte Observer freed up so that it could actually go to the real mission of those ministries. If Franklin Graham’s organizations now spend $900,000 less on lawn care and $600,000 less paying him, then they have $1.5 million to use for their ministries. It’s as if the Charlotte Observer gave the ministries a check for $1.5 million.

On the other hand, if the Charlotte Observer had been unsuccessful at persuading Franklin Graham to spend his organizations’ money better, donors may have decided to give to other organizations instead. Eventually, that financial pressure may have influenced Franklin Graham to make the same decisions. In the meantime, those donations could have gone to other organizations that were already devoting much more of their money to support the same work. Either way, more money would end up going to the real missions that presumably motivate people to give to Franklin Graham in the first place.

I hope that this post facilitates an understanding of why I think stewardship is important and how we call all take part in holding Christian organizations accountable for the money we give.

In case my argument is still unclear, I have also provided an example here of how these suggestions might work in practice. If you still have questions after reading my example, please post a comment.

Footnotes

[1]In Matt. 25:14-30 and Luke 19:12-27, a master entrusts his servants with money, goes away, and then comes back and asks them for an accounting. In each case, the master rewards those servants who have used well the money entrusted to them, earning more money. These two parables are often taught in churches, typically with the admonition that we must use our gifts to serve God. Although this teaching is surely faithful to Jesus’ intent, it misses out on the original, more direct application: we are to be careful what we do with “our” money, which is not really ours at all — it is God’s.

What follows is a simple example that I hope will illustrate the good that can come from applying basic principles of stewardship to our decisions about what Christian organizations to support. I explain those basic principles of stewardship here. Although the example seems very simplified, the real world works in much the same way, albeit in a slower and more complicated manner.

Facts

Mary lives in a simple world. She is a citizen of the country Red, which has a population of 10,000 people. The average income of people in Red is $50,000 per year. Mary makes a salary of $50,000. Mary is a Christian, as are one quarter of the people who live in Red.

There is one other country in the world: Blue. The population of Blue is 100,000 people, and most of the people who live in Blue are very poor. About 95 percent of the population in Blue makes less than $100 per year. Many are in constant risk of starvation and lack the money to afford simple medical treatments. About one quarter of the people who live in Blue are Christians.

There are four Christian ministries in the entire world: Matthew, Mark, Amos, and Obadiah.

Matthew and Mark devote their ministries primarily to evangelism. They share the gospel with people in both Red and Blue. In addition to evangelism, Amos and Obadiah also provide food and medicine to the people in Blue who are at risk of dying because they need food and basic medical care.

Each of the organizations had a total budget of $200,000 last year, and this is how they spent it:

Matthew

Salaries: $100,000 to Matthew; $50,000 split between two assistants.
Programs: $25,000 to putting on 5 “crusades” that each drew 100 people.
Overhead: $15,000 for office space and $10,000 for travel expenses.

Mark

Salaries: $25,000 to Mark; $75,000 split between three assistants.
Programs: $85,000 to putting on 34 “crusades” that each drew 100 people.
Overhead: $5,000 for office space and $10,000 for travel expenses.

Amos

Salaries: $25,000 to Amos; $50,000 split between two assistants who work in Red; $25,000 split between 25 assistants who work in Blue, where the cost of living is much lower.
Programs: $85,000 towards food and medicine for people in Blue.
Overhead: $5,000 for buildings and $10,000 for travel expenses.

Obadiah

Salaries: $75,000 to Obadiah; $60,000 split between two assistants who work in Red; $15,000 split between 10 assistants who work in Blue, where the cost of living is much lower.
Programs: $25,000 towards food and medicine for people in Blue.
Overhead: $15,000 for buildings and $10,000 for travel expenses.

Mary wants to spread the gospel to non-Christians in both Red and Blue, and she also wants to help many of the poor people who live in Blue. Mary has 9 Christian friends who each make $50,000 per year. Last year, Mary and her Christian friends each gave away $10,000: $2,500 to each ministry. In other words, Mary and her 9 Christian friends gave, in total, $25,000 to each Christian ministry.

Mary only recently discovered how each of the Christian ministries spends its money. Mary’s friends still do not know what each Christian ministry does with its money.

Issue

How should Mary donate $10,000 that she wants to give away this year? What, if anything, should she say to her friends?

Answer

Mary should give $5,000 to Mark and $5,000 to Amos. She should write a letter to Matthew and Obadiah explaining why she is not giving them a donation this year and encouraging them to emulate the careful stewardship of Mark and Amos.

Mary should also tell her friends how the four ministries use their money and try to convince them to also give all of their donations to Mark and Amos and to write letters to Matthew and Obadiah explaining why they are giving to Mark and Amos instead.

Analysis

If Mary follows the suggested course of action and successfully convinces her friends to follow her lead, and if everything else stays the same, Mark and Amos will each receive $225,000 in donations this year, and Matthew and Obadiah will each receive $175,000.

Because Mark and Amos use their money more efficiently, they will be able to put more money towards the goals of evangelism and helping the poor people in Blue. The additional amount that Mark and Amos devote to such work will more than make up for the amount that Matthew and Obadiah lose.

Thus, in the end, more people will hear the gospel and more people will receive needed food and medical supplies because Mary chose to give her money to Mark and Amos instead of Matthew and Obadiah and because she convinced her friends to do the same.

Chances are, Matthew and Obadiah will do some soul-searching as a result of receiving 12.5 percent less in donations. The letters from Mary and her friends will explain why they received less money and tell them what happened to it. It is likely that Matthew and Obadiah, especially if they are led by an independent board of directors instead of by Matthew and Obadiah alone, will decide to trim their expenses and make their operations more efficient.

Therefore, in the following year, they will devote a higher percentage of their money to their core mission, and even more individuals will hear the gospel and receive food and medical treatment.