The Altar Call, A Thing of Troubling Beauty

Roswell UMC

All your anxiety, all your care,
Bring to the mercy seat, leave it there,
Never a burden He cannot bear,
Never a friend like Jesus!
"All Your Anxiety," by Edward H. Joy

The above chorus exhorts its hearers to come to the "mercy seat" and leave their burdens there with Jesus. To many it will sound at best obscure and at worst completely foreign, but to me, a person raised in the Salvation Army, it is the very sound of my childhood.

"All Your Anxiety" is the kind of song that gets sung during an "altar call;" it encourages people to step out of their ordinary experience and come to have a special moment with Christ. That, basically, is what an altar call is: an invitation to a special encounter with God. The altar call can be an instrument of manipulation and even cruelty, but at its best, it can also be a thing of profound beauty. I have not always recognized this.

To explain in a little more detail: an altar call, or "invitation," is a portion of a church service, usually coming at the end of the service after an extended period of exhortatory preaching, in which the preacher invites his or her audience to come forward to the front of the room to pray at an altar.¹ The altar can be an object specifically designed for the purpose (say, a large block of wood suitable for kneeling around), or it can be something more ad hoc, like a simple row of chairs. The point is to have something to kneel at and rest one's head and arms against in a praying position, and to have it placed in front of the congregation.

The altar call always takes place during an extended period of singing and music. During breaks between songs, the musicians continue playing in the background while the preacher resumes his or her exhortations, encouragements, and appeals to the congregation, often inviting again and again anyone who was too afraid or stubborn to leave their seat at the first invitation.

The purpose of all this is to (1) invite people to convert to Christianity by "accepting Jesus into your heart" and (2) to offer an opportunity for Christians to either recommit themselves to Christ or pray in a special setting about a deep concern. In both cases, others will typically come to pray with those who come to the altar.

The altar call is a holdover from a tradition that still survives in parts of American Christianity, the camp meeting.

Camp meetings originated on the American frontier as a way of bringing church to sparsely populated areas that couldn't support a church building or a full-time minister. Instead of regular Sunday services, folks would plan to gather and set up camp in a specific place and time, where one or more itinerant preachers would show up and preach an extended series of sermons, typically lasting for several days. There would be a great deal of music and prayer and religious fervor, often to a degree that modern Americans might find strange or uncomfortable:

"Revival" by James Sturm, pg. 15, from James Sturm's America

The altar call originated in this setting, though it has persisted beyond it even as the American frontier disappeared and the camp meeting became a rarity, serving as it does now a much less dire need (most populated areas in the States these days having enough people to sustain stable religious communities of some kind). Unsurprisingly, the altar call still carries with it some of the camp meeting's faults, namely a certain irrational emotionalism and an over-reliance on the rhetorical skill of the preacher.

At times, the altar call can be an aggravation, or worse. If part or all of the congregation does not feel convinced by the preacher's message, or is simply not in the correct frame of mind, the altar call can be a hassle; some preachers have difficulty accepting that no one really wants to come forward, and will drag the invitation out for a while just to make sure, or to try to save face. (Making an altar call that no one responds to can be a little embarrassing.) Sometimes preachers play on the listeners' fears, usually of negative outcomes in the afterlife should they fail to accept Jesus,² in order to get people to come forward.

What's more, sometimes an altar call just is not the appropriate thing: I once was in a church service at which it was announced in the middle of the sermon that one of the congregation's members had died quite suddenly (an accidental death). The preacher chose that moment to make an extended altar call, but no one was in the mood for (re)committing their life to Jesus; we really all just wanted to go home and be sad over our friend's passing.

At the same time, however, the altar call carries on some of the best elements of the camp meeting with it, too. Camp meetings were a time of fellowship, bonding, and community for people who otherwise might not see each other much, or who might never even have met otherwise. The altar call preserves this communal element by creating a time in which members of a church body can come and pray over their concerns together, to forge special sacred bonds with God and one another in prayer at the front of a community of supportive, prayerful witnesses and friends.

Camp meetings and altar calls will likely strike many as holdovers from an embarrassing time in American religion, in which an ignorant, backward religious culture sowed the seeds that would grow into the worst excesses of modern American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. While there may be some truth to this, it misses an important fact: the camp meeting, for all its excesses, was a tool for great good. The best example certainly lies in that most daring of nineteenth-century movements, abolitionism.

Wikimedia

As Marilynne Robinson puts it in her essay "Who Was Oberlin?", the abolitionists of the early 1800s "embraced unpopular, deeply controversial opinions. There was such a powerful stigma attached to abolitionism before the Civil War, and after it as well—what fanatics these people must have been to hate slavery so much they wanted to put an end to the institution altogether!—that to this day it is treated as at best a dubious project."³ While ending may slavery seem like the obvious moral choice to most people today, it is wise to bear in mind the weight of history and social pressure that the abolitionists were up against in the 19th century. Slavery of one kind or another is as old as human civilization itself, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of the prosperity and happiness of the abolitionists' neighbors would have rested on the economic benefits provided by an enslaved population. To the people of their day, the abolitionists were viewed the same way one might view a group that was trying to end the existence of marriage, or money, to name two equally venerable institutions. They were, in a word, radicals.

They were also certainly in the right, which should only serve to enhance our view of their courage. The abolitionists worked tirelessly and, in extreme cases, even fought and died in order to end a barbarous and inhuman practice. They successfully spread the message of freedom and justice from place to place and state to state, moving west to settle and create states of the union that would be free from slavery. The key motivation of the abolitionist movement was a Christian belief in equality of people before God. And the main tool by which the message of abolitionism was spread to the frontier was none other than the camp meeting, complete with altar calls during which people would affirm their commitment to the cause of abolition.⁴

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I have not experienced many altar calls in the last few years; my current church does not employ them. There was a time when I would have called them at best unnecessary and at worst actively harmful to the faith—what use, I wondered, was all this focus on emotional conversion experiences?

I have since circled back round to appreciation, however. The altar call, when done appropriately, when the congregation is ready, when the Spirit of God is moving, can be a special, I dare say sacred, time in the life of the Christian. To quote another Salvation Army tune:

When God comes near,
It is a special moment. 
He calms my spirit,
He takes away each fear. 
Oh such an hour, 
Of sacred, special friendship:
Such is the time,
When God comes near.

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1. In Salvation Army parlance, the altar is often called a "mercy seat," a lovely Old Testament reference which hearkens back to William Tyndale's beautiful, though illegal, English Bible translation. Hence the reference to "mercy seat" in the song at the beginning of this post.
2. Hell, in other words.
3. Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, pg. 176.
4. I will note here that "the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women's rights were strongly associated in the period before the Civil War;" Robinson also says of Charles Finney, an influential revivalist preacher of the era who serves as her primary example in writing about this period, "Charles Finney was a great reformer. His two signature causes were the abolition of slavery and the enhancement of the status of women." Both quotes ibid., pg. 170. When I Was a Child is a fantastic book, by the by.

Give to Everyone Who Asks of You

For two years immediately after finishing college, I served in an AmeriCorps program with a group of 100+ other young adults. They were a bright, energetic, and above all else, idealistic group of people. "Idealism" was literally in the job description, and it was a principle that came up daily as a part of the organizational culture.

(I say this to show that the conversation that follows does not involve any cynical, jaded souls, but two people who cared deeply about and worked to improve the lives of others.)

One day during this time, I was at the office with a friend, and conversation turned toward giving money to people who begged on the street. I expressed some ambivalence about it; "It's hard to know what the money is going toward, and it might be better in general to give to charity," I mused.

My friend, on the other hand, stated that he thought it was wrong. Not questionable, not a gray area: wrong. He pointed out that many people begging on the street suffer from addiction to harmful substances; he felt it was his responsibility to not feed these addictions by giving away money that could possibly be spent on substances to abuse.

I have no memory of whether I responded with any kind of counterargument. But I have done a great deal of thinking about conversation since.

Eventually, I concluded that I had been wrong. And that my friend had been wrong, too.

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"When the Bible refers to the poor, I think of those who are downtrodden emotionally or romantically, not those who are poor financially."
— Bible Students Say.. (@BibleStdntsSay) April 7, 2014

Any Christian argument against giving to the needy is going to run up against a number of, to put it mildly, strong arguments from scripture pointing in the exact opposite direction. Perhaps the most famous and wrenching is a parable Jesus tells, in which he depicts himself reprimanding a group of people at the end of time, saying "You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me." And they ask Jesus in turn, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?" And he tells them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." When we refuse to give to the poor, in other words, we refuse Jesus himself.

More so even than this image—Jesus, destitute and in need of my help—the scripture that I am mentally confronted with whenever I refuse money to a beggar is the direct command* Jesus issues to his followers: "Give to everyone who asks of you."

It's such a simple command: Just give. Don't think. Don't judge. Don't worry. Give.

And, simple as it is, it can be quite hard to actually do.

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As was mentioned, one obstacle to giving to the homeless is the fear that it will feed addiction. "It's a waste of money," "It does more harm than good," etc.

A few months ago, I read an article, written by a real, live, homeless person, that altered my view of addiction and homelessness. I'll let his words speak what I can't really do justice to:

I've coined a phrase for the kind of sleep you get on the street: "the one-eyed sleep of the homeless." When you sleep in public—well hidden though you may be—anyone can walk up on you in the middle of the night. It may be another homeless person looking for a good place to sleep. Or one of the nighttime criminals who beat the homeless and steal from them. Or the police, looking to move you out of  your spot. You never know what to expect, and it makes sleep difficult. Sometimes I'll see a homeless person dead asleep in the middle of the day on the sidewalk along some busy thoroughfare, but I don't know how they do it. Unless they've simply collapsed from exhaustion. Or maybe they're drunk or high.

Alcohol and drugs do play a big part in street life. I've tried to stay away from drugs and have succeeded for the most part. Drink, however, has been a different story. We all have our poisons, something that helps carry us through, that gives us pleasure, whether good for us or not. But when you're homeless, you definitely need something to take the edge off being exposed, every minute of every day. It's difficult to explain this to someone who has never had to live outdoors in the midst of several thousand people roaring around them at all hours. ("Homeless in the City," Theodore Walter, emphasis added)

Substance abuse is a coping strategy for the homeless, who deal with unbearable quantities of stress. In giving someone money, I trust that they're going to use it to get what they feel they need to keep going one more day, even if that includes substances that may not be good for them in the long run. They know their needs better than I do. I remind myself that if the recipient of my money is suffering from addiction, my money may help keep them from feeding that addiction in more dangerous ways, like theft or prostitution. Above all else, I remind myself of Jesus' commands: to give to the one who asks, and also to judge not lest I be judged by the same standard—how often, after all, have I spent money on things that are not healthy for me?

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For me, the other major obstacle to giving is more selfish: I tend to worry that I am being conned somehow. I know I have been conned out of money with a slick story at times, and it's a terrible feeling.

But what this feeling boils down to is pride. I get mad that someone fooled me into handing over my hard-earned money after I hear a made-up story. Which, when I think about it, is essentially what I do every time I go see a movie or buy a novel. Even if the story coming out of the stranger on the street is marketed a bit more aggressively or is somewhat less entertaining than I'd like, no story I ever hear is going to be worse than A Rat's Tale, a movie that features marionette rat puppets and terrible rat puns like "aloe verat"** and which is, I can assure you, totally real and not made up, because my sisters and I sat through the whole thing in a movie theater as children.

However little the recipient may seem to need or deserve my money, I remind myself when handing over my cash that it is unlikely that a successful person with access to steady work is going to be out on the street begging. If someone asks for money, there is a high likelihood that they need some, no matter the way they go about asking.

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Last year, I decided to try out the traditional Lenten discipline of almsgiving.† I made a conscious effort to always have cash somewhere I could get it easily on my person, and anytime I saw someone begging or was approached by someone asking for money, I had some to give. Each day, I relieved myself of some of my cash by placing it in a different pocket, and told myself it was no longer mine: I was simply carrying it for the next person I met who needed it. I found this practice to be such a relief to my anxieties over giving that I have never stopped since. I recommend it to all who would take seriously Jesus' command to give.

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*This command is found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. The first half of the command in each version is essentially identical, and the second half somewhat amusingly demonstrates the differences between the two authors—Mathew has a tendency to soften Jesus' more extreme social teachings in Luke (or perhaps it's the other way around?); see, for another example, the contrast between the Beatitudes in each. 
**Not only is "aloe verat" a real, live, terrible rat pun from this film, it is in fact the MacGuffin that drives the whole plot.
†I will admit that in writing this post, I worried about Jesus' command to give to the needy in secret. I actually kept my Lenten discipline to myself for a long time, and only told someone about it when it would have required a lie to keep it secret, at which point it seemed like I might be taking the whole secrecy thing a bit far.

Photos:
1. Chris Sampson
2. Edouard Manet, "Beggar with Duffel Coat" - This is one of my favorite pieces of art at Chicago's Art Institute; it's one of a pair of portraits that Manet painted in which he portrays beggars as noble philosophers.

Becoming an Evolutionist

"One might say that whereas the Stoic and Josephus reason like contemporary advocates of Intelligent Design, inferring a supranatural power from the symmetries (or, in Josephus's case, the asymmetries) in nature, Jubilees and Philo speak of a self-revealing God who controls nature but is not readily or fully inferable from nature alone. If nothing else, this issues a caution about scientific arguments developed for or against the existence of God. For the God therewith affirmed or denied may not be the God of Abraham."

Inheriting Abraham, Jon D. Levenson, pg. 131 (emphasis added)

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A few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a conservative Christian friend who wanted to pick my brain on some religious issues we disagree about. As I skimmed the message before preparing to dig in and prepare my arguments, I noticed that there, nestled down in the middle of it, was a word I hadn't seen in a long time, a word my friend was applying to me: "evolutionist." As in, the opposite of a "creationist." And seeing the word gave me pause. Am I an evolutionist? And if so, how did I become one?

As a kid, I was never all that invested in a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. My parents were pastors (and not fundamentalist ones) so I heard too much exegesis and application of the Bible to really think that all of it could be understood from its plain sense alone. In particular, I never learned to think of the six days of creation in Genesis as a literal fact. For one thing, it seemed to conflict with what I knew from my books about dinosaurs and outer space; for another, I was well aware that there were people who thought of it and the rest of Genesis in non-literal terms.

I was, however, very invested in the idea of Creation, that God was the creator of the universe, of life, and especially of humanity. So I was open to persuasion on the matter of just how Genesis was to be interpreted. I remember being around eight years old and picking up a creation science book in my church's nursery/playroom, which was devoted almost entirely to providing evidence that people and dinosaurs co-existed. As a huge dinosaur fan I was, of course, totally blown away.  Thanks in no small part to a dearth of critical thinking skills, I remained convinced for years that ancient legends about dragons were describing real encounters with dinosaurs. (Also, that the T. rex had sharp teeth for eating pineapples, not meat, because creation science.)

Wouldn't this be great? This would totally be great.

While this conviction wore off eventually, a new one sprang up in its place. Sometime during my teenage years, I encountered Darwin's Black Box, a book by Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe. In the book, Behe lays out a case against the evolutionary origins of certain biological structures on the grounds of irreducible complexity; in essence, he argues that no one has been able to explain how these things arose by evolution, therefore, they didn't. Today I tend to think of this as the creationist version of Bill O'Reilly claiming that You Can't Explain how tides work,* but at the time I was enormously engaged by the idea that there was a real, live scientist (Behe is a biochemist) who had found physical proof of Creation.

Three things eventually changed my mind. The first was, of all things, Catholicism. As a student at a Catholic high school, I was subjected to various classes under the heading of "religion" (barf, amirite?), including a class on the Bible.** I learned in class that the position of the Catholic church was, surprisingly, that evolution is pretty legit. While I remained unconvinced, I was intrigued that Catholics took a less conservative position on the matter than many American Protestants.

The second thing was college. Not so much listening to professors extoll the virtues of evolutionary theory (though that played a small part), but having a chance to discuss my ideas with a friend who actually studied biology. I brought up irreducible complexity to her, wondering what her perspective would be, and she told me that it was not considered legitimate science! In fact, she had major issues with the way the arguments about it had been advanced, and thought that the whole Intelligent Design movement stood on extremely shaky ground.

I was shocked. I started researching Intelligent Design and Michael Behe in the college library, and I discovered that my friend was correct: irreducible complexity had been rejected and discredited as mainstream scientific theory. I was all set to do what humans normally do when confronted with evidence that contradicts a strongly held belief, namely, do everything I could to strengthen said belief. What stopped me was the third thing: another conversation.

I had started to dig in to defend my position on Intelligent Design, checking out library books and brooding about the issues at stake, when I happened into a conversation on the subject with one of my mentors at church. "What do you think about evolution?" I asked, preparing to hear him affirm my stance on the subject, or something like it. "It doesn't matter," he said. My mentor explained that he was a Christian, he believed in God, in Christ, in salvation and freedom from sin and death. The exact terms of how the world came to be were irrelevant to those beliefs; no theory of biology was going to do anything to confirm or refute his belief in a loving God, because that God stood outside of such things.

Thankfully, this broke my resolve, and I did not spend months, years, or a lifetime trying to use science to prove that God, or Creation, is a thing. What's more, today I can pursue any interest I may have in evolutionary biology or related fields, as I would not have been otherwise. Because of two conversations and a high school class, I can read Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Pinker with delight instead of tension or anger. Because a few people took the time to speak gently to me, I can get excited about new research into genetics or paleontology. Because I became an "evolutionist," I was set free.

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Like most liberal Christians, I love the Bible. I really love it. I spent all of last year reading it, and now I love it even more. But loving the Bible means taking it seriously; and taking it seriously means trying to read it as honestly as I can.

An honest reading of the Bible can reveal the truth of Creation and God's care for it, without insisting that the Bible has all the historical details of Creation. For me, an honest reading of the Bible includes research about the cultures it was written in and the historical events that took place during its composition. It includes hard thinking, praying, and discernment about what needs to be taken in its plain sense, at the literal level, and what has value on other levels. And that discernment should be based not on my instincts about what is right, but on external principles that can guide me and other Christians.

One of these principles is this: when interpreting the Bible, take into account what humans learn about our world through careful study. This includes not only the careful study of the natural world, which has yielded the theory of evolution, but also the study of human history, which has shown that some parts of the Bible record historical details accurately, and that others seem to have been written not to convey exact history, but messages about historical events or instructive stories about certain historical periods.

At the heart of this principle is Genesis 1, in which God creates the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals—all of which God declares to be "good"—and last of all, God creates human beings, declaring the Creation that has been completed with them to be "very good." Creation is good, and humankind is good, and studying ourselves and Creation should also be good, because such study can tell us more about their origins in the ultimate Good. If we learn new facts from studying ourselves and our world, this principle implies, should they not be read as a complement to, rather than a contradiction of, the truths found in our Bibles?

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*Okay, I confess that I actually think it's the creationist version of Insane Clown Posse asking F@#&ing Magnets, How Do They Work?, but I was uncomfortable saying so in the body of this post. Now you know, O footnote reader.
**This was actually a pretty good class, at least in terms of shaping my views of scripture going into adulthood: it was also the first place I encountered the documentary hypothesis and other historical criticism of the Bible.  

Photos:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huxley_-_Mans_Place_in_Nature.jpg
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Largesttheropods_2.svg 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/7696925948/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tfjensen/8056427807/

My Theological Progress

by Dave Mantel

I remember my first crisis of faith. I was about 11 years old, sitting on my bedroom floor, when I asked my mother, “How do we know this stuff is real?”

I was raised in a pretty conservative household and had a pretty sheltered upbringing. Luckily, when I asked this question, my parents didn’t call for an exorcism or send me to some kind of camp for lost sheep. As I look back, I see how lucky I was. There are really two ways modernist Christians deal with doubt and questions of the faith, one: by reprimanding the doubter and reminding them that all the answers are found in inerrant scripture, or two: encouraging questions because all the answers are found in inerrant scripture. My mother’s response was the latter. She gave me some books that I don’t remember reading—probably something by Lee Strobel—and we called it a day.

I think probably the first time I heard that there was another view of scripture other than the two extremes of “inerrant” and “completely false” was in one of my first college courses at Olivet Nazarene University. We were going over the Nazarene statement of faith, and they read their view of scripture: that it was “inerrant in all things pertaining to salvation.” That caught my attention right away. This was in pretty stark contrast to the belief of my upbringing, even though most of the wording was the same. There was that “inerrant” word again. But the clause was that it was only applicable to things pertaining to salvation. I would come back to that idea many times over the next few years.

As I began to fully embrace college life and adulthood, I began reading some of the more “controversial” literature popular with some of my friends—books like The Irresistible Revolution, Jesus for President, Velvet Elvis, Love Is An Orientation, The Way of a Pilgrim…you get the idea. Not exactly controversial (though I guess they are in some conservative circles). As I started to read these books written by Christians who had worldviews that were so different than the one of my upbringing, I began to have more and more questions about the beliefs that I held.

I won’t bore you with the details, but as I started to ask more questions, I found that many of them didn’t seem to have black and white answers—even in this inerrant scripture I had been pointed to for so many years. It’s not that people couldn’t find answers. There were plenty of answers to the questions I was asking, often accompanied by a slew of references and verses as support. The pattern I began to see, though, was that sometimes there were two, or three, or more, completely different answers for the same questions, using the same inerrant scripture as reference. What was I supposed to do about that? Start verse counting? “OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!”

Even more confusing was the fact that on many of the issues I was having my key conflicts with, I began to discover different whole sects of Christianity that had their own traditions and interpretations of the  issues, some for thousands of years, that differed greatly from my conservative, evangelical upbringing. Yet, they all still claimed Christianity as their religion, and they all claimed that their particular view on these issues is the correct and "orthodox" one.

Why do I bring all of this up; tell you this anecdote of my spiritual adolescence? Because I believe it’s not just my story, but the state of an entire generation of post-evangelical Millennials who have a lot of questions that they’ve been carrying around for a long time, but maybe have no idea what to do with them. Or maybe you’ve just grown weary or bitter from carrying these burdens for so long with nowhere to put them.

At this intersection of the modern/post-modern generations within Christianity, it is important for us to remember that many of the “answers” that have been spoon fed to many of us since birth are relatively new constructs, the idea of the complete inerrancy of scripture, for example.

That’s not to say that we should start throwing our babies out with all of our bath waters (side note: you realize that must have been a thing in order to become a colloquialism like this, right? Think about that.) There are many things that can and should be held to as orthodox within the Christian faith. However, those things might not necessarily be what you think they are—especially if you’re a protestant evangelical in the West. Believe it or not, 100-year-old traditions may seem long to you and your church plant, but compare them with Catholic or Orthodox traditions which are based on literally thousands of years, you hopefully begin to gain a little perspective.

So how do we, the post-modern, post-evangelical, Millennial generation get our stuff together and figure out what’s what? You may have seen this coming:

We need to ask more questions.

Shocker, I know. But this is so important. The modern evangelical old guard, if you will, the Pat Robertsons, the Mark Driscolls, and the John Pipers of the world, they will tell you that questions and doubting are not beneficial to your faith, that doubt will destroy your walk with the Lord and lead you straight to hell. They will tell you to fact check them, until you actually do, and then they will either reprimand you or blow you off. And this is all from a place—an indoctrination—of “We already have all the answers. If you’re asking questions, you are not a good enough Christian.” Shaming the very thing that I believe can transform the Church to be looked at as something more than the current homophobic, bigoted, child molesting, hateful, hypocritical thing we are now.

So start to ask questions. Do your homework. Start to refine your questions into scalpels that can help cut out some of this rotting offal that’s been sitting here for decades. Don’t be afraid of criticism, or Church history, and don’t be afraid of the questions. God is not scared by our little questions. There is nothing we can ask or look in to or seriously contend that God can’t answer. Don’t be afraid of the mystery, the unknowing. Some things are not meant to be answered. Some things don’t even have an answer. We must learn to be OK with that. And we must begin with ourselves.

And finally, don’t be afraid of doubt. Rob Bell says in his new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God,

“For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.”

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/starfire2k/3631902258/ 
Photo 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Descent_of_the_Modernists,_E._J._Pace,_Christian_Cartoons,_1922.png

Christians and the Earth

by David Shay

“The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.”

—Eugenio Zolli

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

—Psalm 24:1

It’s 2009, and I’m at a large Christian conference. This is my senior year at a private Christian university, and I'm beaming with confidence as I start to be immersed in the Western Christian culture that is so prominent at Christian conferences in the US. I understand what attracts this sub-culture and what enrages and disgusts it. Having spent the last few years in a Christian university, I'm eager to hear the controversial hot topics of Western Christian culture discussed and debated. I also look forward to being in community with other semi-progressive Christian young adults, who want to push the communities of their faith forward.

This specific conference has a large variety of workshops to choose from. The workshops are the place to hear to tough questions answered, or at least to hear an attempt to answer the tough questions. The workshops are where a lot of the challenges of our faith come out and are tackled. Before I even know all the workshops that are on offer, I decide to go to whatever environmental workshop I can find, because I really care about the environment and want to hear what my fellow Christians are saying about it. I see that there are a few such workshops, and I go to the first one on the list, alone yet still very excited to learn. I’m not too surprised when none of my friends or fellow church members joins me.

However, I do feel a bit surprised at the small amount of people who show up for the workshop. It was a rather large ball room for such a small audience. (Technically, I’m sure now that there must have been more than two of us, but the only person I can recall is this girl with a large dreadlock—yes, singular—and bandana and then of course myself, sitting an aisle away from each other. So I have this kind of terrible mental image of the workshop being me and the single-dreadlock girl alone in a huge room listening to this topic I really care about.)

The workshop begins and I feel my excitement slowly deflating as I realize that the speakers are not touching on anything I haven't already…thought of myself? I feel bad thinking that these speakers are not very good, because they seem like great people. They are a young 30-ish-year-old couple and they talk about how having a healthy environment has made them feel better and helped them raise their children. That’s the thesis of the workshop. I get no new, fascinating knowledge to take away and share with my friends and fellow believers. No ideas to discuss with people. Nothing.

But still, I remain optimistic as I have seen that in a few days a speaker will address the issue of environmentalism and Christianity in the main conference session. This means she will be responsible to give a message on this topic for 20,000+ people to hear. Surely she will have something groundbreaking and important to say. However, when the message comes I have that same experience of excitement deflation as before. What I take away from the message is this: Trinidad is a beautiful country. And Christians should love each other.

I hear some of my fellow conference attendees talking about this message at the main session being the weakest one of the entire conference. I become even more deflated. The agenda that was so important to me is being overlooked and forgotten by my peers and fellow believers. I ask myself if my passion for the natural world is unimportant. Is the fulfillment I get from time praying in the forest preserves of suburban Chicago simply romanticized and irrelevant to the larger Christian picture? Why doesn't anyone seem to care about this?

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Ever since that conference, the more I’ve thought about it, the more compelled I’ve become to make the case for the natural world and our place within it, from a Christian perspective. I don’t think even progressive and environmentalist Christians are really grasping or communicating the full picture.

Let’s start at a material level. Our relationship with this planet is necessary for our existence to continue. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants take carbon dioxide and give off oxygen is amazing and awesome to witness. We give off a gas we do not need and in return receive oxygen.

Also, you have heard it said that money doesn't grow on trees. But I tell you the truth, that the sustenance you need to survive literally grows on trees. Money is something that we added.

The Christian environmentalist argument is usually that God created the Earth,; therefore we are obligated to love it and take care of it. But what if we changed the word “obligated” to “designed?” We have learned through the word of God that loving one another is what we were designed for. When we love one another and express that love by caring for each other, it is healthy for our spirits. What if the same could be said about our relationship with the Earth? It's not that we have to love the Earth, but that loving it and caring for it is what is good for us.

I'm not trying to use 1 John 4:12 to say that we need to love trees. If you ever have to choose between a human life and a tree, by all means choose the human. But perhaps when we hear that Yosemite is burning and ancient trees are dying, we should feel sorrow because we have a relationship with this Earth. Is it healthy for children to want to destroy ant hills instead of study them? Is it healthy for us to see the ways God's creation provides for us and exploit it? When God delivers manna, we take what we need for the day and leave it at that. Yet it's engrained in our culture to take more than we need.

At the start of this post, I placed a quote that speaks about "melodies we do not hear...because no one listens." There are unheard melodies—that is, untapped meaning and depth and beauty—both in sacred scripture and in the world around us. I feel like Christians already know that there are new meanings and beauty to be discovered in scripture, and that it is very precious to us in part because of that. Is it not also possible that our world—a place much larger, more poorly understood, and less explored than scripture, and created by the same God—is equally precious?

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/3650600124/
2. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pleeker/139418540/ 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peddhapati/9703395209/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vkreay/6195960810/
5. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/80901381@N04/7950216844/