Adjectives

Michael Spencer doesn’t like adjectives. In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, he takes on all those adjectives we Christians – we American Christians – clutter our lives with.

Like in worship. Traditional worship. Seeker-sensitive worship. Emerging worship. Spirit-led Worship. Ancient-future worship. Dynamic worship. Extreme worship.

Or the victorious Christian life.

Or good Christian witness.

Or faithful church member. Or spiritual Christian. Carnal Christian. Reformed Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. Progressive Christian. Pentecostal Christian.

How about, totally confused Christian?

After experimenting with every kind of adjectival Christianity there was, Spencer finally came down to one question: could there be a gospel without adjectives?

The answer turned out to be yes. but a lot of stuff had to be cleared out of the way first. And then he heard a lecture on Martin Luther, and it knocked him flat. Spencer learned what Martin Luther had learned almost 500 years ago.

“For the first time,” he writes, “the truth that Jesus is the One Mediator between God and human beings knocked me to the floor and suspended me over the truth that God had done all things necessary for my salvation. I could stop looking for the secret key, and I could ditch the quest to demonstrate that I was a Christian hero. I was humbled as I looked at a universe of grace that filled my empty soul with the love of God in Jesus.”

There is nothing else I could say to add to that.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been having a discussion about Spencer's  Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for some really good thoughts.

Bible Reading

The night I became a believer (almost 38 years ago), I was given a green padded-cover copy of The Living Bible. I had read portions of the Bible before, and even memorized scripture for catechism (King James Version), but I had never really read the Bible before.

I was told to start reading the Gospel of John. I had never read it, and it was like reading a revolutionary treatise. Yes, Jesus loved me. Yes, he had a wonderful plan for my life.

But Jesus was a bomb thrower.

I hadn’t met this Jesus before. He didn’t mince words. He could be loving and tender, but he could also be fierce. He didn’t duck confrontation. And he had this laser-like ability to cut right to what the real issues were.

This was a Jesus I had never met before, almost a complete stranger.

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, reading the Bible and especially the gospels is what Michael Spencer says will change your life, and possibly change it radically. He also says that it is exactly this practice of “reading Jesus first-hand” that many in the church find so threatening.

I pondered that: the American Christian church would find reading the Bible to be radical and threatening? This sounded almost pre-Reformation.

I didn’t know what I thought this until I pictured Jesus showing up to turn over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple – and it could have been where the prosperity gospel was being preached.

Or showing up at any church that believed it had the whole thing figured out and theologically mapped. Or how he might challenge our own learned teachers and theologians. Or that we would likely find him in the inner cities and Third World ghettos instead of the typical American suburb. He would be wherever the hurting, the needy and the poor would be found.

Spencer isn’t advocating the overthrow of the church. “I believe in the importance of Christian community and the ministry of that community to provide boundaries and definition to our spiritual growth and healthy spirituality,” he writes. “I mourn, however, the loss of our openness to the voice of the Holy Spirit directing us in new and important Jesus-shaped directions…The natural conservatism of institutions is deeply rooted in the desire to survive, and that desire colors and limits the way they read the Bible and how they see God functioning in the world.”

I believe in the church. I believe in the local church. I believe I attend a solid, Bible-teaching, Jesus-based church.

But I still have that copy of The Living Bible. And I remember what it was like to “read Jesus” for the very first time.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been reading Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for more discussion. See in particular Fatha Frank’s post on “The Perfect Church?” and Nancy’s post on chapter 9 on the book.

Radical Inclusion

I was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. My mother’s family was Lutheran; my father’s family Southern Baptist. In high school, I started to wander. This was 1968, and pretty much everything institutional was being questioned. I wasn’t so much questioning my own church as I was trying to find one with an active youth group. And I didn’t wander far. For a time I attended a Southern Baptist church, the one a lot of my friends, including my best friend in high school, attended.

I sang in the youth choir (for some reason, the music leader always looked at me when someone sang off key at practice). The summer after my junior year, I went with the youth group to Ridgecrest, North Carolina, for a week with Baptist youth from all over the South. It was a great week; I even ended up with a new girlfriend.

Late that summer, there was a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. It took place in Texas, and there was one major controversy that was going to be resolved – and that was whether local Southern Baptist churches should open their doors to African-Americans. There wasn’t a rule against it, of course, but longstanding tradition had the force of church law. The vote went against the resolution to open the doors.

This mattered to the youth group. It mattered a lot. At the next Sunday morning service, after the pastor had returned, he explained during the sermon how the debate had gone, and how he himself had voted. “I could not, in good conscience, vote for the resolution,” he said. The adult members of the congregation nodded in approval.

Sitting in the balcony (church youth groups always seem to sit in the balcony if there is one), the youth group was stunned. We knew how the vote had gone, but we had assumed the pastor voted for the resolution. His two sons were in the youth group, and they had assumed their father had voted for it. But he hadn’t; he had voted the way the congregation wanted him to vote.

The ridiculousness of this was obvious. Even assuming an African-American wanted to attend the church, which was highly doubtful given the denomination’s reputation at the time, would they be barred at the door? Would a deacon or usher throw a body block? Would the church lock the doors?

The youth group fractured and broke up. My best friend stopped going to church, and told his parents he was finished. A really good friend of his and mine told her parents she was changing churches, and she did. Others stopped coming altogether. The youth choir disintegrated. I finally stopped going, too. And I didn’t attend any church for the next five years.

I was reminded of this story while reading “Accepting the Real Jesus,” chapter 8 of Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. Knowledge of who Jesus is, even the limited knowledge of who he really is, is not enough. Acceptance must come, too. And these are the things, Spencer says, that must be accepted about the real Jesus:

• That Jesus preached, taught, and demonstrated the presence and priority of the Kingdom of God.
• That Jesus practiced radical inclusion of those who were excluded (and thus my story about the youth group).
• That Jesus was constantly engaged in producing disciples.
• That Jesus is the only mediator between God and humanity.
• That Jesus’ movement proclaims the gospel, encourages disciples, and witnesses to the presence of the Kingdom.

It wasn’t that the church youth group possessed more wisdom than the adults. And there were undoubtedly some feelings of superiority directed at the adults and the pastor for such a colossal failure in judgment, understanding and faith.

But the youth group did understand something the church didn’t. Virtually all of us went to public schools, and the public schools had been integrated two years before. After a year of upheaval and even some violence, everything calmed down; the kids figured out how to go to school together. And we discovered that white students and African-American students wanted the same things, and they could learn to work together and even trust each other. In other words, we were all people with the same hopes, desires and dreams. And to keep the church doors shut to anyone was unconscionable.

And this is what the church youth group knew: Jesus wouldn’t have just thrown the doors open to all comers; he would have gone out and ministered to them and talked to them and lived with them as one of them.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page is leading a blogging discussion of Spencer’s Mere Churchianity. See also what Fatha Frank has been writing at Public Christianity.

Look at the Books: Something's Going On

Over at Internet Monk, Jeff Dunn posted a book review Thursday under the title of “Christianity’s Forgotten Man.” The book is Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. As I read the review, I was reminded of another book I’m going to be reading soon: David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

And, of course, there’s the book we’ve been discussing (via Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page): Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality by Michael Spencer, the original Internet monk.

There are others. And there are a lot of blog posts on these and related subjects, like the one posted Thursday by author Ian Morgan Cron entitled “Christians in Exile,” about a meeting he has with someone in a coffee shop, and the reasons why the someone has left the church.

When you see a spate of books on a similar subject, that’s a good indication of (1) publishers are seeing some level of market demand or opportunity and (2) there’s something going on. In this case, it appears that people are seeking Jesus, and a lot of them are doing it outside the church, or at least outside what Michael Spencer calls “churchianity.”

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. More than a century ago, the philosopher doctor Albert Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and he was by no means the first or the last to do that.

It’s as if there is an understanding that we keep letting culture get in the way of our understanding of Jesus. Sometimes we try to “reinterpret” Jesus and in the process end up projecting our own doubts, questions and cultural understanding on him. Schweitzer was criticized for doing something exactly like that.

In Mere Churchianity, Spencer stakes a rather definitive claim as to what we can actually know:

• Jesus really existed.
• He was Jewish.
• He didn’t operate within a democratic system.
• He accepted the Hebrew Scriptures, with conditions.
• And, most importantly, Jesus is (note the change in verb tense) the incarnation of the One God.

That is what we can know, Spencer says. Accepting that is another story (and the next chapter).


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page is leading a blogging discussion of Spencer’s Mere Churchianity. See also what Fatha Frank has been writing at Public Christianity. Yesterday, Fatha Frank did a cool wrap-up of all kinds of related blog posts, and has a new post called Jesus Works. Today, Bob Spencer at Wilderness Fandango had a discussion as well: My Faith Walk...For Now.

Bend the Page

My online friend Nancy Rosback, whose pictures I use a lot on this blog, has started a new blog called

Bend the Page – a place to talk about books. The first book to be discussed is Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity.

I read and reviewed this book, and did a post on it for The Christian Manifesto. It had a powerful impact on me because I felt that author, the late Michael Spencer better known as the Internet Monk, was partially telling some of my own history – it was that familiar.

In her most recent post at Bend the Page, Nancy quotes Spencer talking about people who abandon the church. Here’s what I said in the comments section:

“There are two kinds of abandonment -- the abandonment of leaving a church (or the church) altogether, and the abandonment of limiting your involvement to the worship service. I've seen both and I've done both. I need to think about that some more.”

In my post for The Christian Manifesto, I talk a bit about the church we left some years back, and why. We’d been there for 15 years. We held on far longer than we should have. Actually, I held on longer. My wife – who’s definitely more intuitive and sensitive – was ready to leave about two years before we actually did. For me, the relationships we had made it difficult to consider leaving.

There was no event or situation; rather, it was an accumulation of changes in teaching, content, governance and emphasis that finally led us to leave. We were neither among the first to leave nor the last. The church bled members for several years until close to half the congregation was gone.

This experience left us with two things. First was the sadness, and it was profound and personal. We didn’t hang around with others who shared the same concerns and griped. We just walked quietly away. The second was a hypersensitivity to change. When the church we joined after this experience began making a few changes in what appeared to be the same direction as we had previously experienced, it was all we could do to keep from immediately bolting.

Mere Churchianity was written for people like me; for people who turned from the mega-church-entertainment-teaching-lite-let’s-be-relevant-bring-your latte-to-the-service approach that has so dominated the North American evangelical church for the last 25 years; and for people who find emptiness in an absolutist fixation on tradition at the expense of everything else. In other words, this is a book for the whole church to read.

I’m looking forward to the ongoing discussion at Bend the Page.