In my previous posts I’ve hinted that I’ve adopted a vocational stance that is inclined to see western culture as a positive gift to Christians in the West, however painful it is to receive. In terms of a house-building analogy I’ve been using, I have decided to step on the site of a new building project, one that does not presuppose a parochial perspective or assume a confidence in the parochial positions we might currently hold—even though, I hasten to add, I’m not sure what blueprint might be employed for this new construction. 

However, unlike those who have left (or are leaving) Christian faith, I continue to keep one foot on the other side of the line, in what I previously called a “renovation” project. (I think I’m done with remodelling.) No doubt this is, in part, because I have always been a Christian, behaving in familiar Christian ways, thinking in traditional theological categories, belonging to familiar form of Christian church, critically reflecting on life inside and outside the Christian microcosm through well-established Christian frames of reference. At least that has been the case in a faith journey that has moved from fundamentalist evangelicalism, through emerging sensibilities, and into neo-Anabaptist (but still emerging) configurations. Perhaps it would be helpful to say a bit more about each of these.

My faith was formed in various kinds of evangelical theology and piety for the first 20 years of my life, followed by a 10 year period of a kind of deconstruction, in which I left behind a “personal relationship with Jesus,” including a belief that Jesus was “punished in my place,” to satisfy the “holiness” of God, so that I could “go to heaven when I die,” all spelled out in an “inerrant” scripture. Jesus-centred engagement with scripture remained, along with a sense that, through his life, death, and resurrection, God somehow made (and is making) things right in the world. But my deconstruction knocked down the individual-centred theology and piety of my evangelical background and looked for a blueprint that was more social, political, even ecological, in orientation. The biblical term shalom—for comprehensive, all-inclusive, wholeness, well-being, justice, and peace—served as a kind of place-holder for that “something more.” 

Whether—or how much—or in what manner—this shalom sensibility might still retain some continuity with my former evangelism is a fair question. I continue to have significant reservations about the reduction of life to an immanent frame, with the only relevant agency being our own—what some call a “neo-liberal” worldview. In other words, I still think that our lives are lived within a context of divine agency, the work of a life-giving spirit who restlessly and ceaselessly creates, that is, makes a livable and beautiful world. And I still believe the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus somehow offers an incarnation and model of life in this creation. But I have suspicions that our anthropomorphic and anthropocentric accounts of this god and this work need significant rethinking and reformulating, including the creedal heritage that has informed them.

So, I can see some genuine continuity with my evangelical background, but the label “evangelical” is not one I feel inclined to embrace or defend the way I once did. I have, instead, embraced a more “emerging” sensibility with regard to my shalom convictions and practice, even though that label has lost some of its cultural capital. Once I realized that my faith no longer fit in the evangelicalism into which I was born and raised, and that I didn’t have a definitive replacement, the idea that my faith journey was (and is) an ongoing process of learning and discovering, adapting and experimenting—i.e., that it is somehow “emerging”—seems descriptively accurate, whatever the cultural cash-value of the term.

I should add that, in the course of this emerging, post-evangelical faith, I discovered the Anabaptist tradition of Christian life and thought. It’s the tradition of Christian conviction and practice that I most identify with (I’m a Mennonite pastor, for example). More specifically, I identify with a contemporary expression of that tradition, one I sometimes refer to as neo-Anabaptist. The label, again, is contestable. I use it to distinguish a kind of historic Anabaptism that emerged within Christendom as a critique of that Christendom, from a more contemporary Anabaptism that carries on Anabaptist convictions in a post-Christendom context. Both historic and neo-Anabaptism resist individualistic forms of Christian faith, in favour of more community expressions of piety and peoplehood, in contrast to a wider host society. But neo-Anabaptism understands this peoplehood as a particular kind of political posture in the contemporary, secularized western cultural imaginary. It continues the historic Anabaptist commitment to shalom—to a peaceful world and a peace-making way of life in that world. But it does so with a broader sense of participation in a pluralistic society, including the previously-mentioned concerns about identity, community, ecology, and spirituality.

So, neo-Anabaptism does, for me, offer a promising version of piety, peoplehood, and prophecy. In particular its account of world-embracing shalom commends a kind of hospitality and humility toward other spiritualities, other communities, other forms of critique. 

But here, too, we are still renovating a previously built home, aren’t we. Even if a neo-Anabaptist account of God, God’s work in the world, and our participation in that work, is the best version of a Christian house that I can come up with, that house continues to be built and renovated according to the traditional blueprint for Christian conviction and practice. It still largely presumes accounts of spirituality, identity, community, and ecology that the “the new normal” of western culture is leaving behind.

And so my emerging faith sensibility persists, seeking a not-yet-discovered sense of piety, peoplehood, and prophecy. (Perhaps it is a post-neo-Anabaptist Christian faith I’m looking for!?!?) I feel called to explore fresh images and conceptions: of God and relation to God (that is piety); of how to be a distinct community in relation to this God and the rest of the world (that is peoplehood); and how to engage in critical transformation both within and without that community of people (that is prophecy).

Has this left “biblical” Christianity behind? More on that in the next post.