Andrew’s story has been all over the Christian blogosphere the past couple of days.  It is a heartbreaking, tragic tale of church discipline gone monumentally awry at a nationally known church.  A more descriptive version of Andrew’s story is presented in two installments at the blog of Matthew Paul Turner:  Part 1, and Part 2.  (I will not mention the name or location of the church in question.  You know this church.  You know where it is.  You know who the pastor is.  Bashing this church and/or its pastor is something of a sport in some parts of the Christian blogosphere, and I do not want to get into that here.  If you need to know, read the Matthew Paul Turner posts.)

This story will grab a hold of your heart and not let go.  At least, that is the effect it has had on me.  Partly because it leads me to wonder:  Could this happen at my church?  Could this happen to me?  Partly because it leads me to consider my own relational failings and the adverse effect they have had on people I loved very much.  But most of all, because my heart breaks for this poor soul who has suffered so much at the hands of the Church.

Here is the basic outline of Andrew’s story:  A young man leaves home and travels to the big city in hopes of finding himself.  Upon the recommendation of an older sibling, he visits a well-known megachurch.  Despite some initial misgivings, he loves it there.  He becomes a member, joins a community group, and gets actively involved in volunteering at the church.  He meets the daughter of one of the elders.  They date, and in due season they become engaged.

But one night Andrew hangs out with another woman.  They behave inappropriately (they don’t have sex).  Andrew is conscience-stricken and calls it off immediately.  He confesses to his fiancee (she is heartbroken and breaks off the engagement–that’s a no-brainer) and a close friend in his community group, then later to his community group leader.  He is instructed to leave the group and join a new group.  Then comes a grueling series of meetings with the new community group leader, the old community group leader, and several other church leaders.  Many other relational failings come to light, including the fact that Andrew and his now ex-fiancee were sexually intimate throughout their relationship.

After about a month of meetings, Andrew is informed that he is under church discipline.  He receives a “church discipline contract” enumerating the background issues (read: sins) and a step-by-step plan of discipline (read: penance) that he must successfully complete in order to be restored to the church’s good graces.  The expectation is that he will sign and return this document.

After a few days of reflection, Andrew decides to not sign and to leave the church.  The leaders make it clear that he will not be leaving as a member in good standing but as a member under discipline, and that this will have serious adverse consequences for him.  They then proceed to post a letter to the church’s internal social media site that Andrew is leaving under discipline and that church members are to treat him “as a Gentile and a tax collector” (Matthew 18:17).  The letter describes Andrew’s sin and the church discipline process up to his departure, and gives detailed instructions as to what sort of social interactions with Andrew are permissible and what are not, along with practical examples.

Now then, let us note that we are getting only one side of the story here.  That is a very important caveat.  But if Andrew’s story is even partially true, then in my opinion the leadership of this church will have much to answer for on Judgment Day.

A word about Andrew’s motives in coming forward with this story:  Don’t question them.  Who doesn’t do things from at least partially impure motives?  We don’t know Andrew’s motives, and it is not given us to know them.  God will deal with him in regards to his motives, if it is appropriate for Him to do so.

This church deserves some props for at least attempting to do church discipline.  Church discipline is almost–if not completely–nonexistent in many parts of evangelicalism.  But it is wrong to attempt to correct an error by making the opposite error.  It is wrong to attempt to compensate for a lack of church discipline in the broader evangelical landscape by doing church discipline in your own church in a way that goes completely and totally off the rails.

As described by Andrew, the process that occurred here would have been perfectly at home in medieval Catholicism.

For those of you who are not up on all things Catholic:  If a believer who sins wants to confess his sin and receive absolution, the sacrament of Penance was the venue for that.  (That’s what it was called in medieval times.  Today it is called Reconciliation, or more casually, Confession.)  The believer would confess his sins to a priest.  The priest would assign a penance to satisfy the temporal punishment for the sins you confessed (tricky bit of theology here–Catholics believe that the punishment of going to hell is taken care of by Christ and the Cross, but there is temporal, that is, earthly, punishment that accrues with sins that do not rise to the mortal level.  Your penance takes care of this temporal punishment), and give absolution.  In medieval times, you had to give a complete listing of every sin you could possibly think of.  If you left any sin unconfessed, it was believed that your absolution would have no effect and you would still be in your sins.  Also, priests in that time were known to assign exorbitantly onerous penances.  These days, penances are much more doable and realistic in light of the sins confessed.  Also it is acceptable in many places to list some sins and say “and any others that I can’t remember now” at the end.

Still, the emphasis here is wrong-headed.  It places the focus squarely upon the sinner and what the sinner must do to demonstrate genuine repentance, rather than upon Christ and the cross.

Now, some of the provisions of Andrew’s “plan of discipline” are wise and sensible things for any man in Andrew’s situation to be doing.  Meeting regularly with a close and trusted friend for purposes of accountability and care is an excellent idea.  Not dating at all for a limited season is a good idea–the human heart needs time to heal from something like this.  At my church, the pastor says that if you have been divorced you need to refrain from dating for at least one year–you need at least that long to heal.

But here we come to the crux of the matter.  Here are the next three provisions:

Andrew will write out in detail his sexual and emotional attachment history with women and share it with XXX.

Andrew will write out in detail the chronology of events and sexual/emotional sin with K and share it with XXX and Pastor X.

Andrew will write out a list of all people he has sinned against during this timeframe, either by sexual/emotional sin, lying or deceiving, share it with XXX and develop a plan to confess sin and ask for forgiveness.

These things might be good to do later on down the road, but only in VERY controlled circumstances–namely under the care of a licensed, trained counselor who is bound by the strictures of his/her profession to keep this information confidential.

For a church to require this of a confessing sinner seeking forgiveness and restoration to full fellowship, and to offer no guarantee that the information shared would be kept confidential, is monumentally inappropriate, invasive, borderline voyeuristic, and–dare I say it–creepy.

At no point in this process did anyone offer Andrew a word of forgiveness or point him toward Christ and the cross.  Instead it was all about Andrew.  All about what he had done and what he had to do to show that he was genuinely walking in repentance.  “But where sin abounded, grace much more abounded” (Romans 5:20) did not happen here.  Instead, where sin abounded, discussion of sin much more abounded, in ever-increasing circles, until the entire church knew about it.

Look, I know that church discipline is virtually nonexistent in much of evangelicalism these days.  But you don’t make up for that by going completely and totally off the rails in your own church.  There has got to be a better way of doing church discipline.  For Andrew’s sake, and for the sake of all the other Andrews out there.

Read the Matthew Paul Tanner articles if you haven’t already.  Part 1  Part 2

Here is another post from Matthew Paul Turner that speaks to the broader issue of abusive spiritual environments and abusive systems of church discipline.

Here is a post from Chaplain Mike at internetmonk.com in which he recounts Andrew’s story and suggests that the historical practice of confession and absolution, specifically as practiced within the Lutheran tradition, is a much better way of doing church discipline.

Here is another post from Chaplain Mike, in which he suggests that greater relational wisdom from Andrew and from his community group friends might have mitigated this thing and prevented it from rising to the level of a church discipline issue.  On the whole, relational wisdom is profoundly lacking in many Christian communities, and this leads to all sorts of problems.

Here is an insightful piece from the blog of Wenatchee the Hatchet, a former member of the church in question who sheds light on practices of church discipline and pastoral accountability that have long been of concern, and offers his opinion that the Andrew situation is a storm that has been brewing for several years now.

Also, the church in question has issued a response.

I love to run because it gets me into the outside world.  There my experience of life and of the world is not mediated by a climate-controlled building or the windshield of my car.  For so many people, their experience of the outside world–the heat of summer or the cold of winter or the time in between–is limited to the time they are going from their house to their car or their car to their office or vice versa.

As a society, we have made the choice to throw ourselves upon the mercy of technology.  The technological advances of the past few centuries have made our lives much easier in many respects, but I believe that they have made us less human because they have cut us off from the world and from life.  Who needs to be mindful of the rhythms of day and night when we have lights by which to see at all hours of the night?  Who needs to be mindful of the rhythms of summer, fall, winter, spring when we live, work, and play in climate-controlled buildings and get to wherever we are going in climate-controlled vehicles?  Who needs to be mindful of the vast distance between one side of our country and the other when you can hop a plane and get from one side to the other in only a few hours?

But is this the life we were created for?  Somehow I have a hard time believing that it is.  I need to be in touch with the world, to know the streets of the city because I have felt them pounding beneath my feet, to know that it is summer, fall, winter, or spring because I have seen it and felt it on my skin.

In short, I run to feel human.  I run to be human.

Thomas Merton echoes more or less the same sentiment in the quote which I am about to share with you.  This quote is taken from Seasons of Celebration.

Merton laments the rise of a technology-based society, and its potential to cut us off from the rhythms of the natural world, of day and night and of the seasons.  He laments the fact that modern life is no longer aware of these seasonal cycles and patterns but is instead “a linear flight into nothingness”.  In order to progress in our spiritual development, the first thing that must happen is that we must recover our connection with the world through our connection with the cycles and patterns of nature.  In short, “before we can become gods we must first be men.”

The modern pagan, the child of technology or the “mass man,” does not even enjoy the anguish of dualism or the comfort of myth. His anxieties are no longer born of eternal aspiration, though they are certainly rooted in a consciousness of death. “Mass man” is something more than fallen. He lives not only below the level of grace, but below the level of nature—below his own humanity. No longer in contact with the created world or with himself, out of touch with the reality of nature, he lives in the world of collective obsessions, the world of systems and fictions with which modern man has surrounded himself. In such a world, man’s life is no longer even a seasonal cycle. It’s a linear flight into nothingness, a flight from reality and from God, without purpose and without objective, except to keep moving, to keep from having to face reality….

To live in Christ we must first break away from this linear flight into nothingness and recover the rhythm and order of man’s real nature. Before we can become gods we must first be men. For man in Christ, the cycle of the seasons is something entirely new. It has become a cycle of salvation. The year is not just another year, it is the year of the Lord—a year in which the passage of time itself brings us not only the natural renewal of spring and the fruitfulness of an earthly summer, but also the spiritual and interior fruitfulness of grace. The life of the flesh which ebbs and flows like the seasons and tends always to its last decline is elevated and supplanted by a life of the spirit which knows no decrease, which always grows in those who live with Christ in the liturgical year. “For though the outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. . . . For we know if our earthly house of this habitation be dissolved that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven.” (II Cor. 4:16; 5:1)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,
(Hebrews 1:1-3 ESV)

There will likely be a Christmas party or get-together of some kind at your place of work.  Every church, Sunday School class and public school will have something to attend at this very special time of year.  There is family to visit and food to prepare.  I keep hearing “It’s the most stressful time of the year.”  Even if you’re keeping the Christ in Christmas there is so much to be distracted by.  There is peace and joy as the angels visit the shepherds.  The wise men brings precious gifts.  Our hearts go out to Joseph and especially Mary as they make their pilgrimage in faith to Bethlehem.  It is a tender, precious story of God’s love for mankind.  But don’t forget to look in the manger.

It’s not just a story of an unwed mother being particularly blessed.  The birth of Jesus is the beginning of heaven touching earth.  Hebrews 1 is at the top of the page; take a look at Philippians 2 and Colossians 1.  That’s not just a baby in the manger, that’s God.  Jesus said that he and the Father are one. Isaiah prophesied his name would be called “Wonderful counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”  Jesus is God, God is Jesus.  He left heaven to come here and do this.  When we could not come to God, he came looking for us.

If there is anything in your manger other than God himself, it’s time to re-evaluate.  He is not just bringing peace, he is our peace.  Emmanuel means God with us.  He is near; he is here.  God is in the manger.  This is good news for all people.

One is the world’s way.  This involves lights.  Lots of lights.  And music.  And decorations, usually red and green.  Many stores have had their Christmas decorations up for a while now.  Lenox Square, a mall located right in the heart of the Buckhead shopping district in Atlanta, GA, has had its Christmas decorations up ever since the first week of November.  Some stores are beginning to decorate for Christmas 2012.

Gifts are an essential part of the world’s celebration of Christmas.  You have to go out and buy lots of them.  Buy them for anyone and everyone who is of any acquaintance or relation to you whatsoever.  Why?  Because it’s what the stores want you to do.  It’s what keeps our economy afloat.

And don’t forget about parties.  The next few weeks are all going to be a blur of Christmas parties.  Friends, work, church, family, all having must-attend parties.  You will eat, drink, and be merry.  Your waistline will grow into something approximating the width of a large mountain.

With all the hustle and bustle and commotion of the season, you will work yourself up into a frenzy of anticipation.  And when Christmas finally does arrive, you will be all Christmas-ed out.  You will be left with nothing but a whopping pile of credit card debt from all the gifts you got, a whopping mound of weight to burn off in the new year from all the food you ate at all those Christmas parties, and a boatload of regret.  What is it that Christmas is supposed to be all about anyway?  Because whatever it is, you sure missed it.  Yet another Christmas has passed, and all you have to show for it is this boatload of gifts and decorations and credit card bills.

OR…..

You can celebrate Christmas the way the Church has historically celebrated it for the last several centuries.

For starters, they don’t even call it Christmas.  The Christmas season doesn’t even start until December 25.  It continues from there all the way through Epiphany, which falls on January 6.

The time prior to Christmas is called Advent.  This is a season of waiting.  We remember Israel as they waited for two-thousand-plus years for the coming of their Messiah, as we wait (for real) for Him to come again at the end of the age.

Advent puts us in a mood of anticipation.  We don’t celebrate Christmas prematurely like all the rest of the world.  We still go to all the parties and eat all the food and have all the fun.  We still do all the Christmas shopping and enjoy all the lights and decorations and other sights and sounds of the season.  But while we are doing all this, we give ourselves space to step back and quiet our souls.  To contemplate the darkness of our world, the darkness of a creation that awaits the coming of its Savior and Redeemer.  To anticipate the coming of our long-promised Savior, which we will celebrate in just a few weeks’ time.  And when Christmas does come, we are ready to start celebrating it, not all Christmas-ed out and wondering what the hell happened like the rest of the world.

Which way will you celebrate Christmas this year?

In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.

May angels lead you into paradise; upon your arrival, may the martyrs receive you and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem. May the ranks of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, the poor man, may you have eternal rest.

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words. –St. Paul, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

For all the saints, who from their labours rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress and their Might;
Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well fought fight;
Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For the Apostles’ glorious company,
Who bearing forth the Cross o’er land and sea,
Shook all the mighty world, we sing to Thee:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For the Evangelists, by whose blest word,
Like fourfold streams, the garden of the Lord,
Is fair and fruitful, be Thy Name adored.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

For Martyrs, who with rapture kindled eye,
Saw the bright crown descending from the sky,
And seeing, grasped it, Thee we glorify.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
All are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave, again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

The golden evening brightens in the west;
Soon, soon to faithful warriors comes their rest;
Sweet is the calm of paradise the blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

But lo! there breaks a yet more glorious day;
The saints triumphant rise in bright array;
The King of glory passes on His way.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
And singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

By William Walsham How.

There is so much analogy, metaphor and allegory in and out of scripture that I’m having a hard time deciding where to start.  The Bible is rich in symbolism and imagery.  Let’s start with something simple in the Old Testament.  When the camp of Israel was being plagued by snakes, Moses was told to fashion a brass serpent and place it on top of a pole.  If anyone was bitten by a “fiery asp” all he had to do was look at the pole and live.  The serpent on the pole is a metaphor for Jesus.  We are all bitten by sin.  (Serpent, Eden, see how many levels this works on?)  We will die if we do not look to Jesus on the cross.  Jesus himself even says that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.

That’s an easy one to follow.  I contend that everything in Judaism is about Jesus – Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery, through the wilderness and entering the promised land; the Passover; circumcision; Adam; the alter, temple, and high priest.  I could go on.  The events of the Old Testament are historical facts and help us to understand New Testament theology.  By understanding the role of the high priest we can better understand what Jesus does as he continually goes into God’s presence to intercede on our behalf.  But you don’t have to take my word for it.

The Apostle Paul refers to two sons of Abraham, one by Sara and the other by Hagar.  Paul recounts the history and explains that the events may be interrupted allegorically.  (Galatians 4:24)  So the Old Testament is metaphorical for the New.  What about Jesus’ use of symbolism?  Over and over he draws comparisons to what the Kingdom of God is like.  It’s like a collector searching for pearls; it’s like a woman that looses a gold coin; it’s like planting a field; it’s like the return of the Prodigal, and so forth.  Jesus is like a shepherd, except when he is like a sheep.  We are all like sheep that have gone astray, unless we’re fishers of men.  Or fish.

Can you remember the first time you saw The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe?  Did you realize it was about anything other than a magical land with talking animals?  I wonder what C.S. Lewis would think about Veggie Tales.  So what’s the point of all this?  We are finite in our understanding.  God cannot simply come right out in the Bible and tell us what he is thinking.  Even if we understood our tendency is to disbelieve.  We – collective, human-kind we – often have to be told things again and again.  So stories and themes are repeated, many times.  Jesus is a burning bush, and a sweet branch that makes water potable, and a serpent on a pole, et. al.  God’s kingdom is like a little child on Jesus’ lap.  The church is the body of Christ, or else the bride of Christ.  Why?  Because we need the symbols and pictures to even hope to understand.  We cannot understand God otherwise.  He loved us while we were unlovable, enough to send his only Son.  Jesus loved the same way, enough to not only die but suffer abuse, torment and the cross.  It just doesn’t make sense.

Our minds are small.  Like a child that hasn’t learned to read, we open the Bible and look at the pictures.  (See what I did there?)

For me, the “post-evangelical wilderness” is not some idle theoretical construct created by bloggers with WAY too much time on their hands and nothing better to do with it except sit there all day in front of their computer screens and write whatever strikes their fancy.  For me, the “post-evangelical wilderness” is real life.  It’s where I live, and it is where I have lived for the better part of the previous decade.

The dominant feeling in my life these days is a malaise caused by cognitive dissonance:  Evangelicalism is my home.  But because evangelicals are madly insistent upon embracing the worst aspects of low-brow American pop culture while doing the exact same stupid crap the mainlines were doing a few decades back that put them on a beeline toward complete and utter irrelevance, I am no longer at home in evangelicalism.

Why not convert? you say.  I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I have several Catholic family members about whom I care very deeply who would love to see me “come home” to the Catholic faith.  Also, I have been reading Lutheran blogs and listening to Lutheran podcasts lately, and I am finding that they express the Gospel in very compelling ways.

But I am not entirely convinced that another conversion experience is what I need at this point in my life.  It would be nice to have a conversion story to tell, to be able to tell a tale of having wandered for so long out in the post-evangelical wilderness before finally coming into my new spiritual home.  It would be nice to be able to enter into my new spiritual home and tell my conversion story loudly and proudly.  Maybe I could write a book about it.  Maybe I could do book signings.  Maybe I could go on the speaking circuit and make obscene amounts of money.  Maybe.

But conversion envy is a very dangerous thing.  Being pimped by some other Christian tradition as their poster child is hopelessly overrated–even if you get a book deal out of it and get famous and make crazy amounts of money along the way.

Besides, as I progress in this post-evangelical journey, I am finding that my heroes aren’t necessarily the people with an awesome conversion story to tell, like Francis Beckwith or Franky Schaeffer.  I am finding that my heroes are people like Thomas Merton, who sought to learn all he could about what monasticism looks like in other world religions and apply it to his own context as a Trappist monk in Kentucky.  Or J. I. Packer, a well-respected conservative evangelical writer and thinker who served as an Episcopal bishop for several years.  He sought to work with people, even those whom he thought were crazy, to work within structures that were already in place, to win people over with gentleness and respect, and to be a positive force for the change he wanted to see in his denomination.  He is no longer an Episcopal bishop; I believe they finally excommunicated him a year or two back.  But he stayed and dialogued and worked patiently, even as his whole denomination was throwing itself headlong over the cliff.  They had to run him off.

So I am not convinced that what I need at this point in my life is another conversion experience.  Rather, I think that what I need is to figure out a way to take the best parts of Catholic and/or Lutheran belief and practice and apply them to my own present context.

Recently one of my friends put up a post on her wall on Facebook which summarized her frustrations with the new Rob Bell book.  (Those of you who don’t know which one:  What rock have you been living under the last six months???)  A lot of the responses to this post were back-slapping type responses which flippantly denounced the ideas in this book.  I did not enter into this discussion, except to venture that Bell is asking questions that need to be asked and that we are foolish to dismiss them as out of hand.

I won’t get into my own thoughts on the Rob Bell book.  I have written extensively about them over at my own blog.

As I read through this conversation, I wanted to grab these people and shout in their faces that the whole thing was a MASSIVE EXERCISE IN COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT!!!!!!!!!!  Then I remembered:  These people are my friends.  They are part of a community of believers that has been very good to me over the years.  I would be a fool to throw that away lightly.  Besides, these are people for whom Christ died, just as much as me.  Surely I can afford to show them grace by restraining myself.

This is an illustration of the conflict that is inside of me as I pass through the post-evangelical wilderness.  It would be nice to be part of a community of believers and friends who are all on the same journey as me.  But such people are VERY hard to come by here in the heart of the Bible Belt, so I need to accept and live and work within such community as I can find.  This community has its foibles and troubles, but it has been very good to me over the years and I am a fool to throw that away lightly.