Root System
I claim Evangelicalism as part of my spiritual heritage. I am deeply grateful for it, too. I have fond memories, for example, of an IVCF staff member who introduced me to Bible memorization and meditation after I experienced a renewal of faith in college. I assumed that such a practice was simply what Christians do.
Little did I know how naïve I was.
I memorized Psalm 139 first. It changed my life. I memorized other Psalms, then paragraphs such as Isaiah 40:27-31, John 15:1-11, and Romans 8:28-39, and finally whole books of the Bible, such as Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Evangelicalism breathed life into my Mainline background. I will always be indebted to it.
Still, Evangelicalism functions best as a modifier, as it did for me, growing up in a Mainline church. It is a thin tradition, however robust and fruitful. What it does, it does well. But it doesn’t do enough, which makes it vulnerable to the influence of “big personalities,” emotivism, and political manipulation (as I argued in my last blog).
No tradition within the Christian family of faith is perfect, of course. All have their weaknesses, including Evangelicalism, whose weaknesses have become painfully apparent over the past few decades.
What Evangelicalism needs is a deeper root system, which other traditions can provide.
John and Charles Wesley serve as one good example. They were born, raised, and died as Anglicans, which means that, even after their conversions and the founding of the Methodist movement, they still used the Book of Common Prayer. They had a deep root system in the Anglican tradition.
I am a church historian by training. There is much, I believe, that we can learn from the past. My own Water From a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries provides just one of many examples.
Not that people from the past got everything right, as we well know, having had to face the consequences of their failures. Then again, we don’t get everything right either. The problem is that our weaknesses are less evident and obvious to us. We have adjusted to them as if they were like furniture in our living rooms.
Can the past teach us how to be more faithful followers of Jesus? I think so. I want to mention a few examples.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers seem strange to us. And rightly so. Still, they teach us how to exercise influence as outsiders. They chose to withdraw into the wilderness, which served as a furnace of affliction to forge character, conviction, and independence. Ironically, the movement produced platoons of leaders for the church, like Athanasius, John Chrysostom, and Basil of Caesarea, who were able to resist the temptations of power, prestige, and privilege. Many of the best bishops in the 4th century, in fact, spent time in the wilderness.
Likewise, medieval iconographers “wrote” theology through art, reminding the faithful that a greater reality—the kingdom of God—envelopes our own. Eastern Orthodox churches display icons of saints everywhere. When the faithful enter worship, they step into a liminal space between two worlds. Standing on the threshold of the greater world of the kingdom, the icons of saints gaze into our temporal world and call to us, “Your world is too small. There is more! Don’t let this world blind you to the real world.” They remind us that we are citizens of God’s kingdom, and thus exiles in this world.
Third, the Book of Common Prayer invites us into a life of daily and weekly worship that transcends our obsession with the exclusively personal, private, and popular. The lectionary summons us to read the entire Bible, not simply the passages we like best. The prayers—“collects,” for example—challenge us to pray about matters that we often overlook, like the needs of people who work in dangerous jobs.
These and other devotional practices enlarge our view of reality and force us to pray with bigger vision. They remind us that we are not alone. Christians throughout history have lived for the kingdom, following Jesus in circumstances far more difficult even than our own. Their story is our story. We are now adding to it.
I want to be clear. I am not rejecting my evangelical heritage, and I never will. It has made a significant contribution to the church. It is, however, suffering from attrition and deterioration because it tends to run shallow and thus become culturally captive. It needs a deeper root system, which knowledge of the church’s history can provide.
“All things are yours,” the apostle Paul proclaimed to the church in Corinth. In effect, he was saying, “Don’t limit yourself to one teacher, like Peter or Apollos.” The same is true for us. We have 2000 years of wisdom from which to draw. We have much to learn.