Dead Christians Society

At that wonderful institution of the Christian music world, Cornerstone Festival 2005 (June 30 - July 3, 2005), I’ll be leading a short “Cornerstone University” course on some of the figures in the Patron Saints for Postmoderns book. Here’s the description, or you can check it out at the website:

Dead Christians Society: Patron Saints for Postmoderns, Chris Armstrong - Discerning the Way

We’re living in a moment when increasing numbers of people feel alienated from the church and “church culture.” But if this is true now, what about the past? We will look at a number of culture-changing Christians who, in times of stagnation — when Christians had gotten into “church ruts” and were not communicating well to those around them,not living effectively as disciples,not loving their neighbors as Christ would want — took the church in new directions. These women and men will help us re-enter our own struggle with a sense that we are members of a “Dead Christians Society” — a family of brave, insightful, spiritually alive believers rooted historically in Christ’s body.

Day	Time
Friday	1:00 PM to 1:50 PM
Friday	4:00 PM to 4:50 PM
Saturday	1:00 PM to 1:50 PM
Saturday	4:00 PM to 4:50 PM
Sunday	1:00 PM to 1:50 PM
Sunday	4:00 PM to 4:50 PM

Gregory the Great (ca. 540 - 604): Adapting Pagan practices to win Pagan hearts. A man of undoubted personal piety who gave tirelessly of himself, calling his own position, as Pope, nothing more nor less than “the Servant of the Servants of God,” Gregory ministered to his people in many striking and effective ways (see his wisdom on pastoral care). Just one example: soon after launching a monk named Augustine and a team on an evangelistic mission to England, Gregory found himself answering their agonized letters: What do we do about all the Pagan practices and holidays we’re running across? Gregory counseled “selective appropriation”—that is, the radical, humanly sensitive practice of giving a cultural make-over to beliefs and practices sanctioned by long tradition.

Charles Simeon (1759 - 1836): Keeping it real to build up real ministers. Keenly aware of his own character flaws, finding it difficult to make friends, this “original campus minister” nonetheless had a fire in his bones to bring life back into the dead faith of Cambridge undergraduates and divinity students. Once an evangelical hothouse, by Simeon’s day Cambridge had fallen into a doldrums, slipping into irrelevance as the bastion of an outwardly powerful but inwardly dying religious establishment. In weekly rap sessions (believe it or not, the highlight of many undergraduates’ social schedule!); touching personal letters of pastoral advice; and straightforward, no-frills sermons of great power, Simeon personally mentored hundreds of effective pastors within both Anglicanism and the non-conformist churches of his day. His warm-hearted, lively style cut across the day’s nominal Christianity, reproducing itself in the ministries of his young admirers and spreading evangelical revival within a lost and tired English church.

Jan Amos Comenius (1592 - 1670): Reaching the child to grow the Christian. A prescient pioneer of modern educational theory whose life story is nothing short of harrowing, Comenius, a bishop in the Moravian church, lived in a time when education proceeded by rote recitation and liberal use of the “cane.” He was one of the first educators to understand young people as full spiritual and intellectual beings who mostly need to have their natural curiosity encouraged—rather than their behinds beaten. He was an idealist with a vision for peaceful cooperation among the denominations through improved education. And today, he remains the namesake of a major initiative in European education.

John Newton (1725 - 1807): Connecting through stories to transform plain folk. Many dwellers in late 18^th- and early 19^th-century rural England found themselves under the boot-heel of modernization. The lacemakers of Newton’s first parish barely scraped together a living providing their luxurious product to the doyens of London’s “Vanity Fair.” Against the highfalutin’ literary and clerical culture of his time, Newton perfected the art of ministering in plain words—out of his story and into other people’s stories. He told his life narrative in the most popular and imitated biography of his era. And he ministered out of that narrative again and again in sermon, song (most famously, “Amazing Grace“), and an astounding number of letters of spiritual advice. His approach was always personal and caring: he wrote many of his songs and sermons with particular struggles of particular parishioners in mind, and he poured his life into a close friend, the psychologically troubled William Cowper. He took Cowper into his own home, cheered him in his bouts of depression, and inspired him to write many of his brilliant poems and hymns (generally agreed to have far surpassed in subtlety and style Newton’s own literary productions).

Dorothy Sayers (1893 - 1957): Staging the “drama of the dogma” to wake the “frozen chosen.” One of the deepest-thinking Christians of her day, when Sayers wasn’t shocking Oxford’s Old-Boy guild with disquisitions on Dante’s sex life, she was writing bestselling mystery novels, books of lay theology, and religious plays. Sayers was a passionate intellectual, a no-nonsense public communicator, and an eccentric, even bombastic personality. Through her plays—some performed in England’s grandest cathedrals and others, most famously the Christmas play The Man Born to be King, on BBC radio—she portrayed the passionate rightness of orthodox Christianity for many who had abandoned the presumptive churchianity of England’s religious establishment. Believing that those who slept through church had no idea what dynamite the Gospel really was, she tried to get people to see, as she said, that “the dogma is the drama.”

Margery Kempe (ca. 1373 - 1438): Yielding to the Spirit to challenge the nominal. This soft-hearted but indomitable illiterate British laywoman dictated the first autobiography in the English language. In it, she tells the story of how God caused her to become a public spectacle—overcome with weeping almost every time the host was elevated in the performance of the Mass. In a time when Christian worship had become in many ways routinized and, from the perspective of the laity, distanced—and a vibrant movement of lay devotion had been growing for a couple of centuries—Margery embodied a lay “spirituality of the heart” in a challenging, public way. Everywhere she went, she polarized the church. Some clergy and monastics denounced her, and some admired and supported her. Erratic though some of her behavior appears to have been, it seems clear that she inspired many laypeople to a more intimate devotion with Christ, against a nominalizing trend in the church establishment.

Charles M. Sheldon (1857 - 1946): Confronting the wealthy with the poor–—to do what Jesus would do. The author of the famous question “What would Jesus do,” this Congregationalist minister found himself leading a wealthy, complacent late-Victorian church surrounded by a sprawling working class beaten down by poverty into slum housing, “social sins” of various kinds, and spiritual and emotional darkness. Appalled by this social disparity and convicted in his own heart, Sheldon decided to express his feelings and his vision for a better, more Christlike way of living in a novel beloved by millions: In His Steps. A beautiful balance between social gospel and evangelical crusade, this novel still bears reading today.

Why know Christian history? Why hang around this blog? See my article here.