Dead Christians Society

The “Tale that Wags the Blog” is actually a set of tales–a book I am writing for InterVarsity Press:

Patron Saints for Postmoderns
Ten members of our faith family show us how to be Christ’s body for the world in times of cultural change.

In his justly acclaimed The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996), Andrew Walls has argued that the 2,000-year odyssey of the church’s history is a story of a series of cultural translations. The church translated itself from a Jewish to a Roman “idiom” after the fall of Jerusalem; from Roman to German after the fall of Rome; from Irish to English through the savvy mission of Augustine of Canterbury and Gregory the Great; and so forth.

Today a generation of “Younger Evangelicals” (Robert Webber) or “Emergents” warns that the Western church—especially the comfortable, middle-class American church—has become bogged down in conservative irrelevance. We have become, claims this restless group, unable to communicate with a new, post-Christian generation.

In this stagnant moment we need—say these young critics—to translate the faith anew. We need to slough off the presumptive conservative-Christian cultural shell of the church today in order to reach out to those who speak a wholly different language. We need to do—to be—a new translation of the Gospel.

Only, they admit, we’re not sure yet what that translation should look like.

This is an appropriate moment for the telling of stories.

And so I propose to tell a set of stories of a group of “Patron–and Matron!–Saints for Postmoderns.” Each of these people helped engineer a cultural translation of the Gospel at a crucial point in history, when the church was getting culturally and spiritually bogged down.

One of the first things we find when we look at these folks’ lives is that the most successful cultural translators have been those who stood most firmly on the shoulders of those who went before.

As in the fine arts, imitation is the best anchor and fountain of innovation. So we need to heed the advice of Job’s “friend” Bildad:

“Ask the former generations and find out what their fathers learned, for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow. Will they not instruct you and tell you? Will they not bring forth words from their understanding?” (Job 8:8-10).

“We were born only yesterday and know nothing”; we need to hear the wisdom of our forefathers. If we feel our current church is shallow, thin, or weak, it may be because it lacks an anchor in our history.
 

The stories of these saints can strengthen and deepen us. Sure, none of these people wield the canonical authority of the apostles. But as accomplished members of Christ’s body they are deserving of honor—and a hearing. Ours is, of course, a historical, enculturated faith. Jesus was incarnated once in history, as a first-century Jew from Nazareth. Ever since, he has been  incarnated again—through his body, the always culturally located church. Most of our “body parts” lived long ago—yet they live on. We need to hear them anew.

For more on some of the ten people who will star in this book, browse under the “category” list in the left sidebar of the main blog page.

So, here’s my fond hope:

When readers are drawn in to the personality and world of each of these “saints,” then they can engage in a personal way with the issues and methods represented in stories. Then they can feel these patron saints are truly present with them, urging them on, as patron saints are supposed to be and do. Then they can—if you’ll pardon the romantic image—become initiated into the Dead Christians Society, and begin to draw from the strength of the whole communion of saints through time and space.

In other words, the mode I’m aiming for is more camp meeting than classroom—not stilted didacticism but honest testimonial. But I stress the “honest”: unlike most testimonials for public consumption, these accounts won’t hide the flaws and ambiguities. (I aspire to the kind of refreshing honesty we find in some of Ruth Tucker’s profiles in From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya.)

I’m teaching a couple of courses related to this book. First, a short one at this summer’s Cornerstone Festival (see the post under “courses”). Second, a full semester course this fall (2005) at Bethel Seminary St. Paul (Minnesota), where I am associate professor of church history. (I will post more details on this one later–it will use some of the books listed under the “books” section of this blog.) Though each of these courses stands on its own feet, they are in a sense “laboratories” for the book.

In the end, I do believe we can learn a thing or two about the “how to” of cultural translation from these leaders. But my higher hope is that as we take the next few steps deeper into the fog of a perplexing future, we find in these folks’ stories not just a little more light but also a new resolve. At the very least, I hope each story will remind readers that it is ultimately Christ—through the power of his Spirit and through his whole body—who builds the church so the gates of hell will not stand against it.

Come enjoy with me the process of getting to know ten fascinating “cultural translators” of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Please feel free to share your own thoughts on these figures, knowing that if I am going to quote any blog participant in the book, I will contact them for their permission first! This blog is not an underhanded method of gathering material. I have other ways to do that. It is, yes, partly a “marketing tool,” to let folks know about the book. But more than that, it is a way to make the lonely writing process more dynamic and interactive. I hope you’ll join in.

In writing of each of these culturally translating saints, I will deal at least implicitly, beneath the surface of the text, with a set of questions:

–What cultural moment did each figure face—both in the wider society and within his or her church setting?

–How did the person translate the gospel and rework Christian life for that moment?

–How did that translation challenge the churchly status quo as well as the wider culture of their day?

–What resistance did each meet from within the church? From the world outside the church?

–How did each respond to these sorts of resistance?

–What were the results?

–What were the downsides, the blind spots of these saints’ “translations”? (This is not triumphalist history—we recognize and admit the stumbles of each saint, and we learn from those mistakes, too.)

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.

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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.