Losing a name

This is a rough draft of something that might turn out to be the THIRD column! Jerry's amazed that I've already done two.

Back when I was in seminary, Christendom was divided neatly into about two pieces. Sort of an "us and them" thing.

Well, of course, there were more than two, but the Roman Catholics didn't count and neither did any of the members of Eastern Rite churches. (Though the Catholics are still the largest single denomination in the USA and the Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest body of Christians in the world. But who's counting?)

Anyhow, the "us and them" of Protestantdom was the Liberals and the Fundamentalists. And we knew we didn't fit in very well with either one. Liberals, my seminary professors assured me, were godless pagans who made a point of ignoring Jesus and justified every kind of immoral behavior by saying that it's the modern acceptable norm. Fundamentalists were simple-minded folk who memorized the King James Version and had no clue that there were any doctrines beyond responding to an altar call.

We wanted to be something else. The "we" was people like Francis Schaeffer, Jerram Barrs, Egon Middelmann (my roommate for a while and a relation of Schaeffer). Interesting bunch. Google them. Anyhow, we knew we didn't want to lose sight of Jesus. We knew that the Christian faith isn't just for the shallow-minded. Ted Smith (a professor of graphic design at Washington University) knew that the truly tacky visual arts that were so common in churches didn't reflect God's nature that well. Lots of us college kids loved the six-word gospel choruses, but Egon liked to remind us that church music used to have a lot of depth, so we sang Bach chorales. As a congregation.

The "we" was bigger than my circle of friends and fellow church members in St. Louis. One example was Robert E. Webber of Wheaton College. I'll let you Google those names to figure out who I'm talking about.

We called ourselves "Evangelicals" to distinguish ourselves from the secular-influenced Liberals and from the simple-mindedness of the Fundamentalists.

Then we lost that name. It has picked up connotations of intolerance, prejudice, insensitivity to the plight of the poor and suffering, and a political agenda that includes establishing a right-wing christian theocracy. (Lower-case "c" intentional.) If you say that John Doe is an Evangelical preacher, people assume that he's mainly focused on easy believism, personal wealth and glory for himself, and is probably corrupt. If someone says that First Steeple Church is an active Evangelical congregation, we imagine them to be picketing some courthouse but never feeding the poor. Let the Salvation Army do that.

I think it's a sad loss, both of the name and of the direction.