Reclaiming the Word "Evangelical"
Somewhere in the last fifty years, the word "evangelical" took on an entirely new meaning. So much that I've finally thrown in the towel. Given up. In great despair. It was the one word I thought I could hang my hat on forever as long as I was interested in proclaiming what I understand to be the Good News of Jesus Christ.
That understanding has evolved, I'll admit, since I began singing "Jesus Loves the Little Children," long before I knew this song was about far more than small children like me. I now understand Jesus differently than I did at age three--hopefully everyone acquainted with Christianity does. So how does that make me unique?
By the time I was ten, I understood as well as I do today that the message of Jesus was all-inclusive. Though I was a middle-aged adult before I fully understood what "inclusiveness" means.
In all of this evolution until now, in the eighth decade of my life, I have cringed at the stereo-typing that places anybody "outside the fold" of evangelicalism who believes in going forth and spreading the joy of Jesus to the world. This makes me an outsider. An outcast, though I still see myself as having grown deeper in my understanding of the Good News of Jesus, which is the Good News of inclusiveness. As opposed to the hard-headed insistence that there is only one way to understand Jesus.
Stop it! Just stop and listen. This, I want to scream to journalists, scholars, members of the clergy, and to the "ordinary" citizen on the streets of every continent--anyone who has bought into what must have happened while I lay sleeping. It's as if it happened overnight. Yet it didn't.
The little girl who understood Jesus has grown up in her understanding. Yet the passion to spread the Good News as I have come to understand it has not changed in the least!
I can rant and rave until my last breath, feeling like an evangelical inwardly. I believe I will, in fact--inwardly. Yet I can no longer identify myself as "an evangelical" because the world has come to understand that word in a far different way. It's a way that I do not want to identify myself. For I still want to believe that all true Christians are evangelicals. Otherwise, why would you choose to identify with Jesus, who told us to go out and spread the Good News to the whole world.
As a kid who memorized Matthew 28: 19-20 until I could recite it backwards, I did not see how colonialism had contaminated the Gospel, of course. Nor did I understand that patriarchy and racism had. Nor fundamentalism that insisted on an anti-intellectual approach that would render all other religious belief systems to be evil while my own was complete and perfect.
Somehow, odd ball that I am, I was uncomfortable with this dogma, which I admit I heard from many in the fundamentalist camp of right-winged Southern Baptists. Yet, long before I finished college I had discovered I had little room in my understanding for anyone who "evangelized" with this brutality.
So, I ask you, why should I be the one grieving when I grew up long ago, moving past adolescence, where so many so-called evangelicals have remained stuck, according to the Fowler's Stages of Faith that I learned to espouse as an explanation of the woman I had become by the time I reached mid-life? Why do I have to be the one feeling left out when I still understand so much of what I did as a little child--that the real evangelical is one who spreads the Good News of Jesus as that individual understands the Good News to be. Why, when I've done my best to "put away childish things," as written in 1 Corinthians 13, doing it in the way I speak, teach, write, and even answer my readers' emails? Why indeed!
When I read something written about evangelicals, why am I always near the point of tears, wanting to scream: "No! That's nothing but stereotyping. Do not put me in that narrow camp."
Or when I read something written by a self-identified evangelical preacher, proclaiming what "we evangelicals believe." What gives that guy the right to say that I ceased to be evangelical when I grew up, though I still have more appreciation for Jesus Christ and the message of Christianity as I understand it than I did as a small child. How is it that I'm now considered a heretic by so-called evangelicals? Why? Please, please tell me!
I want to see the word redeemed. I still want to be able to claim this as my identity, even though I'm a member of a church that boldly proclaims Jesus' peace, justice, mercy, and inclusiveness, even in the public arena. Yet I no longer can simply call myself an evangelical. Not to strangers, anyway. Not without hanging my head in shame.
Why do I, as an odd ball, have to explain myself or go away sorrowful, because the world no longer understands who I am? I do not want to be identified with the obnoxious side of evangelicalism that I detest as much as anyone. I want the world to know that this glorious word that I used to endear and once understood as sacred (and still do in its purest form) is now equated, rightfully so, by the majority of this world's citizens, as little more than "narrow-minded bigotry."
Surely I'm not alone. Or am I?
That understanding has evolved, I'll admit, since I began singing "Jesus Loves the Little Children," long before I knew this song was about far more than small children like me. I now understand Jesus differently than I did at age three--hopefully everyone acquainted with Christianity does. So how does that make me unique?
By the time I was ten, I understood as well as I do today that the message of Jesus was all-inclusive. Though I was a middle-aged adult before I fully understood what "inclusiveness" means.
In all of this evolution until now, in the eighth decade of my life, I have cringed at the stereo-typing that places anybody "outside the fold" of evangelicalism who believes in going forth and spreading the joy of Jesus to the world. This makes me an outsider. An outcast, though I still see myself as having grown deeper in my understanding of the Good News of Jesus, which is the Good News of inclusiveness. As opposed to the hard-headed insistence that there is only one way to understand Jesus.
Stop it! Just stop and listen. This, I want to scream to journalists, scholars, members of the clergy, and to the "ordinary" citizen on the streets of every continent--anyone who has bought into what must have happened while I lay sleeping. It's as if it happened overnight. Yet it didn't.
The little girl who understood Jesus has grown up in her understanding. Yet the passion to spread the Good News as I have come to understand it has not changed in the least!
I can rant and rave until my last breath, feeling like an evangelical inwardly. I believe I will, in fact--inwardly. Yet I can no longer identify myself as "an evangelical" because the world has come to understand that word in a far different way. It's a way that I do not want to identify myself. For I still want to believe that all true Christians are evangelicals. Otherwise, why would you choose to identify with Jesus, who told us to go out and spread the Good News to the whole world.
As a kid who memorized Matthew 28: 19-20 until I could recite it backwards, I did not see how colonialism had contaminated the Gospel, of course. Nor did I understand that patriarchy and racism had. Nor fundamentalism that insisted on an anti-intellectual approach that would render all other religious belief systems to be evil while my own was complete and perfect.
Somehow, odd ball that I am, I was uncomfortable with this dogma, which I admit I heard from many in the fundamentalist camp of right-winged Southern Baptists. Yet, long before I finished college I had discovered I had little room in my understanding for anyone who "evangelized" with this brutality.
So, I ask you, why should I be the one grieving when I grew up long ago, moving past adolescence, where so many so-called evangelicals have remained stuck, according to the Fowler's Stages of Faith that I learned to espouse as an explanation of the woman I had become by the time I reached mid-life? Why do I have to be the one feeling left out when I still understand so much of what I did as a little child--that the real evangelical is one who spreads the Good News of Jesus as that individual understands the Good News to be. Why, when I've done my best to "put away childish things," as written in 1 Corinthians 13, doing it in the way I speak, teach, write, and even answer my readers' emails? Why indeed!
When I read something written about evangelicals, why am I always near the point of tears, wanting to scream: "No! That's nothing but stereotyping. Do not put me in that narrow camp."
Or when I read something written by a self-identified evangelical preacher, proclaiming what "we evangelicals believe." What gives that guy the right to say that I ceased to be evangelical when I grew up, though I still have more appreciation for Jesus Christ and the message of Christianity as I understand it than I did as a small child. How is it that I'm now considered a heretic by so-called evangelicals? Why? Please, please tell me!
I want to see the word redeemed. I still want to be able to claim this as my identity, even though I'm a member of a church that boldly proclaims Jesus' peace, justice, mercy, and inclusiveness, even in the public arena. Yet I no longer can simply call myself an evangelical. Not to strangers, anyway. Not without hanging my head in shame.
Why do I, as an odd ball, have to explain myself or go away sorrowful, because the world no longer understands who I am? I do not want to be identified with the obnoxious side of evangelicalism that I detest as much as anyone. I want the world to know that this glorious word that I used to endear and once understood as sacred (and still do in its purest form) is now equated, rightfully so, by the majority of this world's citizens, as little more than "narrow-minded bigotry."
Surely I'm not alone. Or am I?
*****
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