Natanael Disla holds a Licenciate in Business Administration from the Pedro Henríquez Ureña National University and is studying for the Bachelor in Theological Sciences in the Baptist Seminary of Dominican Republic. He is a member of the Latin American Theological Fraternity (LATF) and Coordinator of the Dominican Republic LATF cohort. Natanael ives in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

A Time To Reconstruct

by Jonathan Brink

Over the last decade, many of us who have participated in what some call “the conversation” have been engaging a deconstruction process of our faith. In many ways this leaving was liberation from an old story. The traditional way of seeing the story in the Gospel just didn’t work anymore. The conversation became a place to share our fears, our stories, and our liberation.

One of the real, valid criticisms of this process is that much of the conversation was a deconstruction process. In other words, we were tearing down an old story but nothing new was offered to take its place. I get that concern. It’s easy to criticize what’s wrong with something and never offer something different. But I would also offer that the removing the old story was necessary for us to see something new.

The primary concern for me within this space was our historical understanding of the Gospel. I could no longer ignore the inherent conflicts with our traditional stories, specifically in terms of the atonement. The atonement captured my attention in the conversation because it is the linchpin in the story. It informs us of both the problem and the solution.

Why were there several atonement theories? Why did they fundamentally conflict with each other? Why had the Eastern Church settled on Ransom theory and the Western church settle on Penal Substitution? Wrestling with these theories was important because they were our framing story for the Gospel. I never stopped believing in Jesus. I just stopped believing in the story people were telling me about him.

As a western evangelical, I had reached a point where I could no longer live with what had been handed down to me. Yet the alternative (Ransom Theory) had too many problems. As I voiced my concerns I found a community willing to ask the same questions and wrestle through the possibilities. Had my Catholic friends done one better by simply calling it a mystery? So over a three-year period I simply went back to the original story. I opened myself to the possibility that another way of seeing the Gospel was already present, embedded in the text.

The one obvious piece of evidence I observed was that our historical assumptions conflicted in where they located the problem. Ransom theory assumed we were being held captive to Satan. Penal Substitution theory assumed we were being held captive to God’s justice. Both had enough evidence to suggest they were true, but enough problems to cast doubt that they were true.

At some point though, we can only deconstruct so far without falling into a sense of void. I’m just not that good at sitting with nothing, yet the more I examined the theories, the deeper the tension grew. This exploration process eventually led me to a retreat in the beautiful Lake Tahoe area. I felt compelled to spend time alone with God, wrestling with the tension that was brewing to full steam.

As I stood in my cheap motel room pouring over the evidence one more time, I felt a strange question arise in my Spirit. “Who else is in the Garden?” At that moment I happened to be standing in front of a mirror, and I caught my own reflection. “Who else is in the Garden?”

“We are,” I said out loud, and mirrors don’t lie. Had we located the problem incorrectly? Did the story present another possibility? The answer was a resounding, “Yes.”

Where the traditional theories had always pointed outward, casting the problem away from humanity, the story actually pointed the problem back at us. The key phrase in the story was, “And they realized they were naked.” Naked was always true but their judgment of it had changed. Created in the image of God, humanity held the capacity to construct a reality different from God’s. We held the capacity to judge the self in a way that was untrue. How then does God convince humanity it is good, when it has convinced itself it is not good?

This new possibility opened up an entirely new way of seeing the story. The problem wasn’t with God. The problem was in me. I need evidence to the contrary. I needed evidence that would release me from my own captive judgments. I needed someone to take my place in my own retributive form of justice, one that could only see guilt.

The cross was not God sending his Son to satisfy the demands of Satan, or to appease his own sense of justice. The cross was God lifting his arms to the world and saying, “This is how far I will go to show you that my original judgment of you was true.” For the first time the Gospel could be framed as a ferocious love. God’s justice was found in the act of mercy. It made sense in a way that seemed to redeem the Gospel. And it was so simple.

Seeing this new possibility changed everything. It informed both my sense of pain and suffering, justice and reconciliation. It gave me a sense of compassion that was overwhelming. It gave new meaning to God’s invitation to love my neighbor as myself. Salvation was no longer release from something out there, but from something within. Redemption was about me trading in my false judgment for God’s.

Seeing the new story invited me into God’s mission. We can’t participate in God’s mission unless we know what problem God is actually solving. Could the problem actually keep us from seeing what problem God was solving in the story? Could the problem literally blind us to seeing what I would call the God Imagination, a way of seeing reality from God’s perspective?

As I shared my discoveries with both my evangelical, Catholic and even atheist friends, I was surprised by the response. Most suggested I was on to something. And let me be the first to say, I don’t think I’m discovering anything new. I think the followers of Jesus got it. But over time this Way of seeing got lost. All we’re doing is simply rediscovering it again.

Jonathan Brink is a blogger and author of Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity (CreateSpace, 2010).

Real Austin: Theology on a Downtown Bus

by Annie Bullock

Since moving to Austin just two years ago, I’ve had my share of encounters with Leslie Cochran, almost all of them on the 1L/1M bus through downtown. Leslie is a homeless transvestite and a beloved Austin institution. I saw him for the first time on my very first visit to Austin. He was standing on the curb looking bewildered in a purple mini-skirt and pumps. He crossed the street halfway, paused, and then abruptly returned to the curb he’d just left, slinging his skirt over his hips as he went, revealing a leopard print thong. Between his flamboyant fashion sense and his proclivity for public semi-nudity, he’s hard to miss if you spend any time downtown.

Leslie is a one of a kind weird guy and yet in many ways, he’s emblematic of the Austin homeless community: harmless, eccentric, and not looking for a way back into ordinary society.

Austin’s homeless community is remarkably cohesive in some ways. Leslie Cochran ran for mayor in 2000, capturing nearly 8% of the vote. Jennifer Gale, a transgendered woman who ran for a range of public offices, from mayor to city council to a place on the board of the Austin Independent School District, was another fixture in Austin politics. At her peak, she could be counted on to garner 5-8% of the total vote in a given race. Her campaign slogan modified the popular “Keep Austin Weird,” promising instead to “Keep Austin, Austin.” Both understood themselves as representatives of a legitimate community. The next logical step was to run for public office. And both were emphatically part of what some call the real Austin.

I met Jennifer on the bus shortly after I came to Austin. She was wearing a worn blue sweatshirt, white polyester culottes, and a dingy visor. She carried her belongings in a plastic sack. I’m just coming from a city council meeting, she said breathlessly as she sat down. I’m Jennifer Gale. She shook my hand. I’m running for mayor. You’ll vote for me, won’t you? I thought she might be crazy but I liked her, so I smiled and said I would. As we rode, she told me about her vision for improving Austin, which sounded remarkably sane. A pair of tourists boarded the bus. They were from Oregon—Salem, not Portland, which explains their wary, wide-eyed first reaction to Jennifer. Within three blocks, they had warmed up to her as she told them a series of groan-worthy puns and jokes. Before she got off, she reminded me of my promise to vote for her and gave the tourists a restaurant recommendation. Gatti’s, she said. I go there all the time.

Six months later, I was in the car when I heard the local NPR station report that Jennifer had been found dead on the steps of First English Lutheran Church. She died of heart failure sometime during the night. It was December and they honored her by playing a recording of her singing “Silent Night” at a city council meeting. She was only 48. I burst into tears. I only met her once but she was my friend.

The homeless community isn’t a utopia by any means. There are real problems that come with living on the streets. Jennifer Gale’s death is a painful illustration. Jennifer’s heart condition was aggravated by the physical strain of sleeping outside. A 2009 attack on Leslie Cochran makes the same point. Leslie was hospitalized after he was beaten. He had warned a group of addicts about the dangers of drug abuse. The homeless suffer. Some suffer from mental illnesses. Others suffer from addiction. They all suffer the physical and mental exhaustion that characterizes life on the streets.

Waiting at a downtown bus stop recently, I encountered a man who wore long, shaggy dreadlocks, an ankle length leather coat, and a straw cowboy hat. I just got my guitar back, he shouted. Austin, I am going off! He was drunk or high and a passing cop stopped to run him off. There was a dog sitting in the passenger seat of a sports car stopped at the light. You see that dog, the hobo said as he looked me straight in the eye. That dog is treated like a person. He paused dramatically. You get it? Yeah, I said. I do. He nodded and went on his way. I didn’t do nothing, he threw over his shoulder at the hovering cop. Half a block up the street, I saw him pass a hunched man with a facial tic, shuffling and muttering his way down the street. They paused long enough to share a fist bump.

It’s not a utopia, but it is a community. And there’s a difference between a flawed community of suffering people and an issue, a problem to be solved, or a mess to be cleaned up.

Duane Severance understood this difference. He understood the lives of the homeless because he spent his days with them. Duane was at the beginning of a promising career as a chef when he started reading his bible. When he read that Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell everything he had and give it to the poor, Duane took the advice to heart. He sold what he had, sought out the most destitute folk he could find, and made them his friends. He eventually ended up in Austin, where he prayed for God to give him a corner of his own. As Duane told the story, God told him to go down to 6th and Congress—Leslie Cochran’s corner. He staked his claim there and became a part of the community: Brother Duane, pastor to the homeless. On Sundays, he preached at the Church Under the Bridge, which meets under the I-35 overpass at 7th Street. Duane eventually married but even as the married father of three, ministry on the streets of Austin was his primary occupation.

Duane didn’t set out to address homelessness. He went looking for people. In January of 2010, Duane was killed in a single car accident in Seward Junction, northwest of Austin. Mission Possible, the organization that sponsors Church Under the Bridge, held a memorial service for him that went for hours as a stream of men and women shared the many ways Brother Duane had touched their lives. His funeral was held a few days later at a local church. It was standing room only. For the second time, people were lined up to speak about how Duane had changed things for them. Love is a precious commodity in a world that treats you like something less than human.

To paraphrase Sarah Miles, author of Take This Bread: The Spiritual Autobiography of a 21st Century Christian, this is hardly what George Bush had in mind when he talked about faith based initiatives. The recent surge of public progressive religiosity prompted Glenn Beck’s ill-fated advice to his audience that they should leave their churches if their leaders talked about social justice. Critics rightly replied that the commitment to social justice is in fact biblical. Miles makes the same observation. She converted when she discovered that the radical commitment to solidarity with the poor that she had always associated with progressive values was perfectly consonant with Christianity. And from the Eucharistic table, she took an imperative to go into the world and feed the hungry.

Duane Severance lived that kind of solidarity with the poor and his impact among Austin’s homeless is a testament to the transformative power of compassion. The difference is that Duane was not a progressive—far from it, in fact. His faith was radical, though, and that’s where the real power for transformation—and the possibility of cooperation—lies. He lived among the poor as one of them because that’s what he thought God wanted from him. Like Sarah Miles, he took the gospel command to go and do likewise to heart. Both embraced a radical, kenotic faith. Both were utterly changed by it. Both were agents for change in their communities.

The last several years have seen a palpable shift in public discourses. But we should take care before we find ourselves divided into new camps, religious right and religious left in place of religious right and secular left. We have a new opportunity to seek the common good, not as a replacement for our theological commitments but as the result of them. This is an important distinction. It does not threaten my theological traditionalism to embrace the poor and to work for their elevation. On the contrary, my faith demands throwing my hand in with the outcast and the stranger, just as the faith of so many of my theologically liberal friends and colleagues demands the same thing.

What I’m suggesting isn’t easy. I’ve lost more friends over my religious and political views than I care to recall. I am too liberal for some and not liberal enough for others. It takes courage to stay when it’s uncomfortable. It takes patience to listen when you dislike what you’re hearing. It takes confidence to like people who don’t see things your way. And it takes humility to admit you might be wrong. Growth is painful. But as long as we isolate ourselves from one another, as long as we stay in churches with like-minded people, populate our social circles with our own kind, and fill our theology schools with homogeneous communities of professors and students, we lose the opportunity to mature.

To draw the conversation back to Austin, we lose the opportunity to be real. In the logic of Christian theology, Jesus was a new Adam, the new head of a human race in desperate need of restoration. Jesus restores our vision of what is possible for a human being, fully realized and fully reflecting the image of God. This image is part of every human person. It is obscured by our common captivity to sin and death, but it is there. Our work—which is the work of the Holy Spirit—is to seek what is damaged and restore it, in ourselves and others. Redemption means becoming more whole and therefore ever more fully and truly human. We become ever more real.

The image of God is present in every human being, no matter how addicted, unruly, or unwashed, no matter how unlike us. As I board the 1L/1M every day, I look for the image of God in the people around me. I acknowledge them. I treat them with dignity. I look for signs of life. Above all, I am not afraid to hope in their redemption. In the possibility of their redemption, I see the possibility of my own. And I pray with anyone who will pray with me: Keep Austin real, make Austin human.

Annie Bullock recently received her PhD in Religion from Emory University, with a specialization in the religions of the Roman Empire in postcolonial perspective. She is an adjunct instructor at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX, where she teaches both church history and New Testament.

Unstudying God: Finding God in the Barren Land

by George Elerick

Theology is the study of God… more specifically of any deity. It is a place where we come and try to understand God, where we attempt to bring our scalpels and scientifically assess if God makes sense to us. We bring our history, environments, fears and dreams all to this one place to find the God that exists beyond God. We are affected by all of our past, present and future when we step into the realm of studying God.

Studying God presupposes that God desires us to deconstruct Him. That somehow God wants to be found. In our studying, deep down where the subconscious lies, we want to save God from those around us. Theology has evolved into a practice where we get to be the demi-gods of development. Theology has deformed itself into something that deforms its followers irreparably into people who desire to only make sense of a being beyond our senses. What we have come to understand about God has been formed by thousands of years of interpretations. We tend to align ourselves alongside these interpretations and deem them as theology.

Theology is the practice and study of God as share above, but our discoveries are the fruit of that study. Fruit can rot, get old and die. We need new fruit, at the risk of leaving some of the old fruit behind. There were thousands of years of scholars, linguists, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists who came together to piece together information about Jesus, God, Torah and the New Testament. A lot of our theology is fruit of their labor. A lot of what we know about God derives from their discoveries. But what about the undiscovered country? What about what lies beyond all those fields of study? What about the gaps in between those studies? Is God there, stripped bare of all that we have to offer him? Can God still be found in the barren land?

We need a change.

We need to race like madmen and strip off all of our clothes …those things we’ve made ourselves to hide behind… and find God in the barren wilderness, in the barren place where the death of theology is nothing more than a whisper in our history books. Where God is shouting louder than all the things we have come to call home. The barren land is a place where we come to find healing, to find the shalom we all crave from the storms of our mind. The barren land is a place where we come to deny God to find Him. The barren land is a place where the broken become more broken to find that it’s truly finished. The barren land is the place we all come and lie in the tomb waiting for our rescue.

God resides in the gap.

The barren land calls us to lay down our books, our paradigms, our presuppositions, along with our fear of the unknown and find that God lives in the gaps between them all. The barren land is stripped of all study, for God lies beyond it. The barren land is a place that calls to us out from the darkness into the light. The barren land is stripped of all light. It is a secluded place where God digs through his treasures like an old man rifling through his collection of knick-knacks. He calls like John the Baptist in the wilderness. It’s in the barren land where his must be done.

The barren land is a place where we might leave our answers behind and find a God who is ready for the taking. Rather than theology, we need to chase God in the wilderness of our ambiguity. Rather than worldviews, we need to find God in the place where He resides, outside of our worldviews… outside of our religious divisions and denominational trappings… outside of our spiritual enquiry. When we give them all up, when we are ready to divorce ourselves from all we think we need to grasp the Divine, God will be present in the gaps. We come into the barren land as participator rather than observer.

It is possible to enter the barren land without anything but is a personal journey each must take, as we all have our own theological baggage to leave behind. The barren land is a place of divorce and confusion, a place where only God can breathe. God is in the place where we are learning to believe and un-believe in Him. The barren land is a place that calls the dry and weary soul to maintain its dryness and embrace its weariness and see the God who has been with them in the Garden all this time. The barren land is devoid of historical contingencies, creeds, bibles and truth. God quietly resides in the gap between them.

George Elerick is an author, blogger, speaker and founder of Chairs for Dialogue, an interfaith initiative that unites people from different faith traditions, no faith traditions, and different lifestyle backgrounds to work together to find relevant, creative, and practical ways to respond to global issues such as poverty, sex trafficking, debt, war, intolerance, and injustice.

Where the Edges Meet: What Emergents Can Learn from the New Mystics

by Dave T. Brown

”...The fingers and the thumb have a certain separateness. They have grown out of, and belong to, something larger than any one of them alone…the palm of the hand. The same pulse in the wrist brings the life blood to each of them. ...The basic truth which unites [different churches] is far bigger and more important than the things which separate them, and love for Christ pulses through them all and gives life, power and unity to them all.”—Leslie Weatherhead

I grew up speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and witnessing healings and exorcisms. As disciples of the Charismatic movement, my parents frequently held prayer meetings in our home, and such events became particularly intense when their evangelist, missionary, and prophet friends came to town. Those were interesting times to say the least, especially when I was placed in the “hot seat” for deliverance or healing.

To some, this type of spirituality is all fine and dandy, while to others it has the stench of a cult. Regardless, leaving theology and eccentricities aside, one of the things I appreciate about my Charismatic upbringing is the deep desire to get beyond dry intellectual debate to experience the divine, instead of just talking about it. And while I think back and cringe at some of my memories, I also have affection for some of the things I experienced. So I wasn’t surprised when, about a year ago, I stumbled on some YouTube videos of a group known as the New Mystics.

The New Mystics is a rapidly growing segment on the fringe of the Charismatic movement. It’s characterized by its emphasis on ecstatic experiences of God. Considered leaders of the movement, speaker John Crowder, who CurrentTV called “the YouTube Prophet,” and musician Ben Dunn often get “whacked up” in the “drunken glory” of God and stumble around mumbling like they’re flat-out wasted. They have raves during which hundreds of people, young and old alike, don whimsical attire and gather to trance out with trippy worship music and stumble and crawl around just like they’re completely fried. I’ve also seen them pray for people who then apparently get healed, like one man did in what they call the “pee pee miracle.”

And while I have to say that I view much of their stuff as freakish, what interests me the most about the people in this movement is their determination to experience God with wild abandon. These new Jesus freaks just don’t care what people think because, as they might say, they are tired of dry religion and seek to experience God without the chains of religious decorum.

They travel the world to bring a message of freedom from oppressive religion and a hope for a new way, and encourage Christians to lighten up. There’s a New Mystics-related festival in the UK called Sloshfest, put on by a group called Emerge Wales (led by a drunk monk and a Doug Pagitt look-alike). During the 2010 Sloshfest rave, the crowd sang a rowdy, pirate-style chorus with anti-imperialist lyrics that caught my ear:

It’s over, it’s over, it’s over…The Empire is over!
But it’s growing, it’s growing, it’s growing…The Kingdom is growing!

And that’s when I realized some of the common ground that Emergent has with the New Mystics, Charismania, and other nontraditional Christian religious movements: For one, we’re all often described by others as being fringe movements. And sometimes, including Emergent, we’re called cults as groups and heretics as individuals. But besides this, and more importantly, many of us within these movements seek an end to imperialistic domination of Christianity. We seek freedom from dogmatic tyranny. And I think it would be helpful (ecumenically at least) for Emergents to appreciate the common ground we have with other movements that have started on the edge of the establishment. Not just for historical interest or nostalgia, but to share stories and really learn some things from each other.

For instance, as I said, I admire the New Mystics’ determination to experience God’s power with wild abandon, to get beyond the tired, ivory-tower discussions about Church past and future, to open their eyes to the Kingdom that is here and now, and to get out and do something. I sometimes feel the Emergent movement seems stuck in a cycle of cerebral discussion. Sharing stories of experiences is what conversation is all about, and sometimes I feel like what we call a “conversation” is more like an intellectual debate that’s open mainly to the scholarly. Although movements need discussion and debate to strengthen their core, others involved can’t survive only on the orations of talking-head representatives.

Of course, I’m certainly not suggesting that we can best prove our connection with God by acting like we’re drunk all the time, nor am I suggesting that we can’t find heart-felt meaning in theological discussion. But I know that I have often felt more comfortable swapping big words like “eschatological” and “ekklesia” when I could have been swapping personal stories. Like how I’ve felt detached from the larger Church because, as an agnostic Christian, I don’t have any idea what I believe anymore but I still seek to experience God’s power in a very real way. Or instead of discussing the finer points of how Jung’s collective unconscious applies to atonement theory, I could have shared how I sometimes still find contentment when praying in tongues. I could have held hands in public, prayed with, and cried with my friend who was feeling lonely, instead of distancing myself from an unhip situation by casually helping him psychoanalyze himself. I could have thrown back my head and wailed or at least pumped my fists because of the joy I felt when singing a song about grace, but instead my hands found more comfort in the restriction of my pockets.

None of us on the fringes want to be held down by spiritual tyranny. That’s why we’ve voluntarily exiled ourselves to the desert of edge-pushing spirituality. And that was one of the things that attracted people like my parents to the Charismatic movement. They wanted more than establishment-friendly religion. And while Charismania has frequently (and often rightly) been criticized as all emotion and no substance, I think it’s unwise to adhere to the opposite extreme of all head and no heart. More specifically, I think we all could handle a little more emotion in our spiritual regimen. It’s okay to cry or laugh in church. It’s okay to express our passion with boisterous antics…or weepy, knees-on-floor reverence.

It’s okay to come out from behind the mask of objective distance. Because sometimes life sucks and we need to share the burden with somebody. And sometimes God has worked a miracle and we need to shout it from the rooftops. Sometimes we’re pissed off and it does more harm to hold it in. And sometimes we’ve experienced a hit of holy joy and freedom that we can’t explain, and we should share these things because that’s what community is for.

I don’t want this precious movement of the emerging church to end up as just another dry, debate-filled clique that gradually becomes the empire it set out to avoid. But I have enormous hope that that will never be the case. Because we are all part of a bigger story that will continue to evolve. Even as we sometimes try to distance ourselves from the label, we on the fringes are still an integral part of the larger Christian movement that’s been rolling on for millennia, and it always will be bigger than any one empire that tries to lay claim to it.

In context with the quote I put at the beginning of my rant, Leslie Weatherhead also wrote that “Christianity must have a marvelous inherent power, or the churches would have killed it long ago.” And although I no longer know exactly what my theology is concerning that “inherent power,” I choose to believe that it is indeed marvelous. It’s also wild, untamable, and often unexplainable, and I think it would be good for us to set it free.

Dave Brown is a writer living in Austin, TX. He blogs at TheAgnosticPentecostal.com.