(My) (Evangelical) 2011 in Review

The novelty of the New Year wanes quickly, so only two weeks into 2012, this reflective look back at '011 already feels a bit cool.  But I was away for the first week of January so I'm only getting to it now, and hoping that enough of you are still mistakenly writing "2011" on your cheques that a year-in-review will still strike a nerve. 

Not sure how many of you remember any of the following headline highlights, but each in the list below stood out to me as especially significant, either for its impact on the Christian world, or for the light it shed on the State of that Nation known as the People of God.

January 12: Jay Bakker releases Fall to Grace
Son of the infamous televangelist with the same last name, Jay Bakker released a humble-autobiography-cum-church-manifesto about what's wrong with our present practice of the Fundamentals of the Faith, and what needs to change.  I was under the impression that fundamentalist snipers had neutralized most leading lights in the Emergent Church, but Bakker's book, at the very least, shows that the movement's not yet dead.

March 2:  Pakistani Minorities Minister shot dead
Shahbaz Bhatti's assassination for his political work in Pakistan to guarantee the religious freedoms of that country's Christian minority (1.5% of the population) was far more stunning and troubling than either the mainstream or Christian press gave it time for.  It struck me then, and later still when Coptic Christians in Egypt started to suffer persecution after the much-lauded "Arab Spring" thawed that country, how little attention the Canadian media pays to Christian persecution around the world.

March 15:  Rob Bell releases Love Wins
So much to say about this whole doctrine-meets-Internet debacle, so little time (which is perhaps why some distilled their commentary down to a single Tweet).  It demonstrated in ways few were prepared for what the gasoline of social media can do to the fires of doctrinal disagreement; it showed us how ill-prepared Christians really are after all to navigate the sticky strands of the World-Wide-Inter-Web; it showed us that the closets of Western Evangelicalism were bulging with Universalists of all description waiting-- just waiting-- for someone to jiggle the handle and discover it was unlocked; and it showed us (yet again) the dark under-belly of celebrity-pastor-culture.

April 23:  The Conservative Party promises Canadians an "Office of Religious Freedom" if elected
Whether this was, as some cynical pundits suggested at the time, a shameless ploy to secure the Christian Right vote, or not, it does shed light on the way politics and religion mix far less easily in Canada than they do down south, and that, more than any other party, the Tories "got" the psyche of the average Canadian evangelical.

May 1:  John Piper vets Rick Warren
That John Piper, the old-guard of the Neo-Reformed movement, saw fit publicly to interview Rick Warren, the Hawaiian-shirt-frocked front man for Purpose-Driven pragmatism, on his doctrinal soundness, says less about Warren's supposed "orthodoxy" than it does about the cult of celebrity in American churches, the widening fissures in Western Christendom, the crisis in Evangelical ecclesiology, the troubling in-grouping-out-grouping tendencies of the Neo-Reformed movement, and the even more troubling ex-Cathedral authority pastors with lucrative publishing deals can accumulate to themselves.

May 21:  Harold Camping's Rapture doesn't come
Probably the less said about this one the better, but it did remind me why I'm an Amillenialist, all over again, and reminded me of the wisdom of humbly taking Jesus at his word, when he said what he said back in Matthew 24:36.

June 1:  Christianity Today launches a "Quest for the Historical Adam"
This was, it seems, the year of the "Evangelical Doctrine on Public Display":  Hell, the Rapture, and Genesis-literalism all nova-ed brightly across the canopy of cyber-space this year.  Though this article received less attention than Love Wins, it did show us that the debate is much further from being settled than we ever thought, and that along with those universalists, the closets were also bulging with theo-evolutionists of a distinctly Evangelical variety.  

June 12:  The Book of Mormon (The Musical) wins a Tony for Best Musical
I include this one on the list because the fact that a Broadway musical about Mormonism garnered so much acclaim and accolades illustrates, among other things, how mainstream this religious movement has become.  One Mormon commenter, when asked if it troubled her to see a play so directly and irreverently satirizing her faith, said it all for me in her reply:  "No," she said, "it just tells me that the broader culture has finally become comfortable enough with Mormonism to poke fun at it."  At the risk of sounding prophetic: this illustrates an evolution in the main-stream perception of Mormonism that will have significant implications for credal Christianity and its witness in the world.

July 7:  Mark Driscoll's latest drivel
I'm thankful to Pastor Driscoll for the regular lessons he gives me in throttling my own indignation and choking back my bile.  He's so uniquely adept at saying stupid things insensitively that he has almost become his own adjective.  So: suffice it to say that this summer, when he posted an open invitation on Facebook for his friends and followers to share derisive stories about their encounters with "effeminate anatomically male" worship leaders, it was, for lack of a better word, totally driscollian.

July 27:  John Stott passes
We commended a lovely servant of Jesus and a humble states-man for the Faith to the Grace of God this year.  Preacher, pastor, evangelist, philanthropist (in the best sense of that word), writer, Christian leader, missionary, he was, by all accounts, a beautiful man and God used him wonderfully.  To commemorate his going to be with the Lord, I've added The Cross of Christ to my reading list this year.