My Christian 2015 in Review

Usually at some point every January I try to take a minute to look back on the year that was, and reflect on some of the major news events that impacted, influences or otherwise illuminated the world of Canadian Evangelicalism.  This year I am a bit behind the eight-ball, as usual, and 2015 is already feeling a bit cobwebby and archaic, but even so, I hope you’ll join me for one last glance over the shoulder at the flotsam and jetsam of 2015’s headlines.  When it comes to the “evangelically-significant” events of 2015, this list is hardly exhaustive, I admit, but it’s a good place to start.  Who here remembers when ...

January 7:  Two gun men attack the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, killing 11 people.
As it relates to Canadian Christianity, this story was particularly of note for the way it brought into stark relief a number of global issues all at once: the West’s distorted view of the Muslim world, the recurring narrative of armed gunmen randomly killing victims, the conflicting themes of tolerance and free-speech.

January 22:  Historical Jesus writer and member of the Jesus Seminar, Marcus Borg, dies at age 72.
Given the plethora of more notable and weighty headlines, the passing of Marcus Borg went almost unnoticed, but I’ve included it here inasmuch as: a) his rigorous debates with his friend (and evangelical scholar) N. T. Wright was part of the grist for the historical-Jesus mill that eventually produced Wright’s seminal book Jesus and the Victory of God; and b) it seems to me that the era of liberal  “Jesus-Seminar” style speculation on the “historical Jesus” has in many ways run its course.

February 6:  The Supreme Court rules that the Canadian ban on Physician-Assisted Suicide is unconstitutional, giving Parliament 12 months to enact new legislation.
Along with the question of Muslim relations, and how we will respond to acts of terrorism and violence, 2015 seemed also to be the year when God was asking Canadian Christians how they will respond to the ongoing erosion of traditional Christian values in the broader culture. The EFC has done much good work, speaking out on this issue, which I would encourage those who are concerned about where this one will land, to check out.

February 13:  The film Fifty Shades of Grey released amid much controversy.
On a strictly aesthetic level, this film was, by all accounts, a piece of cinematic drivel.  The only reason it holds a place on my list is because of the attention it drew for its supposedly “risqué” and “raw” handling of sexual themes.  It suggested to me, at least, that Christians have, in fact, a unique word to speak on the meaning of sex, in a world that has almost entirely unmoored it from the things that once gave it meaning and beauty and life.

June 18:  A gunman opens fire on a church prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, killing 9.
2015 was also a year where God confronted his people with their calling to be reconcilers and peacemakers in a world where race relations are as conflicted and fraught as ever.  This racially/religiously motivated act of violence was only one of many headlines that challenged us this year to take our calling as Christians seriously when it comes to the issue of racial reconciliation.

June 26:  The US Supreme Court requires all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed in other jurisdictions.
Celebrated by some as a major victory for human rights, and lamented by others as the final crack that broke the dam, this decision effectively legalized gay marriage in the US.  It seemed to bring out the worst in everyone.  In its wake I saw a lot of defensive vitriol from Christians who felt backed into an ethical corner, and also a lot of vindictive smugness from “liberals” who couldn’t understand why traditionalists weren’t yet with the program.  I heard stories of Christian business being bullied for holding positions of conscience on the issue; and I also heard stories of Christians retaliating with their own share of bullying.  At the very least, it suggests to me that any church that wants effectively to proclaim the Kingdom of God in the 21st Century will have to have thought through this very pressing issue.

September 2: A moving photograph of drowned child sparks international concern over the plight of Syrian refugees
Another story with a whole bunch of themes braided into one: Muslim/Christian relations, xenophobia and hospitality, the plight of the world’s displaced, questions about American foreign policy, the proper Christian response to the refugee crisis all got discussed in turn.

October 1:  An armed assailant opens fire at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, killing 10.
Reports are unconfirmed and still under debate, but some suggest that this assailant targeted Christians in his rampage.  This story would be just as heartbreaking and appalling, either way, but what strikes me in looking back is how rote our response to such incidents has become.  I include it on this list because of my hunch that it was one of the events that motivated Jerry Falwell's tirade on December 2 (see below).

October 19:  Newly elected liberal government pledges to receive 25,000 Syrian Refugees by years’ end.
Another story that shone a spotlight on issues of xenophobia and the Christian call to welcome the stranger in Jesus’ name.

December 2:  Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty Christian University in Lynchburg, Va. encourages students to carry concealed weapons.
This headline almost seemed like it was pulled from The Onion, when I first saw it, but when I read further and realized it was serious I was dumbfounded.  That the president of one of the largest Christian colleges in North America would be received with cheers from his student body when he publically encourages them to start carrying concealed weapons to defend against Muslim terrorists should any decide to show their face on campus... and that they should do this, expressly, in the name of Jesus ... well ... I don’t know what to say.  Except to lament how distorted the Way of Jesus is becoming in an increasingly polarized and dangerous world.

December 15:  Wheaton College, Illinois, suspends professor of Political Science Larycia Hawkins, for public comments claiming that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
Here high-falutin’ theology and down-to-earth current events come together, as voices from all corners of the internet chimed in on the questions: do Muslims and Christians indeed “worship the same God?”  Is that the best way to put it?  And, inasmuch as this was one of the questions related to Ms. Hawkins’ suspension (now dismissal): what are the theological implications of saying they do?  Given the way this list is sprinkled so liberally with headlines relating to the Muslim faith, it seems that these are no longer lofty ivory tower ruminations, but issues that Christians from all walks of life should be thinking through.

(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.

Top Headlines of (my) Evangelical 2010

The parenthetical "my" in the above title is my acknowledgement that I am neither knowledgeable nor impartial enough to offer a list like this with any objectivity. That said, I've put together this survey of news items from 2010 that stood out to me as notable landmarks on the evangelical landscape. I post it here IMHO, and welcome any nominations for additions to the list:

January 12:, 2010 Pat Robertson waxes inflammatory on Haitian disaster.

Not that I think his (at best) poorly timed comments and (at worst) cruel drivel about Haiti's alleged "pact with the devil" was even worthy of the attention it got, but it made me sad on a number of fronts: sad that for some, Pat Robertson's comments will just reinforce the tainted view of Christianity they already have; sad that a camera and the celebrity it creates has made a man like this some sort of spokesperson for a certain kind of Christianity (and that this "kind of Christianity" is so often held up as normative by the secular media); and sad, too, that mere "outrage" has somehow become a legitimate and sufficient moral response to ideas we dislike.

April 27, 2010: N. T. Wright announces his retirement as Bishop of Durham and his appointment as Research Professor at St. Andrews University.

This barely made a ripple in the headlines, I admit, but the fact that one of my favorite biblical scholars has taken a teaching post at St. Andrews was news to me, inasmuch as it gave me hope that the eagerly anticipated fourth volume of his Christian Origins and the Question of God series may be along sooner rather than later.

June 30, 2010: Anti-theist Christopher Hitchens diagnosed with cancer.

One of the world's best-known and more vitriolic opponents of religion announced this summer that he's been diagnosed with cancer. While some people (people of Pat Robertson's stripe, perhaps) have taken this opportunity to use vindictive phrases like "what he had coming," and "cosmic justice," others have taken the opportunity to practice pious prayer for the enemy, which, depending on the motive and content of the prayers, may be just as opportunistic.

July 13, 2010: The Canadian Government scraps the mandatory long-form census.

While this made more than a ripple in the secular media, I only noticed it because it hit the fan the week my family was away in Alberta and I was home alone, so I was listening to the CBC more than usual. At the time I didn't give it much thought. The portent of the decision didn't sink in until months later, when I was sitting in a room full of pastors, and a representative from the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada explained to us how we might use statistical data to help us in ministry, and I finally realized how useful a tool we'd lost.

July 31: Author Ann Rice "quits Christianity."

When Ann Rice first became a Christian, it turned heads especially because she was the famous writer of novels that could morph into multi-million dollar Hollywood productions staring the likes of Tom Cruise. Now that she's "left" the church (in her words: "In the name of Christ, I quit being a Christian") this is "news" only for the same reason; the story mattered to me primarily because it seems to illustrate James' wisdom in warning us against giving preferential treatment to the rich and famous (James 2:1-5).

August 15, 2010: Theologian Clark Pinnock dies at age 73.

I've read very little of this somewhat controversial theologian, but parts of his Flame of Love and parts of his Wideness in God's Mercy were helpful to me. I'll refer you to David Guretzki's tribute to him over at Theommentary, and commend him here to the mystery of the divine grace he worked his lifetime to describe.

August 24, 2010: Donald Bloesch dies at age 82.

It struck me as notable that two theological servants of the church-- in many ways so different in their theological bent-- should both pass away within 10 days of each other. I read swaths of Bloesch's work in Seminary, and found him to be thorough and challenging. When I heard about his death, I thought of a line in Barth (a theologian for whom he had a special affinity). I remember it imperfectly, but he wondered out loud once if God didn't laugh to see him pushing around his wheelbarrow full of books. I commend Bloesch, and his own wheelbarrow full of books, to the mystery of God's grace.


September 7, 2010: Florida's Terry Jones threatens to burn thousands of copies of the Koran on September 11.


Not that I believe a guy like this deserves anywhere near the amount of the attention he got, but it illustrated a number of things for me: a) the media's tendency to pour gasoline on a fire so they can write with incredulity about the religious flames; b) again how we've come to value "outrage" as some sort of "moral" response to things we think are wrong; and c) how tribal the notion of god has become in a world of tolerance and wars on terror.

October 1, 2010: Rick Warren speaks at John Piper's national "Desiring God Conference."

Purpose-driven Pragmatism meets Hedonistic Calvinism? This one raised my eyebrow. After all, when one of the most vociferous doctrinal watchdogs of American Evangelicalism invites one of the most effective pragmatists of American Evangliscalism to the party, eyebrows are going to raise. And they did: 40,000 blog-posts worth of indignant eyebrows, apparently; some even invoked 2 Timothy 4:3 and warnings about latter-days apostasy. For my part, I was left musing about how, in the absence of a clear ecclesiology, Evangelicalism in this part of the world looks and feels like a doctrinal clique.

December 13, 2010: Barna survey finds North American church to be theologically illiterate.

For the record, I saw methodological problems with Barna's survey so huge that it was hard to take their conclusions seriously, but at the very least this headline shored up my resolve to preach on the Incarnation the first Sunday after Christmas.