Here at The Search for Piety and Obedience, we’re in the midst of a several-post series related to the so-called “evangelical left.” (For the first installment in the series, click here.)
In our last post, I argued that the Brethren in Christ should know (and care!) a great deal more about this movement because of our tradition’s significant role in birthing and shaping it. (As scholar David Swartz noted in the comments section of our last post, the Brethren in Christ have had an “outsized” influence on the movement.) I also described how Ronald J. Sider, a Brethren in Christ minister, played a critical role in getting the movement on its feet.
With this post, I want to explore one of the movement’s most important texts: Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
After the jump: More about the origins and impact of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
What Is An Evangelical?
That’s the question that Sojourners magazine has been asking its readers lately. It’s a tough one to answer well, given the diversity within the movement. But it’s also a good question to ask for that exact reason.
Here’s Sojourners contributor Cathleen Falsani’s take:
Most of my friends knew evangelicalism only through the big, bellicose voices of TV preachers and religio-political activists such as Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell and James Dobson. Not surprisingly, my friends hadn’t experienced an evangelicalism that sounded particularly loving, accepting or open-minded.
After eschewing the descriptor because I hadn’t wanted to be associated with a faith tradition known more for harsh judgmentalism and fearmongering than the revolutionary love and freedom that Jesus taught, I began publicly referring to myself again as an evangelical. By speaking up, I hoped I might help reclaim “evangelical” for what it is supposed to mean.
This site collects all of the work Sojourners has been doing in recent months to aggregate a definition for this slippery term. I’m particularly fond of historian Randall Balmer’s answer — not just because I’m a fan of his work, but because he’s willing to challenge prevailing stereotypes about evangelicals. Here’s a taste:
Nothing better symbolizes the current confusion over the nature and character of evangelicalism than the subtitle to an article in the current issue of Christianity Today, the magazine considered by its editors the flagship publication of evangelicalism.
The article, written by Aaron B. Franzen, a graduate student in sociology at Baylor University, summarized his research findings among evangelicals who read the Bible for themselves, absent the biases of evangelical leaders.
Franzen discovered that “unlike some other religious practices, reading the Bible more often has some liberalizing effects — or at least makes the reader more prone to agree with liberals on certain issues.”
The puzzle here is not that readers of the Bible would tilt toward the political left. That, for me, as well as for thousands of other American evangelicals, is self-evident. Jesus, after all, summoned his followers to be peacemakers, to turn the other cheek, to welcome the stranger and to care for “the least of these.” He also expressed concern for the tiniest sparrow, a sentiment that should find some resonance in our environmental policies.
No, the real conundrum lies in the subtitle the editors of Christianity Today assigned to Franzen’s article, which was titled, “A Left-Leaning Text.” Adjacent to a picture of a Bible tilted about 45 degrees to the left, the editors added the subtitle: “Survey Surprise: Frequent Bible reading can turn you liberal (in some ways).”
The fact that anyone should register surprise that the Bible points toward the left should be the biggest surprise of all.
I also like Greg Fromholz’s answer, delivered from a unique (and metaphorically significant) location:
Readers: How would you define “evangelical” in a way that allows for the breadth and depth of this expansive movement?
Quote of the Day
“Make me what Thou wilt, Lord, and set me where Thou wilt. Let me be a vessel of silver or gold, or a vessel of wood or stone; so I be a vessel of honor. I am content. If I be not the head, or the eye, or the ear, one of the nobler and more honorable instruments Thou wilt employ, let me be the hand, or the foot, as one of the lowest and least esteemed of all the servants of my Lord.”
—John Wesley, eighteenth-century theologian and father of the Methodist movement, in his “Covenant Service: For Those Who Would Make or Renew Their Covenant with God, 1780″ as printed in Ken Bible, ed., Wesley Hymns (Lilenas Publishing Co., 1982). Wesley’s theology of holiness would have a major impact on the Brethren in Christ Church.
HT = Donna Harvey
Understanding the “Evangelical Left,” Part 1: Why It Matters for the Brethren in Christ
Most popular and scholarly understandings of American evangelicalism focus on its conservatism — theological conservatism, social/cultural conservatism, and political conservatism. The problem with this narrow focus on evangelical conservatism is that it tends to obscure an important development within the movement: the so-called “evangelical left,” which emerged as a religious and political force in the 1960s and 1970s, ostensibly as evangelicals responded to and/or embraced the New Left movement within American culture.
Most readers of this blog know that, since the 1950s, the Brethren in Christ have been increasingly invested in the American evangelical movement. What some readers may not realize is that the Brethren in Christ also played a crucial role in the emergence of the “evangelical left,” and that the “evangelical left” in turn significantly shaped the religious and political consciousness of a generation of Brethren in Christ.
Ronald J. Sider, for instance, was a major player in the rise of the “evangelical left”; his writings (especially 1977′s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger) pointed evangelicals toward the biblical basis for social justice and encouraged them toward political activism. Sider was also (and still is) an ordained minister in the Brethren in Christ Church, and has described how his Brethren in Christ upbringing influenced his ideas about social justice, peacemaking, and political activism.
Given the role that the Brethren in Christ played within this movement, those interested in denominational history ought to have a better understanding of this development. Enter David Swartz, a recently minted PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame. Now a professor at Asbury University, Swartz wrote his dissertation on the formation of the “evangelical left” and its impact on late twentieth century American politics. The dissertation also describes the role of Brethren in Christ people like Sider in the origins of this movement.
In an series of interviews at Withered Grass, Swartz has explained the “evangelical left” and its origins. Here’s a taste:
Wheaton, Fuller Theological Seminary and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship are significant players in your narrative. What was it about these three entities that made them so key to the growth of the evangelical left?
Fuller, Wheaton, and InterVarsity enjoyed a status as several of the most influential and prominent institutions of the “new evangelicalism” out of which the evangelical left emerged. They were prone to an internal insurgency for a couple of reasons. First, they were among the first evangelicals to repudiate dispensationalism, a nineteenth-century innovation of British evangelist John Darby who divided history into discrete dispensations and argued that Christians would be “raptured,” that is, removed from the earth prior to Jesus Christ’s return and millennial reign. Fundamentalist evangelicals considered the rapture to be imminent. Such a framework placed supreme consequence upon getting the world ready for the rapture for fear that many might be “left behind.” This eschatological pessimism clearly inhibited social action. Repudiating this theory marked evangelicals’ tentative first steps toward social engagement in the postwar era.
A second reason was primarily sociological. As evangelicals grew more socially and economically mobile, they began to attend college and graduate school in greater numbers. It makes sense then that an evangelical left would start to flower when the first and second generations of evangelical graduate students at Harvard, Boston, etc., returned to teach at Wheaton and Fuller. If these young professors had managed to retain a theological conservatism, many of them had not retained the dominant apolitical orientation of their fundamentalist forbears. Many returned to evangelical institutions wholly supportive of the civil rights movement and wary of the building war in Southeast Asia. A generation of evangelical students, touched by these notions, used the very tools of the middle class bequeathed by their parents to rebut that very tradition. “Not a whole lot for many of us to worry over, suffer for,” wrote one young evangelical in the 1970s. “Looking at us here, who would guess what victims we are? We are victims of our past. Our Evangelical history with its immersion in the American Way of Death seems almost to drown us.”
Read the whole interview here and here.
(Stay tuned for our next installment in this series.)
Does Pietism Provide a “Usable Past” for Today’s Churches?
That’s the question I and a number of church historians/pastors/intellectuals from other Pietist-influenced denominations will be answering during a panel discussion at Bethel University’s colloquium on Pietism, scheduled for April 20, 2012.
Here’s a bit more information about the colloquium and the panel, courtesy of event coordinator Chris Gehrz:
In addition to talks by Scot McKnight and Jon Sensbach, we’ll have a roundtable discussion asking whether Pietism provides a “usable past” for churches today.
In some ways, this is a reprise of a session at our 2009 research conference on “The Pietist Impulse in Christianity” — on the historiography of four denominations founded by Scandinavian immigrants — that we weren’t able to include in our book of the same title. But while two of those denominations will be represented again, we’ll also have panelists from three others, and this discussion is intended to move a bit further out of the realm of the academic and into that of contemporary church life.
The panelists include:
G.W. Carlson (Baptist General Conference/Converge Worldwide)
Professor of History and Political Science, Bethel University
Co-editor, The Baptist Pietist Clarion
Ryan Eikenbary-Barber (Evangelical Covenant Church)
Senior Pastor, Bethlehem Covenant Church, Minneapolis, MN
Blogs at Word and Story
Gracia Grindal (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America)
Professor of Rhetoric, Luther Seminary
Devin Manzullo-Thomas (Brethren in Christ Church)
Graduate student, Temple University
Blogs at The Search for Piety and Obedience
Francis Monseth (Association of Free Lutheran Congregations)
Dean, Association Free Lutheran Theological Seminary
Stay tuned to The Search for Piety and Obedience for updates on what promises to be an interesting gathering.
(HT to The Pietist Schoolman for the info and the pic.)
Jay Johnson, pastor of the Zion Brethren in Christ Church in Abilene, speaks at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration at the CrossRoads Church. (SalinaJournal.com)
Here’s a fascinating article from the Salina Journal, describing an ecumenical Martin Luther King, Jr. Day event held at the CrossRoads Church (a Brethren in Christ congregation in Salina) and featuring a keynote address from Jay Johnson, pastor of the Zion Brethren in Christ Church in nearby Abilene.
Here’s a taste:
While he was young when Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the Rev. Jay Johnson told the crowd Sunday at the MLK Day celebration at Salina’s CrossRoads Church that it is not difficult to see the role the church played in King’s life and how he led the movement.
“Where he got his nonviolence from was Jesus Christ,” said Johnson, pastor at Zion Brethren in Christ Church in Abilene, after the celebration. “Everyone knows him as a civil rights leader and everyone knows him as a man we respect, but many people tend to forget how he rose to that level was as a member of the church. That is where he got his philosophy and it pushed him to the forefront of the community.”
Johnson was the keynote speaker at the annual celebration that filled the church with a diverse crowd that spanned several generations.
During his speech, Johnson’s reference to events during the civil rights movement were recognized by people in the crowd who lived during that time.
“You think back to the ’40s and ’50s and it was different,” Johnson said. “Young people today hear about Dr. King, but don’t think about the struggles we went through. In the ’60s, there were separate drinking fountains in the South for whites and coloreds. A black person couldn’t go to a restaurant and order.”
Read the whole article here.
December 2011 Issue of Brethren in Christ History and Life
The December 2011 issue of Brethren in Christ History and Life is pretty fantastic — and I’m not just saying that because I have an article in it!
The issue is jam-packed with interesting and thought-provoking articles — four biographical/autobiographical pieces of various Brethren in Christ and Old Order River Brethren people, an article and a photo essay on the history of Messiah Village, a selection of poetry from a Brethren in Christ writer, a hefty batch of book and media reviews, and a scholarly article by yours truly.
Here’s the table of contents:
Between Legalism and Liberalism: The Brethren in Christ Construct a New (Evangelical) Identity
Devin Manzullo-Thomas
To Have a Home: The Beginning of Messiah Village
Ray M. Zercher
A Photo History of Messiah Village
Karin Bisbee
Experiments with Poetry
Thelma Book
The White Church on Buckeye: A Child’s View
H. Royce Saltzman
Journeying Together with a Faithful God
Anna-Ruth Ressler
From Ringgold Meetinghouse to General Church Office: A Memoir of Mentors
Raymond Donald Shafer
Myron & Lois Dietz: An Old Order River Brethren Couple
John Dietz
Among my favorite articles were Royce Saltzman’s autobiographical article about his childhood in Kansas, where he explores practices, rituals, and beliefs that set those attending “the white church on Buckeye” apart from the rest of the Abilene community. I also found Thelma Book’s poetry poignant, filled with beautiful images and profound moments of insight.
Readers: What were your favorite articles in this month’s issue?
Brethren in Christ Scholar to Lecture at Messiah College
Wendy Urban-Mead, assistant professor of history at Bard College, will present a lecture at Messiah College on Thursday, January 12, titled “Being Brethren in Christ in a Time of Violence: Zimbabwe in the 1970s and 1980s.” Urban-Mead wrote her dissertation on the history of the Brethren in Christ mission and church in Zimbabwe, and is currently working to turn her dissertation into a book.
The lecture is sponsored by the Departments of History and Biblical and Religious Studies, and the Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan Studies.
The lecture begins at 4 p.m. on the 12th, and will be held in Boyer 131.
I hope some readers of The Search for Piety and Obedience will be able to attend Urban-Mead’s lecture. Since I can’t make it, maybe one of you can give a synopsis!
Brethren in Christ on the World Wide Web
Here are a few Brethren in Christ-related links that caught my attention over the past weeks!
- Brethren in Christ moderator Warren Hoffman offers a video message about the recent resignation of two bishops.
- A Brethren in Christ woman from Nicaragua experiences life in the Big Apple.
- The same father-son team currently restoring a closed Brethren in Christ church building in Rosebank, Kansas, is also working to restore a defunct United Methodist meetinghouse.
- Brethren in Christ church member and fundraising expert Rebekah Basinger shares her three words for the new year.
- Bethel University will host a Pietism Colloquium in April 2012.
- My friend, Susan K. Getty, is traveling to the Brethren in Christ Church’s Macha Mission Hospital in Zambia for a three-week mission trip. (That’s her Zambia-related art on the right!)
- Harriet Sider Bicksler celebrates her 30th year of editing Shalom!: A Journal for the Practice of Reconciliation with a special retrospective issue.
Writing a History of the Carlisle Church
Members of the Carlisle Brethren in Christ Church gather outside their church building on A Street in this undated photo. (Brethren in Christ Historical Library and Archives)
In April 2012, the Carlisle Brethren in Christ Church will celebrate its centennial anniversary. The congregation got its start as a weekly Sunday school in a rented building at the corner of Bedford and Louther Streets. Now — after three church buildings, six senior pastors, and one hundred years of history — the church continues to minister to its local, regional, national, and international neighbors.
In preparing for its centennial, the Carlisle church invited me to write its congregational history. I’m in the midst of my research right now, and I’ll be sure to share the results of my work with the readers of The Search for Piety and Obedience. (I’ll also let you know how to get your hands on a copy of my history, when it’s finished.)
Until then, you can learn more about the Carlisle church in this historical sketch on the congregation’s website. Here’s a snippet:
It all began in a house on the corner of Louther and Bedford Streets. Although 1892 marks the year that the first Brethren in Christ service was held in Carlisle, March 1912 serves as the official start of regular meetings of what will eventually be known as the Carlisle Brethren in Christ (BIC) Church.
This house served as the church’s meeting place until April 1, 1920 when with an average attendance of 34 and average offerings at $127.58, the group found itself without a home. The owner of the house on the corner of Louther and Bedford died, and the building was sold, forcing the faithful gatherers to move on to find new accommodations.
The story continues from the corner of Louther and Bedford to A Street. Renting a building from a United Brethren Church, the small and fledgling Carlisle Brethren in Christ Church held services on Sunday mornings while the United Brethren Church occupied it Sunday afternoons. This communal arrangement lasted until 1923 at which point the BIC group moved to an old Reformed church on West Louther Street and service times changed to Sunday afternoons.
All this drifting and homelessness did not discourage the church. . . . This small but faithful congregation must have known and understood the idea that they, the people, were the body of Christ, not the building in which they met.
Read more of the congregation’s history here.
Stay tuned to The Search for Piety and Obedience for more on the history of the Carlisle Brethren in Christ Church!
