When the Evangelical World Stopped Being Home
For 30 years the container of the Evangelical Church adequately held my religious/spiritual self. Then, it didn't. Couldn't.
Editor’s note: This article leans heavy on Jesus’ parable about new wine and old wineskins. If you’re familiar enough with that idea, read on! If however you’re like, what-the-what, then maybe take a few minutes and watch/listen to this segment of a recent sermon I gave.
When I finally left the Evangelical world, the new wine of my expanding Christianity felt free and full of hope.
But I didn’t yet have a new wineskin to hold it.
It would take a few years before I settled in to a wineskin labeled “progressive Christian,” which has sufficiently contained my wine for nearly 15 years now.
Yet, if I’m being honest, I feel like the past few years have been a slow drifting away from that label. With each passing year the wineskin of “progressive Christianity” feels closer and closer to inadequately containing my religious self.
Not because of the “Christian” part, but because of the word/term “progressive.”
I’ll try to explain.
The Old Wineskin of Evangelicalism
Given the fact that I no longer adhered to some of its core tenants, by 2010 the wineskin of evangelicalism—that had sufficiently sustained, held, and allowed to blossom the wine of my adolescence, youth, and young adulthood—had clearly run its course.
Between the years of 2005-20010 I did some serious auditing of my religious convictions by systematically employing the tools of my training: exegesis, original languages, historical context, etc. Some core beliefs I retained and strengthened, whereas others I could no longer hold with integrity.
Looking back, some of the key evangelical tenants I left behind were: the inerrancy of Scripture; the prioritizing of correct belief; the inequality of genders; the conscious eternal torment of hell; and the dehumanization of LGBTQ people.
While my internal exit from evangelical Christianity culminated around 2010, my external exit wouldn’t come for another year when I would eventually get fired because of my stance on LGBTQ inclusion.
Devastating though that event was, the relief I felt at finally being post evangelicalism was tangible. Over the years that relief has only grown deeper.
Buh bye, Evangelical Church. I miss thee not. (Well, that’s not entirely true. There are some things about that world—and my time in it—that I miss. But I’ll come back to that another day).
Spiritually Homeless
As a refresher for those who don’t know: I grew up in the Baptist world; worked for a few years at Christian Missionary Alliance church after college; and then spent five years at the aforementioned evangelical Bible Church.
All told, for nearly 30 years I had a tribe.
Generally within the conservative evangelical world, and specifically, at a denominational level, as a Baptist and then CMA.
Yet as the calendar neared 2012 not only did I no longer have a job or a church home, but for the first time I also experienced a kind of spiritual homelessness.
Many former evangelicals can relate to that experience with regards to the 2016 election of failed businessman and TV personality, Donald Trump. They woke up the next morning and immediately felt like they’d been launched from the house of evangelicalism like Baby Puss, the Flintstones sabertooth house cat, surreptitiously tossing Fred from the family home in the closing credits sequence.
This question has haunted ex and post-evangelicals for more than decade: Where do we go when we want to stay Christian and desire to be connected to a larger group?
Some turn to mainline churches (eg, ELCA, Presbyterian, some UMC churches, the Episcopal church) and find roots there. It’s a beautiful thing. Others understandably toss up their hands and walk away altogether.
But for those who aren’t ready to leave the church, yet also don’t resonate with the liturgical world of the mainline, it can be a disorienting time to be a Christian.
Some of you may recall the late 90’s - early 2000’s movement known as the Emerging Church (well documented in this wonderful podcast). I was deeply impacted by many voices in the emergent movement (Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Phylis Tickle to name a few), and owe those pioneers a ton of gratitude for helping me dislodge some of the tentacles of my evangelical heritage. But by time 2012 rolled around, the movement was gone. And there was nothing left to, well, join or be part of.
Meaning, as I was nearing peak enthusiasm for the new wine growing inside of me, I didn’t immediately have a wineskin to hold it.
Clearly the old wineskin (my evangelical past) had done its job and was no longer needed. Actually, to put an even finer point on it, it could not hold my new wine even if I wanted it to.
So what was I to do?
Growth is Good
I’m human just like everyone else. And humans crave a sense of identity and belonging. We want to be part of something. We want to feel part of something. For better or worse, one of the main ways we feel part of something is by having a label. An identity. A name. A descriptor of who we are. An assignment of what categorical bucket we belong in.
Labels give us safety because they help us know where our sense of self starts and stops. It gives us a sense of “this is me” because that is NOT me.
Even when people claim to reject labels they end up inadvertently placing themselves in a label nonetheless (ie, rebel, punk, non-conformist, free-spirit).
I often say that labels are super helpful… until they’re not.
Wineskins are good. They’re helpful. They contain and protect the wine—which is a good thing because you want wine to age! Aged wine is better. Which means, you need a good, effective, reliable wineskin to hold your wine.
But eventually, if you’re the kind of person who keeps their heart open and pursues spiritual growth, then your current wineskin will grow old… and not in the good way that ages the wine, but in a stale way that can no longer adequately hold whatever new wine is being generated.
My point is, it’s totally normal to need and to look for new wineskins from time to time. This is natural. Every year school aged children get a new wineskin of a different grade. We don’t keep a 13 year old in the container of 3rd grade. Their wine of educational knowledge has grown to need the wineskin of 8th grade.
Outgrowing labels is just another way of saying “transformation.”
And transformation is everything. If we’re not growing then we are retracting. Staying put is simply not possible (see: Second Law Thermodynamics).
Next post I’ll continue the story of my search for new wineskin, how it worked great for a while, and how now… well, I’m less confident in its capacity to properly contain my wine.
I am at this same place, can we not all simply be People of The Way?
Like all good analogies, the wineskin one only goes so far. Who says we need one? In a recent Substack post, Pádraig Ó Tuama asked the question 'what titles have you been given and which have you discarded?' Personally my descent into the unknown of post-christianity has not been a steady stroll but one I'm grateful to navigate as I seek to discard the old garb of labels that don't fit anymore without the need to find new ones.