identity and terms.

Last Sunday, CNN.com published this post by Rachel Held Evans.

While I sympathize with her sentiments, there are some problems with the post.  I don't know how much of it was due to her and how much of it was due to the CNN editors, so don't take everything I say as criticism of Ms. Evans.

The first problem with the post is the title.  "The Church" it says.  Except in her post, she remarks that millennials are leaving the "evangelical" church and joining the more liturgical and high-church traditions like "Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc."  So millennials aren't leaving "the church," at least not the Church as the body of Christ.  They are simply leaving one expression of that church and moving to others.

However, the main problem is that Evans apparently doesn't recognize that the reason evangelical pastors don't "get it" when she talks to them is because she is fundamentally asking them to stop being evangelical, or at least to radically re-define what "evangelical" means.  She ends her post with a list of things that "we want" (full disclosure, I'm about 2 years older than Evans, consider myself more Gen X than millennial, and have left the "evangelical" tradition for the Episcopal Church) without realizing that the things she wants are the very things that evangelicalism has (as she points out unconsciously) spent its time defining itself against.  Evangelical Christianity has the same problem as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: both are movements of religious conservatives that cannot back down from their current, historically held positions without at a minimum a severe identity crisis, and essentially a paradigmatic shift as to how they deal with society, culture, and theology.

On one hand, Evans is right.  It's not about music, coffee, lighting... style, basically.  It's about the substance of the Christianity being taught and lived out in churches.  But to ask an evangelical pastor to moderate his (and it is almost always a he) stance on the LGBT community, science and evolution, and gender roles, to say nothing of completely redeveloping his ecclesiology so the church is something you don't "go to on Sunday" is to ask him to read the Bible differently, with different eyes and different philosophical assumptions.  It is, essentially to ask him to stop being an evangelical and become something else, something different.  Something, unfortunately for those of us trying to effect this change, that we don't have a name for yet.

In the early 2000s, there was a brief uprush of books being published about "the younger evangelicals" or the "post-evangelicals" or "the emergent church."  They were mostly written by older men, confused about the demands of Gen X at the time, demands which, 10 years ago, were basically identical to Evans' in her post.  The fact that 10 years later, people are asking for the same things ought to at least point out that the evangelical church failed to figure this out.  But the approach is almost the same. In these books (and I read a lot of them as part of a research project for my pastor at the time) generally Gen X and the leading edge of the millennials were treated as anomalies, as strange species to be studied, but not people to be taken seriously.  There was a sense that changing language about community and whatnot, but not changing the core of evangelical belief, would mollify these people and bring them back into the fold.  In a couple years, these men promised anxious pastors, these steps would no longer be needed.

The "evangelical" church is not dying, but for those of us who are tired of asking, we need to sit up and recognize that for some reason, we are asking to wear the "evangelical" label with only being tangentially related to what has been defined as "evangelicalism" culturally.  I am aware the definition is contested, but that is precisely the point.  People older than Gen X who want to expand it, make it a "big tent" are fighting not only their own colleagues, but popular culture in general.

I can't call myself "evangelical" anymore.  According to a friend and former colleague of mine, I never really could :)  This might explain why I am comfortable giving up on that tradition and label and looking for something new.  But I suggest to Evans and her cohort that they should take a critical look at what they are asking and ask themselves if they really want the label "evangelical" or if it isn't, in fact, time to find something new. 

Maybe no label at all, so we can stop this in-grouping and out-grouping and indeed live as the body of Christ.