The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice a Common Faith

By Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Published by Zondervan

I hadn’t heard of Wilson-Hartgrove before, but the Zondervan imprint, the forward by Shane Claiborne and endorsements by Eugene Peterson, Phyllis Tickle and Tony Campolo made it clear that the book would be intriguing.  I wasn’t disappointed.

Awakening of Hope, says Claiborne, “reminds us of the holy habits that have marked Christians for centuries.” It is a sort of primer on “the new monasticism” that is attracting a growing number of young Christians. Broken into digestible chapters that explain the rationale for Christian communal living, the book outlines a compelling vision of Christian community:

“Why We Eat Together”

“Why We Fast”

“Why We Make Promises”

“Why It Matters Where We Live”

“Why We Would Rather Die Than Kill”

“Why We Share Good News”

The aim of these monastic communities is to live out Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. The book introduces the reader not only to the disciplines themselves but also to biblical and church history background behind them, as well as contemporary examples of the disciplines as they are lived out in Christian monastic communities all across the country.

The accompanying DVD provides interviews and face-time with not only Wilson-Hartgrove but also with others who are living in these Christian communities.

The title is significant: Wilson-Hartgrove and Claiborne and their ilk see these communities as a harbinger of a new thing God is doing in His church. There is a kind of revival feel to the language, as if these people believe monastic communities could breathe new life into a stagnant American Christianity.

They may be right. The book reminded me a little of Gabe Lyon’s Next Christians, which outlines the profile of the new, young, socially-conscious believers who will carry the mantle of leadership as the post-war generation of leaders and visionaries passes off the scene.   

I do have one misgiving about the message of Awakening. If the new monasticism is understood as the new normal for serious Christians – which Wilson-Hartgrove suggests but does not explicitly state – then they may have missed the point. While it’s true that the earliest days of the church practiced communal living, by the time Paul wrote his letter to Timothy, pastor of the church in Ephesus, responsibility for helping needy Christians had fallen primarily to families, with the church providing a secondary, supportive role (see 1 Timothy 5). The nuclear family, after all, is God’s original design for community. Communes and monasteries are innovation. 

I don’t think Wilson-Hartgrove is trying to suggest that all Christians who live in nuclear families, scattered throughout the neighborhoods, should all abandon their houses and move into Christian compounds. That kind of isolationism has its own obvious drawbacks. But he does a good job of explaining, as he says, why some Christians have – at least for awhile – stepped out of the typical American lifestyle to embrace something wholly different and radical.

Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice a Common Faith is a fascinating read. The thinking the book explores could make a positive impact on the American church. Eating together, making and keeping covenants, being conscious of the environmental impact of our lifestyle, choosing non-violence when we can – all of these are valuable insights and practices for believers, whether we live in nuclear families, with roommates, or in Christian communes.     

While the Prodigal Is Away

Prodigals. We all know one. A family member wandering far away. A spouse who wants out of the marriage you want to save. A rebellious son breaking his mother's heart.

We all wonder what we can do to bring them home.

How we can reach out.

If we should reach out.

Jesus' three stories of lost things found, recounted as single "parable" in Luke 15, feature three lost things found -- a sheep, a valuable coin and a much-loved son.

In the first two stories, Jesus tells of the enormous effort of the shepherd and the woman as they persevered until they found what they were looking for and called for friends and neighbors to celebrate with them. "In the same way," said Jesus, "the angels in heaven rejoice when one sinner repents."

But the third story is different. It too involves a lost thing, but not an animal or an inanimate object: it is a son. And unlike the shepherd or the woman, the father doesn't go searching for his lost son. He waits for him to return and welcomes him enthusiastically.


It may be that the prodigal's father provides us the clearest example of how what to do about the prodigal.

1. What the father didn't do is counterintuitive. After two stories of strenuous effort to find and rescue what was lost, Jesus features what may look like a passive father: he didn't go after his lost son. Not knowing how the story would end, the father declined to pursue his wayward son and instead waited patiently for his return.

We can only speculate what might have happened if the father had put together a posse to go fetch the boy. But we've seen enough interventions on reality TV to know how angry and self-deceiving the prodigal can be when confronted with the truth about himself.

No, Dad never went after his errant son. He wasn't there when the son came to the humiliating end of himself, when he composed the apology speech he would give to his father. This was a realization he had to come to on his own. And his father could do nothing to bring about that awful moment.


2. But just because Dad didn't chase the boy doesn't mean that Dad was idle. Jesus tells us that he saw his son "while he was still a long way off." I know, it could have been a coincidence. The father might have just been glancing up at that moment and just happened to catch sight of his son. But I've always thought that this father was anything but passive. I think he had been looking for his son to return since the day he left. I've imagined that Dad never just glanced at the horizon, he studied it long, he studied it longingly.

And as soon as he saw his son, he ran. Dignity and retribution never crossed his mind. At that moment, the fact that his son had disgraced him in the community, the fact that a third of his estate had been wasted on prostitutes and liquor... none of that mattered. All that mattered at that moment, when he saw his son, was that his son was home again.

What did it take for Dad to maintain that kind of emotional equilibrium the whole time his son was gone? The waiting soul is fertile ground for bad seed. Cynicism and bitterness had sprung up to contaminate the brother's soul, but Dad's heart was still open to forgive and restore. There were no "I told you so" speeches, no demand for restitution; he didn't even let his son finish his apology. There were no mixed feelings here, only grace and rejoicing love.


So what do we do for our prodigals? Do we reach out to them? In our hyper-connected world we have that capability: the Facebook message, the text message, the email. Perhaps we do reach out, but we never coerce or pester. We never try to do the work that God's Spirit alone can do -- change a heart.  

So what do we do?

1. We pray that they can come to the end of themselves soon and without life-destroying consequences.

2. We trust God to do His work in His time in the hearts of people He loves even more than we do.

3. We guard our hearts against bitterness. We stifle the impulse to compose angry "I told you so" speeches.

And we keep the party supplies on hand. No one knows when we might get the chance to use them.

Review: Water from an Ancient Well

I have always been interested in Celtic Christianity. Perhaps it's my family’s Irish roots, my fondness for Irish and Celtic folk music, my fascination with the lush Irish countryside. So when I saw this new book Water from an Ancient Well: Celtic Spirituality for Modern Life (Kenneth McIntosh, Anamchara Books) and realized it explores early Celtic Christianity, I wanted to take a closer look.

In many ways I wasn't disappointed. I learned a great deal about those early days of the Christian faith on the British Isles. I learned, for instance, that the "Gal" in "Galatians" is really a reference to the Gallic (Celtic) peoples who had migrated to the region Paul addressed in his letter to the churches there. I learned more about the amazing ministry of Patrick, who managed to convert the entire island from paganism to Christianity. I learned that Celtic Christianity, while it held fast to basic Christian doctrine -- the Trinity and the Apostles Creed, for instance -- developed its own unique and diverse Christian art forms. 

But I was disappointed in the volume in other respects. This looked like a book that needed an editor's sure hand. For one thing (and this is a small thing) I didn't like the font used in the quotations at the end and beginning of each chapter, italicized Papyrus, not the kind of thing that a professional typesetter would have done, I think.

The writing was uneven, sometimes light and even a little juvenile in the stories that opened the chapters, as if it were aimed at a young adult audience, sometimes in a scholarly, almost pedantic tone when it discussed historical and theological details. It was as if McIntosh couldn’t decide what kind of audience he wanted to reach. The lack of focus extended to its content: sometimes focused on ancient Celtic spirituality, sometimes jumping forward to modern church outreach. I think McIntosh tried to do too much with too little focus.  

There is a good index, always useful in a book crammed as this one is with information. But there are no footnotes or endnotes or bibliography. And for a book that contains as much fascinating historical information as it does, source information would have been helpful.

I think the book was a good idea, but it wasn’t rendered well. I give Water from an Ancient Well two stars (out of four). 

Review: A New Evangelical Manifesto

This collection of essays by notables such as Brian McLaren, Richard Cizik, and David Gushee hopes to lay out a new vision for the evangelical movement. At first glance, the title made me wonder the essays would simply rehearse familiar emergent church themes. And when I saw that Brian McLaren, patriarch and chief spokesman for emergent, had written the opening essay, my first thought was that I was right.

But as I read, I realized I was only half right. Whereas emergent is primarily concerned with theology and ecclesiology, A New Evangelical Manifesto expands on emergent’s concern for social justice. In that sense, its contents are predictable: against the death penalty, against nuclear energy, concerned about global warming, human trafficking, healthcare, race, abortion, nuclear weapons, war and global poverty – themes that will certainly resonate with younger evangelicals.

There is no question that we are witnessing a seismic shift in the American church, a shift we haven’t seen since the 1960s. Young Christians -- hyper-connected, socially concerned and cynical about polarizing ideological squabbles -- are either leaving the church (ala Gabe Lyon’s unChristian) or leaving the faith altogether (“spiritual but not religious”).  What we are seeing in response to this exodus of the young is a whole slate of bold new initiatives, including not only the emergent church movement but also the backlash of the “young, Reformed and restless.” 

McLaren’s introductory essay, “The Church in America Today,” outlines the cultural shift we are witnessing, and he correctly identifies the problem. The old intramural debates that used to occupy the church -- sequence of end-times events, role of sign gifts in the contemporary church -- those debates are simply irrelevant to the young evangelicals. Those old doctrinal questions have been supplanted by more basic questions of apologetics, soteriology and evangelism. They want to know how it is possible to insist on the uniqueness of Jesus in a multicultural environment and how Christians can insist on salvation through Christ when Muslims and Buddhists are not just exotic characters in movies but devout and kind-hearted next door neighbors. “The question isn’t, ‘Are we saved by faith alone or by faith plus works?,’ says McLaren. “The question is, ‘What is salvation in the first place? What are we being saved from and for?’” 

I have seen the same transformation in the students in my Christian high school classroom over the past three decades. Time was when students would get into heated arguments at lunch over sign gifts or eternal security and come steaming into my classroom needing mediation. Now they scarcely even know what their churches teach about such doctrinal niceties and care even less.

McLaren labels the old evangelicalism “nostalgic,” “nativist” and “negative.” Although his summary applies only to the worst of evangelicalism, it is true that this is largely the perception of the many young Christians fading from our churches. And the cliche is true: perception is reality. The new evangelicalism, says McLaren, is characterized by “hope,” “diversity” and “creative collaboration.” He paints a rosy picture of the alternative to the straw man, and it is an attractive vision for many young Christians looking for something to believe in.

Richard Cizik, formerly Vice President for the National Association of Evangelicals, offers a fascinating story of his forced resignation from the organization in his essay "My Journey toward the 'New Evangelicalism.'" His understanding is that he lost his post because of pressure from the Religious Right. In essence, he says, the NAE told him that they will do whatever it takes to avoid criticism from politically connected conservative groups.

Some readers will be provoked and disturbed by Scott Claybrook's essay, "The Dying," which explores euthanasia and medically assisted suicide. In language that might be channeling the Hemlock's Society's Derek Humphry, Claybrook suggests that "uncritical rejections of assisted suicide and euthanasia for the terminally ill fail to accurately comprehend the multilayered experience of pain and suffering as one with a terminal illness begins the walk toward death."

Other essays, “Where the Church Went Wrong” by Steve Martin and “A Disenchanted Text: Where Evangelicals Went Wrong with the Bible” by Cheryl Bridge Johns, take aim at weaknesses in the evangelical subculture. 

While I understand their critique, I do wonder: If they are talking about the old models of the Moral Majority and Religious Right, they are right. Those movements have seen their better days, and there were problems in their perspective and methods. (I never did understand, for example, what support for the B1 Bomber had to do with a Christian/moral political stance.)

But I don't believe these same criticisms could be made of the resurgent new voices leading evangelicalism today: John Piper, Tim Keller and Albert Mohler, for instance. An evangelicalism that follows their lead would look very different from McLaren's vision for our future. And therein lies our choice.

The deeply entrenched ideological debate we see today is nothing new. Protestantism has been divided for decades, ever since the Great Divide of the 1920s, when the modernists and fundamentalists went their separate ways, and the social justice v. doctrinal purity wars were born. Those wars have scarcely let up over the past nine decades. A New Evangelical Manifesto proposes to point the way out of these paralyzing debates, but it looks to many as if the new evangelicalism is not, as it claims to be, more faithful to the entire biblical witness. It seems instead to merely compromise biblical truth in order to pursue a more robust social justice.

So what does the future of evangelicalism look like? Does this manifesto describe the third way forward, or does it merely rehash old liberal diatribes against the right? Or perhaps Mohler, Keller, et al provide the new way forward for evangelicalism? Both movements are robust, both are more thoughtful and more socially engaged than the old evangelicalism, but both cannot lead us forward. They are not going in the same direction. 

It's clear enough that we are witnessing in American evangelicalism the death of something old and the birth of something new. What that new thing looks like remains to be seen. A New Evangelical Manifesto does provide a clear articulation of one possible future for the American church. This reviewer would love to see a comprehensive response from the other version of the new evangelicalism.

Viral Jesus by Ross Rohde

I serve as an elder at my church, so I occasionally read books on church and church leadership. The title of Viral Jesus caught my eye. It’s hip and catchy. And it raised questions for me right away.

The title made me think of an emergent church approach to evangelism and doing church, low on hierarchy (I was right there) big on cultural relevance (not so much). But as I read, I realized Rohde’s approach was far more familiar to me than I could have guessed.

Rohde’s thesis is that the church has borrowed too heavily from Roman Catholic and early Reformer ecclesiology. As a result, we are hide-bound and traditionalistic, and we hinder rather than cooperate with the movement of God’s Spirit in the world. We’re too cautious, we’re too hesitant to embrace the supernatural, we’re too dependent on organization and technique and not sensitive enough to the leading of God’s Spirit to see the kind of wild-fire (“viral”) growth that the early church saw. Rohde even finds fault with the way the church is growing in Latin America and Korea. (China, he says, is a different story. They’re following the first-century model more closely.)

This is all familiar to me because I grew up in the Assemblies of God, one of the old Pentecostal denominations that traces its roots back to the Azuza Street revivals of the early twentieth century. The AG long resisted any self-identification as a “denomination,” with all those overtones of hierarchy and structure, but the charismatic and Jesus People movements of the 1970s recast the AG in the role of counterbalance. With its decades of organizational experience and its growing scholarly reputation, the AG and other classic Pentecostal denominations provided a stabilizing influence in those heady days.

So Rohde’s themes were familiar to me. Viral Jesus read like a defense of AG doctrine, almost like a YWAM handbook: be open to the supernatural, listen for the leading of God’s Spirit, expect the unexpected. 

And he’s right. We evangelicals are too fond of organizational models (which may be, as our emergent critics say, more due to our affinity for corporate hierarchy than traditional ecclesiology), we are far too cautious (almost certainly the business background there) and we get spooked by the mystical and the supernatural, both of which clearly have their place in God’s work.  

But this AG boy got his seminary training at Dallas Theological Seminary, so I am familiar also with the opposing view. At Dallas I was exposed to the heavy emphasis on the study of Scripture and theology, a cautious if not prohibitive stance on the supernatural in Christian ministry and opposition to women serving in official church leadership over men. 

So there was another part of me that said Rohde had gone too far: he didn’t say much about the study of Scripture, except to cite examples of the model he recommends. (He says Luke 10, where Jesus sends the disciples out, is the paradigm for ministry.) As he would have it, study of Scripture, theology and church history are really not essential for a Christian leader. Really?

Rohde argues that church hierarchy was far simpler in the early church and that over the centuries it became the “old wineskin” that we see today. Again, I think he goes too far. Paul wrote three pastoral letters, and in two of them he discussed at length the kind of organization and structure he wanted to see in the churches. Peter certainly had a hierarchy in mind when he wrote about elders, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews urged readers to submit to those in authority in the church. No, authority and submission were part of the church from the beginning.

I remember a fellow Dallas grad telling me once that he wished the church had the mind of Dallas Seminary and the fire of the charismatic movement. Rohde recommends the fire part. His book is not intended to be a balanced treatment of church-planting ministry philosophy, but it provides a needed voice in the discussion of what evangelism, discipleship and church planting should look like.

Every other year I get to have the last word with the graduating seniors at Dayton Christian High School, my alma mater and the school where I have taught since 1977. Below are the words I gave to the Class of 2012 right after they moved their tassels.

Congratulations! This is a most significant achievement in your life. In fact, graduating from high school is a lifetime achievement award.

Do you remember how old you were when you first recognized the importance of the year 2012? You’ve been working toward this night for more than a decade, and tonight you can finally breathe a sigh of relief: you’ve done it. Most of you will go on to further studies, but you will never again work for this many years to get a diploma. The next time you finish something that takes you eighteen years to complete will probably be when your own child graduates from high school. And you will feel a great sense of accomplishment that night as well.

I'm going to speak frankly now. If you go on from here to get a good education, get a good job, find a good person to marry, settle into a nice neighborhood, find a good church, be a good mom or dad, a good neighbor and a good employee… and if you’re satisfied with behaving yourself well and living comfortably… we will have failed you miserably.

I haven’t given the past 35 years of my life to help teenagers learn to behave themselves. Your parents haven’t sacrificed so much for so long just so that you would turn out to be a well-adjusted and productive member of society.

It was my mother who first coined the phrase “Educating for Eternity.” And that’s not just a slogan. It’s what we’re all about at Dayton Christian School. I love my work. I love the fact that I get to spend all my professional energy creating in people’s lives a change that will matter not just for decades but forever. I may not see some of you again in this life, but I’m looking forward to seeing you in the next life and hearing how God used you to build His Kingdom.

Between now and then some of you will live comfortably, some of you will suffer terribly, some of you will be called to professions and ministries that will be difficult and discouraging, as teaching sometimes can be.

But none of that matters. It doesn’t matter whether you make a lot of money or a little; it doesn't matter whether or not you live in comfort and security.

All that matters is that you follow Rabbi Jesus, that you discover your role in God’s Story, and that you play it well. Everything else is details. Don’t get distracted, don’t get discouraged, by the details.

You often heard me thank God for letting me have a part in what He has been doing in your life. I meant those prayers. I really am grateful for that opportunity to make some small contribution to His work in you.

Thank you, parents, for your sacrifice and your commitment, for entrusting your children to us, to my classroom.

And now, my blessing, from the Epistle to the Hebrews:

Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

The Family Is In Trouble

The family is in trouble.

Family life is changing, and the changes are troubling. There’s no question that the nuclear family – the social unit of dad, mom and the kids – is showing signs of decline. No matter which metric we use – out-of-wedlock births, abortions, divorce, single-parent families —the numbers are depressing.

Or not.

There are two ways of looking at the dramatic changes we’ve seen in family life over the past several decades. Many people think of the family as an evolving social institution. In this view of the family, different isn’t worse, just different.

Take, for instance, divorce. Once rare, divorce is now commonplace. Since we all know someone who has been divorced or who has grown up in a family that has experienced divorce, the break-up of a family just isn’t the grand tragedy that it once was. The adults move on. Kids cope. Enough with the lamentations already.

The other way of looking at these changes in family life is that they constitute a kind of deterioration, a slipping away from the ideal. While only the most naïve would argue that there ever was a golden age of family life (nostalgia has a way of painting everything in a rosy hue), there is no question that family life now is far more fractured than it used to be. And this is not good. Family, says this view, is the one place where stability and support ought to be the norm, and when families fail, everyone loses – the kids, the exes, the in-laws, even society in general.

So what kind of social institution is the family? How much does it matter that family life is changing in these ways?

The origin of the family, as the story is told in the first chapters of ancient book of Genesis, begins with God creating all things and declaring His work to be “very good.” What God had created was wonderful and marvelous, “very good“ indeed.

That is, until He looked more closely at the man. Then God said something new, “It is not good that man should be alone.”

So God resolved to make a companion for the man. Oddly, God’s next act was not the creation of that companion but the creation of a felt need. The man, Adam, was alone, but he didn’t yet realize that he was alone. He became aware of that need only after God brought the animals to him, “to see what he would name them.”

So Adam became the world’s first scientist, classifying and naming the animals. As he named the animals, though, he slowly became aware of two things: first, they all came to him in pairs, they all had mates. And second, none of them was like him. There was a vast gap of quality between the man and all of the animals, even the most intelligent among them. And the man at last understood that he was, indeed, alone. There was no creature anywhere that he could call a companion.

That’s when he fell asleep. Weary and discouraged and lonely, he fell into a profound sleep.

When he woke up, he beheld a creature he had not yet named. She was clearly his equal, like him in so many ways. Yet – and he didn’t need long to perceive this – she was clearly not like him at all. (And that was before they had exchanged a word; after they lived together for a while, they both came to understand what every husband and wife discover. The internal, psychological differences between a man and a woman are even greater than the external, physical ones.)  

In other words, God’s design included diversity from the outset. God didn’t make another creature exactly like the man; He made someone intriguingly different.  

So which version of the family -- the social evolution model or the biblical model -- which model corresponds most closely to our experience? Which version of family life works best in the real world?

Conventional wisdom used to hold that the children of broken homes are resilient. They’ll adjust, find some way to cope. But long-term studies of children from broken homes are telling a different, darker story. The titles of books based on those studies are uniformly bleak: The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of our Parents’ Divorce (Stephanie Staal), The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (Wallerstein, Lewis and Blakeslee), and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture. The statistics are grim: as a group, children whose parents split up are more likely to have problems later on – problems with substance abuse, academics, emotional issues and, most distressing, long-term relationships.

If you ask the children, if they get a vote, they’ll tell us that the changes in the family are not just benign social evolution. Children know from personal experience that the more dysfunctional the family, the harder life is.

What is true on a personal level is even more true on a sociological level: family life matters not just to individuals but to society. It’s not politically correct to make this observation, but it is obviously true nonetheless: Life in a community in which families are highly functional is better than life in a community in which families are dysfunctional. Statistics like divorce rate, out-of-wedlock births, abortions and teen pregnancies have social as well as personal impact. Everyone suffers when families suffer.

It’s true that people survive the loss of family; some even thrive despite a difficult and painful family background. But the exception only proves the rule: people have a basic, undeniable need for the kind of life that only a family can provide. This basic need for community and diversity isn't just incidental; it's how God made us.

So does it matter that the family is in distress?

Yes, we need family. We need family desperately because that’s how were designed.

Just ask the kids.

The Believer's Job Description

What does God want from me? He and I both know it’s inevitable that I will fail. So here’s the question: if my ultimate destiny depends not on me but on Christ’s finished work on the Cross (and thank God that’s so), what does He want from me here and now? If I want to do His will (and I do), what is it?

That was the question answered by Micah, one of Israel’s ancient prophets, and his answer is famously succinct:

He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:6-8, ESV)

“He has told you” (in other words, this isn’t news; we already know this) “what is good” and what God requires of His people. Micah lists three verbal phrases, three items in the believer’s simplified job description:

1. “to do justice” James warns us repeatedly that so-called “faith” that doesn’t manifest itself in an ethical life is a dead and useless thing, really no faith at all (James 2:14-17). Sound doctrine is empty and hypocritical if I don’t “do justice.”

2. “to love kindness” If sound ethics must characterize my private life, compassion should characterize my dealings with others. There’s no extra credit in compassion, even with the most annoying person in my life. Compassion is no more than “paying it forward” for God’s extraordinary kindness to me. I express my gratitude for God’s compassion by “loving kindness” in my dealings with others.

3. “to walk humbly with your God” After addressing our ethical life and our social life, Micah turns to our spiritual life, our relationship with God. And his job description is again succinct: “walk humbly” with God.

• It is a “walk,” not an episode. My relationship with God is a part of who I am, not an accessory to put on or take off according to the occasion.

• And it is humble, a consistent recognition of who He is (God) and who I am (not God) in the relationship. I am dependent on Him for wisdom, provision and protection. Because He’s God and I’m not, I don’t negotiate with Him, I adore and obey Him.

It’s only a three-item job description. It takes a moment to say, but a lifetime to fulfill.