What do we do when the Christian institutions we have inherited are insufficient for the Christian calling that we have? Given that many of our churches are either indifferent to or opposed to this calling, how can we nurture something different? How can we nurture a dissident church?

As I have said before, I believe that the cultivation of a dissident church will require much of the American church deliberately to embrace a set of fundamental shifts in our common life. In previous articles I have described these as: shift from Dominion to Communion, a shift in the purpose of our faith, a shift from Myth to Truth, a shift in our interpretation of the context in which we live out our faiths, the shift from Victimhood to Servanthood, a shift of our identities, the shift from Being Right to Being Good, a shift in our formation, a shift from Hostility to Hospitality, a shift in our neighborliness, and a shift from The Powerful to the Poor, a shift in priority.

In what follows, we consider the shift from Celebrity to Community.

From Celebrity to Community: A Shift in Leadership

In this article I am attempting to write about leadership. More specifically, about the dangers inherent in what seem to me to be a dominant model of leadership in much of the American church; a model which—like the market forces from which it derives—transcends both denominational and geographic bounds. I am referring here to what may be called a celebrity model of leadership.

I confess to being somewhat ambivalent about the language of celebrity. My primary reason for this is my sense that, for many, the word “celebrity” primarily evokes things like red carpets, award shows, extravagant wealth, and couture design. And indeed these are—in many instances—clear signifiers of the presence of celebrity.

But while what I am describing certainly can entail these things (though typically on a more modest scale) these are not the heart of the celebrity model. And this is the reason for my ambivalence: By overly identifying celebrity with these outward effects rather than with its inner logic, it is easy to miss features of the celebrity model that are not only more malignant in impact but also more widespread in presence.

Because of this, though I persist in the use of the word, my intention is to draw attention to the inner logic of celebrity and to gesture toward the outlines of another model.

In my experience, the inner logic of celebrity leadership is structured around—and can be easily identified by—four foundational elements: the institutional centering of a single individual, the justification of that centering by appeal to their putatively singular gifts, an inordinate focus on the creation and management of that individual’s public identity, and a culture of institutional protection of that individual’s perceived interests.

In order to understand the celebrity model, it is important to understand both the meaning of each of these elements and the ways in which they—taken together—create the capacity for enormous, predictable, and repeated harm to everyone involved.

In speaking of the first element, institutional centering, I am speaking very simply of the broadly observable tendency of churches and other religious organizations to build their institutions—their vision, mission, strategy, staff community, and financial priorities—around the preferences of a single individual.

In the second element, singular gifting, I am speaking of the frequency with which this institutional centering is justified by often breathless appeals to the capacities of the individual—capacities alleged to be both unique in the world and essential to the work of the kingdom.

In the third, image management, I am speaking of the deliberate willingness—by the institution, by the individual, or by both—to embrace the construction, management, and commodification of the public image of that individual as a central task of institutional life.

And in the last, leadership protection, I am speaking of the tendency of institutions to protect that individual not only from their detractors, but also from the consequences of their own actions.

Taken together, these elements conspire to create an ecosystem of both extraordinary privilege for the leader and extraordinary vulnerability for those under their influence. Privilege, in that the leader inhabits a world in which their will (cloaked in the language of vision) is both the central engine and the final boundary of institutional life.

Vulnerability, in that the individuals under their influence can (and frequently do) find themselves surprisingly subject to both the personal and institutional ambitions of a single, centralized, and often unaccountable leader. And, importantly, this dynamic is replicable regardless of institutional scale; the inner logic of celebrity—and its disfiguring effects—may be readily seen in institutions both large and small.

These disfiguring effects are by now so obvious to many of us that they scarcely require elucidation. Or, so one would think. But the heedless persistence of this model in our midst suggests that a reminder may be in order.

Consider first the effects on the individual at the heart of this model. Do not empirical data and personal experience suggest that the celebrity model cultivates a leaders’ worst instincts? Narcissism: the presumption of being the most important person in the institution. Entitlement: the expectation of having one’s own ideas and language institutionally validated. Pretense: the astonishing vanity of believing oneself competent to to speak credibly on virtually any issue. Isolation: the instinctive need to divide the world into supporters and detractors and to hide within the walls of affirmation. Abuse: the furious instinct to expunge those who threaten their status. Addiction: the desperate need to calm the fear and exhaustion at the heart of celebrity leadership through addictions to affirmation, substances, and sex. Shame: A life made forever vulnerable to both personal regret and public recrimination.

Consider, too, the effect on those under the leader’s influence: Insecurity: the temptation to evaluate one’s own identity and value by one’s proximity to the leader. Loss of agency: the overwhelming temptation to subsume one’s own ideas, gifts, to the service of the leader. Exhaustion: the very real psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical exhaustion that comes from ordering our lives inordinately around the will of another. Alienation: The loss of one’s community, one’s sense of life with God, one’s own sense of self that comes from enmeshment with the life of a celebrity leader.

That each of these is a virtually assured result of the celebrity model of leadership seems to me to be beyond controversy.

How many of us reading these words could, right now and without significant effort, identify both leaders and followers whose lives are marked by these very realities?

How many of our own lives have been so marked? And yet, in spite of all of the empirical data and personal experience testifying to the malignancy of this model, we allow it to persist in our midst. Indeed, we continue to reward it as the paradigm of success.

Speaking personally, I must confess that I know these dynamics intimately. When I was in public leadership, I spoke often—both privately and publicly—about the dynamics of celebrity and my wish to avoid them. Not only this, my colleagues and I took very real—and institutionally unpopular—steps to prevent the celebrity model from taking hold among us.

Even so, I grieve to say that I felt the pull of this model, felt the temptations inherent within it, and—in spite of earnest desire and labor to the contrary—saw a number of these effects on some of the people that I served. I confess, in other words, that in spite of my very real efforts, I believe that I failed to escape the power of the model.

That this is so raises an important insight. Namely, that the negative effects that attend the celebrity model—rather than being caused by a single malignant individual—are in fact intrinsic to the model itself.

Indeed, I believe that many (though certainly not all) of those who inhabit the model do so both unwittingly and unwillingly. And I believe that the reason for this is that many of us and the institutions we serve simply cannot imagine another way. And so, in spite of our intentions and our actions, the celebrity model—with all of its inevitable harms—persists.

Because of this, I am convinced that one of the most important tasks of a renewed church is a campaign of deliberate, explicit, and sustained repudiation of this model as suitable for the people of God.

Let us pause to quench the thirst for caveats. It is true that people have different gifts and capacities. It is true that some of these gifts and capacities lend themselves naturally toward taking positions of disproportionate influence within a community. And it is true that recognizing these gifts and enabling this influence is often a critical component in institutional effectiveness.

Even so, it is also true that our current model for identifying and enabling this influence leads—with alarming regularity—to extraordinary personal and institutional harm and has created a Christian leadership culture that is morally gangrenous, socially corrosive, missiologically catastrophic and, it should also be said, aesthetically bizarre.

What might it mean for us, as a people, to press against this model? While wanting to underline my ongoing personal bewilderment in the face of this question, I do believe that there are several important things that those seeking the renewal of the church can and must do.

The first and most basic of these is simply to name the problem and insist on another way. Meaning, I believe that healthy leaders and healthy churches have to make guarding against the celebrity model a central priority of their institutions. Unless we do this, we will never prevail against it; the forces of celebrity are simply too axiomatic and too powerful to proceed in any other way than direct assault. If you’re looking for a place to start, get some folks together and read Katelyn Beaty’s Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church.

The second is to undertake deliberate, creative experimentation with an alternative model. In my own life, I’ve taken to thinking of this as a Community-Based model of leadership.

In suggesting this language, let me hasten to remind the reader that I have many, many questions about what it will take to escape the celebrity model and disconcertingly few answers. Nor is it the case that I either know how, or even instinctively desire to do the things I am groping toward. The nature of the work here, I repeat, is experimentation. All this to say, in using this language I do not intend to suggest that I am in possession of anything like a fully conceived, perfectly embodied, or empirically assessed model.

What I do intend, however, is to suggest that whatever model emerges to supplant the tyranny of celebrity, will—of necessity—be oriented not toward a single individual, but toward the community as a whole.

What then might such a model entail? As I have considered this question, I confess that my own approach has been framed mostly through the work of defiance. Meaning, as I have struggled toward a new model in my own life, my first step has been to identify the impulses of the celebrity model and then simply to do the opposite.

So, for example, where the celebrity model begins with institutional centering—the centering of institutional energy in the life of a single individual, a community-based model would begin with something like institutional collaboration: the centering of institutional energy in structures of collaborative decision making.

Where the celebrity model begins with the presumption of singular gifting, the community-based model would begin with the assumption of distributed grace. In this, the institution is driven by the deep conviction that we are, in fact, a we, and that the gifts God has given to us come not in the form of a single person, but in the form of a gathered people.

Where the celebrity model is driven by the work of image management (insert barf emoji here), the community-based model is driven by the work quiet embodiment. In this, the institution and those who lead it are anchored in the conviction that appearing to be something and actually being that thing are not the same thing; indeed that these two things are often at odds. A community driven by this conviction will simultaneously prioritize the quiet and substantive embodiment of faithfulness and view the hasty temptation to create and manage a commodified public image with utmost suspicion.

Lastly, where the celebrity model defaults toward protecting the leader—prioritizing the perceived interests of the leader— a community-based model will defiantly insist on protecting the vulnerable. That is, the institution will relentlessly devote themselves to protecting those being unjustly harmed by others—whether those in need of protection are the leaders, or those being harmed at their hands

Let me say again that I neither know the fullness of what a community-based model will entail nor what will be required of me—or of anyone else—as we seek to inhabit it. Even so, I believe that the work of renouncing the power of celebrity in our communities is foundational to any true renewal of the Christian church in our time. Because of this, I write in hope of cultivating—in myself and in our communities—both the moral instincts and institutional skills necessary for rendering the celebrity model not only no longer prevalent among us, but also no longer acceptable to us.

As I have said before, I believe that the cultivation of a dissident church will require much of the American church deliberately to embrace a set of fundamental shifts in our common life. In previous articles I have described these as: shift from Dominion to Communion, a shift in the purpose of our faith, a shift from Myth to Truth, a shift in our interpretation of the context in which we live out our faiths, the shift from Victimhood to Servanthood, a shift of our identities, the shift from Being Right to Being Good, a shift in our formation, and a shift from Hostility to Hospitality, a shift in our neighborliness.

In what follows, we consider what may be one of the most difficult, but also most important challenges before us: the shift from the Powerful to the Poor.

From the Powerful to the Poor: A Shift in Priority

In a recent post, I wrote this:

“The most important divide in the Christian church is not between East and West, not between Protestant and Catholic, not between Fundamentalist and Liberal, but between those who center the poor and those who center the powerful. This—more than theology, more than liturgy, more than anything else—determines the lived shape that faith takes.”

I firmly believe this. What follows is an extended reflection on its meaning—both in my own life and in the life of the church.

In the early days of my life as a Christian, my understanding of the life of faith was bound to a vision of a life lived in service to the poor. This service was the substance of many of the sermons I heard, the prayers I prayed, and the ambitions that I nurtured. Indeed, it was in the context of a mission to a Navajo reservation that I, for the first time, truly and deliberately devoted myself to trying to walk the path of Jesus. And that path, as I understood it, was a path that led directly to the poor.

Looking back now, I can see with regret how my early concern for “the poor” was freighted with paternalism and largely free of any awareness about the social structures that not only create poverty, but also sustain its nearly inescapable force. But I also see that at the earliest moments of my life of faith, that first snowfall of grace, my footsteps were oriented to a life of service to those who lived on the threshold of vulnerability and pain.

At some point in those years, due to some emerging combination of capacity and circumstance, I came to be designated as a “leader.” In one respect, this was not only a welcome but a prescient development; for I have in fact spent virtually all of my vocation in one sort of leadership role or another.

Even so, this designation, for all of its appropriateness, also came with an unseen consequence. That consequence, simply put, is that it ever-so-subtly re-oriented both my concept of myself, and the concept of my faith towards notions of power. First, toward notions of my own power. I began to think—in a way that I had never previously done—about what it meant to be a powerful presence, have a powerful mind, and have a powerful impact. But it also led me to think about the power of others; to view (and to value, I grieve to say) them not primarily because of their poverty or need, but because of their gifts or promise. At first this reorientation was so subtle as to evade my awareness. Indeed, the focus on power seemed simply axiomatic, an inescapable (and God-ordained) dimension of how things are.

But over time, this reorientation became more substantive. Without even realizing it, my focus on the call to leadership and the stewardship of power became a touchstone of my Christian identity. This began, of all places, in seminary. I was fortunate—truly fortunate—to study under professors who labored faithfully and unendingly to curtail and shape the leadership obsessions of their young charges. Even so, the efforts of our professors, and the efforts of our own hearts notwithstanding, these obsessions remained broadly in place, determining not only our sense of ourselves and one another, but also the vocational paths many of us would ultimately choose.

Within a decade of entering seminary, I and many of those with whom I had studied had moved beyond spirited discussion of leadership to vocational posts that entailed some measure of it. Many of us had moved to what were at that time (and in some quarters, still are) called “places of influence.” There we found ourselves in positions that allowed us not only to know powerful people, but also to shape their imaginations and thus, to become “important” people in their lives. Not only this, we found ourselves with the thrilling opportunity to collaborate with people in other places of influence beyond the church, both in the development of strategies for cultural change, and in the enactment of them. And with this, the turn to power was complete: Not only had I become a person of (relative) power, I was also wholly surrounded by—and co-laboring with—other people of power to leverage our collective agency toward something like broad redemptive change.

However, as exciting as this period was, it was also attended by a growing inner anxiety that began to spread across my moral life. I did not understand it at first; indeed, it took me years to truly understand it. But the essence of my anxiety was this: At the very moment in my life in which I was not only surrounded by, but in partnership with people more powerful than I could have ever imagined, I began to see—in myself (I am not innocent) and in others—the terrible, and in my view, inevitable, costs of a life devoted to power. Those costs? The lure of exclusivity. The toxins of self-importance. The ubiquity of instrumental relationships. The ease of moral compromise. And perhaps, above all, the malignant need for control. Each of these bore in upon me with suffocating power.

As important, however, was what I began, for the first time in years, to not see. Namely, the poor. Somehow, in spite of the early seeds of my Christian life, in spite of my explicit theological convictions, and in spite of strong personal agency and extraordinary institutional opportunities—indeed, perhaps because of these things—I had built a life with no real or meaningful room for those at the margins. To the contrary, I had made room, almost exclusive room, for the powerful.

One day, in 2016, as these realizations converged upon me with particularly terrible force, I set aside a day to hike and to pray. I prayed with every step—for forgiveness, for clarity, for courage, for deliverance—and perhaps most of all, for God to speak to me. And, to my utter (and lasting) surprise, God did. Standing at a bend in a hiking trail in Virginia, I heard these words: “Follow me into the dark, and I will be your light.” Upon hearing them I said aloud, “I don’t know the way.” Again, the voice: “Stay close to the poor, and you will know the way.” These words came to me unbidden with what can only be called a supernatural force. I sat down, wrote them in my journal, and resolved to follow them.

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which I did not know what this new path would require of me. The degree to which I still do not know. But what I did know, and what I still know, is that it would mean a conscious movement away from privileging the powerful and toward a life that privileged the poor. Their voices. Their stories. Their agency. Their wholeness. “Stay close to the poor.” And it would, in some mysterious way, mean finding Christ there: “I will be your light.”

At this point, it seems important to say clearly that I have not, indeed do not know how to, disavow power as such. I remain not only aware of the reality of structures of power, but also convinced of the profound responsibility to steward such power (however much one has) for the sake of love. Indeed, as the years have grown since that day on the hiking trail, I see more than ever just how important it is that power of all kinds—relational, economic, cultural, institutional—be not only used on behalf of the poor, but, more importantly, be given deliberately and directly to them that they may use it on their own behalf. This path, in other words, did not lead me away from power.

It did, however, lead me increasingly to step away from a life that privileges the powerful; away from the default adulation, deference, and centering of the powerful that had come to be so troublingly axiomatic in my life. And in walking this path (though never perfectly) I have come to the settled conviction that the church in our time needs to do the same.

After all, the prioritization of the powerful that I described above was not some sort of idiosyncratic personal fixation of my own life. It was—and remains—rather, axiomatic for much of the church itself. Upon reflection, I see that in virtually every religious community or institution I have known, there is an easily discernible practice of centering the voices, ideas, resources, and wishes of those who have—through various means—accumulated economic or cultural power. Indeed, we thrill at their presence, elevate them to our leadership, defer to their wishes, and spend an inordinate amount of time seeking to assuage their concerns in order to remain in their good graces.

This is not to say that these people, so rich in power, are not also rich in wisdom, kindness, compassion, and love. Indeed, over the course of my life I have seen and labored alongside many powerful people who are deeply shaped by the character of the kingdom of God. Many of these people have shaped and blessed my life in incalculable ways. My concern is not about the powerful per se. My concern, rather, is about the ways in which so many Christian communities seem, out of some sort of unholy instinct, to prioritize the powerful in our conceptions of Christian faithfulness, community, and mission. And, my concern is the demonstrable ways in which, precisely because of our prioritization of the powerful, the poor—the marginal, the weak, and the forgotten—remain voiceless among us. If, indeed, they remain among us at all.

Because of this, I believe that the church in our time—even as we continue to engage meaningfully in ongoing conversations about the nature of influence and the stewardship of power—ought to do so with the trembling remembrance that our place, always and everywhere, is with the poor. And everything that we do—every idea we nourish, every strategy we conceive, and every institution we establish—ought to be conceived not only for them, but with them, and ultimately oriented toward their wholeness.

“Stay close to the poor and you will know the way.” It is difficult to overstate how significant this change will actually be for many, many Christians and their communities. Our addiction to power and our infatuation with the powerful runs deeper than many of us even know. And yet, this change—this reprioritization—is the way to life. Not only because this is where our neighbors, in all of their glory and vulnerability, are to be found. But because this is, in the end, where Christ is to be found as well.

Because a number of you are new to this thread, it may be helpful for me to restate (from essay 1) the assumptions–convictions, really–that have driven me to this question.

Assumption 1: At this moment, American culture is facing an extraordinary moral crisis that involves, at least, the following: transparent political corruption, racial tribalism, willed historical amnesia, addiction to violence, the re-entrenchment of institutionalized injustice, grotesque material inequality, the dissolution of social trust, clear signs of ecological death, and a ubiquitous weariness of heart.

Assumption 2. Contrary to the hysterical howls of the hair-gelled punditry, this crisis is not due to Marxism(s), immigrants, windmills, critical theory, or black Little Mermaid. It is, rather, wholly the fruit of our colonial history, of our continued refusal to acknowledge and renounce that history, and our refusal to embrace the words of our own Declaration.

Assumption 3. Much (not all) of the American Christian church, rather than renouncing this history and healing these wounds, has instead chosen to be an accomplice in the wounding; providing moral sanctuary for the very racial, sexual, economic, political, rhetorical, and ecological violence that is destroying our communities.

As I have said previously, as I have wrestled with this question over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that if the church in America is to become the dissident church required by our moment, it must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life.

In previous articles I explored the shift from Dominion to Communion, a shift in the purpose of our faith, the shift from Myth to Truth, a shift in our interpretation of the context in which we live out our faiths, the shift from Victimhood to Servanthood, a shift on our identities, and the shift from Being Right to Being Good, a shift in our formation. In what follows, we consider the shift from Hostility to Hospitality.

From Hostility to Hospitality: A Shift in Neighborliness

By the time I was in elementary school, my understanding of the world largely consisted of an epic binary struggle between good guys and bad guys. I suspect this perspective had many sources: family members with a penchant for grievance, long afternoons playing the soldier games of boys, the apocalyptic blockbuster films that ruled the theaters of the 1980’s, and Sunday sermons warning of the dangers of everything from two piece bathing suits to back-masking records. Each of these set against the backdrop of a Cold War that had not only divided the nations of the world but that constantly threatened to destroy it. Whatever its sources, this perspective shaped not only my understanding of the world, but also of what it meant to live meaningfully within it.

This perspective, firmly ensconced by the time I was in high school, proved to be fertile soil for my encounter with the Christian faith. Through the kindness of friends, I found belonging in a church that had the unexpected distinction of being led by one of the finest preachers in the nation at the time. His sermons were masterworks—elegantly weaving together Scriptural interpretation, cultural critique, and philosophical argument—and I was immediately enthralled. Even before I embraced the Christian faith, I spent months attending two Sunday morning services per week, just so I could listen to him again.

Part of what drew me to his sermons was the skill with which he rendered the struggle between good and evil—the struggle that structured my imagination—in terms that were not only sophisticated in substance but also cosmic in scope. And so week after week—and for years that followed—I did my best to pattern my mind after his, devoting myself to the work of understanding the ideas of atheism and the forces of secularization that seemed to be undermining the credibility of the Christian faith in our time.

Looking back now, I see that even as these seeds of theological curiosity were sown into my imagination, two other seeds were taking root as well. First, the tendency to view my neighbors largely as expressions of a “worldview”; as little more than embodiments of ideas that were, more often than not, hostile to the Christian faith.

And second, the tendency to view Christian faithfulness as the call to critique those worldviews and to police the borders between their ideas and my own with tedious zeal. In saying this, I do not in any way wish to suggest that this is what the preacher believed in his own life, nor that this is what he would have wanted me to believe in mine. In fact, I think it would make him sad. Even so, the truth is that these seeds not only took root, but flowered into a vision of the Christian life that bloomed in me for years.

I am not alone in this, of course. As I noted in a previous post it seems to me to be more than obvious that a great number of Christian leaders—and those who follow them—appear to believe that the work of Christian faithfulness largely consists of some combination of philosophical pugilism and theological border patrol.

One of my concerns—as I noted there—is that this has led not only to an overemphasis on the cognitive dimensions of the faith, but to a correlative under-emphasis on its moral dimensions. But one of my other concerns—and the real burden of this article—is the way that such a vision leads us to conceive of our neighbors. Specifically, that this vision of the Christian life has led so many of us—as it led me—to conceive of our neighbors in both reductive and oppositional terms; to, in short, see them as little more than our ideological enemies and to conceive of our our lives with them primarily in terms of war.

At some point, I am more than grateful to say, this way of conceiving of my neighbors began to lose its shine. Partly because I myself grew weary of the endless tedium of being unfairly reduced to an object of war by others. Partly because I began to spend real time with my actual neighbors and to see that my reductive accounts of them and their lives were largely false; constructs of a theological system that had little contact with reality. And partly because I simply began to be—how can I say it—utterly creeped-out by a religious community led by insufferable know-it-alls whose chief defining characteristic seemed largely to be an absence of questions. And so, my largely hostile account of my neighbors began to melt away and I began to search for another to take its place.

To find that account, I look back—once again—to those early days in that first church. As marvelous as the preaching was, the truth is that it was not the sermons that drew me in. It was the love of families in the church who treated me as their own. Men, women, and teenagers who saw me at my worst (My dad’s summary of me at that point in my life was “often wrong but never in doubt”), and went out of their way to know me, to include me, to nourish me, and to give me a home.

It was, in other words, not their hostility to their neighbors that drew me in, but their hospitality to me. In thinking of these years—years spent scooching to make room on pews, laying extra plates on tables, piled together on trips, having vulnerable conversations on walks—I found a shift taking place in my approach to my neighbors; a shift from policing the borders to setting the table, a shift from hostility to hospitality.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of this shift on my life. In one respect it was a shift in my imagination, a movement away from viewing the world through a lens of conflict and toward a lens of conviviality. In another respect it was a shift in my disposition, a movement away from critical fear and instinctive withdrawal and, and toward something like curiosity, delight, and embrace. And in still another respect, it was a shift in my practices. My family and I moved into the heart of our community. We hosted all of the major parties for our neighborhood. We had people live with us. I made myself handy with a cocktail recipe and a chef’s knife.

But, in time—and perhaps most importantly—it became a shift in my understanding of the Christian life itself. I began to see God as host: the welcoming community at the heart of all things, the one who feeds the world with every good thing. I began to see my neighbors as guests; their presence and the pleasure of their company not only desired but pursued by God’s grace. And I began to see the church as servant; as a community whose entire reason for being is to go out into the world and welcome our neighbors into the mysterious joys of the table.

Of all the shifts that I believe that the Christian church needs to make in America, this is among the most important. For it is here—in setting aside our hostilities in life of setting the table —that we not only tell the truth about who God is, and not only embody the truth about who we are, but also demonstrate the truth about who our neighbors are: creatures made with love, endowed with honor, worthy of pursuit, and welcomed into the kitchens of the new world.

PS: To read more of my explorations on hospitality, please go here!

What do we do when the Christian institutions we have inherited are insufficient for the Christian calling that we have? Given that many of our churches are either indifferent to or opposed to this calling, how can we nurture something different? How can we nurture a dissident church?

As I have wrestled with this over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the church in America, if it is to live truly as a dissident community, must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life.

In previous articles I explored the shift from Dominion to Communion, a shift in the purpose of our faith, the shift from Myth to Truth, a shift in our interpretation of the context in which we live out our faiths, and the shift from Victimhood to Servanthood, a shift in our identity. In this post, I want to consider another shift: the shift from Being Right to Being Good.

From Being Right to Being Good: A Shift in Formation

When I first came to faith, my understanding of what it meant to be a Christian was largely ethical and missional. Ethical, in the sense that I understood being a Christian required daily labor to transform both my character and my behaviors into a shape reflective of divine goodness. Missional, in the sense that I understood that the purpose of my life was somehow bound up with the call to love others and to give myself for their good.

Looking back now, I am deeply grateful for this early formation and the ways in which it not only grounded me in the basic rhythms of the Christian life, but also ultimately guarded me against unseen temptations to define that life in a way that devalued its ethical and missiological dimensions.

In my own case, that temptation—when it came—came as an alluring call to shift my understanding of the Christian life away from the ethical and the missional, and toward its conceptual dimensions. And I fell for it.

At first—during my late university years—this conceptual shift took an explicitly theological form. Without really realizing it, I began to think, read, and talk less about developing a Christian character or participating in Christian mission, and more about developing what I believed to be a Christian mind.

I began to read core theological works of the western Christian tradition. I listened to audio recordings of lectures by theologians. I went to conferences. I labored—for the first time—to think both clearly and critically. And, as is often the case in such a life-stage, I was eager to both discuss and debate these things at length with willing—or unwilling—interlocutors. It was a thrilling time in my Christian life, a time in which I was, really for the first time, giving myself to the task of understanding the faith that defined my life.

Over time however, my interests—though still largely conceptual—shifted away from a relatively narrow focus on Christian theology toward what I learned to call a “Christian Worldview.” This led me to engage not only with theology but with poetry, art, film, music, architecture, history, and science, philosophy—each with an eye toward identifying and critiquing the worldview each of these presumably contained. If the turn to Christian theology I described above was thrilling, the turn to a Christian worldview was even more so. This is because it opened not only the faith, but the very world to me—showing me a God who cared not only about me and about my neighbors, but about all things.

Looking back now, I view this conceptual shift through a complicated lens.

I can say without hesitation that this shift was both necessary for my growth and foundational to all the ethical and missional work with which I am now involved. And yet, I must also say that my conceptual turn entailed a real—if unintended—shift in emphasis away from how I lived and toward how I thought. That is, while never really denying the ethical or missional dimensions of the Christian faith, I nevertheless placed a disproportionate emphasis on its conceptual dimension.

The fruit of this was fairly predictable. On one hand, it meant that I began to put a good deal of energy into scrutinizing both other Christians and my neighbors for errors in their conceptual frame. Suddenly, understanding and debating the conceptual differences between Protestants and Catholics, Baptists and Presbyterians, Buddhists and Secular Humanists became of paramount importance in my Christian life. On the other hand, this meant that I had less interest in, and therefore gave less energy to, the ethical and missional dimensions of the faith that originally anchored my life. Simply put, there is a very real sense in which I was becoming more right but less good.

At risk of projecting my own issues onto others, it seems fairly obvious to me that a great deal of the American church is similarly afflicted. Indeed, this conceptual focus reveals itself in a host of ways: in our instinctive adulation of so-called “thought leaders” (🤢), in our ongoing sponsorship of conferences, seminars, and curricula aimed at “cultivating a Christian worldview,” in our endless appetite for analysis and critique of those who differ from us, in our grotesque habit of reducing our neighbors to their supposed worldviews and engaging them almost wholly through that lens, and in our mouth foaming appetite for online disagreement. Each of these suggests that a great deal of the American church has itself succumbed to the conceptual temptation, and that both we and our neighbors are worse off because of it.

My first awareness of the costs of this shift in myself came during my first year of parish ministry. I was 31 years old and had just taken responsibility for a large and complicated congregation in a university town. Although excited by the opportunity, I was also unprepared for the distinctive combination of public pressure, institutional conflict, and private pain that came with it. Nor was I prepared for the fact that at the same time that I began this parish work, several important theological leaders—each of whom had a significant influence on me—entered into periods of moral crisis that were at once personally tragic and publicly destructive. Within a year of beginning my ministry, this convergence of vocational pressure and relational disillusionment left me both deeply frightened and desperate for answers to a fundamental question: How can I remain faithful amid dangers that lead so many to ruin?

In the months that followed, I posed this question not only to myself, but also to my colleagues and friends. To our surprise, the answer we found led us not away from the conceptual realms of theology or worldview, but in some sense beyond them—into the mysterious realm of formation. I remember the moment when clarity came. Wade Bradshaw, a friend and fellow pastor looked at me and said, very simply, “We have to go to the monasteries.” Though neither of us fully understood the implications of these words, they nonetheless rang within me like a bell, filling me with hope.

Over the following year and a half, we labored together to unpack the meaning of Wade’s instinct. We started (of course) with reading books both by and about monastic leaders, and about the life they aspired to lead. Augustine. Anthony. Benedict. Teresa. Aelred. Julian. Bernard, Ignatius. These writers opened an entirely new world to me—a world in which the goal of the Christian faith was not simply to think God’s thoughts (an impulse I now view primarily with wariness) but to participate in God’s life, and through that to be conformed to God’s image.

This insight led us, as it had many of our monastic sisters and brothers before us, to begin to ask hard questions not simply about what we believed, as about how we lived. To examine not simply our minds, but also our words, our use of time, our relationship with food and alcohol, our use of money, our friendships, our domestic lives, and our bodies. What we saw was disheartening. This is because it revealed a community of men and women, each of whom loved God and gave themselves to the work of ministry in his name, who were nonetheless profoundly disordered in the most ordinary aspects of our lives.

In response to this, we worked together to create a rule of life—adapted from the monasteries themselves—that would support us in the work of giving holy attention not only to what we believed, but to what we loved, and to how that love might take concrete shape in every area of our lives. In August of 2010, we formally embraced this rule together and began to let it shape us into new human beings. And, while the intervening years have led each of us to different places in our lives, each of us remains devoted to—and anchored by—this rule.

Though I did not understand it at the time, this movement entailed a profound shift in the nature of my Christian life. That shift, simply put, is the shift from being right to being good. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that the conceptual dimensions of the Christian life ceased to be important. To the contrary, they remain essential to my life of faith. Nor do I mean to suggest, Lord knows, that I am good. What I do mean to suggest, however, is that the intellectual dimensions of my faith are now sublimated within and subservient to the large goal of being formed—mind, heart, body, word, and labor—into the image of our Lord. And I can say without equivocation that as I have walked a road more painful than I could ever have imagined, this shift has saved my life.

As I survey much of the American church in our moment, and our participation in some of the ugliest features of our common life, it is my earnest yearning that both individual Christians and gathered congregations will embrace such a shift–the shift from being right to being good–in their own lives. This, I believe, is the only way to be free of our dark obsession with our own insight and our neighbors’ errors. This is the only way to be faithful in the midst of a painful path. This is the only way not only to be whole, but also to offer wholeness to our neighbors. This is the only way to turn from our needless participation in the violence of this world and become a people that bear goodness into its heart.

What do we do when the Christian institutions we have inherited are insufficient for the Christian calling that we have? Given that many of our churches are either indifferent to or opposed to this calling, how can we nurture something different? How can we nurture a dissident church?

As I have wrestled with this over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the church in America, if it is to live truly as a dissident community, must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life.

In previous articles I explored the shift from Dominion to Communion, a shift in the purpose of our faith, and the shift from Myth to Truth, a shift in our interpretation of the context in which we live out our faiths. In what follows, I consider the shift from Victimhood to Servanthood.

From Victimhood to Servanthood: A Shift in Identity

One of the most tragically evident features of a great deal of American Christianity is its obsession with its own victimization. Indeed, if one listens to sermons from our pulpits, prayers from our pews, or the speeches of our political leaders–especially our Victim in Chief–it is difficult to avoid the impression that American Christians believe themselves to be under relentless attack from all manner of cultural enemies. We are, above all things it seems, besieged. And, in my view, this quality of besiegement has become a treasured form of identity.

There is a sense in which this victimized form of identity was inevitable. After all, our (previously considered) commitments to Dominion and Myth teach us not only to believe that the purpose of our faith is to extend God’s dominion through power, but also that we do so against the backdrop of binary world of full of endlessly creative enemies who seek not only to thwart our labors, but also to extend dominions of their own over and against us. There is a very real sense in which American Christians are predisposed to view ourselves through the lens of victimization.

In fairness, I wish to concede that both the teachings of the Bible and the history of the church assure us that the Christian church will, at all times, face deep forms of opposition. Indeed, our commitments to the centrality of God, the reality of sin, the futility of self-righteousness, the necessity of the cross, the triumph of resurrection, the priority of love, and the coming of judgment guarantee that it cannot be otherwise. Nor, given our faith in the crucified Lord, should we expect it to be otherwise.

It is important, however, to remember that circumstances of opposition and an identity of victimization are not the same thing. Indeed, in the mirthful and surprising logic of the Christian faith, they are unrelated. In 2 Corinthians, for example, even as St. Paul teaches us that followers of Jesus will always have trouble, he also teaches us that—precisely in the midst of that trouble—we are also a people of joy. Afflicted in every way? Yes, but not crushed. Perplexed? Yes, but not driven to despair. Persecuted? Yes, but not forsaken. Struck down? Yes, but not destroyed. Sharing in the death of Christ? Yes, also sharing in his resurrection. All of this to say: Opposed? Yes. But not victims. Never victims.

How is it that so many of us have, nonetheless, come to see ourselves as victims? How is it that we, in the midst of our suffering, have drawn the wrong conclusions about its meaning? The simple and straightforward answer, I believe, is that we have made it about ourselves—and have done so in two ways.

First, by focusing exclusively on our own suffering. As I said above, some form of suffering for the Christian church in this world is inevitable. But the suffering of our neighbors is also inevitable. They too are born in the image of God and made for wholeness. They too are weighed down by the pain of sin—in all of its guilt and corruption. They too bear the burdens of futility. They too are vulnerable to the abusers of power. They too live under the shadow of death. And yet, in so much of our private thought and public discourse, our neighbors—insofar as they enter our minds—exist not as bearers of their own suffering, but merely as abstract villains lurking behind our own.

Second, by prioritizing our own relief. One of the saddest features of much of the American church at present is the extraordinary degree to which our social and political energy is explicitly devoted to alleviating the suffering—both real and imagined—of the church. Consider again the sermons from our pulpits, the prayers from our pews, and the soundbites from our leaders. Do we not hear in these not only an obsession with our own grievances, but also a telling silence regarding the griefs of our neighbors? Does this not betray the belief that the work of God in the world and the concern of the church in the world consist largely of our own vindication? This obsession with our own suffering can only create a self- absorbed community characterized by hysterical hand-ringing and joyless grievance. Indeed it has done so in our very midst.

If we are to become a truly dissident church, we must renounce this identity of victimhood and replace it with the only holy alternative: Servanthood. Indeed, this is precisely the shift that Paul urges in the passage above: “We proclaim not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.” Why? Because it is only through embracing the identity of a servant that we can turn from cataloging our own suffering to compassion toward the suffering of others. It is only through embracing the identity of a servant that we can renounce our small and quavering obsession with our own relief and give ourselves wholly to relieving the suffering of both our neighbors and our enemies.

This, I believe, is one of the central tasks of the Christian church in our time: to actively put off the identity of victimhood that has so deeply disfigured us, and actively cultivate the identity of servanthood that our Lord embodies and our neighbors need.

This, as I noted in my last several posts, is not a new question. It is a perennial question for Christians across time and space who have found themselves facing an institutional reality that is insufficient for their missional calling.

As I have wrestled with this over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the church in America, if it is to live truly as a dissident community, must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life.

In my previous post, I suggested that the first of these shifts is the shift from Dominion to Communion. This is fundamentally a shift in the way we are to understand the purpose of our faith. This is because it entails a shift from a life lived for the purpose of extending God’s dominion over the world—a goal which, for all of its biblical merit, currently expresses itself in our lives as an obsession with power, an idolization of impact, and instinct toward cultural conflict—to a life lived for the purpose of dwelling with God and sharing in His presence in the world.

This is not to call for an abandonment of transformative presence in the world. It is, however, a call to the abandonment of dominion as the meaning and method of that life. It is a call to a way of being that insists that our lives—intellectually, emotionally, bodily, relationally, vocationally, etc—are fundamentally expressions of loving communion with God and with our neighbors, and that everything we do is an expression of that purpose.

In this post, I consider a second shift—the shift from myth to truth.

From Myth to Truth: A Shift in Context

I describe this as a shift in context, but what I really mean is a shift in the ways that we interpret both our nation and the moment in which we find ourselves. Why? Because the way many of us have been taught to interpret our nation and our moment is, as the ancient philosophers put it, cray cray.

This interpretation goes something like this: We live in a binary world of good and evil, a world in which the good is wholly good and the bad is wholly bad. The good, as it happens, is us: the United States of America, God’s chosen nation, and the Christian church which is both its source and its steward. And the bad, as it also happens, is wholly outside of us; lurking malignantly in the teeming hives of communists, feminists, liberals, and DEI administrators who oppose the legitimate interests of God and nation, and who—with seemingly endless cunning—seek to undermine “our way of life.” Because of this, the work of Christian faithfulness in our time consists in defending our faith and our nation against the manifold invasions of the godless, and—through the righteous deployment of strategies ranging from puppet ministries to nuclear warheads—to ensure our triumph in our nation and in the world.

I grant that this is a rough and ready summary. And I grant that within the borders of this interpretation of the world, there is a continuum of moral and intellectual seriousness. Even so, I believe that the core features of this view of the world have established the lens through which generations of American Christians perceive both themselves and the context—both local and global—in which they live. Those features? A binary world, an innocent self, an external enemy, an ethos of besiegement, and the sacralization of cultural triumph. Read that list again. Do we not hear each of these things daily from the leaders of our political world and the court theologians that support them? We do.

I confess that as a Cold War kid, I feel the pull of this sort of account. Indeed, it is my native habitat. After all, these things–the binary world, the innocent self, the external enemy, etc–were foundational to the intellectual, moral, and rhetorical structures of the American Cold War imagination. We saw them in movies (Red Dawn). We heard them in songs (99 Luftballons, anyone?). We heard them in speeches (“Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall!”). And, we saw them in our geo-political interventions (Vietnam, Nicaragua, Space). In addition to being ubiquitous, they were also thrilling; giving both historical meaning and political direction to our lives. I mean honestly, who among you actually took the side of that bloodless Commie robot Ivan Drago in Rocky IV? Exactly.

The problem—as I came to understand—is that this account is almost wholly rooted in myth.

Consider, for example, its embrace of a binary world. Is it really the case that the boundary between good and evil falls along lines of political ideology or national territory? Or the innocent self; is it really the case that either the American nation or the church that justifies it is innocent of the theft of land, the enslavement of human beings, the blindness of greed, or the harvest of violence? What of the external enemy? Can it be plausibly claimed that the enemies of truth and the vandals of faith, hope, and love are always someone other than ourselves? Or the ethos of besiegement. Does not the claim that the wealthiest, most powerful, and least politically constrained people in the history of the world are actually victims have the character of farce? What, finally, of the sacralization of violence? Is it not obvious that, in our relentless drive for divinely sanctioned triumph over our neighbors, we are simply re-enacting (again and again) the moral impulses of conquest?

And yet, laughable though it is, this interpretation of our nation and our cultural moment continues to control the moral imagination of much of the Christian church in our nation. Indeed, its features remain everywhere evident. It is the source of the endless bloviations of our current president. It is the impulse behind the current destruction of monuments to those who defy the myth. It is the rationale for imprisoning immigrant children. It is the pretext for the sneering redactions of a predator’s secrets. It is the seed of our swaggering imperialist presumptions. It is the secret refuge of religious leaders who, perhaps above all things, need to feel important. It is the sum and substance of almost everything that is poisoning our nation at this moment. And yet we continue to embrace it.

As long as American churches remain committed to this myth, we will never be a people who bear witness to the kingdom of the living Christ. We will be only the haloed and haunted reflection of the antichrist.

Because of this, the call to be a dissident church requires us to deliberately shift from an interpretation of our nation and our moment rooted in myth, and to embrace an account rooted in truth. That truth? I have a few ideas:

This God’s world. All of it. Political borders are not theological facts. There is no place where God’s light does not fall. No place where God’s love does not dwell. No place where God’s promises are not true. The world is not binary.

In spite of the heretical and self-righteous fantasies of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, neither our nation nor our churches are redemptively messianic or morally pure. To the contrary, we have been accomplices to some of the most profound wickedness in history and the world is deeply wounded because of this. We do not first bring our morals or our mandates to the world, but our mourning. We are not innocent.

Others–even our cultural foes–are never reducible to evil, but that they bring gifts we are called to receive and burdens we are called to bear. As Solzhenitsyn (who spent his career fighting this myth) put it—“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.” Outsiders are not enemies.

We are not in a fortress, and the enemies are not at the gate. We are, rather, pilgrims walking together through the unimaginable complexities of this world. And we are held by the love of God as we do so. We are not besieged.

Our lives–minds, words, bodies, money, hopes–are not for us, but for our neighbors. Our work is not the defense of our own lives, but the nourishment of the lives of others. Our way is not that of the fortified wall, but of the steaming kitchen and the laden table. We are not called to win, but to love.

It is difficult to overstate the degree to which this account stands opposed to the malignant myth of our time. But they are lies. And the work of the dissident church is to renounce these lies by meeting them deliberately and consistently with holy defiance. It is only as we do this that we will make straight the path for the coming of truth, and in this, the coming of light.

Ps. For a more extended treatment of these themes, you can read my review of Rod Dreher’s Live not by Lies here:

On one hand, the claim that the Christian church is—always and everywhere—to devote itself to confronting and healing the harm done to our neighbors by wickedness, greed, violence, and deceit. And yet on the other hand, the reality that much of the Christian church in America is—and has long been—one of the greatest justifiers, perpetrators, and beneficiaries of these very things.

This conflict is currently leading many American Christians to ask a deeply important question: Given that many of our churches are either indifferent to or opposed to the most deeply necessary forms of Christian presence, how can we nurture something different? How can we nurture a dissident church?

This, as I noted in my last post, is not a new question. Indeed it is a perennial question for Christians across time and space who have found themselves facing an institutional reality that is insufficient for their Christian calling. And not only this, these have long proved to be the very moments in which some of the most creative and impactful theological, liturgical, and practical work has emerged.

In the 20th century alone, for example, we saw an extraordinary cloud of witnesses step forward to undertake exactly this sort of work. Howard Thurman, writing in the face of white supremacy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer standing against Christian nationalism. Mother Teresa contending with greed by centering the poor. Oscar Romero preaching against government oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr. re-articulating the call of justice. Lesslie Newbigin contending with the coming secular. Willie James Jennings unmasking the perversity of the colonial imagination.

Each of these—and so many others—not only took up the question above, but devoted their lives to answering it with creativity and courage. Each of us is called to do the same.

As I have wrestled with this question over the past 20 years, I have come to believe that the church in the United States, if it is to overcome its current role as chaplain to evil, must deliberately undergo a number of shifts in both the substance and the structure of its life. In this post, and in posts to come, I want to consider these shifts together.

From Dominion to Communion: A Shift in Purpose

The first shift I want to consider, the shift from Dominion to Communion, is a fundamental shift in how many of us understand the very purpose of our faith.

Some personal context:

When I first embraced the Christian faith in the late 1980’s, one of the first lessons I learned is that the purpose of the Christian life is to transform the culture in the name of the Christian faith. It was an exciting discovery, one that brought meaning and motivation to an otherwise aimless life.

At the time (as now), this transformational purpose was conceived in a variety of ways.

Some understood the transformation of culture in largely political terms; seeking transformation through grassroots action and governmental influence. Others spoke largely in cultural terms; seeking transformation through the creation (or criticism) of art, literature, film, and music. Still others spoke in what might be called institutional terms; seeking cultural transformation through the deployment of institutional access and agency across a host of social domains.

While these various transformation visions often critiqued one another, each was nonetheless animated by a shared conviction about the purpose of the Christian faith: to transform the world by exercising dominion in God’s name and toward God’s ends.

I learned this lesson well. Over the years I have written articles, given lectures, shaped institutions, and made personal decisions in light of this early transformationalist conviction. Indeed, there is a sense in which I continue to do so to this day. This is because I continue to believe that the love of God and love of neighbor ought to take living shape in the world.

That said, over the years, I have developed a deep concern about the ways in which this transformationalist conviction has warped both the imagination and the practices of those parts of the American church who unreflectively embrace it.

Part of my concern stems from the ways that this conviction indexes Christian faithfulness to “cultural impact” and the subtle ways that this indexing denigrates the faithfulness of those with comparatively slight vocational or institutional agency.

Part of my concern stems from the restlessness inherent in a constant desire for change, and the ways that this restlessness can obstruct the attainment of things like gratitude and contentment.

But the largest part of my concern stems from the ways in which the transformationalist vision cultivates–and legitimates–an instinctive obsession with power. And not simply with power as such, but with the power to win over one’s cultural foes. With power as the path to cultural conquest. With power to impose one’s will on the world and call it “redemptive.” And, following from this, with the way this account of dominion serves inevitably to frame everything, and everyone, not as creatures to be loved, but as domains to be conquered.

In virtually every Christian context in which I have been involved–in the local churches, in conferences, in intellectual communities, in professional networks, in the Faith and Work movement, etc–I have witnessed these things. I have watched good people being slowly warped by the allure of power. I have watched bad people being uncritically adored in the dream of dominion. And I am watching now, as indeed we all are watching now, as this same dream takes monstrous and murderous form in our political culture.

Over time, my encounters with the thirst for dominion and my experience with its disastrous consequences in my life and in the life of the church, led me to search for an alternative way of understanding the purpose of the Christian faith. And quite unexpectedly, this search led me to the Christian contemplative tradition. This was not an obvious place to seek an alternative. After all, much of the daily life of the contemplative tradition—especially as it is expressed in monastic communities—is explicitly transformational; an effort to transform the minds, hearts, bodies, relationships, and hourly habits of the Christian life.

And yet, as I submerged myself in this tradition I began to understand that while the contemplative tradition values transformation as an important element of the life of faith, it does not see it as the purpose of that life. That purpose is, rather, communion with God and neighbor. That is, for contemplative writers such as Augustine, Benedict, Julian of Norwich, Bernard, Aelred, Gueric, and Lawrence—the purpose of the Christian life is not cultural dominion but mystical communion—the holy pursuit of intimacy with God and with others. The purpose of the Christian life is, in other words, not to win, but to love.

I could say a great deal about the ways in which this emphasis on communion utterly redirected virtually every aspect of my life: my mind, my heart, my body, my words, my relationships, my very vocation. But, more importantly for this moment, it reshaped my understanding of the purpose of the church and the nature of its role in the world. That role, simply put, is to bear witness to the communion at the heart of Triune life through our intimacy with God, with one another, and with our neighbors. Our purpose is not, and never has been, to exercise dominion. It is, and always has been, to experience and extend communion. Let me say it again. Our purpose is not, and never has been, to exercise dominion. It is, and always has been, to experience and extend communion.

This is not to suggest, as we will see in posts to follow, that communion is merely an internal reality. No. Love must take shape in the world. But the source and substance of our shaping of the world–the heart from which it flows, the means by which it emerges, the fruit by which it is known, and the measure by which it is evaluated–must always be our true purpose: the living mystery of loving communion.

This reorientation of the church’s purpose from dominion to communion is, I believe, the first and most important step in the creation of a dissident church. Why? Because in our moment, it is evident that much of the American church is defined by an addiction to the fantasy of its own dominion: obsessed with power, idolatrous of impact, instinctive in conflict, and indifferent to the trail of pain in its wake. And the first work of the dissident church is to say no to this; to renounce the pernicious ways that the lust for dominion has corrupted our personal, ecclesial, and civic lives. And to re-embrace the holy mystery of communion with God and with our neighbors as the very purpose of our presence in the world.

Assumption 1: At this moment, American culture is facing an extraordinary moral crisis that involves, at least, the following: transparent political corruption, racial tribalism, willed historical amnesia, addiction to violence, the re-entrenchment of institutionalized injustice, grotesque material inequality, the dissolution of social trust, clear signs of ecological death, and a ubiquitous weariness of heart.

Assumption 2. Contrary to the hysterical howls of the hair-gelled punditry, this crisis is not due to Marxism(s), immigrants, windmills, critical theory, or black Little Mermaid. It is, rather, wholly the fruit of our colonial history, of our continued refusal to acknowledge and renounce that history, and our refusal to embrace the words of our own Declaration.

Assumption 3. Much (not all) of the American Christian church, rather than hastening the renunciation of this history and the healing of these wounds, has instead chosen to be an accomplice in the wounding; providing moral sanctuary for the the very racial, sexual, economic, political, rhetorical, and ecological violence that is destroying our communities.

Question: Given that many of our Christian churches are either indifferent to or opposed to the most culturally necessary forms of Christian presence, how can we nurture something different? How can we nurture a dissident church?

This is the question that is actually before us. And those who care about the church and its work in the world are called to take it up. But as we do so, it is important to remember that we are not alone. Indeed, throughout history, many faithful Christians have faced this question and have offered powerful forms of dissident Christianity in response.

Consider, as one example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 1930, Bonhoeffer left Germany and crossed the ocean for Union Seminary in New York. For most of his life, he had embraced—and been embraced by—a German church that was, at its heart, nationalistic, ethnocentric, elitist, militaristic, and animated by deep grievance. Indeed, he himself had affirmed each of these in his early teaching and writing.

But as the political context of his home country began to shift, a strange disquiet began to grow inside of him. He came to see that these core features of his native ecclesiology not only paved the way for a violent nationalist Messiah, but also rendered the church utterly incapable of meaningful resistance. To the contrary, they insured the church’s complicity. And part of his nascent hope in coming to America was not only to more deeply understand these dynamics, but to find in America a Christianity that offered something to subvert them. His first encounter was with the liberal theology of Union Seminary and the establishment ecclesial order that it represented. It did not take Bonhoeffer long to realize that the anemia of theological liberalism would not—indeed could not—give him what he sought. He needed something else.

He found that something else, of all places, in the black church of Harlem. And what did he find? A church centered not on the nation but on the community. A church centered not on racial fantasy, but on universal brotherhood. A church centered not on elites, but on the suffering. A church centered not in the valorization of violence but on the practice of peace. A church centered not on an ethos of grievance, but on the music of triumphant joy. He found, in other words, a form of Christianity that gave him the very things his country most needed, but that his native church most abhorred. And it changed him. And this change led him to return to his country, leave the pseudo-Christian cult of German nationalism, join the Confessing Church, found a clandestine seminary, forge a new theological voice, align himself with the purged, and ultimately to die singing of resurrection. And he did all of this in an attempt to answer—in his very life—the question pressing in upon us today: How can we nurture a dissident church?

Over the coming weeks, as just one part of what I’m doing here at The Convivial Imagination, I’m going to explore this question. And I’m going to do so by proposing a series of shifts that (much of) the church in America will need to make if we are to break free of our suffocating ecclesial inertia and become the dissident community of love that our neighbors need and our faith requires. Please join me!

Like millions of other people around the world, I tuned in to watch Bad Bunny’s halftime show at last night’s “Superbowl.” Full disclosure, I only watched about ninety seconds of the game. But in that ninety seconds, and in the thirty minutes of the half-time performance, what I saw and heard (my 269 consecutive days of Duolingo Spanish notwithstanding!) awakened a deeply rooted joy.

A couple of caveats: I am not unaware of the neoliberal commercial entailments of either the game or the performance. Nor am I unaware of the ubiquity of meaningless spectacle in our time. No need to remind me of these.

So why the joy? Here’s why:

Bad Bunny’s performance took place against the backdrop not of a football game, but of a terrible, violent, and longstanding cultural conflict. And in spite of the sanctimonious evasions of our current political “leaders,” this conflict is not about borders, not about immigration, not about jobs, not about housing, and not about “safety.” It is about identity—about what it means to be an American and what it means to be a human. It is about who gets to determine these things and whose lives must merely be determined by them. It is about the enduring American struggle between the universal and tribal imaginations.

On one side of that conflict stands the latest expression of America’s bloated oligarchy. Unimaginably wealthy. Singularly powerful. Legally impervious; their violence hidden behind masks and NDA’s. Surrounded by obsequious puppets who cater to their whims and assure them of their genius. And yet, if our current President is any indication (and he is) this oligarchy is somehow also uniquely victimized, and, as a result, singularly whiny, petty, and offended. Offended by the name, Ocasio. Offended by the language. Offended by the instruments. Offended by the dancing. Offended by the cultural references that elude them. Offended by the adoration of someone other than themselves. So offended, in fact, that they preemptively declared the performance a scandal and planned their own separate “All-American” halftime show. The most privileged people in the history of the world are, in their own minds, also the most besieged. It is difficult to imagine a more tedious existence: pampered, petty, and vindictive; an existence entombed in its own gilded joylessness.

On the other side of the conflict stands one of the most consistently exploited communities in the history of the west. The community whose ancestors welcomed Columbus only to be poisoned and enslaved by him. Whose bodies were abused. Whose cultures were destroyed. Whose lands were burned. Whose labor was exploited. Whose governments were overthrown. Whose resources were stolen. Whose presence was criminalized. Whose parents, whose siblings, whose children are hunted, beaten, imprisoned, and dropped in the midst of chaos not of their making. And yet, if the half-time show is any indication (and it is) this community is somehow not only alive but is wreathed in joy. Joy in their land. Joy in their work. Joy in their bodies. Joy in their pointedly unmasked faces. Joy in marriage. Joy in children. Joy in their elders. Joy in food. Joy in frozen drinks. Joy in vintage trucks. Joy in song. Joy in dance. Joy, in short, in defiantly celebrating every single thing their oppressors sought to destroy.

As I watched, I thought of another conflict; ancient and biblical, but not altogether different than the one in which we find ourselves.

On one side of that conflict stands Herod, a petty tyrant king desperate for power, riddled with insecurity, and addicted to violence. He is, as all such men are, a farce of strength held in place only by fear, malice, and greed. When we first meet him, he has just learned that a child is to be born; a child who, if the prophets spoke truly, would ascend not only to Herod’s throne, but to all thrones. Existentially threatened and desperate for control, Herod tries charm. When charm fails, he relies on deceit. And when deceit fails, he descends to murder, destroying every child in the region who could possibly be his rival. You know the type.

On the other side of that conflict stands a teenage girl named Mary. Socially, she is a woman in the ancient world. Economically, she is part of a poor community. Morally, she is an unwed mother-to-be. Politically, she lives under violent occupation, and is eventually forced into exile. She is, especially when compared to Herod, certainly one of those whom Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.”

And yet. In the midst of her social limitations, her economic want, her disconcerting pregnancy, and her political oppression, one of the first things we hear from Mary is a song:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant…He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”

In the face of violence, Mary sings a song. A warning song. A consoling song. A defiant song. An invitational song. A song of coming reversal that breaks the spell, exposes the lies, scorns the proud, drowns out the threats, and delights the hearts of the poor. A song.

This is the song I heard on Sunday night. Truth in the midst of lies. Celebration in the midst of erasure. Joy in a plague of petulance. Dance in the face of violence. Community in the midst of polarization. And an invitation in the midst of rejection. And it was, in a word, magnificent.

Some of you may think of restaurant visits with friends; spaces that are the perfect balance of light and dark, quiet and hum, food and drink.

Some of you may think of parties in the street; adults holding beers, laughing and talking while kids play the endless summer games of childhood.

Still others may think of the beloved, flush-faced Uncle with the absurd sweater who laughs a little too loud at the Christmas party.

There’s room for all of these and more within that marvelous word: convivial.

At its heart though, convivial simply means “life together.” And joined, as it is here, with the word “Imagination,” it means the capacity to imagine our lives, our communities, and the world as places in which we—stubbornly, deliberately, and beautifully—choose to live lives both with and for others. This is what the convivial imagination is.

Given that, the purpose of this Substack is really twofold:

First, I want to draw your attention to resources—stories, poems, recipes, songs, books—that embody and encourage the work of building lives with room for others. I want, in other words, to cultivate the convivial imagination in all of its forms in all of our communities. In this respect, this is a bit of an impressionistic undertaking. But my hope—and it is hope—is that, taken together, the resources that emerge here will encourage the capacity to reimagine all life, real life, as life best lived together.

Secondly, I want to draw your attention to the endless assault on life together that is everywhere around us. This bears elaboration. The moment in which we live is a moment in which both the idea and the practice of life lived with and for others—especially those who are most frequently excluded from common life—are being relentlessly dismantled. And not only this, this dismantling is being celebrated as virtue and rewarded with riches. We are, in short, witnessing the willed dissolution of a convivial imagination and the replacing of that imagination with a monstrous vision that not only deliberately sows hatred but also gorges grotesquely on its fruit as our love-starved cities look on with dismay. But, as a poet somewhere once said, “Fuck that shit.”

My hope, then, is sensuous celebration of the beauty of life together, and a raging resistance to everything that tears it apart.

In the coming days, I’d be grateful if you’d join me in this hope. After all, if the project of renewing of the convivial among us is ever to take shape, it must be done—as all good things are—together.

Thanks for being here, for subscribing, and for coming along.