Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America - Hardcover

Moore, Russell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593541782 ISBN 13: 9780593541784

Verlag: Sentinel, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Former Southern Baptist pastor and Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore calls for repentance and renewal in American evangelicalism

American evangelical Christianity has lost its way. While the witness of the church before a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn apart over Donald Trump, Christian nationalism, racial injustice, sexual predation, disgraced leaders, and covered-up scandals. Left behind are millions of believers who counted on the church to be a place of belonging and hope. As greater and greater numbers of younger Americans bleed out from the church, even the most rooted evangelicals are wondering, “Can American Christianity survive?”

In Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore calls his fellow evangelical Christians to conversion over culture wars, to truth over tribalism, to the gospel over politics, to integrity over influence, and to renewal over nostalgia. With both prophetic honesty and pastoral love, Moore offers a word of counsel for how a new generation of disillusioned and exhausted believers can find a path forward after the crisis and confusion of the last several years. Believing the gospel is too important to leave it to hucksters and grifters, he shows how a Christian can avoid both cynicism and complicity in order to imagine a different, hopeful vision for the church.

The altar call of the old evangelical revivals was both a call to repentance and the offer of a new start. In the same way, this book invites unmoored and discouraged Christians to step out into an uncertain future, first by letting go of the kind of cultural, politicized, status quo Christianity that led us to this moment of reckoning. Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what’s dead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He lives in Brentwood, TN.

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If we wanted to find Jesus, we would have to lose our religion. That's what the preacher said. In fact, he said it every week, every Sunday morning and every Sunday night, and then in the fall and the spring, he would bring in a guest evangelist to tell us the same thing. Religion, he said, gave the wrong answers because it asked the wrong questions. Religion asked, "Am I a church member?" or "Am I an American?" Religion asked, "Am I a moral person?" or "Do my good deeds outweigh my bad?" Religion asked, "Can I assent to the fact that the Bible is true?" or "Can I recite a creed or a catechism?"

Those were the wrong questions, and religion gave the wrong answers. The ultimate questions were deeper, more personal: "Do you know you're a sinner?" and "Do you trust the crucified and risen Jesus to atone for that sin?" and "Will you commit your life to taking up your cross and following him?" For those questions, they would assert, religion would not do, only a relationship, a personal, living faith-not your church's faith, not your country's faith, not your family's faith, but yours. If we were to see the kingdom of God, religion couldn't get us there, they said. We must be born again.

Some people call it an altar call. Some call it a "Come to Jesus" meeting. We called it an "invitation." Though we were low-church Mississippi Baptists, who thought we didn't have any ritual or formality, this was part of our liturgy. Every week, at the end of the service, the gospel would be repeated-about how God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believed in him would not perish but have everlasting life. Every week the question "How do I become a Christian?" was answered with step-by-step guidance, sometimes even with a prayer a person could repeat. Every head would be bowed, every eye would be closed, but sometimes we would be looking around, with everybody praying that this would be the week that Miss Velma's husband would go down the aisle, to accept Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior.

Every week was an opportunity, not just for the unbelievers but also for all of us. We would ask ourselves: Is there some sin I need to confess today? Do I need to recommit my life to Christ? Is God calling me to "full-time Christian service," maybe even to be a missionary on the other side of the world? While all these questions-from the pulpit and in our own minds-were being asked, the organ would play quietly in the background hymns we all knew by heart: "Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me . . ." or "Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling . . . calling, oh, sinner, come home . . ." or "I have decided to follow Jesus . . . no turning back, no turning back."

When I was older, I found much to criticize about this weekly revivalism. It could communicate a kind of "pray this prayer after me" transaction that propped up the nominal, cultural Christianity all across the Bible Belt. It could substitute the biblical language of justification and sanctification with sentimental phrases about "Asking Jesus into your heart." It could become just as much a formality as could praying the rosary or reciting the Nicene Creed. It could reemphasize the sort of individualized Christianity that enabled generations of my ancestors to fight for the enslavement of human beings or to ignore the atrocities of Jim Crow segregation, all with an easy conscience that all was well as long as they repented of the sins the preacher mentioned-personal sins such as getting drunk or playing cards. It could highlight the emotional manipulation inherent in much American evangelicalism.

But I walked those aisles anyway. I "went forward" to profess my faith in Christ, to pray along with the preacher for God to forgive my sins on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus. I "went forward" to rededicate my life to Christ, after I had grown cynical through a time of doubt. I "went forward" to say that I was "surrendering to preach," that is, to give my life to the calling of ministry to the church. And sometimes I "went forward" just for someone to pray for me, often telling the counselor down front that I had an "unspoken," which we all knew was a prayer request about something one didn't want to talk about at the moment. I knelt at the front of one of those aisles, as the ordained men laid hands on me, setting me apart for ministry.

And I believed it all. I went door-to-door telling people the Good News of the gospel, with a tract showing them how to be born again. Because dancing was considered "worldly," I spent the night of my prom at a Bible study in our church's Family Life Center instead. Drinking wine was considered wrong, so the first alcohol I ever drank was not at a college keg party but at a White House Christmas Party when the server accidentally dipped my cup from the "naughty" bowl instead of the "nice" one. Thanks Obama. Not only did I not lose my virginity until my wedding night, I committed at my ordination to the "Billy Graham rule" of not being alone with a woman not my wife. The altar call not only framed my life; it was my life.

One day, though, the "Come to Jesus" meetings changed. I found myself sitting, sometimes for eight hours at a time, with Southern Baptists like me in heresy trials at which I was not the inquisitor I had been trained to be, but the defendant. I hadn't changed my theology, or my behavior, at all. What I had done, as the president of my denomination's public policy agency, was refuse to endorse Donald Trump.

A denominational leader, after one of the countless "Come to Jesus" meetings at which I was upbraided for sacrificing "unity," articulated with bracing clarity what had been implicit for quite a while. "We can't get rid of you," he said (though they tried). "All our wives and kids are with you, but we can do psychological warfare until you think twice before you open your mouth."

What surprised me was that this vitriol came even from some I had counted as mentors. It was nothing personal, they told me. They just wanted to maintain "influence" with the most rightward fringe of the denomination. Those populists would eventually win, they reasoned, and only those who could "stay at the table" would be able to lead long-term.

A friend, and respected older Baptist leader, called when I was at the lowest moment of all this psychological warfare. I assumed it was to check on me or pray with me. Instead, he acted as though I had betrayed a fraternity into which he had inducted me. "This is not how you play the game," he said. "You give them the 90 percent of the red meat they expect, and then you can do the 10 percent of side stuff that you want to do, on immigrants or whatever." He was right. I had played the game poorly. I didn't consider the culturally conservative positions I took to be "red meat." I was pro-life and pro-family for the same reasons I was pro-racial justice and pro-refugee. I didn't realize that we were playing a game. If so, why would I give thirty years of my life to it? The thought that perhaps that's all this was turned out to be the most effective psychological warfare of all.

The breaking point came, though, when an investigative journalist published a report demonstrating cases of hundreds of people sexually abused and assaulted in Southern Baptist churches, along with multiple allegations of churches having covered up such abuses. In attempting to address accountability for such churches and leaders, we faced stonewalling and retaliation for even the most minimal efforts. We sat in mind-numbing meetings behind closed doors where we heard sexual abuse survivors described as "Potiphar's wife" (the Egyptian ruling figure who made a false accusation of rape against the patriarch Joseph) and other spurious biblical analogies. Survivors were often characterized as "crazy" and, at least by one leader, as possibly worse than the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sentinel
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593541782
• ISBN 13: 9780593541784
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland