In one account in the Gospels Our Lord rebukes a group of religious leaders, telling them that they make their converts twice the sons of hell that they themselves are. It's striking: The fault he lodges with them is not that they are indifferent or that they are failing in their work in some way. Rather, they are quite industrious and actually do see people won to their way of life.
But that way of life is hellish:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
What happens when religious leaders are successful at converting people to something hellish? The answer seems relatively obvious: You get religious communities that are quite hellish themselves. And if you get enough of those sorts of communities, you begin to see mass, large-scale problems caused by religious communities that evince few signs of grace or newness of life but instead make their converts "twofold more the (children) of hell" than they are themselves.
I thought about that both as I read Miles's recent review of exvangelical memoirs and as I read some of the responses to this question recently posted on Twitter:
What stood out to me as I read the replies to Winger's question was that there were very few mentions of the church. Some did, to be sure. But many of the replies either came from adult converts who encountered the Christian faith as a bracing message of hope and meaning or they came from cradle evangelicals who found reasons to stay in apologetics or scripture, often in apologetics or scriptural texts that actually helped them recover from bad church experiences.
I think we have passed through a time in which there have been many faithless churches, the outcome of which has been a generation of "churched" people who either took nothing from the experience (because it wasn't that important and they were never properly catechized or discipled) or who were actually harmed by the experience rather than helped. That is my own story and the story of many others.
So how do you help address the problem that Miles is describing in his review, a culture of biblicist guruism in which the churches do not even look recognizably Protestant in any real way? How do you address the massive gaps and holes in a person's Christian discipleship that result from sustained exposure to such churches?
I cannot answer that question for everyone, but I can say what things helped me as I was detoxing from that sort of church experience.
I do not think my parents always understood exactly why I was struggling with church, though they understood a lot. That said, in our case the church I was raging against was the church where they met Jesus. So I am sure it was complicated for them to see me so angry and furious at the place that had meant so much to them and to which they had given so much of their life. Even so, they led with love in all their interactions with me during that time. They assumed my sincerity, they trusted God, and they tried to give me what I needed. When friends' parents castigated them over the things I read, they defended me. When they were told to "set ground rules" for me by another (maybe?) well-meaning parent, they told that parent that they would handle things with me as they thought best before the Lord. And throughout my years of struggle, I never doubted the strength of our relationship. Indeed, very early in my own anger and doubting my parents told me in no uncertain terms that no matter where I ended up, they would never shun me. I would always be welcome in our home. Given that we attended a fundamentalist church where shunning was not unheard of, I can't tell you how much that meant.
One of the points lingering in the background of Miles's review is that it is likely the case that many evangelical churches of the past 30 years aren't really churches in the conventional sense of the term. If the Gospel was not clear or was not preached, then what you had was more a religious assembly than a church. If the sacramental life of the church was non-existent, you had a religious assembly, not a church. And if there was no aid in Christian discipline... well, you know the drill.
When I came to Grace Chapel in 2007, a small PCA church that was at the time located in central Lincoln, I didn't know that I'd not really been part of a church before, at least as the church was traditionally understood. What I found at Grace was something I hadn't even known to look for because I didn't know it existed. I found something obviously and unapologetically Christian—the Gospel was clear in every sermon, and clear in a way I'd never heard it from a pulpit before, the Eucharist was celebrated regularly, and the pastor at the church actually seemed to know the people in his church and to think it was his job to care for them and aid them in their discipleship. I'd never seen anything like it before.
And the services themselves helped to reenforce the basics of Christian belief and practice: We prayed the Lord's Prayer corporately. We confessed our sins corporately. We sang old hymns. Every week we received a benediction. The grammar and vocabulary of Christianity pervaded the liturgy; it wasn't just a guy in a pulpit pontificating, loudly proclaiming his own loosely assorted thoughts about life and expecting you to take him seriously because he attempted to root them in scripture.
Ultimately I think there are two reasons to be Christian, and the two ultimately amount to the same thing: Because it is true and because it is the doorway to all good adventure—and knowing that those two amount to the same thing is what gives one joy. (The innate longing we feel for such adventure is a kind of memory of our true origins and destination.) At Grace I found a congregation that really believed all the things that Christians believe and that allowed those things to make them joyful. The pastor encouraged these connections too, I think. Each sermon ended on the Gospel and each sermon was immediately followed by the Lord's Supper, and his eucharistic reflection always ended with the phrase "with so much joy in your hearts, come and keep the feast." And then because Communion was served at the front of the church rather than being distributed with trays, we had to actually stand up and walk toward Christ, as it were. When that was done, all that remained was music.
To this day I've never heard a congregation that sings like Grace. And in their older building, a small austere formerly Baptist chapel with a narrow sanctuary and tall ceilings... the sound itself transported you. This doesn't do it justice, but I think it's the best I can find to give a sense of the warmth and excitement that pervaded the singing.
There seem to be a great many people concerned with notions of 'deconstruction' now and alarmed or enraged by the boom of exvangelical memoirs now hitting bookstore shelves. My advice to such people would be that if you want people to follow Jesus, live in a way that makes them want what you have. That doesn't mean be blandly likable and inoffensive, but it does mean being warm, marked by care, and eager to love and serve your neighbor. And if you want younger people to stick around, give them Jesus instead of programs or life advice or moral rules. Those things can all be fine, of course, if rightly ordered. But at bottom what people need is Christ—all of Christ. And give them the fulness of the life of his people—give them the prayers that his saints have prayed through the ages, give them the sacraments, give them pastoral care. We live in a world saturated with the superficial. Sometimes something as simple as a sustained attentiveness and seriousness is all it takes to get a person's attention, accustomed as they are to the shallow and the flippant.
These are the things I found, thank God, in the Christian home I knew as a child, though not in the church I knew as a child. But because my parents essentially created the conditions in which I could go looking in other churches, I did—and once I could feel confident that the things I saw in my honorable parents were actually just Christian things that I could find in church too... well, I wasn't going to leave that.