Be careful who you give those Bibles to October 12, 2007
Posted by Zack in Missouri , trackbackYesterday morning, while I was hunting for coffee outside of the convention center, I found myself walking alongside a very tall, very bearded college student who was hunting for breakfast. Over breakfast I got his story.
Erik grew up deeply religious in a small town in Arkansas attending a conservative Southern Baptist church. In 2003, he was accepted to the Air Force Academy, which, if you don’t know, is extremely difficult to get into, and a huge honor, especially for someone coming from Erik’s community.
Over his first two years at the Academy, he was more and more troubled by doubts about his decision to become an Air Force pilot. Partly, it was getting away from his home church that gave him the space to reconsider what his faith had to say about a military career. He was already well versed in the Bible, and kept studying it—now with somewhat fresh eyes. He became more and more certain that, if he really believed in the gospel, he couldn’t go dropping bombs on people in Iraq or anywhere else.
But how would he explain his decision to his friends in the Academy and back home, his parents and his church?
He found the resolve to quit after a bout with the flu that left him bedridden and alone with the Bible for several days at school. While reading one of Paul’s letters, something just clicked and he knew his decision was made.
Now he’s back in his home town attending a local college. I fished around to see what other influences there might have been that made him think about things differently. One, he said, was a young Bible teacher in his private Christian high school. “He told us, you really need to ask yourself whether you believe what’s in this book,” Erik said.
Erik is now a part of a house church community founded by that teacher. And for the past couple of years, he lived, “in a house with eight other guys where we had church all the time.”
Recently, Erik went down to Waco Texas to visit and learn from the “Church Under the Bridge,” an interdenominational church “with a call to the poor and the marginalized.” He said he was looking around to see what other Christians were up do—and that’s why he’s come to this conference too. With friends he’s sought out enclaves of homeless people and people living in extreme poverty in his own area, where he humbly and openly wrestled with the same dangers of inadvertently doing more harm than good that everyone at this conference is dealing with.
As I’ve written before, one amazing thing about this movement is how spontaneously it seems to be rising in so many different communities. Over and over, you see the same patterns. And often, they’re taking place without any contact with the national/international voices that are representing the movement. For example, Erik hadn’t read Shane Claiborne or Greg Boyd or any other anti-militaristic Christian voices before he left the Air Force Academy.
Erik’s story may seem exceptional. But this conference is full of young people on the the same kind of radical path. (Catalyst was too.) But one thing that’s so interesting: even though some of them may have drifted away from the church in which they grew up (sometime just temporarily), they have not drifted from the “church universal.” These young revolutionaries are staying right inside the heart of the church, never giving up.
Tag: CCDA
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If you’re in St. Louis on Sunday, be sure to check out New City Fellowship (newcity.org). It’s a multicultural evangelical church committed to “show God’s love to the poor, widows, orphans, immigrants and refugees of St. Louis.” Sunday service runs from 10-12. The worship style is an amazing mix of black gospel, white contemporary praise, classic hymns, and African songs (in their native tongues). Portions of the service are also translated into French by a Congolese pastor for the benefit of our large Congolese immigrant population.
Wait… there were other people from Arkansas at CCDA?! Why couldn’t I find any of them?
Is CCDA the community development conference?
Yes - the Christian Community Development Association conference. CCDA.org
Zack: The AFA, it has been widely reported, has a very active and aggressive right wing Christian movement. They plastered the place with paraphenalia, for example, when the film “Passion” by that anti-semite lush Mel Gibson was released, etc.
How did Erik handle this? When these Christofacists got wind of Erik’s, ah, ‘different’ reading of Scripture, how did he avoid getting fragged every other day?