Another West Hartford kid goes to church March 28, 2008
Posted by Zack in Connecticut | write a commentA little while ago, I got an email from a guy I went to high school with in West Hartford, CT, named Matt Casper. He told me that, though an atheist, he had just been paid to go to church all over the country as part of a project by evangelical author and instigator Jim Henderson. In the book, Jim uses Matt to make a whole bunch of points about all different kinds of churches. The underlying point seems to be: traditional and non-traditional churches alike are doing little that’s likely to suck in a non-believer like Matt. Here’s an interview with my old high school classmate about his experience:
RIJ: As someone outside of the church, how did you end up getting involved in this book?
MC: It’s all in the intro to the book. I worked for a few months at a Christian marketing company. I had just moved to San Diego (2002) and needed a job w/benefits as I had a wife and a baby girl. The first thing I found was a job as Copywriter for Outreach Marketing (take a look at what they do: www.outreach.com). My job, primarily, was writing postcards that would get people to go to church. My personal favorite was one where I had to renounce evolution… “Sure, monkeys are cute. But are they family? Come to church X and hear the whole story…” shit like that.
While at Outreach, I made a few friends with the less rabid, one of whom is featured prominently in the book, Jason Evans. He’s an excellent drummer, and I had a band in need of a drummer, and so on. So we became friends. Jason later introduced me to Jim Henderson who was in San Diego looking for “lost people” to interview in front of a room full of evangelical pastors (you can read about that stuff here). I gladly signed up and had a great time.
About a year later, Jim got briefly famous after buying a guy’s soul on ebay (Hemant Mehta; you can read his and Jim’s story here). Jim and Hemant were offered a book deal, but Hemant passed; wanted to his own thing. Jim held auditions for another atheist to write a book with him, invited me to take part, and ta-da!
RIJ: In the book, you were very polite to Jim and all the Christians you met. But, as someone who doesn’t believe in the Bible as history, did you ever want to stand up and blurt out, “You people are crazy—you believe in 2000 year old fairy tales!” ?
MC: Yes, I did. But yelling at people doesn’t change anything. Think of all the Christians who try to “win” people over by telling them they’re going to hell… totally ineffective. So I thought about what it was I wanted to accomplish in a new light. Basically, I realized that I don’t care if people believe in gods of any kind so long as they are constructive in how they live their lives. When that belief drives them to love others, help the poor, etc. (much like Jesus actually asked them to do), then how could anyone be against it? It’s when that belief drives them to spew homophobic vitriol or fly planes into buildings that I have a problem. Think about it: if everyone in America who says they follow Jesus actually did what he asked, we would have no poverty, no homeless, no healthcare crisis, no income disparity. The question I liked asking them over and over was “Do you think Jesus was a capitalist?”
RIJ: Were you moved by seeing the communities in the churches you visited? Growing up in West Hartford, I never encountered community like what I see in these churches. (Maybe your experience was different?) I don’t mean just the gathering for worship, but all the small groups, the youth groups, Bible studies, and other ways that people really become part of each other’s lives.
MC: Yes and no. The “community” at some churches seemed to disappear with the first note of the recessional, if it was ever there at all. I think “community” goes out the window when you have 2,000 (Saddleback), 7,000 (Willow Creek), or 16,000 (Lakewood) people under the same roof. What you’re seeing then is simply mass mentality, no different than a World Cup game, a rock concert, or the Nuremberg rallies. It’s when these mobs would break into smaller groups that the community focus would kick in. And the smaller the church, the larger the sense of community. I attended a house church where the sense of community was so incredible, even a non-believer could feel it. And these house church people were/are committed to working together to make the world a better place and held each other accountable.
It’s a simple fact of human nature: the more people there are, the less individual accountability there is. And the message of Jesus is ALL about individual accountability. The biggest problem facing the entire world may be people saying, “Hey, that’s not my problem.” Johne Donne put it best: ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Basically, the big churches let people feel like they were doing something to make the world a better place, when they weren’t really participating at all.
In West Hartford, no, I never saw anything like what I saw at the biggest and smallest churches in America, but WH is a WASP town and WASP’s belief systems are not openly discussed. After all, that would be rude. And we mustn’t be rude! 
RIJ: Since the publication of the book, have you spoken in churches at all? And what’s been the response to you as an outsider who still has not become a believer?
MC: Yes, I have. And it’s been a blast. Most people really want to hear what I have to say. I get stopped in the lobby or in the elevator at such events by people thanking me for helping them become better Christians. Far out. It’s like thanking Christopher Reeve for helping you become a better swimmer. I think there is growing dis-satisfaction with the “belief comes first” churches, and more young believers appear to be getting more out of life by putting deeds before words, which is always a good idea… provided said deeds are constructive and not destructive. Granted, “constructive” and “destructive” are subjective terms, but less subjective than “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “evil.”
RIJ: THANKS MATT!
Tags: jim henderson, matt casperAmerican Idols January 15, 2008
Posted by Zack in Connecticut | 4 commentsI haven’t been on the road full time visiting actual Revolutionary Christian communities for the past several weeks. It seems other considerations, such as earning a paycheck and having a place to live, have caught up with me a little bit.
However, I’m hoping to visit a different community for a week or so every 6 or 7 weeks, and do more in-depth writing about each one—what the community is up to, what I learn about the Bible and the Church from them, and stories of the people I meet along the way. Who knows…maybe it could become a Revolution in Jesusland book. Please suggest communities for me to include in this project! Post a comment or email me at info@revolutioninjesusland.com.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep bringing you the Revolution, which exposes itself intimately online on tens of thousands of blogs, church sites and sermon podcasts.
Today, check out Pastor Eric Stillman’s recent three blog posts on Idolatry. (Part I, Part II, Part III.) This is a major theme I’ve heard preached in dozens of churches. I always thought that Idolatry just applied to the worship of statues, etc…. But the Revolutionaries preach about an expanded meaning of Idolatry—and I’ve been surprised, in my own gradual reading of the Bible, that this is not a stretch at all, but is very blatantly there in both Old and New Testaments.
The expanded Idolatry means putting anything ahead of God in your life. Material possessions, prestige, sex, work, a business, a hobby…those are all frequent idols for American Christians these days. But what does it mean to put God ahead of all those things (none of which Christians are against)? It means you do what God wants. And you only enjoy those kinds of rewards when God intends you to enjoy them in the course of doing what he wants. But what does God want? That’s a BIG question, and it’s one that every community answers in the course of studying the Bible and deciding how to live it out.
Fortunately for the world, the Revolutionaries believe God wants Christians to serve the poor & oppressed, fix broken systems and other beautiful things.
Eric Stillman takes on that topic in a post that (not accidentally, I’m sure) immediately preceded the Idolatry posts. Stillman’s church is embarking on a two-year project to read and study the Bible cover to cover. As he explains in his post, they’ll be stopping every six weeks to devote church gatherings to testimonies about members’ struggles to live out the Bible. If you’ve always been curious how evangelicals can believe the Bible is true, and not resort to stoning adulterers, Eric’s post (called “Living out the Bible (except the part about stoning people…)“) can shed some light on that.
Even the praise-the-Lord evangelical types! November 9, 2007
Posted by Zack in Connecticut | 1 commentHere’s a little bit more evidence of the progress of the revolution. Conservative columnist Laurence Cohen, in the Hartford Courant today, is despairing because “Even some of the more praise-the-Lord evangelical types have” have joined with those crazy Quakers and bleeding heart liberal mainliners and “begun to scratch the itch to become ‘environmentalists.’ ”
Many of the mainstream Protestant faiths have been led astray by denominational staff that has grown bored with transcendence and prefers to probe the mysteries of air pollution and property tax reform. Even some of the more praise-the-Lord evangelical types have begun to scratch the itch to become “environmentalists.” Which coal-scrubbing technology would Jesus recommend? Apparently, you don’t learn that in chemical engineering class; you learn it at seminary.
In these here parts, the Greater Hartford Coalition for Equity and Justice, for instance, is a church-fueled advocacy group indistinguishable from the lefty fringes of the Democratic Party and irrelevant labor unions. In a sermon in 2003 at the Washington National Cathedral, the executive director of the Christian Conference of Connecticut used the occasion to spew anti-Bush rhetoric that even many Democrats found embarrassing.
Thanks to my Dad for the link.
