Toronto | Revolution in Jesusland

Interview with Brian Walsh September 19, 2007

Posted by Zack in Toronto | 3 comments

While we were in Toronto, we took the opportunity to contact Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, who we knew only from their book, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire.

The book, on the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letter to an early Christian community at Colossae, has been something of an intellectual rallying point for progressive evangelicals as well as the growing ranks of young conservatives who are rebelling against the theology they grew up with. (Check out, for example, this post by a Kentucky evangelical blogger and Baptist preacher who describes himself as a “libertarian-leaning conservative politically and an adventurous pilgrim theologically.”)

Part of Colossians Remixed is about Brian and Sylvia’s down-shifted life in Toronto, but it turns out they now live on a farm a couple hours outside of the city. Brian still comes to the University of Toronto every week, where he serves in campus ministry and teaches classes at the seminary. After we made contact, he invited us to dinner and to his community’s “Wine Before Breakfast” regular Tuesday morning service.

After searching through the basements of Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto School of Theology, we finally found Brian’s office. Walking into the enormous room, we could feel right away that it was the home of a community, not just a professor’s office. Half the room is taken up by well worn chairs and sofas arranged in a circle; the other half by some long tables with coffee urns, breadbaskets and cutting boards.

Let me back up and tell you how we first discovered Brian and Sylvia’s book. Colossians Remixed is an explicitly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist work, and yet I found it through a conservative evangelical Church that Elizabeth and I attended occasionally in North Carolina. This was during the first year of our marriage, when I was still getting used to going to church. When I realized that church was a non-negotiable part of the deal, I decided that at least I would like to learn something about the real heart of American Christianity: we would go to evangelical churches, conservative churches, Baptist churches, charismatic churches, etc…. Besides, the liberal mainline services that Elizabeth was trying to ease me in through were just so boring and empty.

It was the third or fourth time we had attended Chapel Hill Bible Church. I liked it because the regular preacher was very historical and usually made a real class out of his sermons. One of my first big surprises in attending evangelical churches was how scholarly and open minded their reading of the Bible was—even while reading it as the “inspired and inerrant word of God.” Most of their preachers have studied the Bible in the original Greek and Hebrew, and their sermons are all about putting scripture in its ancient historical context. For me, it was kind of unbelievable the first few times I saw these giant halls full of suburbanites–soccer moms, Nascar dads, teenagers, and all–delving enthusiastically into deep study of everything from Roman imperial social relations to subtle nuances of ancient Hebrew poetry.

So, church had surprised me many times already, but never as much as on this particular Sunday. After sitting down inside the sea of preppy, polo-shirted businessmen and their perfectly made-up wives, I looked down and read the title of that Sunday’s sermon in the program: “Two fists in the face of Empire,” a sermon on Colossians.

And, yes, the preacher was explicit that, while the empire of Jesus’s day was Rome, ours is America.

I was shocked, and excited. Was this an aberration? When we got home, I read all the bits of the Bible referenced in the sermon and then got on the web and did some Googling: “Colossians Empire Evangelicals”. There were thousands of pages, mostly Christian blog posts wrestling with conflict between the Bible and the modern American imperial mindset. The top ten or so hits were discussions of Brian and Sylvia’s Colossians Remixed. My next stop was Amazon.com, and when the book came, I was amazed to find the same basic argument and ideas from the sermon.

I say that I was amazed because it meant that either the Southern, conservative, evangelical preacher–in a church that, for example, doesn’t allow women hold leadership positions–was preaching from a Canadian anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist tract…or, he was getting it from somewhere else (a broader movement?). Either way, I was made dizzy by how vastly different the world of Christianity was turning out to be–at least very large pockets within it–than I expected.

OK, so, back to our time with Brian in Toronto. We had a very enjoyable dinner at which we got him to tell us stories about his family’s new agrarian life on an organic farm in the country. It was inspiring to hear about how bravely they’ve embraced this enormous change, and about the sacrificial community they’ve formed there with a few other families. We learned about the arduous learning curve involved in beginning to raise, and slaughter, cattle and other animals–in graphic detail. In the interview posted above, Brian talks a bit about some of the compromises involved in moving to the country–not an angle I was expecting to hear.

The next morning we went to the “Wine Before Breakfast” service at the Wycliffe College chapel that the community has been holding every school year Tuesday since Sept 18, 2001. The service was a beautiful mix of singing, litanies, readings from the Bible and a poetic sermon by Brian. It was September 11th, and it was fascinating to learn that this community was started the week after the 9/11/2001 attacks.

The service was largely a lament, a cry of grief out to God, around the event of 9/11 and all the violence that has exploded out of that day. The first reading was from Psalm 13:

How long O Lord, will You forget me?
How long O lord, will you look the other way?
How long O lord, must I bear pain in my soul
And everyday, have such sorrow in my heart?

…But I trust, in Your unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
Still I sing, of Your unfailing love
You have been good
You will be good to me

As a kid, growing up in an atheist household, this was the main thing I could never understand about Christianity: how can Christians believe that God is omnipotent, and that He lets all this bad stuff happen, and yet still love and trust Him? The answer, which I’m only starting to be able to grasp, is that what Christians are doing is surrendering to the mystery of God. They don’t claim to know what God is up to with us (well, some do), they are just taking it on faith that whatever it is, it’s good, beautiful and infinitely important and meaningful.

The Wine Before Breakfast service definitely helped deepened my understanding of all this.

After breakfast, Brian sat down for an audio interview with me in his office. I tried to get him to discuss his book and Colossians with a secular audience in mind. You can listen to the excerpts by clicking on the track titles above, or download the whole interview for your iPod to take with you.

Tags: Brian Walsh, capitalism, Colossians Remixed, imperialism, Sylvia Keesmaat, Toronto

Missional living September 10, 2007

Posted by Zack in North Carolina | write a comment

This morning, on our flight from Charlotte to Toronto, we sat next to Donna Sheets, who is the Missions Coordinator at Covenant Church in Winterville, NC. She heard us talking about this blog and struck up a conversation with us. In fact, she is part of the reason we have finally gone ahead and decided to make this blog public.

We were sitting there on the plane talking about whether it would be crazy to try to hold a conversation with secular folks about what radical Christians are up to—and whether maybe this “Christian revolution” is just a figment of our own imaginations and in reality is limited to just a few over-hyped churches like Mars Hill. Right then Donna pipped up and introduced herself from the seat next to me. Donna is completing her PdD at Regent University, which is the Christian University founded by none other than Pat Robertson. It was originally called “CBN University,” an outgrowth of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Donna started her job at Covenant fairly recently. We got her talking about it and she gave us an overview of all of the organizations they work with on local, national and international levels and explained to us their framework for community involvement (while drawing a diagram for us, above).

Her missions team sees Church mission work in terms of four levels: She called the first the “Cadillac” level—as in driving through a poor community in a Cadillac, throwing money out the window. The next is the “Popcorn” level, where church members pop in and pop out of oppressed communities, e.g., going to a soup kitchen for a few hours, dropping off a Thanksgiving turkey to a family, etc…. The third level is the “Relational” level, where church members actually get into life relationships with those in need.

But their church, like many others these days, is attempting to move towards a fourth level, “Missional living“, which means totally altering your life and lifestyle in order to live completely and totally in the service of others—”sacrificially,” in their language.

We’ve heard this same kind of talk from the folks at Christian Community Development Association, Mars Hill and elsewhere. But to hear it from a Regent University student…it was enough to push us over the edge and convince us that this blog is definitely called for. This movement is HUGE and its story needs to be told to secular folks.
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Update: Donna emailed a chart with the complete “Four Mission Styles and Characteristics”…

4 Mission Styles and Characteristics

Mark Lykin 03-19-2007
Based on: Matthew chapters 25 and 28

June 1, 2007

Mission Style Characteristics	Cadillac Mission Style	Popcorn Mission Style	Relational Mission Style	Living a Missional Style
	Self directed	Event directed	Connecting directed	Self directed by a deep calling
	Can be local / seasonally based	Can be local / seasonal / national based	Can be local /seasonal / national based	Across all bases
	One shot deal	2-3 times a year	2-3 times a year or ongoing	Daily Short or long term
Who is called to do this and who does it?	Individual	Individual/ group/ family Church wide	Individual/ groups/ teams Church wide	Individual/ group/ family
How to measure success	Easy to measure by numbers and short term	Easy to measure by numbers and short term	Need to measure by relationships over long term	Need to measure by relationships over long term
What is it driven by?	Usually guilt driven	Task or Event driven	Relationship driven	Relationship and lifestyle Driven and Transformation
Where does the call to do this come from?	General call to experience a step or the next step into missions	General call to experience a step or the next step into missions	More of a specific call to mission	Specific call to change lifestyle or to live in a new culture to live a missional lifestyle
Entry Points	As individual groups or families are moved by interest or by the Spirit	Serve’s Up Enter Mission	Specific training for Local/international mission Comission training DR Reunions and local training	No specific way at present, mostly by individual or family call