Jake Meador, Author at Refcast

The Evangelistic Shift

By Jake Meador — 4 months ago

Once the issue of trans identities arose, an openness to traditional Christian accounts became more costly….The social costs for progressive non-Christians of simply expressing an openness to or curiosity about traditional forms of Christian belief became much higher.

When I first started writing online in the early 2010s, most of what you might term the evangelistic openness I saw in media culture was coming from the political or cultural center-left.
A columnist at the New York Times came to faith.
A religion writer from Vox did as well.
Additionally, there were editors at both Vox and the New Yorker who were part of PCA or ACNA congregations. A number of other prominent writers in elite media seemed open to faith.
I remember hearing one such figure, now at the Times with quite a large platform, interview all three of Rod Dreher, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Patrick Deneen within about a 12 month stretch in the late 2010s. Hearing some of his questions, particularly in his conversation with Dougherty, had me genuinely wondering if he was close to conversion.
This was also, of course, the tail end of Tim Keller’s ministry at Redeemer. Given Keller’s success as a church planter and ecosystem builder in New York and given New York’s significance culturally, much of this era may well be tied up in Keller’s presence and Redeemer’s ministry.
Yet if you look around today, something has shifted: To my eyes there is very little evangelistic openness in the center-left world. There are still plenty of Christians to be found, but virtually all of them that come to mind for me are not adult converts and came from Christian backgrounds.
But if you look at the right or the reactionary ends of the political horseshoe where right and left begin to converge, the picture is quite different: Jordan Peterson’s wife is now Catholic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a one-time new atheist who did events with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, is a Christian. So is Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw.
Meanwhile, figures like Tom Holland and Douglas Murray and Bari Weiss all seem, to varying degrees, interested in Christian faith in a way that goes beyond mere intellectual curiosity.
Moreover, as younger Americans politically polarize by gender, with men tending toward the right and women toward the left, those trends seem to also align with young men going to church in growing numbers even as young women continue to dechurch.
It would be a mistake to suggest this is happening because Christianity itself is “right wing.” In the first place, defining “right wing” is itself a fraught project—is it the “right wing” politics of Dwight Eisenhower or Mussolini? The politics of Reagan or George W. Bush or the politics of Orban or Meloni? Or should we range further afield—what about the “right wing” of D’Annunzio or Disraeli? “Right wing” conceals as much as it reveals in such conversations.
In the second place, one can easily think of any number of political positions one could plausibly assign to the right that do not align at all with historic Christianity. (Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism is the essential book to read on this.)
So what accounts for this shift and how should Christians respond?
The answer to the first question might be surprisingly simple: The shift dates back to the growing awareness, acceptance, and promotion of transgender sexual identities in mainstream American culture. This shift, dating to the mid 2010s and probably peaking in the early 2020s, did two things that fundamentally changed the evangelistic landscape for Christians in America. (I know some will argue that the real shift has to do with “wokeness” more than it does trans issues specifically. I don’t find this altogether persuasive both because I think one can disambiguate the different parts of the “woke” package and because I think issues of sexuality strike at the vitals of Christian belief and practice in uniquely complicated and challenging ways.)
The Mid 2010s Evangelistic Shift
First, as acceptance of transgender identities became a litmus test for the American left, the conflict between left wing political ideology and Christianity was redefined and intensified. A left wing media figure in 2015 might be able to signal friendliness to conservative post-liberals, for example, both as a sign of sincere desire to understand the appeal of Donald Trump and as an openness to alternative theories of American social collapse. Social breakdown was, after all, a long-standing concern of many on the American left dating back decades and certainly well-established by the early 2000s when works like Nickel and Dimed and Bowling Alone hit American bookstores.
But once the issue of trans identities arose, an openness to traditional Christian accounts became more costly: Christianity was no longer seen as a plausible conversation partner with left-wing political concerns around public justice. Instead, it became regarded as a threat to the lives of transgender individuals that made it impossible for trans people to publicly exist as their authentic selves. The social costs for progressive non-Christians of simply expressing an openness to or curiosity about traditional forms of Christian belief became much higher, in other words.
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A Tale of Three Pastors

By Jake Meador — 4 months ago

Pastor 1 has rightly been defrocked. Even apart from the relationship, I think it’s hard to square his other behaviors with the requirements for pastors given in Scripture. We need to become far more serious than we have been about corruption, starting with the actual real enforcement of all the Pauline and Petrine demands for pastoral qualification. My point is not to minimize the evils of corruption, then, but rather to note that even if it sometimes seems as if corruption is the norm, there still remain many faithful pastors.

I’m thinking a lot about three pastors this week.
Pastor 1 is in his early 70s and recently was removed from ministry due to a five-year long relationship with a woman in her 20s that was not sexual in nature, but was still a violation of the pastor’s wedding vows.
Prior to being defrocked he worked for a nonprofit that he ran and that paid him $150,000 annually with an additional $100,000 paid “by the organization or other related organizations,” according to tax filings while claiming he worked for them 40 hours a week. We can’t view his church’s financials, obviously, but one imagines the church paid him a wage and also expected that he worked 40 hours a week there—which raises the question of how a man in his 70s is logging 80 hour weeks.
It would also mean that the man was making, at minimum, $250,000 annually from ministry, if the $100,000 supplemental income on the tax form is from the church. Or it might also mean that he made $250,000 from the non-profit, with the church salary (and book royalties and speaking gigs) layered on top of that.
This, incidentally, is what Carl Trueman had in mind when he coined the term “big eva.” Trueman specifically had in view pastors who become internet brands, become largely divorced from the work of shepherding in local churches, and who become surrogate pastors for Christians who spend too much time online and too little in their local church. (This old piece from the Baylys, by the way, is helpful for learning a bit about how ministry finances often work in the evangelical world.)
Even before the inappropriate relationship was known, this first pastor had a reputation for being a rather expensive and “high-maintenance” speaker with “very, very unusual food requirements,” as one acquaintance of his put it on social media. He reportedly would demand to be taken to stores that sell thousand dollar pens on certain trips, and also had highly specific requirements regarding wardrobe, including what brands of suit he wears and even specific ties he would wear.
You know pastor 1’s name, which is why I’m not bothering to say it here. What’s worse, you probably know a number of other pastors that fit this profile. I certainly do. But if that’s all you know about American church life, you know something true, but you also know too little.
Pastor 2 is in his early to mid 60s. He recently decided to step down from his senior pastor role in a church of 250 after nearly 35 years in the church and around 30 years as the senior pastor, faithfully and quietly shepherding a congregation, preaching the Word, and administering the sacraments. In that time, he’s helped plant two churches and launch an RUF. Now one of the churches he helped plant is planting and there may be a further plant happening in the medium-term future.
During his career he has pastored his congregation through two building fires and a move after the first fire destroyed their building. He has dealt with many complicated shepherding cases in his own congregation and in the presbytery.
He has sent dozens of people to seminary over the years and is known and respected amongst staff at the seminary where he graduated and where he has sent many people as students.
He has also been instrumental in helping the presbytery become a far healthier place. He has sought to create an atmosphere of care and trust amongst the presbytery’s teaching elders and has been remarkably successful in that, insuring that the men called to ministry there all recognize one another as brothers, are all praying for each other, and trust the basic virtue, theological soundness, and good will of their fellow pastors. That sounds like it should be the norm, but in too many places it isn’t.
He has done all of this without any notable scandal in his household and while faithfully caring for his family.
He’s stepping down so that he’s able to care better for his in-laws and mother, all of whom are in their 80s or 90s and in poor health. But he’s still staying active in ministry, just in a less senior role.
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Reflections on the Evangelical Fracturing, Ten Years In

By Jake Meador — 1 year ago

During times of instability we naturally seek out allies to stand back to back with us as we feel attacked. Yet this ecumenism of the trenches can be quite dangerous. It causes us to abandon faithful brothers and sisters who we ought to persist in working with, as well as encouraging us to form quite dangerous and unstable coalitions with people who might align with us in some highly specific ways but are actually quite out of step with orthodoxy. As Gen X leaders failed or lost credibility and as older friendships broke down, these vital restraints on individual and movement behavior fell away. The thought leaders who need people leaders in their ear lost those relationships and vice versa. The outcome of all this is that our movements have become smaller, less effective, more prone to schism, and more angry (if right wing or progressive) or more anxious (if centrist). One of the tragedies of all this is that we now find ourselves in an enormously exciting time from an evangelistic point of view.

While reading an ARC of Mike Cosper’s forthcoming book, I was caught up in how Cosper described the church planting scene of the mid 2000s, particularly as it existed around the then still embryonic Acts 29 network.
There was a blending of innocence and confidence and hopefulness that Cosper captures well. I wasn’t part of it directly, but I remember listening to Mark Driscoll sermons and then Matt Chandler sermons at the time and picking up something of the atmosphere from afar. (I was born in 1987, left the fundamentalist church I grew up in in 2005, spent 18 months in an attractional megachurch more in the Willow Creek stream than Mars Hill, and then found my way to RUF and the PCA in 2007, where I have been ever since.) From about 2005 until the early 2010s it seemed as if Acts 29 might represent the defining movement in the next wave of evangelicalism: They had found a way of blending the best insights of the attractional movement of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren with the theological and missiological acumen of Tim Keller and John Piper.
Moreover, because of their particular grunge-inflected aesthetic they naturally avoided some of the worst excesses of the attractional movement, which was a tendency toward the superficial and happy clappy. Their strength here wasn’t necessarily a product of any special virtue—Gen X tends toward the brooding and melancholic, after all, and virtually all their leadership were poster children for Gen X. But the resultant synthesis of their many influences was compelling.
Moreover, as their three defining leaders of that era became established, you could see how the three fit together and could, together, chart a path toward long-term health and success: Mark Driscoll represented the kind of alpha figure who could draw a crowd, win a following, and define the direction of the network through sheer charisma and force of will.
Darrin Patrick, meanwhile, represented a more cerebral and patient voice who was in many ways ahead of his time in his analysis of cultural issues as well as being more balanced in his approach than many of today’s commentators.
Matt Chandler was the more personable balance to Driscoll. Driscoll would deliver the “bodies behind the bus” type speeches and Chandler could then come in behind to help patch up whatever relational issues were created by Driscoll’s harsh style that frequently shaded into straightforward bullying, especially as he became more and more detached from external authority. Again, this sort of arrangement within leadership is not without parallel in church history: Melanchthon was the moderating force on Luther. Oecolampadius was the moderating presence with Zwingli. Bucer was a moderating influence on Calvin. Friendships of unlike personalities who balance one another out are a common occurrence in church history.
In a happier timeline, Driscoll, Patrick, and Chandler would still have another 15-20 years of effective ministry ahead of them as a team: Driscoll is still only 53, Patrick would be 53, and Chandler is 49. For context, Tim Keller was 58 when he published The Reason for God and John Piper was 42 when Desiring God was published and 54 when he spoke at Passion in 2000 and gave his “Don’t Waste Your Life” sermon. So if you think Piper’s Passion sermon and Keller’s Reason for God are their most consequential or influential personal works, that would mean that each of the Acts 29 triumvirate would still be several years away from the ages Piper and Keller were for their most far-reaching, influential works—and that is all to say nothing of all the things both men did after those two signature works. Keller published 29 books after he wrote The Reason for God, many of which I actually like better than Reason. Piper wrote or contributed to nearly 60 volumes after his Passion sermon many of which, likewise, surpassed the Passion sermon or, in my opinion, Desiring God.
Of course, that isn’t the timeline we’ve gotten. Driscoll’s story took a dark turn toward ever greater autonomy and away from real accountability, Mars Hill collapsed, and the magic of those early years never returned. Patrick tragically took his own life after a lengthy and by all accounts genuine process of repair and reconciliation with staff and church members at the church he planted. Chandler has remained in ministry and the Village has continued to do much good work, including particularizing their many campuses into standalone congregations—the same trajectory of the former Redeemer and Bethlehem campuses. But the continued ministry of The Village has not been enough, on its own, to sustain the old Acts 29 momentum. Additionally, Chandler himself took a leave of absence in 2022 after engaging in an inappropriate online relationship with a woman from the church.
Meanwhile, Acts 29 itself has struggled with pastors in the network breaking off in a variety of different cultural and theological directions with some going more progressive while others have taken a reactionary conservative turn.
The story of Acts 29’s trajectory will feel familiar to many of us outside of the network as well. Indeed it may serve as a small-scale model for much of the evangelical fracturing that began around 2015 and has continued through to the present. So it is worth considering why all this took place.
Technology
One pastor friend who serves in Acts 29 observed to me that many of the early Acts 29 leaders began ministry in the early 2000s. Sermon podcasting was only just beginning and many Acts 29 guys were early adopters, as Cosper documented in The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. What this did is it allowed many early Acts 29 pastors to grow what today would be called a somewhat large digital platform and to do so at a relatively young age and very early in their pastoral ministry. That in itself is somewhat dangerous spiritually because, as others have observed (including Driscoll himself at one time), talent can become confused for maturity. So obviously talented men grew large platforms while still quite young and, often, they were not prepared for the spiritual weight of having such a sizable audience.
But there is one other factor to consider here: The mid 2000s was a very unusual time on the internet. Podcasting was established enough that you could grow, by the standards of the day, quite a large platform via sharing your sermons. And yet social media had not yet emerged as a tool for flattening hierarchies and bringing institutional leaders into more direct contact with their audiences. So the positive reenforcement one gets from possessing a large platform was there for these young pastors, who could generally have a decent idea of how many people their sermon podcasts were reaching. But the negative feedback and critique one can get from social media were not yet present.
So even by the standards of ministry in the digital era, a strong case can be made that no one labored in a more spiritually dangerous digital environment than Gen X pastors in the early 2000s. This might seem counter-intuitive given how destructive smartphones and social media have been and that neither of those things existed in the early 2000s and were not at all well established until the late 2000s. But if the danger in our current era is being malformed by negative attention, the danger of the former era was the easy optimism of digital tech with virtually no familiarity with its now very well known dangers. It was an era marked by a false hope that recognized the reach of digital media but did not perceive the spiritual dangers of it and was, technologically speaking, largely insulated from the negative feedback mechanisms that became unavoidable in later eras.
What this adds up to is a technological context that made it difficult to be obscure and that tended to inculcate pride and militate against humility. Certainly, one could simply not podcast one’s sermons or one could charge for them, as Keller did, which had the effect of minimizing his reach. But the entire tech optimist ethos of Acts 29 tended to militate against that sort of tech skeptic approach, I think. And so the network that had a chance to be the future of American evangelicalism writ large saw its leaders and young pastors formed in a deeply corrosive environment whose dangers were for the most part invisible and, often, were only discovered much later.
Leadership Failure
Perhaps the defining story of the past five years—and likely to be an ongoing story for the next five to ten years—has been the often disastrous leadership transitions in many evangelical organizations as Baby Boomers have retired and their Gen X successors have failed to hold the institution or movement together. Amongst the many reasons these failed transitions have been a problem is that effective movement leaders serve as a restraint within their institution. When the restraint fails, the movement fragments. You might say that effective leadership creates an environment in which the impact of Charles Taylor’s nova effect is somewhat muted. (The nova effect refers to the nova-like explosion of new identities and forms of expression that arise under modernity.)
To take two examples from outside Acts 29, Keller did this in the PCA by helping limit some of the battles that the missional wing of the denomination would sometimes try to fight. On at least one occasion he intervened to get a presbytery to withdraw an overture to GA that would have created enormous (and quite unnecessary) controversy and dissent within the church. Piper played a similar role in his circles: Piper was able to hold together a cultural critique that could say hard and necessary things about racial injustice while also maintaining a firm commitment to necessary right-coded political issues. This had the effect of restraining his institutions as a whole, keeping them back from both the hard left and hard right. His annual practice of preaching on racial injustice one week and then taking up abortion the following week is indicative of this synthesis. But in the aftermath of Piper’s retirement, the dam broke, as it were: The leaders attracted to the social justice aspects of Piper’s ministry flowed in one direction while those drawn to his more right-coded positions became similarly less restrained.
As Mars Hill collapsed and Driscoll fled ecclesial oversight and discipline, the leadership that had framed, guided, and directed the network began to fail. And as with any dam that breaks, the resulting flood can run in many different directions and behave unpredictably.
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Political Religion

By Jake Meador — 2 years ago

Critics of “Christian nationalism” speak as though there were something wrong with Christianity’s shaping public life. Bonhoeffer suggests, by contrast, that the real problem is when Christian faith is shaped by politics. What if the word of God were let loose in America, not merely in service of our national norms, but in order to call our nation to a more faithful Christian discipleship?

There is no theology here,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend shortly after arriving in America in 1930. He was referring to Union Theological Seminary, home to some of the day’s most respected liberal theologians, including Reinhold Niebuhr. But he didn’t just mean the seminary. Later he would write:
In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.
For Bonhoeffer, the American churches in the Union Theological Seminary orbit seemed no longer dedicated to the preaching of the gospel. This kind of Christianity had become a “social entity” with more worldly purposes. “In the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation.”
As Joel Looper notes in this excellent book, Bonhoeffer’s first sojourn in America came a hundred years after another European visitor traveled to this experimental nation and returned to old Europe to write about it. Alexis de Tocqueville’s account has several points in common with Bonhoeffer’s. Looper quotes one passage that anticipates Bonhoeffer’s more withering attacks a century later:
A countless number of sects in the United States all have differing forms of worship they offer to the Creator but they all agree about the duties that men owe to each other. Each sect adores God in its own particular way but all sects preach the same morality in the name of God. If it matters a lot to the individual that his religion is true, that is not the case for society as a whole. Society has nothing to fear or hope for from the afterlife; what matters is not so much that all citizens profess the true religion but that they profess one religion.
In Bonhoeffer’s view, the morality of the American church had become conformity to the politics of American democracy. And so the preaching of God’s word was, at best, relativized to suit the needs of that order. More often, the gospel was simply neglected and ignored. As an outsider, Bonhoeffer could see that this species of Protestantism took its cues from the social order rather than the word of God: It was a Protestantism that could exist only within the peculiar social order of American public life. The core problem of American Christianity, Bonhoeffer thought, was that the word of God had been made subservient to worldly authorities. As Looper puts it, “Each individual, it seemed, determined the will of God by her own reading of the scriptures by the Spirit, by the ‘inner light,’ or by an internal sense of what was morally right.” Bonhoeffer’s own starting point was Reformation Christology. But for him, the American church exhibited “Protestantism without Reformation.”
Bonhoeffer’s dismay at American Christianity has something in common with critiques from scholars such as John Milbank, William Cavanaugh, and Jeffrey Stout. Looper shows that Bonhoeffer can usefully complicate this debate. For Milbank and Cavanaugh, secularism is almost a purely extractive, negative social force, replacing a thick web of interconnected common life with atomized individuals and all-powerful nation-states.
But, Stout counters, how should society function when its members are pluralized not only religiously, but also along cultural and economic lines? Explicit appeals to Christian thought to buttress one particular vision of the good might still be worth hearing out. Yet such appeals are unlikely to be conducive to a healthy body politic when many members of that body explicitly reject such reasoning. For Stout, secularism isn’t about secularist individuals, but about a secularized public square in which radically different communities can find ways of coexisting.
Yet for Bonhoeffer, as Looper puts it, “American pluralism was not first and foremost a product of capitalism and an increasingly interconnected world.” Rather, pluralism had been forged by English dissenters who gave authority to their own personal reading of Scripture. In more extreme forms, this personal reading of Scripture gave way to an “inner light,” by which individuals could discern the truth by means of their own internal disposition or witness.
Stout views pluralism as intractable due to economic and social transformation. He bases his argument for secularism on the unalterable fact of pluralism. But for Bonhoeffer, secularism grew out of a church that had chosen to define itself politically and subjectively rather than according to Scripture. When privatized Christian experience and “the inner light” become normative, the word of God wanes in the church, and the politics of the church become the politics of the world.
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