Written by J. Chase Davis and Matt Patrick |
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
Today if you visit an Acts 29 church, you can’t be sure what you will experience. You might experience the promotion of trans ideology, a woman preaching in the pulpit during worship services, the teaching of critical race theory…that America was founded on lies and racism which has set up a system of white dominance. Or, you may experience a faithful pastor trying to do the best he can with little support or oversight from his primary church affiliation. 

For this is what it means to be a king: to be the first in every desperate attack, and last in every desperate retreat, and when there is hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.“The Horse and His Boy,” C. S. Lewis, 240.
Leading a Christian organization for the past few years has been difficult. The church is in desperate need of courageous men to lead in such times of tribulation. Sadly, this has not been the posture of many evangelical leaders.
The American evangelical landscape has lately experienced the pains of the Big Sort. Christians are self-sorting according to various religious and political convictions that reflect broader national trends. Regardless of the reasons for such a sorting, whether it be the idolization of politics as some might claim, or simply the natural result of broader cultural trends, the evangelical Big Sort is in full swing.
An example of these trends is the Acts 29 Network, a network of approximately 700 churches, which projects a niche expertise in church planting. Founded in 1999 by David Nichols, of Spanish River (Presbyterian) Church alongside Mark Driscoll, who eventually became the primary leader, Acts 29 discovered its market position in the midst of the nascent and now fractured Young, Restless, and Reformed (YRR) movement.
Acts 29 was always committed to gospel-centered ministry, complementarian theology, missional innovation, Spirit-led pneumatology, and Calvinist soteriology. However, the scandal-plagued organization has failed to meet the needs of the hour with grace and truth. Churning through leaders and tolerating trans ideology in pulpits, this once strong church network has outkicked its coverage, losing the moral clarity our times of disorder and particular depravity demand and the courageous conviction it once possessed. Constant board turnover, network realignment, and bloated bureaucracy speak to an organization building the plane as it flies rather than instilling confidence and stability in its member churches.
Our church joined Acts 29 in 2011. At the time we were already on the ground in Boulder holding worship services for our church plant.
For young church planters, joining Acts 29 was attractive because of the access to influential voices within the YRR movement such as Darrin Patrick, Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler, Sam Storms, Steve Timmis, and Ray Ortlund. The benefit of joining Acts 29 wasn’t monetary as they did not give money to church planters at the time. The benefit was found in the trusted relationships based on theological alignment and the credibility the brand provided. It was like joining a trade organization or guild so that you could put the logo of the network alongside your brand ensuring credibility and gain access to people and conferences which could help you plant a church. Not to mention, the network was the “it girl” of church planting. Mark Driscoll was being discussed in the New York Times, Darrin Patrick was going on Fox and Friends. These guys seemed to have two things that don’t normally go together, a commitment to biblical fidelity and an attractiveness to a wide audience. What church planter wouldn’t want to join their network?
Over time the focus of the network shifted. Rather than lauding the glorification of God in all things through a rich commitment to the historic Christian faith and church planting, Acts 29 began to talk less about theological convictions and more about cultural diversity. As busy church planters, much of this didn’t catch our eye. We were glad to be part of the club and assumed the best of the talented leaders directing the network.
That changed in 2020. There were four events which led to a slow erosion of trust.
First, the sudden firing of Steve Timmis under the claim of “abusive leadership” based on a hit piece from Christianity Today seemed suspect. Whether there were biblically justifiable reasons to dismiss Timmis is unknown, since to this day, the network has not shared any investigation which would justify arriving at such a conclusion. When one network leader was asked what abusive leadership is, his reply was simply “Anytime a leader misuses power.”
Second, COVID created a confusing and at times contentious environment amongst churches in the network. Some stayed closed and others stayed open. Acts 29 provided pragmatic opinions on the best practices for churches but offered little theological instruction surrounding the importance of churches remaining open.
Third, our friend Darrin Patrick took his own life. Darrin was a recent friend to our church and a former board member of Acts 29. His own life unraveled as he had a moral failing and falling out at his own church plant. Darrin’s experience was emblematic of broader problems in evangelicalism in dealing with once-famous pastors who were voted off the island.
Fourth and most significantly, with the death of George Floyd, churches in the network became deeply divided and did not receive clear leadership from Acts 29 central staff and regional directors regarding biblically sound approaches to this matter. Acts 29 executive chairman, and former president, Matt Chandler, blamed the church for making BLM necessary. Vice president of church planting, Tyler Jones, proclaimed that those who have been silent regarding racism are walking in unrepentant sin. Acts 29 itself parroted worldly talking points about systemic racism. On a network call for pastors, the Director of Pastoral Care stated that “America has designed a system where white folk always win…This system sprung up from the church…My prayer is that God would use our generation of pastors…to dismantle it with the gospel truth.” One former board member, and current Acts 29 pastor, Leonce Crump, referred to the revolutionary war as an insurrection. He went on to say, “God is always standing on the side of the disenfranchised, marginalized and the oppressed” all while claiming to be neither left nor right. Furthermore, claiming that if we don’t participate in BLM, we will dishonor the heart of God and that we must be anti-racist. In an interview with Acts 29 pastor Guy Mason, pastor Crump said “Blood, violence, and hypocrisy are the soul of this nation.”
All of this led us to begin asking earnest questions to restore trust and build unity within the network and our own church. We have had over a dozen phone calls over the last three years with vice presidents, former board members, and other leaders in the network to seek clarity on doctrinal and financial matters. As part of their membership in the network, churches agree to give 2% of their annual budget to the network to further their mission of planting churches (think of them as member dues). If our church was going to support church planting in this way, we wanted to ensure that the churches that were being planted were not worldly.
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Contextualization and winsomeness are about presenting the gospel and biblical message in the language and forms that are intelligible and compelling to people in our cultural moment. But successful and faithful presentations do not mean that arguments understood will be accepted. Sometimes they will be rejected, not out of intellectual ignorance or obstinance, but reasoned disagreement. It is a disservice to exvangelicals like McCammon to conclude that if we simply cleaned up our presentation and behavior that they would be persuaded of the gospel. In our cultural moment the simple truth is that many evangelical doctrines, no matter how they are shared, will be barriers to conversion to outsiders and sources of embarrassment for some of our kids.

I grew up in a subculture that was evangelical and fundamentalist. Many of my childhood friends have deconstructed, dechurched, and deconverted. So it was with great interest that I read Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangalicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. McCammon, now a correspondent for NPR, grew up evangelical, with all the right bona fides. Exvangelicals is one-part reporting on why some evangelicals dechurch, one-part memoir of McCammon’s own process of leaving evangelicalism.
I come from the same world as McCammon, although her background had a Charismatic inflection absent from my own, and I even knew some of the people she interviewed. Her experience of and insight into evangelicalism from the late 80s to the early 2000s rang true. I could quibble with some of her descriptions and emphases (she takes some extreme examples from her own experience and makes them normative for all evangelicalism; does she have a non-patronizing explanation for the tens of millions of kids who grew up like her and stayed evangelical?), but on the whole I found her work valuable in providing deeper insight into the experience of my friends. Every generation of evangelicals has a group that moves on; rather than dismiss the exvangelical narrative as the same tedious story, those of us who stayed behind should listen with a sympathetic ear. As an evangelical pastor, McCammon’s work gave me better tools to compassionately understand my exvangelical friends and how to think about the posture and expectations of gospel communication.
Salvation Under Duress
“Yeah, I grew up with God. He’s a douchebag, alright? Did he tell you that you were broken and that you need him? Yeah, that’s his move.”
This line from exvangelical, Millennial comedian Taylor Tomlinson’s (crude) stand-up routine encapsulates the flavor of McCammon’s experience with the evangelical church. While full of sincere, if misguided believers, the church expressed a manipulative understanding of God that left people traumatized. And it is explicitly trauma, not ideology or exegetical differences, that forms the matrix of McCammon’s ex-evangelical account.
She opens by recounting an Easter reenactment of the crucifixion she attended as a child. She observes that the evangelical story of the crucifixion “was meant to illustrate a deeper reality: that lurking beneath the veneer of our comfortable, suburban, midwestern American lives was a threat so severe that God had to send his only son to brutally suffer and die to save us from it. The blood might be fake, but the danger was not. That threat informed every aspect of my life.” Her portrayal of evangelicalism is a life policed by fear: fear of hell, fear of the world, fear of transgressing boundaries.  
Her experience, like so many other Millennial evangelicals, is one where the church blended the law and gospel, the indicative and imperative of the Christian life. Ethics did not flow out of gratitude to Christ in communion with him, but the motivation for obedience and good works was fear. Making our calling and election sure was done through conformist, good behavior, not faith in the gloriously unmerited grace of Jesus. Instead, fear of going to hell, of losing our purity, of being hoodwinked by a crafty world, of God’s anger, was normative.
The misery of this is not insignificant; religious trauma occupies a whole chapter of the book. Perfect love is supposed to drive out fear, but for many exvangelicals the “fear of falling out of favor with God” terrified them, lest a forgotten sin keep them from salvation. McCammon describes still waking up in the middle of night in a panic about God’s (damning?) purpose for her.
Karl Barth once attended a Billy Graham rally in Switzerland, and described Graham’s preaching as
the gospel at gun-point…He preached the law, not a message to make one happy. He wanted to terrify people. Threats–they always make an impression. People would much rather be terrified than be pleased. The more one heats up hell for them, the more they come running.”
Fair or not to Graham, this description of “gospel” preaching summarizes what was heard by McCammon and millions of other exvangelicals: a gospel at the end point of a hellish pitch fork held by Jesus, as salvation is received under duress.
This leads to an evangelical culture that might preach love, but really is more about boundary-policing, especially with purity culture. This posture of fear leads to an overemphasis on how the world outside the church’s doors is terrible. I often have conversations with high school students confused since their secular, non-Christian friends are genuinely nice and well-adjusted people. “We were told how ‘the world’ is an evil place, and you have to stay out of it…I found the opposite to be true. I found that ‘the world’ was a much more loving place, and much more comfortable to be part of than a strict religious bubble.” McCammon quotes her friend Daniel here, and this stands as a representative perspective of the exvangelicals. When the church is supposed to be the good guys and shouldn’t cross the line into the terrible world, but the “terrible” world is pleasant and much nicer than the church, it seems like the church was wrong about all kinds of things, including God and the gospel.
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The redemption theory holds that humor’s essence is found in humanity’s amused perception of ambiguity and incongruence, but also in God’s provision of humor as something that helps us deal with disorder, ambiguity, and pain that exist in a fallen world.

How many philosophers does it take to explain a joke? Quite a few, as it turns out. And not only philosophers. Psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have exerted themselves to explain exactly what makes people laugh. Although everybody understands intuitively what humor is, the concept of humor is still elusive, being difficult to define in a way that encompasses all of its facets.
Humor may evoke a sly grin or it may detonate explosive laughter. It might be conveyed through words or images or actions. We find it in in a vast array of situations, including photos, interpersonal encounters, articles, and skits. It takes on a wide range of forms, from knock-knock jokes to slapstick physical comedy to puns to double entendre.
There is humor in which the joker deprecates himself or herself, such as Oscar Levant’s quip, “Under this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character” or British politician Boris Johnson’s statement after having been demoted in Parliament: “My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”
Conversely, there is humor that deprecates other persons or social groupings. Consider Dorothy Parker’s wit directed against one of her contemporaries: “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” Or, Roger Kimball’s wit directed against America’s scholarly class who consider themselves independent minds but are “huddled together in bovine complacency, mooing ankle-deep in its own effluvia, safe within its gated enclosure.”
In thus recognizing the considerable diversity on offer when it comes to humor, many intellectuals and comedians have drawn conclusions about the essence of humor. With that in mind, this post will explore seven of those theories, offering examples that confirm the theory and examples that call that theory in question. Finally, it will offer an alternative—theological—explanation of the essence of humor.
Here are seven of the most prominent theories about humor:
1. The Superiority Theory
Some theorists, including philosophers Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Roger Scruton, believe the essence of humor is its ability to bring laughter to the masses but shame for whoever is the butt of the joke. Thus, according to this theory humor rides on its ability to make a portion of the audience feel superior to another person or group of people. For example: “If you were any dumber, you’d have to be watered twice a week.”
However, this theory doesn’t quite work because, just as we are able to win competitions without necessarily gaining a feeling of superiority, we are able to tell and hear jokes without necessarily feeling superior to the person who is the butt of the jokes. For example: “Police were called to a daycare, where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.”
2. The Incongruity-Resolution Theory
Some theorists, including philosophers Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Soren Kierkegaard, believed that the essence of humor is found in pointing out incongruities. Other philosophers have revised the theory to say that the essence of humor is the resolution of an incongruity. For example: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.” Or, Groucho Marx’s quip: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
Yet, not all reinterpreted incongruities are humorous; conversely there are good examples of humor that doesn’t involve the resolution of an incongruity. For example: “A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his friend looked astonished, the man apologized: “I’m so sorry. I’m quite embarrassed. I thought it was spinach.’”
3. The Benign Violation Theory
Some recent theorists, such as Thomas Veatch, argue that the essence of humor is the non-threatening violation of some type of norm—moral law, social codes, linguistic norms, or similar. For example: As Demitri Martin once quipped: “I’m sorry’ and ‘I apologize’ mean the same thing. Unless you’re at a funeral.”