Proud to be an Okie

Blog post from Kingsview & CoActually no, I’m not from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where “We don’t smoke marijuana” and “where even squares can have a ball,” as country singer Merle Haggard celebrated. Still I’m almost proud to be from there as I ponder the history of the version Merle first sang, what he came to make of it, and what became of it over the years since he first wrote the lyrics (with Roy Edward Burris) during the Vietnam War.

It’s complicated. Just before the pandemic hit and he mostly stopped live touring, for the first time I heard Kris Kristofferson, surely closer to the hippie Merle mocks in the song than to a square, in live concert. (There is a 1975 version on YouTube of Kris singing “Okie” with Cher and Rita Coolidge that seems to suggest some ironic awareness; the younger Kris throws around his mop of wild hair as he intones the lyrics about not letting “hair grow long and shaggy.”) That pre-pandemic night Kris, himself oddly enough a former soldier, sang  of the hippie-like values and addictions Merle chastised accompanied by “The Strangers,” the very band Merle founded and toured with until his 2016 death.

Memories of that night came flooding back when CBS released a special featuring Willie Nelson’s 2023 ninetieth-birthday concert. Woven through it are several appearances by a frail Kristofferson, supported tenderly by such singers as Roseanne Cash and Nora Jones. These made me grateful I’d experienced Kris live when I did and reminded me again of the “Okie” complexities.

Because they also live in me, riven by paradoxes in my roots and life trajectories, the contradictions inherent in hearing Kris sing Merle’s famous “Okie from Muscogee” did fill me with a certain rapture. The contradictions throb in me, for example,  as I remain committed to pacifism yet will never forget how moved I was by the stories of U.S. veterans I met while dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

By the end of his life it seemed clear Merle, once a prisoner pardoned for burglaries by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, was singing the song within layers of complexity I could never claim fully to plumb yet which intrigued. The Okie (which he only kind of became after his family migrated from California during the Great Depression) who sounded like he was bashing anyone who smoked marijuana had battled addictions himself.

Anyone who hasn’t heard Merle sing “Amazing Grace” at St. Quentin, where he had been imprisoned, hasn’t fully experienced grace. This version is ragged, rough, and raw–throbbing with awareness of how “wretches” (an “Amazing Grace” lyric I rejected when younger, before I grew old enough to recognize myself in it) are saved.

So this is who sings about being from Muscogee. And in his singing so many layers of meaning, he reminds what richness imperfect people can offer if true to their truths rather than addicted to offering fake truths.

I and we needn’t agree with Merle on every detail to grasp that here is a real human being, someone who has traveled through vicissitudes with integrity, acknowledging and even magnifying them when called for. Here is no flattening of meaning but ever deeper exploration of it.

And so as Merle ages his songs become ever richer, their subtexts ever more resistant to simple interpretations, such that it made sense at Kris’s concert for his audience to break into applause as  “Okie from Muscogee” launched.

We were sitting, that night, in a country in which some loved “only squares can have a ball” and others loved the possibility that Merle’s song is at least partly the satire Kris may think it to be. Yet the song transcends the divisions.

The hatreds and animosities that spawned it in the 1960s as war raged have perhaps not so much healed as mutated and maybe even intensified. Interpretations and responses to “Okie” have mutated as well. Some see it as one more inspiration for continuing the cultural battles. But as I ponder Kris singing Merle’s song as his own life fades and with the band Merle’s death left behind, I find myself living at least briefly in a world in which only squares can have a ball yet with the hippies sing toward that grace still able to amaze.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

The God of Joshua and Jesus, by Ted Grimsrud

Author photoOne of the more challenging passages in the Bible is the story told in the book of Joshua. God’s chosen people enter the “promised land,” meet with opposition from the nations living there, and proceed—with God’s direction and often miraculous support—to kill or drive out the previous inhabitants. The book ends with a celebration that now the Hebrew people are in the Land, poised to live happily ever after.

Probably the most difficult aspect of the story to stomach is the explicit command that comes several times from God to the Hebrews to kill every man, woman, and child as part of the conquest. This element of the story is horrifying, even more so in light of the afterlife of the story where it has been used in later times to justify what are said to be parallel conquests—such as the conquest of Native Americans and native southern Africans. I wonder as a Christian pacifist what to do with this story. But, really, even for Christians who are not pacifists, how could any moral person want to confess belief in such a genocidal God—or accept as scripture a book that includes such a story?

Exhortation not history

I want to see if we can find meaning in the story that will help us put it in perspective and protect us from uses that find in the story support for our violence. More than defending Joshua per se, I want to defend the larger biblical story of which it is a part—an essential story for faith-based peacemakers. So, the first step for me is to recognize the type of literature, in a general sense, that Joshua is. I will call it “exhortation,” not “history.” It was an account likely written many years later than the events that inspired it may have happened. It was shaped in order to offer exhortation to its readers and hearers to seek faithfully to embody the teaching of Torah. I do not think it was meant to tell the people precisely what happened in the Joshua years.

I would characterize the Joshua story, then, as a kind of parable, a story (mostly if not totally fictional) that makes a point. To see the Joshua story as kind of a parable does not take away the troubling elements of the story—however, I think such a view changes what is at stake for we who believe in the Bible. What is at stake for us, most of all, is to try to discern the lesson the story is meant to make—not to feel bound to believe that the details are factual. Thus, for one thing, believing the Joshua story conveys important truths does not require us to accept its portrayal of God (or of the vicious character of the “conquest” of the promised land) as normative for us.

In what follows, I will not work at discerning what it is that we should make of the still present problem of why the Hebrews would have told a story with such problematic details about their tradition and their God. Such reflections are important, but they are beyond what I am able to articulate right now. Rather, I want to focus on what I understand to be the ethical, political, and theological concerns of the parable. Especially, I want to focus on the place of the Joshua story in the larger story the Bible presents us with. How does the Joshua story contribute to the Big Story that culminates in the life and teaching of the later “Joshua” (that is, Jesus)?

A political agenda

My Old Testament professor Millard Lind, in a class I took from him on based on his book, Yahweh is a Warrior: The Theology of Warfare in Ancient Israel, gave a useful framework for me to think about Joshua and other stories of divinely initiated violence. Lind focused on the understanding of politics in the Old Testament. He suggested that what was most interesting and revolutionary in ancient Israel was its attempt to create an alternative to the coercive, hierarchical politics of the empires and nations of the world, an alternative to what he called “power politics.”

We may think about the main elements of the Old Testament through this alternative politics lens: Creation and fall, the exodus and Torah (including the Ten Commandments, Torah’s spirit of empowerment, the concern for vulnerable people in the community, the sense of being over against Egypt, and the Sabbath regulations [day of rest, forgiveness of debts, anti-centralization and social stratification, and the jubilee provisions concerning land ownership]). Then we may think of Joshua, the Judges, the turn toward kingship, the prophets’ critique, and the impact of exile. Finally, we may turn to the New Testament picture of Jesus in the gospels and the apostolic witness in Paul and Revelation. All of these materials may be helpfully understood as presenting an alternative political orientation to the power politics of the nations.

Let’s focus on the Joshua story—the so-called “Conquest.” On the one hand, in this story we may see an emphasis on what Lind called “theo-politics” over against state-politics or power-politics. “Theo-politics” is a useful term for categorizing the alternative politics of the Bible. In the Joshua story, following on the heels of the exodus and Torah-revelation in the wilderness, we see a de-centering of human power structures. We also see that sustaining the Hebrews’ status in the land will be based on their faithfulness (or not) to Torah. So, in this story we have a reiteration of the countercultural politics introduced with the exodus.

On the other hand, in the Joshua story we also come face to face with overwhelming violence and its celebration. The Hebrews in the story may have been marginalized and recently liberated slaves and the “Canaanites” in the story may have mainly been kings and oppressors (see Norman Gottwald’s account in his famous book, The Tribes of Yahweh). Yet the story that was written and then retold became a story that kings and oppressors could and did use to justify their conquests during the era of Christendom—an utterly devastating story.

Reading Joshua as part of the bigger story

How do we understand the Joshua account to fit with the bigger biblical narrative? We may think in terms of something like what Walter Brueggemann has called the Bible’s “primal narrative”—the core story of God’s liberating acts that is repeatedly recounted throughout the Bible. We may read the primal narrative with what we could call a “theo-politics” lens. We start with God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah when they are first called to something new—their descendants will “bless all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3). This promise may be seen as the core element of the biblical story (I develop this point in my book, God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes).

What follows in the story is the path, at times quite tortured, that God’s people take in trying to carry out the vocation implied in that promise. In the Christian Bible, this path leads ultimately to the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22 where the nations are healed by the leaves from the tree of life.

Abraham and Sarah’s immediate descendants face various adventures that culminate, by the end of Genesis, with them in Egypt. The settling in Egypt turns ominous in the book of Exodus. The Hebrews are enslaved. They have multiplied far beyond Abraham’s clan and have little sense of identity. They cry out, God hears, Moses arises, and they are delivered (without any generals or a king!). After their deliverance, God gives the people Torah as a gift to guide their common life as a counterculture in contrast with the ways of empire. Torah details a just and peaceable society with decentralized power and a sense of the value of each person (which involves a special focus on protecting the well-being of marginalized people in the community).

We are given the sense that to live out Torah, the people need a particular place where human flourishing may be embodied and practiced in the flesh in order to lead to the promised blessing. However, we are also given the sense that the only way to imagine such an embodiment of Torah would be in a territoried community, a geographical region with boundaries and sovereignty as a people. However, also, from the start we get the sense that this existence in a territoried community is contingent upon faithfully embodying Torah—the landedness is meant to serve the vocation, not to be an end in itself.

As it turns out, to be established in a particular land will require violence. People will be displaced, and the community will need coercive force to maintain its borders. There seems no way to have landedness (at least to the degree it requires sovereignty and boundaries) without also having violence. This seems the case even if from the story of the exodus it is clear that this necessary violence is not meant to be the monopoly of a centralized human power structure. Instead, at the beginning the necessary violence comes in the form of God’s direct intervention.

So, when Joshua leads the Hebrews into the promised land, the land of Canaan, inevitable violence takes place—on a large scale, as the story is told. The story makes it clear that this violence is God’s. At most, the human role is secondary. The on-going human leadership in the community is not based on gathered military might but on faithfulness to God’s commands.

The growing problem with territorial sovereignty

In Joshua as the people enter the land, in Judges as the people settle and establish their on-going community, and in the first part of 1 Samuel, the violence to maintain territorial sovereignty remains ad hoc and does not lead to permanent structures of power: no standing army, no collection of generals, no human king. However, the tension and sense of insecurity without such structures prove to be intolerable for Israel’s elders. These elders (and note in 1 Samuel 8 that the initial call for a king is not a popular demand from “the people” but a demand from the elite, the “elders”) make a decisive move to restructure Israel’s politics to “be like the nations.” According to the story, the main representative of God among the people, Samuel, argues vehemently against this restructuring, but he is ultimately told to accept it by God.

There is, earlier in the story, a brief account of how human kingship might work in harmony with Torah—Deuteronomy 17:14-20. This kind of king would be subordinate to Torah and would refuse to centralize military power and wealth in his and his main supporters’ hands.

As the story continues, though, it becomes clear early on that neither Samuel’s warnings nor the strictures from Deuteronomy 17 would be heeded. Kingship in Israel and Judah does indeed lead to centralized power, wealth accumulation in the hands of the few, disenfranchisement for the many, and a militarized society. The prophets make it clear that the on-going departure from Torah would have terrible consequences. And when their warnings are borne out, their words were remembered and provided a theological rationale for continued faith.

The disasters that befell Judah (destruction of kingdom and temple) did not mean God’s failure but vindicated God’s warnings. Because the long-forgotten books of the law were found during Josiah’s ill-fated kingship, the people had resources to sustain their sense of identity and the sense of the promise given to Abraham and Sarah. As a consequence of the failures and, at the same time, due to the sustenance of the core vision, the community was able to respond to the disasters with creativity and resilience. As it turned out, the loss of territory opens the possibility to revisit the initial tension between a community established with decentralized power dynamics and the need for territorial sovereignty. This time, the community was able move toward the decentralized power side of the tension instead of the territorial sovereignty side.

Beginning with Jeremiah 29 there is an embrace (or at least an explicit acknowledgement) of a vision to carry on the promise where scattered faith communities would “seek the peace of the city where they found themselves” rather than to hark back to a vision of a territorial kingdom as the necessary center for peoplehood sustenance and the vocation to bless the families of the earth. Though the story line that follows continues to be centered in the “holy land” with its rebuilt temple, it evinces little hope for re-establishing a territorial kingdom as the condition for the sustenance of the peoplehood. Though little noted in the biblical texts, the Judaism of this time continued to spread and solidified its existence as a scattered peoplehood outside of the “promised land.”

The politics of the second Joshua

When we get to the story of Jesus, we are introduced to a political vision that takes non-territoriality for granted. Jesus shares with his namesake, Joshua, a message that God saves (the meaning of the name). He brings a message about the kingdom of God and is ultimately seen to be a royal, messianic figure. But his message repudiates the coercion and centralization of power politics that a territorial kingdom requires. In that sense, he becomes a kind of anti-Joshua.

Jesus’s community embodied a politics of servanthood not domination, free forgiveness not the centralized control of access to God, and non-possessiveness not accumulated wealth. He set his notion of God’s rule over against the Pharisaic purity project, the centralized Temple, and brutal Roman hegemony. Rather than the eradication of the impure Other that we see in Joshua, with Jesus, we see him healing the impure. Rather than the sense that God intervenes violently on behalf of the promise that we see in Joshua, with Jesus we learn that God’s intervention on behalf of the promise is decidedly and necessarily nonviolent. Victory through self-giving love replaces victory through violent conquest. With Jesus, the promise does not need a state with justifiable violence that requires defending boundaries. In fact, what we learn from the second Joshua is that such a state is most likely to be hostile toward God—and in fact such a state (Rome) does execute God’s true human emissary. We must note, too, that Jesus seems to believe that this vision was present in his tradition from the start: “I came to fulfill Torah, not abolish it.”

The biblical story concludes in Revelation with New Jerusalem, established not through the sword but through the self-giving witness of the Lamb and his followers. Babylon is overthrown by this witness, and the result is the healing of the nations, even the healing of kings of the earth. Politics are utterly transformed.

The role of the Joshua story

The Joshua story is crucial. It shows that territorial sovereignty is not possible without violence. As we read the trajectory of the biblical story, we get the sense that what Joshua sets up is a kind of experiment. Will it be possible to embody Torah in concrete life through controlling a particular territory that might be administered in just and peaceable ways? Doing so could indeed serve as a means to bless all the earth’s families. That Israel could envision a blessing through territoriality is seen in the vision recorded twice, in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4: People from all the earth come to Israel to beat their swords into plowshares and learn the ways of peace.

As the story proceeds, though, we see that the very means to establish Israel in the land carried with them the seeds of failure. Indeed, the land could not be secured without violence—and once the land is secured, the dynamics of violence do not disappear. The initial tension between a decentralized theo-politics on the one hand and territorial sovereignty on the other hand came to be resolved on the side of territoriality. That is, Israel could not be sustained apart from the centralized authority of kingship and its attendant power politics.

However, as Deuteronomy 17 and 1 Samuel 8 warn, such a politics of domination cannot help but undermine Torah. Such a politics cannot help but be corrupt and violate the very conditions of existence in the promised land—as the story tells us. In the end, after the Babylonian conquest, Israel again is presented with the tension between territoriality and theo-politics. This time, in tentative ways, the tension is resolved more on the side of theo-politics. Certainly, the strand of the biblical tradition that culminates in the ministry of Jesus clearly resolves the tension in this way.

When we reread Joshua in the light of these later developments, we will recognize that the violence there is stylized and exaggerated. In exaggerating that violence, Joshua helps show the inevitability of power politics being a dead end and the impossibility of the promise being channeled through the state. Joshua itself points toward countercultural politics by helping to clear away the illusion that theo-politics ultimately could find expression in a territorial kingdom.

“Biblical politics”

The story the Bible tells, then, becomes a story pointing toward a kind of countercultural politics—decentering the state (rejecting empire and the coercive maintenance of geographical boundaries) and advocating organizing for shalom apart from the state through decentralized communities of faith that are open to all comers.

“Biblical politics” is revolutionary in its own way. But it does not underwrite a focus on directly overthrowing the state and doing without any human authority—though even more certainly the Bible strongly repudiates the kind of obeisance toward the state all too characteristic of post-Constantine Christianity. The state, it seems, can be seen most of all in the biblical story as simply existing, for better and for worse. It should not set the agenda in either a positive or negative way for peace people. Theo-politics is about peace work is all its forms, generally independent of territorial kingdoms or modern nation-states. There can be some common ground; more often there will be tension and even conflict between peace people and the nations.

The main point, though, is to work for human flourishing in local communities and global connections of resistance wherever they may be enhanced. Perhaps this will lead to a whole new global order (we may hope; the current order is doomed). More importantly, is the much more modest affirmation of such work as the only way to embrace life in healthy and sustainable ways—or at least it’s the best we can hope to do.

—Ted Grimsrud, Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Senior Professor of Peace Theology at Eastern Mennonite University and was a pastor for ten years. He has written numerous books, including God’s Healing Strategy: An Introduction to the Bible’s Main Themes, revised edition (Cascadia, 2011) and, most recently, To Follow the Lamb: A Peaceable Reading of the Book of Revelation (Cascade Books, 2022). He blogs at Thinking Pacifism, where this essay was first published.

The Day of Endless Kindness

Amid the tsunamis of cruelty drowning the planet, the day of endless kindness began as Joan and I watched Maine waves roll in for the last time. We unwrapped the breakfast sandwiches we had bought at the grocery store. On each, written by a server who had once seemed distant then mellowed when gently treated, was a heart face, a smile, and  “Have a safe trip.”

Then  we pondered the hog-the-beach ritual spread in front of us. Even before sunup more and more folks preemptively build beach cities of chairs, umbrellas, windbreakers, tents then leave. To crest the dunes is to wonder if an entire new megalopolis is springing up on the beach.

We flinched as this time one person fed the beach city but did note his spread was minimalist. As he trudged back up past our beach bench I bracketed judgmentalism and cheerily, I thought, teased, “That was cruel, making us watch beach setup just before we have to go home.”

Instantly he turned defensive: though his family had the privilege of living nearby, minimizing the chaos of bringing his children to the beach was worth setting up early.

I tried to signal I had been teasing about having to watch setup just before going home but sensed we were talking past each other. When he left, Joan went down to say goodbye to the waves while I kicked myself: “You have got to stop deadpan teasing when people don’t know you well enough to get it. You deserve to be misunderstood, since early setups do annoy you even if you didn’t mean to take it out on him.”

Minutes later, I looked up. “I just had to come back,” he said. “I thought, I have the privilege of being a year-round Mainer and need to represent my state better than I did. I was sensitive because early setups have gotten people mad; there have even been social media dustups.

“Because I thought you were mad, I wanted to explain that I don’t mean to hog the beach.

“Then after I left I kicked myself. Because when I played back the conversation, I realized you were just teasing about having to watch setup before ending vacation.”

“And I was sitting there kicking myself,” I reported, “for being a deadpan teaser easily misunderstood.”

We reflected on how good it felt to make peace and how often these days we egg each other on instead of paying attention to the inner voices nudging us back to kindness.

Joan and I neared home. I said maybe we should drive around until nightfall to avoid seeing what the lawn looked like after being unmowed forever while rain endlessly fell. Reluctantly we confronted reality.

And were stunned: the lawn was mowed. We texted friends. Did you do that? No. Son-in-law? No. I analyzed the mowing pattern where it met my neighbor’s lawn. The lawns looked seamless. Wow, did he really do that?

Then a knock: neighbor. With  muffins and his own fresh-grown tomatoes. Whoa! “Did you mow our lawn?” Yes.

As eight rambunctious siblings and I grew up, we were not fans of hearing from our parents, “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32 KJV).

But on that day when kindness instead of meanness seemed endlessly to ripple out, I wished my parents were still here so I could tell them, not even grudgingly, “Okay, okay, I get it!”

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. Before it merged to form Anabaptist World, he wrote  the “Unseen Hands” column for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this column.

 

Do I Dare, a poem by Joseph Gascho

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9-10

Do I dare to tell my Darwin friends
about the giant hand
that led my surgeon’s hand
for six whole hours?

Do I dare to tell my Dawkins friends
about the gentle hand
that held me
for 40 days?

Do I dare to think
it was no dream,
that gentle, giant hand,
holding me,
lovingly?

—Joseph Gascho, Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, is a retired cardiologist and emeritus professor of medicine and humanities, Penn State University College of Medicine. The Annals of Internal Medicine awarded him both poem of the year and photograph of the year. Positive Exposure 109, on museum mile in New York City, has featured his photography exhibit, “The Operating Theater.”  In addition to other books of photography and poetry (see  jgascho.com), he has written Heart and Soul: A Cardiologist’s Life in Verse (Wipf and Stock, 2023) .

Some Airplane Fun

Even if we were having to fly into Newark during a late-season winter storm, we were fortunate to have been able to experience the sunny tropics in the first place. Our plane did run late due to thousands of storm-related delays and cancellations including snow, ice, rain, howling winds. Nevertheless, we were boarded, not that much more than an hour late, pushed back from the gate, raring to go.

Then that dread intercom crackle. Pilot: “Sorry folks. There is a problem with a seal on a life raft access panel. It has no bearing on flight safety, but we need to research if policy will let us fly or we have to go back to the gate. If we go back, we’ll time out and this crew won’t be able to take you to Newark. We do apologize and will update you soon.”

All 150 or so of us are trying not to cry. I’m reminded of my youngest granddaughter: I need a time out so I can go back into my bed and use my pacifier.

Pilot: “I’m very sorry folks but policy doesn’t let us fly. We’ll need to go back to the gate.  Someone there will help you make arrangements.”

Back to gate. But we sit and sit. Maintenance people with orange and green vests roam around the panel. All seems resolved. But that pesky time out. Wait wait wait.

We think about how much of our lifespan is about to go down the drain. I really do need to get in my bed with a pacifier. But then: Wild idea from pilot. Maybe we can fly you to Dulles and then another crew will fly you to Newark and you won’t even have to get off the plane!

Joan and I like this idea. Lots and lots of people do. But some people don’t.

I wish I’d have dared video some of the action to get my minutes of viral fame. In lieu of that, I did text family members contemporaneously, so I’ve stitched together a narrative based on often-verbatim texting of what came next.

After the pilot reported the potential solution,  maybe one-fourth of the passengers went into a complete tizzy (some in we-have-feelings English, some in eloquent and energetic Spanish, bilinguality only adding to the fun). They threw fits. Let us off this plane! We’re done! This airline is toast! We have our rights!

They were reminded they were only going to Dulles to get a new crew. They wouldn’t even leave the plane, and it was the fastest they could get to Newark. They were warned if they got off they might make it to Newark amid cancellations maybe by the end of their lives. So most of them huffily paraded back on. But enough got off that all the luggage had to be pulled and reviewed on the tarmac.

After oh, two or three hours of new mutinies leading to more efforts to get off leading to more reminders that you might be in your grave before you get to Newark if you persist in this self-defeating behavior, a few people did give nice speeches. They pointed out (I didn’t speechify but courageously nodded support) that this would be a good time to work together as a community to help each other get to Newark instead of generating constant door openings and closures and luggage delays and threats from crew to cancel this flight right now. But the collaboration contingent struggled to achieve full buy in.

Then came word that–

a.) we might get to Dulles if the flight path around wind and storm and oh, a rocket launch at Canaveral could be achieved . . .

b.) fast enough the crew didn’t time out (our seatmate noted that if they timed out they might land us in the ocean), but–

c.) only if you dear people settle down right now.

Except that as the hours passed the crew had said you can go out to terminal for food if you send only one rep per family and return soon. Of course all kinds of exciting new hell broke loose as the push-pull of will we obey so we can actually fly or will we do what we want because we deserve it after all the fuss you’ve put us through continued including as some insisted give us airline vouchers right now to buy our food.

Somehow, even as we were constantly warned we had to get going any minute, the chaos persisted yet another hour or more. Then another update: Nearly within reach of a flight plan if you all settle down.

This was greeted as wow, just an ideal moment for more going to the bathroom, roaming the cabin, arguing with the crew. At this point our seatmate, admirable representative of his locale, a polite young gentleman by and large, observed that “these people are f-ing stupid.”

Joan and I have been on multiple canceled flights. There were many junctures at which we knew that in prior cancellations this would signal flight ended.  But unbelievably, the crew started coming back to re-check boarding passes. Okay folks, we should have the flight plan in minutes.

So one woman starts playing local party music really loud. Attendant goes back says stop. She argues. Attendant says everyone can’t play music really loud on this plane it’s not legal stop right now. Argue argue.

Attendant, who seems to be a boss and a grizzled competent veteran of passenger wars, goes back up front to pick up microphone as amid the music kerfluffle a contingent that apparently has bought duty-free liquor celebrates the blessings of the spirits. The music fan and the spirits-lovers both have their celebrations rudely interrupted as the attendant goes on loudspeaker to observe as follows in several layers of Spanish and English:

“You need to know you can’t all play your music loud so none of you can. Imagine if you all did that! And it’s the rules that you can’t. Furthermore. Furthermore! If any of you even try to drink your own alcohol you need to know that could involve the federal government. Which is to say la policia. Which is to say you could be taken off this flight. Which is to say this flight would be canceled and no one would get to Newark. Not even to Dulles. Which is to say you could end up arrested and in jail instead of in Newark.

“So you need to listen. You need to obey the law. Please. Tienen que escuchar y obedecer la ley. Por favor! This flight will be problematic indeed without your cooperation. Este vuelto sera problematico sin su cooperacion.”

Cockpit door keeps opening and closing. Cabin door keeps opening and closing. People in reflective vests keep showing up after all seems resolved. Doors close. Doors open again. Thunk thunk sounds below the plane. Baton dude who guides the plane out gets to work then sits down again on a concrete barrier to watch the fun.

Chief attendant scrolls up and down his cell phone screen for the 3,423rd time in four hours. He and pilot confer for the 50th time. The pilot is not looking like he’s on a happy date. We keep waiting for sorry folks, your dreams are dashed. People keep getting up. Some go to the bathroom 242 times. Bathroom has become an overflowing outhouse and we haven’t even gone anywhere.

But then. Then. Flight plan has been approved “BUT ONLY IF WE GET TO RUNWAY IN 10 MINUTES.”

Lots of fussing and muttering. But crew firm, mostly on loudspeaker now, reiterate: “If we run out those 10 minutes Dulles canceled SIT DOWN people.” Somehow 10 minutes becomes like 25 but flight still hanging by its thread.

Loudspeaker: “Captain says NO ONE Stand Up for ANYthing or That’s IT we’re COOKED.”

The plane actually starts to move. Attendant comes back to check we’re all behaving. Gentleman behind continues a phone call. Attendant tells him, politely but sternly, phone off. Guy yells in several languages, “F— you [that part for sure is in English] we’ve been patient long enough.” It feels like blows come next.

The attendant says one more time “Stop the call or we cancel.” Then backs off and keeps moving up the cabin. Passenger huffs. Gets off the phone.

The plane keeps taxiing. The cockpit door stays closed.  It looks gray and inscrutable and strong and a bulwark against the breakdown of civilization. You can almost feel the pilot concluding that so long as no shots ring out this plane is getting up in the air. And this plane is going to Dulles. And in a few hours this story is going to be shared with airline colleagues, maybe even putting some of that duty-free libation to legal use.

Our seatmate says this is the first time he’s been so scared. He says, “It feels like there’s too much going on in this plane.” Joan and I agree.

We get to the runway. I tell our seatmate there’s no wrong answer but ask if he believes in God. He says yes. So we all breathe prayers.

The plane gathers speed. We see the ground drop away.

Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

Skimming in Harmony

As usual the news was filled with reporting on national divorcing of red and blue and infinite variations, enough said, as much of the world’s energy went into taking things apart.

But in one part of the world, itself no perfect place as wealthier and poorer live their sadly stratified lives and the privileged play while the struggling work, there was a moment of sheer loveliness. All the struggle was right there, the endless plastic bottles and trash caught in the grass and dunes and trees just behind the waves, those with too little money selling what they could on the beach while the kites soared.

I wonder what we do about this. But I doubt simply ignoring the soaring fixes the struggling.

So I did love watching as the kite surfers fluttered across the waves like butterflies used to before so many went extinct along with their habitats.

And I particularly felt my breath catch when three surfers, perhaps part of a team though maybe they were just committed to sheer joy, started skimming in unison. Back and forth they raced across the ocean, slowing down to turn at the ends of coves then somehow knowing who would take the lead and how quickly until they were lined up in near-perfect formation.

Kiters one

Mostly there was no need to do anything but cherish the sight. I also, however, thought about the sheer delight stirred by humans who must have spent endless hours practicing their soaring collaboration rather than feeding endless versions of that national divorcing.

Kiters two

I thought I’d better learn from their example how to invest more of my own energy in skimming and less in splitting.

And I imagined all the healing that could be released if resources for kiteboarding, both literal and metaphorical, were so equitably shared across the weathier and poorer of us that we could all skim together on the Planet Earth team.

Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

Thankful for for Little Cow

Ella, three years old, has been fascinated by the scar on her grandfather’s chest, where the surgeon literally took out my heart and fixed it before putting it back in. She particularly keeps trying to understand the role of the bovine aortic valve Dr. Desai put in.

I explained that it came from a cow. That really caught her fancy. As we’ve kept talking about this, I’ve started suspecting Ella’s cow image is quite literal.

So I asked her: “Do you think there is a tiny little cow in my heart helping to keep me alive?”

“Yes, PawPaw. Your cow is always in there taking care of you.”

She paused. “But it makes me sad. Because a big cow had to be killed so your little cow could live in your heart.”

In recent years I’ve read about research suggesting that in their own ways bees think creatively; spiders dream; trees communicate. And maybe, metaphor though this may be, little cows live caringly in our broken hearts.

Ella is no longer a baby but she lives closer than I do to what William James once memorably described:  “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion. . . .”

Through Ella’s insights my bovine aortic valve links me to all of that–and reminds me that there is in nature so much glory and so much sacrifice. Ella reminds me to be grateful for great blooming of life. And for the suffering and new possibilities, so often both mixed together, we create for each other as we strive and yearn for life amid all the buzzing confusions of our thoughts and dreams and sacrifices.

Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

A Pentecostal Theater Large Enough for This Marriage

Kingsview & Co blog post barn imageFor a year I’ve been the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer made a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offeredresponses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’ve been posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation. As touched on below, this post completes my participation.

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If I dare put it this way, I’m grateful to J. Terry Todd for offering, in “Following Jesus to the Altar: One Pentecostal’s Reflection,” a Pentecostalism large enough for my marriage. This marriage, of a former atheist and semi-former charismatic, has called for a large room–even, in Todd’s language, a theater. And in relation to the Pentecost-related matters Todd addresses, as much my marriage as my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has set the stage for my experiences and perspectives. The story:

As a teen, I attended a church camp. I had by then decided that adopting atheism was the most ambitious, dramatic way I could declare independence from traumatizing aspects of my Mennonite church community.

Intertwining with classic Anabaptist themes in my church experience were already evangelical and fundamentalist influences. Then yet another stream was added: the charismatic renewal movement. Abruptly all manner of settled ways of praying and worshiping and thinking were unraveled. It could be said that, to echo Todd’s memorable wording, a form of Pentecostalism was making its transgressive appearance.

It had taken over this church camp. So there I was, theoretically atheist. Yet underneath the atheism I was also, as Todd introduces his experience, “bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name.”

What happened next could be described almost word for word as Todd does:

Bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name, one Sunday I tarried at the altar, a classical Pentecostal phrase that involves praying mightily for a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit.  I stood, along with others, near the front of the worship space, my body enveloped by the band’s percussive rhythms and the praise team’s soaring vocals.  I, I’ve seen God do it, and I know / it’s working out for me. / It’s getting ready to happen. The entire assembly chanted the song’s refrain, again and again: It’s getting ready to happen, it’s getting ready to happen.  I wasn’t kneeling at a structure but standing, walking, rocking on my heels at the “altar,” a space that in most Pentecostal settings encompasses the center front of the church, stage left and stage right as well.

My moments of tarrying, or waiting expectantly, involved both the fervent hope for a divine encounter with the Holy Ghost, and a struggle with my willingness to surrender to the experience. And then it happened . . .

But precisely there our experiences sharply diverge. For me it most definitely did not happen. I felt crushed under the dreams of those praying over me, laying hands on me, issuing ecstatic utterances through which I grasped, though without understanding the words themselves, that they were entreating the Spirit to enter recalcitrant me.

“Just let go,” they pled. “Let your tongue go even if it makes no sense. Say nonsense words and then the Holy Spirit will come to fill them with meaning.”

So I did. And a sort of half feeling of sort of half being filled with something arrived but deep down I knew: I was doing my best to be filled with the Spirit but not managing actually to be filled by other than my own quest to be “good” for those who wanted me to be filled. Still I yielded. Eventually I eked out some nonsense words. Joy erupted. For several days I convinced myself It had happened: I had spoken in tongues; I had been baptized in the Spirit.

Only for a few days. Then as I noted no underlying transformation of my troubled self, I admitted the truth to myself: I had tried but failed to open myself. Whatever had happened had been my effort to go along with the expectations of the crowd.

Years later I was to find paths toward following Jesus and experiencing the Spirit. Part of what it took was concluding that what had befallen me back then was external coercion blending with my inner need. I had experienced true hunger but not necessarily for what I was being offered at that camp.

In mid-pilgrimage I met a woman. She was Joan, still a teenager, in her first year at Eastern Mennonite University, where we met when I was a senior. She had been raised American Baptist. She had found much to treasure in her tradition. But there were hungers not yet met in her teenage self. In her world too the charismatic movement made its transgressive appearance, undoing patterns and spiritualities that had long seemed settled. She was blessed. She still connects with friends from the days she sang in a traveling choir with her charismatic mentors and friends.

Eventually, of course, the former-but-sometimes-still-atheist and the charismatic decided that one thing amid their confusions was clear: They should marry. When they announced this oil-and-water merger to their respective friends, there was no joy in either camp. There was gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, smearing of ashes on brows. This was a variant of Thelma and Louise rollicking their way off a cliff.

So here we are, forty-some years later. We have survived partly by becoming more like each other. What our friends couldn’t always see–nor actually could we ourselves, who realized we might have lost our minds–was that we would also, hoary though the concept is, complement each other. So I am often enough the skeptic but experience Joan as offering guard rails that keep me from, ultimately, plunging into the ditch of cynical disbelief.

And I think she would testify to the ways we mutually nurtured each other when at moments of severe distress in her circle of loved ones the charismatic word was sometimes a toxic pray harder, trust God more, get out of the Spirit’s way even if that forces you to lie to yourself about what is actually happening here. During one potentially fatal crisis, it was also not her charismatic mentors but that boring old-fashioned leader, an American Baptist pastor, who knew precisely the words of divinely inspired grace and wisdom to offer.

Within that journey we find ongoing blessings as we nurture children and grandchildren in a world turned wilder than many of us might have anticipated even a few years ago. We go to church. We engage Scripture. We do things good Christians and Mennonites do. We take seriously the Mennonite Church USA understandings of the Holy Spirit offered in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective article 3, which concludes that–

The Holy Spirit enables our life in Christian community, comforts us in suffering, is present with us in time of persecution, intercedes for us in our weakness, guarantees the redemption of our bodies, and assures the future redemption of creation.

But buffeted by traditions we have long experienced as sources of both strength and shadows, we have not majored in jots and tittles of Holy Spirit doctrine. Nor have we found that the somewhat middle-of-the-road MC USA take on the Spirit exhausts the wildness of the wind and the tongues of fire that blow and alight where they will.

This means I take in Todd’s report more as testimony and inspiration than as theological tome–although I appreciate and affirm the theological nuances he offers us and the many ways they resonate with Joan’s and my lived experience. I particularly am moved by Todd’s ability to show us three things:

First “is the experience of worship as a theater of divine encounter, a space of intense emotion and intimacy where God meets us at the altar.”

Second is “transgressive space”:

As a theater of divine encounter, the Pentecostal (or renewalist) altar can be a “transgressive space,” a term Gastón Espinoza has used to describe the altars at Azusa Street, the 1906 Los Angeles revivals that helped put the Pentecostal movement on the Christian map.

Third is the “freakiness” that this can catalyze and empower. Todd documents an amazing array of Christians and peoples and experiences that can all, in their frequently contradictory ways, fit in the theater. As he describes matters, “The altar where I first experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a transgressive space, which is why I use the provocative language of ‘flying the freak flag’ to unabashedly embrace Pentecostal ideas and (especially?) actions that might puzzle or even repel others.”

That grips my heart. That shows me what it can look like when Christians today behave as those first book-of-Acts Christians did, seemingly drunk but with Spirit not spirit. That fills me with appreciation for ways in our half-blind and fumbling ways Joan and I, one burned by one form of Pentecostalism, one healed by another form of it, then both of us discovering mutual inspiration and healing at the nexus of salvation and shadows, have found each other. And have been found by the Holy Spirit who turned even our marriage into a wing of that theater of divine encounter.

Yes, J. Terry Todd:

That prophecy makes me dance with joy at the altar, as I await this Third Pentecost, grateful for the radically relational pneumatology that undergirds it.

Somebody shout Hallelujah, please.

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This post completes my contributions to the “Following Jesus” conversation. It has been a rewarding journey. Meanwhile “Following Jesus Is a Liquid Dance,” J. Terry Todd’s engagement with his respondents (which includes comments on my post above), provides an eloquent and heartfelt wrap-up to a valuable year of mutual learning for the twelve of us involved. Let Todd have the last word:

As embodied souls we are here for a time such as this. Some of the roadblocks to the flourishing of all God’s people are novel – a climate emergency on a global scale, the possibility of nuclear destruction, along with the usual human litany of greed, war, murder, inequality, and exploitation.

How do we sing the Lord’s song in such a strange land?  Well, it’s not all dependent on our singing, thank God since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Maybe it’s the Spirit that plays and sings through us. Glory! In a prophetic phrase attributed to Montanus, “Behold, the human being is like a lyre, and I [the Spirit] fly over them as a pick.”

Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and participated in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Pondering Across Two Traditions Both Shadowed and Hallowed

Barn image, Michael A. King Kingsview & Co post For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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Robert Millet’s winsome portrayal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints took me first back to my growing-up years. As has been true in the case of many traditions I’ve responded to, my early formation in Anabaptist-Mennonite communities and theologies predisposed me to view the Mormons, as we then knew the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with suspicion. I was taught by my tradition that Mormons were a cult. They based their views on the false foundation of the Book of Mormon claimed by then-New Yorker Joseph Smith to have been written on mental plates derived from an angel.

Mormons, it was said, falsely believed that they were the highest, most faithful version of Christianity due to their founding ultimately by Christ in New York  long after the other traditions. They believed in polygamy and tried to convert others to this lifestyle and problematic beliefs.

There are similarities here with Anabaptist-Mennonites. We often have seen ourselves as restoring the true church of Christ. We rescued the church from wrong directions taken from about the time of the Emperor Constantine and across the centuries of Catholicism and of Christendom (church and nation intertwined) expressions still partly maintained by the Reformers.

Mennonites also, it seems to me, have sometimes been careful to interpret our own history in ways that favor our preferred understandings of ourselves. This may be one reason some of us have favored a “monogenesis” view of having emerged largely from 1525 Zurich when Conrad Grebel rebaptized a number of other Anabaptist leaders. This can enable at least some carving away of the more shadowed historical details. In contrast, a “polygenesis” view that Anabaptists emerged from multiple streams and settings makes it harder to say well this is Anabaptism but that wrong turn is not.

For example, perhaps the most troubling dynamic in Anabaptist history emerged at Münster in Germany in the early 1530s. Anabaptists attempted to impose a theocracy on the city through what came to be known as the Münster rebellion. Jan Matthys was one of the noteworthy Anabaptist leaders until the bishop they had exiled besieged the city, killing Matthys and others. For a time the Anabaptist rebels still held considerable sway, as this paragraph from the Anabaptist encyclopedia GAMEO (Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online) summarizes:

The 25-year-old John of Leiden was subsequently recognized as Matthys’ religious and political successor, justifying his authority and actions by claiming visions from heaven. His authority grew until eventually he proclaimed himself the successor of David and adopted royal regalia, honors, and absolute power in the new “Zion.” There were now in the town at least three times as many women of marriageable age as men, so he made polygamy compulsory,[3] and he himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded Elisabeth Wandscherer in the marketplace for refusing to marry him, though this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Meanwhile, most of the residents of Münster were starving as a result of the year-long siege.

For centuries thereafter, Anabaptist-Mennonites have wrestled with this. Are Münster and its leaders part of Anabaptist history? Or an aberrance to be bracketed out?

I pay attention to this example because it illustrates the complexities of my own tradition’s history and because there are  striking overlaps with Mennonite takes on Mormonism. Perhaps finding a path that didn’t affirm Münster or other thought-to-be-mistaken Anabaptist streams contributed to what I experienced growing up: Certainly Mennonites were not prepared to cede the one-true-church or the highest-expression-of-the-church mantle to Mormonism. This contributed, I’d guess, to the Mennonite tendency to form in its members the often-stereotypical perceptions I’ve summarized.

Eventually I went to college and seminary. I learned more nuanced understandings of other traditions. However, I have less often encountered sensitive interpretations of Latter-day Saints history and beliefs. It has been a privilege then to participate in conversation with such a generous sharer of his tradition as Robert Millet. And I want to spend some more time in, precisely, affirming Millet’s interpretations rather than questioning them.

Before I proceed, however, I do wonder if Millet would be willing to comment on the common perceptions–or surely often misperceptions as Millet has in other responses movingly reported–of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (When I invited Millet’s commentary he in fact responded generously and comprehensively.) Perhaps hinting at a kind of polygenesis of Mormonism, the Latter-day Saints offer, as I understand it, a preeminent (and non-polygamy-affirming) but not sole expression of Mormonism.

I note Millet has not mentioned the stereotypical takes on his tradition; I’d expect that’s intentional. Why focus on what may be misinterpretations when given the opportunity to write not so much a defense as a proactive statement of the visionary principles that guide the Latter-day Saints of today? Still, it would be informative to learn more of how Millet might address critiques of his or other Mormon branches. It would also be valuable to learn how Millet, who as highlighted below affirms Scripture, views Church of Jesus Christ specifics. For example, what is the role of the Book of Mormon, which I’d imagine few other traditions are prepared fully to embrace?

But turning beyond the shadows, I am struck that Millet helps me make sense of something of a turning point in my own impressions of the Latter-day Saints. Some years ago I was letting Spotify’s algorithms take me hither and yon. That particular night I was tempted to say the algorithm was Holy Spirit, but I doubt Spotify has itself achieved this though who can say how the Spirit may use Spotify!

At any rate, I was in something of a troubled mood and looking for the comforts of music. There were hints of this in various songs. But suddenly I stumbled across a version of “Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,” by The Lower Lights, about whom I knew nothing. I got goosebumps. I turned up the sound. I let the music fill my home and soul. I looked for more Lower Lights music and found many gems.

Then I looked up the group’s background. I was startled to learn that they are . . . Latter-day Saints. That caught my attention. What a clash between what I had been taught and what I was experiencing. I don’t want to claim there was a major theological impact, though once I knew about the Latter-day roots I could hear Latter-day influences in some of the songs. What really tugged at me was that above or beneath whatever the theological overlaps or differences might be, The Lower Lights were blessing me. My heart opened as it rarely had before to paying attention to Latter-day Saints’ gifts.

Then came Millet, who helps us understand core Latter-day Saints commitments and helps my mind continue the journey The Lower Lights have already helped my heart make. I see much for Mennonites to honor in Millet’s “Walking in His Steps: How Latter-day Saints Seek to Follow Jesus” summary:

Millet emphasizes the Latter-day commitment to search the Scriptures daily. As Millet summarizes, “There is a power inherent in scripture, a power unlike anything else we may read or study.” Meanwhile, at our best (which we don’t always manage), Mennonites are committed to believing as we do because we take the Bible seriously as a guide to daily living. We emerged from visionary leaders and communities that sought to read the Bible for themselves. They became convinced that the Jesus they found in this Bible was to be followed even when teaching such radical precepts as adult baptism or that enemies are to be loved.

Mennonites are perhaps not as known for being a praying people as adherents of some traditions. In fact, when I looked for prayer in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, I couldn’t find an article on it. I did find prayer appearing in footnotes, for example in the article on the Holy Spirit, in a note summarizing that “the Spirit of Christ is in the midst of the church in its gathering for prayer and praise.” I see Millet as speaking well for Mennonites in his descriptions of how Latter-day Saints practice being a praying people.

Millet describes Latter-day commitment to serving and loving others as Jesus did. This is in effect a Latter-day variant of one of the five core commitments of Mennonites I summarized in my post on Mennonites.

Latter-day Saints are deeply committed to church attendance–and this includes emphasizing community. As Millet puts it, “Christianity entails more than prayer, fasting, and searching the scriptures–more than an individual effort to live the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As vital as personal devotion and individual effort are, Christianity is fully lived out only in community.” In turn a core Anabaptist-Mennonite precept is that we are to live not primarily as individual Christians. We are to journey as followers of Jesus who through adult baptism commit ourselves to live as members of the body–or community–of Christ.

Many thanks, Robert Millet, for these valuable admonitions and for contributing to my own personal pilgrimage toward grasping the treasures in your tradition.

Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Jesus as Social Revolutionary: Engaging Farris Blount’s Prophetic Invitation

Blog post from Kingsview & Co by Michael A. KingFor a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offer responses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’m posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation.

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Thank you, Farris Blount, for an accessible yet multi-layered overview of the Black Church in A Tale of Many Options: Following Jesus in the Black Church Tradition. The “many options” of your “tale” of the non-monolithic Black Church tradition captures well both central emphases and the many variations.

Your first words fit well with my own take on Anabaptist-Mennonitism and other traditions:

As many of my colleagues have noted during this series on following Jesus from diverse Christian traditions, there is no uniform structure or pattern to such a task. Following Jesus is primarily informed by the context of a people and the needs, desires, and goals of that people.

Rightly emphasized are ways denominational theologies, church models, and forms of following Jesus arise from particular geographical, cultural, and social locations. Amid much that overlaps with ways given situations have shaped my and my tradition’s forms of following Jesus, it’s vital to note your stress on the historical mistreatment and marginalization of the Black Church. Because so much rides on one of your core paragraphs, let me quote it in full:

The historical mistreatment and marginalization of African-Americans can explain how many Black Jesus followers have understood that to follow Jesus means working towards the liberation of all those who are oppressed, particularly Black people. Such a perspective has been molded first by our historical experiences. Our Black Christian forebearers could not understand how a loving and redeeming Savior, who sought to restore our relationship with God and free us from the penalty of sin through His crucifixion, could support the brutal institution of American slavery. Throughout history, African-American Jesus believers could not make sense of how some people could worship a God on Sunday that made humankind in God’s image and declared that this creation was good (Genesis 1) but then treat Black people like second-class citizens unworthy of rights and resources on Monday. Because of these realities, Black Christians have argued that the Jesus we serve laments with us as we process through the trauma that racism creates and fights alongside us as we work to create a world where all God’s creation can thrive. In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.

I‘m a member of a tradition born amid persecution and death so significant that the massive classic, The Martyrs’ Mirror (assembled by Tieleman Van Braght in the 1600s), tells story after story of Anabaptists chased down, burned, drowned during the Reformation. I was ridiculed as a first-grader for not bearing toy guns in a school play because my peace-committed Mennonite parents forbade it. I feel in my bones the traumatic potential of mistreatments and marginalizations. I resonate with your statement that “In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.”

However, precisely because for me and many in my tradition the age-old persecutions involved primarily beliefs, not race, I struggle fully to understand. I imagine beyond a certain point I can’t grasp the depths of trauma intertwined with slavery and racism persisting both in historical memory and still so often actively inflicted today.

Then add the complexity of how African-Americans have themselves, as you report, found their way through that history and present racisms:

However, despite the myriad ways in which the Black Church tradition echoes this commitment to justice in following Jesus, such a commitment does not reverberate through the halls of every Black congregation. In fact, the disagreement between how African-Americans should respond to discrimination can be explored through a polarity that Lincoln and Mamiya call “the communal and the privatistic.” If striving for equal and fair treatment of Black Americans in all areas of life is considered a “communal” approach to the Black Church tradition, then the privatistic approach is one in which there is a “withdrawal from the concerns of the larger community to a focus on meeting only the religious needs of its adherents.” While communal approach advocates echo that following Jesus involves active engagement against oppression, privatistic approach proponents contend that following Jesus is all about an individual public declaration of belief in Him and a resulting shift in behavior (i.e. no cheating, stealing, etc.). Communal believers see Jesus as a liberator that desires for us to experience some Heaven on Earth right now through just relationships and equitable policies, while privatistic believers see Jesus as someone who came chiefly to liberate us from sin and its penalty – eternal separation from God.[1]

It makes sense, as you describe Black Church diversities, that this polarity of the communal and the privatistic would name and form alternative expressions of Black Church experiences. The polarity is also strongly applicable to other traditions. I grew up in what I’d consider a privatistic form of church. I remember its members criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. for focusing on social justice rather than, as these Mennonites believed was more crucial, bringing about change through inviting Jesus into our hearts as personal savior.

In contrast, some Anabaptist-Mennonites have emphasized communal approaches. I’d understand Mennonite Church USA to be trending in this direction in its statements and resources on “Undoing Racism” introduced with these sentences: “Racism, antipathy and alienation stand in the way of Christ’s kingdom of love, justice and peace. As missional communities we will seek to dismantle individual and systemic racism in our church.”

Crucial to my own quest to follow Jesus was Vincent Harding, whose journey included speech writing for Martin Luther King Jr. (such as King’s historic “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence“) and significant involvement with Mennonites. He increasingly became a critic of Mennonites (for reasons likely related to the privatistic side of the church) yet also at one point with first spouse Rosemarie directed a Mennonite service unit in Atlanta. In the 1970s he changed my and my wife Joan’s life when in a presentation at Eastern Mennonite University, our alma mater, he urged Mennonites, so often agrarian, to become more meaningfully involved in cities and communal concerns. His invitation catalyzed our spending some 14 years training, working, and living in Philadelphia.

I’d see the privatistic/communal pendulum going back and forth in Anabaptist-Mennonite circles depending on era, given congregations, denominational variations, and so forth. Interestingly, this might be illustrated through how our Following Jesus conversations have been received. I’ve been sharing my posts on Facebook and elsewhere. When I posted my response to Pietist Christopher Gehrz, one FB commentator observed that “I too have heard Mennonite leaders opine about how Pietist sentiments can lead to a me-and-Jesus instead of an us-and-Jesus mentality. I find those comments suspect. It ignores, suppresses and denies the reality that each of us is an individual with an irreducible inwardness. . . .”

Another commentator hoped that valuing the inward, privatistic aspects of Pietism as I had summarized them was not an either/or. This person stressed what Blount is calling the communal, wondering, “Is the Bible primarily addressed to whole communities of God’s covenanted people or is it primarily intended for our personal devotions?” The commentator answered that we pray not “My” but “Our” Father in the Lord’s prayer. This is in contrast to, say, coming “to the garden alone” or walking the Jericho Road as “just Jesus and me” (as two songs put it). 

I said that “As I understood the Pietist summary to which I was responding, indeed both/and not either/or!” Your own answer, Farris, is that

I am not condemning such an approach to following Jesus. On the one hand, there are spiritual practices, such as prayer and scripture reading, that should undergird the life of a believer, no matter what one believes it means to follow Jesus. These practices give us the strength to keep serving and following Jesus amid life’s difficulties. On the other hand, Black Christians who have dedicated themselves to fighting for justice have sometimes done so at tremendous personal sacrifice.

Well said, and a nudge to any of us—personally or at the level of our traditions who may be tempted to overinvest in the privatistic at the expense of the communal. Many thanks for making the stakes clear.

The week this was first published we confronted yet again the violence shredding our culture, too often on behalf of White supremacy, and Black shoppers dying simply for being in a Buffalo grocery store when a teenager, incited by hate-filled ideologies he had no trouble finding and feeding on in today’s political and media contexts, set out to kill as many as he could. Amid such horrors, you issue an invitation that ultimately has implications for all of us:

However, I do not believe we can avoid the fact that Jesus was a social revolutionary if we look at the scriptures and His engagement in His world. And if that is the case, we in the Black Church tradition who call ourselves Christians and attempt to model the life of Jesus, must ask ourselves – what am I willing to sacrifice and give up to follow the Jesus that came to give humanity life and life more abundantly right here and right now?

Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and is currently participating in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.

Extending DreamSeeker Magazine through posts from Michael A. King and guests