The current issue of Image includes a moving essay by Todd Shy, entitled “Recovering Evangelical: Reflections of an Erstwhile Christ Addict.” Shy describes his crisis of faith, which started while he was working for John Stott. During that time he suffered a breakdown, gorged on coffee, rode the London buses, and found comfort in classic literature such as Dostoyevsky and Melville. He never found his way back to Evangelicalism, or, it seems, to any orthodox Christian faith.
Shy’s struggle with the sterility and banality of contemporary Evangelicalism resonates with me. I love his description of the Evangelical’s presumed relationship with those outside the faith:
In conversion the evangelical has not only been pulled from the ocean, he has been given a chair and told to watch for others drowning. The problem, to the evangelical, is that we are all drowning, and so conversation does not involve the question of whether we are in danger — or simply swimming — or whether we should flee from the ocean — or use it as a passage — the evangelical is already in the elevated chair and claims, as a consequence, a privileged perspective, a different kind of knowing.
Shy doesn’t deride Evangelicals for taking this posture because, as he notes, “[i]f that lifeguard is right, and the swimmer is drowning, it seems ludicrous not to drag him to shore.” Yet, sitting in the lifeguard’s chair separates us from the human experience of those we seek to rescue. As Shy puts it,
the assumption that you are perched above the water and that the person you’re addressing is drowning prevents real empathy. You will never understand that person’s mystery until you abandon the need to move her where you are, to leave her where you yourself don’t want to be. Because every evangelical knows, in the end, that the act of conversion is a mystery.
I think Shy, like Brian McLaren, has pinpointed something within Evangelicalism that can be soul-sucking: the constant focus on the “other,” on, as McLaren puts it, on “who’s in and who’s out.” (It’s too bad Shy abandoned evangelicalism before finding some of the alternative evangelical perspectives on spirituality and relationship that are now beginning to emerge). This sort of focus leads to shallow worship and an instrumentalist, results-oriented faith. The faith becomes a four-point marketing plan rather than an encompassing joy. Why can’t we trust God with the “in” and “out” questions, and love passionately and share the Gospel precisely because it is “good news,” without keeping score?