"FORMED": Emerging evangelicals navigate two transformations

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 1 “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations James S. Bielo this book asks a vital question. Is there a sea change happening on the social, political, and cultural front of evangelical social engagement? And if so, just how is that sea floor shifting? These questions are important due both to the significant influence of evangelicals in American public life and to the received wisdom among academic and mainstream discourses about evangelicals’ public presence. There is a familiar story at work here. American evangelicals are culture warriors, obsessed with abortion and homosexuality, who seek to elect their own into public office so they can codify religious morality.1 They create Christian alternatives to every imaginable form of popular culture and democratic institution.2 And they do service work with people who are socially disadvantaged and marginalized, largely from the comfortable confines of middle-class suburbia.3 We might read this volume as a call to take seriously the complexity and tensions within the amorphous category “evangelical.” As Steensland and Goff outline in the Introduction, evangelicals have recently made waves on their own shores and those of secular media outlets for appearing in unexpected places: taking up arms in debates about sustainable development, climate change, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and global peacemaking. This chapter proceeds from the assumption that while platforms and agendas are indeed up for grabs, the future of evangelical social engagement will not unfold on the basis of specific public issues. It will unfold along the cultural contours that give expression and direction to evangelicals’ ongoing public influence. Any comparative analysis of a new social engagement must confront the institutional and ideological changes that evangelicals have produced and oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 31 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 32 recent evangelical movements and trends wrestled with in recent years. The diverse movement known as the Emerging Church exemplifies such changes and was the focus of my ethnographic research from October 2007 to July 2011.4 In this chapter, I highlight one institutional invention among a small group of emerging evangelicals in Cincinnati, Ohio, to consider how views of social engagement are tethered to ideals of spiritual formation. Emerging evangelicalism is best defined as a movement of cultural critique grounded in a desire for change. “The Emerging Church” is a label, created by movement insiders in the mid-1990s, marking a dual assumption: that contemporary evangelicalism is undergoing profound change and that the Christian church always has and always will be changing. The label itself is of increasingly little interest to adherents as a meaningful self-identifier, but the movement it was intended to capture continues to thrive. Their critique is aimed—in general and targeted fashions—at the religious culture cultivated among conservative evangelicals (though emerging evangelicals are also apt to reference the troubles of mainline Protestants and Catholics). As a movement, the Emerging Church has not developed as a tightly coordinated effort; it is equal parts improvisation and strategized maneuvering, formally institutional and informally relational, virtual and intersubjective, local and national. Their cultural critique is diverse and wide-ranging, aimed at both private and public religious life. It encompasses doctrinal theology, scriptural hermeneutics, congregational ecclesiology, liturgical ritual, social memory and relations to church history, scrutiny of dominant values such as consumerism, and, most germane to this book, the form and content of social engagement. Demographically, the emerging movement coalesced and has been primarily successful among middle-aged and younger, white, middle-class and upwardly mobile, educated, urban and suburban evangelicals. Emerging evangelicalism is undoubtedly a transnational movement in the Anglophone world; however, my research has addressed only its U.S. incarnations.5 This chapter emerges from nearly four years of multisited ethnography, which began in Lansing, Michigan, from October 2007 through July 2008.6 From August 2008 through July 2011, the research was based in southwestern Ohio (primarily Cincinnati, but also in several surrounding urban and suburban locales). Data collection focused on four fieldwork activities. First, I conducted formal interviews with ninety emerging evangelicals from forty different church communities and eleven denominations. The sample consisted of sixty-eight men and twenty-two women; fifty-six were doing urban ministry, thirty-four suburban; nearly all were middle-class whites; and all were born between 1958 and 1989 (most between 1970 and 1980). Second, I conducted systematic observations of collective religious practices: from oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 32 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 33 church worship to weekly small groups, informal church gatherings, national and regional conferences, workshops, and book promotional tours. Third, I engaged in several forms of collaborative ethnography, in which the researcher attempts some remove from authority by involving consultants in the design of fieldwork activities (e.g., pastors led me on guided tours of the urban neighborhoods they approached as mission fields).7 Fourth, I collected a variety of material culture and textual items produced, used, and circulated by the individuals and congregations I worked with. Any genealogy of the movement must follow at least five interwoven tracks.8 First, the theological lineage is grounded in an epistemological critique. The organizing claim is that Protestant theology developed in the cultural context of philosophical modernism. As a result, certain doctrinal beliefs, models of religious selfhood, and hermeneutic methods are said to carry deeply rooted, questionable assumptions. Second, emerging evangelicalism is influenced by missiologists who focus on the challenges of evangelizing in Western societies. The base critique is that Christianity has shifted from being the default worldview among Westerners to being widely considered merely a spiritual option, irrelevant, anachronistic, or destructive. In turn, American evangelicals need to approach their own society as a foreign mission field. Third, the ecclesiological lineage works off a critique of local congregational trends, in particular, a distrust of church growth models and megachurch aspirations. The result has been a renewed focus on the spiritual and social engagement potentialities of house churches and new church plants. Fourth, the liturgical lineage is fixated on meaningfully connecting with Christian history. This desire has been neatly captured by the trope of “ancient-future,” which suggests that modernity’s unwelcome influence materializes as a flawed disposition toward worshiping God: too much disconnect with past Christianities, too much emphasis on the power of the spoken sermon to convince and convert, and too little integration of embodied experience with mental comprehension. Fifth, emerging evangelicalism roundly rejects any definitive political allegiance or agenda. The movement largely retains an acceptance of political activism but promotes a broader conception of moral governance. As this genealogy suggests, reimagining evangelicalism’s proper role in public life is central to emerging identity. While this chapter seeks an up-close, detailed analysis of one emerging evangelical community, we can speak in general terms about the movement’s conception of social engagement. Omri Elisha provides a useful starting point—for emerging and nonemerging evangelicals alike—by defining the socially engaged as “pastors and churchgoers who draw strong associations between religiosity and social conscience, and are notably active (either professionally or as volunteers) in promoting and oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 33 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 34 recent evangelical movements and trends participating in various forms of organized benevolence.”9 In the ethnographic example that follows, I am less concerned about a specific act of engagement than I am with characterizing the religious sense of self that accompanies being socially engaged. Integral to my example here, as well as the emerging movement writ large, is the theme of localization (see chapter 4). Emerging evangelicals emphasize local action and mobilization, often articulated as being “neighborhood” or “city-focused.” As a result, emerging evangelicals reliably cultivate an intricate sense of place through which familiar aims of evangelism and positive social change are sutured to developing a relationship to, or “dwelling” in, a specific locale.10 This push to localize is grounded in a predominant theological focus among emerging evangelicals on “the kingdom of God.” Nearly without exception in my fieldwork, emerging evangelicals rejected dispensationalist views of God’s kingdom in favor of either an “already, but not yet” or “kingdom now” orientation.11 Following Jon Bialecki’s ethnographic work among Vineyard charismatics, kingdom theologies are not merely theologies; they provide models of temporality and agency.12 For emerging evangelicals, the place-based emphasis on local action ensues from their kingdom-inspired commitment that while God’s agency is unlimited, their own agency is most effective when sustained in an immediate social surround. My organizing example in this chapter is a yearlong curriculum of spiritual formation created by emerging evangelicals in Cincinnati. From planning meetings that began in April 2010 to the curriculum’s culmination in July 2011, the program created by this group exemplifies an organizing assumption of this book: evangelical social engagement has historically combined two transformations, personal spiritual change and public social change. Using the example of this group and their creative labor, I am interested in what evangelical social engagement looks like on the ground and the kinds of problems generated by new forms of engagement. With these frames in mind, I pursue two interests in this chapter. First, emerging evangelicals seek to collapse any division between personal and public transformation. Individual piety and visions of the collective good are not seen as distinguishable, competing commitments, separate pursuits, or even complementary acts, but as a fused, mutually reinforcing endeavor. The group’s lack of interest in disentangling the two transformations tracks with Susan Harding’s recent notion of “transevangelicalism.”13 Pointing to both the emerging movement and the mass-marketed Biblezine that premiered in 2003 as examples, Harding argues that recent evangelical practices incline toward boundary refusal. These practices are marked by “their instability and their in-between-ness, neither/nor-and both/and-ness vis-à-vis the categories oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 34 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 35 of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular.’ ”14 I suggest here that the same is happening with emerging evangelical social engagement, where modern distinctions are viewed with great suspicion. Binaries such as inner-outer, personal-social, and private-public are intentionally troubled to the point where they are desired to be dismissed. This interest in co-(llapsing, mbining), de-(stabilizing, constructing), and re-(fusing, integrating) projects is consistent with emerging origin stories and a self-conscious ethos that embeds critiques of modernity. Second, although emerging evangelicals hope for such boundary collapsing, they are not immediately successful—which, in this case, proves true for both program creators and participants. In particular, two tensions preoccupy their transevangelical effort. To be clear, this is a cultural argument, not a psychological one: tensions exist as competing imperatives in the production and consumption of the spiritual formation program. Tensions center on an uneasy relationship with late modern temporality and an anxiety about invoking an old fundamentalist separatism in pursuit of a changed evangelicalism. I concentrate on a single example here, but these arguments hold up with respect to the remainder of my fieldwork and were evidenced through a wide range of practices. Emerging evangelicals pursued personal and public transformation through actions as diverse as organizing prayer walks, in which small groups of fellow congregants ambled throughout city sections praying for people and place; planting community gardens, in which small groups of congregants maintained food-bearing plots and distributed the produce to local residents; joining neighborhood associations and other forms of local governance to contribute voluntary labor and influence decision making; and entrepreneurially establishing businesses that focus on serving local neighborhoods. The example I present here is instructive, in part, because it encompasses several of these kinds of practices. The Team In April 2010, five emerging evangelical pastors began meeting weekly to design a yearlong spiritual formation program for use in their local communities: two house churches and two campus ministries. It all began with Kevin. He is the oldest of the five, then in his early forties, and the program originated as the final project for completing his seminary dissertation. So long as his sleeves are rolled up, Kevin’s dominating feature is the large tattoo snaking up his left arm: the Latin word Resurgam, “I shall rise again.” Since 1995, Kevin has helped pastor a house church network in the working-class neighborhood of Norwood.15 As part of his striving to be missional and incarnational, Kevin owns an auto body shop on the neighborhood’s western edge, a oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 35 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 36 recent evangelical movements and trends half mile from the communal house he and his family live in with other house church members. This kind of local, contextually oriented, holistic ministry is deemed integral to being socially engaged and reasserts the transevangelical style of boundary refusal by breaking down the modernist separation of work and home. Because the program would serve as his dissertation, Kevin often took a lead role in the group, but by no means was he a formalized leader. The most active member was Aaron, a campus pastor at Northern Kentucky University in his late thirties, who has been friends and ministry partners with Kevin since 2003. He was rarely absent from group planning meetings and often took the lead in running them. While the program originated with Kevin, Aaron was instrumental in advancing it. He outlined an early version for a Fuller seminary course, where he was working toward a master’s degree. Adam was also influential in the program’s development. In his mid-thirties, he and his wife have led a house church since 2004, modeled on the communal living practiced by Kevin. The house itself is in the Clifton neighborhood, home to the University of Cincinnati and close to the independent coffee house Adam and his wife own and operate. The remaining two members were the most marginal to the program’s formation. In his early thirties, D.G. is a self-described “cultural architect,” which he defines vis-à-vis religious identity: “As Christians we are called to transform the very community and culture we live in.” A large tattoo of a shamrock embedded in a Celtic cross dominates his right inside forearm, and, no matter the occasion, he keeps a silver Celtic cross with the Greek letters for alpha and omega on a necklace hanging midway down his chest. The group’s beginning coincided with the dismantling of D.G.’s church plant and his dismissal as an assistant pastor from a conservative United Methodist congregation in northern Kentucky. His spotty participation in the group had less to do with lacking interest than it did the competing hours from his new job at an Apple store in Cincinnati’s northern suburbs. The group was both a lifeline to his heart’s desire, being a missional pastor, and a reminder of what he had recently lost. Christian was the least active member and the last to join. He moved to Cincinnati in 2008 to work as a campus ministry director at the University of Cincinnati for the Church of the Nazarene. All five men are white, college-educated, and saturated in the cultural tastes and capital of middle-class life.16 In September 2010, Mandy and Andrea were added to the group. Mandy is a long-standing member of Kevin’s house church and was brought on as a paid assistant. She handled most of the administrative responsibilities and served as scribe at weekly meetings. Immediately, though, she was also an active contributor to brainstorming and decision making. Andrea is in her late oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 36 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 37 twenties and was a new addition to the whole scene. She recently began work as an interfaith campus director at Xavier University, just north of Norwood. Through informal social networks, she contacted Kevin and, after arriving in the city, moved into their communal house. She, too, played an immediately active role in the group. Both women are demographically similar to the five men. The addition of Mandy and Andrea was not incidental or strictly pragmatic. From the very first meeting I attended, the original five talked earnestly about bringing a “female perspective” into the planning. They explicitly pitched this as a direct rejoinder to a troubling persistence in mainstream evangelicalism: a male-dominated and implicitly sexist public sphere. For them, being intentional about inviting two women to be equal contributing members was a countercultural act. The team’s gendered critique of evangelicalism also indexes an important issue that appears in almost every case of evangelical social engagement. Consider the difference between individualist and structural logics for social change. In American civic life, for both faith-based and secular activists, these two orientations prevail.17 An individualist logic concentrates on the responsibilities, motivations, and actions of individual people. The prime location of agency is the individual, and the relevance of histories, systems, and structures for determining social realities is downplayed. A structural logic combines a focus on individual agency with substantial explanatory weight given to the histories, systems, and structures that create, delimit, and constrain opportunities and actions. Elisha, in his ethnography of socially engaged megachurch evangelicals, provides an extensive account of how individualist logics of social problems such as poverty triumph among conservative Protestants.18 His portrayal of key consultants illustrates the point. In presenting Stacy—a mother and lifelong churchgoer—he concludes: “while she recognized that uncontrollable circumstances and social structures may limit or complicate the choices people are able to make, she rarely pursued such notions very far, but rather emphasized issues of personal morality and responsibility.”19 For another, Elisha shares a revealing example from a Sunday school classroom. In teaching the class, Jim combined individualist logics with acute systemic observations: “He spoke of how Christian bookstores were full of books on topics like marriage and self-improvement but very few dealing with urban poverty and decline.”20 Yet, when his presentation shifted to group discussion, “hardly anyone took up the structural dimensions of Jim’s main argument. . . . The discussion returned, as if by gravitational force, to the theme of relationships and the importance of showing God’s love through direct personal influence in people’s lives.”21 oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 37 8/26/2013 1:31:10 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 38 recent evangelical movements and trends Adding Mandy and Andrea to the group obviously leads to no decisive structural outcome. The evangelical public sphere remains male-dominated. However, it does mark a structural sensibility in the group’s understanding of who gets heard in evangelicalism’s “order of discourse.”22 This interest in structural change was common in the group and marks a point of departure from conservative evangelicals. As illustrated in Elisha’s ethnography and by other scholars, evangelicals return, “as if by gravitational force,” to individualist explanations (a pattern that resonates with both frontier ideals of individualism and neoliberal ideals of autonomy).23 By making structural realities and needs explicit, such as the case with gender inclusivity, emerging evangelicals prefigure their desire for cultural change within their own religious subculture. The Curriculum They named it FORMED. Adam first suggested this handle, and the others thought it captured well their ideal of “inviting people into a process of spiritual formation.” Kevin had always thought of the program as “a curriculum for Christlikeness,” a phrase he borrowed from the theologian Dallas Willard.24 FORMED joins a long-standing dialogue among Christians: how to be a disciple of God. In typical emerging fashion, Kevin’s initial desire to create the program and the others’ desire to develop it began as a discontent. They were not satisfied with any of the vast number of discipleship resources available in the current Christian marketplace. In what came to be a predictable component of weekly planning meetings, they made sardonic reference to existing evangelical discipleship products and their shortcomings. The immensely popular (and profitable) 40 Days of Purpose, part of Rick Warren’s cottage industry, was a favorite target of derision. In particular, the group objected to the way existing products were not based on a yearlong effort, did not combine the wisdom of ancient and contemporary Christian thinkers, and did not thoroughly fuse personal spiritual transformation to public social transformation. August 2010 through July 2011 would be the beta year of FORMED, a trial run to work out kinks, and would consist of three components. It is also worth observing here that the group’s decision to create FORMED rather than adopt and alter an existing program reflects their status as entrepreneurially minded, middle-class actors with the requisite social and cultural capital to imagine and complete the work of creating a new spiritual formation program. The first component of FORMED is the use of eleven different vows to organize the program. Each month foregrounds one vow and a specific set of meanings the group attached to it (the year’s final month would be a form of oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 38 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 39 Sabbath, a rest from the preceding spiritual labors). Their initial vow descriptions read as follows: Soul-Keeping, a renewed life: In a world frazzled by overcommitment, we’ll take time for rest and recreation. Simplicity, a focused life: In a world that is frantic and overcommitted, we’ll live simple, purposeful lives. Community, a shared life: In a world full of fractured relationships, we’ll display unity through a shared life. Prayer, a God-centered life: In a world chasing “self-fulfillment,” we’ll center our lives on God through a prayerful life. Study, a transformed life: In a world that is force-fed by self-centered advertising and media, we’ll regularly reflect on God’s word and let that transform our minds. Work, a creative life: In a world drunk on laziness and entitlement, we’ll be industrious and generous through meaningful work. Service, a generous life: In a world that idolizes power, individualism, and ego, we’ll demonstrate Christ’s way of serving through practical acts of love. Hospitality, a welcoming life: In a world filled with hostility, we’ll be a warm, welcoming place for friends and strangers. Justice, an active life: In a world full of injustice, we’ll work at the local grassroots level for visible social change and be a voice for justice among the world’s oppressed. Holiness, a set apart and faithful life: In a world where anything goes, we’ll live faithfully toward God, others, and ourselves. Celebration, a joy-filled life: In a world plagued by apathy and anxiety, we’ll regularly and joyfully celebrate all that is good, true and beautiful. There are several observations to make about this list. Most obviously, the enumeration of each vow follows a formula. A tag line (e.g., “a transformed life”) is followed by a cultural critique (e.g., “In a world that is force-fed by self-centered advertising and media”), concluded by an evangelical-inflected riposte (e.g., “we’ll regularly reflect on God’s word and let that transform our minds”). For the prayer materials used each month (see later), the group sought to integrate the language of the vow as much as possible. Also, this particular collection of vows was intended as a revoicing of the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Finally, note that the vows move back and forth between personal and social transformation. Most overtly, service, hospitality, and justice call forth the imperative of being socially engaged. Others—for oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 39 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 40 recent evangelical movements and trends example, simplicity, work, and holiness—refuse a separation of the two transformations, preferring to see them as too intertwined to distinguish. The second component of FORMED is a monthly prayer book. The group was fond of reiterating, in public events and among themselves at weekly meetings, that this would “not just be a prayer book,” but a guide for establishing an “internal spiritual rhythm.” Borrowing another monastic element, the prayers are to be performed aloud daily at fixed hours in the morning and evening and only in the intersubjective context of community (house churches and campus ministries, respectively). Each day’s prayer follows a repeating structure in the morning (call to prayer, restatement of monthly vow, reading of vow-related scripture, reading of vow-related quote from past or present Christian author, a vow prayer prewritten by the group, reading of a Gospel text, reading of the Lord’s Prayer, reading of a Psalm text, an open period of intercession to address specific prayer requests, a brief concluding prayer written by the group), afternoon (midday restatement of vow and vow prayer), and evening (call to prayer and then a repetition of the morning structure with the exception of a different Christian author quote, Gospel text, and Psalm text). Whenever possible, they aligned the Christian author quote with the liturgical calendar (for example, for October’s “Simplicity,” a prayer from St. Francis of Assisi was read on October 4, St. Francis Feast Day) or the fusing of personal-public transformation (for example, for January’s “Study,” the group assembled a diverse set of boundary-collapsing quotes, including this from St. Bernard of Clairvaux: “There are many who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. There are others who desire to know in order that they may be known: that is vanity. Others seek knowledge in order to sell it: that is dishonorable. But there are some who seek knowledge in order to edify others: that is love”). The final component is a daylong event on the first Saturday of each month, where an invited speaker addresses the vow with FORMED participants. These events ended up following several different formats but at minimum involved a public talk followed by a shared meal. The group relied on their personal and ministry connections to arrange the speakers and eventually included both local pastors and published Christian authors living elsewhere. Their hope was that these events would satisfy several purposes: renew excitement for the program by beginning each month with a special event, present a learned introduction by someone who has devoted specialized attention to the monthly vow, and provide a public event where FORMED participants from the four different communities could gather. Throughout the year, these events drew anywhere from twenty to seventy people, almost all of whom were involved with a FORMED house church or campus ministry. oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 40 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 41 The monthly talks became a primary way of demonstrating the entanglement of personal and public transformation. One strategy was the symbolism of location. The event setting was a frequent topic of planning meeting discussions, as the group had two priorities: host the event in different locations throughout the city and host as many events as possible in public locations. The kind of structural sensibility the group displayed through including female contributors was also present in how they organized the meals following talks. The focus was trained on “sustainable food,” and most meals were biographically introduced. For example, the February “Work” meal was prepared and introduced by Robert, a member of Kevin’s house church, who maintains several community gardens in Norwood. He explained the seasonality of two different vegetarian soups, their ingredients, and when the herbs and vegetables were planted and harvested. These biographical introductions were explicitly framed as rejoinders to the spiritual damages of relying on the industrialized food system for sustenance. Finally, the subject of the monthly talks affirmed the approach to social engagement. For example, the June “Holiness” event hosted the vice president of a Cincinnati-area ministry that develops and supports anti-human-trafficking campaigns. The April event featured a widely read evangelical author on the vow of “Hospitality.” Her organizing idea was “Hospitality as a dangerous practice,” which she presented to the gathered group of twenty over the course of several hours in an alternating lecture and question-answer format. She introduced the vow with an autobiographical anecdote that intended to be both humorous and demonstrative of boundary-collapsing social engagement: Funny story, from when I was doing my dissertation. I did a Ph.D. in Ethics, but I did my dissertation on recovering the hospitality tradition. And when I would tell people that they would look at me absolutely blankly; now, mind you this was, I sort of started working on it in ‘88, so this was before there’s been a real resurgence of interest in hospitality. But, they would look at me and say, “You’re doing a dissertation on coffee and doughnuts?” [group laughs] This was really a little bit disturbing. But, then they would follow that up with, “Are you doing a real Ph.D.?” And, it was a very interesting, I mean it was actually impossible for them to fathom that somehow hospitality was connected to ethics or to issues of justice or recognition or inclusion, those kinds of questions. It was still a few years down the road before that really became even possible for people to imagine, and that really it’s actually a pretty useful framework for thinking about issues of how we oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 41 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN recent evangelical movements and trends 42 negotiate difference, how we make room, find unity amidst diversity and so on, how we allow people to have voice. In walking through the FORMED curriculum, my aim has been to illustrate how the group sought to fuse the two transformations of personal and public change. The example of FORMED is striking because it is, most overtly, a discipleship program: a “curriculum for Christlikeness,” where individuals work to strengthen their individual faith. Yet, even when the design is about fostering inner spirituality, emerging evangelicals constantly import desires and material goals for social engagement. It is this striving toward inseparability, this refusal to recognize or reify distinction between the two transformations that defines the group’s creative labor. Two Tensions The FORMED beta year concluded with no major stumbles. The prayer books were completed—quotes collected, scriptural texts selected—and distributed on time. The monthly speakers were arranged, brought in, housed, and fed with few delays, no cancellations, and no crash-and-burn performances. The planning group met nearly every week to brainstorm, make decisions, and reflect. As the summer of 2011 waned, the group exchanged congratulations and began plotting version 2.0. However, through my ethnographic observation of version 1.0, I saw two tensions become apparent in the production and consumption of FORMED, both of which incite familiar evangelical dilemmas. The first tension ensues from an uneasy relationship with late modernity. On the one hand, the group, as with the emerging movement more broadly, is fueled by cultural critique. Something is awry with contemporary life, an insistence made clear by their vow enumerations. On the other hand, there is much about the group that is unapologetically contemporary. Their affinity for technology is an easy illustration: weekly planning meetings were replete with Facebook posts, Twitter updates, Google doc sharing, ring tones, and message alerts; Aaron released the prayer book in regular and mobile versions; at monthly gatherings, as many people were reading Bible verses from iPhones as were from printouts of the prayer book or print Bibles. In anthropological terms, this uneasiness can be framed as a matter of temporality: cultural assumptions about the nature of time and its passing. Jane Guyer argues that late modern America has witnessed an “evaporation of the near future” in favor of immediate and far distant futures.25 Evangelical Protestants are no stranger to the power of temporality; we need look no further than oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 42 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 43 the extensive impact of rapture eschatology on shaping social practice.26 What emerging evangelicals seem to struggle with is how to square their vehement cultural critique with their relative cultural comfort. The temporality of late modernity is troubling to them because it poses opportunity and danger, benefit and cost, promise and fear. The FORMED year launched publicly with the September speaker for the opening vow, “Soul-Keeping.” They invited a trusted friend, Dave, the pastor who cofounded the Norwood house church with Kevin. This was a choice less about convenience and more about expertise: Dave regularly speaks at national conferences on sustainable faith, teaching other pastors how to “establish rhythm” and “avoid burnout.” Near the beginning of his talk, Dave voiced a definitively emerging critique of contemporary life: I believe that we are living in a time that is unparalleled in human history. And by that I don’t mean that there’s some rapture that’s about to occur. I just mean that where we find ourselves in the early part of the 21st century is unlike, in the Western world, is unlike anything that we have ever experienced before, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We are in what many sociologists would say is a liminal point. We are seeing the deconstruction of old ways, but we don’t really know clearly what the new way looks like. And, the church is filling this. . . . Where before have we ever in history been inundated with marketing to the degree that we now are? . . . When have we ever experienced the incursions against the gift of sleep that we have experienced in our day and age? And, had the kind of inundation of noise and lights and sounds and distractions? When have we had an industrialized food system before? . . . When have we ever been so confused as to what is food and what is not food before? We live in a topsy-turvy society. . . . It’s as if we’re living in a perpetual hiccup and people cannot seem to find the rituals and the rhythms that give sanity to life. . . . And, when before in human history have we ever been so isolated as a people from one another? . . .27 Dave went on to explain how Christians can work against the grain of these in(cursions, undations, dustrialized) pressures to foster a healthier spiritual life. The talk seemed well received, which I found not surprising, given the shared ground of cultural critique. But Aaron did surprise me at the following planning meeting. The group was discussing Dave’s talk, all very positive, when Aaron added how he “wasn’t crazy about the ‘ain’t the past great and doesn’t now suck’ ” tone he thought dominated the presentation. Part of my surprise oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 43 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 44 recent evangelical movements and trends was that I had heard Aaron articulate this same critique numerous times. Dave had gone too far for Aaron, but how? A clear answer never materialized for me ethnographically, but the root dilemma for Aaron seems to be defining the proper relationship to “now.” It is a dilemma of temporality. A brief but telling example is found in the monthly prayer books beginning with the second vow of “Simplicity,” and continuing through the present month in version 2.0. On page three, the midday prayer is printed in a small, dotted-line box with the following written beneath it: “Here’s a handy Midday Prayer for the month that you could cut out and pocket for days when you are on the go.” I would remind you of the tag line for the “Simplicity” vow: “In a world that is frantic and overcommitted, we’ll live simple, purposeful lives.” I take the copresence of “frantic and overcommitted” and “pocket for days when you are on the go” not as evidence of contradiction or as FORMED accommodating late modern pressures, but as a reduplication of Aaron’s dilemma. Consider two further examples. On October 1, the last weekly meeting before the “Simplicity” talk, Adam shared a book he had just finished with Aaron and Kevin: Starbucked.28 The book is part journalistic observation, part socially engaged satire that explores the infamous coffee chain’s dominance. As Aaron and Kevin perused the book, I shared an anecdote. The day before, walking in downtown Cincinnati, I had seen etched on a Starbucks store door their new national campaign: “Take Comfort in Rituals.” Since seeing it, I had thought of the group, both their critique of consumerism and their own investment in the power of ritual. Without my asking, as if on cue, almost scripted, Aaron and Kevin laughed and then pulled out their iPhones and retrieved photos they had each taken, separately at different Starbucks, of this same campaign etching. They, too, were struck by Starbucks’ appeal to one of their most valued symbols. Again, my point is not about contradiction. My point is that late modern life is both problem and solution to the group: here was something central to their discipleship program, ritual, being presented as attractive and not archaic by the troubled vehicle of consumerism’s coffee behemoth. Two weeks later, as the group prepared for the “Community” vow presentation, Christian presented the group with a problem. He had been struggling to convince his campus ministry participants to buy into FORMED. He thought that the web page needed something specific for college students. Aaron, who was having more success with his campus ministry, agreed. So did Kevin, who extended the suggestion to tailoring unique pages for small groups, house churches, college students, and other demographics. Christian made an analogy to eating at a Mongolian barbecue, where everyone has all the same ingredients, but you should be able to combine them to fit your taste. Aaron oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 44 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 45 analogized it to the modular movement in art and architecture. As they traded parallels, I could not help considering all their ideas as exercises in late modern specialization. The economic anthropologist William Roseberry argued, ironically using coffee as his prime example, that late modern life is defined by post-Fordist production regimes and niche marketing.29 Yet, the group marshals a similar impulse toward specialization in their efforts to localize social engagement. Once again, their relationship to “now” is defined by conflicting imperatives. Taken together, these examples illustrate the group’s tension with late modern temporality. While their cultural critique of contemporary life is vital for their sense of self, they are also thoroughly late modern in many ways. This tension surrounds the two transformations FORMED seeks to collapse. The very project of tethering personal change to social engagement, in fact, draws the group into this dilemma. What parts of themselves as late modern beings and what parts of public life as late modern institutions need transformation, and which are worth retaining? Ultimately, this incites a very familiar evangelical dilemma: how to be in the world, but not of it. The second tension ensues from an uneasy relationship with exclusion. The question that FORMED raised for many who participated was how to be a new evangelical without becoming an old fundamentalist. Consider the following example. The invited speaker for the “Community” vow was a house church pastor from Minneapolis. Mark was not a polished presenter, far more comfortable during informal conversations and the public question-answer session. He was short and heavyset, sporting a large beard, leather Kangol hat, baggy clothes, and dark-frame glasses. Mark began by informing everyone that he was distracted. By being there, he was missing a big day for his house church. For over a year, they had been holding a weekly Saturday dinner in an abandoned neighborhood parking lot. Much like Kevin’s missional life in Norwood, this type of action was taken to exemplify the lack of division between private religious community and public social engagement. Recently, local police had threatened to disrupt the dinner due to their never having obtained a city permit. Mark forcefully observed that “breaking bread” has become “civil disobedience in America.” This Saturday was supposedly the day when police would intervene. So, he was distracted. He used the story to segue into his primary premise: the “American Dream” and “the Kingdom of God” are “competing stories.” Their job as Christians is to “challenge the whole system.” “Community,” the vow he was invited to speak on, “is an act of revolution.” Making ample use of references to “empire” and “imperialism,” Mark invoked the familiar evangelical trope of comparing contemporary life to oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 45 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN 46 recent evangelical movements and trends biblical times: in this case, the United States is Rome, and the Religious Right are Pharisees.30 Much like the preceding and subsequent monthly events, the day proceeded favorably: engaged and curious questions were asked, and participants exited seeming edified. One participant, Chris, was a house church pastor in suburban Cincinnati and had been close friends with Kevin for a decade. After the event ended at 2 p.m., Chris and I spent several hours debriefing at a nearby coffee shop. It was an intense interview, primarily because Chris was bothered by Mark’s talk. Generally, he found the whole presentation “separatist,” “exclusionary,” and “narrow-minded.” Since 2001, Chris has led a network of house churches where his desire has been to “live simply” amid suburban largesse, “in the belly of the beast.” He teaches his house church that conspicuous consumption is a pervasive sin they can address as a community. He talked about house church members who are upwardly mobile in their companies and likened their experience to Old Testament figures like Joseph and Daniel, who had “success in foreign kingdoms. We can subvert it if we don’t belong to it.” Chris was critical of Mark, in part, because the extreme difficulty of avoiding “the system” went unrecognized. He offered several examples of how Mark is “implicated”: he flew on a plane from Minneapolis, he used his Mac laptop to present, and he used a bank mortgage to attain their communal house. For Chris, Mark’s “operating completely in absolutes” was a “sign of spiritual immaturity.” Mark and Chris are both emerging evangelicals. The dissonance separating their versions of authentic community helps bring into view the tension of inclusion-exclusion in evangelical social engagement. What does it mean to be countercultural? How do you change “the system”? From a historical vantage point, Mark and Chris appear to be reenacting a lasting twentieth-century debate between fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals. Should Christians separate themselves from their social surround or integrate physically in order to alter it ideologically? As with the tension of temporality, questions of inclusion and exclusion frame the broader project of fusing personal and public transformations. And like the case of gender inclusivity pointing to a structural sensibility, we must account for how folk theories of agency and change are operative among emerging evangelicals. For Mark, public transformation is unlikely at the macrolevel; “the empire” will destruct before it changes. Meaningful change is only truly possible at the local level and will happen when Christian communities (i.e., house churches) bridge personal and neighborhood transformation. For Chris, a similar transformative weight is placed on Christian community, but the extent of potential change is different. Through changed individuals, his Josephs and Daniels, the system can eventually be rewritten so long as the script originates locally. oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 46 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 47 In my work with emerging evangelicals, these are the questions, tensions, and internal debates fueling social engagement. One finding I consider especially revealing is the way in which the new evangelical social engagement incites familiar evangelical tropes (how to be in the world, but not of it) and dilemmas (how to manage cultural separation). FORMED is an instructive example because it resonates with the broader trend of refusing divisions such as inner-outer, personal-social, and private-public. Transevangelical projects open a space to talk of monastic vows as a strategy for social change and neighborhood transformation as an enactment of personal faith.31 While platforms and agendas are indeed shifting—broadening to human trafficking and sustainable development, for example—the future of evangelical social engagement will not unfold according to issue. It will unfold along the kinds of contours that shaped the production and consumption of FORMED. not e s 1. Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2. Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 3. Omri Elisha, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 4. James S. Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 5. John Drane, “Editorial: The Emerging Church,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 6 (2006): 3–11. 6. George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117. 7. Luke Eric Lassiter, “Collaborative Ethnography,” AnthroNotes 25 (2004): 1–14. 8. For an elaborated explanation of these five tracks see Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals, 10–16. 9. Elisha, Moral Ambition, 7–8. 10. Keith H. Basso, “Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape,” 53–90, in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996); James S. Bielo, “Purity, Danger, and Redemption: Notes on Urban Missional Evangelicals,” American Ethnologist 38 (2011): 267–80. 11. For a detailed analysis of the competing kingdom theologies among emerging evangelicals, see Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals, 138–56. Briefly, the “already, but not yet” asserts that God’s kingdom was introduced by Jesus but will remain incomplete and unfulfilled until the Second Coming. As a result, oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 47 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN recent evangelical movements and trends 48 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. kingdom realities like divine healing are possible but not assured. The “kingdom now” theology asserts that God’s kingdom was ushered in fully with the New Testament reported event of the Jewish temple destruction in a.d. 70. “Kingdom now” is also referred to as “fulfilled eschatology” and “Preterism.” I reference these competing kingdom theologies here only to make the point that they embed models of temporality and agency. Jon Bialecki, “Disjuncture, Continental Philosophy’s New ‘Political Paul,’ and the Question of Progressive Christianity in a Southern California Third Wave Church,” American Ethnologist 36 (2009): 35–48. Susan Harding, “Revolve, The Biblezine: A Transevangelical Text,” 176–93, in The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism, ed. James S. Bielo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). Harding, “Revolve,” 181. Norwood’s local economy still suffers from the 1987 closing of a General Motors automotive factory. The outward aesthetic bares this impress. Houses are run-down: crooked and broken fences, chipping paint, cracked windows, few attempts at outward beautification. Streets are uninviting: trash scattered along curbs, rusty and bent road signs, potholes and eroding asphalt. Cars are categorically tattered, modest, and older—nothing glitzy or ostentatious. Yet, Norwood is lively because it is a lived-in place. Children play on sidewalks when days are not dampened by rain. Mothers push strollers. Older men and women sit in expired lawn chairs, idling or observing. Men congregate on corner pub stoops to smoke and talk. Demographically, the neighborhood is predominantly working-poor and lower-middle-class whites, most with kinship ties to central Appalachia from successive waves of migration following the steep decline in coal-mining employment. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]). E. Paul Durrenberger, “Explorations of Class and Consciousness in the U.S.,” Journal of Anthropological Research 57 (2001): 41–60. Elisha, Moral Ambition. Elisha, Moral Ambition, 104. Elisha, Moral Ambition, 108. Elisha, Moral Ambition, 109. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” 51–77, in Untying the Text, ed. R. Young (London: Routledge, 1981). John P. Bartkowski, The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Tanya Erzen, “Testimonial Politics: The Christian Right’s Faith-Based Approach to Marriage and Imprisonment,” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 991–1015; Sally K. Gallagher, oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 48 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Aug 26 2013, NEWGEN “FORMED”: Emerging Evangelicals Navigate Two Transformations 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 49 Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (N ew York: HarperCollins, 1998). Jane Guyer, “Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Microeconomic, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time,” American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 410. Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell; Amy Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Joel Robbins, “Secrecy and the Sense of an Ending: Narrative, Time, and Everyday Millenarianism in Papua New Guinea and in Christian Fundamentalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001): 525–51. The several ellipses in this example mark where Dave goes off script, annotating his prepared outline. None of this improvising added substantially to or challenged anything that appears here. Taylor Clark, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture (New York: Little Brown, 2007). William Roseberry, “The Rise of Yuppie Coffees and the Reimagination of Class in the United States,” American Anthropologist 98 (1996): 762–75. James S. Bielo, Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 47–72. Harding, “Revolve.” oxfordhb-9780199329533.indd 49 8/26/2013 1:31:11 PM