Evangelicals and Mennonites and Anglicans (oh my)!

Elliot and Diedre have both posted recently about Mennonites and Evangelicals, and it got me thinking.

I met Jeremiah on the bus recently. He had some things to say about the Church—about where it is going and where it has been.

Jeremiah is in his late fifties. He’s missing a few teeth, and his breath is unpleasant. His grammar is flawed and his logic is questionable. He’s in love with Jesus. As we rode the bus together, he told me earnestly about the Anglican church, and how it is failing in its mandate to witness to the world. He told me about a preacher he knew who believed in miracles and preached about life-changing faith. He told me about God's work in the church.

I've spent a lot of time in the past few years with people who would call themselves intellectuals. CMU was my church when I first came to Winnipeg, and it has constituted almost my entire experience with Mennonites. Through CMU, I gained a lot of respect for the Mennonite church. At CMU I found people who took their faith seriously, who thought deeply about the challenges of Christian faith, and about how we should live in light of that faith. I found people who argued passionately a Christian ecological stewardship of this earth. I found people who for intelligent and complex reasons were convinced that God calls us to make peace in every way, and that as Christians pacifism is a necessity.

I also found people for whom "Was Hitler redeemable?" and "Is an American soldier redeemable?" are questions of equivalent difficulty, and the strong instinctive answer to both is "no". I found people who look down their noses at "stupid fundamentalists", who exhibit a hostility which is difficult to call by any name other than hatred for people who take the Bible literally. I was introduced to a two churches (MB and MC Canada) with so much hostility for each other that I was surprised that they had any left for the rest of the world. But they did. I found people who, in between statements on pacifism and reconciliation breathed venom for the Billy Graham and divided their own churches. I found people who would have utter disdain for Jeremiah and his kind of Christianity.

My church now is St. Margaret's Anglican. It contitutes most of my experience with the Anglican church. In the Anglican church I found people with a love of the sacramental mysteries, who feel that there is more in heaven and on earth than is dreamt of on our philosophy. I found people with a deep respect for the symbolism of the church. I found a church that produces art and literature. I found a litergy with generations worth of insight and wisdom written into it, and a church structure that is carefully and intelligently designed to be meaningful on more levels than we may be aware of. At St. Margaret's I found preaching of a kind I'd never experienced before, intellectually challenging and engaging. David quotes the Bible and Barth and Luther and Augustine and Plato and Bonhoffer, and other people I would never have heard of at the AGC church I grew up in. People whose names I probably still wouldn't recognize if I hadn't been to CMU for four years. At St. Margaret's I found people who engage their faith on an intellectual level, and who truely try to love the Lord their God with all thier mind.

And I've found a church that teaches (implicitly, mind you) that education improves a person's worth. I've found a church where intellectual posturing and condescention are par for the course. I've found people who genuinely believe that if you haven't read Barth's dogmatics then you are failing in your mandate as a Christian. I've found people who are sure that our salvation lies in our ability to think through theological problems. I've found people with utter disdain for fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. St. Margaret's allows itself to be evangelical in theory by thinking of themselves as smart evangelicals, and behind our smiles we laugh at the stupid people who think that the world was created in seven days.

But Christ does not teach smug satisfaction. Christ teaches love. Jesus was much harder on the intellectual elite than he was on the uneducated. And demononational rivalry is the great shame of the Christian church. We are one body. Evangelicals and Fundamentalists also serve in the body of Christ.

Theology is important. An intellectual engagement with God and with his Christ is important. Pacifism and social conciousness is important. But all this is not the Gospel, and no one will be saved by their theology, or by their works. Salvation comes from God, not from us.

Both Mennonites and Anglicans have failed and continue to fail. As do Fundamentalists and Baptists and Presyterians and Pentacostals. This doensn't make them hypocrates, though. It is possible to believe in something and still fail to live up to it. It's called "sin", and it's what we should expect.

And salvation comes from God. It comes for Mennonites and for Anglicans. It came for Jeremiah, and it comes for me.

Halleluia