My Theology is Getting More Complex – My Faith Is Growing More Simple

On Thursday evening I engaged with a long thread of discussion on my Facebook page about a post made by a popular author by the name of Jim Palmer. Jim lives in Nashville and is a former evangelical pastor who left the pastoral ministry several years ago. He writes some helpful and genuinely provocative stuff. I have not read his three primary books, two published by Nelson and one by a private publisher, but I have read a number of reviews of them. Most comments on Amazon are glowing and demonstrate his popularity. A few come from the far right and talk about “new age” tendencies and other such nonsense. I have honestly sought to get a handle on what he, and his particular writing, is about. I’m still not quite sure what Jim is doing but I am getting a clearer sense over the last 48 hours or so. From what I’ve read, at least up to this point, Palmer mixes his painful experience of the religion of “ought and should” (my words) with his very bad experience of church. In the process he protests against this painful journey in evocative and honest ways that resonate with many. He sees the failure of the contemporary church writ large. Here is where I agree with him. But what is he actually offering in the place of this flawed system of religion, as he calls it, and intolerably bad church life? This is where I grow uneasy. He sounds like a number of so-called “emergent” writers who believe in the love of God but do not see how to actually love the visible, flawed and imperfect church in our present age. I get it. The church is living in a very messy time. Christendom is breaking up on the shoals of secularism and post-modern realities that are not going away in the near future. Like Luther I think we have entered a time we might call the “Babylonian Captivity.” (There are thoughts here that I hope to explore in 2013). What I cannot understand is this–how you can love Jesus and not also love the church, all of it? To love Jesus means to love his people, expressing life together (or even death) in various church forms.We can argue about the forms but we cannot reject the church as the people of God gathering under the Word and celebrating the sacraments given to them by Christ. This is why I call my perspective missional-ecumenism; e.g. John 17:21. I love Jesus and I love his church; cf. John 13:34-35.

I wrote a friend to ask him if he had read Jim’s work and what comments he could offer to give me more perspective. He responded most helpfully and then confirmed what I’ve seen by reading the posts of this talented and able former pastor. (Did you know that 9 of 10 persons who enter the pastorate will not retire from the pastorate?) My friend expressed that he too was leery of Jim’s message for the same reasons that he is leery of the whole “Emergent” crowd . . . . “