Family

In light of my recent blogs that have critiqued the contemporary evangelical church culture, I thought it would be prudent to affirm my loyalty to the evangelical church. As my previous posts have indicated I do have concerns regarding our worship of the system, our passivity in society, and our condemnation (I use this in traditional sense of "damning people to hell") of others. Despite these disagreements I remain committed to the evangelical church.

I have grown up in the evangelical church, it has been my ecclesiological family of orientation for 20+ years. Over those years I have been exposed to other Christian traditions and have developed a deep appreciation for the faith in Christ that they have emulated in their lives and theology. It has been a joy to engage in cross-traditional dialogue. There are many things within these various traditions that are appealing and that we, as evangelicals, can learn from. As a result of this exposure I have found myself having to avoid two extremes of the reactionary pendulum. At one end of the pendulum is an evangeocentrism (evangelical ethnocentrism), where I reject anything that is not common in our evangelical community. At the other end is an unquestioning embrace, where it does not matter what someone believes, as long as they believe something. At one end we find rigidness and 0stracizing, while at the other we find a nebulous of ambiguity.

As I attempt to avoid these extremes I live in relationship with my family. My extended ecclesiological family is much bigger than the evangelical church. My family includes, liberals, conservatives, fundamentalists. It includes Protestant, Mainliners, Catholics, and Orthodoxs. At family reunions I will see this extended family, and in the everyday I live with my ecclesiological family of orientation. As with most families, there will be arguments, perhaps shouting matches. I might even at times storm off to my room and slam the door, but the evangelical church is my family, disagreements and all; and you don't give up on family.