THE GOSPEL IS NOT ENOUGH

When I would get into fights with my mom as a teenager, I would angrily remind her of how good she had it, that other kids were out doing drugs all night. Of course, she would wring her hands and apologise. I’m just kidding, Asian mothers never apologise. She just rolled her eyes and told me that compared to the kids who were on their way to becoming doctor astronauts, I wasn’t even close. She was right, I was no Jonny Kim. I quit Calculus the first week I tried it because I didn’t understand a word of it, and I was too busy playing Sims to have time for drugs or doctor astronaut ambitions. Sometimes, I think back to this habitual argument I had with my mom when I think about my relationship to the church, particularly the Reformed faith. They tell me, “Hey, at least we’re not a cult! We can’t be a cult because we take the Bible literally!” They look at the bottom of the Christian barrel and see heresy and tell people to be careful because it’s either the Reformed faith or the cult life. And if what they say and teach sounds harsh, unloving, or unjust, it is because it is either that or heresy. If the Christians in that church are harsh, unloving, or unjust, at least they are right.

I went to a church called Redeemer Fellowship in Kansas City, Missouri for 4 years. I loved it. There was something magical about Redeemer. Situated in an old church with stained glass in the middle of midtown KC, they mixed old and new in ways I had never experienced before. I grew up sleeping in the church pews as a little kid, both Southern Baptist and Pentecostal and I wrongly thought I knew all there was to church. Redeemer was something else. It was my first experience with liturgy. It was my first experience with getting marked by ash on Ash Wednesday. It was my first experience with the motions and mysticism of high church. Their hymns were different too. There was no Hillsong, no Vineyard. They sang old prayers set to cellos and trumpets. But, they also aimed for theological accuracy, dedicating months to go through a book of the Bible in careful exegesis. They were a unique blend of the aesthetics of mystical high church, so foreign to natives of the Reformed faith, and conservative evangelical theology. They weren’t going to rush people into an emotional frenzy by singing the contemporary Hillsong hymns with their worship crescendos and on-cue hand raises like other churches. They were going to lead the congregation through an intentional, liturgical confession of sins and acceptance of forgiveness, and if it was unpopular then so be it. Redeemer wasn’t just counter-cultural to the dominant American culture, but they were counter-cultural to evangelical church culture.

And people loved it. Redeemer grew from a few hundred members to a few thousand in a matter of years. They were their own mini, very hip, version of Willow Creek, right in the urban part of Kansas City. They have now grown up to 3 church locations. Unlike Willow Creek’s embrace of suburban mall aesthetic, Redeemer embraced something much older and traditional. It projected a feeling of authenticity impossible to find in the white-washed suburbs. Ironically, they were able to do the white-washing right in the city, right under our nose. The thing with authenticity is that you it lures you into a comfort and safety that belief seems natural and suspicion seems crazy. Though they were located in a very diverse and struggling part of KC, the majority of people in the congregation looked as young, white, and privileged as Urban Outfitters or Anthropologie catalogue models. There was even less diversity in leadership or perhaps there was no diversity in the congregation because there was no diversity in leadership. While I was there, Redeemer Fellowship went from a pastoral team of 3 white men, Kevin Cawley, Wes Crawford, Kris McGee to a team of 12 white men and 1 black man.

It was easy to get swept up in the culture and message of Redeemer though because of Kevin Cawley, one of the head pastors. He is a great orator. Emotional, charismatic, dramatic. He had it all. Redeemer didn’t need Hillsong or Vineyard to move people because they had Cawley. Dressed every Sunday in glasses, leather boots, untucked button-up plaid and Baldwin denim jeans, he looked like every other KC cool guy around town. When he said things like, we are called to heterosexual relationships because it would be too easy to love your own gender, therefore it would be selfish to be gay; men and women are so different, we are forced to learn to love each other through our differences, young people nodded in understanding. Or when he said, male leadership was not about sexism as he had once had a female boss, but about needing a single leader, just as there could only be a single boss, therefore wives should submit to their husbands and let the men cast vision for their family, and let the all-male leadership in the church lead the way, young people only nodded. Or when Michael Brown was shot in 2014 and the Ferguson protests were happening only 4 hours away, Redeemer encouraged prayer for peace in the city and wisdom for the police, but never said Black Lives Matter or acknowledged America’s systemic racism at play. Instead what they said was: Only God can save us. Only God can heal us. Only God can deliver us. Were we even listening to the words he said or just floating along on the cadence and drama of his delivery? But it was exegesis, and we were taking two years to go through 1 Corinthians, who were we to question it? Were we confusing their confidence in being right as actually being right? Somehow Cawley was able to wrap everything up into the Gospel message and end the sermon in a call to prayer every Sunday. We are sinners in need of saving, unable to save ourselves. Jesus is God, and he came to save us because he loves us. Jesus lived and died as a man. He rose from death on the third day. It is only through Jesus we are saved. Redeemer was teaching the Gospel so surely everything else they were saying was Biblical too, and as long as it was Biblical, it was right. Wasn’t it?

Except the Gospel isn’t enough. Just like it isn’t enough to pray for God to heal cancer and avoid the doctor, it isn’t enough to just study the Bible and pray for racial healing or housing insecurity or poverty or hunger. It isn’t enough to tell people the Gospel or to know a lot of Scripture or obsess over having right theology. In Romans, Paul reminds the Romans that it was God’s kindness that led them to repentance. And God’s active kindness is recorded all throughout the Gospels. When a rich, socially ostracised man name Zaccheus climbed a tree to get a better look at Jesus, Jesus didn’t pray for him. Jesus didn’t tell Zaccheus he would put in a good word for him with his father, God in Heaven, and walk away. Jesus called him out by name in front of a crowd of people, validating him in the community that hated him. Jesus went and dined with him, honoring him in front of people who despised him. Jesus loved him when Zaccheus had lived his entire life cheating and robbing others and nobody in the community thought he deserved love. And when Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink of water at the well, she was shocked that a Jewish man would talk to her, a Samaritan, when the nationalities historically hated each other. He crossed cultural and racial boundaries because he came to eradicate them.

And this was 2,000 years ago in the Middle East, so a pretty conservative time, and Jesus knew she had been remarried 5 times and was living with a man who wasn’t her husband. He knew her story before she told him, and still validated her as a person, telling her that he knew her without a word of judgment. And when she went to the village to tell people she had met someone who knew her story even though she hadn’t told it to him, Jesus stayed at the well so when they returned, he could validate her story again in front of the crowd. And of course there is the story of the woman who was caught cheating at a time when it was normal to stone women to death for cheating. Several teachers of the temple brought this woman to Jesus, and they all waited to see what kind of teacher Jesus was. Instead he told them, “Whoever has not sinned, pick up the first stone.” Nobody picked up a stone and eventually left. He didn’t just save her life, he humiliated the leaders of the temple by making them admit to their own hypocrisy. Jesus explicitly told her, “I do not condemn you.” He told her to go and live a better life. He did not tell her how sinful she was or how grateful she should be or how much she needed saving. Jesus didn’t follow the tradition set by the temple; he actively disowned their practices for spending all their time praying and reading the Bible and running around judging people. He told them they were like beautiful pristine coffins. Shiny and perfect on the outside and full of decay and death on the inside. Since when has being right been that important to the Christian faith and why is it so important now? It is this particular need to be right that Jesus came to correct. There is a culture in the church of counter-culturalism. Be in the world, but not of it. Be different. Stand out. It took a long time for me to look at the church and wonder, since when it harshness counter-cultural? Since when is hate?