Notable Christians

Most of the Truly Influential Are Dead

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I'm late to this debate and it has raged better elsewhere, but Time published their list of Most Influential Evangelicals this last week. Now I am not one to let secular magazines do my thinking for me, so because it's Time I have to take anything they say with a grain of salt. But upon perusing the list I noticed a curious mix of what denotes influence. There were cases were the folks listed clearly had the ears of kingmakers and there were others that actually had the ears of real, down-to-earth Christians. Time did not make this distinction, but it is certainly worth making.

I would contend that the folks who have the ears of the the kingmakers don't wield all that much influence. There were some high-falutin' politicos and financial honchos in the list, but since the average person in the pew is not directly impacted by them, do they really have "Evangelical" influence?

Who truly does influence Evangelicals? Let me proffer a few names of folks whose impact still rings throughout Evangelical churches in America. Most of them are dead, but their thinking profoundly affects how Evangelicals live and breathe:

Clive Staples Lewis—It is possible that Lewis is still the most widely read person in Evangelical ranks (all considerations given to LaHaye/Jenkins and Warren.) I know that almost every Christian I know has read one of his books. Most refer to his books when trying to make points, so obviously Lewis mined some academic standard for Christians today if we continue to use his arguments and illustrations.

Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, et al.—The Reformers created Protestantism. There is no Evangelicalism in America without their influence and Evangelicals still refer to their writings.

Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield—Overwhelmingly influenced American Christianity in all streams through the First Great Awakening.

Jacobus Arminius, John Wesley, and Charles Finney—Call them what you will, but they are the precursors of modern Evangelicalism.

John Darby, Hal Lindsey, and Tim LaHaye—Dispensationalism rules in Evangelical ranks, sweeping aside almost every other eschatological view. I believe that Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth is only eclipsed by the Bible in total sales since it was released in the early 1970s, popularizing the Rapture and focus on the Middle East. LaHaye (on Time's list) pushed the envelope even further with the astonishing success of the Left Behind series. He may have indoctrinated more Americans in Dispensationalism than even Lindsey.

Eugene Peterson—The effect of The Message cannot be underestimated in Evangelicalism. I may be the only person I know that doesn't have a copy of this (outlandish) paraphrase. It has supplanted the traditional translations for more people than I can count. Given some of the theological issues with this work, its ultimate legacy cannot be underestimated.

Charles Darwin—Not a Christian, but certainly his theories have torn Evangelicalism in a number of directions, all of them disheartening. That most Christians operate solely from a naturalistic worldview is damaging to the cause of Christ.

James Dobson—He's on the Time list. I will reserve comments at this time, but his influence cannot be underestimated. When he teamed with Bill Bennett, they almost singlehandedly created the homeschooling movement that has become enormous to Evangelicals.

Norman Vincent Peale—The Power of Positive Thinking author's offspring can be seen in almost every Evangelical megachurch today. Schuller, Warren, and Hybels all owe their ministries to Peale. He singlehandedly made psychology palatable to Evangelicals. We will be undoing his damage for years to come.

George Barna—A current figure and oddly not on Time's list. I've heard enough pastors quote him in the last fifteen years to know that our church leaders are reading Barna religiously. However, his actual influence through his demographic studies is debatable since he's been publishing disturbing facts for years without many taking them to heart. On the other hand, Barna is a big proponent of running churches like businesses, and we've all witnessed how much this has influenced church leaders—so he's got to stay, but for the wrong reason.

Henry Ward Beecher—The well-known abolitionist voiced radical thoughts far beyond just attacking slavery. His was a soft, almost effeminate Christianity and his ideas have been co-opted for much of the weepy-eyed Evangelicalism we see on display today. He was Bill Hybels and John Wimber rolled into one and his idea of what constitutes Evangelicalism predominates in Praise & Worship-oriented churches.

Dwight Moody—His influence is lessening even as Beecher's increases, but Moody is the rock upon which many of the more vocal opponents of Evangelical concessions to worldly living build.

Oral Roberts—For the portion of Evangelicalism that considers itself charismatic, Roberts singlehandedly made charismatic theology popular. His influence is so far reaching that almost all 21st century charismatic streams must pass through Tulsa, OK at some point. He spawned Hagin, Copeland, and enough well-known imitators to fill a stadium.

Martin Luther King, Jr.—The social justice branch of Evangelicalism (as represented by Jim Wallis and Sojourners) still worship at the church Dr. King founded. It is not possible to engage this group of Evangelicals without ultimately tracing their theology and methodologies back to King.

As you well notice, most of the people on this list (save for Barna, Peterson, LaHaye, Lindsey, and Dobson) are deceased, but their views live on, continuing to influence Evangelicalism for better or for worse. If we want to talk about real influence, they cannot be ignored, since most people in the seats in Evangelical churches are making decisions based on what these men said or did, whether those pew-dwellers know it or not.

Your take? Do you think I'm right or nuts? Let me know and tell me who you think I left out.

Keith Green: the Prophet Still Speaks

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I will readily admit that I do not do a good enough job of promoting other Christian blogs. I have a few links at the right, but Cerulean Sanctum has pretty much just been my views.

Hoping to make this blog a better portal to excellent Christian material (while also—hopefully—keeping my own discourse here sharp), I want to direct people to one of the best blogs I know of, Paradoxology, run by Chris Monroe, better known as Desert Pastor. The topics he posts are routinely hot potatoes within the Christian world and in need of good analysis. The dialog that results is almost always thought-provoking and all over the map of belief. I always come away from Paradoxology better than I went in.

Today, the topic is the nature of prophetic ministries, specifically taking a look at Keith Green’s: Paradoxology: Prophetic Aftershocks, part 1 (will pop a new window.)

Keith Green has had a huge impact on my life even though I was unimpressed with him before his death. Only after that fateful plane crash twenty-two years ago did Green’s ministry start to hit me between the eyes. I know it’s odd, but his death completely changed my perspective on his life and music. I now wish I had had the opportunity to see him in concert before he was taken away from us.

Here’s my comments on Green over at Paradoxology:

…and still no one today is making the kind of music Keith Green was blessing us with 25 years ago.

Keith GreenI am the Christian I am today largely because of Keith Green and the band of people he ran with. He was Emergent before there was such a thing. He was an ordained Vineyard pastor back in the early days of that influential movement, but he kept one foot rooted in the great preachers of the faded past. Green introduced me to Leonard Ravenhill’s writings and preachings, and Ravenhill pointed me to A.W. Tozer and the history and wealth of the Welsh Revival.

Green has always been a “love him or leave him” figure in the Church. While his voice is definitely prophetic, if you read his biography you realize that much of Green’s prophetic ire was directed back at himself. He never lashed out at the complacency of the sleeping church without a keen sense that he was just as asleep as everyone else. Call him a prophet with feet of clay, but his stern call to something better than what we were/are experiencing in the life of the Church in America is unmitigated, nonetheless. We would do well to wake up, just as he said.

Green brought streams of Christianity together, too. He incorporated the holiness movement, the charismatic movement, the Jesus People movement, the missionary movement, the worship movement, and old-fashioned tent revivalism into one foundation. I can’t think of anyone in recent memory who was able to pull off this feat so well. That we lost him at so young an age, and eventually watched the ministry he founded go adrift, is a loss that has not been overcome yet.

Lastly, and this is almost a minor aside, but Green wrote music for adults. He and Rich Mullins, also tragically lost too young, wrote music for people who wrestled with life and faith, not for popsters and teenyboppers. I heard “Asleep in the Light” played on the local Christian radio station at 3AM a couple days ago, 3AM being the only time they could get away with playing it without offending anyone. What a sad comment on where Christianity is today. Oh that our music was more offensive and less pancreas-destroying!

Thanks for noticing how important Green still is. Hopefully this generation will look up his works and take them to heart.

Desert Pastor’s singling out of Green as the start of a series on modern-day prophets is a good beginning. I hope you will all surf over to Paradoxology and not only check out this new series of posts but the rest of the conversation, too.

“Eat His Body, Drink His Blood”

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Christians today think that the worship song “revolution” that we are experiencing is something new. But for those of us who have been firmly planted on the Earth while it has gone ’round the sun forty times or more, this trend is nothing new.

Catholics like Ray Repp brought a new folk mentality to worship music around the time of Vatican II. This trickled over into Protestant churches a few years later, especially within liturgical denominations. Songs like “I Am the Resurrection,” “Lord of the Dance,” “Pass It On,” and “They’ll Know We are Christians By Our Love” all were big hits when I was growing up in the Sixties. We sang them regularly as kids and even saw a few of them creep into the adult services in the Lutheran churches I was a part of at the time.

Despite the fact that I routinely sang Larry Norman’s “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” the one song that always seemed the strangest to me was “Sons of God”:

Sons of God, hear his holy Word,
Gather ’round the table of the Lord,
Eat His body, drink His blood,
And we’ll sing a song of love,
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!

As a young person, I found this song (very Catholic, but heartily sung in our Lutheran church at the time) always hinted at a mystery far beyond what I understood whenever the communion meal was served. But now that I am older, I find the whole thing very eerie.

As I mentioned, I grew up Lutheran. And despite the fact that no one in the Lutheran Church today will agree on this, I was taught a consubstantiation position on communion. This differs from the Catholic transubstantiation in that the bread and wine were not “magically” transformed into the body and blood of Christ before the communicant partook of the elements, but rather “something mystical” happened to those elements after they were consumed. At least that is how I understood all this in my younger days.

Later, I wound up in the Presbyterian Church. I found that their take on communion—simply a remembrance done out of the command of Christ—to be highly lacking in any sense of the transcendent, unlike my Lutheran experience. This is not to say that I grasped what I’d been taught, but the evasiveness of responses to my pressing questions to older Lutherans was bothersome. I never did get a complete handle on the Lutheran view, and if any five Lutherans of varying ages were pulled off the street in your town today, they’d all have a different take on communion, I’m certain.

Now I am not of the cannibalistic sort, but despite the fact that I’d probably get a knot in my stomach singing “Sons of God” today, something has been lost in evangelical and charismatic ranks when it comes to communion. I’d love to see us come to some higher treatment of the communion meal. It deserves more than we are giving it.

I am firmly convinced that in many ways we have simplified too greatly the entire idea of communion. A complete meal hosted in the home is more what I hope to see, and some house churches have gone this way, but I also hold out hope that an invocation and celebration of the wine and bread would entail more than the casualness we bring to it. We have lost too much mystery in our meetings, and where better to restore it than in communion?

What is your take on communion? What are your reminiscences and joys over the communion meal? What would you like to see done differently? And lastly, do you feel that we have lost something in the transcendence of the meal itself?

Blessings!