Some may remember, from my earlier posts, my colleague D. D is about to retire and is an outspoken member and critic of a Very Large Southern Denomination.
A while back, on a teacher work day, D wandered into my classroom and said, “I’m reading a book by a guy with really fuzzy theology.”
It turned out he was talking about Brian McLaren. “Oh,” I said. “I’m reading a book by him, too, one called A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN, for my Sunday school class.”
“Yep, I’ve read that one, too,” he said. (Actually, it sounded like he’d read most of McLaren’s books.) “And they haven’t thrown your class out of the church yet?” He quoted the bumper sticker motto of his denomination: “‘The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.’ Not much room for fuzziness there.”
He talked more, about the dogmatism of his fellow Very Large Southern Denomination-ists, specifically a missions group concerned with feeding the poorest of the poor in Africa, who, in a spirit of grave concern, were tied up in knots because the miller who offered to grind for free the corn to be given away was, alas, not Christian. “Jesus didn’t say anything about that, did he?” D said. “No. He just said, ‘Feed the hungry.'”
Several weeks later D popped in again. “Kicked out of church yet?”
“No,” I said, chuckling. “But whenever we talk in Sunday school about what we don’t believe, we talk about your denomination.”
“Aw, that’s OK,” he replied. “We’re so confident in our beliefs, that won’t hurt our feelings at all.”