Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity

3. Ancient-Future I: Experiencing God [Includes Image Plates]

70 | 3 Ancient-Future I Experiencing God The December 2007 issue of U.S. News and World Report, one of a few widely circulated news periodicals reliably perched in grocery store check-out aisles, was entitled: “A Return to Ritual: why many modern worshipers , including Catholics, Jews, and evangelicals are embracing tradition .” The cover photo hints at the story’s contents: priests in formal, brightly adorned robes blessing a sacrament in front of an altar, complete with sacred texts and a white stone, winged angel (Figure 3.1). The article suggests that Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim communities are increasingly attracted to older expressions of faith. To illustrate the Evangelical incarnation , the author takes us to a nondenominational church in Texas: The congregation of Trinity Fellowship Church participates in something that would have been considered almost heretical in most evangelical Protestant churches five or ten years ago: a weekly Communion service. An independent, nondenominational church of some 600 members, Trinity Fellowship is not the only evangelical congregation . . . doing [things] that seem downright Roman Catholic or at least high Episcopalian. Two months after the U.S. News release, the feature story for Christianity Today was: “Lost Secrets of the Ancient Church: how Evangelicals started looking back to move forward.” The cover photo differs from its secular counterpart (Figure 3.2). A shovel is implanted in sand, signifying a completed excavation. A gold, Eastern Orthodox cross is mostly dug out of the sand. And a Centauresque excavator kneels by the cross: the body of an I-Pod, the head of a twenty-something white male. The article reports various ways in which Evangelical communities are “embracing tradition.” It begins with a montage of scenes from the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference , “The Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future”: Ancient-Future I | 71 They joined their voices to sing of “the saints who nobly fought of old” and “mystic communion with those whose rest is won.” A speaker walked an attentive crowd through prayers from the 5th-century Gelasian Sacramentary , recommending its forms as templates for worship in today’s Protestant churches. Another speaker highlighted the pastoral strengths of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic. Yet another gleefully passed on the news that Liberty University had observed the liturgical season of Lent. The t-word—that old Protestant nemesis, tradition—echoed through the halls. Just what was going on in this veritable shrine to pragmatic evangelistic methods and no-nonsense, back-to-the-Bible Protestant conservatism? Had Catholics taken over? (italics in original) The shared reference to Catholicism in both articles—U.S. News’s “almost heretical” nod and Christianity Today’s somewhat earnest, somewhat rhetorical take-over inquiry—is revealing. These two reports suggest that Evangelicals are worshiping God in ways that seem patently non-Evangelical. A partial list of such worship activities from my ethnographic fieldwork includes: heightened emphasis on public creedal recitation, public reading of monastic and Catholic prayers, burning incense, replacing fluorescent lighting with candles, setting early Protestant hymns to contemporary music, chanting Eastern Orthodox prayers, using icons, creating prayer labyrinths, following the church calendar for sermons and lectionary readings, using lectio divina to read the Bible, and increasing the role of silence. What do we make of all this? We begin with these two mass-produced moments to establish that by 2008 “ancient-future” had entered the Evangelical mainstream. It was no longer merely an ideal promoted by scattered theologians, such as Robert Webber, but had become a widespread phenomenon that legitimated front page news. We observed earlier that ancient-future is an integral part of the Emerging movement’s genealogy, and in this chapter we examine the cultural work performed around this trope with respect to an enduring question that confronts all Christians and Christianities: what is the best way to experience God? For Emerging Evangelicals, ancient-future performances tell us a great deal about the intersection of religious experience, mediation, and late modernity. Presence and Mediation in Evangelical Subject Formation In the previous chapter we considered one response to the anxiety of mediation : the strategic use of irony. Ancient-future worship demonstrates a different response: the strategic use of varied semiotic channels for religious expe- 72 | Figure 3.1. U.S. News and World Report cover, December 2007. | 73 Figure 3.2. Christianity Today cover, February 2008. 74 | Ancient-Future I rience. This phenomenon—“embracing tradition” and remembering “lost secrets of the ancient church”—is one...