Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog

Jason,
I deeply appreciate your thoughts on the body. I've begun lately to view one fundamental aspect of the church as a body of people who don't like each other or get along. Where else in our culture or world do we have the opportunity to try to be family with people we don't like? This is the raw side of love, loving when we don't "like" (which might end up changing our ideas about what we like and don't like). The church gives us plenty of opportunities to learn this essential part of following Jesus, and calling ourselves "Christian" lays claim to this hard work.

I've just written a bit about this story (or at least mentioned it) over at astatum.net.

It appears to me that the name swapping going on in much of Western Christianity - emerging, evangelical, Jesus follower, etc. - is indicative of a much larger crisis of imagination. Evangelicals - or Christians in general - in the West (and America in particular) have a hard time identifying what it is about how we live and think and believe that is particularly Christian. The moniker Jesus follower thus becomes an attempt to be "distinctively Christian" without actually having to change anything about how we live. The deception is that calling oneself a Jesus follower makes it easier to follow Jesus without actually having to do so (which is evident by the apparent necessity of divisiveness and differentiation between various warring Christian "camps").

Jason, I like your energy around this topic! I do think you are onto something about recovering meaning in our language. It's so very important to imbue words with richness, especially one as important as Christian. I was recently in a meeting with leaders of a health movement where they realized their solution (hospice) wasn't the ultimate goal, but a name for a way of care that was provided in the last acts of life. Their ultimate goal was about flourishing, and sometimes the name got in the way, or worse, meant something scary to the audience. Do they give up the name or do they renew its meaning. Likewise, I've seen in several places that "reconciliation" is also a word that needs recovered meaning. I applaud you working through what that meaning looks like, and giving us a deeper way of looking at what Christian means. Bravo!

Thanks Allegra!
And thanks to Andrew Tatum. The examples on your blog are even better ones of companies that have acted heinously trying to get distance from those actions by changing their name. I think there's something more with the effort to pry loose space from the word "Christian"--an anti-institutional sentiment that wants to have Jesus as a loner over against Israel or Church. And that's the move I don't want to let others get away with.

There's also an implicit vanity in saying, "I'm not a Christian but a Jesus-follower." It implies that the Christians are therefore not Jesus followers. Or at the very least, that the Christians are lagging a few steps behind the Jesus-followers, dragged down by heavy buildings, budgets and some embarrassing history. The Jesus-follower gets to travel lite.

I actually saw this portrayed in a such a demeaning way that I wanted to punch whoever made the videos. Floating around the net is a "Christian vs. Christ-Follower" spoof of the "Mac vs. PC" commercials. As you can imagine, the Christian is a white dufus and the Christ-follower is a young white rocker.

This is all about branding. We think we can get inroads with outsiders (or however you want to brand "non-Christians") if we distance ourselves from everything perceived as Christian: Crusades, suits in worship, hymns, pews, etc. It's very trendy in some perverse way to do evangelism by bashing other Christians. This is a very old game I think ("Nestorian!" "Monophysite!" "Arian!").

But you're right: we're one body, like it or not.

What everybody else said. I'm a mainline stick-in-the-mud and probably immune to reason on this topic, but it sometimes strikes me that independent churches take an unfair shortcut: by "freeing" themselves from the calamitous history of the church, however they define that calamity, they are able to test-market doctrines and labels and forms of worship as if they were Procter & Gamble.

One of the distinguishing marks of American Protestantism is its capacity for spawning new tendrils off the vine of the historic faith. Witness the proliferation of denominations claiming Wesley as their father. While this may be viewed as energetic and reformative, it can also be seen as the chuch's uncritical appropriation of the American fascination with novelty. Neo-evangelicals emerged in the late 1950's as "new and improved" Fundamentalists, leaving behind the more unsavory elements of the sawdust trail. Seen in this context, Christ Followers are not bold and innovative, but solidly -- and stolidly -- in thrall to an American cultural tradition which may owe more to secular impulses than to a firm grounding in the incarnation.

Jason, thanks for your thoughts here. I do understand the impulse behind "Jesus-followers," especially with the resonances "Christian" brings to mind for many people : see the new book, "Un-Christian," where "judgmental, antihomosexual, and "hypocritical" are the words that the unchurched most often associate with the church. Even so, something in this notion of name change reminds me of how the now-infamous Blackwater security corporation recently changed its name do "Xe" ("Z") because of its "image-problem" following the murder of Iraqi civilians. Also, I wonder if "Jesus-follower" doesn't subtly suit our inclination to think that we are just following the teachings of a great dead Rabbi named Jesus, rather than being changed from inside out by the living, surprising, unpredictable presence of Christ within us. "Christian" at least suggests that not only do we follow Christ, but we become a different identity, a little Christ. In the end, it seems to me that the way out of this dilemma isn't a name change, but a rededication to be defined by love: "see how they love!"

Here's a link to some of those Mac vs. PC videos: http://simplyecclesia.com/2008/05/20/i-am-a-christ-follower-mac-versus-p...

Jason and the rest of you raise some excellent points. Thanks! If I remember my church history correctly, bad reputations were attached to Christians from the very beginning - they were called cannibals (eating Jesus' flesh and blood), unpatriotic (refusing to worship Caesar), or atheist (worshiping some itinerant preacher rather than the "accepted" gods), etc. Interestingly, those who chose to forsake their commitment to their identification as Christians were considered back-sliders from genuine faith, or worse. This was not judgmental, either, so far as I read history. It was an attempt to recognize that to forsake one's identification with the rest of the Christian Body constituted faithlessness to her Lord. While I would commend folks for rethinking traditions for the sake of the lost, I think forsaking apparent identity with Christianity goes a bit too far. Or maybe more than a bit...

Great line, "A new member is healthy tissue grafted onto a wound." That is a fine image and worthy of contemplation as we round the corner to Golgotha.

This is a great conversation within our Christian club. What is striking to me, both in reading "unChristian" and in conversation with young adults labeled 'outsiders' in the book, is how easy it is for us Christians to stand on principle while so many go about their business totally (often intentionally) oblivious to an out-of-touch church. Just the other night, one of our newly connected twenty-somethings was talking about this very thing--that he prefers to think of himself as a Jesus-follower rather than a Christian. This may be an important distinction to honor in this postmodern time when many prefer to belong before they buy in to all of our beliefs. This isn't to reject the importance of doctrine or the high ecclesiology I learned at Duke. I wonder, though, if in the newly acknowledged missionary field framed by postmodernity in the U.S. we might be able to stomach some lenience. This may be particularly important for all those who find it difficult to connect our Savior with the "way" followed by so many presumably saved. That said, I think it important for our new catechetical work (whatever that comes to look like) to include an emphasis on the believer's connection with the church universal, i.e. all of us Christians.

Good points all and not to be dismissed. On the other hand, this critique focuses mainly on folks avoiding the label "Christian" as a way of distancing themselves from the institutional church or historic actions of Christians, or certain specific groups.

I think a different, equally common reason is to avoid being identified with the nominally "Christian" culture of the West...not the church, but Babylon wearing a Jesusy hat. In other words, we might identify as Christ-followers (or similar terms) in times and places where "Christian" just means that, during December, you sing about Santa Claus instead of driedles. Or where "Christian" is just a synonym for "American", or whatever.

Jason, I love your insight on the issue of detaching from the body. However, the question is whether or not the institutional church is indeed Christ's church. From what I read in scripture, I can't imagine Christ having any desire to be the Head of this body we humans refer to as the church. Meeting in 'temples,' Bible schools and degrees, hierarchy, worrying about petty legalistic details, guilt-ridden, work-driven...these are attributes we find in our churches, which are the same as Christ's nemesis, the Scribes and Pharisees.

I suppose we have a very different view of the church. Any effort to go find the "right" one winds back up in the same place--with a new batch of mediocre people. Christians call it "sin." And Jesus does indeed seem to have a penchant for spending time with sinners.