Evangelical vs Progressive Christianity

What do they actually believe?

Part one: Foundation of Faith

“I know that this bold investigation will alarm many, but it would be paying too great a compliment to their credulity to forbear it on that account. The times and the subject demand it to be done.” Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason 1794.

Moving away from my evangelical upbringing has allowed me to step back and look at Evangelism with a new perspective. While I was involved in evangelical circles it was nearly impossible to objectively examine what I was being taught. Once I started to analyze what Evangelicals actually believe, (based on their mission statements), I began to see some glaring, deeply rooted flaws.

I need to interject here that I do not hold to the beliefs of either Evangelical or Progressive Christianity. I no longer call myself a christian and therefore feel no obligation to believe any christian dogma.

Nonetheless, I was curious to see how the mission statement of a progressive church differed from the mission statement of an evangelical church. I chose one evangelical and one progressive church (both of which I have a history), went to their webpages and compared their “mission statements”.

Since both of them are Christian churches, i.e., based on the Bible, I expected to find very few, if any, differences. I was wrong… very wrong. The differences were striking. The most notable difference being their view of God and how man relates with God.

Surprisingly, what became obvious to me rather quickly was how vague, ambiguous, and unclear the evangelical mission statement was. I kept asking myself, “What do they really mean by that?” I reached out to the evangelical church to ask for clarification. One of the pastors agreed to speak with me, but the conversation proved unproductive. Perhaps I was asking questions he could not answer. I’m not sure he had ever really actually read his church’s mission statement. (I should have enquired about that at the beginning of our conversation.)

If someone is being vague or ambiguous about what they believe, it usually means that they don’t really know what they believe. And that’s what I found over and over with the evangelical mission statement. Conversely, the mission statement of the progressive church was less wordy, less ambiguous and much less vague, as we shall see.

I have divided the sections into areas of belief and compared them that way. There are nine and we shall compare one each week.

Foundation of Their Religion

Evangelical: “We are a group of people trying to figure out what it looks like to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus today. We are built on the values of presence, practice, wholeness, family, renewal, and roots. We are grounded in the lives and faith of those who have gone before us, but also, we believe Jesus has a beautiful mission for us in the present.

Progressive: We are a progressive, Christ-centered church, founded on the life, teachings, death, resurrection, and eventual return of Jesus Christ. We believe that we belong to God long before, or even if we never believe in God. God’s love is eternal, always welcoming, and does not require any transaction on our part.

Let’s take a closer look at exactly what is being said here.

Evangelical: “We are a group of people trying to figure out what it looks like to live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus today.”

“Trying to figure out…?” It appears from this statement that they believe they will be somehow pleasing to God if they could only figure that out. No wonder they’re confused. They’re trying to adapt the teachings of the first century Jesus into their modern-day world. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman gives an eye-opening evaluation of Christians who try to do that.

Jesus was a first-century Jew, and when we try to make him into a twenty-first-century American we distort everything he was and everything he stood for.”

So that’s why they’re still trying to figure this out. It’s an error of reasoning. It can’t be done. Dr. Ehrman has more to say on this issue of making Jesus a twenty-first century Christian.

Most televangelists, popular Christian preacher icons, and heads of those corporations that we call megachurches share an unreflective modern view of Jesus — that he translates easily and almost automatically into a modern idiom. The fact is, however, that Jesus was not a person of the twenty-first century who spoke the language of contemporary Christian America (or England or Germany or anywhere else). Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us, we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and for our own purposes. Jesus would not recognize himself in preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world. He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise. He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life. He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy. He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of social security, food stamps, welfare, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy), or the welfare state. So far as we know, he expressed no opinion on the ethical issues that plague us today: abortion and reproductive rights, gay marriage, euthanasia, or bombing Iraq. His world was not ours; his concerns were not ours, and—most striking of all—his beliefs were not ours. Did Jesus Exist

“His beliefs were not ours!” Let that sink in for a second. I once attended a mega-church in the suburbs of Denver. Not only did they attempt make Jesus contemporary, but they also made him a suburbanite.

Vague Beliefs:

This statement of belief offers no clarity to what they really believe.

Evangelical: “We are built on the values of presence (vague), practice (vague), wholeness (vague), family (vague), renewal (vague), and roots (vague). We are grounded in the lives and faith of those who have gone before us (vague), but also, we believe Jesus has a beautiful mission for us in the present (vague).”

What exactly does it mean to be “grounded in the lives and faith of those who have gone before us”? How would this manifest itself in their weekly services? What exactly is this “beautiful mission” they speak of? It would appear that they really have no idea. It sounds nice, but there is nothing of substance to support any of this.

Progressive

Compare this with how Progressives articulate the foundation of their beliefs.

Progressive: We are a progressive, Christ-centered church, founded on the life, teachings, death, resurrection, and eventual return of Jesus Christ. We believe that we belong to God long before, or even if we never believe in God. God’s love is eternal, always welcoming, and does not require any transaction on our part.

Comparison

The Progressive’s foundation seems to be built around the attributes of God. “We belong to God… God’s love is eternal… and does not require any transaction on our part.” Conversely, Evangelical’s foundation is built around works: “we are a group of people trying to figure out…” They must do something to earn God’s approval because it doesn’t appear to be freely given.

This paradox is something that we will see quite often in our evaluations of the evangelical mission statement. They outwardly purport that “salvation” is a gift and can not be earned by any measure of “works”. However, that is not what is found in their mission statement. We shall see that, for evangelicals, there are certain requirements that must be met in order to attain (and keep) salvation. In the words of Thomas Paine…

“Everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be. It is the reverse of truth.”  The Age of Reason.

Therefore I award a point for Progressives 1-0

Coming up next:

We will look at how each congregation views a belief in the trinity. Feel free to make your own evaluation before reading the next installment.

Part two: Belief in the Trinity

Evangelical: We believe in one God, eternally existing in three persons Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These three are identical in essence and equal in power and glory; they possess the same nature, attributes, and perfections, and are worthy of the same worship, confidence, and obedience.

Progressive:  Our theological heart and soul has been formed by a Trinitarian understanding of God as Creator, Redeemer, and Spirit. We trust the flow of God’s love toward us and toward all people as it pours out endlessly from the relationships we discover within God’s very self: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We understand this relational aspect of the Trinity as a divine dance of love originating in God long before creation.

 

From Where I Stand

Dale Crum