From Seeker-Friendliness to Fundamentalism

forth. I preferred to attend churches that did not sully the worship experience with earthly things such as ornate Communion tables, pictures of saints, or even beautiful church buildings. After all, material things are in competition with spiritual things.

Others who thought similarly surrounded me, including some who went so far as to burn down their church building. “What a powerful testimony to the fact that God’s Kingdom is not of this world,” they reflected while watching their former sanctuary go up in flames.

Thankfully, I never went so far as to personally incinerate churches. However, the various dualisms in my thinking—matter versus spirit, sacred versus secular, this world versus the next, nature versus grace—resulted in a deep distrust of institutional religion in addition to causing me to be deeply divided. It was as though my Christian faith overlaid my experience in the world, and I kept it in a separate compartment labeled “the spiritual realm.” I understood the Christian life as little more than getting saved, trying to live a life of obedience, and then waiting to get to heaven. Although I felt deeply drawn to things of this world such as art, poetry, music, and literature, I had no idea how the Logos permeated these pursuits, nor how I could pursue these domains as an outgrowth of Christian discipleship.

In my late teenage years, I began visiting different churches in a search for a more integrated approach to the faith. Ironically, even the churches that claimed to offer a more optimistic mentality toward the material world still ended up assuming a basic disjunction between the spiritual and the physical. At age nineteen, I attended a seeker-friendly church in California where the pastor believed in using anything and everything to make the gospel more attractive. This pastor, whom I will call “Pastor Hip,” had been kicked out of his

previous church after arranging for people to drive motorcycles up to the pulpit. He never tired of telling us that “we should use anything in the world unless it’s actually a sin.” (Pastor Hip, with his crude biblicism, only considered something a sin if a scripture verse explicitly forbade it.)

As parishioners of this church, we believed that Christ had come to give us abundant life, yet we conceived that abundant life as simply more of what we already had as pleasure-seeking, comfort-loving Americans. This over-realized eschatology conflated the Kingdom of God with the present order of things. Ironically, this posture of extreme earthly-mindedness ended up devaluing the material world since it took the world to be spiritually neutral, reduced to so much raw material that could be exploited for evangelistic purposes. As the goodness of the material world became entirely instrumentalized, any organic connection between the spiritual and the material was lost. By losing sight of a horizon beyond the present order of things, we lost any context for seeing how the present life could be ennobled, dignified, and exalted through participation in something beyond itself.

At the age of twenty, I left California and moved to a Bible college connected to a fundamentalist church. This church took the opposite approach from Pastor Hip: for it, the world is not the friend of faith but its relentless enemy. The contents of my dorm room were searched on two occasions to make sure I wasn’t harboring worldly substances such as jazz, rock music, or love songs. Along with the other parishioners, this church taught me a fundamentalism that denigrated culture and an anti-intellectualism that despised academia. The church used the pulpit to teach a truncated vision of the gospel with little to no understanding of how the material world might fit within God’s plans. At best, they saw the material world as spiritually neutral; at worst, they declared it the enemy of faith. They perceived new creation as a future reality that had minimal contact with the present