The Light in Our Eyes: Rediscovering the Love, Beauty, and Freedom of Jesus in an Age of Disillusionment

by Nicholas McDonald

John Stackhouse noted that “in America…evangelicals can think that they either run the country or they should. Nowhere else do evangelicals think that.”[7]

Folks in this crowd could properly be called “Deconstructing” in the sense that Yale literature professor Paul de Man (the great popularizer of the word) used it: the dismantling of previously accepted ideas because of the belief that they have no inherent meaning.

So is there something to the critique, often made of proper deconstructers, that behind their objections there lurks a simple unwillingness to follow Jesus into the hard things? To make Christian faith all about them? Maybe. Sometimes. Often.

There is no church I’m familiar with over the past 2000 years that I would be a member of if it were up to me…. Yet I have little time for the anti-church crowd who seem snobbish and who have little sense of the lived way of soul and Christ. —Eugene Peterson, quoted in A Burning in My Bones by Winn Collier

My best friend Fashion Pete left the church after my brother’s drowning accident. He told me about some really terrible things that happened to him when he was younger and said that if God wanted to fulfill people’s dreams, He was doing a real crap job of it. I couldn’t blame him. Most of my friends from Ignite also left the church. Relevance is funny like that. The more relevant you are now, the less relevant you’ll be in ten years. Or in a different culture. Or when life rocks you with tragedy. Nothing could have been less relevant to me than “relevance” in those few weeks.

Their faith was something like what Ben Sixsmith called “mainstream culture…with a twist of Christianity.”

As Bonhoeffer historian Reggie L. Williams put it, Bonhoeffer was disturbed to find that, “for American liberal Christians, much the same as it was in Germany, Christianity, civilization, and culture were nearly synonymous.”[4] Relevance isn’t Jesus’s dream. Exclusion isn’t Jesus’s dream. Those dreams are far too small. Jesus’s dreams are bigger. And better.

We do not draw people to Christ by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it. —Madeleine L’Engle, Herself

I despise that religion that can carry Bibles to the heathen on the other side of the globe and withhold them from heathen on this side—which can talk about human rights yonder and traffic in human flesh here. —Frederick Douglass, “American Slavery,” 1847

How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? —Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Secular Vocation Is Sacred” from Creed or Chaos

Growing up, I thought God wanted everyone to go to His party, called heaven, because He was vaguely mad at all of us for enjoying earth too much. So, I figured we all just kind of had to deal with God not liking our world, and if we wanted to get on His good side, we had to at least pretend to want to go to this magical play place He created called heaven. Don’t get me wrong; heaven was…fine. It was like earth, except that there was no television or macaroni and cheese, and there was nothing to do except sing in a long trance always, all the time, and if someone asked how my day was going, I might say, “Well, I’m just sort of floating around today. And you?” “Yeah, I’m floating around, just like I do always, all the time.” “Cool, cool, cool. I’ve got a float-around with Noah at three. I was going to ask him about the dinosaurs.” “Oh gosh, don’t even. He’s so sick of answering that one. I’ll give you my notes. Choir’s about to start!”

The trailer park church deepened my understanding of evangelical culture. Having grown up believing the story of escape, I can tell you it makes perfect sense—according to this story—that a pastor would take advantage of the people in his congregation and community. That is the logic of escape playing out. It makes perfect sense that when a presidential candidate comes along saying, “I’ll help you get what’s yours!” evangelicals are on him like church ladies on a casserole. It fits perfectly with the story of escape. And it’s not surprising to me that all this climaxed in an insurrection at the Capitol.

In fact, many of the causes evangelicals consider “liberal” agendas today were started by these nineteenth-century evangelicals. In her book The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior wrote, It was in large part owing to the early evangelicals that the larger society began to see human suffering in a different way—as a result of systemic injustices that could and should be eased…. They therefore set out to abolish the slave trade, educate the poor, improve conditions for laborers, and stem cruelty to animals.[3]

But this experience with Ecclesiastes was not like that at all. The book of Ecclesiastes is basically God saying, “You know, if I had your perspective, I’d be depressed too.” It was incredibly generous of God to say that. In that way, Ecclesiastes affirmed me. It named my experience, and it didn’t pull punches. That’s what I mean when I say something is just weird enough to be trusted.

We love men not because we like them, nor because their ways appeal to us, nor even because they possess some type of divine spark; we love every man because God loves him. —Dr. Martin Luther King, “Strength to Love”

When we step into the pages of the Scriptures, we’re all immigrants. —Rebecca McLaughlin, The Secular Creed

Redeemer is a larger church that I tell people is constantly trying to grow smaller. We love our Sunday morning worship, but we recognize that having a covenant with such a large community isn’t really a relationship. Sitting in the back of a worship room once a week isn’t covenant community. Online streaming isn’t covenant community. Podcasts aren’t covenant community. Covenant community is a place where we’re committed to one another and known by one another. As we seek to plant more neighborhood churches around the city (where community can be place-based and even walkable), we encourage folks to connect with their Redeemer neighbors through geographically based community groups. So even if Redeemer is too large to be my community, I still have a good, healthy-sized community of Redeemer friends in my neighborhood. Community groups help us get together. But they also, importantly, give us spaces to speak the truth in love to one another, and these are spaces where we help one another grow into our Christian freedom.

Instead, let me make a personal appeal. So very often, when older evangelicals ask what they can do to prevent deconstruction, here’s what I say: “If you want to do one single thing that will help your niece, grandson, or children see Christianity as credible, it’s this: Form a bridge where the world can’t. Sit down with your minority Christian brothers and sisters, and model the gospel of reconciliation. Stop reading about ‘them.’ Stop assuming things. Partner with them. Have hard conversations. Do good together in your community. Tell your niece or grandson or children what you’re learning and how you’re growing in Christ through these conversations. There are millions of young people waiting to see the power of the gospel. They want to see it. Until they do, none of your apologetic seminars matter. For the next generation, witnessing the gospel at work in the world is the apologetic. If they don’t see this in your life, they’re going to look for it elsewhere.”

Newbigin, as a missionary, argued otherwise. In a non-Christian culture, the gospel needs to be demonstrated in our lives and communities before anyone has interest in its content. In the West, he said, that means the first place we will demonstrate the gospel is in our public life.[13] If you sincerely create beauty, protect the vulnerable, and serve from the heart in all your work, you’re preparing the way for Jesus to enter someone’s life. Before our neighbors understand the truth of Jesus, they need to see the beauty of Jesus. People must be enchanted before they’re convinced. We show that beauty, not through acts of greatness or dominance, but through small, humble, everyday acts of service.

Writing in the early fourth century, the pagan politician King Julian (yup) complained that the church was multiplying like rabbits around him, but note what he observed in their behavior: “The impious Galileans [Christians], in addition to their own, support also ours, [and] it is shameful that our poor should be wanting our aid.”[6] He also wrote, “Why then do we…not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause?”[7]