Exvangelicals.

I have noticed a class of Christians that we have come to call the "exvangelicals."  The word refers to people who have left evangelical churches for various reasons.  Often they experienced some kind of abuse or rejection.  Sometimes they simply realized that what their church taught did not reflect the Jesus of the gospels, or their own views. 

Exvangelicals have been around for a while.  They featured prominently in the Emerging Church movement around the turn of the century, and they had an instrumental role in setting up the Wild Goose Festival, which Susan and I enthusiastically attend every year.  I've met a lot of them.  In the beginning these folks sought to rediscover Jesus and the Church, and emerge free from corrupted versions of both.  Sometimes they even came to see things that we in the mainline Protestant churches have known and done for decades, like social justice, and we welcomed their participation.

But lately it seems to me that many exvangelicals do not just want a better, more faithful and authentic understanding of Christianity.  Instead, they either reject Christian faith altogether or seem to feel they need to reconstruct it for themselves along new and different lines.  In other words, they abandon orthodox Christianity and try to invent some new kind of spirituality that may or may not have anything to do with Jesus.

I think they took the version of Christianity they were being fed in evangelicalism as somehow the whole thing.  So when they left their former churches they assumed they were leaving Christianity.  Hence, they may toss out much of basic Christian doctrine and even the Bible.

While I understand their motivation, I also feel that maybe it exhibits a certain immaturity, like when a person bitten by a dog as a child therefore resolves to fear all dogs forever.  Or someone uses their bad experience with one person of a certain demographic category to be always suspicious of everyone in that category.  As if their experience of a toxic evangelical church justifies their belief that all Christians, all churches, and Christianity itself need to be radically changed or done away with.

Sometimes people carelessly toss into a dumpster something that, when cleaned up, polished, and restored to its original form, holds immeasurable value.  To reject something because of what it looks like to me at the moment is the hight of arrogance.  People have pulled amazing and precious things out of trash bins or found them in garage sales.

In any case, I certainly hope that people leaving evangelicalism -- or any presentation of Christianity that they find wanting -- will look anew at the deeper, broader, higher, and older strains of Christianity, many of which conventional churches of all stripes tend to ignore.  We have a rich mystical tradition, for instance.  And even our core creeds and doctrines are not the oppressive documents they often get presented as, but powerful statements to guide practice and transcendence.  Finally, there are expressions of authentic Christianity from other times and other parts of the world that counter a lot of the toxicity that has come to predominate in the West.  I have found that the Eastern Church offers a deep well of spirituality in a different key that is often quite refreshing.  It's time people knew about all this.

So if your church is disappointing you or even worse, please don't let that lead you to reject Christianity altogether.  You may choose to go deeper to find and follow a very different Jesus Christ, the real One, who remains present and alive in you and the world.

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