Bryan College Triangle

By Annalise Williams
Guest Writer

Hipster Christianese emphasizes trendiness over holiness

Recently I got an email that opened with the hook, “Want to move forward in becoming a Global Christian?” What is a “Global Christian”? Someone with all the Christian movements on their newsfeed, with the t-shirts, the computer stickers, and the conference experiences; someone who has seen dozens of movie clips about starving children in Africa and who has the Voice of the Martyrs devotional on their bookshelf; someone who knows the estimations of how many sex slaves pass through the Atlanta airport; someone who only purchases Fair Trade coffee; someone who knows all the latest International Justice Mission stats and success stories?

It is easy to become so social in our “global” concerns that we forget our call. We are to be the light and the salt, to carry the revelation of Christ to the local world, and to invest our time and selves in the local church. Without fulfilling this primary call, we cannot fulfill the call to support and love those further away from us. It’s easier to send our resources to the inner city outreach or to an overseas rescue mission than it is to commit to the local body of believers who obviously struggle with the childish things of faithfulness and commitment and grace in spite of grouchiness — to commit to the people who annoy us and so pollute our sense of holiness. It’s easy to be a self-satisfied Christian from the role of a distant benefactor. It’s hard to be a self-satisfied Christian while gathering together with other Christ-followers who, like ourselves, are not Christ.

Once we disconnect from the immediacy of a situation, we lose the potency that localization requires. Everything becomes a cerebral problem and the possibility of action diminishes to sending something or knowing facts. Yes, we love with our minds but our minds (with their built-in credit-card-swipe solutions) are not strong enough love. Long-distance actions usually don’t require the forgiveness or long-suffering patience and grace that, as iron sharpens iron, molds us more closely to the image of Christ.

As G. K. Chesterton points out, specificity is the beauty of love, for love is choosing. The man loves the one woman, and this is sacred. We can’t ethereally love the catholic church in the same way that we love the local body because love is an action, borne out in many particular actions. We bring food to the widow down the street, visit the neighbor in the hospital, pray with the friend who has a migraine. We can indeed pray for individual men and women who are far away, but this is still a local kind of love because it is directed specifically. Love cannot be delocalized.

Removing the immediate situation removes the burden of the necessity of effectiveness from us. If we simply support another ministry to the neglect of our own ministry, we do not feel as responsible. “They” — the organization — determined how the money was spent and where and why. We just provided it. Our responsibility is diminished.

This reminds me of Christ’s indictment in Matthew 15: “But you say, ‘Whoever shall say to his father or mother, “Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’ And thus you invalidate the word of God” (v 5-6 NASB). Christ was addressing a situation where people who should have been placed in a position of respect and honor were being ignored, pushed out by more “spiritual” concerns. I fear, my friends, that many of us, too, have allowed the culturally impressive to dictate our support. Just as we are called to care for our parents, so also we are called to minister to and within the body of local believers. This assumes an authority we do not have to direct our resources as we please.

There are no “Global Christians;” only local servants of Christ. Those God calls from one place to another are still called to serve in a specific way in a specific place, even if they are only called to that place for a time. They become local Christians in a new locale, not some detached benefactor.

So let’s be where we are called to be — in the physical place where God put us, living church with the body of believers in the same place. Yes, we should support the rest of the church in other parts of the world with prayer and finances, but this is an aspect of being a faithful, local believer. Just as it is ridiculous to define ourselves as the Tithing Christians or the Praying Christians or the Bible-reading Christians, so it is foolish to define ourselves by something that is simply one single aspect of the immediate, constant call to be knitted to the fellow believers who are physically near us. In following this command, we lose the superiority of choosing who is worthy of our attention and our resources that comes with “globalization” and must humbly love the people God has placed in our path. We’re not supposed to be slick, trendy, global. We’re the aliens, remember? We’re the bond-servants of the despised and crucified King who washed the feet of the disciples who constantly argued around him. This is the service to which we are called.

If I had to leave Bryan and do something important with my life, what would be the last words I would want my peers to remember from me?

Should I spend my last words talking about chapel skips, some funky dinners, a list of the funniest pranks, all of my least favorite rules, or is there something else that matters above all?

At Bryan, we are sinners. Just like every church I’ve attended, every camp I’ve seen, and like every other Christian I’ve met, we are sinners. Each year, I learn more and more how many sinners there are in the body of Christ.

Bryan hasn’t been any different. Our relationships still fail. We still lie to each other and our professors. We don’t trust the school not to lie, mislead or stay silent on important issues. We lust. We hurt ourselves. We hurt each other. We drink. Above all, we let our righteousness stand in the way of God’s.

We know that we are sinners; I don’t feel the need to reemphasize this point. What matters is that since you know I am a sinner, we may as well stop hiding it. I know that you are a sinner, so we may as well accept the humiliation of standing naked before God and man.

When we are trying so hard to help other people who are hurting, we stay so unwilling to be helped ourselves though our worlds are secretly falling apart. As honored as we feel when our best friend trusts us with his darkest secrets, we somehow believe inside that it would be an overwhelming tragedy if he were burdened with our needs.

Can we stop pretending we are anything different? Can we get past our desire to hide our flaws and focus more on sharing what Christ died to save? When Saul transformed into Paul, do we believe his sins were somehow hidden away? Instead, he wrote publically about them so that we could praise Jesus who forgave such a despicable person.

When the author of James commanded us to confess our sins, did he put any recommendations on whom we should hide our souls from?

I won’t pretend that our sin won’t ruin our reputation. I won’t promise that every person we tell will be as forgiving as God. I can’t even reassure you that I won’t foolishly judge you for our sins.

I promise that God is glorified.

As a campus, we sin, and there is no better time than now to repent. As a campus, we can tell each other about the marvelous work God is doing through our failures.

My name is Timothy Baldi, and I am a sinner graduating from Bryan College. My name is Timothy Baldi, and my sins reveal the glory of God.

By Tim Baldi
Copyeditor 

Dear Editor,

As my four years at Bryan College come to a close, I’d like to share a few thoughts about my time here.

I do not write out of anger, nor do I write out of bitterness. I think there are some great aspects of this college; I have stayed for the opportunities and passions that I have gained. However, I am not writing this to explain the good, but to challenge what I think has been truly bad.

I am writing this letter for the students who have graduated feeling as though Bryan College did not provide what they needed and for those still here struggling to find their place within a system that has been designed to prepare us to make a difference in today’s world. Read full story »

Dear Editor,

“The Problem isn’t Bryan, it’s you.” Healthy? I think not.

As a freshman and a sophomore, I was bewildered that a religion, a God would defend the attitude, “if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be here, after all you chose to be here and in doing so, you chose to abide by the rules.”

Some at Bryan might not mean for it, or even be aware it can be taken this way, but the rules here have successfully misrepresented Christianity. Fact. I can only call it a misrepresentation after tak­ing four years to learn that Christianity could not be further from the envi­ronment that has been created here. Read full story »

Dear Editor,

Editor’s note: This letter is a response to an opinion article by Triangle reporter Jesse Murray entitled “Pope fights homosexual marriage, alienates patronage” (click here to view).

The article “Pope fights homosexual marriage, alienates patronage” brought to mind the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which portray the Christian message of salvation as an offensive redemption. The public disapproval of the Pope’s message should not surprise Christians: people are always either repentant or offended when confronted with their sin, which is why Christ was the most polarizing man to have ever lived.

The title of the article seems a misnomer, for instead of discussing the patrons who were apparently alienated, the piece cites readers of USA Today. This only makes the point that some people online are willing to bicker about Christianity and gay marriage, but then again, what is the online populace not willing to snark about? What the piece does not explicitly address is what the response of the Catholic world has been.

Jesse Murray speaks in fatalistic terms: “All of the back and forth has created such an environment as to forever douse any possibility of understanding or helpful dialogue.”

The Catholic Church has consistently opposed gay marriage. The “back and forth” to which Murray seems to be referring is between USA Today readers – and that is the nature of online comment sections, where people will be ignorant, unjust, rude and, most of all, anonymous.

Murray states that, instead of proposing a solution, this article is intended, “to sit down in the filth that is the universal church’s relationship with the rest of the world and admit that it stinks and there’s only so much we unhappy few can do about it.”

This is not helpful. Contradictorily, the article does go on to suggest how we as Christians should respond.

The article argues that, as something ordained by God himself, marriage transcends the state’s and the church’s definition of it. It is true that since the state has no jurisdiction over the nature of marriage, a legal redefinition cannot actually change this nature. What Christians are trying to do in preserving the label of marriage for man and woman only is call truth truth and lies lies.

As verbal creations, the words we use to think shape our ideas of what things are. The rhetorician Richard Weaver correctly identified one of the current maladies of the West: “[w]e live in an age that is frightened by the very idea of certitude, and one of its really disturbing outgrowths is the easy divorce between words and the conceptual realities which our right minds know they must stand for.”

If we know that gay marriage is not marriage and we desire precision in language so that truth can be expressed, the battle of terms is an important one.

Christianity is a fractal of paradoxes, from our finite perspective. One of these paradoxes is that, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (ESV II Cor 5:19) and at the same time Christ says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (ESV Matt 10:34). Before reconciliation can take place, truth must divide between the holy and the unholy. Just as mercy requires truth or it is a lie, and the law opens our eyes to our need for redemption, so also division comes before reconciliation.

Is gay marriage a hill to die on? Perhaps not. Should we say that since gay marriage is a fiction, it no longer needs to be addressed, and so bury truth for the sake of being culturally amiable? Not if we are Christians.

I agree that we are called to love everyone – the gay activist, the narrowly legalistic Denominationalist, the Pope, and even the online commenters on USA Today, but love should never silence the truth out of us. As Christians, our living out truth ought to highlight lies in the world. Love is active, and ignoring sin is never love. God does not ignore our sin – He calls attention to it so that we learn to despise it, and then offers redemption. The damned ignore their sin.

This article appears to advocate a passive love, which is not love. Truth in love sometimes offends, but love without truth is not love, for it reduces it to a selfish, sniveling sentimentality, as quickly rescinded as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s first marriage. Passivity in love is a misunderstanding and abuse of the grace Murray says we should extend.

- Junior Annalise Williams