Sherry Chandler

The Emerging Church

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

These are the words of the Reverend Gregory A. Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills megachurch outside St. Paul, as quoted today in a NYTimes profile. He also said these things:

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

The Times features Mr. Boyd as one of a small number of evangelicals rebelling against the currently mandated lock step with the Republican Party and the far right. Just as some denominational colleges are rebelling, so are some evangelical mega-churches (a term I still consider oxymoronic).

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

Cause for hope, yes. But in some ways this article left me more appalled than ever about what is going on in the evangelical church. Look at this passage:

[Mr. Boyd] said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.

Mr. Boyd paid a price for his rebellion. He lost about 1,000 of his 5,000 members, most of them white, middle-class, and suburban. He lost millions in contributions and had to lay off staff. He lost volunteers:

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” [family pastor Mary Van Sickle] said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”

Did you know it was “Truth, Justice, and the Republican way?”

I didn’t.

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