Something I often have to remind my progressive social justice friends is whether you love or hate evangelicals, they put their money where their mouth is. While I’m terrified by stories of Rick Warren, like the globe trotting and electoral politics meddling Billy Graham before him, blessing foreign regimes that brutally (and legally) oppress LGBTQ+ citizens, I’m also heartened by the massive investment evangelicals have made to increase access to clean water, address famine, and fight human trafficking. Philanthropic research consistently reports that the lion’s share of giving in the U.S. is directed to higher education institutions and to faith based communities and organizations. Because of their commitment to sacrificial giving and their orientation to voluntary, collective action Evangelicals have the capacity to make a significant impact on the world.
The fact that evangelicals have also utilized this capacity to hold violent protests in our nation’s capital while some of them called for the “hanging of Mike Pence,” a political leader who proudly counts himself among their number, is by no means lost on me. However investments in organizations like World Vision - and sadly militia groups filled with sad bastard (mostly) old white men like Patriot Front - is key part of evangelical life. In our tradition, we refer to these organizations like World Vision, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and Focus on the Family, as para-church organizations. The latter term is inspired by a Koine Greek[ The common Greek of the Hellenistic period in which the New Testament was written. In the same family, but differentiated from Classical or Modern Greek.] preposition that means with or beside. Thus, World Vision is not the Church, where we have Word, Sacrament, an how many minutes until this service is over? Rather, it works beside the church to collectively address a key element of Christian mission.
All of that to say, as a “you can’t wash that shit off” evangelical, I cannot share the story of my calling without talking about my involvement in para-church organizations. While Sinners and Saints invested almost all of our revenue in local nonprofits[ Like Beverly Bootstraps, which itself - like almost every other major social initiative in our town - was founded by First Baptist Church. However, First Baptist Church is a mainstream American Baptist congregation that is in no way affiliated with evangelicalism and has created independent nonprofits like Bootstraps and Harborlight Homes to do their good work. The lines are fuzzy, but with evangelical lens you can clearly rule Intervarsity Christian Fellowship in to the para-church world, and Beverly Bootstraps out.] and Christian missions oriented towards the Asian subcontinent - orgs like ServLife and OMF International - the para-church initiative that I, and a few others like James, were directly involved and invested in was the Emergent conversation. What was the Emergent conversation? Well, it was something that went by different monikers over the years, so that question itself provokes a conversation.
Near the end of the millennium in the late 1990s, the sheen had started to fade on the evangelical expansion that took place in the late seventies and was catapulted during the Reagan years. I’m no sociologist, but I suspect that the end of the Cold War, which so brilliantly buttressed binary “us or them” type thinking and the capitalism inspired eclipse of nationalism by globalization dropped the scales off of many young pastors’ eyes.
A group of successful youth ministers and young church planters with names you may have heard like Tony Jones and Mark Driscoll, and a number of others you might have not like Andrew Jones, Tim Conder, and Rick Bennett - the latter of whom I later pastored with at City on a Hill in Boston - were joined together in the Young Leader’s Network. In its most notable era, the Network was led by Doug Pagitt, who facilitated a number of gatherings nationwide to discuss the future trajectory of the church. Around the same time, a slightly wiser and older church planter and leader named Brian McLaren, started writing and speaking about “the church on the other side” that was born of such progenitors as globalization, quantum physics, and postmodern philosophy of writers such as Michel Foucault. These men, and they were, but for the rare exceptions like Karen Ward of the Church of Apostles in Seattle, like me, hetero-white men, started to talk about a new trajectory for the evangelical church.
This conversation operated under several different names early on, such as the Terra Nova[ Latin for “New Land.”] Project, before becoming known broadly as the “Emergent Church.” Near its apex, this movement gave birth to a nonprofit organization called Emergent Village that was overseen by a more gender diverse board and led by Tony Jones. There were leaders like Dan Kimball in Santa Cruz, CA, Doug Pagitt in Minneapolis, Karen Ward in Seattle, and Tim Conder in Durham, NC,[ I, along with Rick Bennett and the City on a Hill Church, were among them.] who were very invested at that time in how new theology was giving birth to a new forms of ecclesiology[ Fancy word for the structure and mission of the church.]. However, from my perspective anyway, it became evident fairly early on that the genius of Emergent was its focus on generative conversation, not liturgical innovation. Years later, after my ecclesiological adventures at Sinners and Saints and The Gathering Church ended, and shortly after Kellie and I decided to live into my previously offered half wit prophecy[ Namely, “if I was God I would have made me an Episcopalian.”] by joining Christ Church of Hamilton Wenham, my priest stopped me in the receiving line and said, “we’ve got to find some time to talk about the emerging church.” “We can,” I promised him, “but I have to tell you that I’m not very interested in the church part[ As demonstrated by attending and being confirmed in a fairly high, Anglo-Catholic episcopal congregation.]. I’m focused on the conversation.” That seemed to quell his concerns and the conversation never took place.
As for Emergent, what a conversation we had! For four or five years a group of us would gather monthly in Boston to talk about our evolving understanding of faith and practice. A majority of us hailed from evangelical backgrounds - many with origins in the South or Midwest - but by no means all of us. We had people who grew up Conservative Baptist in New Hampshire, United Methodist in Mid-State New York, and Presbyterian in California. There were more members of the conversation that went to Harvard Divinity School than Gordon College or Gordon-Conwell, so we decided to meet in or near the city. When selecting a meeting place, we actively protested the traditional Evangelical narrative that the Emergent conversation was simply an attempt to make Christianity “cool” by intentionally choosing the most uncool meeting places possible. For instance, for the most vibrant couple of years of the conversation, we met at Danny’s Diner, which was located in a side street off of Davis Square in Somerville. Danny was a lovely first generation immigrant cook who served up proudly middling diner food along with tepid New England branded coffee.
When we gathered, we talked about our evolving understanding of the Bible, since most of us had grown up in traditions that viewed the scriptures as inerrant or at least infallible. A regular topic of the conversation was the journey that many of us were still making towards being accepting and inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community[ For the record, I was all for reserving judgment and promoting toleration when gay marriage became legal on the anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education in a moment of beautiful symmetry in 2004. By 2008 or so I completed the journey towards full inclusion and acceptance.] and we also spent a fair amount of time dreaming about what a future in Christian ministry or the academy would look like for us. Our group was called an Emergent Cohort, just one of the little nodes of conversation that sprung up around the country. While our regular meetings rarely drew more than 15 people - and more often about 8 - 10 folks - we had a number of incredible opportunities to either host events when Emergent affiliated speakers came to Boston or to interact with speakers when they were invited by supportive organizations like the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. One memorable evening in a packed, blazing hot Irish pub in Cambridge,[ Where one of the older attendees, sadly, passed out. When it comes to climatological preferences, I have not found New Englanders to be the most hearty and durable of people.] we hosted the hyper-kinetic Irish theologian Peter Rollins, who kept us on edge with scintillating questions, handcrafted parables, and the reminder that “the one of who we can never speak fully is the one of whom we should never stop speaking.” On another Saturday afternoon before an Episcopal Diocesan event in Boston, I had the opportunity to introduce Brian McLaren before the most diverse group of priests, deacons, and other ministers I had ever seen in New England. I had the opportunity to hug Brian as he came up on stage and awkwardly offer him mutual greetings from our friend Rick Bennett. During that event, I met my dear friend Callid Keefe-Perry, who came across as this completely intriguing and quirky Quaker elder with one third size branded business cards that I could not wait to get to know more. Callid would only attend a Cohort meeting or two before he and his wife moved back to Rochester, NY, but our families would become dear friends. After the event, at a reception at some Episcopal young adult house in Brookline, I had a drink, me a beer, him a cup of wine, and chatted with Thomas Shaw, the esteemed Episcopal monk and Bishop of Massachusetts. I had blessed lunch with Phyllis Tickle at another Episcopal event. And I have to give props to the then National Coordinator of Emergent Village, Tony Jones, who met with our group every time he was through, even joining us on one occasion at Major Magleashe’s, the shadiest bar in Salem that we could find, and never received a dime of honorarium. The Emergent conversation never sought to be a solution to the North American Church’s woes. Rather, it was designed to give us space for the questions and the fellowship we needed to continue following God in the way of Jesus.
Through the Emergent Cohort I also met Cindy Bauer. At that time Cindy was in the very early stages of building out a nonprofit called Kupenda[ Which is the word for “love” in Swahili.] for the Children. Initially, the focus of Kupenda was providing school fees for students with disabilities in eastern Kenya. Cindy started Kupenda after a period where she was doing a wild life biology research on an animal her friends lovingly called the “golden assed swamp rat” in eastern Kenya. Cindy had been born with a foreshortened arm, but she had lived the life of a normal New England teenager of the conservative baptist variety. While in the Malindi District of eastern Kenya, one of Cindy’s field guides asked her to visit a family he knew where a young woman had the same disability and, for that reason, was considered quite incapable by her family. The guide quite simply wanted Cindy to show this young woman’s parents that a woman with a shorter arm could carry water on her head and complete almost every other task that was asked of women in her rural village. Unsurprisingly, Cindy was able to carry baskets and jars of water on her head quite easily, and the mother realized that her daughter could do more than she had initially imagined.[ Likely stripping the kid of one of her best excuses, but I’m sure she managed well:)] After that encounter, the guide also introduced Cindy to a school that served students with disabilities and things started to roll from that point on.
I mentioned that initially Kupenda was focused on paying school fees. Cindy and her brother recruited donors from their church, Gordon College, and other evangelical related folk around the North Shore and slowly but surely, ten, then twenty, then two hundred students had their school fees covered. If the mission had stopped evolving at that point, Kupenda would have languished in white savior land, where yet another group of mzungus scraped off a little layer of their cream to assuage post-colonial guilt. But Cindy did not stop there.
She partnered with a known Special Education expert in eastern Kenya, who trusted her enough to tell her where the real pain points were. The nation was responsible for paying many of the fees, the local expert Leonard Mbonani explained. But many students at this school were Deaf or hard of hearing and there were no teachers who knew Sign Language. Funding educators who knew sign language would be beneficial. Moreover, many of these students had to travel long distances to the schools, but the funding for dorm parents was short. That is a staffing need that Kupenda could help address. On and on the nonprofit evolved[ In the nonprofit sphere, evolution is essential. In my experience, almost any intervention in the disability space that does not evolve over time, becomes counter productive at best and oppressive at worst. As an example, take sub-minimum wage paying sheltered workshops for people with disabilities. These spaces were revolutionary when they were welcoming people back into their communities post-institutionalization. However, 40 years after we started to dismantle the institutions in ernst and 32 years after the passage of the ADA, they are segregated, “separate but equal” spaces that should not be allowed by law. Yes, I’m looking at you, New Jersey!] and, by grace, Cindy, Leonard, and their teams attracted the funding - both in the United States and in Kenya - we needed to do the work. For years the nonprofit did not even have paid staff stateside, Cindy ran it as a passion project. But we always had staff in Kenya who were directly identifying student needs, advocating for the system to meet those needs, and clarifying how our key learnings could be utilized to benefit students in other countries like Tanzania and Haiti.
Today, Kupenda continues to evolve. Cindy is no longer unpaid, fortunately, and she continues to serve as our fantastic Chief Executive Officer. Thanks to Leonard and his brilliant crew, we are not only doing effective advocacy with the state and district to benefit students, but we are also investing in education - not only in churches, but also among native healers since we know that is the resource many families turn when disabilities are discovered - in order to expand disability awareness and promote inclusion one student, school, and village at a time. As a longtime and second longest tenured member of the Board of Directors, it is has been such an honor to watch Kupenda grow from a family affair into an international nonprofit that is led by local leaders and lives up to its promises. While started by evangelical Christians in America and primarily staffed by Christians in Kenya, Kupenda is a non-proselytizing organization that actually believes that people will know we are Christians, even faithful agnostic ones like me, by our love.
Deep investment in and attachment to voluntary organizations like Beverly Bootstraps, Emergent, and Kupenda has been one of the highlights of my life. My doubt filled, but still stumbling forward faith in the way of Jesus drove my connectivity to these organizations. Moreover, the life that I have experienced in these communities, far more than any belief about the supremacy of Christian doctrine or the hope of an infinite life beyond this mortal horizon, are one the primary reasons my feet remain on the way still.