Celebrity apostasy
When famous Christians renounce the faith
Afew months ago two Instagram posts surprised the evangelical world in North America and provoked public reflection. On July 18 Joshua Harris, famous for his promotion of a puritanical approach to Christian relationships, and his wife Shannon announced they were separating after 20 years of marriage. Nine days later, he wrote he was also abandoning his Christian faith. “By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian.”
Harris became famous in 1997 for a book he wrote when he was 21. Kissed Dating Goodbye was an appeal for courtship, parental involvement, no kissing before marriage, and the like – it sold more than 1 million copies. Harris has since remained a hero among homeschoolers (his dad Gregg is a major influence in that movement), in Reformed circles and beyond (Christian thinker Eric Metaxas recently tweeted “I happen to agree w/most of what he wrote” in that book).
Harris published a few other books but focused on pastoral ministry. He was lead pastor in Maryland at Covenant Life Church until 2015, when he stepped down after a multi-year crisis across the Sovereign Grace Ministries network about improper handling of sexual abuse. He started making headlines by distancing himself from his book (see the documentary at www.ISurvivedIKDG.com) and expressing regret for his self-righteousness and the fearful perspective his book encouraged.
He moved to British Columbia in 2015 and finished a master’s degree at Regent College in 2018. Now, a
Iyear later, he has said goodbye to his book (purposefully out of print), his wife (a talented musician) and the gospel. He has also embraced progressive views on sexuality and apologized for previous anti-gay teachings. His website now focuses on his marketing and brand-strategy company (connected with Donald Miller of Blue Like Jazz fame).
Given Harris’s fame and the influence of his first book, many Christians have responded. Some malign him for his prior legalism on courtship and sex, but others say his strict views helped guide them through their volatile teen years.
The end of his marriage was greeted with some derision (especially since his second book Boy Meets Girl offered the tale of his engagement and marriage) but mostly sadness. In hindsight it’s hard to read lines like, “There is Shannon, leaning on her father’s arm. She seems to glow. Today is my wedding day. My bride has just walked into view. My bride. My bride.”
His abandonment of Christian faith has been greeted with anger and contempt by some, though again the dominant reaction is sadness and disappointment. His apostasy has also led to theological reflections. Radio personality Todd Friel argues along Calvinistic lines that Josh’s decision proves he was never a Christian (see “Josh Harris kissed nothing goodbye” on Youtube).
In other corners, several of Harris’s former Gospel Coalition colleagues (Kevin DeYoung, Greg Gilbert, Collin Hansen, Justin Taylor) warn against arguments that his apostasy can be traced simplistically to “homeschooling, fame at a young age, Neo-Calvinism, the charismatic movement, purity culture, Sovereign Grace, lack of a seminary education, or all of the above.”
Various bloggers have argued a shallowness in evangelical culture accounts for Harris’s failings. Grayson Gilbert (“Relevant & Reformed”) writes that “The difficulty with Joshua Harris Instagraming his way out of his marriage and subsequently, the faith, is that it is so apropos a metaphor for our generation. We are a trite people, who think trite thoughts, and display our triteness for the world to consume in equal measure.”
Several Christians zero in on Harris’s endorsement of homosexuality, which he has demonstrated by posting pictures of himself from Vancouver Pride. Harris made it clear in a Sojourners interview in February that he thinks approval of homosexuality is incompatible with biblical Christianity. Clearly, he has chosen between the two.
As sad as this saga is (some of Shannon’s blog posts are heartbreaking), there is nothing in Josh’s fall that should totally surprise those familiar with biblical warnings about apostasy (1 John 2:1819). Christians who feel betrayed may need to reflect on what appropriate expectations for Christian leaders should be.
Thankfully, the Bible also contains stories of redemption and restoration. That’s why some Christians have moved beyond anger and disappointment to hope. “Come home, Joshua. Come home.” As well, human failings of all sorts point to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Southern Baptist Seminary president Al Mohler wrote that all this “reminds us that we can place our trust in no sinful human being, but in Christ alone, the one who alone is worthy of our trust.” /FT
Christians who feel betrayed may need to reflect on what appropriate expectations for Christian leaders should be.
IJM BOLIVIA MARKS 150TH CONVICTION
IN 2016 A family friend drugged and raped two young Bolivian girls, 11 and 13 years old at the time. Two years later a Bolivian court sentenced him to 25 years in prison. This verdict in June 2019 marked the 150th case that International Justice Mission has supported in Bolivia.
This charity with Christian roots works to end slavery, trafficking and exploitation in countries such as Thailand, Uganda, the Philippines, Dominican Republic and India. It was founded in 1997 by American Gary Haugen and has offices in several other countries including Canada. In total it reports helping authorities worldwide arrest more than 3,800 suspects.
When the Bolivian mother brought the case to police, they invited assistance from mission staff, who not only advised the police, but provided months of counselling for the family.
The police investigator diligently spent three months pursuing evidence the accused had hidden in his apartment. The family needed to persist as the case was repeatedly delayed at court. All were amazed when the judge not only declared a sentence, but also sent the aggressor immediately to prison.
GENDER IN RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
A CHRISTIAN LAWYER in India attempted to defend a woman facing exploitation from landlords. When the lawyer, also a woman, had a chance to present her case to a local official, he started asking about her age and then dismissed her from his office unheard.
A summit last March in New York held by the UN Commission on the Status of Women documented many such stories. A buzzword at the summit was intersectionality, which refers to how interlocking systems of power such as race, class and gender impact those most marginalized in society.
But the religious aspect still gets almost no attention in UN documents. Nearly none of the commission’s sponsored research and papers mention the intersection of gender and religion.
That’s surprising since 83 per cent of women worldwide identify with a religion (Pew Research Center).
Christian activists are trying to call attention to the religious aspect. One of the hundreds of side events held by charities during the summit was hosted by the Salvation Army and co-ordinated by the World Evangelical Alliance. That’s where the Indian lawyer’s story was heard.
A gender persecution specialist from Open Doors International also spoke at a side event. Their latest research suggests the persecution of Christian women most often takes the form of sexual violence, often from extended family and/or the local community (reported in 59% of the countries with the worst persecution); forced marriage (57%); rape (47%); forced divorce (35%); and denial of custody of children (31%).
An example is Sudan. “Female Christians . . . are forced to dress like Muslims,” reports the Open Doors research. “Those arrested for ‘indecent dressing’ often face groping and humiliation during interrogation.”
Persecution against men often involves economic harassment/ job access (74%) and military conscription.
Shaming and shunning are common forms that target both men and women.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom and the UN NGO Committee on the Freedom of Religion or Belief are trying to bring religious freedom into the next summit in 2020.
Within minutes, any persecutionrelated news in India is communicated widely not only in India, but even globally. WhatsApp is probably the most popular virtual communication tool that is being used by the Church in India. —Dr. Alex Abraham, director of Operation Agape WWW.LAUSANNE.ORG/ LGA
KOREAN FIGHTS TRAFFICKING
CHUN KI-WON, a South Korean businessman turned pastor, has rescued trafficked victims from North Korea over the last few decades.
China is promoted as a way out of North Korea, but Chun says 99 per cent of North Korean defectors to China don’t get past the Chinese human trafficking trade.
Chun’s aid organization Durihana has helped over a thousand defectors reach Seoul since 1999.
Faith Today: Marilyn, what exactly do we mean by practical theology?
Marilyn Draper: We talk about three areas – the practices of culture, the practices of the Church and the practices of God, and where those three practices meet, that’s the area of practical theology. So an example of a practice of culture would be leadership. How does culture see leadership? How does that compare with how God sees leadership and then how does that connect with how the church does? We would look at what is a biblical, theological and also practical understanding of what it means to be a leader in the church.
FT: You’ve been part of several church plants. How can we think theologically about church plants right now in our culture?
MD: So often in the past, we have just thought of a Sunday morning. “What we need to do is come into an area and we need to start a Sunday morning service.” And what we’ve recognized is that this is not really thinking deeply theologically about what the church is – that the church is so much more than a service where people get together for a couple hours on a Sunday morning. So now what we do is we look at it through the lens of discernment and the idea of mission. What is God doing in a particular area?
The key question I ask a group, if they’re thinking about planting a church, is get in there and learn to see your community through God’s eyes and ask the key questions. “What is God doing in this area and how can we participate?” And then, as a result, the way the church plant develops is completely different. And often the church service ends up becoming, you know, maybe step five. Or step six as opposed to step one.
FT: How do you know? How do you find out what God is already doing?
MD: We talk about excavating the community, and that is simply spending time in the community. You would be walking the streets, you would be praying as a small group. I’m thinking you’ve actually got a little bit of a team that you’re starting with, so that you’re not totally on your own.
And so, as a team, you’re walking the streets and you’re praying, “God, what are you doing here?” And then you’re talking to people. You’re going in to talk to shop owners and meeting them. Instead of having an office in a home, or a designated church building or church place you’re actually making your office perhaps in a local coffee shop. And what you’re doing is you’re listening and you’re asking questions. “What are the challenges here? What is the great thing about living here?
MARILYN DRAPER is assistant professor of practical theology at Tyndale University College & Seminary. She is an ordained minister and church planter. She spoke to Faith Today about the role of story in evangelism and why we shouldn’t worry so much about numbers in our churches.
What are the problems about living here? What are the resources that are needed? What are the resources that are abundant? How are people thinking in terms of spiritual theological concepts?”
A lot of what you do at the beginning is simply listening. You’re listening to God and you’re listening to the community, and then you’re getting together and you’re talking about what you’ve been hearing in that process.
FT: We all want to be about building the Kingdom, but sometimes when a church plant moves into an area that has already established churches, there can be some competition that seems to happen with people moving around between churches. Can you speak to that?
MD: Competition is often the first reaction, although I can also say from experience that often what happens when you come in and you start a new church ministry is you actually end up giving more to the churches and to the congregations in that area. One of the reasons for starting a church plant on the ground and through listening is that ideally you’re going to be connecting with the unchurched people, the “nones and the dones,” the people who have never been exposed to Christianity and the Good News that’s inherent in the Gospel.
Or the people that maybe were in the Church as children, but really have never been enabled in their faith. So ideally, if you’re building relationships with those people, you’re not starting a congregation that’s going to be attracting people from the other congregations because you aren’t putting on a show. You’re simply building relationships. A lot of it for the first while is not seen.
In terms of that idea of competition, I know we’ve been involved in a couple of church plants where people came to know Christ and then they started to get more excited about their faith. Well, then they’d come to us and they’d say, “Okay, now, we actually want to serve in this area, but this group is so small. We’re actually going to jump to the more established congregation because it has the youth group that we want to help out with, or the missions teams that we want to be involved in.” So
we actually found it’s not uncommon for us, for a small church plant, to actually give people to the bigger congregations in their area.
FT: So you are saying they would come to Christ at the church plant, and then head off to a more established church because it’s bigger and has more established programming?
MD: Yes, that kind of thing. And often it was the people who actually became Christians in the church plant, as much as the people who had fallen away from the Church, or been hurt and came back, and through relationships experienced healing, and then they were ready to make the jump back into the more established congregations.
FT: So church plants sometimes might be tending to those people who have fallen away, but it’s a safe doorway back into the Church for them?
MD: That’s right. That’s where church planting and small churches actually connect because the value of both is the value of relationship.
FT: Sometimes church plants are small churches, at least for a time. Let’s talk about numbers. It’s very difficult to disconnect from the idea that numbers mean success for a church.
MD: We very much see numbers as success. I think because it gives us a way to analyze how we perceive God working. And because we’re not sure that God is working in our midst, we say, “Well, people are coming to Christ (or we’re growing), therefore we’re good to go.” And it becomes a default mechanism because it’s much harder for us to think about success being faithfulness. What does it mean to be faithful to what God is calling us to do?
So we start to think about failure and success differently. One of the ways I find really helpful to talk about success and failures is through Parker Palmer in his book Active Life (Jossey-Bass, 1999; Harper SanFrancisco, 1990) talking about instru-l mental action and expressive action. Instrumental action being action that we specifically look to, to achieve the ends. This is all about success and failure. Expressive action is more values – what emerges out of who we are.
I think as a congregation we look to those instrumental things – these are things that we can do, we can see these results. And so mission becomes a humanoriented project. When I am working with congregations, I like to look at those instrumental and expressive actions, and I say, “Actually God’s responsible for the instrumental.” God’s action is instrumental and it’s expressed through the Incarnation, through the person of Jesus Christ, who took on flesh and blood, and lived, and died and rose again.
Our action is actually not instrumental. Our action is expressive, and we express our desire to know God and follow God, and then God uses what we do as an instrument in His hands to achieve His purposes. That helps us to take the emphasis off the numbers, and off the programs, and focus more on what it means to participate and what God’s doing in the world.
FT: So what is church for?
MD: We talk about church being for the glory of God, right? But what in the world does that mean? One of the terms that’s often being used these days is partnership, but I prefer the idea of participation.
We are invited to participate in the very life of the triune God and then the very mission of the triune God. And that’s what churches are for, so church as a congregation itself becomes what Leslie Newbiggin talked about as the “hermeneutics of the gospel,” through the way that we live with one another in our communities that becomes a sign of God’s Kingdom emerging among us. That becomes a sign of what the Good News of the gospel is actually supposed to be.
And then suddenly we may step back from our congregations and say, “Oh, you know, if we only ever interact for two hours on a Sunday morning, are we truly loving one another?” And Jesus said that’s how we would be known, through our love for one another. So are we truly loving God, loving one another, and loving our neighbours through how we’re actually living as His Church?
How can we as a congregation think more deeply about what it means to participate in God’s very life? And what does that look like in terms of our congregation? Are we actually in tune with that? Or has church become something that we do in time together on a Sunday morning, or perhaps in the odd activity that we do in our community?
FT: What about numbers as evidence of conversion? How do we hold those things together, that sharing our faith is important and bringing people into the loving Kingdom, and not thinking about numbers?
MD: I certainly don’t want to lessen the importance of evangelism at all. Even if we are thinking of evangelism, in terms of its more narrow sense of a proclamation, of actually speaking. But what happens is we tend to start equating that proclamation with propositions, so we think that in order for me to share the gospel it means that I have to expand these particular concepts, [such as] “God is good, but we’re sinful and we have to accept Christ.”
And for some people that can be helpful, if you’re talking with someone who has some kind of a church background, and understanding that can be helpful. But where we’re leaning in terms of evangelism is to be inviting people into the story. The story of what God is doing.
So talking about Jesus is still primary, but we want to do it by inviting people into the stories. We actually encourage people to develop times that you’re going to be meeting with your neighbours, with
“We are invited to participate in the very life of the triune God and then the very mission of the triune God. And that’s what churches are for….
your unchurched friends, and you’re going to be actually spending time in those stories, which are stories you take out of the gospel. Simply sharing stories of who Jesus is and what He’s done, how He interacted with people, what He said.
And getting people to ask questions about those stories. “Why did Jesus say that? Why did He do that? Why did He wait?” And then as people see Jesus more as a multifaceted character and then recognize He’s not just a character, but someone who is alive, and still active and still working.
Then you’re developing relationship, not just between person to person, but between people and Christ through the Spirit as well. And that adds a whole different dimension to our evangelism. And then if we’re actually living that out as well, that helps people to see that the Good News is truly good news.
And it’s a story where I’m invited.
FT: What about our own stories of change and God’s presence in our lives? Do they become even more important in this way of sharing? MD: I think so. It’s interesting. Both in the Old Testament in Isaiah 43 and in the New Testament in Acts 1, God calls His people to be witnesses. So when you think about a witness in a court of law, what does a witness do? A witness has seen something, and then they’re called to the front to testify, and they go to the front and they say, “This is what I saw. This is what I’ve heard.”
And that’s really what evangelism allows us to do, and where our story comes in. We tell people, “This is what I’ve heard from God. This is what I’ve heard from the community of the church. This is where I have seen God at work.”
One of the things that I love about new Christians is they will pray the strangest prayers and God will delight to answer them, simply to give them a sense that He is at work, and to help them open their eyes and open their ears.
FT: Thank you, Marilyn. /FT
One of the things that I love about new Christians is they will pray the strangest prayers and God will delight to answer them, simply to give them a sense that He is at work, and to help them open their eyes and open their ears.”