Jesus Brand Spirituality

Sample Chapter

My father had a favorite word: bass-ackwards. Sometimes I wonder if those of us who promote the religion of Jesus have gotten something bass-ackwards. Have we front-loaded people with so many matters of belief that we are, in effect, asking them to swallow the whole package as a prerequisite for meaningful engagement with Jesus?

A young man came to our church with his wife and kids. He wasn’t a practicing anything at the time. He found himself moved during the services, tears inexplicably falling down his face, that sort of thing. We met a time or two and talked about his experiences and what they might mean. He found himself being drawn to Jesus, and he responded.

Then he came to our membership class. During the membership class it was suggested to him (by me) that he read our church bylaws, which include a standard twelve-point statement of faith. Some of the points in that statement of faith were hard for him to swallow. I told him that he didn’t have to swallow them all in order to respond to Jesus, but I’m not sure this registered. During the class, he decided to respond to Jesus by getting baptized. His baptism was the last time I saw him at church for quite a while.

You can’t crawl into another person’s soul and know what’s going on in there. But after being in the pastor business for so many years, I’ve developed a kind of intuition I’ve learned to listen to. My intuition tells me it wasn’t helpful for this young man to read our statement of faith as the threshold for authentic Christianity. I think it gave him the impression that he was expected to swallow the thing whole or not at all, and unless and until he did, he had no business thinking of himself as a Christian. It’s making me rethink how we use something like a statement of faith.

Have we forgotten that the Christian doctrinal system has been in development for more than two thousand years, rooted in ways of thinking that are even older? The tradition-bound Judaism of Jesus’ time was a younger, less-developed system than Christianity is today. Is it possible that our current rendering of the Jesus faith has gotten so developed as to be unwieldy? Its sheer weight is certainly intimidating. The doctrinal formulations are often written in language designed to address controversies that are no longer pressing concerns, using thought forms that are now remote or moot.(1)

The first-generation disciples were actively engaged with Jesus before they fully understood that he was making messianic claims or what those claims meant. Compared to people considering the Christian truth claims today, the disciples had a lot more breathing room, a lot more latitude of perspective within which to engage Jesus. It isn’t until halfway through the gospel of Mark that Jesus turns to Peter and says, “Who do you say I am?” (8:29)—and even then, Jesus asks this without any veiled threat to disown Peter if he got the answer wrong.

BELIEVING

I didn’t come to faith by accepting a statement of faith summarizing doctrinal perspectives that were more than four hundred years in the making.(2) In fact, the first time I saw a statement of faith, it said that God created some people to be the elect and others he created to be the damned.(3) I handed that statement of faith back to the pastor who gave it to me and said, “Even if this were true, I think it would be wrong to teach it.”

I wasn’t even aware that statements of faith were part of the process of coming to faith when I first started. Maybe this was the core gift, the treasure of the Jesus Movement, the religious movement of the late 1960s that provided me with the cultural context for engagement with Jesus. (If you want a feel for it, listen to “Slow Train Coming” by Bob Dylan, who made his own start toward Jesus as a part of this movement.)

I had been to confirmation class as a kid. (4) I memorized the Ten Commandments and the Apostle’s Creed and the longer Nicene Creed. (5) The class influenced and informed me, but at the time it didn’t take. I got hung up on a question that I never bothered to ask in class: Why would God want to be praised? Is he some kind of egomaniac? I couldn’t swallow the package, and I didn’t feel that questioning the package was allowed. After confirmation, I stopped going to church.

Several years later, I read the gospel of Matthew in a weak moment. My fascination with Jesus had begun, and reading the Bible only made it worse. I was impressed by the Jesus portrayed in Matthew. I found myself annoyed by some of his teaching, but overall his message was attractive. He was attractive.

At a certain point I came to a decision: I need to pursue this now, while I have the chance. I realized that if I didn’t take another step closer to knowing, I might never take a step closer to knowing, because I was fully capable of ignoring this growing fascination. I could replace it with another fascination. But somewhere in my gut, I felt that if I did so, it would end up on my list of deathbed regrets. Maybe top of the list. The thought haunted me, not because I imagined myself afraid to die without faith, but because I wanted to avoid that painful sense of an opportunity missed.

That Jesus may have risen from the dead seemed plausible to me. Just that—plausible. I didn’t know how such a thing could be verified. I couldn’t imagine an experiment to demonstrate it. It just seemed that whatever wonder the world is an expression of could plausibly be thought to be capable of such a thing.

I didn’t have any opinions about whether the Bible was the Word of God and, if so, in what sense. I didn’t have any opinions about whether Jesus was born of a virgin. I didn’t have any opinions about the existence of or the nature of heaven and hell or whether Jesus was the only way a person could connect with God. I had impressions from the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels about these things, but they were sketchy. I wasn’t always sure how he was using terms and what exactly he meant by things he said touching on these topics.

The package that drew me wasn’t the system of Christian doctrine. The package was the person, Jesus. And thankfully, thankfully, thankfully—and for this reason alone I will always love them; this book is dedicated to them—the people around me who were on their own path toward the center thought that was just fine. I didn’t feel any pressure from them to swallow any faith package whole. I just felt a sense of shared excitement with them about taking one step closer to knowing.

So I offered myself to Jesus as a disciple, a student, a follower. I was young and thought I was pretty hot stuff. I imagined that Jesus, should he in fact exist as I was hoping he did, enough to follow at least, would be pleased by this new addition to his group of followers.

If you had interrupted me in the act of offering myself to say, “Ken, do you know that you are a sinner?” I would have said something like, “A sinner? I guess so. Isn’t everyone?” If you pressed further to ask, “Do you believe that Jesus died to save you from your sins?” I would have said something like, “I don’t know. How does that work ?”

Biologists tell us that when baby ducklings first open their eyes and see their mother duck hovering above them, something happens in their brains called imprinting, and from that moment on they know that they too are ducks. For better or worse, this early experience imprinted something on my brain: taking that step toward Jesus, without swallowing any package whole, is what I cannot but believe is the heart of the matter. All the other explanations of how things work, to call into service the nearby metaphor, roll off like water on a duck’s back.

We’re drawn to Jesus. We respond. And things happen along the way to confirm, or expand, or cause us to ask other questions or face other dilemmas, and we see if we’re drawn and we see if we respond. I realize I cannot formulate this into a doctrine that can be taught in seminary, but it’s how I think it really works.

The only stuff that happens, happens along the way. Get going and see what happens.

HEART MENDING

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. faced a crisis of faith early on in the civil rights movement. He was living in Birmingham, Alabama, and found himself leading the church-based bus boycott that began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of the bus. Dr. King was the new minister in town, and leading the boycott fell to him by a kind of accident. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time and became the leader.

In this case, becoming the leader of the bus boycott meant becoming the target of death threats. His phone number wasn’t yet unlisted, so hateful people called him at night threatening to blow up his house with his family in it if he didn’t call off the boycott.

Alone at the kitchen table one of these horrible nights after one of these horrible calls, Dr. King had to decide what to do. His biographers tell us that Dr. King’s form of Christian faith at the time wasn’t so much a matter of personal trust—Dr. King trusted Jesus to help him and lead him in the personal way that many people speak of today. His faith was a kind of philosophical understanding shaped by the Christian ethic. (6) But at the kitchen table that night, he had some tough decisions to make, and he didn’t know how to make them.

Head in hands, Dr. King presented his dilemma to God: the people were looking to him as a leader, but he was filled with fear, at the end of his own strength, unable to continue. Slumped over the kitchen table, he suddenly felt what he called “the presence of the Divine” as these words resonated within: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” (7) His fears “almost at once” subsided. He had what he needed.

As we take steps toward the center, toward the fulfillment of the longings of our pilgrimage, things happen to us along the way. Things happen to us that convince us of needs we didn’t know we had; things unfold between us and the divine that we may not even be seeking until we hit a particular point along the path.

The year my fascination with Jesus really kicked into gear, I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, married, the father of a young child, and working whenever and wherever I could. I got a part-time work-study job, funded by the university, at the local community mental health center. I was pretty good at helping people in crisis, so I was asked if I wanted to be trained as a suicide prevention worker to staff the suicide prevention hotline.

One night while I was at home “on call,” trying to sleep in the living room near the phone, hoping no one would be thinking about suicide that night or dialing the hotline that would patch the call in to my apartment, the phone rang. It was a young veteran back from Vietnam, calling from a phone booth in the parking lot of a bar. He told me that he had ingested an overdose of barbiturates and just wanted to tell another human being why he did it, before losing consciousness. There was no way in those days to trace the call. All I could do was try to keep him on the line in the hopes of gaining his confidence enough to learn where he might be to send him help.

I was nineteen years old at the time and feeling out of my depth. The man’s voice began to slur, and I knew he was slipping away. Before he did, I asked his permission to share about my newfound understanding of Jesus as a sign to all of us that God knows, loves, and cares about us, no matter how bad things get. With permission, I prayed with him over the phone. Eventually the conversation just ended. I never knew what happened to the man.

When the call was over, I got mad. Mad at myself for not having anything else to do but talk and pray. Mad at the community mental health center for letting a neophyte like me staff the suicide prevention phone. But most of all, mad at God for putting me in the position of being possibly the last person on earth to talk to this troubled soul. What do you think you’re doing putting me in a spot like that?

Something was happening to me along the way. I went to talk to my favorite pastor, Dick Bieber. His church in inner-city Detroit seemed like the kind of place Jesus would have enjoyed. Drunks from the infamous Cass Corridor would come to church stinking of alcohol, and people loved and accepted them. Professors from nearby Wayne State University and businesspeople who drove in from the suburbs to hear Dick preach would mix it up with street people and irreverent Jesus freaks wearing their OshKosh overalls to church.

I told Dick how mad I was at God for putting me in that tight spot with so little to give, and he just smiled. Then he told me a story that Jesus told of a man who went to his ornery neighbor at midnight because guests had just arrived and the man had nothing in his cupboards to feed them. The neighbor fussed and fumed, but he eventually handed over some bread so the man who had the late-arriving guests could give them something to eat (Luke 11:5–8).

I got it. I was the man whose cupboards were empty when someone late at night needed something I didn’t have to give. God was the ornery neighbor who gave me some bread just to get me off the porch. My job was to pester God for what I needed, whether I thought God felt like giving it to me or not.

“So what is it,” I asked Dick, “that I need to go out and get?” He asked me what I thought it was. I said, “I think it’s more of a God connection than I feel right now. I think it’s more of the Holy Spirit. Jesus talked about the Holy Spirit like someone we feel close to, but I don’t really know what he’s talking about.”

“Do you want more of the Holy Spirit, then?” Dick asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Come back on Wednesday night,” he told me, “and after the Bible study we’ll gather around and help you ask for more of the Holy Spirit.”

It can’t be that easy, I thought. But I trusted Dick and knew that he knew of what he spoke, so I came back nervous but hopeful.

After the Bible study was over on Wednesday evening, Dick invited me to come to the front, where he and a few others would pray with me to help ask for what I wanted more of. Man, was I nervous. This seemed very much like a situation where something spiritual was supposed to happen, and I wasn’t sure I was in the mood. I was sure I couldn’t make anything spiritual happen. I hoped these people wouldn’t be disappointed when what they asked for didn’t occur.

Dick served us Communion, then he suggested I kneel while the others gathered around for the laying on of hands, and quietly some prayers took place. I was kneeling there worried about the fact that nothing was going to happen, wondering whether I even believed in a Holy Spirit after all—Jesus I liked, but who was the Holy Spirit? To get myself out of this mental wormhole, I decided to cheat and pray the Lord’s Prayer, for lack of anything else to pray.

I hadn’t prayed the Lord’s Prayer in years. I used to pray this prayer in my bed as a kind of magical incantation to ward off things that hide in the shadows in a child’s room. As a brand-new and much more sophisticated disciple of Jesus, I wasn’t inclined to pray this kids’ prayer. Except that I did, there and then.

Our Father . . . For the first time, the thought dawned on me: God is offering to be my dad. He’s willing to be my dad. I want him to be my dad. Only it was a little more personal than that. Like, I’m your dad now and will be forever. I suddenly felt very lucky. My throat tightened with that burning sensation young men have when they are fighting back tears. I couldn’t finish my prayer. I was stuck on the father part.

You’ve got to understand: I was a dad myself then, but I was far from feeling up to the task. I wasn’t used to feeling over my head in need. I was in the stage of human development when people need to feel a growing sense of mastery. I was feeling just the opposite.

I’m your dad now and will be forever sounds like something you might read in a cheesy greeting card. But it did not sound like that to me. It felt like a dream where you’re at the place where the aliens have just landed and they come out of their spacecraft and with the most believable kindness say, “Peace, all shall be well; your planet is safe forever.”

No, I didn’t feel electricity shoot through my body, like some people I know. I don’t know what the people around me saw or felt. I just know something happened. Or something began to unfold that night that is unfolding still. Some little epiphany sparked a growing awareness that, looking back, hasn’t left me. I think that was the missing bread in my cupboard.

These kinds of things, or other kinds of things that fit you better than they fit me, happen along the way. The sequence of these things isn’t set in stone. Nothing necessarily has to come first. It’s not so clear as many people make it out to be that these three things in this order are the necessary three things in that order.

Yes, certain themes recur. Willingness to surrender when you reach the point where surrender is called for. Willingness to trust when trustworthiness has been sufficiently demonstrated. Willingness to do what you are told to do when it’s clear that the one doing the telling is God.

But how all this works itself out can’t be captured in a formula.

It’s the makings of the story that you and God are writing together and will be for the rest of your life.
As you take a step closer to knowing the Jesus who is repairing the world, it’s helpful to understand that this is part of an ongoing story that involves you. Among other things, it’s a mending story. He’s about repairing the world, and he invites you to help him get the job done. And while that’s under way, things are meant to happen that mend you.

I’m trying to stay far away from that debate about whether the world as a whole needs to be fixed before we as individuals are, or whether we need to be fixed one at a time before the world can improve. That’s one of those old meaningless debates like, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg”? (8) We are part of an enormously complex system of connections, a network in which the slightest changes at any one part may have a cascading effect that touches the whole. We change, and the network changes. The network changes, and we change along with it. Repairing the world, and the mending of each of us in it, is all of a piece with the work of God involving us. The mending happens to us in so many ways along the way.

Our fears are allayed as they were for Dr. King that night when he laid his head on the kitchen table and prayed. Our bodies are constantly in the process of mending, or we’d all die in short order. Our care and tending of each other through medicine and love and prayer and many other means mends us. Sometimes the mending just allows us to let go and die in peace; other times it causes us to snap out of it and prevail. Sometimes the mending is tender and gentle. At other times it feels brutal, as when we’re enabled to survive or even move on despite unspeakable horrors.

There’s a lot of mending that needs to be done.

BODY MENDING

The Jesus of the Gospels was actively engaged in healing the sick. He did it a lot, but it was scattershot. That is, it didn’t seem to be part of an overall public health strategy to increase longevity. People in a given locale begged him to stay longer and do more, and he shook his head no and moved on to the next village to get his message of the coming kingdom of justice out.

Jesus is compassion driven. His message doesn’t seem to be about him as much as about the sick people getting better. Jesus never told stories about how he healed people in the previous town in order to rev people up in the next town about his message. From the stories included in the Gospels, he got phenomenal results. Even the most skeptical scholars, including those who think many of the miracles in the Gospels didn’t happen, seem to acknowledge that Jesus healed people. (9)

This might make you nervous, but Jesus also told us to heal people. By “us,” I mean people who are curious enough about him to want to learn more. In fact, the first-generation disciples were sent out to heal the sick before they had arrived at any conclusions about Jesus being the promised Messiah. (10) Go heal people. Hmm . . . talk about a deal breaker. But what does that mean? You might think it means you have to make like the sweaty, fleshy preachers on television holding the microphone, talking to gullible people, and pushing them over to the cheers of the crowd. And you’re thinking, No thanks. Me too.

What if it just means, “Go heal people?” What if it means, “Don’t shy away from the sick and the outcast?” (If you’ve ever been really sick, you know how isolating an experience it is.) Instead, draw near to them, as Jesus did when he shocked the leper by touching him because he was “moved with compassion” (Mark 1:41 NKJV). This phrase, in the original language, Greek, means “moved in the bowels,” thought to be the seat of emotion. Now we know that long nerves from the brain go straight to the gut where some emotions are felt. So the ancients weren’t quite as dumb as we think they were.

Go heal people. It’s not about showing off. It’s not about proving how profoundly wonderful you are. It’s about repairing people’s broken bodies because God made himself a world and loves it. How can you do such a thing? Do what you can, not what you can’t. Stop their bleeding, clean their wounds, and see that they get the medical

care they need, like the good Samaritan in the story Jesus told about the poor man mugged on the road and left there half dead (Luke 10:25–37).

Be willing to go out on another kind of limb as the situation warrants. If people are willing, try to heal them as Jesus did. At least try. With permission, place a hand on their shoulder, open your eyes and your heart toward the wonder that the world is an expression of, and slip into that space that Jesus occupied, where God was known as Abba, Father. And then, like Jesus did, do as you are moved to do or instructed on the spot to do. Say to the pain, “Stop”.Or to the body, “Be healed.”

Don’t make a show of it if you get a little success. Don’t tell stories that make you look like the healing hero. Some friends brought a man with a speech and hearing problem (they often go together) to Jesus so he could heal the man. Jesus pulled him away from all the gawkers to tend to him more privately (Mark 7:31–37). Wouldn’t it be great, just once, if the people who did healing on television (and I’ve been around long enough to think some of that healing really happens, though much of it doesn’t as it appears) turned to the camera and said, “This is not a show; point the camera somewhere else. Actually, what are we doing on television, anyway?”

Shortly after I came to faith, my father landed in an intensive care unit in a deep coma, his body impervious to pain, and his kidneys having shut down. After days in a coma, the doctors warned us that even if he came out of the coma, he would likely be severely disabled. It was pretty grim.

A friend and I went to the chapel and prayed for my dad. We were hoping the tide would turn. While we were in there praying, Dick Bieber, the pastor I mentioned earlier, was visiting my dad. He had been talking with my dad about the new fascination with Jesus my dad had been experiencing in a very dark time in his life.

Dick was talking to my dad, who was lying there in a deep coma. He was saying things like, “Glen, you are loved by God and a lot of people. Wake up; there’s hope.”

As Dick turned to leave, the nurse in the unit told him, “Pastor, Mr. Wilson is in a very deep coma and can’t hear you.” Dick knew that, of course, but he graciously said something like, “Thanks for letting me know.”

At that point, my dad spoke up and said, “Thanks for coming, Dick.” This provoked some surprised reassessment of his condition. Obviously, he was waking up. And more wondrously, he kept waking up until soon he was just fine. He had to go through intensive physical therapy to loosen a shoulder that lost range of motion as he lay there not moving for days. And he had to go through intense counseling to deal with some things that respond to counseling. But in time, he was just fine.

You never know what’s going on. Was it just a happy coincidence or divine intervention? Hard to tell.

My sister and my mother were in the unit the next morning, though, and overheard the doctors on their rounds commenting on my father’s case the way they sometimes do as if no one else is listening. They said, “It’s the closest thing to witchcraft we’ve ever seen.”

Since then, I became more open-minded about the possibility that the words go heal people are words from Jesus worth paying closer attention to. Do what you can, not what you can’t. But sometimes you can do more than what you think you can if you are willing to go out on a limb and try.

The frustrating part to me is this: I know healing is possible. I’ve seen it work. After thirty-five-plus years of trying and watching others try and hearing reports of credible witnesses, I know it works. It just doesn’t work as much as I think it’s needed or as much as I want it to work.

As I write this, a dear friend is in the nearby hospital in a coma, having undergone a very serious medical emergency that almost killed her. There she lies, still alive, but just barely. To what end? I’m thinking. I’ve visited her many times, spoken to her words I hoped God would use to wake her up. Hopeful words, because I know it can happen. But it hasn’t happened. None of this makes sense to me.

I know people who believe in healing have explanations. Many of the explanations have to do with how much faith I have or she has, or whether I’m using the right words, or whether I’m using the right words with the right theology behind them, or whether I’m plugged in enough to get results. That last part makes sense to me. I don’t think I’m plugged in enough to get the results Jesus seems to have gotten. As I said, it’s frustrating.

But so what? It’s not about me. Some of the most effective healers in the world, whether by means of prayer or complicated surgeries or medical interventions, are also the most frustrated people, because things don’t work as well as they want them to and the sick people need them to. One of the most effective faith healers was Aimee Semple McPherson.11 People crowded around Aimee every time she came to town, and wonderful things happened that showed up in the newspapers, written by skeptical reporters who were as surprised as that nurse in the intensive care unit was when my dad said, “Thanks for coming, Dick.” Even Aimee got frustrated, though.

I do know that I hear a lot more credible-to-me reports of this kind of healing in places where there are fewer opportunities for the other kind of healing—for example, in places in the developing world where the message of Jesus is moving through a given culture for the first time in history. There are such places.That doesn’t lessen my frustration, because if you’re sick in spite of the best efforts of modern medicine to make you better, your need is as great as someone who is in one of those developing nations where the message of Jesus has been previously unheard of. Fair doesn’t seem to be what healing is about. It seems to be more about mystery.

There are plenty of reasons not to try, but I think we should try. Because sick people who don’t have other options need us to try. We should do what we can, not what we can’t, and we should also be open to doing things we think we can’t, because maybe we can.

A single woman, pregnant with twins, came to our church out of sheer desperation. Her previous religious affiliation had nothing to do with Christianity, but she needed friends and had a high school acquaintance who came to our church. The doctors told her the babies had twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, which means there was a shared blood supply between the twins when there shouldn’t have been. It’s very serious, because it usually dooms one or both of the twins, as best I understand.

This young woman came to a small group that my wife leads for single moms. (My wife, by the way, gets better results healing than I do. If I were you and sick, I’d go to her, because I’d feel my chances were somewhat better.) The women in the group found out she had this medical problem that has no known medical solution—all the doctors could do was monitor the situation—and they prayed with her. Not just once or twice, but every time they had the chance and she was willing, which was often.

The woman began to get better reports from the doctors. They told her things were going much better than expected. The twins still had the condition, but it wasn’t having the usual effect. As time went on, the doctors were more excited. They asked for her permission to share her case in a special-cases forum for doctors, because it was very special.

Eventually, the twins were born prematurely, as many twins are, but both babies were healthy. I’m so happy for her and the twins, but I’m still bothered that healing like that doesn’t happen more often. If I’m a student of Jesus, though, I’m only expected to keep learning.

I have my share of pet theories concerning why we don’t get better results than we do, but they are just that, theories; until they are tested, there’s no sense bothering you with them.(12)

One thing keeps me living in the tension between the occasional inexplicable healing and the too-frequent lack of intended results. Jesus spoke of the reign of God as coming in two different ways. Sometimes he spoke as if this coming reign were already here, or at least near at hand, like your next breath. At other times he spoke of this coming reign as coming, in the sense of “not yet here.” So this tension that I live in is at least a tension that Jesus seems to recognize in general between the “already” of what he’s up to and the “not yet” of what’s to come. Having made the distinction, I think we’re all supposed to long for more of the “not yet” to become the “already.”

SOUL MENDING

We often think of the soul as something apart from the body, but the tradition that informed Jesus didn’t see it that way. In his tradition, the Hebrew tradition, the soul is more like an expression of the person in his or her wholeness. As the creation story in Genesis 2 tells us, God breathed into Adam, and Adam became a living soul (v. 7). Another way to say it is that we are enfleshed spirits and inspirited flesh. We are soul.

I think addictions might be best described as a disease of the soul in this sense. There’s something very physical going on in addictions. Genetic predisposition probably plays a role; it’s certainly the case that some addictions are physiologically much harder to beat than others. Let’s hope for a medical breakthrough that will help. But addictions also seem to respond positively to what we think of as spiritual interventions.

Why wouldn’t they, if we are soul?

As a pastor, I talk to a lot of people suffering from addictions. I see firsthand how much pain in the world is fueled by addictions. In fact, if there were one way to improve the world so that significant social problems would be greatly lessened and the world itself would change for the better, it would be to mend the soul by curing addictions. Apart from the classic addictions—to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and the like—sin itself seems to have an addictive quality.

I think Jesus, the treasure buried in the field of religion (Matt. 13:44–46), is the source of a great deal of soul mending when it comes to addictions.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan Addiction Research Center indicates that measures of spirituality tend to increase during alcohol recovery. (13) Those who experience an increase in day-to-day spiritual experiences and sense of purpose in life are more likely to sustain recovery. The study indicated that these results did not depend on participation in Alcoholics Anonymous. (Alcoholics Anonymous is the most well-known and widespread approach to treating alcoholism with a spiritual program.)

I would be surprised if Jesus brand spirituality were the only form of spirituality that had this effect. I’m not aware of any study demonstrating that it is. But I do think that the demonstrated impact of spirituality on recovery from alcohol addiction says something important about Jesus brand spirituality—just not over and against other spiritualities.

It’s a fact of history that the recovery principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, summarized in the twelve steps, were distilled from

Christian spirituality. What became AA was first associated with something called the Oxford Group, a form of evangelical Christian faith.

People bandy about the word prophetic nearly as much as the word journey. But I think the story of Alcoholics Anonymous is a story through which God is speaking and, in that sense, prophetic.

You may know that Bill Wilson, the cofounder of AA, was an end-stage alcoholic whose recovery began when a friend of his who had gotten a Jesus brand form of religion started talking to him about the power of religion to change lives. Bill Wilson’s physician, unable to successfully treat Bill’s alcoholism, told him that a religious conversion sometimes helped. He didn’t know how to lead his patient toward one other than to advise him to get one. In the hospital, drying out from yet another binge, Bill Wilson got one.

In the depths of his torment, Wilson issued the unknowable challenge: “If there be a God, let Him show Himself now!” he shouted. As if in response to his demand, the room suddenly filled with light. It was bright and white, a benign, enveloping presence that seemed more than a match for the terror he had been feeling just moments before. Then he saw himself on a mountaintop, with a wind blowing toward him. The wind moved closer and closer, then through him. Then the man who had been bound up in a seemingly irresolvable struggle felt profoundly free. (14)

The context for this experience was Bill’s connection with the Oxford Group. These are the people he approached to help him sustain the new freedom he gained from using alcohol. The principles he integrated into the twelve steps were principles he learned from people who derived them from the message of Jesus.

You’d be wrong to think this is a story of Christian triumphalism. Perhaps Bill Wilson realized that his principles of recovery couldn’t be practiced as plainly as they needed to be practiced inside the camp of Christianity. The culture of the church in general at that time wasn’t a good one for recovering alcoholics. It was too focused on applying moral effort to stop the sinful drinking, and it didn’t work. One biographer indicates that Bill Wilson didn’t view drinking as a sin, as his Oxford Group fellows did, and that many of his other views were outside the accepted views of these dedicated Christians as well. (15)

So Bill Wilson, as aware as he was of the connection between those twelve steps and the religion of Jesus, made a decision to take AA outside the camp of Christianity. This strategy included the counsel to entrust one’s life to “a Power greater than ourselves.”16 This wording annoys many Christians. They would much prefer that Jesus be named the official higher power. In fact there’s been a long history of something like sibling rivalry between AA and the church, though in recent decades both parties are getting along much better.

Perhaps Jesus is more interested in helping drunks get better than in getting the credit. If your brain is pickled in alcohol it’s difficult to follow any path, let alone the Jesus path.

I think God sent Alcoholics Anonymous outside the camp of the church with his blessing on each one of those twelve steps, his presence hovering wherever two or three alcoholics bent on recovery gathered. Through AA, God was both helping as many alcoholics as would have his help and slapping the church in the face to wake them up. In large part, it’s worked. The church today is a much healthier environment than it used to be for recovering alcoholics. Many churches sponsor their own recovery programs, and the spirituality of the twelve steps has found its way back into the camp.

I think this is a lesson for the church: we shouldn’t just look for God to show up inside our camp; we should look for him to show up outside our camp as well. Jesus, after all, went outside the camp to do his most important work.

1. For example, the doctrine called “transubstantiation” (that the wine of Communion becomes the blood of Christ) is based on Aristotelian understanding of physics, which makes a distinction between the “substance” of a thing and its “accidents.” This is a philosophical distinction that we simply don’t use anymore.

2. The Christian understanding of God as a Trinity of coequal “persons” took that long to develop into the form articulated in the Nicene Creed; other perspectives in even the simplest summaries of faith took longer to develop in the form represented in the statements. The earliest confession of faith was simply, “Jesus is Lord”—and there were no doubt those who hastened to add, “properly understood.”

3. This particular statement of faith was called the Canons of Dort.

4. A class at my Episcopal church designed to teach young people about the core beliefs of the Christian faith.

5. These are beautiful statements of faith from the second and fourth centuries, respectively.

6. For example, the title of King’s doctoral dissertation was “A Comparison of the Conception of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” See Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic, 2006).

7. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper, 1987).

8. It’s a meaningless debate, because a population of birds, through a gradual process of adaptation to changing environments, over a very long period time, became what we call chickens today. They and their eggs did, that is.

9. Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 61.

10. The term Messiah refers to an individual, longed for by Israel, who would come to make things right, and especially to deliver them from foreign occupation.

11. Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson by Daniel Mark Epstein (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993) is the best book about her and details the extraordinary results she achieved. This book was not written by an adoring follower of McPherson.

12. I wish other people who had pet theories would find a way to test them before foisting them on the rest of us.

13. Elizabeth Robinson, PhD, Kirk Brouwer, MD, James Cranford, PhD, and John Webb, PhD, “Six-Month Changes in Spirituality, Religiousness, and Heavy Drinking in Treatment-Seeking Sample,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 68, no. 2 (March 2007) 282–90.

14. Francis Hartigan, Bill W.: A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2000), 61.

15. See Hartigan’s discussion in Bill W., especially p. 68.

16. “The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous,” step 2, http://www.alcoholicsanonymous.org/en_information_aa.cfm?PageID=17&SubPage=68. (accessed October 23, 2007).