Pastors With Sneakers

Jake Meador from Mere Orthodoxy recently wrote a piece titled The Importance of Not Caring about Mark Driscoll for Mere Orthodoxy. I am newly subscribed to Mere Orthodoxy (eagerly awaiting my first print edition of the publication) but this was also shared by my friend Roger on his blog.

As he writes about the particulars of the evangelical strain of Christianity, Meador notes their strangeness to more traditional Christians.

People who aren’t as steeped in evangelicalism as a sociological entity often find all this mystifying. One friend with ties to an eastern Christian tradition once remarked to me that, “you evangelicals are kind of a joke, you know? My people have been persecuted for centuries. Our children have been stolen from us. We’ve had martyrs. Our churches have been burned. But still we are faithful. We still follow God. We still meet for worship. We still pray. We still raise our children in the truth. But you evangelicals discover that critical race theory is a thing that exists and six months later you’re devouring each other.”

The reference to devouring one another is a callback to the book of Galatians, an epistle by Saint Paul, to the church in Galatia.

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. (Galatians 5: 13:15)

Paul’s warning is a potent reminder to even modern-day Christians of the dangers we face if we are not careful.

A colleague of mine, who was part of the PCA Church, used to converse with me in the break room at the office about matters of faith.¹ He constantly asked me if I knew the celebrity pastors he referenced. I had heard of very few of them. Tim Keller, John Piper, bad boy pastor Mark Driscoll, and a handful of others were familiar to me but the vast majority were not names that I had heard. The mindshare that these fellows (they were always men) held seemed to me a bit outsized relative to their credentials. Though, I want to be careful about sitting in judgment of these individuals as an entire group — I for one think we could use more Tim Kellers in this world.

In the Orthodox faith, we don’t have celebrity influencers juicing the numbers of their book sales (like Driscoll) to rise to the top of the Christian publishing industrial complex. We have the saints and the clergy, who have been vetted and to which we proclaim “Axios!” (they are worthy). In them (the saints in particular) we validate the presence of the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These fruits are named very shortly after the admonitions of Saint Paul not to devour each other in the fifth chapter of Galatians.

This spring, I began thinking quite a bit about how we notice The Holy Spirit at work in the world. I have worshipped with Pentecostals who speak in tongues to portray manifestations of the Spirit. I have sat on committees with progressive Presbyterians trying to discern the voice of the Spirit (which sounded, in that context, suspiciously like the contemporary cultural zeitgeist). It wasn’t until I was received into the Orthodox Church that I realized that the saints were designated as such because they were the examples of the Spirit manifest in the lives of believers.

I read about Saints Nektarios of Aegina, Seraphim of Sarov, Paisios of Athos, Mary of Egypt, Vitalis of Gaza, Basil of Caesarea, Macrina the Younger, Gregory of Nyssa, and others. I recognized the role of the Church in pointing us to the lives of these remarkable individuals in whom we could see the fruits that Saint Paul instructed us to look for in chapter five of Galatians.

Though I try to be mindful of criticism of Christians from different backgrounds, I can’t escape the skepticism I have about spiritual formation that one may get from popular influencers in some of these spaces.

It’s important to note that Mere Orthodoxy is not titled as such because it’s a capital O Orthodox Christian publication. The name of the publication comes from a combination of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton. Although, like many thoughtful Christians writing these days who happen to be evangelical or similarly situated, its writers — whether consciously or not — at times seem in some ways to have an outlook that is close to traditional Orthodoxy.

1. This now-former colleague recently converted to Catholicism. He messaged me on 4/1 of this year to let me know about this change and included pictures so I would know it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke. ↩︎