The Born Again Church Tour–OTM Live 2008 Seattle

Posted by Benjamin on: 10.13.2008 /

This last weekend Megan and I attended OTM Live 2008 Seattle, part of a two city tour this year.  The crowd seemed smaller than last year, but I’m thinking that everybody who wanted to come used to fly here, and this year they had one other option as well.

Two main things struck me.  The first was that … I am more definitely outside the church in general, and evangelicalism in particular, than perhaps I previously was.  Perhaps I’ve sort of … completed the journey out, to some extent.  The ways I realized this were around being surprised at how “in” some of the speakers seemed to me.

For instance, David Kinnaman was surprisingly “in”.  I guess I had thought of him as a bit more out here with me, largely because of the rather kewl quotes I’ve read (and used) from his book. And yet he came across, for instance, as thinking of homosexuals as very much “other”.  He even said outright that he thought that homosexuality and christianity were incompatible, although he immediately continued by saying he realized that there were sincere Christians who disagreed with him.  He spoke of people in three categories: non-Christians, Christians, and Christians with a “BWV”, which stands for “Biblical Worldview.” (Their definition is about halfway down that page that I linked.  Be warned: It’s *totally* obnoxious.)  I was thinking “Biblical Worldview” is something akin to an oxymoron.  It’s not exactly an oxymoron, it’s just an attempt, in my opinion, to squeeze … apple juice from an orange.  The Bible doesn’t offer a “worldview”.  At best, it offers a series of stories of people from lots of different cultures over a period of many centuries, each of whom arguably *had* a worldview.  I think what David (and Barna) really meant by “BWV Christians” was “Christians who … are like me to some definable extent on some axis or axes”.  BICBW.

And Christine Wicker was surprisingly in.  I guess after her kewl books on … alternative spiritualities, I also had kind of thought of her as being out here with me.  I think she herself might have, over the past couple years, been a bit surprised by her in-ness.  In recounting the tale of the writing of her excellent Fall of the Evangelical Nation, she recounted story after story of how she kept slowly coming to the realization that contrary to prevailing myth, evangelicals are a dying rather than a growing breed.  What struck me as she spoke was the way she kept saying that each time she ran into a new statistic which evidences this, she felt afraid.  I asked her why she had felt so much fear during her realization of the decline/fall of evangelicalism here in the U.S. She said that having grown up Southern Baptist, and having left the church a while ago, learning of the sickness of the movement was kind of like learning that an old Pop against whom she had rebelled and whom she didn’t really like, but who was still *family*, was dying.

Anyway, the second thing I realized was that Off the Map attracts the most astoundingly kewl people.  So the real highlight of the parts of the conference I was able to attend (Megan and I had to trade off conference and child care on Friday) was getting to meet some of these kewl people and ask questions and hear bits of their stories and what attracted them to Off the Map.  I had a longish talk with Dennis, the leader of a men’s group up in Marblemount Washington, a tiny community of 250 where he and 30 other guys meet on Thursday mornings to pray, and apparently something rather kewl often happens.  I had a great talk with Dr. Winn, who I think is onto something with his idea that verse numbers and chapters very unneccessarily chop up the Bible into an unreadable mess. (my words–”unreadable mess”, not his.  But he *did* say Christians become “versified mutts”, a phrase I simply loved). Winn also introduced me an idea he had gotten from someone else that the world is divided up into two groups of people: “Gutenbergers”, which are people who who are more into reading *paper* sources than reading online sources, and “Googlies”, which are people who, as Winn put it, “have an umbilical cord growing out of their stomach into computers and the Web.”  I was telling Winn that in my opinion, by 2020 physical paper books will *all* be rare.

I also had fun conversations with the brilliant Pam Hogewide, and the brilliant and hilarious Matt Caspar (who kind of threatened to put a skid mark on the copy of Matt and Caspar Go to Church he was giving away as a prize.  But I think you had to be there to understand why that was funny) and the motorcycle riding super awesome Randy Siever, and the brilliant Mike O, who had the opposite emotional reaction than I did when I told him his home state of Minnesota was my hero because they were the *only* state whose electoral votes didn’t go to Ronald Reagan in 1984 =), and the excellent Dave, who has a real passion, it sounds like, for connecting with children and teens.

I’m afraid I largely rather skipped offical sessions with speakers in order to have a lot of these conversations.  Ah well.  Overall, I still feel like Off the Map is doing incredibly kewl work.  We are helping people like me and people like “them” connect.  Ultimately this is something that is absolutely essential to all the really good biggish results, in my not so humble opinion.  I’m glad I went.

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