I am rather tired of discussing why my faith is reasonable. It’s not reasonable. I will never be convinced that it is reasonable. I could reason myself into the opposite conclusions. It’s only in the living that it makes sense, living my particular life and seeing the particular ways that God communicates to me. I find God in the particular, not the general. And reason is so general that it can be used to prove anything. Only God can give me certain experiences and ways of understanding. And I am the only one who can communicate those experiences. But it is not only in the particularity of personhood that God seems most real. Time and place are also significant. Flannery O’Connor did a beautiful job describing the strangeness of God’s ways through her depictions of the South in the early 20th century. If she were to attempt to describe God somewhere else at some other time, her stories would lose their power, because that was the place and time that she lived. That was the time and place in which she understood God. I don’t feel that I can comprehend very much of God as he was in the Old Testament. That is not my story. God is not reasonable and his ways are not our ways. But I can see some of the ways God worked in Chicago in 1998.

And Jesus’ story is my story too. He became incarnate and I am carnal. He died and I will die. He came into a very particular place – Bethlehem – into a very particular family and entered Jerusalem a particular way, because that was how it was to be. And perhaps there is something significant in the time he chose. Chesterton thinks there is. The Roman Empire had unified a great deal of the world, which allowed Christianity to spread rapidly. Paul was able to go to Rome and speak the same language. Going into all the world was a challenge, a life-threatening challenge, but the world was also more prepared to receive the message than perhaps it had ever been. Maybe Chesterton is wrong. But I like to think that Jesus chose a particular time. He did not come during the golden age of Israel, nor did he come during the worst persecution of the Jews. He came during a time of oppression when people longed for a political messiah. He came at a time of desperate need, but not a time so desperate that they were completely malleable.

Nothing is quite so generic as a new person or place. It takes time for things to become particular. It is only when you know someone very well that you can understand and appreciate their complexity and their beauty. The nuance of a picture becomes clear only after staring at it for a very long time. My current struggle is finding the particularity of this place and these people. I have not been in Osprey Point for very long, and I do not know people as particular individuals quite yet. I am still attempting to discern the underlying meaning of a sigh or the tone of a laugh. Meaningfulness comes with particularity, and thus far we have only been working towards particularity, seeing each other dimly. But I hope that soon we will see face to face.

The other day, during a conversation about calling, Os Guinness told us that we need to redeem the word "evangelical" because it has so many negative connotations. Josh, a fellow participant, asked whether it would not be more productive to simply use a different word, as 'evangelical' has so many unwanted political and historical connotations. Guinness disagreed. He was also extremely pessimistic about the state of Christianity in our generation. And I believe those two sentiments are connected.

Although I'm not a particularly optimistic person, I do have great hope for the future of Christianity. We no longer live in an ultrarational society that rejects things which cannot be proven. We are comfortable with uncertainty, and that comfort allows room for spirituality and paradox. But I do not have great hope for the future of evangelicalism as it now is. And that tenuous future is responsible for the fear of the future communicated by leaders such as Guinness. His generation cannot understand how genuine faith can exist without the light of reason. But we are supposed to see things from the light of God, not the light of reason. There is great danger in assuming that we can only communicate God's grace through one particular mode of thinking. If God is truly God, he is God in modernity and God in postmodernity.

I do not consider myself evangelical. Evangelicals read Focus on the Family. Evangelicals believe in capital punishment. Evangelicals listen to radio stations that are safe for the whole family. To become an evangelical is to subscribe to a particular brand of politics, shopping habits, etc. It is descriptive of the majority of Bible-believing Christians in the United States. But that lifestyle should not be prescriptive. And if you are reading this, I am fairly certain you agree with me already, so I won't go any further in this direction.

The challenge as I see it, is confronting the negativity of the older generation. How do we communicate that situation is not quite so bleak as they believe it to be? Granted, most people in our generation do not attend churches. But most of the people attending churches at the moment do not have a faith that dictates more than church attendance. We are more disingenuous. It is not as though church attendance is an accurate gauge of spirituality. It is the spirit of community that is important, not the spirit of church attendance.

Evangelicalism as we know it may disappear, but Christianity will not. If Evangelicalism becomes a petrified forest, we should not place so much importance on preserving it that there is no room for new growth. New trees need sun and water, but they also need space to branch out. And to stifle them is to risk deforestation. To take the forest metaphor even farther, we certainly need to be cautious about allowing weeds to grow too far. But if we are overly cautious we will never see anything new at all. Perhaps it is time Evangelicals started believing in evolution.