The Pilgrim’s Protest

This piece began as just a revision of the letter that I read at the Open Forum a couple of weeks ago, but things from recent days and especially recent hours will likely have dramatically changed what it will be. I came on campus today for the usual Monday meeting that The Pilgrim’s Protest staff has every week. In that meeting, Dr. Crutchfield was talking to us about our generational propensity for phrasing things to ourselves in ways that his generation would read and pretty much dismiss. He then jokingly referred to himself as the “token adult” as that turned into a conversation that essentially amounted to talking about the way our two generations carry ourselves and conduct our business. I’m 23, meaning I’m the second oldest person in the room, and Dr. Crutchfield’s words hit home for me.

The walk to the place where I’m writing now was a reflective one, a burden of age and responsibility finally articulating itself for me. Some of us, you see, have taken up the campaign to question and dialogue with our institution about some of its practices and policies. We have done so out of a desire to see CIU reach its potential, because we love it and we know that if everything else matched the integrity of the Bible training one receives here, Columbia International University would become the powerhouse center of modern Christian study that its administration so longs for it to become. Of course, no one likes to be questioned at the top, and the people below don’t like to have their comfort zone challenged.

And, at the end of the day, it’s easy to be comfortable here. Read your Bible for a half hour a day, go to a building every Sunday, play games, have fun, never question your elders and call that a community. Bind yourself to a set of southern cultural standards, some of which aren’t sin, and call that holiness. Check off all the things on that list and call it sanctification.

Follow the rules, do what you’re told, and don’t question. Move along, there’s nothing to see here. Stay under the radar. Yeah, it’s easy to be comfortable here. It’s easy to coast through four years with no passion, happily perpetuating the pop Christianity that’s marketed to us in our favorite bookstores. It’s easy to read from the text the same things we always have without putting our hermeneutics training to work and finding a richer way to be human – one where sanctification is as much about learning to process things with a godly mind, through the lens of naked scripture and history rather than our denominational and institutional leanings, which have become the latest incarnation of the inevitable political landscape that religion mutates into when it is comfortable. We’ve managed to do it, just like the religious authorities in Jesus’ day did it. Maybe even a little faster.

Some of us see the potential and get frustrated at the response. We’re not comfortable because we’re different, and burdened because we can’t really change anything. Change in this atmosphere takes time – months and years. We are a postmodern generation questioning the comfortable nest that our modern professors and administrators have built up around themselves. Their element is paperwork and committees, whatever we think of that, and asking them to shift their thinking so drastically is maybe a bit much. I say that not as a slam, but as an admonition to myself. To me, it is as simple as sending an email, having a meeting and saying, “We do this differently from here on out.” To them, its months of committees, the wording of policies and whether something is offensive – whether or not it may be the truth. We demand they meet us where we are, like missionaries moving into a foreign culture and totally westernizing it. We demand they do what we ourselves are unwilling to do, and I can’t help but smile at our arrogance and irony at that. Or maybe its just bare idealism, I don’t know.

Am I saying to give up? No. Am I saying to stop questioning? No. Am I admitting that The Pilgrim’s Protest has been wrong in anything it has done? Not at all; a paper like the Protest is necessary as it is an outlet for the student body - if the individual members of that body will stop complaining that maybe they disagree and write their disagreement and submit it. We’re submissions based; it’s my own fault if I fail to submit anything. Community is never the perfect alignment of ideals, but it is the mass communication of ideas and the agreement to cast away the belief that we are always and completely right. The truth is, more often than not, somewhere in the middle of our extremes. A community is true humility and a willingness to change for the common best.

Now, that is not aimed just at my postmodern cohorts. It is also aimed squarely at our modern counterparts. It is your job, too, to reconsider your positions, consider that your ideas and ideals might not be biblically square, and most of all – to not abuse the authority given to you by God. So often we get this backwards. “You are in authority so what you say is absolute.” The job of the leader is not to rule absolutely but to bear the burden of what is best for the many, even if the leader disagrees. And, like it or not CIU leadership, modernism isn’t the end all be all and you’re dealing with a generation that is incredibly different. What is best for us won’t be what has been best in the past.

And, by the way, postmodernism isn’t evil. It is a tool and a possibility, an ability to question with this in mind for the Christian: there is a truth. Its particulars may be buried beneath a couple of centuries of church politics and a few decades of pop western Christianity, but there is a truth to be found. Questioning the particulars is good – Jesus had to question the authorities of his day to get back to the core, naked truths of God. These undeniable and unchanging truths should always be a goal for us – not the safety net of cultural standards and politics.

I could choose to include in this editorial the strong criticisms I read at the forum: my disagreement with the structure and the spirit of behavioral standards, my dislike for the atmosphere of fear that is here, and my dislike for the way we handle our finances as an institution. I could do that. But anyone willing to ask me at the lunch table, from Dr. Murray to the newest freshmen can easily get that out of me, and many have before. This is my final piece of writing as a student at CIU and as a member of the Protest staff. I’m leaving for USC, and to establish a career as a writer and visual artist.

I want to make a plea – meet in the middle. I’d wager none of us are completely right. But a fight won’t change a Christian institution into what it could be. Humility just might, along with a healthy dose of the Spirit of God. The truth is, our generation will rise to power in the next 20 or 30 years and then we can do things our way. My hope, however, is that we will be wise enough in our youth to rise to power with the humility to gain the wisdom of those above us now, whether it is learning from their mistakes or from their experience. This is, after all, why any of us should be here: to learn, think, be challenged and grow as Christians and as people. We should not be here to merely affirm everything we’ve been told previously. Don’t be coerced into anything that seems wrong to you philosophically or spiritually, but seek the core truth of scripture and be willing to admit that you may need to change your ideology.

Leave if you have to. Stay if you should. Do what is right, love justice, and walk humbly with the Lord your God.