I just spent probably an hour I don’t have writing out my impression of the Elephant Room, which I attended at its simulcast at Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon yesterday from 9am to 4pm. Here’s an abridged version (stupid WordPress!). Here’s the description of ER from their website. And here’s the list of participants and conversations, click here.

My General Impression

The most sensational think about this round of the ER is that T.D. Jakes was there. He is known for his modalism or Oneness Pentecostal views on the Trinity; meaning that he has denied the Trinity. Yesterday, after answering some rapid fire questions from Mark Driscoll, he said that he could now affirm a belief in three distinct persons and one God as such. Yet he still seemed partial to the language of manifest, which is the favorite word used by Oneness Pentecostal about how God ‘manifests’ himself as different persons per whatever the occasion (so sometimes the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit). I think all we can do now is wait and see what Jakes preaches and teaches in the days to come to see if in fact he was not just playing to his audience (which some skeptics, I’ve read are already claiming the case to be). Beyond this issue, I have one more main impression; to that we now turn.

The reason I went, was because I wanted to get a sense of where the American Evangelical church is at today (from the Elephant’s mouth, as it were); and so the ER, with its cross section of pastors from all the high profile churches in America serve as a good representative of where the church is at in America today (or where many smaller churches are striving to be). The sense I walked away from this with was that Theological Education, and that kind of discipleship in the church today (in general, based off of these guys’ approach) does not have a chance—so a theologian type like me doesn’t really have much of a chance of getting hired as a pastor of Christian education, Evangelism/Discipleship (which are my strengths), teaching in an environment like this (like I didn’t know this already). This is a bad state of affairs. What predominated their discussion was the pragmatics of their ministries; this is what stood out in my mind as I left Western and the ER yesterday. It was as if Jesus and any kind of ‘depth dimension’ was absent; as if their ministries were some kind of abstraction from Christ’s ministry, such that their kingdoms were the ones on display (it was ultimately sickening to me!)—the only exception would have been Crawford Loritts. So as not to sound too harsh, they were all very sincere, for the most part, it seemed (but of course there are lots of sincere people in the world).

I went in thinking that this was more the American Evangelical spectacle (and another way to make money—the full price to attend, even the simulcast, was $99.00—I was given a discounted rate, $29.00, since I have a blog and can blog about it and give it more of an online presence) of American Evangelicalism; and ultimately I did not leave the event with a changed impression. They denigrated, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly (like James MacDonald especially); theological thinking, and pursuit of thinking Christianly like that. Instead it seems, that at least MacDonald, would have us continue on sucking on the baby pablum that all of us Evangelicals have become so accustomed to. There was no call for Christians to get deep in thought by pressing into the rich heritage that we have in the history of the Church, and even in contemporary Christian thought. There was a call for holiness, but I wonder how these Pastors intend to get people into the inner sanctum of God’s life and thus doxology if they don’t intend on appealing to any thing other than ‘mystery’ as the mode for thinking deeply about God … oh yeah, never mind, I forgot; they have a whole play list of Christian mantras and worship songs that they can use to place their congregants in an altered state of consciousness through—too harsh? I don’t think so. I am deeply saddened by the greatest scandal that has ever been perpetrated on the Church of Jesus Christ; that is that the so called ‘Shepherds’ treat their flock like they’re a bunch of stupid sheep—and thus they seem to think that the continued trajectory of apathy is the way to go. They did talk about the trajectory of American Evangelicalism yesterday, and most of them had dim projections if we stay on our current path. The scary thing is that most of them seemed to think that the discussions started at the Elephant Room yesterday could have the effect of re-trajectorizing the American Evangelical church in a fruitful way forward. Huh?!!!