Here’s another excerpt from The Feast.

“A writer, whose name I’ve since forgotten, once wrote that the two great religions in America are optimism and denial.”

—Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

The soul of American Christianity is malnourished. We are in constant need of having our imaginations raised from slumber. Feasting together on the words and stories of Scripture is the way this happens. If I’m correct that America’s religious soul is starving, starvation is the symptom and not the problem. The problem is that many of us lack a diet of the Gospel in our lives. We fill our hearts and minds with the junk food of social pop-psychology and shallow entertainment. Our souls atrophy because we do not feast on the teachings of God’s story. The following chapters provide a few recipes.

The atrophy of Christian spirituality is ironic, of course, because the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are packed with “feasting” language and imagery. The prophet Jeremiah declares, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight,” (15:16). God commands  Ezekiel to eat the book he’s been given (Ezek 2:8ff). Jesus tells the crowd that real spiritual life is reserved for those who are willing to eat his flesh and drink his blood (Jn. 6). John the Apostle is instructed to eat the little scroll which will “turn your stomach sour but in your mouth will be sweet as honey” (Rev 10:9-10). Eugene Peterson inspired me to dig deeper into this image in Eat This Book:

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body.     Christians don’t simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus’ name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.³

Digesting the teachings of Scripture is one way Christians can actually embody the good news of God in our chaotic world. In my own consumption of the Scriptures, I often see God as priest to the outcast and prophet to the religious. As I write this I live in the inoculated suburbs of Detroit. Scripture has proven to be a powerful remedy for indifference and apathy, prompting me to go into all the world as I try to heal, evangelize, practice justice, and raise hands in adoration to God, the Father.

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As a collective whole the church has fallen short of this lofty vision, for more humans died violent deaths in the twentieth century, the alleged height of Christendom, than in all previous centuries combined. Genocide in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Darfur, Northern Uganda, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Srebrenica, along with the devastation of WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust crushed the optimism that characterized the West at the onset of the twentieth century. By 1930, due to war and an unprecedented economic turmoil now known as the Great Depression, the spirit of progress began to give way to a spirit of disillusionment.

Modern Christianity did not fare well because it failed to feast primarily on Jesus and Christian Scripture. Many of the aforementioned atrocities took place in “Christian” nations or nations closely affiliated with the Christian religion (including Nazi Germany, which at the rise and reign of Hitler’s Third Reich, was overwhelmingly Lutheran).⁴ Or, in the words of one poet: “After two thousand years of [Christian] mass / We’ve got as far as poison-gas.”⁵

The following statistic reinforces my claim that American/Western Christianity is in a state of decline: according to Alister McGrath, though almost two-thirds of all Christians lived in the West in 1900, two-thirds of all Christians in the world now live outside the West. Hence the phrases in popular parlance regarding the seismic shift in religion as we know it—the United States is now post-Christian and postmodern.

In the last fifty years, Christianity shifted to the far corners of the world: China, South America, and Africa. Scholars now note that there are more Anglicans in Africa, for instance, than in all of Great Britain.⁶ The largest Christian congregation in the U.K. is Kingsway International Church, started by two African leaders, and Africa now boasts more Christians than the United States. Conservative estimates indicate that less than one half of one percent of China is Christian, though as one spiritual guide points out, “one half of one percent of infinity is a lot of people.”

My own religious tribe, Churches of Christ from the American Restoration Movement, has been slowly declining for the last three decades.⁷ This trend mirrors what’s happening in most of Western Christianity, which—with the exception of two major segments of Protestant faith, Pentecostalism and Independent/Community Churches—is in a season of stagnation and severe deterioration.

Yet just as so many are losing the faith that has been a source of comfort and direction in ages past, more chaos marks the twenty-first century global landscape. The devastation of America’s 9-11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, tragic earthquakes in Pakistan and Kashmir, the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and the latest surge of wars in the Middle East should cause Christians to ask two important questions: “Is God present and working in the face of such pressing evil?” and “How can Christianity be ‘good news’ for those who do not ‘believe’?” These two questions undergird this entire book. I’m convicted that Christianity’s real genius and power rests in its ability to bring healing, justice, and equality to all people. The real test of Christian theology is the result it brings for those who do not subscribe to the Christian faith.

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The Feast engages the discussion of what Christianity, as a spiritual movement rather than an institutional religion, can sound and look like in a pluralistic society like the one emerging in the United States.