There Are So Many Ways to Follow Jesus...

For the past year, I’ve had the honor of taking part in Following Jesus, an online, ecumenical conversation with eleven fellow Christians: theologians and historians; professors and seminary students; clergy and laity. Each month one of us started by writing 1,500 words about what it means to follow Jesus in our particular Christian tradition. After the other eleven responded, the lead writer got a final word at the end of the month.

Organized by retired Christian college administrator Harold Heie, this iteration of his “respectful conversation” model went in rough chronological order, starting with Eastern Orthodoxy (David Ford) and ending with Pentecostalism (J. Terry Todd). As the Pietist in the group, I followed my Baptist counterpart (David Gushee) and preceded our Wesleyan colleague (Sarah Lancaster) in representing post-Reformation traditions.

A word cloud generated by the twelve lead essays in the Following Jesus conversation

I think Harold intends to publish the collected result,¹ adding a final comment from Canadian evangelical scholar John Stackhouse.

But now that my part in the process is largely concluded, let me offer a few general observations of my own.

You can’t follow Jesus in the abstract

For years now, I’ve heard more and more students and alumni at my Christian university reject particular identifiers like Protestant, evangelical, and Baptist, and even the general term Christian, in favor of something like “follower of Jesus.” And I get that: Protestants, evangelicals, and Baptists, like Christians in general, are remarkably adept at turning good words bad.

So go ahead and be a follower of Jesus… just understand that you can’t do that in the abstract.

If this year-long conversation made anything clear, it’s that how we understand Jesus — who he is, what he means to us, and what we think he requires of us — is contextual. Dare I say, incarnational?²

I won’t say that all of our religious beliefs and behavior are merely the products of what precedes us or the residue of who surrounds us. But how we think about Jesus, his gospel, and his kingdom is always shaped by influences we often don’t recognize, let alone understand. Indeed, how we follow Jesus is often conditioned by choices that others made before us.

“Follow me”: Caravaggio’s painting of Jesus calling Peter and Andrew as disciples - Wikimedia

Tradition isn’t static, or simple

Which is why I liked Harold’s emphasis on the word “tradition.” It reminds us that we’re rooted in something that we don’t simply decide anew moment by moment. At the same time, the historian in me understands that the continuity — and complexity — of tradition is brought into relief by change over time.

First off, personal change over time. I was surprised to see how many of my conversation partners had changed traditions. Randall Balmer and Wes Granberg-Michaelson both left evangelicalism and followed the Canterbury and Geneva trails, respectively, to the Anglican and Reformed Traditions. And those journeys seemed short and direct compared to Terry Todd’s move from Episcopalianism to Pentecostalism, or Christina Wassell’s self-described “winding path” from evangelical, Methodist, and Episcopal churches to traditional Catholicism.

However they got there, I think each participant succeeded in defining distinctive beliefs, practices, attitudes, instincts, etc. that set off their tradition by comparison and contrast to others. But I’d underscore that all those markers have developed over time. Sometimes in response to theological debates or the emergence of a charismatic innovator; sometimes under the duress of socioeconomic change, political upheaval, or military conflict that caused Christians to rethink, reform, or retrench.

It’s why I found our Orthodox and Pentecostal bookends so intriguing. Having started the conversation with “a path of belief and practice” that David Ford says has been “followed with remarkable consistency by millions of Orthodox Christians through twenty centuries,” we ended with Terry Todd describing the “transgressive” tendencies within Pentecostalism, a movement born in the 20th century, exploding in the 21st, and releasing religious forces with the power to overturn any status quo.

But both are also marked by diversity. For all its constancy, Orthodoxy is full of variety, if only because it’s always expressed via vernacular language, ethnic heritage, and national community. And you didn’t have to be a Pentecostal to join Todd in struggling to pull common themes out of “the bewildering variety” of one’s tradition. For example, Mennonite scholar Michael King devoted about half of his essay on the Anabaptist Tradition to sketching the complexity of what’s numerically the smallest tradition in the conversation. And Farris Blount III took pains to explain that “there is no such thing as the monolithic ‘Black Church,’” orienting his essay around the tension within that tradition between those emphasizing social justice and liberation and those emphasizing personal holiness and private piety.

Sculpture of Jesus from Indonesia - CC BY 2.0 (Argya Diptya)

Practice and Experience over Belief

Either way, Blount’s essay was typical of most in the conversation in couching “following Jesus” more in terms of experience and action than belief. Whether Black Christians stressed prayer or protest, what mattered most was practice as followers of Jesus, not propositions about Christ.

That emphasis was probably hardwired into the design of a project that asked about following Jesus, not just Jesus himself. (To my relief.³) But it was still interesting to see how rarely we lingered on questions of theology, especially as the calendar moved past the ancient and Reformation traditions into those of more recent origin.

I structured my own essay around a week in the life of an imagined Pietist, who came to church on Sunday “to meet Jesus, not just to think about the idea of Christ,” then proceeded to spend most of her time engaged in individual and corporate disciplines of prayer, study, and service to others. What else would you expect from Pietism, with its suspicion of “dead orthodoxy” and its dedication to “making faith active in love”?

I don’t want to draw too sharp a line here. Whether it was David Gushee on the Baptist notion of gift and task or Mark Ellingsen on Luther’s understanding of Christian freedom, some of the best essays made clear how Christian belief animated and shaped Christian practice and experience. And Ford was no doubt right to tell me “that the modern-day Pietist whom you winsomely describe could perhaps be strengthened and enriched in her faith-walk with Christ if she were a little less hesitant and/or skeptical about the importance of sound doctrine/teaching about Him.”

But we also had a Wesleyan explain what love has to do with the practice of holiness and an Anglican find beauty in liturgy, music, and art. Perhaps most strikingly, Robert Millet said almost nothing about the theological innovations of Mormonism and instead emphasized practices that Latter-day Saints share in common with most all Christians: Bible study, prayer, community service, and taking communion.

Which is a good reminder that, for all the variety of Christian traditions and the diversity within them, it’s mostly in shared experience and common activity that we can hope for a greater degree of Christian unity.

Of course, there’s also value to the kind of patient, painstaking theological discussions that Granberg-Michaelson and Millet have engaged in. But if Christians can never agree on the finer points of doctrine, they can nonetheless follow the example of my pietistic ancestors: self-described “Mission Friends” who deemphasized confessional uniformity in order to give themselves greater freedom to partner with fellow followers of Jesus Christ in pursuing his work in this world.

1. As he has done with earlier conversations on topics like politics, evangelicalism, and sexuality.

2. One of many reasons I’d love to see a second year of the conversation, bringing together voices that reflect a greater diversity of contexts. For example, I’d love to hear a Presbyterian from Korea, a Mennonite from Ethiopia, and a charismatic Catholic from Brazil discuss how they follow Jesus.

3. There’s no way I could have contributed to a year-long conversation about Christology, but I could share a historian’s and Pietist’s perspective on how Christians follow Jesus.