A Fifth Great Awakening?

Whether or not you agree with Robert Fogel’s thesis that the rise of evangelical Christianity in the 1960’s and 1970’s constitutes a Fourth Great Awakening, there is growing evidence that in the first decades of the new millennium we see the beginnings of the Fifth.

Last year, the Presbyterian Church (USA) joined the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ by voting to lift the generation old barrier to ordination for GLBTQ Presbyterians. The change that has come to four of the five mainline Protestant denominations has brought with it a renewed spirit of hope for progressive Christianity.

For most of my life and for the entirety of my ministry, progressive Christianity has laid mostly dormant. Those who dared to profess a bold vision of the Gospel as the radically inclusive declaration of God’s love for all God’s children were pushed aside in the church or pushed out entirely. Far too many progressive voices simply gave up on the church and left. In other cases, progressives were purged from denominational leadership as whole denominations were subject to the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hostile takeover. (To wit the putsch in the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980’s). How many of our sermons in how many of our churches have been edited on Sunday morning when Saturday’s courage morphed into Sunday’s pragmatism? How many of us let prophetic courage have its sharp corners softened to prevent anyone being hurt by them?

As prophetic voices became silenced, it began to look like mainline Protestantism was destined to be a community with a single voice speaking from somewhere to the right of center. Progressive Protestant Christianity, if not dead, was on life support. The few brave souls who dared to speak against the new mainstream of Evangelical rigidity were rapidly marginalized or excluded.  Like a Gothic Cathedral with only one strong wall and no wall opposite to support it, the church began to crumble. 
Then something began to happen. As the consequences of the Reagan revolution’s war on the poor, the environment, marginalized communities and on the very concept of social justice became evident, progressive Christianity, like Lazarus, woke up and began to speak.

A new day dawned in the church and with it a new commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ was awakened. Once again the proclamation that Jesus is Lord of all meant just that…ALL. Through the work of groups within various denominations and groups that transcended denomination and even national lines, the theology of inclusion and care for all God’s children began to be preached and proclaimed and heard. After a generation of political and ecclesiastical policies that work to exclude and marginalize, a growing voice in the church is saying, “enough!”

This moral awakening of the church cannot be denied. The time has come for the Church to stand against the voices of exclusion and bigotry in the world and declare that God’s divine “yes” in Jesus Christ is God’s divine invitation to love and care for one another; progressive, conservative, evangelical, liberal, gay, straight, male, female or in whatever guise the child of God may come into our lives.

As a Presbyterian pastor, I am proud that our denomination has thrown its cap over the wall and taken the path of prophetic witness. Presbyterians were at the heart of the First Great Awakening; perhaps we have a role to play in the Fifth.

With God’s grace, may we all have the strength, courage and faith to recognize the gifts of the Spirit in all God’s children and, trusting in God to guide us, together grow stronger in the light of Christ.