Turns out we cannot turn loose of Jesus. The 1,200 or so people at the Evolving Faith Conference this past weekend, and the larger number watching online, just can’t turn loose of Jesus. Most of us come from evangelical backgrounds, and while we’ve jettisoned the baggage of fundamentalism, we have somehow managed not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

James Fowler’s book Stages of Faith is a classic. He describes the stages of faith development with the language of a social scientist. The first two stages are the magical faith of children. First, mom and dad are the gods, quickly exchanged for dinosaurs and such. Stage three is where a lot of folks get stuck. It is traditional faith, full of rules and regulations and angry gods, reluctant to allow anyone onto their heavenly real estate.

On this side of the Abrahamic divide, stage three residents are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The fundamentalists are a tad more conservative than their evangelical cousins, though evangelicalism has taken a hard right turn over the last couple of decades. Thanks Paige Patterson, Focus on the Family, Franklin Graham… Well, I shouldn’t have started listing them. We’d be here all day.

Stage four is the stage of disenchantment, in which we begin to question the duality of in/out theology and reject the notion of an angry God who would fry his own offspring. In America most people get stuck in stage four, sometimes smugly so. I was talking with a woman who said, “My first Sunday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I went to mass. The second Sunday I stayed in bed. I’ve ever been back.”

Since we’ve always best worked out the meaning of life in community, I find that sad. I also find sad the statistic that throughout the 20th century 70 percent of Americans had a local religious community to which they belonged. Between 1999 and 2021, that dropped to 47 percent, not a good sign for organized religion.

Some people still recognize that community is the best place in which to work out life’s meaning, and those good people move on to Fowler’s stage five, in which there is a re-enchantment of faith. The journey is usually back to the religion of childhood, but with a much broader, non-dualistic perspective. If you happened to be raised Christian, then it’s a return to Christ, but it’s the Christ described by Richard Rohr in the Cosmic Christ, not the Christ of fundamentalism.

Those are the folks I was with in Minneapolis, post-evangelicals who made it through stage four and on to stage five because they never lost sight of Jesus. You know, the one who on his last day of public ministry said religion is all about loving God, neighbor, and self, and said it so convincingly that from that day on, no one dared to ask him any more questions.

We listened to preachers like Sarah Bessey, Alicia Crosby Mack, Randy Woodley, Amy Kenny, Krista Tippett, and in the session I preached in, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wil Gafney, Joyce del Rosario, and yours truly. We had long conversations and bought lots of books (it was kinda nice to have both my book sell out and Jonathan’s as well.)  And we talked a lot about Jesus.

What brought me to tears was none of that, rich and salient as the sermons were. What brought me to tears was 1,200 people singing How Great Thou Art in four-part harmony, while The Many led us with the heartfelt fervor of old time revival musicians .

Pretty much everyone in attendance came from the same stock, generations of families capable of singing all four verses in four-part harmony without opening a hymnal. I wept for the memories of good people with a simple, yet powerful faith, formed through generations spent in communities of faith, whether in urban neighborhoods, rural white clapboard church buildings, or suburban sprawls.

The old time religion does not work for these folks anymore, stage three a distant memory. But the music still has power, words redolent with meaning beyond most worship songs written in the last half century. We sang with joy and sorrow. Joy that we had found one another. Sorrow that we have lost so many who have not joined us on the road less traveled by.

After the conference ended, a number of the speakers and musicians gathered for dinner at the hotel where we stayed. Eating together, talking about our love for the church, glad to be rid of the rage and anger that had driven us in stage four, showing grace for those still there. It was all so good.

My week began at a thriving mainline UCC church in Iowa (I will write about that next week) followed by TEDWomen in Atlanta (I will write about that the following week,) and ended with the strains of How Great Thou Art in the Minneapolis convention center.

Fate had it that Dr. Wil Gafney, my fellow-speaker on Saturday, was on my flight from Minneapolis to Dallas. For three hours we talked animatedly of life and its joys, both buoyed by our time at Evolving Faith. As I bade her farewell at Dallas, to head to my connecting flight to Denver, these words were on my lips,

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee

How great Thou art, how great Thou art

Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee

How great Thou art, How Great Thou Art!