The Body of Christ Keeps the Score

What Can Trauma Reveal About the Wrong Kind of Revival?

This past week’s bonus episode of CT’s The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast featured a conversation between my colleague Mike Cosper and therapist Aundi Kolber about the effects spiritual trauma can have on one’s body.

The dialogue has haunted me ever since because it’s prompted me to ask whether American Christianity has experienced collectively how some experience trauma individually—and whether that might provoke us to reconsider what we are asking for when we pray for “revival.”

In the interview, Mike asked how someone who has been through the sort of spiritually toxic environment described in the series could begin to heal. Kolber—referencing work such as Besser van der Kolk’s influential book The Body Keeps the Score—says she begins not with how a traumatized person thinks about a situation but, first, with what that person’s body is showing.

That’s because, she argues, we can numb our perception to realities that we don’t know how to make sense of. But, she says, the nervous system often points the way—signaling that something is wrong by manifesting a variety of symptoms, sometimes long before the mind is ready to acknowledge that there might be a problem.

It’s important to recognize this, Kolber says, and to not speed through healing from trauma. Often people want a checklist of ways to recover from a horrible situation—including spiritual abuse or trauma—so they can “move on” quickly with their lives. But the path to healing is not so simple, she argues. It usually requires a slower, more deliberate attempt at grounding and sorting through what happened.

This is important because, as Kolber puts it, “what is not repaired is repeated.”

How many of us have seen this dynamic at work in toxic family situations? Sometimes a person from a horrible background will seek out someone else—perhaps a spouse, a friend, or even a pastor—who carries out the very same sorts of abusive behavior.

Kolber suggests that is because we often default to what feels familiar. And those who haven’t yet confronted just how abnormal their past situations were might well repeat the same scenarios over and over—and never detect the warning signs.

This happens not just with families but with churches too.

Right before I listened to this episode, I had coffee with a pastor friend and colleague, Ray Ortlund, who referenced a line from A. W. Tozer that I had never heard before, a line that jarred me at first.

Tozer—one of the 20th century’s most respected evangelical advocates of a “deeper life” spirituality and of the necessity of revival—suggested that maybe the American church should stop seeking revival.

“A religion, even popular Christianity, could enjoy a boom altogether divorced from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and so leave the church of the next generation worse off than it would have been if the boom had never occurred,” Tozer wrote in 1957.

“I believe that the imperative need of the day is not simply revival, but a radical reformation that will go to the root of our moral and spiritual maladies and deal with causes rather than with consequences, with the disease rather than with symptoms.”

“It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all,” Tozer wrote. “A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.”

This would not have surprised me had it come from the kind of antirevivalists I’ve encountered throughout the years—those for whom, it seems, every form of emotional experience is suspect in favor of doctrinal syllogisms and almost any mass evangelism efforts are suspected of being marketing or manipulation. But that wasn’t Tozer.

I was also taken aback because revival is precisely what I think the American church needs. The older I get, the more I can see the best gifts that a return to the evangelical revivalism of the past could offer the church.

To be sure, some of that is nostalgia. I grew up singing songs like “Revive Us Again” and “Send the Light” Sunday after Sunday, in a church that was not embarrassed to pray for revival (or to schedule revival meetings on the calendar, but that’s another story).

When we look at the wreckage that is American evangelical Christianity right now—the splintered churches and fractured friendships, the leadership scandals and revelations of abuse, the politicization and grievance-based identity politics, and the ambitious hackery often disguised as culture wars—is it not obvious that we need revival? When we see people disgusted with and harmed by our very own churches, people who wonder whether there’s anything spiritually real, why on earth would we not hope for revival?

I believe we still should—but only a revival of the right kind.

To me, what Tozer was warning about seems oddly like the much more modern idea of trauma repetition. If by “revival” we mean a resurgence of American Christianity—with all the numbers, influence, programs, and reputation the church once had—the results could indeed be catastrophic.

Jesus warned the religious leadership of his time: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you are successful, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are” (Matt. 23:15). Jesus’ point—after laying bare the ways the religious leaders were lifelessly mimicking religion and exploiting the piety of their followers—was that “reviving” or expanding such lifelessness makes a terrible situation even worse.

In the Bible, revival is tied to the idea of resurrection—from the classic passage of the wind breathing life into the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37) and onward. But not everything that continues life is resurrection. God placed the fiery sword at the entrance of Eden to “guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24) precisely because he did not want a twisted, fallen humanity to live forever in that state of death.

An undying humanity without spiritual life is not resurrection life, after all. It’s a zombie story—the corrupted and decayed body is animated and without an endpoint but still horrifically dead.

Many high school students have read the short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” about the wish for a dead loved one to be brought back to life. The terror comes about because that person is indeed made alive, but just as he is—a decomposing nightmare. The Bible points us to a Holy Spirit revival, not to a Monkey’s Paw revival.

In other words, the church needs revival, but only the kind that comes from the Spirit. And that will require that we honestly see just how much we’ve normalized things that are abnormal. Resurrection comes, but not unless what has passed away is buried (John 12:24).

If true revival—not just a resurgence of the status quo—does not come, we will end up repeating the things that have led us to our present crisis. We will end up as Jesus warned the church at Sardis: “You have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead” (Rev. 3:1).

Healing can and does come. Those who have lived through trauma shouldn’t believe the lie that they are irreparably “broken” and that all they can ever experience is reliving the trauma (or carrying it out on others). As Kolbert points out, those cycles and experiences can be replaced with life and health and a new start. But that can’t be done without paying attention to what has happened in the past—even if one’s body keeps the score when the mind cannot and the soul feels what the brain can’t process.

The same can happen for a church. But it does not involve doing the same things over again with a new cast of characters. Nor does it mean tossing everything aside and choosing the mirror image of the same problems, just from a reverse direction. It means, as Jesus said, that we should “wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die” (Rev. 3:2).

What is not repaired is repeated. And what is not reformed cannot be revived.

Ronald J. Sider, RIP

The first time I met Ronald J. Sider was when he asked me to walk the beach with him in Maine. I was a nervous wreck. I was very young and unknown, as it was just before or maybe just after I completed my doctorate. Somehow I had been invited to a conference organized by the legendary Michael Cromartie, and I was in a room with a group of people whose works I had been reading, in many cases, since middle school in Mississippi. I kept thinking, What am I doing here?

When Ron Sider introduced himself and asked to go for a walk, I was bracing for a couple of things. First, I expected to be quizzed by this brilliant man, and I was sure that I would stammer around and make a fool of myself, trying to keep up with him. Second, I knew that he was the leader of what some called the “evangelical Left.” He was adamantly opposed to war, to the death penalty, and so on. I knew that my views were way to the right of this man I greatly respected, and I expected him to needle me on that—on how I could admire George W. Bush and so on.

Those expectations weren’t entirely irrational. After all, lots of people who are committed to “peace” are belligerent and tribalistic personally (just as lots of just-war proponents are cowardly and passive). Peace activist Jim Forest joked that anyone looking for peace should avoid the peace movement—noting how much nastiness and conflict he had found in some of the organizations in which he worked. “At times I’ve speculated that the peace movement’s main contribution to world peace may be that it absorbs some of the planet’s most hot-tempered people and keeps them a safe distance from lethal weapons,” he once quipped.

That wasn’t Ron Sider, though.

On the beach that day, I experienced not someone who wanted to debate or correct me but a kind, gentle man who wanted to find ways to encourage this conservative Southern Baptist. He wanted to talk not about our differences on the War on Terror or whatever but about the joy of knowing Jesus. I told him how much his writings had meant to me—not only in the places where I shared his viewpoint or where he persuaded me to a new view but also in the areas where I still disagreed. He thanked me. Then he wanted to know how to pray for me.

Over the years, Professor Sider kept up that encouragement. At almost every momentous turning point in my life, I would receive a note or email from him, assuring me of his prayers. That impressed me—and it impresses me still.

It also impresses me that this godly Christian stood by his convictions even when it put him out of step with whatever was supposed to be his “side.” I’ve seen him defend a historic vision of sexual integrity in places where that was considered retrograde. I’ve seen him in conservative circles where he was the one to stand up and speak for the poor. I’ve seen him in “justice” meetings where he was the “progressive” who kept reminding everyone to care about the lives of unborn children.

He agreed to speak at our ERLC Evangelicals for Life event several years ago. As I introduced him to the crowd, I joked that anyone who formed a group called Evangelicals for McGovern was prepared for a life of loneliness. When he stood up to speak, he pleaded with those of us who are conservative evangelicals to repent of our support of capital punishment. Afterward, some people asked if his remarks offended me, and I replied that it was exactly why I invited Ron Sider.

I knew he wouldn’t pick a fight just to have a fight. And I knew that he wouldn’t cater the way he expressed his beliefs to what he thought his immediate audience would want to hear. “Besides,” I said, “it is entirely conceivable that he is right and that I’m wrong on the death penalty.” In either case, Ron Sider stood by his conviction that a whole-life ethic meant the Sermon on the Mount should put an end to killing of any kind.

I knew some people in our audience would blanch at his talk—and I also knew that some of his fellow progressives would castigate him for speaking at a pro-life conference. He didn’t care about fitting into any of those categories. He just wanted to please Jesus.

“Embracing a biblical balance of prayer and action, preaching and modeling, evangelism and social ministry, worship and mission will often lead to transformed, growing congregations,” Sider once wrote. “But not always. Sometimes they throw you out. But unless you are ready to risk that, it means that no matter how you rationalize it, no matter how you massage your conscience, you really worship job security more than Jesus.”

I admired that about Ron Sider where I agreed with him—and where I didn’t too.

This week, Ron Sider died at the age of 82. I immediately went back and read his emails of encouragement and his requests for prayer for the healing of his cancer.

But I also read something he wrote years ago about something far less headline-making than nuclear freezes or world-hunger policies. “I am far less brilliant than vast numbers of others, less handsome than most, and far less wealthy than many,” he wrote. “But all that is okay. In fact, embracing my finitude is the only way to truly enjoy the wonderful, finite world of creation that I live in.”

He wrote that while his beloved wife was beautiful and intelligent, he was sure others might be a bit more beautiful or a bit more intelligent. Yet “if I had tried to satisfy my longing for God with more and more beautiful women, not only would I never have been satisfied, but I also would have missed the astonishing joy of learning to grow and love one specific, imperfect, but wonderful finite woman.”

“Embracing our finitude—truly accepting the fact that it is okay for me to be less intelligent, less powerful, less wealthy than others—is the only way to joy,” he concluded.

Ron Sider modeled that sort of joy in the finitude. He challenged us to be faithful to Christ and to keep the “both/ands” where Jesus put them. He called us to recognize that by global and historical standards, the vast majority of North American believers are “rich Christians in an age of hunger.” And he modeled the peace, joy, and love of someone who could never get enough of Jesus and who was unwilling to settle for anything short of him.

With one finite, beautiful life, it is hard to ask for more than that.

Goodbye to the Global South?

Last week, I wrote about Philip Jenkins’s new book on how climate change could affect religion around the world. Much of that discussion was rooted in Jenkins’s previous study that claimed Christianity’s future lay in what he called the “Global South”—a category in which he included Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He argued that while the Christian faith is declining in Western Europe and North America, it is booming in the Global South region. His scholarship changed the way I saw the church as the body of Christ.

In his 2008 book The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford University Press), Jenkins showed how Global South Christianity often reads the Bible more in consonance with Scripture’s original context on matters such as the supernatural in general, spiritual warfare in particular, as well as wealth and poverty, honor and shame. In the years since, Jenkins’s thesis has proven itself over and over again. Consider, for instance, the way Anglicanism is in decline in England but on the rise in Nigeria and Uganda.

Now, though, Jenkins writes that we might be seeing the “end of the Global South.”

In his final column for the Christian Century, called “Notes from the Global Church.” Jenkins outlined some of what he’s learned about world Christianity over the years. But then he closed with a rethinking of the Global South category that he once pioneered.

Jenkins is not arguing that Christianity is in any way declining in these contexts. Rather, he wonders whether the term makes sense anymore, given the differences between each of these regions.

“That label once made sense as a convenient overall term, but the more we look at trends in various regions—in Asia as opposed to Africa, say—the more we see the need for new categories, wholly new maps of Christianity worldwide,” Jenkins writes. “Christianity in Africa has certain themes in common with Christianity in Asia. But the two continental traditions are so different in so many ways, and those differences are becoming ever more acute. And don’t get me started on Latin America.”

This means that Jenkins’s earlier predictions about where and how Christianity would grow have proven so accurate that the old categories aren’t big enough to describe them. That’s sure to have seismic implications for all of us in the body of Christ. And I suspect that, growing pains aside, those implications will be for the good.

This week’s submission comes from reader Peggy Randall, who writes that she loves music and so found it hard to narrow her list down. Here it is:

“A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri

“These Eyes” by The Guess Who

“Love of My Life” by Queen

“Oregon (I Can’t Go Home)” by Blackhawk County

“Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA

“Song for a Winter’s Night” by Gordon Lightfoot

“Breezin’” by George Benson

“You Were Meant for Me” by Jewel

“Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” by Selena

“It’s Okay” by Nightbirde

“Unconditional Love” by Donna Summer

“The Joke” by Brandi Carlile

Thanks, Peggy!

Readers, what do you think? If you were stranded on a desert island and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you for the rest of your life, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like.

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Onward,
Russell Moore