WHO? ME? A FUNDAMENTALIST?

Katie Funk Wiebe

For many years voices debated within me, each attempting to establish a bulkhead for a specific worldview. On the one side was fundamentalism with strong evangelical strains; on the other, a worldview that said the gospel is about freedom and not the law. Sometimes fundamentalism spoke loudest.

Former president Jimmy Carter in Our Endangered Values (Simon and Schuster, 2005) lists the prevailing characteristics of fundamentalism as rigidity in beliefs, domination by authoritarian males, exclusionary tendencies of people not considered true believers, and isolationism. To this could be added fear of intellectualism and humanism and a strong endorsement of dispensationalism with an emphasis on premillennialism. And always the stress on the individual.

It’s sort of like getting chicken pox. You know you’ve been infected, but you still hope that the spot on your neck is a mosquito bite, not something worse.

Today I admit that some fundamentalist traits were part of the Mennonite Brethren church to which my parents belonged and often attended. I grew up with fences. I see it now, but not then. Then the church I knew was a strongly missions-minded church with more converts overseas than in America.

There were fences between MBs and General Conference Mennonites and between MBs and other Mennonite-related denominations, and even higher fences between MBs and anyone who belonged to mainstream Christianity. At the time, these fences seemed normal and right.

At the age of nearly 90, my father, a lay preacher, repeated his favorite sermon at my request shortly before his death. His text was John 3:8. The message was that the Holy Spirit is not stuck in one pattern. It blows freely. I think he meant not stuck in one denomination. He was often perplexed by the way people drove halfway across town to attend a church when there were a half-dozen closer by. He had figured it out that denominations were human inventions, not God’s.

These fences are a legacy I have found hard to escape. Once this mind-set becomes part of your psyche as a child, it is hard to identify and discard. It seems so natural because it is part of you. My siblings and my children have all moved on to other congregations, as have the children of many MB friends. Why am I still with a group in which the voice of fundamentalism keeps speaking?

A little personal background may help. Our MB church when I was a child was 20 miles away across the Saskatchewan River, which froze over in winter. With the roads closed, we stayed in our little "pagan" village of Blaine Lake from fall until the spring thaw. The United Church Sunday school, an amalgam of various denominations, became our church home as we children learned that Jesus wanted us to be "G-Double-O-D GOOD," which later I learned was rank heresy to a fundamentalist. Being good had nothing to do with salvation. You had to ask Jesus to come into your heart. You had to have words to talk about being saved.

In winter we did wonderful un-MB things like skating in the ice rink, enjoying Santa Claus at the Sunday school Christmas concert, getting our hair cut and curled, playing long intense games of Monopoly late into the night, wearing shorts and slacks, and attending school movies. But no drinking, dancing, or smoking.

Then came summer and attendance at the across-the-river church. Only in summer did we have to worry about being saved and listening to hellfire sermons. Only in summer did we sing "Are You Washed in the Blood?" and "Send the Light." Only in summer did we have to be concerned that the trumpet of the Lord might sound and snatch some people away, leaving behind clothes, even dirty underwear, wristwatches, and pocketbooks.

Yet those few months each summer were long enough to convince me I was a rank sinner. I needed to be converted. As a child during Vacation Bible School I had made a gentle request for Jesus to come into my heart—but was that enough? Was I saved or wasn’t I saved if little changed after going forward at an altar call?

If I was saved, why didn’t my temptations leave me? Why did people keep going forward at revival meetings? Wasn’t once enough? Something didn’t jibe. In winter I could leave these questions behind and coast again.

Such ambivalence acted as a strong undertow when I began to question other more serious issues. As a young person I got caught in some theological emphases, especially fundamentalism’s strong need to clearly separate right from wrong (and to see the greatest sins were sexual); biblical literalism with its need for prooftexts, and stress on laws with little room for grace. I chuckle now as I remember how in Bible college my young adult daily devotions had to be at least 15 minutes long even if my roommate or I fell asleep on our knees before the other one finished praying.

I don’t want to return to the judgmentalism of people’s behavior I experienced in my youth when I became a church member. And the consistently imposed burden and accompanying guilt to nail neighbors, coworkers, and even casual acquaintances with the question, "Are you saved?" We were instructed to do that in Bible college on the streets of Winnipeg for personal evangelism classes.

It took me too long to realize that the Christian life cannot be reduced to words, even words of Scripture thrust at people like a sword, to earn God’s love. Or that an overemphasis on evangelism without an equal emphasis on discipleship can lead to trip after trip to the altar and spiritual stagnation.

Some leaders in the fundamentalist church nationwide got caught up with Darbyism and a study of the end-times. They delighted in figuring out the complicated puzzle of God’s plan for humanity to the day and hour. As a young adult, I found myself entranced by a Sunday school study of prophecy. I liked puzzles. I bought a Scofield Reference Bible and studied the underpinnings of dispensationalism in the footnotes. I learned to draw all the complicated charts about the end-times. I ordered a Prophecy magazine. I could explain every line and arrow in those charts as easily as I could recite the alphabet.

Not until my adult life could I challenge the teaching that the essence of the Christian life is to figure out a mammoth cosmic puzzle according to these teachings, although the thrill is probably as great as nearly finishing a double-size New York Times crossword puzzle.

It took me too long to understand that scouring the daily news for clues to beat God at figuring out the divine plan for the end-times means you have to put all your energy into preconceived human conclusions and not into what is important about the Christian life. It took too long to say to myself, I do not—I cannot— believe this. There is some truth somewhere in eschatology, but not when the result is an intricate drawing of lines and arrows.

I finally grasped I had the power to let go of certain interpretations. I didn’t need to believe every humanly devised structure imposed on the Scriptures. I don’t need to accept the Left Behind books—or The Da Vinci Code, for that matter—despite the grain of truth they may contain.

Trying to escape early influences is like trying to get rid of your DNA. With time I could acknowledge that denominational fences are permeable and that all denominations have gifts to offer the kingdom of God. I should have learned that as a child with our mixture of churches: Mennonite Brethren in summer, Russian Baptist church in our home in winter for my parents while we children attended the United Church Sunday school. Our school friends were Catholic, Doukhobor, and Anglican with an easy camaraderie.

My adult life has been a second growing up—sorting, learning to respond differently to old stimuli—to come up with an understanding of God that is mine, not forced on me by old experiences. It has been a matter of choice.

Members of other denominations often place me with the Mennonite Church in its USA and Canada versions (Mennonite denominations not identical to my MB home denomination) because of the opportunities for services I have found there. It and other denominations have given me a bigger view of the work of the church. They have stretched my understanding that God works in many ways, not just the MB way. Instead of my faith being diluted by mingling with other Christians, I am enriched. I am privileged to see the wider world, its diversity, and the common values all Christians hold dear. My faith is strengthened as I learn to know God’s people outside my childhood fences.

A friend recently asked why I stay in the MB church when it restricts women’s use of their gifts of service. I answered that as a member I can continue to speak to the church. For the remaining years of my life, I would like to be a member of a congregation where women’s roles are no longer an issue. That may not happen. Despite some denominational moves in that direction, I see no overwhelming trends to offset the deeply entrenched belief that adult men with authority must have the true word and the final word. I have not heard a woman preach more than once in my home church in the last decade. Mostly men with wives hold key positions in church life. But that is only part of my answer.

Only in America with a church building on every other street corner can one drift from church to church and denomination to denomination when one becomes dissatisfied. Spiritual growth occurs when people of unlike thinking continue to work at their disagreements. The real testing of God’s love through us comes when we stick with those we would rather not be stuck with. That’s another reason I stay.

So I ask myself again, as an octogenarian: Why am I still in a church with leanings toward fundamentalism amid the mixture of evangelicalism and Anabaptism? I stay because among this body of believers are loving people with rich gifts of service.

I stay because I recognize the traces of a spirituality learned by enduring intense suffering. My parents, their families, and their friends knew violence, hunger, and pain. They trusted God because God was God, no other reason. Even today, when I feel downcast, I turn to the same simple hymns of faith I heard them sing when I was a child. These songs still speak to my soul, bringing God’s presence into my heart as no modern praise/worship song can. God is with me as God was with them.

In Growing Up Religious (Beacon Press, 1999) Robert Wuthnow writes that it is special to grow up with a religious tradition that believes there is value in prayer and in learning to serve others. My father believed in helping the people in town without enough food. His heart ached to see them in such a condition. He had seen too much hunger in Russia to reject them. Mother believed in steadfast prayer to the end of her life at nearly 99. I stay because of this spiritual inheritance, even though it is waning in the present generation.

I stay because churches with an evangelical heritage have a freedom to speak about spiritual matters, sometimes too glibly, I’ll admit, which I miss in congregations in which only the minister, not the members, are freed to use God language. I am still an MB because I value biblicism. MBs have always nurtured Bible study and a personal relationship with God in Christ Jesus.

But I sit on the fence, sometimes closer to the outside than the inside, for other reasons.

As evidenced from my pew, the fortress mentality of fundamentalism church is still with us. We love it when people leave denominations to join us, but we find it hard to freely fellowship with anyone who doesn’t use identifiable evangelical language. Yet this almost subconscious shibboleth handicaps our freedom to move freely among other Christians.

Evangelicals/fundamentalists are more likely to get taken up by the big church growth programs of national leaders like Rick Warren. The teaching of James Dobson reaches near equality with the Bible truth. One Sunday when I was handed a little gadget and a bottle of bubble-blowing liquid to show my joy in the Lord, I balked. Yet maybe becoming more childlike would help rid me of some of my inhibitions. So I blew a few weak bubbles. But I felt a deep loss at the absence of mystery of God, of transcendence.

F. Thomas Trotter writes about the "flattening of wonder" in the church through banality that leads away from a spirit of awe, wonder, and transcendence in the presence of God. Fundamentalists want things clear, simple, and understandable. Casual relevancy replaces a communal search "for authentic ways to confront and be confronted by the enormous complexity and terror of life in this world," Trotter writes (Loving God with One’s Mind, Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church, 1987).

The necessity to get doctrine precise and worship easygoing to achieve growth and relevancy leaves little room for wonder. Discrepancies and problems in the Scriptures must be explained, leaving no room for ambiguity. Everything has to be so housebroken that the challenge of costly grace gets lost.

Church has become a normal, comfortable place to come to, not a place where you are warned that the fully committed life in Christ is risky and dangerous. Festivals of the faith become fewer and fewer as they are replaced by national social emphases like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Graduation Day, Memorial Day, and a multitude of others.

For some people, when the fundamentalism of their childhood doesn’t make sense, their world falls apart. Some leave the faith. Some join another church. So far I haven’t. At this stage in my life I have a clearer understanding of the messages I received in childhood. I have been able to move beyond some but to keep those that are nonnegotiable. I am still a seeker.

—Katie Funk Wiebe, Wichita, Kansas, is a writer, storyteller, and speaker. Among her more recent books is Border Crossing: A Spiritual Journey (rev. ed. DreamSeeker Books, 2003).