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But while acknowledging how firmly enslaved we are, the author repeatedly says things like, "Lessons from the black church or lessons arising out of the theology of suffering can lead to freedom from the Western, white captivity of the church." And in an interview to publicize the book, he says, "In fact, the more diverse we become, Christianity will flourish."

As if the flourishing of church depends on our ability to make it diverse. As if liberation from the thick chains of cultural captivity is had by learning lessons from others. As if blacks, Asians, and Native Americans are not themselves captive to entrenched cultural ideologies. Missing here and in many such worthy efforts is an emphasis on God's power, not human example, to free us from the principalities and powers, and on the good news that it is not we who must build the shalom community but the ones who receive it as gift and promise.

The same horizontal temptations face any one of us who seeks to directly or indirectly reform evangelicalism. Sider's subtitle says a lot about what motivates many of us: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? Similarly, a website that crystallizes the theology and goal of what I call the "following Jesus movement" says, "Following Jesus is about listening and doing. It is about putting into practice the things that Jesus taught. It is about a lifestyle of peace and justice that sets one apart from others" [emphasis added].

In our righteous frustration lies a temptation that entices us when we start anxiously comparing ourselves with "the rest of the world." This is the temptation of the devout that Jesus described, of the evangelical Pharisee who thanked God that he was no longer like sinners! We might do better to shift the comparison; the scandal is not that we are just like other people but that we are not more like Jesus.

Other examples abound of our temptation to shift our eyes to the horizontal. Take the missional movement—again, a crucial corrective for churches that have become nothing more than religious social clubs. It is a corrective that, in its better moments, focuses on the mission of God. Yet how easily the conversation slides into what we are doing. In an article in which he tried to clarify the nature and purpose of the missional church movement, Brian McLaren defined it as " … an attempt by Western Christians to reclaim our identity as disciples—people learning to be like Jesus and ready to follow him into our world" [emphasis added].

To be sure, a book title or single remark cannot be used to indict a person or whole sub-movement. Each reform group within our movement has vocal advocates who, while recognizing God's call to move into the horizontal, nonetheless thoroughly ground themselves in the vertical. Yet the overall impression one gets from self-critiques and studies by sociologists of religion is that we are increasingly uninterested in things vertical. As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, " … the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality … for religious liberals and many evangelicals …"

The plethora of solutions suggests a confusion of tongues. Some say this signals the irreversible fragmentation of evangelicalism. There is no longer an evangelical center, and if there is one, it cannot hold. Many of us fear that we no longer hold enough in common, that we might as well go our separate ways. Not only do we not listen to each other any more, we can hardly understand one another when we do.

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October 2009, Vol. 53, No. 10