Imagine a well-known denomination is enjoying a season of prosperity. Attendance is high. Ministry is faithful. Prayers are answered. God feels near. The good times last for years.
But then, cracks appear. Long-held doctrine comes under doubt. Prominent ministry figures are exposed in corruption or abuse. Questions arise first about the leaders, then about the theology undergirding their ministries. Finally, questions are raised about the tradition itself. Was there ever anything good there? Or was it always rotten?
Sound familiar? If you guessed that I’m thinking of third-century North African Christianity, you’re correct—and that history is far from the pristine vision of unity and holiness we might imagine. Church history may not repeat itself, exactly, but it sure does rhyme.
Around the year 250, a crisis arose after Christian bishops fled the city of Carthage in the midst of persecution. After two and half centuries of off-and-on persecution, martyrdoms, and Christian survival amid a hostile Roman empire, the fleeing bishops were a grave scandal. Their escape caused a crisis of faith in both their pastoral leadership and the theology they’d proclaimed.
At the heart of the controversy was a popular priest named Cyprian. He’d been named as a deacon and then a priest not long before this persecution began. Already a figure of some controversy, Cyprian fled even as other Christian leaders—including Pope Fabian—were put to death. In Cyprian’s absence, many other Christians either abandoned the faith or wrote letters falsely claiming they had renounced the faith in order to survive.
After the most intense persecution ended, the church in North Africa underwent a new crisis: How should Christians who had remained faithful treat those, like Cyprian, who had fled or even lapsed in their faith and then returned once it was safe? More broadly, what do we do with a church that fails to live up to its ideals?
For the North African church, the question only became acute five years later, in 255, when a collection of ministers fell into heretical teaching about the Holy Spirit. Cyprian, who by then had been reinstated to ministry, took a hard-line position: Heretics could not be faithful ministers of the gospel, he said, and not only were these pastors themselves spiritually bankrupt, but also every baptism they’d performed was invalid.
“How can he who baptizes give to another remission of sins who himself, being outside the Church, cannot put away his own sins?” Cyprian argued. “For when we say, ‘Do you believe in eternal life and remission of sins through the holy Church?’ we mean that remission of sins is not granted except in the Church, and that among heretics, where there is no Church, sins cannot be put away.”
Baptism by heretics is not at issue in the American church today. But we too are forced to ask what to do with a broken tradition and ministerial failure. If a denomination is corrupted, a local church split by scandal, or a pastor exposed in sin, what should we do? Is all their work bankrupt? Are all their teachings, baptisms, works of mercy, and gifts of the Spirit simply to be discarded?
Cyprian’s opinion on this was not the final word for early Christians. Two centuries later, the church father Augustine articulated a very different position, one that would become the norm for most Christians since. A bad minister, he reasoned, does not negate the work of the Spirit. God can even work in and through heretics, as well as ministers whose failure is unknown to us, Augustine argued.
This is so because the fallen pastor or troubled tradition was never responsible for securing the truthfulness of the gospel. That is God’s work, and God never fails us.
Augustine’s wisdom has been needed many times since. When starting this article, perhaps your mind went to 1940s Germany, 18th-century France, 15th-century Italy, or 21st-century America—for I think every generation has its own experience of a Christian tradition that has come up short, whether through outright failure or ambient disappointment. This is one of the oldest stories of Christianity.
In fact, we see it in Galatians 2, where Paul recounts the incident of Peter and his companions refusing to eat with the Gentile believers. As Paul tells it, this was not just Peter’s error but that of a whole “circumcision group” (v. 12), and the error was spreading, including to Barnabas.
It is easy for us, reading Galatians, to see Paul’s argument as a wholesale rejection of any place for tradition within God’s work. But that is not what Paul is saying. He follows the story of conflict with Peter by explaining the centrality of the Holy Spirit in creating God’s people.
It is the Holy Spirit who enlivens us to carry the work of Jesus forward. It is the Holy Spirit who illuminates not only how the law is fulfilled but also how we are set free to be God’s people (5:2–6). Paul is not negating the law or rejecting tradition, for he calls his audience to continue things which the law also commends (vv. 19–21). He is showing that it is God who brings life to traditions, meant for our blessing, that cannot be lived apart from God’s Spirit (3:19–22).
This story of Peter and Paul provides a pattern for us still. Tradition and God’s presence belong together. These bones live because—and only because—God makes them alive.
To live inside any Christian tradition, then, is to live inside a tradition that has disappointed us and that will undoubtedly disappoint us in the future. Long before there were pastors sexually abusing their congregants, there were racist Christians. Before there were Nazis, there were Christians killing each other over baptism and Communion. Before there were three popes all claiming to be legitimate at once, there were Christians accumulating exorbitant wealth at the expense of fellow believers.
Yet for all that history of heresy and sin, in every era over the past two millennia, God’s Spirit brought forth salvation, increased our understanding of Christ’s work, and expanded the gospel’s reach into new peoples and lands. In every era, the traditions of Christianity have proliferated through faithfulness and failure.
We can’t forget these failures, but neither should we focus on failure alone. In a social media age, failures both ordinary and extraordinary are always on display, serialized in podcasts, pouring into our minds a continual stream of bad news. The omnipresent cares of today make it easy for us to forget that things have always been broken—and that God’s Spirit has always worked through our broken traditions anyway.
This is as true of evangelicalism as it is of every other Christian tradition. The evangelical movement has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and some of these changes strike at the very heart of what has made evangelicalism good. Many institutions that once fortified American evangelicalism—colleges, publishing houses, ministry networks, and more—have spread groundless conspiracy theories (or worse) alongside the gospel. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Evangelicalism does disappoint us.
Some Christians have left evangelicalism because of these disappointments, departing either to some other tradition or to nothing at all. We’ve seen a surge of interest in traditions, both ancient and novel, that might offer some immunity to changes of this type.
I understand the impulse but don’t think that’s the solution. The bad news in a fallen world is that it’s not a matter of whether a tradition will be broken but how. The good news—the gospel—is that God brings broken people and broken traditions back to life. For now, as always, the point is not that a tradition is perfect but that God works through it, truly and faithfully, for it has always been God’s work to save.
Myles Werntz is the author of Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
