In his volume, St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Washington University in St. Louis, lays out a compelling portrait of Patrick, the theologian-evangelist. In accomplishing this, Freeman attempts to reconstruct Patrick’s cultural milieu—that of a world that had “ended” with the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. This collapse of Roman power had unleashed savagery in the British Isles, as thieves and slave-traders were unhinged from the restraining power of Caesar’s sword. Patrick’s ministry was shaped by this new world, not least of which by Patrick’s capture and escape from slavery.

Freeman helpfully retells Patrick’s conversion story, one of a mocking young hedonist to a repentant evangelist. The story sounds remarkably similar to that of Augustine—and, in the most significant of ways, both mirror the first-century conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Freeman helpfully reconstructs the context of local religion as a “business relationship” in which sacrifice to pagan gods was seen as a transaction for the material prosperity of the worshippers. Against this, Patrick’s conversion to Christianity was noticed quickly, when his prayers of devotion—then almost always articulated out loud—were overheard by his neighbors.

The rest of the narrative demonstrates the ways in which Patrick carried the Christian mission into the frontiers of the British Isles—confronting a hostile culture and institutionalized heresy along the way. With this the case, the life of Patrick is a testimony to Great Commission fervor, not to the Irish nationalism most often associated with the saint. As a matter of fact, Freeman points out that Patrick’s love for the Irish was an act of obedience to Jesus’ command to love enemies and to pray for persecutors.

This biography gives contemporary evangelicals more than a pious evangelist to emulate. It also reconstructs a Christian engagement with a pagan culture, in ways that are strikingly contemporary to evangelicals seeking to engage a post-Christian America.

Patrick’s context was a Celtic culture deeply entrenched in paganism, led by the native earth religion of the Druid priests. This is especially relevant in an era when pseudo-Celtic paganism is increasingly en vogue in American and European pagan movements. Freeman sweeps away the revisionist historical claims of the Druid revivalists: there was no “golden age” of equality among the sexes within the Druid cult, for example. Instead, Freeman shows that Patrick’s Christianity actually brought harmony among the genders with his teaching that women were joint-heirs with Christ.

Any evangelical seeking to kindle a love for missions among the people of God will benefit from this volume’s demonstration that the Great Commission did not lie dormant between the apostle Paul and William Carey. Patrick’s love and zeal for the Irish may also inspire American evangelicals to repent of our hopelessness for the conversion of, say, the radical Islamic world—which is, after all, no more “hopeless” than the Irish barbarians of Patrick’s era.

Since then several have asked whether it’s a thumbs-up or a thumbs down. I’ve got mixed feelings.

Here’s the upside:

1.) It’s in many ways a typical Disney film, with all that means.The visuals are good, and the storyline is entertaining.

2.) This is the first Disney animated film with an African-American protagonist, and that’s a long time coming.

The film introduced some of the racial and class tensions that have existed historically in the crescent city (and all around the country) with a clear sense of the “arc of history bending toward justice.”

3.) It’s good to see New Orleans as the setting, especially now nearly five years after the catastrophe of Katrina. Yes, it’s set in the past, but much of what is gloried in here is strikingly present (and future).

Those who predicted the death of New Orleans after Katrina (and I heard many such prognostications) know nothing of New Orleans.

4.) The film recognized the dark side of the demonic. The voodoo villain “The Shadowman” uses his “friends on the other side,” channeling their power. Ultimately, as is always the case, he is their prey (see King Saul of old).

Flannery O’Connor once said of New Orleans: “If I had to live in a city I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other—both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil’s existence is freely recognized.” I rarely argue with Ms. O’Connor, and certainly won’t on that point.

The film also recognizes (if shallowly, of course) that voodoo is a complex issue, with many practitioners seeing both a “light” and a “dark” side to it (I don’t accept any good aspect, but that’s how some, especially in some Haitian communities, have seen it).

5.) The movie offered a hat-tip to the dizzying array of New Orleans musical styles (jazz, gospel, zydeco, etc.). It was a Disneyfied version, to be sure, but if it gets some moviegoers to discover the real stuff, I’m all for that.

But here’s what I hated:

1.) It’s in many ways a typical Disney film, with all that means. The template is there. Jiminy Cricket is a lightning bug this time; the “Jungle Book” bears and wolves are alligators, etc.

2.) Whatever committee was in charge of accent development clearly never went to New Orleans in their lives, or, if so, simply overheard tourists in the French Quarter and went home. Instead of New Orleans, Cajun, and Creole (and there is a difference) accents (and there are many), the film substituted the kind of ridiculous faux accent we saw with Jude Law in “Cold Mountain.”

3.) Disney is embarrassed (and rightly so) now by the racial stereotypes present in at least one of their earlier movies. No one now would market crude ethnic caricatures in an animated film, and that’s a good thing. Why then is it okay to use the most derogatory and cardboard stereotypes of rural working southern people? The cajuns in the bayou are presented as characters from “Deliverance.”

Wendell Berry rightly warned us against the “acceptable” bigotry against “provincial” country people (whether white, black, or what have you) who are presented as backward, despised, and even scary simply because they seem “other” in our monotonously pseudo-cosmopolitan televised American culture. The filmmakers here would have done well to have heard him.

4.) I noted before that the film includes Disneyfied samples of various forms of New Orleans music, including gospel. This is only right. Perhaps one of the greatest singers in American history was New Orleans’ own Mahalia Jackson who could sing “There Is Power in the Blood” and “We Shall Overcome” like no one else. She was in a long tradition of those in African-American Christian churches who sang of Christ Jesus and his good news.

I don’t expect Disney to give us gospel in our gospel music. But do they have to insult the genre by putting it in the context of a voodoo witch who makes everything alright by encouraging the characters to “dig a little deeper” inside of themselves to find the hidden potential therein?

Just reading that in the type in front of you probably has some of you angry. Let me help you see why that is, and, in so doing, why caring for those with AIDS is part of the gospel mandate given to us in the Great Commission.

The statement that Jesus has AIDS startles some of you because you know it not to be true. Jesus, after all, is the exalted son of the living God. He has defeated death in the garden tomb, and defeated it finally. Jesus isn’t weak or dying or infected; he’s triumphant and resurrected.

Yes.

Yes, but, what we’re often likely to miss is that Jesus has identified himself with the suffering of this world, an identification that continues on through his church. Yes, Jesus finishes his suffering at the cross, but he also speaks of himself as being “persecuted” by Saul of Tarsus, as Saul comes after his church in Damascus (Acts 9:4).

Through the Spirit of Christ, we “groan” with him at the suffering of a universe still under the curse (Rom. 8:23,26). This curse manifests itself, as in billions of other ways, in bodies turned against themselves by immune systems gone awry.

That’s why the church is to suffer, continually, with Christ as we take his presence into the darkness of a fallen creation. The Apostle Paul says, then, “I rejoice then in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24).

Some of Jesus’ church has AIDS. Some of them are languishing in hospitals right down the street from you. Some of them are orphaned by the disease in Africa. All of them are suffering with an intensity few of us can imagine.

Some of you are angered by the statement I typed above because you think somehow it implicates Jesus. After all, AIDS is a shameful disease, one most often spread through sexual promiscuity or illicit drug use.

Yes.

Yes, but those are the very kinds of people Jesus consistently identified himself with as he walked the hillsides of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem, announcing the kingdom of God. Can one be more sexually promiscuous than the prostitutes Jesus ate with? Can one be more marginalized from society than a woman dripping with blood, blood that would have made anyone who touched her unclean (Luke 8:40-48)? Jesus touched her, and took her uncleanness on himself.

AIDS is scandalous, sure. But not nearly as scandalous as a cross.

At the crucifixion stake, Jesus identifies himself with a sinful world (including the scandal of my sin). He was seen to be cursed by God (Deut. 21:23; Gal. 3:13). This is why it seemed so reasonable to the shouting crowds to curse him as a false Messiah, because only those rejected by God would ever be hanged on a tree. And that’s why the apostle Paul had to repeatedly insist that he was not “ashamed” of the cross. At Golgotha, Jesus became sin (though he never knew it himself) by bearing the sins of the world (2 Cor 5:21). Now that’s scandalous.

Moreover, some of you are angry because you believe that the statement I typed above is an affront to the dignity of the ruler of the universe. He doesn’t have some immune deficiency disease; he’s ruling from the right hand of God.

Yes.

Yes, but we cannot see Jesus only in his Head but also in his Body, also in his identification with those he calls “the least of these, my brothers” (Matt. 25:40). Jesus isn’t right now hungry, is he? He isn’t naked, is he? He isn’t thirsty, is he? He isn’t in jail, is he? Well, yes, he is…in the nakedness, hunger, thirstiness, and imprisonment of his suffering brothers and sisters around the world.

When we stand in judgment, we’ll stand, Jesus tells us, accountable for how we recognized him in the trauma of those who don’t seem to bear the glory of Christ at all right now. We see Jesus now, by faith, in the sufferings of the crack baby, the meth addict, the AIDS orphan, the hospitalized prodigal who sees his ruin in the wires running from his veins.

I wonder how many of us will hear the words from our Galilean emperor, “I had AIDS and you weren’t afraid to come near me.”

And so, if we love Jesus, our churches should be more aware of the cries of the curse, including the curse of AIDS, than the culture around us. Our congregations should welcome the AIDS-infected, and we shouldn’t be afraid to hug them as we would hug our Christ. Our congregations should be on the forefront of missions to AIDS-ravaged regions of the world. Our families should be willing to welcome those orphaned by this global scourge.

Through it all, we should be insistent in gospel proclamation. To those whose blood has become their own enemy, we should announce blood they know not of, the blood of One who can cleanse them of all unrighteousness, just as it cleansed us (1 Jn. 1:7); the blood of One who is forever immune to sin and death and hell (Jn. 6:53-56).

Jesus loves the world, and the world has AIDS. Jesus identifies himself with the least of these, and many of them have AIDS. Jesus calls us to recognize him in the depths of suffering, and there’s AIDS there too.

Jesus has AIDS.

Now, as I soon as I mention Sesame Street, I know some of you will balk about its educational value. You’ll point me to studies suggesting that learning the alphabet from singing puppets actually shortens kids’ attention spans. No argument here. But simply learning facts was never the primary goal of the program.

As the New York Times puts it, this was a “messianic show,” with a “mission” to remake the way children envisioned the world.

Yes, Big Bird and Bert and Ernie and Grover and Oscar the Grouch and their human co-stars would teach you about letters and numbers and safety tips. But, more than that, they would show you, by the characters they featured and the plotlines they put forward, a new way of seeing things on issues ranging from racial equality to obesity prevention to the global fight against AIDS.

I know that some immediately will conclude that I’m saying simply that churches should contextualize in their teaching and mission.

Yes, Sesame Street did contextualize. The writers and producers picked up on familiar themes such as advertising commercials (“This broadcast is brought to you by the letter ‘C.’”). They built their segments around a typical child’s attention span. They featured songs that were easy-to-sing and memorable (pop quiz: can you hum the tune of Ernie’s “Rubber Ducky” song? Of course you can).

And, yes, of course, churches should contextualize the gospel, addressing people in a language that can be heard and understood. But contextualization itself is not enough. Some of the most self-consciously contextualized churches are faddish and hyper-consumerist. They’re more like the mass-marketed latter years of Sesame Street, and less like the early, innovative, culture-shaping times. And we’ve got all the “Tickle Me Elmo” kinds of Christian ministries we can stand.

Sesame Street was effective because the program didn’t just contexutalize to the present; it contextualized to the future.

Remember, after all, when the show started. It was in 1969, the era of George Wallace and the Black Panther Party and campus race riots and the Richard Nixon “Southern Strategy.” From the very start, the program showed kids what few of them had ever seen before: a racially integrated neighborhood.

Now, Sesame Street could have done this with preachy didactic dialogue (kind of like Norman Lear’s Maude series). But instead, they showed kids racial equality, and made it normal for them, without ever saying much about it in the process.

As I read that, it struck me that, years before my Mississippi elementary school was integrated via busing, I’d seen African-American and Latino characters (such as “Gordon” and “Maria”) functioning as equal members of a society, on the television screen of my home.

“It’s almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street,” the New York Times says. “The world is finally beginning to look the way that PBS show always made it out to be.”

What would happen if, whenever our culture saw love or reconciliation or peace, our neighbors said, “This is exactly the way that church always made life out to be?”

I wonder what would happen if our churches were to recognize our role in showing people the future, not just in our teaching and in our going but in our being? What kind of witness could we be to our communities, as fragmented as they are by race and class and economics and politics, if the very makeup of our congregations signaled the “manifold wisdom of God” (Eph. 3:10) in which “here there is no Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Schythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11)?

What if our children were accustomed to seeing black pastors of majority white churches, and vice-versa? What if a hotel janitor were named chairman of deacons in a wealthy suburban megachurch, because all recognized his spiritual maturity and nothing else mattered? What if our churches pioneered tort reform, not by arbitration alone, but by Christians agreeing cheerfully to be defrauded (1 Cor. 6)?

And what if all that started to seem normal to us?

The New York Times speaks of the “messianic mission” of Sesame Street and that’s, of course, tongue-in-cheek. But we really do, as the Body of Christ, have a mission that is, quite literally, messianic.

We’d still offend a lot of people. Jesus always does. But we’d offend them the way he did, with them peering over their shoulder in wonder on the way.

And some would come back, even if by cover of night, to ask us what we’re up to. Some of them would love our songs and listen to our teaching even before they believe it’s true, just because they would hope it would be true. They’d see a picture of the universe as it could be. As deeply as their sinful natures would draw back, the image of God within them would resonate with the beauty of a cosmos at peace.

It seems to me if this were the case, we’d have less abstract theology and fewer “faddish” principles to teach. We’d be announcing to the outside culture and to those who’ve taken refuge with us in Christ, “Welcome to the future, to the kingdom of Christ in miniature.”

Mission will always be difficult, as long as we’re fallen and there are demonic powers out there. Still, we can wonder what we might be able to get across to our neighbors if we market-tested the future (by faith), and not just the present (by sight).

The Sesame Street idea was a product of its time, a Great Society-era utopian project rooted in an understanding of history as “progressive.” The people of Christ know better. If our congregations are workshops of kingdom righteousness, we’ll have to make it clear that this isn’t natural, and it isn’t due to history or to progress or to us. We’ll have to say something like, “This church has been brought to you by the letters ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega.’”

If you think your first few sermons are great, you’re probably self-deceived. If the folks in your home church think your first few sermons are great, it’s probably because they love you and they’re proud of you. If it’s a good, supportive church there’s as much objectivity there as a grandparent evaluating the “I Love You Grandma” artwork handed to them by the five year-old in their family.

So your first set of sermons, unless you’re very atypical, are probably really, really bad.

So what?

The great thing about Christian ministry is that Jesus doesn’t start all over again with his church every generation. He gives older men in ministry who shape, disciple, and direct younger men in ministry. This includes (although it’s not limited to) critiquing your sermons.

Your sermons will be critiqued. You want them to be critiqued, and harshly.

Now you don’t want them critiqued harshly by your congregations (and a critical attitude toward your pastor’s preaching, church members, is not a fruit of the Spirit). But you want them critiqued, and you want them critiqued now.

Your sermons will be highly critiqued early on in your ministry, when you’re still being shaped, or you’ll just be left alone.

The great preachers you hear or that you read about in your church history books are not almost never those who were preaching great sermons from the very beginning of their ministries.

Great preachers are the ones who preach really bad sermons. The difference is that they preach really bad sermons when they’re young, and are sharpened for life by critique.

Mediocre preachers are those who start off with sermons that are, eh, pretty good, but they’re never critiqued and thus never grow.

So if you’re early on in ministry and you preach a bad sermon, so what? You’re in a train of previously bad preachers that extends from Moses to Aaron to Simon Peter to about every good gospel preacher you’ve ever heard with your own ears.

Your bad sermon says nothing about your future. If you’ve got folks in your life saying, “Hey, that was a really bad sermon,” that does indicate something about your future, so praise God for it. It’s probaby a sign that God has something for you to say, for the rest of your life.

Texas pastor Bart Barber posts this morning one of the finest, and most charitable, explanations of inerrancy I’ve seen in a long, long time. I suspect he’s right that there’s a sense of “inerrancy fatigue” among some evangelicals, including perhaps some within my Southern Baptist denomination. His response to the theologian-in-residence at the Baptist General Convention of Texas is strong, comprehensive, and merciful.

The outside world won’t hear our inerrant Bibles until we start displaying how corrected we are, personally, by it (I’ll write more on that later).

Barber’s post is a good model of someone who is talking to regular people (those able to cross list arguments and counter-arguments by Barth, Henry, and Lindsell are not who will decide this matter), showing why it matters, and why it doesn’t make one ignorant.

And there’s something there Chrisians can learn about children, horror, and the gospel.

From the time my sons were babies I’ve read to them the Maurice Sendack classic picture book. They love it, and so do I. They’d sit attentively through Goodnight Moon, but they’d squeal “Let the wild rumpus start!” whenever we’d journey with Max to the place of the wild things.

Children, it turns out, aren’t as naive about evil as we assume they are. Children of every culture, and in every place, seem to have a built-in craving for monsters and dragons and “wild things.” The Maurice Sendak book appeals to kids because it tells them something about what they intuitively know is true. The world around them is scary. There’s a wildness out there. The Sendak book shows the terror of a little boy who is frightened by his own lack of self-control, and who conquers it through self-control, by becoming king of all the wild things.

The Sendak book, with its muted words but fantastic drawings, achieves this sense of wonder and wildness. The movie doesn’t. That’s because the movie tames the wild things too much. It’s not that they’re too scary for children. It’s that they’re not believable as scary. The dialogue sounds like it was lifted from an old episode of Thirtysomething, as the beasts talk through their psychodramas and jealousies and interpersonal offenses with one another. Kids will be entertained because the special effects are good. But they won’t “get it” deep inside like they do the book.

I’m amazed though by the way some Christians react to things like this. They furrow their brow because the Max character screams at this mother, and bites her, even though this is hardly glorified in the movie. They wag their heads at how “dark” the idea of this wild world is. Of course it is “dark.” The universe is dark; that’s why we need the Light of Galilee.

Where the Wild Things Are isn’t going to be a classic movie the way it is a classic book. But the Christian discomfort with wildness will be with us for a while. And it’s the reason too many of our children find Maurice Sendak more realistic than Sunday school.

Too many of our Bible study curricula for children declaw the Bible, excising all the snakes and dragons and wildness. We reduce the Bible to a set of ethical guidelines and a text on how gentle and kind Jesus is. The problem is, our kids know there are monsters out there. God put that awareness in them. They’re looking for a sheep-herding dragon-slayer, the One who can put all the wild things under His feet.

Your kids might be bored by the Wild Things movie. They won’t be bored by the Wild Things book. It’s their story, and mine. But read them the story of Max and his monsters, and then show them the Story they were knit together to love.

And let the wild rumpus start.

An evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for Halloween.

A conservative evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for the church’s “Fall Festival.”

A confessional evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up for “Reformation Day.”

An emerging evangelical is a fundamentalist who has no kids, but who dresses up for Halloween anyway.

A revivalist evangelical is a fundamentalist whose kids dress up as demons for the church’s “Judgment House” community evangelism outreach.

A fundamentalist is a fundamentalist whose kids hand out gospel tracts to all those mentioned above.

In that church a “fundamentalist” was one who believed not just in the “fundamentals” of the faith, but also in a cultural context that meant flat-top haircuts for men, koolots for women (if you don’t know what those are, just rest in the ignorance), exclusive southern gospel quartet psalmnody, and a dispensationalist, separatist, KJV-only identity. I am, for sure, not that.

The next week, though, I was registering as an observer for a liberal Baptist gathering, where I’d planned to write about the goings-on. Inclusive as they were, they tried to sign me up as a delegate. I tried to explain to the nice person at the registration table that I actually didn’t want to be a delegate because I wasn’t protesting the hegemonic patriarchal whatevers they were there to stand against. “You don’t want me signed up,” I said. “I’m a fundamentalist.” And it was true.

In their context, a “fundamentalist” meant anyone who believes the Scriptures were inerrant, the tomb was empty, and there is such a place as hell.

It seems to me the question of “evangelical” is similarly amorphous and contextual. I don’t mind saying that I’m an evangelical, and it’s true, but it’s mostly a tag for other Christians to know what kind of Christian I am, not a self-identity.

 I’m a catholic (small “c”) Christian. I’m a Protestant Christian. I’m a Baptist Christian. I’m an evangelical Christian. I’m a four-point Calvinist, complementarian, high-view-of-the-sacraments, ecumenism of the trenches kind of Christian. And the definitions can get a whole lot more specific depending on how much context the situation requires.

If I need to know whether or not we can work together on a church plant or an evangelism strategy, the definition of “evangelical” matters to me. The rest of the time, the ambiguousness of the term doesn’t bother me any more than the fact that both Kuyper and Moltmann are “Protestants” (whatever that means).