The Road to Missional by Michael Frost

Author:Michael Frost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012000, REL045000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

The Lame Dictates of Pious Rituals

Maybe the patrons at Pat’s Tavern in Columbia, Missouri, just thought Enter the Kingdom stunk. Maybe when your neighbor ignores you, it’s not because he hates the light of the Lord that shines from you. Maybe he just thinks you’re a jerk. Maybe we get most of the rejection we do because, well, we deserve it. It’s no different from President George W. Bush explaining the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington as acts of violence perpetrated by people who hate us because of our freedom. While America was innocent that day and those acts of terror were perpetrated by violent and hate-filled men, the explanation that all Islamic extremists hate America because of her democratic freedom is a pietistic way of dodging the real issues. The worst forms of pietism make a person impervious to humility, unable to learn from an enemy or an outsider. Sadly, within many churches discipleship is often reduced to such pietism, and very often it’s the worst form of pietism that demonizes outsiders and encourages a bunker mentality.

I believe there is a great difference between true godliness and this kind of self-serving pietism, which insists on withdrawal from anyone who doesn’t share the same views on life as us. This kind of pietism really is a lie about the nature of true godliness, which is shown to us by Jesus as being more to do with engagement with brokenness than withdrawal from it. So what’s wrong with pietism and how in particular does it lead us away from being missional? Essentially, pietism is about self-improvement. It is a resolute devotion to increased “holiness,” a never-ending process of putting away sin and becoming more and more pleasing to God. This sounds good, but the view of God often taken by pietists is that of a far-off deity, removed from the sinfulness of human society, disgusted by the foibles and conceits of human nature. This is a form of religiosity that lifts itself aloft (though admittedly that may not be very far off the ground ), separating itself from everyday life and contact with so-called sinners, whom one always refers to in the third person as though we ourselves are not sinners as well. In an effort to do this, pietists find themselves turning inward away from the world, in search of greater and deeper improvement. So it is the erection of a false standard of holiness, one that is generally sentimental, smarmy, and resentful, and which is then applied to the church by its dogmatic enthusiasts. It makes the pietist always right, always righteous, or more insidiously, always the victim. Any dissent, any disagreement, is seen as persecution. Such false pietism wants us to believe that they, the pietists, have a monopoly on righteousness, and that everyone else has a gross deficiency of it.

The problem with this is that it grants too much to the pietists. Their problem is not too much righteousness, but rather that they are unrighteous.

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