To Be Evangelical and Catholic: A Longing of the Heart
Photo by Kevin Carden
In the church world, two words are hardly as controversial as evangelical and catholic. These two words can be used both as adjectives and as nouns, with seemingly countless variations in meaning. In my context in New England, the words can be both badges of honor or signs of shame. In a region historically marked both by the austere spirituality of the Puritans and later cultural Roman Catholicism, it does not take long for the average person to be perplexed by the usage of each term. I serve as a pastor in a United Methodist annual conference which predominantly self-identifies as progressive, and in this context, these words sometimes evoke confusion at best, and disgust at worst.
Confusion comes due to evangelical's increasing association with right-leaning political movements in the United States, often due to sloppy usage of the word both in reporting and in self-identification. Many people see "evangelical" as a social group to which they belong that may or may not include an active and faithful commitment to basic Christian doctrine or participation in Christian community. For some, the word has come to mean a full-throated endorsement of conservative U.S. political platforms. Therein lies some of the aforementioned disgust, as well.
It’s similar in the case of the word catholic. Confusion comes when the use of the word has become synonymous with the entity that is the Roman Catholic Church. More often than not, people who are Roman Catholic will use Catholic as shorthand. For some, that means little more than a nominal attachment to the label as those who were raised in Roman Catholic families or in cultures wherein Roman Catholicism has been inculcated. In New England, many were raised in nominally Roman Catholic areas. For others, Roman Catholicism is not just a rich Christian tradition, but constitutes the Church, the one which Christ Himself founded as an actual and visible institution to be led by the successors to the Apostle Peter. So when a Methodist like myself uses the term catholic as a descriptor, or even when our congregation regularly recites the Apostles’ Creed and professes to believe in the holy catholic church, heads turn.
Why does any of this matter? It's clear that these two words mean something, as they evoke such strong emotions from a myriad of groups. But they're not just words. They matter to me because at the heart of both words is a piece of the faith to which I cling. Indeed, the faith to which I cling is a faith in the Lord Jesus Christ which is necessarily evangelical and catholic. It is a faith that understands the euangelion (the evangel, the Good News) to be Christ Himself, who has come that we may have life and life abundantly (Jn. 10:10); it understands Christ to be the Way, the Truth, and Life (Jn. 14:6), and to be the One in Whom God was reconciling the world to Himself (2 Cor. 5:19). It trusts that Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, has come that we might be forgiven of our sins and raised to new life. Dear reader, I need this evangel, so I cling to that world evangelical.
As a child, I did not understand sin to be anything other than an atomized "bad thing" to avoid. I did not know that humankind's propensity to sin is a result of fallenness. Sin is not just a "bad thing" for which we need a reprimand. Sin is a deep sickness that leads to death. Sin leads to despair. Sin is vacuous. But the evangel is that which assures us that such is not the telos of creation. We were and are created in the imago Dei. The evangel proclaims to humankind that through Christ we can live as humans were intended to live.
When I had my conversion to Christ around the sixth grade, I found such freedom in this evangel. It was simple and profound. No longer did I have just a vague sense of an impersonal deity existing somewhere who, at best, only wanted to make me happy, and at worst was deeply angry with me. Instead, I knew the One in Whom I lived, moved, and had my being. Yes, I could know God, with full confidence that God knew me and loved me. I became a convinced "evangelical" at that point because I felt that anything else would fail to capture the weightiness of a relationship with the God of all that is, was, and is to come. The people who introduced me to a life of knowing Jesus in this way were the most loving people I had ever encountered. They spoke of Jesus in intimate ways. They sang to Him with tears in their eyes and loved studying the Bible. There was something at stake in their lives of faith, such that church was not just something they did because it was conventional or culturally expected.
And without knowing it, these evangelical Methodists (which itself should be redundant, though is regrettably no longer the case in some corners of Methodism) taught me the importance of being catholic (though such a term would cause not a few of them to grimace). To be catholic, in the original Christian usage of the word, is to be part of the whole. Like my previous understanding of sin as individual “bad things,” the tendency among some Christians (both evangelical and otherwise) is to see the faith as an individual endeavor: just Jesus and me on the evangelical side, or just my own pursuit of “the divine” on the more progressive side of things. The important thing, as commonly expressed, is my connection to God, and my experience of God may lead me to all sorts of commitments and convictions that differ from your experience of God. But to be a catholic Christian means that I do not have to be a theological innovator, nor should I be alone in this life of faith. I belong to a people, and as part of a people, there are particular markers of identity. My small United Methodist church, even without calling themselves catholic, gave me the catholic sensibilities of connecting my baptism with the grace of God and not my own work. They instilled within me a hunger for the Bread and a thirst for the Cup where Christ is present. They spoke of the Holy Spirit Who fell upon those at Pentecost, and Who continues to fill people today.
By God’s grace, this is the faith that has been handed down to me. While the words we use may at times be imprecise and cause more confusion than we would like, I am not yet ready to let go of evangelical and catholic. Like most good things, they are worth retaining and even reclaiming. In a way, to be truly evangelical and truly catholic is a longing of my heart. I am quite certain that I fail to live up to the beauty I see in the two words, and yet the Lord to whom they point has not seen fit to release me from such a longing. May it always be so.
Spencer Shaw is a Th.D. student at United Theological Seminary and the pastor of Hampden Highlands United Methodist Church in Hampden, ME.