There's a lot to be offended by in that paragraph, I'm sorry to say. For starters, there's the idea that "the left" has no idea what's going on inside of Christianity. In fact, plenty of collaboration goes on between secular and religious groups on the left. And if I have to explain one more time that there is such a thing as a progressive - even leftist - Christian, I'm going to jump off my steeple.

That ain't all. The revolution Zack proclaims sounds an awful lot like things that have been going on for quite some time in both evangelical and other Christian churches. It's a bit irritating to have evangelicaldom represent all of Christianity*, given that my peeps in the mainline have been feeding and clothing people since day one. But then so have evangelicals. They also pioneered "contemporary worship," as well as a whole host of outreach techniques that Revolution Church no doubt puts to good use.

My point here is not to run down Revolution Church or Zack. The former is doing wonderful ministry in its context, and the latter seems to have picked up on a genuinely interesting social movement within the evangelical church. (I'll have to read on a little more, but I think what he's talking about is the emergent church movement, which is intriguing and a real challenge to how evangelicals do church.)

But passages like this grate on my nerves:

After the service we also got the story about how “Revolution” had come to this 100 year-old Methodist church. Two years ago, two young pastors were placed at the church by the Methodist Central Command (I’m making that up, I don’t know what they call it). The church was down to a couple dozen, mostly elderly members in a church with room for hundreds. In other words, the church was dying.

The young pastors, a married couple, got the go-ahead from the elders to try something new. They refocused the church on missional work and started doing church in some new ways that were more welcoming to outsiders and young people.

Now the pews are nearly full—though a some people were missing this weekend due to a Chiefs game.

...

The young leaders at Revolution have the answer for the denominations. Hopefully, the Methodists are watching and learning from their church in Kansas City.

Zack might think this is new and exciting, but I think it's the same old crap we've been hearing for thirty years now: get evangelical or watch your church dry up and wither away. From that, we've gotten churches that don't look like churches, praise songs ("four words, three chords - two hours long," as Thomas Long says), and the "church growth" strategy, which seeks to sell the neighborhood church just like any other commodity.

It can work well for congregations that embrace it, but it's absolutely not true that every church or denomination has to embrace it or go the way of the dinosaur. There are plenty of communities that engage tradition in a meaningful way rather than reject it. Those places thrive, by and large.

Diana Butler Bass talks about churches that are "traditional but not traditionalist" in her book Christianity For The Rest Of Us. She speaks to a member of another United Methodist Church, this one in Florida:

Scott knows the pitfalls of boring faith - he used to be an Episcopalian and struggled with chilly religion for a long time. He also spent time with fundamentalist-type Episcopalians and grew weary of their emphasis on uniformity and authority. Scott was seeking an expressive, hospitable, open form of faith when he found Cornerstone, a church that has given him real enthusiasm for being a Christian again. But he is also critical of too much emotion. "You can have all emotion and nothing else. You end up falling flat." He sees his congregation's intentional mix of spirituality and tradition, of ecstasy and order, as "the yin and the yang" of Christian life.

As it happens, Cornerstone uses a "blended" worship service that draws in elements of both very traditional forms of worship and very contemporary ones. They celebrate weekly communion and have a kick-ass praise band. But I've seen many congregations who are quite traditional doing a great job of ministry because they can breathe new life into those traditional ways. As Butler Bass reflects:

Like the people at Cornerstone, all the mainline Protestants I met were busily reclaiming tradition. However, they understood tradition as a fluid, dynamic, and critical process, making a distinction between the life-giving "Great Tradition" that religion scholar Huston Smith refers to as "the voice of peace, justice, and beauty that emanates from the Christian soul," and authoritarian, exclusive traditionalism as practiced by some contemporary American Protestants.

As one Pittsburgh Presbyterian said, "We are really trying to be a church that knows tradition and at the same time moves into the future." A mainline pastor in Washington, D.C., described the new emphasis as "recovering the practices of the early church and offering them in a way that the contemporary or emerging church can use and find meaning in." None of the churches treated tradition as a museum piece to be guarded; rather, they understood it as the clay of Christian experience - material that successive generations of believers must craft with faithful care.

Whenever I'm asked about why churches like Revolution grow while churches like "ours" don't (it's happened in more than one congregation), my response is always the same: they're doing some things that suit their niche very well. But do you want to be like them? Do you feel called to be just like them? If not, then God bless them and let's get on with finding our particular calling.

And whenever somebody holds up Church X, Y, or Z as a model of Christian charity that could really transform society if we'd just pay attention to its example, I worry about whether they're actually seeking that transformation, or if they're just putting a band-aid on things.

I wouldn't want to lay that charge against Revolution Church, since I don't know enough about it. But it's worth remembering - as Paul Krugman does - the origins of the term "compassionate conservatism":

The Bush administration has proved adept at what the British call “dog-whistle politics,” the art of sending out messages that only the intended audience can hear. A classic example is Bush’s description of himself as a “compassionate conservative,” which most people heard as a declaration that he wasn’t going to rip up the safety net. It was actually a reference to the work of Marvin Olasky, a Christian right author whose 1995 book The Tragedy of American Compassion held up the welfare system of 19th century America, in which faith-based private groups dispensed aid and religion together, as a model - and approvingly quoted Gilded Age authors who condemned “those mild, well-meaning, tender-hearted criminals who insist upon indulging in indiscriminate charity.”

Again, we don't need to rip specific churches to see how deeply flawed the "faith-based" model of assistance is, even assuming that it's not just a patronage scheme. God love church charities: they do a lot of good in our society. But they also have a way of being selective in the aid they extend. And privatized charity is no substitute for public justice. The causes of poverty in this nation don't usually resolve to individual misfortune or malfeasance, but to inequalities in our economic structures and a tattered social safety net that becomes more of a reward system with each passing day. So while feeding ministries and learning to connect with the poor is great - and I encourage all churches to do it - it doesn't really fix the problem. A true revolution would be religious institutions working to change the systems that keep the poor where they are and the income gaps ever growing.

The divide between ministry and transformational justice is intellectually speaking a false choice, of course. In terms of organizational models, though, it opens up huge gaps in the theory of government. Our friends at Third Way point out in what may be the strongest part of their recent report that

The predominant ways Evangelicals and progressives see government’s role in affecting social change--one changing hearts, the other changing society--need not be in conflict.

If I had to choose one area from that report to begin conversations from, that would probably be it. The divide can be bridged, and probably for everyone's benefit.**

The tricky part about it is that progressives have been trained by decades of Religious Right excess to hear the call for government to take part in changing hearts as code for Olasky's "discriminate charity." After years and years of right-wing media outlets bashing government programs as subsidies for rank immorality in the name of Christianity, we've come to feel the hot breath of judgmentalism in every evangelical critique of government, no matter how insightful it might be otherwise. Often that bashing has been done in the service of very secular political ends, and often, it has been done by people directly connected to the folks who sat on the advisory board of the Third Way report. And all too often, those same people have been the ones running down the "liberal" churches as faithless and ineffective.

You might excuse someone such as myself then for being reluctant to be enthused about this here revolution. What I've heard over and over again is that my way of doing religion sucks, and my approach to government sucks. It hasn't been from Zack Exley or the people who run Revolution church - more like their parents or grandparents. But it's been repeated often enough to leave a bad taste and a real distrust of one-size-fits-all solutions. I don't mind places like Revolution church, honestly, I don't. I do think that if we all have to look them - in worship or in ministry - to create a new progressive faith movement, we're going to have a rough go of it.

I was taken to task a few weeks ago for suggesting that Jim Wallis' approach to issues was something less than optimal. We've all got different approaches, my colleagues told me, let a thousand flowers bloom.

And I'm happy to do that. The more you learn about Christian history, the more you learn that there are really any number of Christian histories. Even in the earliest years of the church, there was considerable variation in belief and practice. To my knowledge, there has never been a period when The Christian Church all believed the same thing at the same time. Not even after the great ecumenical councils.

So while Zack is enthused about the revolution in compassion he's seeing and Jim Wallis is droning on for the umpteenth time about the search for the new moral center in this nation, I'm looking around and what I want to see bloom is the flower of the same old moral center we've known for a long time.

Christopher Hayes, writing in the Guardian, reminds us of what it used to look like:

It was back in 1993, as the Clintons prepared to roll out their new universal healthcare plan, that Bill Kristol wrote a memo to fellow conservatives and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill warning them that their goal must be to "kill," not amend, the Clinton plan. "Healthcare," Kristol wrote, "is not, in fact, just another Democratic initiative ... . It will revive the reputation of the ... Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

This is really the issue: from the New Deal through the Great Society, the Democrats dominated American politics by being first and foremost the stewards of social-democratic middle-class entitlements. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, white southerners in particular and white middle-class voters in general, began to associate the Democrats with pursuing the interests of Others - minorities, homosexuals, welfare queens. Conservative political dominance in the post-Reagan era has rested on two pillars: preserving, at a rhetorical level, the conception of the Democrats as being beholden to "special interests" (who don't look like you) and, at the policy level, making sure Democrats never have an opportunity to pass legislation that would belie that claim.

This is where I want my church to stand on social issues. Not on a partisan platform, nor on a mission to protect the middle class, necessarily. On the moral commitment to bringing as many people into the middle class as possible, to government as the great leveler of society, in order to spread prosperity as widely as possible.

What makes me - and many others like me - a progressive Christian is the desire to have their church and their government stand for all people, not just the privileged few. That's actually an old and rather conservative idea. It is also a fine common ground for all liberal believers to stand on. I'm not so interested in importing somebody else's revolution, then, especially since my folks have already been through it. But we don't all have to look alike to work with one another to rediscover the moral center we once knew. That sounds like a fine, if not-so-sexy, plan.

Besides, the Clash now hawk cars, in case you hadn't heard.

*Since I started writing this essay, Zack's branched out from the evangelical world a bit.

**Interestingly enough, closing the gap is the announced rationale for Barack Obama, the one true evangelical mainliner in the race. Hillary is the next closest, and she used to talk this way back in the '90s before...well, before a lot of stuff happened.