A year into my call to pastor the Gainesville Vineyard, one of the most interesting things I found is that our community pastor, Jacob Larson, four years ago felt led to buy a bar in downtown called The Bull. His lead pastor at the time sensed God was up to something but since then the church and the bar have existed as nearly separate worlds for Jacob, with some of the congregation begrudging his diverted, divided focus. My own sense has been to work to integrate these spheres and have the church catch Jacob’s vision and heart for “loving our city.” To wit, I am writing up this proposal on a Friday night at The Bull, having just finished my weekly shift tending bar. And this is not a phenomenon unique to Gainesville Vineyard. Across our movement, there are many examples of kingdom work that looks like this, many who have sensed a call like Jacob heard.
This paper attempts to offer a robust theological grounding for this move by way of reflecting on key concepts from three works by Jacques Ellul: Meaning of the City, The New Demons, and Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, alongside what I have learned over the last year as this experiment has flourished. As Darrell Fasching observed, “Ellul's work can be understood as an exercise in postmodern, post-Christian theology... a decentered style of thinking about the role of Christianity in society. Its role is not to dominate from the center, creating a ‘Holy Roman Empire’ but to subvert throughout the diaspora and transform from within through decentering strategies.”1 I contend that in these city-loving practices, we are already exhibiting thinking like Ellul’s even as this pulls against how we have understood some of our favored tropes, such as ‘radical middle’ and ‘centered set.’ Thinking alongside, and in dialogue with, Ellul can help us press into these decentering callings we keep sensing from the Spirit.
[Darrell J. Fasching, “The Sacred, the Secular and the Holy: The Significance of Jacques Ellul's Post-Christian Theology for Global Ethics,” (April 2014): Ellul Form #54.]
The full paper is attached to this post.
