Jon Ward

Thank you to Brazos Press for the ARC. I wrestled heavily with this book. Given my own past and "church hurt," I may not have been the intended audience, but I still overall enjoyed it. The last section of the book wrestles with the Trump presidency and evangelical movement coinciding with the presidential run, and then COVID-19. This part of the book would likely turn some away, but furthers the author's thesis. Ward poses two questions for me through his writing: How do Christians separate Jesus from political movements, and what are the stakes if they don't?… (more)

Summary: A national journalist who grew up in an influential evangelical movement describes his separation from this movement as he witnessed its embrace of control and power, both within churches, and in increasingly authoritarian politics, at the expense of both truth and character.

Jon Ward is a national correspondent with Yahoo News who has covered the White House as well as several presidential campaigns. He is also the child of parents who came to faith in the Jesus Movement revival of the early 1970’s. That caught my attention. The Jesus Movement was significant in the spiritual journeys of both my wife and myself. And the words “the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation” in the subtitle are deeply troubling to me. I’ve written about the spiritual ideals and vision for society of evangelicals of my generation, and am deeply chagrined with how so much of this has unraveled. We failed our children.

Ward was born in 1977, several years after the wave of the Jesus Movement swept through the country. In its wake, a number of independent churches formed, many charismatic, believing in the baptism and gifts of the Spirit and worship expressing ecstatic emotion. He grew up in one such church in the Maryland suburbs of DC. His church, initially called the Gathering of Believers was pastored by C. J. Mahaney and Larry Tomczak. Ward’s father was also a pastor for a time until he was asked to step down, for reasons later found to be suspect.

He describes the Christian culture of the time, the music, personalities like Keith Green, who tragically died young, going to early pro-life rallies, the first connections of pro-life and Republican politics, a mission trip to South America, doing skits and getting people to pray. He describes the growing sense of being in a culture war, books like This Present Darkness that framed things as spiritual warfare. He describes the distrust of the intellect, learning how to feel and what to believe, but not having any understanding of why or any sense of engaging with the culture. It was an enclosed, insular life in church and Christian schools and Christian music. The church became Covenant Life Church. Larry Tomczak was forced out and moved the Cleveland. He describes people being slain in the Spirit and his own experience of being prayed for, feeling nothing, except C.J. Mahaney gently pushing him backward. He went along and fell–and began to wonder. Yet he eagerly wanted to please God and his leaders and around 1998 went on a trip with Mahaney to one of Louie Giglio’s Passion Conferences, being groomed for leadership, along with Josh Harris.

Then Mahaney took a right turn into the New Calvinism. This was also the time of the purity movement and “accountability” groups. By this time, Ward was a student at the University of Maryland and felt he was suffocating. It was time to get out. Teaching for a couple years, he pursued writing, getting a job with the Washington Times. He was a part of Chuck Colson’s Centurions course, and for the first time, was challenged to a faith with intellectual heft. While he left Covenant Life, on its way to becoming Sovereign Grace Ministries, he followed developments in the church of his parents–two streams. One was Mahaney, a thinker, gifted speaker, and increasingly exerting control over the churches within the movement. The other was Lou Engle, a culture warrior, seeing politics and spiritual warfare as conflict, violent if necessary. He describes both the scandals around Mahaney’s use of power, and later, Sovereign Grace’s cover up of sexual abuses, even while sharing the platform with Al Mohler at Together for the Gospel conferences.

By 2013, he is working for Yahoo News as a national correspondent. Because of his background, he covers Republican politics and the deepening alliance between evangelicals focused on abortion and sexuality issues, even as the party turned toward Donald Trump. Meanwhile, he is growing in his awareness of the grievances of Blacks, getting to know the work of Bryan Stephenson and others, and how the racial fault lines of the country were being exploited, giving encouragement to the White Supremacist movements and the tragedy at Charlottesville. He recounts watching people he cared about, even most of his family, become radicalized by this movement. ignoring flaws of character, outright lies, racist rhetoric and more, simply to advance pro-life and pro-American values. He painfully describes his pleas with his father, only grudgingly heard after January 6.

As the book ends, as disheartened as he is by political developments and the failings of the churches in which he grew up, exacerbated by the pandemic, he also describes a deepening Christian life, learning to pursue the way of the cross rather than the way of acclaim or power. He believes this is what the church needs to be about. He decries the attack on truth, and the complicity of those who should believe in truth. He argues, from his experience as a journalism, that we are in desperate need of nuance in a world the reduces things to soundbites. Many of the things we confront are complicated and good solutions are achieved by people who do the hard work of listening, who achieve workable compromises. He believes in the role of evangelicals who have followed neither the C.J. Mahaney’s down theologically precise, narrow roads nor the Lou Engles who frame things as a black and white battle. They are those who forgo dominance for repentance, seek reconciliation rather than race wars with Blacks, and seek to rebuild rather than tear down institutions.

This, for me was a powerful “testimony” in two ways. One was in how it traced the diversion through its weakest elements, of a genuine movement of God through the Jesus Movement. The anti-intellectualism, the framing of the church as a persecuted minority in a spiritual battle created the foundations for the political captivity of evangelicals in the Trump era. While many of us traveled different roads than Jon Ward, we recognize the landscape.

The other is in its call for the remnant who did not bow to these things to Christian faithfulness in this time–to repentance, to the way of the cross, to relational healing and racial justice and reconciliation, and to institutional and intellectual renewal. Only God knows if the tide can be turned–indeed he controls the tides of history. But we cannot sit around and feel sorry for ourselves–there is still work to be done!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.… (more)