Wish I had a Vagabonds group nearer to me, I'd go

17/8/2013

I feel I was actually there, sat on the pub window ledge, watching the meetings. I must confess, I went on two marches for Jesus. Waving this hideous 2M by 1M banner I made with my grandma. All whilst singing, “We are
marching, we are marching, we are marching, woah hoooooo! We are marching in the light of God". My defence has to be that I was thirteen years old.

The post charismatic fundamentalist syndrome is something that became a big part of me too. I wish I'd had a group like yours. Even the initial 'spill your guts' group would've been cathartic. I kind of ended up cast in the church wilderness, so to speak. If my past experience is anything to go by, I'm convinced the Vagabonds did/does so many people the world of good.

I'm more and more seeing Evangelicalism as a wolf in sheep's clothing or a tare amongst the wheat. It seems to have persuaded the laity and themselves that its tenets are not only true but the very truth of God. That it is the truth of Christianity since Christ; the only true restoration of the church from Roman deception etc.

Questioning is feared, since you're questioning the safety of certainty and the only remedy to these challenges seems to be violence to varying degrees, be it shunning people from the church, or the Bible Belt demanding we blow up Baghdad. I say a wolf because it looks like the church, yet doesn't seem to be what
Christ talked about establishing on earth. Wish I had a ‘church’ like Vagabonds near me.
Jessie from Bristol, UK

1 Comment

Dick

17/9/2013 13:43:08

Hi Jessie –

I wanted to get back to you – so here I am. That's a spirited story you've told! I’m not sure you’d have enjoyed the ‘spill your guts’ group but I’m sure you’d make a perfect Vagabond – and I wish you’d been at the table rather than sitting on the window ledge!

Fancy you being on the Marches for Jesus – but the time they’d started as far as fundamentalism was concerned t had been a long time since I’d rock and rolled. But I do remember passing by a March for Jesus once on the way to St James’s one Sunday morning – and the e triumphalism was depressing. You were probably there waving a banner!

I believe that at least some of the people on these rallies believed they were reclaiming physical space from Satan and his minions by marching in his territory . The only time I was in the thick of one of these reclaiming exercises was at an Ecumenical rally in Birmingham in support of Jubilee 2000, the Churches’ campaign for the abolition of Third World Debt. A busload of us went from St James’s. The climax of the rally was to be a human chain formed by all attendees linking hands around the outskirts of the City Centre.

It was a boiling hot day and the rally was addressed outside of Birmingham Cathedral by a number of speakers). Elaine Storkey took the platform when her turn came. She is an Evangelical Christian with strong social justice concerns. At this time she worked for TEAR fund – the Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund in Britain. As she began to speak, and she gave a rather good speech, all of a sudden a great din of ‘rough music’ sounded. People blowing whistles, shaking football rattles, and one rather portly man stripped to the waist and wearing a Stetson even blowing his bugle in people’s ears. Then a man produced a soapbox – seemingly from nowhere - near me; and mounting it he began a nasal rant against the ‘apostate Church’ while his henchmen barked out ‘Praise the Lord!’. Catherine from St James’s was shouting out, ’Why don’t you join us’ – but with little effect.

Then I saw that this ‘militant tendency’ were co-ordinating their disruption, speaking to each other on mobile phones in clandestine conspiracy against the Evil One and his slaves. As we left to form our human chain one of them, a man stripped to the waist with cobwebs tattooed on his necks and scoffing an oily beef burger, barked at us – ‘Enjoy your daisy chain, you bunch of pagans’. These people were obviously having enormous fun and I hate to criticise enjoyment in life but...

Well not all Evangelicals are that bad – and some of them are really OK people. We all have to negotiate the right balance between the excesses of licence and the excesses of authority and I think have learnt that some people who are what I’d call ‘value conservatives’ can really come up trumps from time to time (and theological liberals, like the liberal democrats, can be very nice as long as they are permanently in opposition). However, everything you say about the Evangelicalism in the American Bible Belt and influenced by the American Bible belt rings very true.

Has your evangelical/fundamentalist background given you anything worthwhile I wonder. I get a very strong positive, intelligent, articulate, and passionate feeling from what you've written.

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Wish I had a Vagabonds group nearer to me, I'd go

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