Interview with David Fitch: Evangelicalism, Anabaptism, and Being the Church in a Post-Christian Culture
This past spring, I spent a little over an hour on the
phone with David Fitch, an author, pastor and theology professor. Our
conversation has
just been published in Anabaptist Witness, a journal published by
Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary.
For the last 10
years, I have been on a journey of rethinking
what it means to be the church. Early on that journey, I stumbled on author
and professor Scot McKnight, whose explorations of Jesus, the kingdom and the
gospel as a larger Story were welcome manna along the way. As McKnight and
Fitch are colleagues and friends, it didn't take long to run into Fitch's blog and writings about
missional theology. I found Prodigal
Christianity: Ten Signposts into the Missional Frontier a particularly challenging and affirming exercise of putting that theology into practice.
In May 2013, McKnight and Fitch were among the
plenary speakers at Missio
Alliance’s inaugural gathering in Alexandria, my home town. Missio Alliance is a
multi-denominational coming together under a common commitment to provide a
place to address what faithfulness to Christ and His Mission might look like
for the churches of North America. In other words, what it looks like to be the
people of God we are called and enable to be here and now.
I found great value in getting to know the faces and
personalities behind the authors, thinkers, theologians and people in a
conversation I’d been following for the last decade. In one session, Scot McKnight
and Cherith Nordling touched on how the theological voices who change the way
we think are not formless voices coming to us out of a void but connected to
real people and personalities. And I enjoyed the chance to get to know those personalities,
particularly Alan and Debra Hirsh, Todd Hunter, Nordling, Fitch, and McKnight.
And I was thrilled by the presence of Anabaptism in the
discussion. It has been interesting watching the theology move from the margins
and saturate the current conversation. For most of my life, I have straddled
the Anabaptist and evangelical streams in my explorations of Jesus and the
church, and I have found affirmation in maintaining that tension in Fitch and
McKnight, who wrestle with those tensions as well.
Through Missio Alliance and writers like McKnight and Fitch
(and Dallas Willard, Richard Foster—the list is quite long,
actually), I have also found great affirmation that I am not alone in this
journey. Truth be told, 10 years into it, I thought we might be further. But
that’s my own weakness. Foster says it’s a slow process, and I’m impatient. But,
for the first time in a long time, I am expectant. I see the movement of the
church to the margins in a Post-Christian world as an unexpected opportunity,
one that gives us the chance to loose the entanglements that have kept us from being
the authentic communities of love, justice, and restoration into which our
gospel compels us.
So,
it was a pleasure to talk with David Fitch about what it means to be the church
in a post-Christian world and about the growing relationship between
evangelicalism and Anabaptism. May it be a helpful addition to the larger
conversation about what it means to be the people of God we are called and
enabled to be here and now.