Episode Details

“Why not just throw the worship service out the window, and re-think what it means to be a Christian community?”

Most Christians today have nestled into, or hopped between, a very standard modern expression of Christian faith, one that involves meeting for an hour on Sunday and having an unchanging mixture of songs, scripture reading, announcements, sermon, and prayer. Many people are leaving churches, and even Christianity itself, because it just doesn’t meet their spiritual needs.

Today, we talk to Dr. Evan Amo, who did theological training at Princeton Theological Seminary and after a few traditional conservative Christian pastoral placements, asked: “why not just throw the worship service out the window, and just re-think what it means to be a Christian community?”

Here are the main points in our conversation of his spiritual journey and his own answer to that question:

• grew up in a typical mainline Presbyterian church with a traditional worship style that was beginning to experiment with “contemporary worship”; quite comfortable and satisfied in that setting and with those traditions; “inerrancy and ‘personal relationship’ was the default thinking there”
• went off to university which introduced him to a more critical approach to the Bible, and joined a different Evangelical church which was a bit less conservative; both began to challenge some of his theological upbringing
• also began developing musical skills; formed a band
• following his undergraduate degree, and some Christian leadership experience at a Christian camp, as well as “doors being closed” in his music career, Evan began graduate training at Princeton Theological Seminary
• never had aspirations for typical pastoral career, but wanted something “outside of the box”; theological interests started curving toward social justice and liberation theology; these were hugely influenced by socio-political upheavals in the U.S. at the time
• after graduating from Princeton, he served for two years in a large church in North Carolina; then moved on to a temporary supply pastor position in a nearby small rural — and very conservative