Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

by Robin Meyers

Overview

A leading voice of progressive Christianity makes a powerful case for faith as a radical way of being in the world

During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry.
 

Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active—sometimes even subversive—defiance of the ego’s temptations, of what he terms “the heresy of orthodoxy itself,” and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300203523
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/28/2015
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC church, Oklahoma City, and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice in the philosophy department, Oklahoma City University. He lives in Oklahoma City, OK.

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Church Is Dead. Long Live the Church! ix

Note to the Reader xix

1 Undone: Faith as Resistance to Ego 1

2 Undone: Faith as Resistance to Orthodoxy 41

3 Undone: Faith as Resistance to Empire 81

Epilogue: Resisting the Reign of the Christian Status Quo 125

Notes 135

Index 139

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/13/2015
Pastor and social gospel prophet Meyers (The Underground Church) adapted his 2013 series of Yale Divinity School Lyman Beecher Lectures into this explosive call to religious progressives to resist cultural and economic injustice. Building up from the populist red dirt of his 30-year Oklahoma pastorate of a United Church of Christ congregation, and on to the lectern endowed by a 19th-century pillar of the American religious establishment, Meyers skillfully builds an argument of the church as a "beloved community of resistance."Using three poems by 20th century Polish poet Anna Kamieska, Meyers explores the necessity of "falling off a horse" like Saul on the Damascus road, to disorient the ego; of resisting ossified theologies and a rapid-set faith and instead embracing the particularities of small, ordinary things ("‘It's not from the grand/ but from every tiny thing/ that grows enormous'"); and of waking up to acknowledge how we have been flattened by American political empire into soul-weariness. Meyers writes, "If the Body of Christ has become just one more peculiar gathering of loyal subjects of empire... then we have no Good News to offer, just religious propaganda." His writing is knowledgeable, engaging, and provocative. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Spiritual Defiance is a veritable landscape of dramatically beautiful phrases and insights, bon mots and felicitous subtleties. Meyers’s “Resistance To Orthodoxy” section is particularly brilliant, seeming almost to scintillate before the reader. It would be hard, in fact, to imagine a more informing and/or pleasurable treatment than this of clericalism in the contemporary world.”—Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why

Phyllis Tickle

A challenging and visionary manifesto.  When this wind comes sweeping down the plain, it sounds a lot like the creative breath of a Genesis dawn and the fiery spirit of a Pentecost morning.”—John Dominic Crossan

John Dominic Crossan

While many are scrambling to find nifty fixes for all that ails the uninspired and uninspiring institutional church, Robin Meyers is looking instead to God’s holy fools, for passionate Don Quixotes of non-compliance, who are as resistant to scriptural and cultural rigidity as they are subversive for the cause of love.  Rather than a Christianity that peddles implausible doctrines, Spiritual Defiance calls for a Jesus Ethic that lets go of ‘being right’ and gets on with the more distinguishing work of challenging empires and changing the world.”—The Rev. Dr. J. Bennett Guess, Executive Minister and National Officer, United Church of Christ       

The Rev. Dr. J. Bennett Guess

Here is a book that could not be more timely, or more urgent. Robin Meyers has carefully and persuasively sketched out exactly what we most desperately need today to defeat the divisive forces that threaten to shred our communities. Fair and comprehensive, the book is also eloquently composed.”—Harvey Cox, author of The Future of Faith 

Harvey Cox

This is Robin Meyers at his pastoral and prophetic best.  Read it, and then for the love of God—RESIST!”—Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu

Robin Meyers names the factors that are paralyzing the church and making it irrelevant. His witty discerning summons will ring true for many readers.”—Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann

This is an important and delightful book. Robin Meyers is a modern practitioner of the traditional clergy/scholar model of ministry: wise, learned, witty, but with passion for the church refined by his years of experience as a pastor. At a time when everyone is ready to give up on the institution, he eloquently provides a hopeful, helpful vision for the future. Anyone who cares about the future of the church and the world the church is called to serve, should read this book.”—John M. Buchanan, Publisher/Editor of the Christian Century

John M. Buchanan

Robin Myers is unsettling, disruptive, even subversive. I find myself imagining a loud buzzer sounding in every seminary classroom and from every pulpit in America: 'We interrupt this normally scheduled programming with a message from the Emergency Broadcast System. This is not a test; it is an actual emergency,' which is followed by a reading of this book."—Brian D. McLaren, author/speaker/activist

Brian D. McLaren

★ 05/15/2015
Meyers's (philosophy, Oklahoma City Univ.; Saving Jesus from the Church; The Underground Church) call to action is based on his Lyman Beecher lectures, hosted each year at Yale Divinity School, and given its title this work is a suitably bracing and even fiery summons, what Meyers terms orthopraxy (right action). He is inspired in part by the writings of 20th-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska but has little need of borrowed eloquence as he movingly asks for resistance to the tyranny of the self, to orthodoxy, and most especially to the indignities and outrages of militarism and capitalism. The author also calls for and preaches the true Social Gospel; he urges readers to contest the Church's own staid, repetitive, exclusive status quo, the church as "a boys club, or a heavenly pyramid scheme." VERDICT Meyers's ideas might upset and alienate the comfortable yet will also enlighten and inspirit a thoughtful readership of seekers and pastors.

Library Journal