The Limits of All The Wilmores Everywhere

Five Further Notes on Public Repentance

In the previous installment, we looked at the common dynamics of two very different public acts of witness: He Gets Us and the worshipping community at Asbury. This is a brief follow up for paid subscribers to that post.

As was predictable in a networked age, people (myself included) have had thoughts about things which are not in their backyard, in far flung places like Wilmore, Kentucky. When the telegraph was invented, the thought was that people from New Mexico and New York could now communicate, at which point someone quipped, “But what would they have to talk about?” And that, dear friends, was when the Internet was born: a way for strangers to communicate, even when they have nothing to say.

If you’ve been reading this long enough, I try to make it a practice of not focusing on The Immediate Thing: it’s a losing game, for many reasons. But the reactions (some of curiosity, and much skepticism) online have prompted me to break from that, to sketch five theses for watching acts of public piety. These are less about how to judge what’s happening than to offer some principles that help us to not get caught up in the breathless cycle of boom and bust that inevitably exhaust us by conflating hope with success.¹

All things in season, and nothing endures in one form forever. But as the soil reminds us, nothing is truly lost.

Thesis #1: Good Things Are Susceptible to Corruption

There is nothing in the world that will not, in the pursuit of something good, stumble and fall down. The temptation for churches is that they will follow the example of the Donatists, equating the sinfulness of persons within the organization with the goodness conveyed by the organization itself.² None of this is to say that accountability is bad, or that righteousness is to be shelved, saying that “they had good intentions”. It’s simply to say that all of us have good intentions, and that sometimes those intentions do great damage anyway.

Lauren Winner, in her fantastic book The Damage of Christian Practice, provides this example: baptism is meant to convey that you are entering a new household of faith, but sometimes, because of the language of baptism, families baptize their children so that the children will be more a member of their household of origin. There’s a deep irony there, that the core practice of Christians becomes a thing which ultimately moves the baptized away from associating with the full body of the church. But this is what happens with literally every human activity: things will go sideways, and never in the way we expect them to.

Already, reports are circulating of outside worship leaders and disgraced ministers coming to Wilmore, attempting to use it as a platform, or offering “guidance” to the students leading the celebrations.

elijah @EdwardVersaii

Y’all are gonna want to hear this about the asbury revival A celebrity worship leader called the university, you know them, and asked what they could do. The university answered, “you’re welcome to come! We’ve got worship covered” Who’s leading worship right now? The students

Charlatans always flock to publicity, hoping for a score, and always will. Faithful churches will become too big to fail. Good intentions build themselves into monstrous outcomes. When this happens, these are to be named, but not as a way which destroys the good that truly happens through any human response to the act of God. What is repentance except the possibility that goodness can be restored?