President’s Note: Living Christian Identity

In my 2009 interview with a Fuller faculty selection committee, charged with filling a new faculty chair, I expressed my uncertainties about joining a theological faculty since it meant stepping away from the front line of pastoral ministry. For several decades, the beautiful, funky, complex, and unfolding realities of shepherding a communion of ordinary (and peculiar!) people had grabbed my sense of urgency and greatly expanded my wonderment and awe over God’s strategy and faithfulness. Bemusedly, one of the committee members said, “Oh, this is the frontline!” My eyes widened and then were relieved when laughter filled the room.

When I came to Fuller as a professor, and later on as president, the church and the world for which it is meant have been central in my mind. When the meltdown of White evangelicalism began to lay bare the controlling idols of power and ideology that captured millions and millions of people,
I was thrown into grief and lament. The name of Jesus was being desecrated by people who used him in a political shell game. And many claimed to do so as his disciples.

Jesus said that many would cry, “Lord, Lord!” and fail to do what he had commanded. In the fullest sense, that is true of all who have called him Lord. Yet, the point is that Jesus’ lordship bestows a new identity which is meant to be lived in real time and space.

We live in an era when it is unclear whether those who call Jesus Lord are interested, willing, or able to live their identity as disciples. It is not for a failure to see some who do, but across the political and social spectrum, across all denominational or nondenominational lines, in families and neighborhoods, in cities and schools, following Jesus seems to have been taken hostage to other competing and distracting powers and authorities. Fear is perhaps the most pervasive factor—paired with a desperation for safety, attached to specific dangers and threats, along with the voices and forces people believe will protect them. Around the United States, and in many places around the world, living Christian identity is far from what most occupies God’s people.

All of this and more is why Fuller’s strategic plan, FULLER NEXT, makes our first priority “Listening Afresh to God, to the Church, and to the World,” and our second priority “Rethinking Church in the 21st Century.” When the people of God, and the institutions of church, show as many points of historical brokenness regarding race and gender and as many contemporary crises as Christian nationalism and ideologies of power, we have to pray and think, act and reform, in order for God’s church to reflect the love, justice, and mercy of our one hope, protector, and Lord.

Fuller is earnestly seeking to hear afresh how God may be speaking in this time, how the church in pain and struggle needs to be renewed, and how the world that longs to be free from violence and to live with justice and love might find it. This is what our School of Mission and Theology, our School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy, our ethnic centers, and our Leadership Formation Division are committed to engage. This is an era in which the church urgently and humbly needs to find and live its identity anew. As I step down as president, I give great thanks that our new president, David Emmanuel Goatley, a man of the church and the world, will assume that mantle and move Fuller’s response forward with wisdom, courage, and faithfulness.