Labels Should Have a Shelf Life

I still cringe a bit inside when I remember the taunting I endured as a child, and a name I was given. A name I did not want. There are few things worse than being given an ugly name you don't want.

Yesterday I blogged that I no longer consider myself a Protestant, but rather a man who belongs to Christ. The earthquake in Haiti has been occasion for me to quickly move to the next step of discarding yet another label which is no longer a welcome name to wear: Evangelical.

Like food, religious labels tend to go bad with the passage of time. Meaning upon meaning gets heaped onto them, and as the layers get thicker, the whole thing can start to exude telltale fumes. Sometimes people's unsavory words and deeds get layered in too, adding toxic potency to the cocktail.

That's what happened for me today with the word Evangelical. I noted yesterday that a personal friend of mine drew a dotted (or solid) line between the earthquake in Haiti and (dubious history) a purported pact with the devil made some 200 years ago by slaves living there under French rule. Both Pat Robertson and this friend of mine would consider themselves evangelical Christians. This equally dubious dotted (or solid) line which I am hinting at here is not my own invention. Yesterday evening I read these words from a Chicago Tribune article focusing on the spiritual ramifications of the earthquake: "Evangelical Christians blame Voodoo for bringing on this ruin."

Really? If that is what evangelical Christians believe, then I must not be one, because I don't know why God allowed the earthquake to happen. And it sickens me to be lumped in with people who presume they do.

So....

Another birthday! Birthdays everywhere! If the 24th of January was the first day of my post-Protestant life, then January 25th was the first day of my post-Evangelical life.

This is not to say (I must re-iterate) that I have ceased to hold things in common with Protestant Evangelicals. Far from it! But I don't have to be an Evangelical. There's no law that says I do. Given the things people now associate with that name, I don't want to be one anymore. I'd rather explain those beliefs I hold in common with Evangelicals than have to explain why I am one.

But if beyond all these things I must still have a label, I would like it to be this: I am a follower of Jesus Christ. Whatever name he wants to give me I will keep.

Revelation 2:17, 3:12

...I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.

...Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on him my new name.