New Evangelicals for Social Action Co-President Looks to “Che Guevara Jesus”

This is the second of two articles about the recent Evangelicals for Social Action conference. To read part 1, please click here.

A worship service marked the conclusion of Evangelicals for Social Action’s “Follow. Jesus.” conference on Sunday, July 14 at Eastern University. Prior to the installation ceremony of ESA’s new co-presidents, Dr. Paul Alexander and Dr. Al Tizon, each delivered sermons outlining their vision for the organization’s future.

Alexander, a professor of theology, social ethics, and public policy at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God church. He created a stir in the denomination earlier this year after delivering controversial remarks on theology, race, and sex at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

Tizon, a professor of holistic ministry at Palmer Seminary is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church.

Beginning his sermon, Tizon quoted the first part of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Tizon explained “ESA has been in the middle of a re-visioning process and the phrase ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ has really captivated us … [we decided to] claim the phrase to be our vision statement.”

This part of the Lord’s prayer puts “worship and mission in the same breath,” he said, instead of being “siloed from each other” as they are in some churches. “‘Begin,’ Jesus said, with ‘Our Father, not so much to distinguish God as father from God as mother but to distinguish God as loving parent from God as impersonal deity. When you pray, call the Lord God, maker of heaven and earth Father, Abba, Dad, Mom,” Tizon instructed.

Further, he said, Jesus “instructed them to pray what we’d call today in missional prayer.” Tizon pointed to the description of the New Heaven and New Earth as an example of what Christians should envision when praying for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. “It’s a prayer of hope for God’s kingdom to come and come quickly … God’s kingdom of peace and justice and healing and wholeness for many.”

Evangelism, social transformation, and reconciliation are “missional activities” implied in this prayer, Tizon asserted. Without evangelism, he asked, “How do we get such a big choir in that worship scene in heaven?” Further, “how else could the suffering, and the pain, and the tears in Revelation 21 have been abolished unless the Good News was demonstrated by God’s people today among those who are poor, oppressed in the world?” And, “how else could all the tribes and nations be gathered together … unless the Good News of Jesus today was actively dismantling the dividing walls of ethnicity, and race?”

“When we engage in the reconciliation and the healing of the nations we provide a glimpse of the beautiful diversity of humankind that constitutes the ultimate citizenry of the kingdom right now right here on earth as it is in heaven,” the professor declared. Tizon concluded, “evangelism, social transformation, and reconciliation, these constitute what it means to live out God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.”

Dr. Paul Alexander began his sermon with a photo of two Waodani men baptizing the children of the missionary Nate Saint, whom they had speared to death years earlier. This photo, Alexander said, represents the justice and reconciliation Church ought to pursue.

Although historically justice has been understood differently, from “sevenfold retribution … where if someone hits you on the cheek you slit their throat … [resulting in] spiraling violence,” to “one for one kind of retribution,” Alexander stated Jesus brought a new “revolutionary” way as the “Che Guevara Jesus, the nonviolent revolutionary Jesus.”  This Jesus, as opposed to the “Colonial Settler Jesus” Alexander joked he asked into his heart at a young age, advocated “turning the cheek of equality, turning the cheek of respect, staying engaged in the conflict and in the problem and working toward hopefully transformation and a solution.”

He concluded: “I’m hoping that the next … few decades, the next few years, already starting that the European North American lighter pigmented folks that are this way because we live further from the equator and create the color hierarchies … that we can listen to and learn from the churches around the world … Skin pigment being a tie to privilege is a serious problem. Amen?”