19: Rethinking the Ekklesia - with Ray Sawatski

I have had the pleasure over the last decade or so of thinking with Ray Sawatsky about religion and culture. I am delighted to talk with him in this series of conversations on the Ekklesia. He is an astute commenter on the entanglement between a number of political interests and evangelical church leaders. How have these entanglements shaped his generation’s growing unease and distance from the churches that shaped their childhood? 

Ray has worked very effectively with a number of para-church organizations, family charities, educational institutions and think tanks, all part of the broad evangelical world. Few have as rich a sense of the shape and reshaping of the evangelical tradition and there implications for both church and the larger culture. He explores the model of the evangelical churches international charitable work. In the last few years, he has been giving sober second-thought to much of what he has been a partner in. Where is “the other” in the evangelical world? Why the fixation on the sexual life? Is charitable work also a process of manufacturing “need” and the latest chapter in colonialism? Have we created a charitable industrial complex? Are megachurches a kind of spiritual Walmart? How did this unfold and where does it lead?