This is long for a review, but I have a synopsis of some my grievances a little ways down. This is in no way a personal attack against a person I do not know, but his book is symptomatic of a larger struggle for the faith in the midst of a global battle for human thriving (body and soul) waged to turn back a salivating ideological Hydra presented here in Jesus’ clothing. I have made this crisis a particular study of my own for some time, seeking to grasp the soul and design of an insidious humanist theology advanced by its prophets and priests so as to be ungraspable, shifting, and multiheaded. It is insatiable, but meant to be undefinable… it’s not. It wheedles its way into hearts and institutions through an ever changing but always false face. It seduces with empty promises and conspiratorial accusations about the reason things have never been so bad and why we need a total reset. If this ideology were a medical doctor, it would present an impossible picture of what health is supposed to look like, then misdiagnose every failure to achieve it, and then offer up counter-productive solutions before eventually killing its patient. You may grow tired of hearing certain phrases, like Critical Marxism and Critical Theory (They are one and the same) but stay with me for its edicts are the substrata for the thrust and demand in this book, even if the author himself, well-meaning I’m sure, does not know it.
Critical Marxism and Postmodernism have had insidious effect on a particular set of people who lay claim to being Christian. In danger of becoming bitter roots in the Church whose condemnation is spelled out quite clearly in books like Hebrews and Deuteronomy, these boast Christ, but have so radically altered their understanding of Him and of Scripture as to make them a wholly different breed of religionist than any part of Biblical Christianity would recognize. Some are on their journey away from such thinking as you can read with benefit from Alisa Childers’ testimony in Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity (Carol Stream: Tyndale Momentum, 2020) and others are on their journey in. Given Walling’s vocabulary, fixation on unraveling the historic Christian church (in the name of recapturing the true Jesus), and his heavy quotation and reference to known progressive Christians and many whose online presence seems to promise such perceptions it is here and not in the more obviously atheistic and nihilistic Critical Marxism discussed below that I fear one will find the real drive for Unlikely Nomads, whether known or unknown to the author himself. I unpack this a bit more in my follow up article, “Why My Rather Hostile Review of Unlikely Nomads by Terry B. Walling is Important Well Beyond a Consideration of Walling’s Book” also on this blog site. ~Andrew Sargent, PhD
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Unlikely Nomads : In Search of the New Church. By Terry B. Walling. Chico: Leader BreakThru Inc., 2023, 259 pp., $16.99, Softcover.
Terry Walling, author of the book Unlikely Nomads: In Search of the New Church, is an Adjunct Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, and has been founder and president of Leader Breakthru since 2008. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in business administration from Point Loma College in 1975 and from Fuller Theological Seminary with a DMin in 2001. He has authored several self-published books like Deciding: Clarifying Your Kingdom Contribution (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2018), Stuck! Navigating Life and Leadership Transitions (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2015), and The IDEA Coaching Pathway: Coaching the Person (Instead of just the problem) (Leader Breakthru, 2015).
A short time ago, a friend, for whom I have always had regard, posted a picture from a book’s page on Facebook. I was neither amused nor enlightened by the highlighted portion, which read, “A line was drawn in the sand. Follow Jesus? Or stay in the church? It was time for me to follow down the same path as Abraham: pack my bags, and go.”
I was curious at the lack of capitalization on Church and wondered if the author was speaking of a specific church or THE Church. What I could see around the highlighted portion suggested something bigger than a kerfuffle with a congregation or even deadlock with a denomination. I also wondered about the intent behind the use of Abraham imagery. Perhaps the author was being melodramatic in his intoning of Abraham, perhaps he really believed it. Abraham, after all, broke from a pagan worldview and from his family and clan who held that pagan worldview to create a new people with a radically different understanding of God, Man, and Reality. Monotheism was born… or as I imagine, Reborn.
So I replied, “Haven’t read the book, but it sounds beyond arrogant, right on to dangerous hubris. What’s the book and who’s the author?” This is not my first rodeo with movements that make these same types of claims, as I will discuss at the end, but I did want to give the author a chance to defend himself through all the book’s pages.
My friend fussed, “You are way better than to make those comments admitting you have not read the book. You can do better. Unlikely Nomads by Terry Walling.”
I defended, “The comment seems arrogant beyond belief, but context is king. So I asked for book and author to check out the remark in context.”
Terry Walling himself joined in the thread saying, “After serving over 30 years in the local church context in America, and in helping coach pastors see renewal and greater passion for discipleship, the context and motives are centered on seeing an expression of local church be more of what Jesus intended, and more like the life he lived. That’s it.”
I am certainly not against biblical parachurch ministries (I’ve been running one since 1998) but this seemed different somehow. So, saying more than I knew at the time, I countered, “So says every progressive “Christian” I’ve ever met. Your claim does not assure me, but I’ll read your book. The idea that you see yourself as a modern Abraham showing the rest of us poor clods how it’s really done is disturbing. And I too have been working in the church for more than three decades.”
As promised, I read the book. This is my review.
So… Shall I begin my assessment with Walling’s claim that “the context and motives are centered on seeing an expression of local church be more of what Jesus intended, and more like the life he lived. That’s it.”? I shall not, for that is NOT it… thus it is not the best representation of what I actually read there. Walling believes that the historic expression of the Church is passing away (and good riddance) and he sees himself and others like him being on the cusp of a new era of Christianity. It is he and his new band of Nomads that are restoring Jesus to Christianity and to Christian “apprenticeship.”
I could begin with his opening discussion about the mass exodus of the church from supposed “committed ones” who “stayed until they could stay no longer,” who “have not left Jesus,” but “could no longer support the compromised Christianity they see expressed in so many of today’s local churches.” His book, however, does not merely seek to understand this body of supposed too-faithful-&-spiritual-for-church leaders in order to reclaim them, their gifts, and their spiritual energies for the churches. Rather, in Unlikely Nomads Terry B. Walling calls his readers to likewise abandon their own churches and launch out on a similar path as glorious activists boycotting a 2000 year old paradigm that is, as activists tend to deliver, poorly represented in the book’s pages.
Perhaps I could begin with his opening quote from Tim Keller, whose Marxist imaginings are commonly offered up in his books and articles as biblical theology?[1] Keller is quoted, “There is no more urgent question for American Christians than this: What is wrong with the American Christian church and how can its witness and ministry be renewed?[2] So the opening of the book is critical and accusational in the tradition of the critical theories that both Keller, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, Walling seem to me to have embraced. Now, in the face of a global socialist revolution conducted through Critical Marxism and Critical Marxist agents and their “Useful idiots,”[3] being myself in the midst of a three volume work on Biblical Worldview in the face of a Critical Marxist World War, I might imagine more important questions to ask, but this quote captures the tone of the book far better than Walling’s own “That’s-it” elevator pitch in our Facebook thread; for that pitch is loaded with abused language which obscures the real essence of Walling’s contribution in Unlikely Nomads.
In Unlikely Nomads, Walling makes many “missional misteps,” (a phrase he rallies against the churches in the book), and I will try to detail some of them here, but the mood of the book is best described as cynical/radically skeptical about church, and unwary about casting millennia-long “paradigms” aside. I would recommend that he study Chesterton’s Fence.[4]
Now he would, I imagine, insist that his book is hopeful for the future because he’s found his unlikely Jesus-heroes among these bands of “Nomads,” but his hopefulness is the hopefulness of all activists who believe that the present order of things is so bad and so hopeless that they are willing to toss a Hail Mary into the future as they work to unravel the present. It’s the hopefulness of the rebellious teenager who runs away from home thinking anything has got to be better than this! All Marxist revolutionaries, for example, including Critical Marxists who call themselves theorists, believe that on the other side of total ruin, they will find a phoenix rising spontaneously from the ashes of what they have destroyed.
Walling does not merely aim to expand one’s vision of what is possible and helpful in spiritual devotion and discipleship, (Something I would have applauded) but seeks, rather, to spur others to join his Nomads by abandoning what Walling deems an unsalvageable wreck—the present church “expression.” If I took the incredibly vague but positive elements of his descriptions of Nomads and removed the overarching narrative of church abandonment, this would become a wholly different book. But Walling has done all that he does from the venue of cynicism and contempt for “the present manifestation of the church” and continually insists that it is dead and dying and ready to fade away. We must do Walling the good service of interpreting every vague but positive appeal to the reader within that context, for he has worked hard in Unlikely Nomads to keep it front and center.
Here are some highlights if you don’t have the gumption to read my whole review, which, again, is quite long… the size of ten of my journal reviews. (Some 13,000 words) (But worth it, I think.)
- Walling shares the cynicism common to post-moderns and both the hostility and Utopian daydreams common to Marxists and Critical Theorists, though I prefer the label Critical Marxists which is the term the Marxists of the Frankfurt school thought to use for themselves originally.
- Walling is sparse on revelations of exactly what the content of his Nomad’s discipleship is, though his own inclinations are revealed in bits and pieces throughout. You will also learn a little bit more if you look up the ministerial content of his chapter heroes. Other than the famous one’s that everybody quotes, most are also surprisingly vague on their websites, but there is some insight there.
- The only thing worse than Walling’s notion that the ailing of America will be fixed by new paradigms of church—(A dubious answer to the first questions “Where do we come from?” “What’s wrong with the world?” & “How can it be fixed?”)—is the appearance that this claim is being driven by a cynicism rooted in Critical Marxism, which, by this name or any another, seems to have taken hold of Walling’s thinking, even if he himself is ignorant of its origins.
- Walling is channeling Critical Marxism whether he knows it or not. Claims like “I’m not a Critical Marxist, I’m just reading the Bible and trying to live Jesus today,” would be belied by putting one’s back behind almost every Critical Marxist cause, reasoning out the world through Critical Marxist dialectics, and buying into Critical Marxist claims about human nature and the cause-effect structures of societies. Walling:
- Manifests radical skepticism about the the present order of things in the church.
- Repeats conspiratorial conceptions of the cause-effects leading to the present order… which needs to be “deconstructed.”
- Makes hopeful appeals to some future Utopia that will emerge from the ashes of what he wishes to see “deconstructed” and buried.
- Casts a glorious vision for authentic, small, grassroots movements led by Guru-like guides who are making a new church without any reasonable consideration of the consequences of helping to destroy what he wishes to see destroyed.
- Uses self-confirming criteria for his own mascots and self-condemning criteria for his critics and for non-participating outsiders. It’s not what you do, it’s who you are. Part of his Nomads? Then activities 1, 2, 3, etc… are glorious kingdom building postures, and practices and make you sacred guides. Not part of his Nomads? Those same postures, and practices are inauthentic and you are part of the problem. Though he does allow that some may be bridges between church and the Nomads if they agree with his assertions about “church” and are ready to become Nomads.
- Conceals, perhaps even to himself, his real driving rationalities, and posits delusional goals.
- Repeats and supports numerous dialectical conflicts promoted by Critical Marxism and criticizes “the present manifestation of the church” for not accepting the Critical Marxist perspective on them.
- Walling disparages the value of the church as a visible presence in society at the very time when an aggressive response to Critical Marxism is needed most. He’s not worried though because his core ideological framework has, knowingly or unknowingly, been shaped by Critical Marxism, so happy day!
- Walling’s hope for change seems to be tainted by the fiction that the unsaved, broken, marginal, and even Millennials and GenZ know and can teach us the secrets to engaging them effectively, if we would only listen. Dysfunctional people are not the ones to ask about what they need to be functional… (And Millennials & GenZ are largely dysfunctional generations). If they knew that, they would, more than likely, have already become more functional. Does Walling imagine that there is nothing seriously wrong with people who know neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Word of God? Because he is certainly under the impression that “we need them more than they need us.” (pg. 172)
- Walling’s book is NOT aimed at making better disciples; that is quite secondary. Every supposed appeal to discipleship growth is tailored to creating critical mindedness in his readers so as to build a class of “Nomads” who reject and deconstruct church. Every posture, guide, and practice is ultimately dedicated to creating a NEW kind of church, the one that Jesus meant to create, but that only Walling and his Nomads really understand. While this is done in the name of better functionality and better spirituality, I could not escape the distinct impression (garnered from Walling’s own statements) that it is actually driven, in addition to his deep rooted cynicism, by the desire to preach a radically different kind of Jesus… Jesus the revolutionary… Jesus the Critical Marxist… Jesus the anti-capitalist. Sincerity in our dialogue partners is nice if we hope to work out conflicts, but in the face of such spiritual and social visions as those cast here in Unlikely Nomads, open deceit would do less damage.
- In the name of mentoring/guiding/nurturing marginalized[5] groups into a kingdom relationship with Jesus, which Walling imagines is mostly only able to be accomplished in his Guru-Nomad mold, the real issues on the table do not seem to be, as he suggests, better disciple methodology, but, rather, a different gospel message which he appears to regard as some kind of recovery of Jesus’ and the early church’s method and message. Based on the false contrasts that he puts forward throughout the book, he actually seems to have a weak grasp on the historical realities of both.
- The things that Walling says must not be evaluated by the normal meanings of his chosen words. Critical Theorists/Marxists abuse normal language to conceal from others their real intentions and their ideological connections in order to more stealthily awaken a critical consciousness in them. Words don’t mean what you think they mean… unless you think they are code words for critical consciousness, in which case they do mean what you think they mean. Walling may or may not be aware of the tricksiness of his language, but that does not change the reality of his verbiage.
- Many of the calls to NOMAD-LIKENESS are innocent enough when removed from the overarching goal of re-set. His statements would mean something different in a different context, but don’t be sucked in. His Nomad descriptions are just disciple descriptions bent toward the creation of a mystical critical consciousness in the work of the disciple/apprentice. The idea is that the ONLY way to become this type of Christian is to embrace critical consciousness and leave the church.
- Every chapter is much the same as every other chapter, with only slight variations in theme. Critical Theorists/Marxists and their “Useful Idiots” love to put themselves forward as enlightened and intellectual, as if they are the smartest people in every room; they rarely are, but they are skilled at manipulating others into crediting them with intellectual/spiritual superiority. They invent terms that are supposed to hint at their improvement on language, suggesting that they possess a keener sense of what’s really going on in the world than you. They don’t.
- Walling is sparse on revelations of the beliefs behind his Nomad descriptions. He talks about what others are doing and hints that only those who leave the church and become Nomads can accomplish these things, but he rarely presents the actual beliefs of his Nomad heroes. This is a serious lacuna given that it is, it appears, his disagreement with beliefs that drives his desire to both abandon the church, and get you to abandon it as well. His repeated use of “systemic” is a Critical Marxist trumpet blast. The system has gotta go! There are other strong hints to the belief-driven nature of his call to forsake and reform. He uses a lot of Marxist phraseology and categories, shares Marxist concerns, and makes Marxist accusations. This is also revealed in the common threads of belief in the less famous people he quotes and talks about… Like Rachel Held Evans and James H. Cone.
- Don’t image that the word Marxist must designate a card carrying Communist or a swastika tattooed community activist. Marxism is an ideology that manifests broadly in postmodernism, socialism, communism, and modern identity politics like feminism, the alphabet ideology, multiculturalism, fat studies, anti-ableism, and critical race theory. It is insidious and advances best among those who adopt its language and “vision” without a full understanding of it goals.
- I find his comments arrogant, and his demands dangerous. Walling strikes me as just another grown up hippie-wanna-be who is angry that the church hasn’t gotten with his leftist program. He hates Trump, is furious that many in the churches of America supported Trump (I for the record do not even like Trump… though I voted for him). Walling doesn’t consider the present Marxist overthrow that Trump was elected to fight against as a problem, but does accredit polarization, alienation, and divisiveness to those conservatives pushing back against it.
- Walling spins critical theory stories which bastardize history and reality in order to awaken what seems a near perfect similitude of critical consciousness. He advances conspiracy theories about historical causes and effects and manifests a subpar understanding of history, political theory, theology, biblical studies, hermeneutics, and economics.
- The small mindedness of Walling in this book is almost soul-numbing. His sense of what the church is, what the church has been, what the church does and has done is disturbing and ignorant. He cares not a whit about the role of the church in building and sustaining Western Civilization, in global Christian mission, in reshaping pagan cultures, in being a light in the darkness, and a city on a hill. There is no city on a hill in his emerging church movement; they are so fixated on their own sense of “small,” “authentic” “relational” and “spiritual,” (which is most certainly more spiritual sounding rhetoric than reality) that they disregard the vastness of church work in the real world and they ignore the culture-shaping of believers in scripture. He seems to have either no awareness or care about the sheer numbers of people given life, health, prosperity, and both the opportunities to find Christ and the cultural push for them to do so that was created globally because of the church at which he sniffs contemptuously.
- Walling has a twisted understanding of justice, sets himself up as judge, jury, and executioner over other peoples “consumption,”—a recurring Marxist criticism of the West. If he could reshape the church to look exactly like he thinks it should look, the devastation to human civilization and to the hundreds of millions so effected would be great indeed.
- There have been many many flash-in-the-pan movements through the 2000 years of the church and every single one thought they were the cat’s pajamas, the true work of Jesus. Some did great things, others great evil. I grew up in a church that chased the spiritual highs of as many of these fad movements as they could… they always came back tail between their legs to re-center when that movement fizzled, soured, imploded or exploded.
And now, for the REST of the story.
Introduction of Unlikely Nomads
The introduction of Unlikely Nomads details Walling’s cynicism concerning “the present order of the church.” Walling sees himself at the 500 year crossroads of a revolution in church, a leader amid a new band of Martin Luthers. Oddly enough, he ties this present order of change to the Covid pandemic, which he says “was a signal of the change already happening in the world.” (pg. 6) I had the feeling even then, that he and I would mean radically different things by such a remark (He imagining it a good thing that Christians needed to allow to inform their faith—a flow to float in & I imagining it a power experiment in the present global Marxist takeover about which Christians need to inform themselves so as to defend the Church AND the world from it—The Great Reset.
He goes on to hint at the real issue. (Remember, for those who embrace the foundational edicts of Critical Marxism/Critical Theory, knowingly or unknowingly, the issue is rarely the issue.) He speaks vaguely of a “distaste for what the church is seen to represent.” He disparages the embrace of “partisan politics,” a phrase meant to demean NOT Critical Marxists who are intentionally seeking to unravel human civilization, but conservatives who are resisting them. He waves the Critical Marxist flag of “cultural injustices” and alienation. (pg. 10) He even scorns the idea of a “rebranding” or “make-over” demanding “a major reset.” (pg. 10) Hmmmm…. Where have I heard that phrase before? He derides those who are “resisting the sudden changes that are now upon us.” (pg. 10)
Hereafter, Walling breaks his book down into four parts.
Part 1: Endings
Part 1, which he calls “Endings,” introduces his favorite believers and why they are better Christians than the rest of you. He will say that this is not the spirit of his message, but I would beg to differ. His repeated dismissal of the value of his postures, guides, and practices for people committed in churches, sets the spirit of the contrast firmly in the camp of holier-than-thou.
Intoning the paradigms of Post-modernism and Critical Marxism, (again, knowingly or unknowingly) Walling rejoices that they are “not deconstructing their faith in Christ” but are rather “deconstructing today’s expression of the local church.” (pg. 16) I was wondering at this point, if he should have added that they are deconstructing Christ himself, giving him a Critical Marxist make-over so that they can still believe in Him… but I needed more evidence at that stage of reading. Alas, Walling will mostly keep the actual nature of his Nomads’ theology in the shadows with only hints here and there as to the actual content of their “apprenticeships.” You will have to discover their theology and practice for yourself (as I sought to do) or just assume that Walling’s spiritual bingo-phrases are accurate when the rubber meets the road.
The Prodigals
Walling opens chapter 1, “The Prodigals,” with a rather sappy “fable” that paints his special saints as new heroes of the faith who are too spiritual for regular church, and the only one’s truly singing Jesus’s “song.” (Remember: Critical Marxists love manipulative fables, especially Critical Race Marxists.) After throwing out some sweeping generalizations about the American church, he grabs at statistics for American Christians and their reflection of the “actions and attitudes consistent with those of Jesus.” (pg. 21) We don’t learn from Walling what these actions and attitudes are supposed to be, of course, so the rushed reader must merely accept that they are genuine reflections of Jesus as opposed to, say, the revolutionary Jesus of liberation theologies embraced in so many Christian institutions today, and by so many of the radicalized hippies coming to Jesus during Walling’s own joyously-remembered, California-based, “Jesus Movement,” discussed in chapter 2, “The Unraveling.”
The Unraveling
In “The Unraveling,” Walling paints the movement from the churches of the Builder Generation/Greatest Generation/Silent Generation to the Boomer churches on to today. He notes how the “Boomers tore down many of the staid traditions of the church, seeking to ‘upgrade’ it into a new age.” (pg. 25) They “rejected the forms and style of the builder churches,” and “focused more on emotions, self-actualization, and the need for meaning,” that included “New expressions of worship, and relational approaches to evangelism.” (pp. 26-27) I am uncertain what he thinks of this exactly, but he does show repeated contempt in the book for “the rise of expository preaching that converted Sunday Mornings into Bible study classrooms.” (pg. 27) This lead eventually, he claims, to the CEO pastor and Mega-churches, Satellite churches, and the leveraging of methodology and technology. My own church experience from those same beginnings has been quite different; go figure. Walling sees these institutional structures (but not these original hippie values???) as blocking his desire to “see change” and the best leaders’ “ability to see the church move forward.” Change is not an innate good, of course. While I might enjoy a dialogue about some of these elements that he discusses as less than ideal, his sweeping descriptions make for a poor history of the far more diverse expressions of the church throughout the country during all these periods of time.
The postmodern writers, like Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida, were resentful Marxists dreaming of the fall of Western Civilization because of its rejection of Socialism. They were scheming for a new method to bring about the great reset—a global Marxist revolution. I sense a similar frustration in Walling over the direction that his generational brothers and sisters took the Jesus Movement. Such promise wasted in over consumption, technology, organization, and growth paradigms.
Walling scorns the church because “Those outside the church long ago shook their heads at and rejected todays expressions of the local church.” (pg. 28) Surely, the increasingly-wanton, sexually confused, child-murdering, morally-corrupt, ethically-challenged masses of a nation in the unwitting thrall of Critical Marxism are a good guide as to whether the Church is being what the Church should be… right? As one millennial told me, “People would love the church if only Christians would get off their morality kick.” Certainly, if we were like Jesus, the whole world would love and praise us like they did Jesus in his own day… right?
With Walling, the issue rarely seems to be the issue. One can hardly believe that a structural change is supposed by him to be the secret to recapturing the trueness of Jesus’s intended church. Just so, he uses an analysis of the “Dones,” the “de-churched” to attack the churches’ active engagement with the world in the form of securing political power and presence and cultural influence. The “Dones,” you see, have been frustrated in their desire for “a place that’s safe and supportive and refreshing and challenging” (All Critical Marxist demands on college campuses). They want a church that’s “active and engaged with the world, where people can bring their full and authentic selves and receive love and community in return.”[6] I hope you see the sparks here. As usual, Walling’s complaint appears to be one thing, but ends up being another. “Dones” it seems, according to Walling’s synopsis, want a world-engaged church, but not a church that’s engaged to defend biblical worldview out of a conservative perspective… it’s got to be in support of leftist causes.
Walling insists that this conservative political interest “began to siphon off the direct involvement of churchgoers in meeting the needs of their communities.” (pg. 31) This is false at couple different points past and present, but Walling declares this conservativism and its fictional fallout as the opposite of “love they neighbor.” (Pg. 31) Here, he hints again at the issue behind the issue, using the abused language of Critical Marxism to castigate the church for growing “increasingly silent… when it came to local and systemic issues of race, immigration, diversity, violence, gender, and growing tensions related to sexual preference.” (pg. 31) This may as well be a business card saying, “I’m an apprentice of Critical Marxists.” He may be simply absorbing the milieu of California, but this ideology is the source either way. “Silence” in this case appears to mean that they failed to agree with the paranoid conspiracy theories of Critical Marxists and failed to parrot their talking points, for conservatives certainly have a lot to say on all these subjects and always have.
The only acceptable activity and engagement, it seems, is to promote leftist causes and the agendas of Critical Marxists in the name of Jesus. Walling scorns “conservative evangelical” as being “as much about the culture, as it is about theology,” (pg. 31) yet, whenever he breaks the fifth wall and admits something of what his Jesus “apprenticeship” believes about Jesus and the Church, he favors the present culture shift under the growing domination of Critical Marxism. It is to him a juggernaut that needs to be embraced rather than exposed and resisted. There is in this something of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical vision of history as an ultimately irresistible move toward Utopia through conflict, an historical ratchet that only tightens no matter how many times you try to turn it back. Resistance is futile.
Christianity has to one degree or another built Western Civilization, but it appears that in Walling’s mind, Christians should rollover and join the fight of the Critical Marxists who are tearing it down; they should start by abandoning the church that Walling problematizes at every turn, especially in chapter 3, “Father Abraham,” when he renders the churches’ pushback against Critical Marxism as “political upheaval and polarization.” (pg. 41).
Father Abraham
In Chapter 3, “Father Abraham,” Walling replicates his sub-par historical picture of the Church from the Builders to the Boomers to the present, with an equally sub-par understanding of The story of Abraham, the Roman—Orthodox split, the Reformation, the Covid pandemic, and the implications of his demands concerning the “present expression of the church.” He loves phrases like that, as if two-thousand years of Church, or even 500 years of church, can be dispensed with easily and consequence free… no negatives worth caring about, just positive Jesus Utopia ahead.[7] Here, he introduces his scorn for paid pastors and church staff who support a paradigm of church that he thinks is dead and needs to be buried.
Unlikely Nomads
Chapter 4, “Unlikely Nomads” wraps up Walling’s hope for those who have proven too spiritual for the “present manifestation of the church.” I love a good movie reference, but Walling’s use of Chocolat, to cast a vision for the hopeful future of Nomads and the doomed state of regular church congregations is disturbing. Its sets the stage, however, for his presentation of these Nomads throughout the rest of the book.
We have the terrible ogres who want to keep a lent tradition of denying themselves chocolate. We have the weak religious leader who disagrees with the ogres, but can’t bring himself to fight. We have the oppressed populace who also disagrees with the ogres, but are afraid to defy them. We have the Guru wanderer who sets up her new mystical-magical chocolate shop (intentionally?) just before lent, and, through the ensuing struggle, solves the problems of everyone in town including her lent opponents, like the chief ogre. We have the wonderful gypsies so honest and authentic. Walling loves the word authentic, for while his Nomads are authentic, few in the church are, you see. This entire scenario, including the use of “authentic” to describe resisters and activists, is, oddly enough, part of the paradigms of Critical Marxism reaching back ideologically to Rousseau.
It is easy to find ridiculous structures and people and traditions to problematize, and it is the habit of activists—and writing a book to encourage people to leave their churches and launch out as Nomads is an activist performance—to use ridiculous examples to establish Motte & Bailey[8] arguments for their activist goals. Bailey: The church is finished and you should leave it. Motte: Don’t you agree that this example here is ridiculous/unjustifiable/deserves to be unraveled? Accept my motte and you must accept my bailey.
As he argues throughout the book, he makes many false contrasts that have a Motte & Bailey quality to them. If you accept one, his contrast demands that, you accept the other. So when he presents Jesus as a nomad, and says something like, “While a life lived by unlikely nomads is not necessarily a call to give up home and shelter, it is a call to no longer be dependent on a church address, but rather to follow and align our lives with Christ,” (pg. 53) we should take note of the framing. There is no contrast between church addresses and following Jesus, nor with aligning our lives with him. Walling admits this on page 55, then he explains that this fiction is drawn from his cynicism about the church… my words not his. His cynicism appears to be driven by an unstated issue… the issue behind the issue.
His comments demonstrate either an ignorance of the early church or a manipulative framing of them. He writes as if Peter and Paul in Acts present the decisive pattern for early Christians in general, rather than for the more narrowly conceived early Church Apostles. It is also a handling of the Gospels that fails to recognize the fuller historical realities of Jesus and his disciples as a continuation of a large and varied work by God in creation. There is order, law, nationhood, discipline, transformed and transformative culture shaping… for culture involves shared values and beliefs as well as less universal elements like a shared semiotic. The churches were stayed and stable and bound to community.
Just as the Jews built synagogues when and where they could, but sometimes met without them, the Christians met in homes but also built churches… early. I’ve been in several of them in a few different nations. Many of the early church leaders were paid, as Scripture notes clearly. So too, in Matthew 18, Jesus envisions a Sanhedrin level of authority for the Apostles, and Hebrews instructs those in congregations to submit to church leaders.
Oddly enough, Walling imagines the possibility of “accountability” for his Nomads without authoritative structures in place. He says, Paul calls “those who journey as nomads,” to “both personal holiness and living in accountability to one another,” but naively fancies this taking place without the structures for it. Has his sense of human nature been knocked silly by his seeming embrace of Critical Marxism, even if he doesn’t know his ideas by that name?
Finally, at the end of chapter 4, he plays the Critical Marxist game of “Utopia dreams” that can’t be known or imagined, but will surely be wonderful in spite of the conflict paradigms that set them up. The traditional church is presented as a dying seed and his future Jesus Utopia built by Unlikely Nomads as the plant that springs from the death that he aims to speed through his book.
Part 2: Postures
The second part of the book, which Walling calls, “Postures” involves a series of… well… postures that Nomads are supposed to cultivate. They are Motte & Bailey false contrasts that would, save for Walling’s cynicism, speak to any believer’s pursuit of a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ… minus the actual content of said relationship, at which we are rarely allowed to even peep. Walling is big on spiritual sounding phrases and thin on clear practical descriptions of what his postures actually involve. Its not mystery so much as an issue behind the issues… one which isn’t being stated clearly.
Interruption
Chapter five looks at the posture of interruption, which involves being ready and responsive to God’s interruption of OUR plans to involve us in HIS. Moses is doing his sheep thing, and God meets him at a burning bush. Somehow, Walling imagines that being part of a church renders you unlikely to be able to cultivate sensitivity to divine interruption. I can run a list of many people I know who have and teach this sensitivity, but I suppose they don’t count. Just as in Critical Race Marxism where minority voices only count if they support Critical Marxism, Walling cynically excludes these ready and responsive church folk as rare and unlikely given the supposed death knell over traditional church.
Surrender
Walling picks up the posture of surrender in Chapter 6, which he describes exclusively as “aligning with the new work Jesus is doing in his Church,” (i.e. Walling’s friends the Nomads) by abandoning the local church. He plays the prophet, declaring that “ahead of us is something far different than our current expression of church,” a “rummage sale,” a “resetting.” (pp. 71-72) Anyone might use the barest image of the new wine in new wineskins innocently enough, but when wielding it against the church in the same sense that Jesus wielded it against apostate religious rulers managing a system wholly corrupted by them, we should pause and take a step back. Walling is not worried though. What could possibly go wrong with his errrr… I mean Jesus’ plan.
Though he says he’s talking about our “current forms of church,” one gets the distinct impression that he means more than that, complaining, “Many nomads have experienced times of suffering, and deep wounding for expressing their questions and dismay over our current forms of church.” (pg. 72) There is nothing in the practice of Sunday worship that warrants his level of critique and condemnation, so the issue must be something else. Yes, Christians should drop their own plans and pick up Christ’s plans, but interpreting this to mean that Christians should abandon their churches and do something structurally different, but still similar, but authentic not traditional, smacks of the disruption-for-disruption’s-sake patterns of Social Justice activism. In Critical Marxism, disruption is the short goal and this continual conflict found in a shifting set of dialectics (points of stirred conflict) is imagined to lead spontaneously to something wonderful in the long-game—a phoenix from the ashes. I believe there is worldview, theology, morals, and values standing in the shadows pushing Walling to make these odd and insistent connections.
Stillness
Chapter seven, like the others, presents a worthy posture of spiritual development—stillness (Silence, Solitude, Rest)—but it is again connected Motte-&-Bailey-like to Walling’s larger design for church abandonment. I often discuss the inability that many have to be silent with their own thoughts. Many people hate the feeling of being still in their own skin. They crave distraction and noise to drown out the nagging questions of meaning and purpose in the face of their own emptiness. Walling goofs on his sense of Elijah’s “still small voice,” but many do… the real problem is the connection of an appeal for stillness before the voice of the Lord with Walling’s overarching call to abandon the churches through the veiled suggestion that this kind of stillness is for Nomads, but both rare and unlikely among those committed to “the present manifestation of the church.” He is wrong.
Unlearning
In Chapter 8, “The Posture of Unlearning,” Walling returns to his more aggressive dismissal of the traditional church. Even so, the ability to unlearn something bad is a vital skill in the whole of life, including our ability to grow as disciples of Jesus through the study of scripture, theology, and discovering more productive methods of discipling others.
When discussing unlearning, Walling tosses up the traditional Critical Marxist category “constructs,” and ties this to the typical postmodern[9] fixation with the proposed failings of the Enlightenment. He claims, “The reset required in the days ahead will run cross-purpose to many of the paradigms we have held to be true.” (pg. 92) Paradigms??? Does he really mean something else? Perhaps something involving theology, morals, and values? I think he does, but he connects this to the undoing of the practices “of local churches being led by ordained clergy… all the way back to the second century of the Church.” (pg. 92) He envisions abandoning this pattern to be the restoration of “the priesthood of all believers.” (pg. 93)
Though there are many critiques one could legitimately make concerning the Enlightenment, Walling’s suggestion that “unlearning” was not integral to the enlightenment is again either ignorant or manipulative. It is not the sciences done scientifically that resist unlearning, but, rather, the ideologies that seem to be driving Walling’s call from the shadows.
I would seriously question whether he understands Acts 10:13-16 when he uses it to promote Peter’s unlearning, but of greater concern is the list of postmodern assumptions that he makes about what must be unlearned/unvalued (Linear thought, gradual change,[10] efficiency) and his list of false contrasts on page 99, which includes, among other destructive dialectics, embracing egalitarianism vs. male domination, apprenticing rather than going to church, personal development rather than growing churches, and “church” without walls set against church buildings.
Integration
In the ninth chapter, which promotes the posture of Integration, he envisions his Nomads breaking free from church to “follow Jesus to an undivided, integrated life,” as opposed to the churches, “disconnected way of life, structuring and separating itself, and its programs, in such a way that believers are not fully formed as apprentices.”
He is again, rather vague on what an integrated life actually looks like, saying that it looks like Jesus, but he is also adamant that it doesn’t look like Sunday-Centric church people. Church people you see are the reason the whole world doesn’t come to Jesus with love and acceptance like everyone did in the gospels… wink wink. Our bad picture of Jesus is “why many have chosen to walk away,” and “why many more choose not to enter.” (pg. 103) Walling attacks those who advertise, (billboards, campaigns, & T-shirts), those who stand on street corners, run outreach nights, and particularly those who had “His white face and name represented on banners and baseball caps as many stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6th, 2020.” (pp. 103-04)
So we know what Walling hates, but still don’t find out exactly what he thinks does reflect Jesus properly to the world. He calls for “Love with justice,” “Judgment with grace,” and “power with peace” and talks about “How we act, how treat others, how we neighbor, how we consume, how we love, how we judge, how we sacrifice, how we take responsibility,” (pg. 104) but that is all we really get, virtually amorphous spiritual sounding phrases without meat and bones. As far as I’m concerned, he’s described most of the Christians I know, but Walling would baulk at my claim… “Unlikely in the present expression of the church!”
He does expand a bit in his use of Palmer Parker, an “activist” whose front material is as opaque to real content as Walling’s book, but seems to focus without Christ on “the truth that lives within us,” saying that the most important thing is “knowing that we stayed true to ourselves.” (pg. 105) Hmmmmm.
Walling regards this as “counter-cultural” “especially as we call the church to engage in the more difficult issues of our time.” (pg. 105.) Then he comes out with it… a little. Walling pits the values of Christ’s kingdom against an interesting set: “all forms of indulgence and self-centeredness, over-consumption, and complicity, hatred and inequality, abuse and exploitation… all too often found first in the church itself.” (pg. 106) Well, somebody seems to have been reading Marx. Indeed, Walling claims that it is our failure to embrace THIS set of clearly Marxist concerns[11] (thus Marxist defined) that is driving the young away from the churches. He quickly returns to “structures” that “fuel a compartmentalized faith,” (pg. 106) but the definitional tracks have been laid.
He goes on to lay down his straw-men church goers, and decry them as inauthentic with sweeping condemnations. He mocks those who wish to resist the present push into Critical Marxism without using the various labels for it, saying, “We can no longer afford to live with a belief that the church can influence and ‘win’ the culture wars by playing the partisan politics game.” (pg. 108) This is a call back to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 per his comments on page 41. One might guess by this that he, like Timothy Keller, prefers child murderers, XX/XY deniers, pedophile supporters, child mutilators, and Hamas Champions when he looks for political leaders. At least they steal mass amounts of money to run psychologically destructive programs that buy votes and enslave and destroy… errr… I mean… help the poor.
Lest we missed his first set of Marxist talking points, Walling gives us some more on the bottom of page 108. He is more than a little worried about “racism, violence, rejection, oppression, segregation, power struggles …disenfranchisement …trained clergy” and “gender based leadership differences.” I might worry about some of these as well if I didn’t know that they are abused–language phrases that don’t mean what honest and well-meaning people mean by them. Critical Race Marxism isn’t against racism, for instance. Rather it promotes racism in its “anti-racist” campaign against “whites,” Western Civilization, and free market economies. So when he speaks of living an integrated life like Jesus, what he actually seems to mean is taking up leftist causes that he delusionally imagines reflect the purpose and mission of Christ.
Interdependence
Am I crazy? Am I making this up? Let’s consider that Walling opens chapter ten, “Interdependence,” with a quote from that bitter root, Rachel Held Evans, a progressive “Christian” who supported abortion, homosexuality, fornication, and transgenderism. The quote is not related to these issues, but it is a flag of sorts, a raised fist signaling loyalties and affinities.
Of course, interdependence is basic to community even though Walling seeks to pit it against American Christians by representing American “rugged individualism” as incompatible with “authentic community.” (pg. 111) He denounces individualism (Marxists, Socialists, Communists, and Fascists are all collectivists.) as “choosing to stand outside the group, preferring one’s own commitments and opinions over the shared commitments of the groups, which breeds questions and ongoing conflict.” (pg. 112) That is a horrible presentation of Western Individualism and quite false.
As one who appears to know little about the actual experience of collectivist cultures, Walling is certain that Western Individualism induces, “the loss of connectedness,” “fractures community,” and distorts the health and growth of that community.” (pg. 112) He, of course, has his eye on the perfect balance between this independence and its equally dysfunctional opposite “dependence,” where people push their responsibilities for personal growth onto others—You guessed it—interdependence. He complains, “churches have often become breeding grounds for codependent relationships.” (pg. 113) Walling then launches into a rather malformed rendition of the friends who lowered the paralytic through the roof, which should, by this time in the book, raise a serious question about Walling’s interpretive skills with the Scriptures.
Walling concludes with an ironic portrait of being an interdependent Nomad. He says, “The posture of interdependence involves a continued journey toward greater health and a commitment to walk alongside each other, moving into the future together.” That’s great, if rather vague, as most of his chapters are vague. The real problem is that he believes this is only accomplished or is mostly only accomplished among those who break with the church community to become Nomads and then seek interdependence with other Nomads who broke from their church communities.
Part 3: Guides
In Part 3, Walling gives us his own Nomad Hall of Fame inductees, shifting labels from Spiritual Entrepreneurs (11), to Curators of the Table (12), Mentors of Engagement (13), Architects of Community (14), Coaches of the Sacred (15), and Conveners of Relationships (16). These are pretty much all doing the similar work of creating alternate forms of Nomad ministry. He works hard to distinguish them, each described like a Guru specialist. But Walling seems to be merely setting up a platform for introducing his beloveds’ special talents.
And worthy talents they are. In truth, as I read, I had specific individual’s names come to my mind of people in my own spiritual journey who excelled at all of these things… without abandoning the churches. The key is to understand why he feels the need to separate these… shall we call them ministry skills… from the “present form of the church.”
Spiritual Entrepreneurs are his prophets casting a vision for the Nomad life, being mentors to Nomads. They are always-practical, early-adopters of new movements. It just so hard being them, that they MUST leave the church and take their work outside it. (Keep in mind that I do not have a problem with para-church ministries… I’ve founded one myself… without leaving the church.) His Spiritual Entrepreneurs are word warriors (like Critical Marxists who believe language is a power game rather than a means of coming to communicate, cooperate, and understand each other). They are self-defined, and purveyors of new norms, and activists against past norms. Here, he promotes Hugh Halter whose own Tangible Kingdom Movement has received some just concern as a progressive movement that has highly questionable understandings and presentations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.[11b] Though he seems to present himself in intentionally “un-pigeonhole-able” terms, part of his focus is Social Justice,[12] the abused-language anthem of Critical Marxism. It is neither social nor just and accomplishes none of its proposed aims.
Curators of the Table are his hosts and hostesses who make people feel welcome and lead with relationship. He says, “People are not objects to be converted, but unique acts of creation to be known. A meal is not to convince, but rather a place where life is exchanged.” (pg. 111). I could agree with this depending on its nuance, but Walling’s ongoing contempt for traditional church driven by what seems a progressive agenda leaves me wary. He speaks of “safe spaces” and “valuing all people,” his emphasis not mine, which may accord with my own teachings on the significance of Imago Dei, but may also be a touch stone for something else. I’d gamble on the latter.
Then Walling lets it out. Having disparaged the idea of conversion, he pushes for “having a meal with a Muslim leader. A white, middle-class Evangelical Christian, sitting down with an urban, city dweller who is African American. A Conservative Christian accepting the invitation into the homes and lives of members of the LGBTQ+ community. A well-off suburban family, enjoying the generous hospitality of their immigrant neighbors.” (pg. 114) I have done ALL these things and more, but they do not require his overarching push to leave the traditional churches… unless what he means by this call is the embracing of a Critical Marxist consciousness while doing it.
Here he showcase Laurie Yackley part of Threshold Community whose entire website appears to be as opaque with the same kind of spiritual sounding nothing that Unlikely Nomads is. Threshold Community could be great, could be mixing up the Kool Aid while we speak, or could be intentionally vague about its theological positioning… it’s anyone’s guess.
Mentors for Engagement are intentional, active participants in following Jesus… (so far so good) …as He leads us into being a different church which engages the issues which the local church in America has chosen to turn a blind eye. (Well that’s suggestive.) Maybe his opening quote from the Critical Race Marxist, James H. Cone will tip the interpretive scales?[13] (pg. 140) Maybe it will be his accusation that the churches are unable “to accept and address… the racism and racial injustice found both in our past and present.” (pg. 141) Or his association of, “The overt white supremacy of yesterday,” with “the white, Christian nationalist movement of our day.” (pg. 141) How about Walling’s Race-Marxist insistence that “There is no way we who are white will ever understand,” calling the issue systemic. (pg. 141) Perhaps his asinine connection between Emmet Till and George Floyd will convince you that what I’m saying about Walling’s book is true.
Walling has allowed himself to become a voice for racists, and called his readers to race activism according to the dictates of Critical Race Marxism. But that’s not all, there is more. He openly expands his notion in this chapter to apply equally to Critical Gender Marxism, Anti-colonial Marxism, and one would imagine the intersectional multiplication of all Critical Marxist causes. He may be totally unaware of the connections between his vocabulary and values with Critical Marxism, but it come out the same in the end. His heroes for this chapter, in addition to Cone, are Harold McKenzie and Dan Nold, whom, if their discussion is any tell are sold on the dictates of Critical Race Marxism as well.
So, being a Nomad to Walling is not being one who is an intentional, active participant in following Jesus who engages issues which the local church in America has chosen to turn a blind eye, but is, rather, one who embraces Critical Marxism intersectionally and leaves the church because his or her activist spirit is incompatible with traditional Christianity.
Architects of community are people who “cultivate and nurture new spaces, practices, and sacred rhythms,” people “able to hold together at one time the many variables of community life and formation.” These are his great guru saints, more spiritual than your average bear. He contrasts this with churches that promise community, but rarely deliver. I, for one, beg to differ. For this describes many of the pastors that I have had the pleasure to meet over the last 38 years of ministry.
Here, it is plain that we are not dealing with a structural problem solved by new structures, though he repeatedly makes this dubious claim. And he does make this claim by default, for he argues that Sunday-centric structures prevent his spiritual postures, guides, and practices from working properly… thus… he is, in the end, laying everything at the feet of structure. We are instead dealing with the promotion of a radically different commitment to a radically different vision of God, Man, and reality… what appears to be a progressive vision of Jesus that cannot operate effectively in the present order of things. Either that, or Walling is a terrible communicator. I’m guessing the former, but am certainly open to the possibility of the latter.
I am all for out of the box ministry so long as what it represents is biblical in content, but Walling’s off-the-hook pessimism about the church is disturbing. Here he highlights the work of Laurie Yackley’s husband Rob.
Coaches of the Sacred help people take the extra step from learning to living. (Sounds good.) They “offer trusted relationship in which to process how God is already at work.” (pg. 162) (Okay, I’m with ya.) Of course he speaks of this figure in isolation to Nomads, but nothing so far dictates the need for such a distinction.
Here, however, we learn a little something about Walling’s own past with his college baseball coach, who served a similar function in his early life. Walling joined a college protest in the 70s and was, according to him, being “scapegoated, and made an example of, because,” he “wasn’t playing the church-and-school-politics game” (pg. 166) Progressive “Christians” always accuse conservatives of “politics game,” but deem their highly politicized vision of the revolutionary Jesus as apolitical… just real faith and discipleship. He never tells us the issue or his conduct in his protest, but his coach helped him through both this issue and his spiritual walk.
Here he offers up Paul Rhoads as his chapter hero. Paul Rhodes was involved with SoulFormation, a plainly Critical Marxist organization seeking to radicalize Jesus for their cause. In their “about us” section, we find Critical Marxist ditties like, “The dominant culture church has been complicit in the marginalization and oppression of all others. This sin has traumatized BIPOC[14] leaders and has deformed those of the dominant culture. This was never God’s design. We intentionally decenter Whiteness believing that leaders develop and thrive in communities where diversity, mutuality, and inclusivity are practiced.” Elsewhere we find, “We intentionally champion and hold space for leaders whose voices, experiences, and identities have been marginalized by the dominant culture.”[15]
Walling opens his introduction of Conveners of Relationship with the “prophetic” proclamation that “Fewer and fewer of our neighbors will experience the transformative love and way of Jesus through Sunday-centric church experiences. Rather they will experience it through the life and relationship they share with their nomad neighbors.” (pg. 171)
That is one bold claim. Bolder when you consider what drives it from the shadows. I know many conveners of relationship operating in the church loving their neighbors in their neighborhood. Walling’s cynical description of a church whose attenders drive by their neighbors on their way to church instead of loving them is unseemly and inaccurate… actually, it’s soul ignorant and high hubris.
Walling goes on to scorn believers who love their neighbors and desire to help them find Christ, by saying, “Conveners of relationship love their neighbors, not with the motive to change their neighbors, but rather in acknowledgement that they need their neighbors more than their neighbors need them.” (pg. 172) This is one of those many pseudo-spiritual things that Walling says to add a guru quality to his special Nomads. If we are the inheritors of Christ and the word of God and our neighbors don’t know Him, then it is the most loving thing to seek their transformation through Christ. Eternity is yawning its maw before us and they need to be ready to meet their Maker.
This makes me wonder even more deeply if Walling has some theological thought of eternity and salvation and damnation dancing in his puffed up rhetoric OTHER THAN the gospel which Paul preached to the Galatians. Walling scorns inviting people to church. He spits on outreach programs. Calls for us to put aside our agenda for conversion. Last I checked, the great commission is that we go into all the world and make disciples teaching them to obey all that Christ commanded. This does not, as Walling complains, make people “projects” and this is not rightly contrasted with his own superior claim to reach them as people “searching for meaning and purpose.” (pg. 173)
Walling reveals, perchance, some of his ideology in his victimization claim about people when he says, “To these guides, people deserve to be known for who they are, as opposed to who the world, the culture, or life’s circumstances have forced them to be.” (Pg. 173) Though he tries to tie this to recognizing their image of God status, that won’t fly. Throughout the book, Walling pushes notions of “true self,” “unique self” that defies the universally shared Imago Dei category. He has something else in mind—a systemic oppressor/oppressed dialectic?
You may be more than tired of hearing it stated, but this bears a striking similarity to Postmodern and progressive understandings of individuals before the artificial and oppressive constructs of the world. It is as if there is a beautiful butterfly inside each person longing to escape the ugly chrysalis forced on them by societies’ norms, morals, and values. If only we could get that torn away, the butterfly could fly free. Unfortunately, waiting inside that chrysalis, inside the human heart unredeemed and untransformed by Christ and untaught by Divine word is the seven deadly sins run amuck.
Many of Walling’s descriptions of “our neighbors” and of his Nomad Super-Saints smack of a Hollywood movie in which the script writers went nuts describing the perfect character. Because psychological dishonesty doesn’t matter in Hollywood, and they are not constrained by reality, they can make big promises on the page that real human beings can’t meet.
I’ve engaged with the homeless in many places throughout America and in several places abroad. The delusional or deceptive descriptions of the homeless by leftists have the same unreal corona of sacred victims and saintly servants. Leftists rage when people point out that reality doesn’t fit their manipulative and ideology driven narrative.
Here, Walling introduces us to Jonathan Wiebel with Front Yard Missions whose core (based on its presence in almost every part of their website) is diversity and racial and cultural reconciliation. They aim to raise up “cohorts of culture-change leaders.”[16] Now, it just may be that this is an innocent focus, but since missions organizations in general go into all the world, seeking to lead people of every tongue and tribe to Jesus, we may safely assume that the ideological framework that is driving their typically vague spiritual sounding rhetoric on their website is… do I need to say it again? If you have embraced Critical Race Marxism and present yourself as being involved in race reconciliation, you are deceiving yourself. Any organization or person that is seeking to raise a critical consciousness around the pressure points of Critical Marxism is either NOT doing the work of Christ or has so bastardized their understanding of Jesus as to raise serious questions about their status as Christian. When you find yourself putting your back behind every atheist cause taken up by Marxists of every stripe, you should be asking yourself some serious questions about the real nature of your faith.
The Five-Fold Leaders
Walling finishes Part 3 with a consideration of how his band of Nomads are the only ones really fulfilling Paul’s vision for Five-Fold Leaders. He opens with a bold claim, saying, “The new church that is emerging is a radical reset of what it means to be the church.” (pg. 183) As noted, we should not ignore it when Walling and his Guru heroes of the faith intone Critical Marxist language and categories and practices. For instance, Walling uses the typical Critical Marxist Kafka trap of deeming any concern with his claims as proof of his claims. He sloughs off worries about organization, oversight, and accountability in his emerging church because “Questions like these are vestiges of our deeply ingrained, institutional habits and our desire to organize and bring new expressions back under our control.” (pg. 183)
He then uses a typical Critical Marxist fable/story/tale to emphasize his own conviction that “Christ did not come to found an organized religion, but came instead to found an unorganized one.” (pg. 184) The story makes historically false contrasts to build false contrasts between organization, oversight, and accountability with “taking religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.” (pg. 184) That sounds so powerful, but it also wholly misrepresents both Yahwism, Judaism, and the early church which did all this tethered to organization, oversight, and accountability. In fact, organization, oversight, and accountability were the means of purifying the rest.
The false claims keep on rolling as Walling quotes Alan Hirsch saying, “the problem is that the Church for too long has only focused on teachers and shepherds at the exclusion of the others.” (pg. 184) False. Walling’s book is filled with irresponsible and wholly untrue accusations against the Church to excuse abandoning it for the greener pastures of his beloved Nomads. In a movement so vast as the Church there is enough anecdotal evidence to carry any wild accusation, but sensible readers will call Walling on his garbage and demand something a bit more substantial than his cynical say-so.
I am always interested to see out-of-the-box ministries that prove to have a particular knack for penetrating difficult areas of need, but Walling’s notion that this cannot go on effectively so long as people stay connected to local churches is an outrageous contention. In this chapter, he gives a new pall to the five-fold ministry that seeks to separate each of the five from their tethering to organization, oversight, and accountability.
Teachers are supposed to have new insights into scripture, but Walling dismisses “semitary” oops he means seminary, and philosophically crimps their ability to educate themselves properly in biblical studies and theology by manifesting disdain for paid ministerial positions. As a biblical scholar who spent a lot of money and time becoming one through blood sweat and tears, I’d also like to eat and wear clothes… or should I stuff my work into my off hours from being a Walmart greeter? (I am NOT a Walmart greeter.) Walling fantasizes about teachers giving “Orthodox instruction that keeps the church of today aligned with the church of the past”—which is the product of 2000 year old institutional patterns that he rejects—but also cuts off the desire for the mechanisms that secure said orthodoxy. He has little use for the church of the past save those movements that prove useful as a foil for the present.
Pastors become unpaid, warm-hearted spiritual leaders caring for whole communities not church congregations, and not whole communities through congregations. And though pastors tend to be pastoral wherever they go, this separation is not a biblical definition and doesn’t wash with the earliest expressions of Church.
He may claim that he made poor word choices, but he has signaled the script fantasy of his own assertions when he says, “In the days ahead, we must guard against our innate need to order and control, and instead allow new expressions to be unorganized, able to grow organically around relationships, as opposed to recreating our old forms of institution.” (pg. 187) He claims that the church was “designed by Christ to be a grassroots movement. Its expansion was never meant to be controlled.” (pg. 187) That sounds soooo spiritual, but its reality is both in conflict with Scripture from Genesis to Revelation and to, as he noted above, “innate” human “need.”
Phrases like organic and authentic feel so good, like Rousseau-ian bucolic scenes of undeveloped landscapes, where man is free from the corrupting influence of civilizing oppression. From Genesis to Revelation, however, the innate need to deal effectively with organically-broken, authentically-corrupt human inclination is cultivated through the application of truth, law and order through organization, oversight, and accountability. The organic conflict between each person’s core essence as sinner and entrusting some of these sinners to organize, oversee, and hold the others accountable is, says centuries of historical experimentation, met best in constitutional curtailing in limited government (Torah, for instance), separation of powers, and checks and balances such as was laid down in Deuteronomy 17, and to some degree articulated philosophically in the writings of men like John Locke and John Stuart Mills.
Part 4: Practices
In his last part, Walling proves rather redundant in his consideration of “Eyes on Him,” (ch. 18), “Sacred Spaces,” (ch. 19), “Returning to Mystery” (ch. 20) and “Hope from the First Fruits,” (ch. 21). Then, we can thank heaven that his book is finally over.
Eyes Fixed on Him
The entirety of chapter 18 is a long series of false contrasts, and false claims about the role of church buildings in the Churches’ supposedly defunct spirituality. This is signaled in his opening… what? …is it supposed to be a poem? Anyway, he writes, “Taking our eyes off Sunday; Placing our eyes back on him; Loving God for God’s sake.” (pg. 191) He just described most of my Christian friends who are committed members of churches and drive past their neighbors, whom they love all week long, on their way to church on Sunday, earnestly demonstrating their devotion to watching eyes.
Walling signals his less than ideal understanding of Greek and linguistics in his attempt to claim that our word church violates the spirit of Paul’s favored term ekklesia. He spins a deconstructive yarn about how we rejected Paul’s idea to create “congregations” and then “churches.” Sorry, but the word ekklesia means “assembly” or “gathering,” and these are perfectly in line with “congregations” and, even “church” (house of the Lord). We are the body of the Lord. We are members of His household. We ARE the Church. And we assemble together in places that we like, but worship to learn from each other, to worship with each other, to pray for each other, and to commune as one part of His greater body. THIS IS NOT All THAT WE DO, but it is an important part of what we ARE as a community of believers. I will never scorn this, will not accept Walling’s cynical portrait of it, and will not be taken in by his holier-than-thou casting of his beloved Nomads, whose worldview expressions, upon even a slight investigation, raise many red flags for me.
Sacred Spaces
“Sacred Spaces are about holding your life open to the sacred… about daily moments when we recognizes God’s presence… intentional times that are woven into the rhythms of our lives.” (pg. 204) As worded… as I myself would intend these statements… no problem. The problem comes in, as with almost everything Walling says in this book, when we discover at least part of what he actually means by these statements.
As worded, he has described most of my Christian friends and associates and acquaintances. But he reserves this practice for his Nomads in their abandonment of traditional expressions of church. Nomads make “the choice to reserve time, energy, and spiritual awareness of how Christ may be at work using our day to day to shape our lives,” (pg. 205) but those who make Sundays and church a regular part of that reservation of sacred space and time are deemed less than. He will, perhaps, try to deny this, given his milk-toast description of his book in our first Facebook Thread. He might yell, “But I’m a nice guy!” And I’m sure he is; he looks like quite a pleasant fellow on his book cover. “I’ve served the church for over 30 years!” I’m sure he did so with a great desire to do good for others and to please Christ. “I have good intentions!” Most do… even Hitler, Stalin, and Mao when you get down to it. (No, I did not just compare Terry Walling to Hitler, I am just saying that intentions are NOT the basis for evaluating ideas, authors, or messengers.) So, regardless of intentions, the frequency of Walling’s disparaging of “Sunday-centric” Christians, and the variety of his ways of expressing it, make his opinion clear—The present expression of the church and those who sustain it are less than, and his beloved Nomads are the future of true Christianity.
We learn something important about Walling in his constant bleating on and on about Covid. Like those power-players that he seems to support with his citizen’s vote, if he votes, he sees the Covid event as an opportunity to bring about a “major re-set”—Them of global political structures, he of “the local church.” (pg. 195) He celebrates how Covid restrictions lead to the creation of “a new breed of ecclesial anarchists, who can never go back.” (pg. 196)
As part of this, Walling is excited by the new generations of Millennial and GenZ youth who “refuse to embrace the church they are inheriting.” He accredits this refusal not to the overwhelming influence that Critical Marxism has had on these generations, driving as many as possible to become activists expressing contempt for traditional Christian morality and ethics. No! These youth are heroes crying from a deep place of soul for ekklesia and more authentic church, with their eyes fixed on Jesus. Almost every statistic involving Millennials and GenZ demonstrate increasing depression, suicide, isolation, confusion, and a deepening moral quagmire. They are technology addicted and suffer the soul draining effects of it. But Walling sees nothing but sunshine and roses ahead, because they’re breaking with the churches.
Return of Mystery
We can summarize here with the opening of the chapter: “Christianity is a sacred mystery.” (pg. 215) Again, so far so good, I guess, though he either doesn’t understand the term “mystery” as used in the New Testament, or prefers his own sense of mystery. Even his quote of Brian Zahnd is partially okay, when Zahnd says, “Room for mystery is necessary for orthodox theology. Mystery is good for theology. And mystery is good for the soul.” I agree. Unfortunately this quote comes on the heels of a bald and unnuanced accusation that, “Western Christianity has tried for too long to make the gospel a kind of scientific formula—a pseudo-science of biblical facts, atonement theories, and sinners’ prayers—when in fact it is more like a song, a symphony, a poem, a painting, a drama, a dance, and yes, a mystery.” (pg. 215) How ethereal of him. He must be very spiritual.
I love a good tune and a jig as much as anyone, but Walling and many of these figures whom he quotes live in a different reality than I do, and they are full of contempt for the good work that millions of Christians are doing in, with, and for Christ on a daily basis. His Nomad’s self-congratulatory mystical ideal of what it REALLY means to be a disciple of Jesus leads him to hold the more practical and society altering elements of church in contempt. Again, Chesteron’s Fence. Fixating on the core of spiritual communion with Jesus and relational outreach as the be-all and end-all of the work of Christ in the world is myopic, and dismissing as unspiritual the vast work that Christ has done and continues to do through all aspects of His Kingdom is unwise. I recommend a careful reading of “I and Thou” by Martin Buber… right to the end.
So, Walling like most postmoderns returns again to hating on the Enlightenment and the place of reason in the development of Western Civilization and on the values, morals, and ethics of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Who needs civilization? Who needs theology? jWe just need to go the prom with Jesus and enjoy swaying in the embrace of mysterious love. It is not merely critique, on Walling’s part, because he radically misrepresents his enemy—the Enlightenment—in his subpar analysis of its reality.
In this chapter, He loves him some paradox and I won’t bother unpacking them here, save for a couple comments.
First, the suggestion that his Nomads are wrestling with mystery and paradox better than believers committed in the traditional church structures is a fiction. We might note, for instance, that Walling’s understanding of John 8 and the woman caught in adultery is ill-informed. Perhaps if he’d taken better courses in Semitary… ooops, I mean Seminary, he would have done a better job understanding the event as told by John.
Second, we might wonder what stands behind Walling’s claim “The Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. One comprised of fewer absolutes than we sometimes proclaim. Living out the life of his Kingdom will forge a different kind of church, and is worthy of the nomadic journey.” Given all that Walling has said, thus far, the quote seems to contain many questionable ideas about the visible churches’ moral and ethical standards and theological discussion, and manifests a readiness on his part, like Rachel Held Evans, to dismiss them in the name of “love,” and before the mysterious communion of our unique self-definition with Christ. Any misgivings in “crossing lines” are numbed with the bequeathing of the martyr’s badge of being misunderstood in doing so.
The quote is also insulting to the tens of millions of believers who have gone before him and beside him, giving all for Jesus in the building of a church system that Walling clearly despises. He’ll complain that he doesn’t despise it, but his constant bleating on and on about how he and his Nomads have recaptured true Christianity and how others, missing the mark, created the present mess, belies such a claim.
First Fruits
Finally…. Walling goes on about the New Wine of his Nomad movement. I’ve heard it all before in the 51 years I have called Christ Lord.
The Magazine from the 70s called New Wine, put out by Charles Simpson, with whom I am amply familiar, was created when Simpson and some of his ministry compatriots developed the Shepherding Movement. This was one of those flash-in-the-pan promising disasters that put itself forward as the future of the church for anyone whose anyone. THEY understood what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus and THEY were eager to bring everyone else into the fold. Their discovery of true discipleship was the new wine that the church had always needed and didn’t have.
The horrors of this movement are the stuff of legend, but I could tell you insider traumas that would curdle your stomach about the levels of abuse, corruption, and theological non-sense that became all too common among these leaders and their disciples.
In the early 70s, years before our church began running down the Shepherding Movement’s road to disappointing glory, a number of groups began gathering around the ministries of Witness Lee and his predecessor Watchman Nee.
For instance, Gene Edwards, who was later to write the book Letters to Devastated Christians over some of the traumas many suffered at the hands of these leaders and their disciples was “interrupted by Jesus” when he first read Watchman Nee’s books. I quote:
“Nee’s presentation of the believer’s identification with Christ in death and resurrection deeply resonated with him, and in time he grew to believe that Evangelical churches in America had fundamentally strayed from the spiritual vitality of the first-century churches. In November 1961, at the height of his popularity, he ended his evangelistic ministry, canceling all future engagements. …Edwards’ books and tapes laid the groundwork for his own house church movement that began in the United States in the 1970s. Groups and churches that he planted pattern their gatherings around primitive Christian practices such as meeting in homes, writing their own songs, and meeting in an open, participatory style. These groups aim for a distributed ministry model in which no one in the group possesses greater authority than any other so that all will be encouraged to function and speak in the meeting.”[17]
Some of these groups were heavily influenced by the Christian mystics. They sought to unravel local churches and suck away their members, and their leaders, into their own “truly spiritual” patterns of Church. They started out “so wonderful,” but ended in disaster and are known today for the wild accusations of abuse, wantonness, and heretical mystical avenues that they traversed in the name of recapturing the true church of Jesus.
Though Gene Edwards was only one player in a larger movement, I highly recommend reading Kevin Knox’s personal testimony of being mentored by Gene Edwards during those days.[18] One worthy quote is “Finally, I had been forced to look at his actions, rather than at his words.”
Talk is cheap and I’ve been through the same paradigm that Walling is promoting with several church movements over the last 51 years. I am always interested to see what comes of them as they start out committed and excited and eager for experiment, but few of them stay the course.
‘Let not the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off. ‘
~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD
[1] Keller was Marxist before accepting Christ and has continued in a Christianized version of it ever since. See: Larry Alex Taunton, “Tim Keller, John Piper, & Donald Trump,” The Aquila Report, 11/4/2020, https://theaquilareport.com/tim-keller-john-piper-donald-trump/ (11/4/2023); Timothy F. Kauffman, “Workers of the Church, Unite!: The Radical Marxist Foundation of Tim Keller’s Social Gospel,” The Trinity Review, March-June 2014; https://www.trinityfoundation.org/PDF/The%20Trinity%20Review%20Review%20317%20Workers%20of%20the%20Church%20Unite%20KauffmanonKeller.pdf (10/4/2023); “Timothy Keller is a socialist. He promotes the idea of redistribution of wealth forcibly administered by the power of government. … In his desire to promote government administered social welfare, Timothy Keller promotes the Democratic Party and urges Christians not to vote for Republicans. In doing this, Mr. Keller is so biased in favor of governmental social welfare that he ignores the current Democratic Party’s flagrant and extreme promotion of violating two of the Ten Commandments: “Do not murder” and “Do not commit adultery.” Glenn Ballard, “Why Timothy Keller is Wrong about Politics,” Medium, 10/11/2018, https://gcb1.medium.com/why-timothy-keller-is-wrong-about-politics-85648312d494 (11/4/2023).
[2] Tim Keller, “Tim Keller on the Decline and Renewal of the American Church,” The Gospel Coalition, (2/20/2023);
[3] This is the Marxists’ own term for those they manipulate into supporting them.
[4] A discussion by G. K. Chesterton in his 1929 book, The Thing… no, not the 1982 one by John Carpenter.
[5] The difference between using the terms marginalized and marginal is an entire worldview.
[6] Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, Church Refugees (Group Publishing, 2015) pg. 38.
[7] I highly recommend the books by Barak Lurie Atheism Kills : the Dangers of a World Without God – and Cause for Hope (Los Angeles: CT3 Media, 2017) & Atheism destroys : how Godlessness destroys the pillars of civilization–and how to fight back (Los Angeles: CT3 Media, 2021) which detail the larger role of the church in the creation and sustenance of Western Civilization. Only a small-minded person imagines that the Church in all its forms should be dispensed with to satisfy the nostalgic imaginings of those meditating on the Gospels and Acts through a Critical Marxist lens… whether that lens was ground directly or indirectly by Critical Marxists.
[8] The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the “bailey”). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte). Wikipedia
[9] One should note the intimate link between the post-modern philosophers (who all started out as Marxists) and the Critical Marxists, both of whom far from rejecting Marxism came to see its forms under Marx as vulgar and in need of updating. The present state of Critical Marxism what many call Critical Theory is wholly indebted to both the Neo-Marxist Post-modern Philosophers and the Critical Marxists like Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School Scholars.
[10] Marxism in all its forms including its critical manifestations fixates on rapid revolutionary change rather than allowing self-correcting patterns of liberal systems to improve through the processes of liberal interaction in a free market of ideas.
[11] Don’t be naïve as to the real thrust here. These Marxist buzz words are not used the way most of his readers will hear them. The collection together with what he has allowed to leak onto the page in regard to his Critical Marxist leanings, determines the meaning of these phrases. Hate doesn’t mean hate; it means resisting Critical Marxism.
[11b] https://www.gotquestions.org/tangible-kingdom-movement.html?fbclid=IwAR1OykOTgK6KI5Rp2KO_93hJYODFqAYmMUL5bAAw0-wEXTyb5u0oN2kgtco (11/28/2023).
[12] Andrew Mills, “The Promise of the Emerging Church: A Critical Engagement,” (Hamilton: Thesis, McMaster Divinity College, 2010).
[13] Author of A Black Theology of Liberation, and Black Theology & Black Power.
[14] “BIPOC” refers to “black, indigenous, and other people of color”
[15] https://www.soulformation.org/about-us (11/7/2023).
[16] https://www.converge.org/church-strengthening/evangelism-discipleship/
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Edwards (11/9/2023).
[18] Kevin Knox, “Regarding my 10 years under Gene Edwards,” https://familyhoodchurch.blogspot.com/2008/06/regarding-my-10-years-under-gene.html (11/9/2023).
