Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith beyond the Baggage of Western Culture

By Mandy Smith and Walter Brueggemann

"Smith's sage advice will aid Christians in recognizing the simple joys of practicing their faith."--Publishers Weekly

Western culture is in a tailspin, and Christian faith is entangled in it: we do kingdom things in empire ways. Western approaches to faith leave us feeling depressed, doubting, anxious, and burned out. We know something is wrong with the way we do faith and church in the West, but we're so steeped in it that we don't know where to begin to break old habits.

Popular pastor and speaker Mandy Smith invites us to be unfettered from the deeply ingrained habits of Western culture so we can do kingdom things in kingdom ways again. She explores how we can be transformed by new postures and habits that help us see God already at work in and around us. The way forward isn't more ideas, programs, and problem-solving but in Jesus's surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness. Ultimately, rediscovering childlike habits is a way for us to remember how to be human.

Unfettered helps us reimagine how to follow God with our whole selves again and join with God's mission in the world. Foreword by Walter Brueggemann.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: May 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781493431144

Mandy Smith

Originally from Australia, Mandy Smith is lead pastor of University Christian Church, a campus and neighborhood congregation with its own fair-trade café in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a regular contributor to Leadership Journal and PARSE and the author of Making a Mess and Meeting God. She is also the creator of The Collect, a citywide trash-to-art project. Mandy and her husband Jamie, a New Testament professor at Cincinnati Christian University, live with their two kids in a little house where the teapot is always warm.

Book preview

"Mandy Smith’s Unfettered helps us discard our Westernized baggage so we can be formed all over again as children in awe of God. With lively prose and a profound wisdom, she teaches us how to dance with God. Open these pages and allow yourself to be drawn in to this childlike way of life with God. Learn the postures of resting, receiving, and responding. Explore knowing God."

—David Fitch, professor, Northern Seminary; author of Faithful Presence

"Few writers are able to combine cultural criticism and hopeful imagination for the future in the manner that Mandy Smith does. Unfettered is essential reading, a wise guide to tiptoeing into a vibrant, post-Christendom faith. It is a much-needed book, and at the same time a dangerous one, for one cannot read it and remain unchanged."

—C. Christopher Smith, founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books; author of How the Body of Christ Talks

This rare book on childlikeness is written by someone who is herself charmingly childlike in her approach to God, people, and the world. Mandy is a well-informed writer, and she is also a profoundly enchanting one as she pens what could prove to be the manifesto for the always-possible, ever-resurgent, Order of the Eternal Child. Viva!

—Alan Hirsch, founder of Forge Missional Training Network and the Movement Leaders Collective; author of The Forgotten Ways

"When it comes to getting at the core of the problem of the fractured self, Smith strikes at the heart of the dualism of Western culture with her analysis in Unfettered. Unwavering in her commitment to unravel the quandary that Christianity in the West has trapped itself in and unflinching in her determination to tell the narrative of one who would gather all creation into wholeness, Smith makes a clear case for seeing with renewed eyes and hearing with unclogged ears. Unfettered provides space for reflection where we can find our full humanity and abandon the need to ‘fix’ our lives. It is an invitation to lean into the uncomfortable void and therefore create room where we can exist, grow, and flourish."

—Phuc Luu, author of Jesus of the East: Reclaiming the Gospel for the Wounded

"We have pastor-practitioners and pastor-scholars, but we need pastor-artists because they help us encounter God as Mystery. Mandy Smith is a pastor-artist. In Unfettered, Mandy invites us to dance a three-step of rest, receive, and respond. She shows us what we can be: human beings deeply connected to God, self, and others. Mandy doesn’t make it sound easy; she just makes it sound so very worth it. She invites us to a dance that lives fully into the goodness of God. I’ve been grateful for Mandy’s voice for a long time now, and Unfettered is an overdue guide for those of us wanting another way."

—Steve Cuss, lead pastor of Discovery Christian Church, Broomfield, Colorado

Being quite skilled at the controlling, adultish ways of exegeting Scripture, I was deeply confronted by Mandy Smith’s rest-receive-respond approach. She invites us to divest ourselves of our need to be masters of the text and, like children, allow our senses, our instincts, even our bodies, to contribute to hearing from God. Like Nicodemus asking Jesus how one becomes born again, I found myself regularly resisting, questioning, and doubting Mandy’s new method before being won over by her approach. If you want to contend with the Good News in your heart, mind, and body, read this book!

—Michael Frost, Morling College, Sydney

© 2021 by Mandy Smith

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

Ebook edition created 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-3114-4

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For Vera

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Contents

Cover    i

Endorsements    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    v

Dedication    iv

Foreword by Walter Brueggemann    vii

Acknowledgments    xi

Introduction    1

1. Rest    17

2. What Gets in the Way of Rest    45

3. Receive    77

4. What Doesn’t Get in the Way of Receiving    93

5. Respond    97

6. What Keeps Us from Responding    119

7. A Theology of Childlikeness    153

8. Rest, Receive, Respond    185

Appendix: Resources for Engaging Scripture    199

Notes    203

Back Cover    213

Foreword

Walter Brueggemann

Do not, dear reader, take up this book unless you intend to be changed, because this book concerns emancipatory transformation. In poetic idiom, Mandy Smith has written a narrative account of her wondrous awakening to the gifts of freedom and grace in her life that have taken her by surprise. Her quite personal account is intended as an invitation and a summons to her readers that they, like the author, might come to live differently in the world.

Smith names and effectively resists empire, a stand-in for the seductions of modernity that vie for control, certitude, and predictability. It is clear that this mode of life cannot deliver on our hopes for humanness. Smith has seen that in her own life, her previous practice of faith seduced her into certitude and control that denied her the freedom, joy, and grace to which such imperial faith often attested. She found that her imagination had been occupied by and limited to the rigidities of orthodoxy that had become the very enemy of that which it advocated.

Smith is a compelling storyteller. The pivotal story she tells is about the life-changing moment when, during her sabbatical, she observed a flock of flying geese. She saw that without a plan the geese readily formed the shape of a V in the sky: The shoulders of a goose know how to find the space where the wind is kind. And without conscious effort they are flying in a perfect V. As she observed this oft-reenacted wonder, Smith resolved, I want to fly like that. This book is about her flight lessons and her newly acquired capacity to soar. Her poetic gifts not only bear witness to that new joyous freedom but also invite her readers to take flight.

Another gripping tale she tells is about how the night before a daring meeting to be convened for prayers of healing (which struck her as awkward and a bit embarrassing), she went alone to the church sanctuary to act out her uneasiness about the enterprise. There, alone in the sanctuary, she danced in anticipation and protest and demand:

My shoulder stiffly twitched, as I clenched my eyes shut to avoid witnessing my own awkwardness. I don’t know what it looked like, but I danced. I pictured the faces of those we would pray over in the morning, and I danced for each one. I felt my muscles begin to loosen, my heart open a crack, my longing leak out, and a little joy shyly emerge. By the end, I was sweating, not because my dance was so exuberant but from the exertion of will it took to override my lament, dancing when I felt like weeping. Psalm 30 expresses it this way: You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy (v. 11).

At this point Smith was in a new world that was given to her, one that she had not anticipated or chosen. From her deep faith and restless readiness, she has been able to formulate a three-step movement into this new gift.

Rest. It is important that Smith’s notice of the geese that fly like that was during her sabbatical, when she was taking a break from the pressures of empire. She knew then and knows now that without such restful attentiveness one is not likely to engage such emancipatory reality. This is a good, strong word for those of us who maintain religious busyness in our lives.

Receive. The empire requires us to keep taking initiatives—to manage, produce, and generate. But rest puts us in a posture to be on the receiving end of reality that does not start with us and therefore does not depend on us. In a posture of rest we might receive gifts that are being given by the goodness of God via the wonders of creation. Thus Smith, for the first time, began to pay attention to the book of nature that is as revelatory as the book of Scripture.

She found all around her wonder, gift, and mystery that have turned out to be buoyant and sustaining. It is therefore not a surprise that Smith finds the mundane of creation to be Spirit-filled in its restorative gifts.

Respond. When we receive, we then can respond. The response to which Smith finds herself committed is a ministry of healing and reconciliation among her neighbors. That ministry in response, however, does not require (or permit) that we be self-starters. As a result, in this sequence of rest-receive-respond there is no risk of burnout or fatigue or excessive managerial burden because the response is enveloped in receptivity.

Smith’s fresh awareness is that we may become childlike in awe, wonder, innocence, and trust. She observes that an excessive passion to be a knowing, responsible adult serves the empire of control, certitude, and predictability. She is, moreover, acutely aware of the oft-repeated warning that in becoming childlike we should not become childish. But she knows very well that being childlike has nothing to do with being childish, so she tersely dismisses that warning. And then in what I think is a brilliant maneuver, she observes that in a parallel way being an adult runs the risk of making us adultish—that is, overly responsible and obsessed with making everything come out right. She sees that in the empire the risk of becoming adultish is even greater than the risk of being childish. So much for the empire of control!

Before I finish, I will comment on two terrific images Smith offers. First, she reports that she has learned that God is not some kind of encyclopedia in the sky. Second, she reflects on her old desire to meet with God for a business meeting only to find that God had in mind a picnic. What a trade-off! The picnic sounds like an echo of the wondrous affirmation of the Westminster Shorter Catechism that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.

Smith’s book is primarily addressed to her own circle of faith—namely, evangelicals who are too certain about all matters of faith. But I read as a liberal Christian, and her book surely pertains as well to my circle of faith wherein liberals are filled with their own certitude and bottomless convictions about what is to be done. Indeed, liberal Christians readily assume that we are the real adults in the room. In a rejection of such certitude among evangelical and progressive Christians, Smith invites us all to rest in the Spirit. Smith could have danced all night and nearly did. It was a dance of tears that turned to joy. Smith knows that when we are preoccupied with presiding over God’s business meeting, we may miss the dance of the Spirit. This book is a powerfully compelling good word to the church in our society—evangelical and liberal—that has largely exhausted its old endowments. Isaiah 40:31 exhorts us to soar on wings like eagles, to run and not grow weary, and to walk and not be faint.

Fly like that!

Acknowledgments

This book may have my name on the cover, but it is the expression of many rich conversations and community adventures.

Thank you, Bob Hosack and all at Brazos, for your adventurous spirits, and to Karen Swallow Prior for introducing us.

Thank you to all who have affirmed the call to Fly like that: Justin Dunn, Jared Siebert, Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw, Kathy Callahan-Howell, Sandie Brock, Stephanie Young, Tiffany Mills, John and Kate Pattison, Susan Carson, Candyce Roberts, Deb and Al Hirsch, Steve and Liesl Huhn, MaryKate Morse, Cherith Fee Nordling, Ruth Anne Reese, Cheryl McCarthy, and all my friends at Ecclesia Network and Missio Alliance.

Thank you, Joshua Retterer, Scott Jones, Dave Hansen, Paul Pastor, and Sister Dorothy Schuette for telling me to write. And then telling me again.

Thank you to Meg and D. J. and Trischler Design Company for loaning me your imaginations and helping me remember why I’m doing this.

Thank you to everyone at Ben and Julia’s wedding, All Things New Fest, and Nowhere Else Fest for being the first to dance with me (some metaphorically, some literally)!

Thank you to my UCC family—and to all my guinea pigs there—for showing me what it means to be lost and found in the body of Christ!

Thank you to Wendy and Mum and Dad: because of you it’s not hard to imagine the kingdom as a loving family.

Thank you to Jamie, Zoë, Kieran, and Jathan. What a gift it is to figure out childlike-adultlikeness with you all!

For the Lord of Every Story: thank you that you didn’t want to do this without us.

Introduction

The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.

—Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowledge

Our concern as followers of Jesus is neither with a religion called Christianity, nor with a culture called Western Civilization, but with a person, Jesus of Nazareth.

—John Stott, In Christ, in Knowing and Doing

Western culture is in a tailspin, and Christian faith is entangled in it. Before we can begin the work of disentangling from Western culture, we first need to identify how we are shaped by it. We have inherited from our Western, Enlightenment, industrial culture certain ingrained ways of being that can be detrimental to our faith. These habits can be summed up in the phrases I think, therefore I am and I do, therefore I am.

First, I think, therefore I am, a phrase coined by René Descartes, sidelines emotions, instinct, nature, mystery, and bodily experience. When faith is mostly based on information, it leads to dryness and doubt. As James K. A. Smith puts it, [The] (Protestant) church still tends to see us as Cartesian minds. While secular liturgies are after our hearts through our bodies, the church thinks it only has to get into our heads.1

Second, I do, therefore I am has not been as clearly articulated as Descartes’s statement above, but Western culture is built on the assumption that human agency is the hope of the world. While this premise seems empowering, it actually leads to oppression, depression, anxiety, and burnout. It also leaves little room for partnership with God. Brennan Manning knows the desperate irony of this gospel of independence:

The . . . church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. . . . We believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps—indeed, we can do it ourselves. Sooner or later we are confronted with the painful truth of our inadequacy and insufficiency. Our security is shattered and our bootstraps are cut. . . . Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat denial of the gospel of grace.2

FIELD GUIDE

How do you see these I think, therefore I am and I do, therefore I am realities at work in your own experience of faith, in your church, and in the church at large? What should we do about it?

If you’re anything like me, your response to this summary of our situation would look something like this: "Oh, this is a problem! We should think of new ways to fix this!" We’re stuck in these habits of thinking and self-sufficiency. I attend many gatherings of Christians where we sit and talk and lament and problem solve. We would say that theology is more than ideas and that the hope of the world is not all up to us. But when we spend all our time thinking and planning, our very habits make a theological statement. How we do things is theological. All of life is a confession of our doctrine. And not all the belief we claim with our habits and postures resonates with the belief we claim with our mouths. If we really believed that there is more to faith than ideas alone and that there are more ways forward than we could find in our own strength, how would we live and be the church?

Both of these habits—I think, therefore I am and I do, therefore I am—look more like Western culture than Christianity but have become foundational postures in the Western church. We do kingdom things in empire ways, which doesn’t look like good news. The way forward cannot be found through our usual approach—new ideas we arrive at on our own. But we have been so steeped in this culture that we’re oblivious to our own perpetuation of the problem, even as we try to troubleshoot the problem. This is going to take more than thinking differently. This is going to take detox. And detox is messy, especially if the thing we need to detox from is our own control.

I propose that a way forward can be found in Jesus’s surprising invitation to the kingdom through childlikeness. Here’s why:

Children identify and engage as whole (thinking, feeling, sensing, embodied, relational) selves.

Children know how to engage without taking on full responsibility.

Unashamed of Humanness

Here’s where the incompatibility of Christianity and Western culture comes to a head: to be a Christian is to be like a child, someone incomplete and open to outside guidance, things that are anathema in the West. As Willem Vanderburg puts it, we begin to understand why the Christian Bible insists on believers becoming like children. . . . Children . . . do not act as if their mental map is complete and reliable; they are open to outside guidance. Adults, on the other hand, choose to live as if their mental map is the final word on everything, and this makes it impossible for them to live any longer in the world with a certain playfulness as children do.3 Western culture tells us we should be complete and independent. It tempts us to believe we can escape our ordinary, human limitations—weakness, sickness, incapacity, ignorance. We swim in water that is toxic to humans. The more we bring that toxic culture into our Christian practices, the more we strip our faith of every way God wants to redeem us as ordinary, limited humans.

FIELD GUIDE

Advertisements give us an interesting insight into our cultural values. Pay attention to the underlying messages of advertisements you see, how they subtly judge every way we feel ordinary human limitation.

As I write, I have just heard that my son’s university is shutting down temporarily in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. And I have just been in conversation with local church leaders about whether we will be holding services this Sunday. In my lifetime I have never heard of a crisis as far-reaching as this one. Not only is it sparking fear about health but it is also frustrating our plans. The couple whose wedding and Italian honeymoon were supposed to happen is out of luck. It is also affecting family businesses (If we’re