All you need is love

Last updated on: January 24, 2005 at 5:55 pm by Fred Clark

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All you need is love 2005-01-24T17:55:41-05:00 Fred Clark

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John Leland's New York Times Magazine profile of Jay Bakker — "The Punk Christian Son of a Preacher Man" — provides a nice portrait of this son of famous parents.

I met Jay one summer at the Cornerstone Festival. I liked him.

Like most people in America, I already knew part of his story. I knew about the business empire his parents, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, had created, and I hadn't been sorry to see it fall. PTL had amassed extravagant wealth promoting a wretched false gospel of "prosperity," so when it fell apart in scandal and disgrace, I saw the hand of God at work.

Jamie Charles Bakker was 11 when that scandal erupted and his family became fodder for Saturday Night Live sketches and late-night comedians. Leland describes the aftermath in Jay's life:

In the years since, Jay Bakker has been a teenage alcoholic, a skate punk, a Christian pariah, a high-school dropout, a Gap employee and, for a while, a singer in a Social Distortion cover band. He wears this journey on his sleeves, literally: the tattoo on one wrist reads ''Broken''; on the other, ''Outcast.''

Now 29, Jay has re-emerged as what the late Henri Nouwen called a "wounded healer." His preaching and his work with The Revolution bring an urgency to his single-minded message of grace. Leland captures the crux of this message well:

"We're just trying to love people with no agenda," he told the group. …

Where his father punctuated every broadcast with a signature ''God loves you, he really does,'' Bakker offers a similar message in a different language. ''We're not about issues,'' he said. ''We don't get on bandwagons. In the church today, the only two things that matter are abortion and homosexuality.'' He shied away from taking a position on either of these issues. ''I'm not saying something's right, something's wrong,'' he said. ''I don't have a right to judge. God's called us to love people no matter who they are or what they've done. . . . You can't change people. You can for a little while, but eventually they'll rebel or be hurt or realize what's going on. I'm not in that rat race. I'm just in the game to say, 'This is who Jesus is, he loves you for who you are and hopefully you see that in my life and you see the positive things that are coming from it.''' …

Bethra Szumski, 33, a tattoo artist, said she came to Revolution in 2002 with a low opinion of Christians, whom she found judgmental. She told me she believed in God, not in church or religion. But she was drawn to Bakker because he was wrestling with his own problems and because he did not judge her. ''Under my own resources, I'm incredibly ineffective to do anything except self-destruct,'' she said. ''He said salvation wasn't anything I could find on my own. Jesus had atoned for me.'' At Revolution, she said, the teaching never strayed far from this core idea of grace. ''We hear that a lot, it's really repetitive, but I need to hear that every single week.'' …

That core idea of grace seems, in Jay's life and preaching, heavily influenced by the 12-step spirituality of AA/NA. I've never attended an AA meeting. The closest I've come is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (which may be my favorite book on ecclesiology). But it seems to me that this is an approach that treats grace with far more seriousness than it is treated in those communities that pretend perfection is a human option.

Jay seems like a genuine example of the old description of an evangelist: "I'm just a beggar, telling other beggars where I found bread." That's a nice image, but the impression one gets from too many evangelists is that they don't really think of themselves as beggars at all. They're just sure that you are one — a dirty, filthy beggar who needs to become more like them. What's refreshing about Jay is that he seems more certain of his own need for grace than he is of yours. He isn't judging, he's testifying. That's good news.

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