​I’m a parent of two small children, therefore I am familiar with Disney’s animated film, Moana.


If you’ve not seen Moana, it is the story of (you guessed it) Moana, the daughter of a village chief named Tui (the film makes a couple of jokes as whether or not this makes her a princess), a Polynesian girl who longs for the open ocean (indeed, her name means “ocean” in Hawaiian). Her beautiful island home is beginning to show signs of decay and so she sets out on her own to find the demigod Maui, who is needed to restore the heart of the goddess Te Fiti, in order to stem the tide of oceanic decay and save her people.


The film plays with a mixture of various versions of Polynesian myths and is meant to offer a story about an actual period in history, when the Polynesian way-finders abruptly returned to oceanic exploration after a 1,000 year period following a sudden cessation of all long-term sailing activity. The film presents a mythological take on the events, saying that the Polynesian peoples remained on their islands for that millennium due to calamity on the high seas that resulted from Maui stealing Te Fiti’s heart—an event which lead to the unintentional rise of monsters and a spreading darkness throughout Oceana.


Moana is also the story of a young woman trying to find herself, making it a coming of age story. As the daughter of the village chief, she is next in line to inherit her father’s throne and the film shows, early on, how she’s being raised to administrate the island’s affairs and to care for her people. But she also harbors an inexplicable call to the ocean and has made numerous attempts during her young life to venture out on her own “beyond the reef” to see what else is beyond the horizon.


Moana’s oceanic longing is assisted by her grandmother, who reveals to her a shocking truth: her people were once voyagers who sailed the open sea and discovered new islands and learned to read the stars and currents and winds.


The tension in the first part of the film is between Moana and her father, Tui, who once harbored a similar ambition as his daughter’s, but one which led to the death of his best friend. He is a man profoundly afraid of the ocean and, in his role as chief and protector, has continued a tradition of staying close to shore.


This central tension is summarized in the lyrics of one of the early songs, as Tui is beginning the process of shaping his daughter for her role as chief and trying to keep her eyes away from the ocean. He sings, “this tradition is our mission.”


And, now, this finally brings us to what I’m really writing about in this piece: tradition.


Moana is a film about tradition, which is something that is discussed a lot, and in a number of ways in our society. In many cases, “tradition” carries a negative connotation, where “traditional” is code for “out-dated.” At the same time, we love tradition—family traditions, social traditions, etc. We have a complicated relationship with the concept, is what I’m trying to say.

Without a doubt, Moana is a meant to be a “progressive” film and has been embraced within feminist circles for its depiction of a female protagonist who is making her own way in the world, despite what the patriarchy (remember, this word implies “father”) expects from her.


The song “How Far I’ll Go” could very easily be understood as a fairly by-the-numbers “go where my heart takes me” example of liberal individualism, with Moana being true to her individual impulse, following the beloved liberal saying “to thine own self be true.”


But the thing about Moana and her story is that she demonstrates something really remarkable for popular Western culture: she is a traditioned person and her impulse to sail on the high seas is not rooted in individualism. Rather, Moana comes to realize that the world she’s been raised in, the world to which her father has expected her to conform, is the outlier—that world is not actually the “tradition” of her people.


The music of Moana makes much of cultural identity—and far less of individual identity. Moana is not an island unto herself. Rather, she comes to understand herself in the broader continuum of her people’s history. “We are descended from voyagers” she sings at the film’s climax, in the truly remarkable song “I Am Moana,” where she wrestles with who she is in the grand narrative of her people.


In the end, Moana helps her people understand who they truly are—which is consistent with the values that her father instilled in her, in looking out for her people. As chief, it is her job to preserve cultural memory and to guide her people into being precisely what they are supposed to be. The millennium of living comfortably on an island was not the truth. The tradition carved out in that idyllic village was a novelty, an innovation, developed as a result of fear. Moana came to know about a tradition that was greater than this and she served to remind her people of this truth.


A similar situation faces us as Christians in America.


We tend to forget that Christianity did not begin in 1776, nor did it begin in Europe. Ours is an Asian faith, born in the political turmoil of the Middle East in the first century—indeed, a faith fostered in many ways in opposition to the West (remember, the Romans represented Western Civilization, the Jews did not).


The faith did not begin with the Reformation, nor did it cease to exist during the High Middle Ages. There is no “dark age” between the Apostles and Luther, despite what many would like to believe. Yes, the Church became corrupted at that time, but when hasn’t The Church dealt with some kind of corruption (just read First Corinthians if you need proof)?


Our survival as a people is dependent on us recovering the grander Christian tradition, not simply the “tradition” that we’ve grown accustomed to.

We were not meant to be maintainers of island life. We were meant for so much more.


Since we’ve been reading The Benedict Option, I’ll make a note about that book here. Rod Dreher offers us a vision, but it’s a vision that doesn’t go far enough. Dreher thinks Christianity exists to maintain Western Civilization. This is the “island tradition.” That tradition is, properly, only a stop along the way.


Maintaining Western Civilization is, to allude to another recent blog post, imperial thinking. It’s wrapping up the gospel in a particular context and using the language of The Kingdom to defend the existence of a specific cultural identity that may not be consistent with what Jesus has freed us for.


We are recovering the grand tradition of The Church. We see the reviving of ancient practices and the embrace of ancient liturgies—even as we adapt those liturgies and their language for new contexts.


Like Moana, we cannot be satisfied with island life. Instead, we need to follow the call to the voyaging life, the life that is more true to our people.


We are to better know the gospel that leads to freedom so that we can carry it to “the uttermost parts of the earth,” not so that we can export Western Civilization. But so that the whole world can know the liberating truth of Jesus’ salvation.


But, here’s the scary part: living into that grander tradition will mean a willingness to let go of what is comfortable and familiar. To give up the surety of island life. It will expect us to encounter “the world” as it is, and to actually live within the world—not apart from it in our own religious enclaves.


At the same time, living in the world is not capitulation to the world. Indeed, the grand tradition of the Christian faith is something that stands unique but is also compelling to the wider world. Our society has seen the failures of the West with our decadence and inequality, with our tendencies toward subjugation and oppression. It’s not all bad, of course. The West is, at its best, intellectually open and innovative and has fostered some of the greatest positive technological and cultural changes. But the Western Church has largely become irrelevant to Western people—and this is because much of the Western Church has embraced the island life tradition of self-maintenance and preservation.


But, again, there’s a greater tradition. A spiritually rich and innovative tradition situated in the person of Jesus Christ and carried through His apostles, a continuing and coherent thing that transcends particular “islands” while taking root where it is planted. This is a tradition defined by the beauty of ritual, eloquence in prayer, in silent meditation, and in exuberance in song. And this tradition is translatable to different contexts and places.


The island will always be there when we need it. However our tradition is not confined to the island. The island is comfortable and secure (for now) because it is familiar. But we are robbing ourselves of much beauty and an awareness of our true Christian selves when we think of ourselves as being made for the island.​



We know where we are
We know who we are, who we are

We set a course to find
A brand new island everywhere we row

We keep our island in our mind
And when it’s time to find home
We know the way

We are explorers reading every sign
We tell the stories of our elders
In a never-ending chain

We know the way


--from “We Know the Way (Reprise)” by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Opetaia Tavita Foa'i

​The article I read posed an interesting question. The primary focus of the article was to address whether places like IKEA or Walmart were contributing to a culture of disposability. In the course of that discussion, the author asked:

“Do you have to build IKEA’s furniture, or do you get to build IKEA’s furniture?”

In other words, is putting together, say, a bookshelf from IKEA an integral piece of the experience of purchasing the bookshelf or is it a chore that is passed along to the customer?

This is a good question and it raises other thoughts about the words “have” and “get.” About obligations and pleasures.

This all comes to mind as I ponder the issue of evangelism.

Two things have helped raise this issue anew for me. The first is the ever-commented fact that church attendance throughout the West is in decline—even among mega-churches and evangelicals, groups that have touted their supposed “growth” as evidence that their vision of the faith resonates better with the culture than the vision of places like The Episcopal Church.

And despite all the think-pieces and commentary about these facts, there is only one simple truth that is going to reverse the tide of church decline:

Christians must be evangelists.

The second thing that has caused this issue to come to my mind is from a quote by Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese theologian who worked as a missionary in Thailand in the 70s. In the newly written epilogue for the 25th anniversary edition of his important book, Water Buffalo Theology, he writes:

“I believe we we can speak forcefully and intelligently about Christian faith only when we are in engaged in the common battle against violence. Christian speech on the uniqueness of Christianity would speak to the world if the world had been impressed by Christian work toward the elimination of violence.”

Koyama writes this while asking why civilizations are so violent—particularly the West, which is shaped by Christianity. It stands to reason that “Christian” civilizations (meaning, those shaped in response to the Christian Church) ought to be the most non-violent and peaceful civilizations on the planet.

Somewhat related to this is a line from a review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option where the reviewer, Michael Baxter of Regis University in Denver, challenges Dreher’s ideas that the Sexual Revolution of the mid-20th century and the expansion of LGBTQ rights in the early 21st evince a “point of no return” from which the Church’s privileged status in America can no longer return (thus opening up an era of either compromise or persecution). He states that he would rewrite Dreher’s timeline to reflect that American Christianity already passed the point of no return by founding a nation on slave labor and the massacres and forced relocation of indigenous peoples (something that is true of practically all moves of Western colonialism).

It’s no secret to you all that I spent a not insignificant amount of my teenage years doing door-to-door evangelism. But what I’ve probably not said before is this: I spent many years unsure of what this “gospel” I was sharing actually was. 


In my head “the gospel” was the “plan of salvation” (either the Romans Road or the “Wordless Book”) and I was more or less told to imagine that Saint Paul and the other apostles were engaged in something quite similar in the first century. But I never saw that in the Bible and always wondered what their “plan of salvation” was. It seemed to me that if “the gospel” was a “plan” then that plan would be plainly laid out somewhere in the Bible, not assembled piecemeal from various references cobbled together.


This was all the more frustrating because the word “gospel” in the New Testament carries an assumed definition. Whenever it’s used, its used in such a way that indicates the reader already knows what the word means. 


It took me a long time, but I finally was able to construct a simple and straightforward explanation of what “the gospel” is all about and it is this:


Thanks to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead we no longer have to try and save ourselves—salvation has already happened—and now we are free to live a life no longer encumbered by the stress and uncertainty of trying to achieve salvation.


See, here’s where things went wrong with all my previous understandings of evangelism: I was told that people have to believe in Jesus, not that they get to believe in Jesus. (See? That IKEA bit in the beginning finally came back around.)


Having to believe in Jesus is something rooted in Imperial thinking. It’s conquest, a “do this or die” approach. And it winds up concerning itself primarily with behavior. This is because it is trying to make imperial citizens.


Getting to believe in Jesus is something else altogether. It is truly liberation. It is not an obligation, but an opportunity.


Obligating someone is hardly good news. And in our current multi-religious landscape all it does it make Jesus an option among other religions, with evangelism becoming a sales-pitch concerned with the superior features over other methods of belief.


But the good news of Jesus is the very thing that satisfies the religious longing of the human race. We’re all interested in being saved, in doing the right thing so that we can find liberation and avoid damnation. The problem is that we keep trying to do that work ourselves and keep failing at it. That Jesus has already done the work of salvation for us completely changes the game and completely re-narrates the human story.


So, the reason why Christian nations have not stamped out violence and why The Church is in decline has much to do with the fact that the message we’ve been proclaiming has been caught up in the wrong kind of medium.


The gospel is not the tool of the Empire. The gospel is the truth, a truth that passes our understandings, and subverts the ways of the world.


We don’t have to believe in Jesus because having to believe in Jesus misses the whole point. Since Jesus is the savior and has effected salvation by virtue of the cross and His tomb that stands empty to this very day, then there is no longer an obligation. Rather, there is the opportunity to live the life we have spent so much time struggling to achieve.


And because of this, we get to believe in Jesus. Because God sent His son into the world to save the world we are given the opportunity to live a liberated life.


This is the message the world wants to hear, indeed, needs to hear. When they hear it, then a new world will begin to come into existence. Not the world of Empires with their obligations, subjugations, and violence. 


Rather, the Kingdom of God.