I have to admit “nonconformity,” as a negative term, is subject to the same weaknesses as other negatives (eg non-resistance instead of peacemaking, anti-abortion instead of pro-life, prohibition instead of temperance) even if the cause is good and even though it be a scriptural phrase. And it is used online for a number of causes that have little to do with the Bible (eg rock bands thinking they are going against the flow when they flout some convention in society). Movements built on negatives usually do not remain vigorous or on track. In politics, negatives can reap short term alliances and results, (“Anybody but X!” “Drain the swamp!”), but in the end a government without a positive agenda will lose its way.

Prophets can condemn, but regular Christian worship texts which damn the world throughout will not edify for long. Radical holiness advocate Martin Wells Knapp wrote a song in his last year (d 1901) warning sinners they were heading to hell in all its verses.¹ A possible useful tactic, but not something a congregation will often sing. A quick check of a number of older hymnbooks² including two used by the early EMCC, suggests that hymns referring to nonconformity were few, and most of them include only one line (often in the second verse) warning or mentioning “leaving worldly pleasures.” I found none considering worldly thought or culture complexes, as the following quote would suggest should be done.

Michael F Sadler (1819-1895), though a baptismal regenerationist Anglican, correctly characterized Romans 12:2 in his commentary on “And be not conformed to this world….” A Mennonite or a Wesleyan holiness writer could have written this, at least before World War Two:

“This world” comprehended the whole course of the unregenerate society, heathen or Jewish [of the first century], which was not ruled by the Spirit of God. The Christian was not to be fashioned in his life and conversation by this society. He must keep out of it as much as he could. If obliged to mix in it for a time, he must do so, as it were, under protest, for he would be liable to be led into compliances which were idolatrous and sinful…Everything by which the world acted or showed itself—the concourse of men, their assemblies, their amusements— were all deeply tainted with evil. Architecture, painting, statuary, poetry, even philosophy, all were evil, all unregenerate, and must be shunned if men would maintain a consistent profession of Christ.³

I understand the desire to appear positive. A modern forum of Wesleyan holiness theologians showed little interest in developing the notion of “separation,” even though early in their book it is featured in the definition of God’s holiness and the believer’s holiness:

“ ‘Holiness’ is a quintessential attribute of God. Its central meaning is separateness from all that is evil, unclean, ordinary…Biblically speaking, the ultimate goal of a believer’s spiritual life is to be holy—separate from the world, cleansed from sin, and elevated to Christ-likeness in being and action.”⁴ (my emphasis)

Even the moderate Reformed and evangelical Baptist theologian Millard J Erickson defined God’s holiness similarly: “Holiness of God: God’s separation from all else and particularly from all evil.”⁵

Perhaps the Wesleyan writers remembered criticism against holiness churches which said they were cranky and legalistic, and instead wanted to emphasize love and moral uprightness. Still, the omission says something: they wanted to avoid the negative side of nonconformity/ holiness.⁶ We hear a lot about “engagement” these days, and it is a useful term. It sounds active and positive. Speaking for majority Christianity about “holiness,” Oliver Davies observed: “Contemporary Christian engagement with the holy has in general sought to strip away the world-denying resonances of the term.”⁷

There is an ambiguity involved in his word “world.” While “world” can mean the created world (as probably intended in the Davies’ quote), the New Testament often uses “world” (κοσμοϛ) for a God-denying system. “Contemporary Christian engagement” thus is discarding a biblical insight about holiness if it neglects the negative side. Paul commended the Thessalonians for turning away (from idols) as well as turning toward God (I Thessalonians 1:9). C S Lewis criticized a major aspect of modern culture in similar terms in his 1942 sermon, “The Weight of Glory”: “And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.”⁸

In the 20^th century, missiologists discussed the Christian attitude to culture and worldviews, which had been going on by theologians for over a century.⁹ Whereas the non-Christian anthropologist or sociologist attempts to describe societies and cultures with neutral or non-evaluative language, the Christian recognized, before post-modernism came to the fore, that all cultures reflect the image of God (including goodness), all cultures reflect the disorder and rebellion of humanity (sinfulness), maybe even the demonic, and no descriptions are fully neutral, but reflect the worldview of the scientist. (This is true for historians as well.) Cultural change of a sort is happening all the time, little by little, everywhere. Christian missions have been smugly criticized for interfering with indigenous cultures (even to the level of “cultural genocide”), but our definition of culture, and even more so the instructions of Jesus have constrained us to discriminate. “What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight,” is a saying of the Lord, Luke 16:15. “The world” hated Jesus and hates his followers, John 15:18-19.

Some elements (say, alcohol use) of a culture may be worse or better than other cultures’ expression of that element. Christians attempt to appreciate world cultures, but we cannot let the world set the agenda; Jesus does, Matthew 18:18-20. Unhappy attempts to form Christian cultures embarrass the history of missions and church history, but “the world,” as it was in pagan Roman and Greek times, had to be corrected by the gospel, just as it must in Ontario or Patagonia today. And the gospel keeps correcting the Church! No culture, whether Chinese, Russian, Congolese, Samoan or First Nations Northwest Pacific, exists pristine, separate, or so holy or integrated or wise that it cannot be transformed for the better. Transformed, sometimes by members of the culture nonconforming even to its entrenched and honoured patterns.

In the early 21^st century, Christians, EMCC people as well, are tempted to conform to the pressure to be only positive. Leaders try to move believers to the same discernment of the world’s ways as “do not conform,” by commending a “Christian lifestyle,”¹⁰ or a “simple lifestyle.” These terms can be robust if taught well. Ronald J Sider (d 2022), a Brethren in Christ advocate for the poor from Ontario, though his career was in the United States,¹¹ promoted the “simple life-style” around 1980 as one strategy for Christian obedience. The Lausanne Covenant language (1977) of living simply to free money for “relief and evangelism” was apparently suggested by him. It seems he continued to use this phrase among the numerous initiatives in his life,¹² and I suspect the biblical instruction has been behind many of them.¹³ A critic of his famous Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger in Christianity Today claimed the book prevented real engagement with the evils of the world.¹⁴ In fact, I and others had learned from the book all the things the critic said we could not. I said as much to Ron Sider in the one moment I ever met him, probably at the Canadian Simple Lifestyle Consultation. He urged me to write Christianity Today to say so. I did not, thinking why would an American magazine’s readers listen to a Canadian? I should have taken his suggestion, even though I still think his American Christian critics would not listen.

Christian holiness is very much needed in the world. There are God-resisting world systems that still squeeze believers to conform, to participate in whatever causes wars, disputes, greedy control of God’s gifts, pride and proud behaviours, sexual abuse, pollution and disfigurement of the image of God in our neighbours. We gain against the enemy in the power of the Holy Spirit by not conforming, by submitting ourselves, body definitely included, to the Lord Jesus Christ, for our transformation.

Banner: Possibly an apparently snarling camel reminds us that, oppositely, Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. Love is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered … Courtesy: Fuller family. Camel in Nigeria, November 2013.

1Martin Wells Knapp, “The Judgment Day,” #444 in Spiritual Songs and Hymns (Nappanee, IN: E. V. Publishing House, (1935), chorus: “To their awful doom eternal, at the final judgment day!” My copy was used in the Hespeler MBiC, and given to the author in 1988 in Elk Lake, ON, by Mrs Ella (Tremaine) Chester, who grew up in Hespeler, ON, (now part of Cambridge, ON).

2I have gone through five so far: Henry S Hallman and Wilford Gingerich, ed, Songs of Glad Tidings 11th ed (Kitchener, ON: For the Editor, 1934) (Mennonite Brethren in Christ); Spiritual Songs and Hymns (Nappanee, IN: E V Publishing House, 1935) (Brethren in Christ); The United Brethren Hymnal rev ed (Huntington, IN: United Brethren Publishing Establishment, 1952) (United Brethren in Christ); The Keswick Hymn-Book (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1936/38); The Mennonite Hymnal (Scottdale, PA/ Newton, KS: Herald Press/ Faith and Life Press, 1969) (Mennonite Church/ Mennonite General Conference).

3Michael Ferrebee Sadler, The Epistle to the Romans, with Notes Critical and Practical 2^nd ed (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889) p 267-268.

4Barry Callen, “The Context: Past and Present,” in Kevin W Mannoia and Donald Thorsen, ed, The Holiness Manifesto (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B Eerdmans, 2008), p 8, 9.

5Millard J Erickson, Concise Dictionary of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1986) p 75.

6Paul Hiebert (1934-2007) in Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 2008) had little to say about rejecting idolatry, old ways, or “separation from the world,” though he served in the Mennonite Brethren, preferring to talk of transformation (also mentioned in Romans 12:2). To him, “turning to” Jesus had a start and was continuous. He did not see complete breaks with older worldviews happening in the Christian communities he studied as an anthropologist, just stages of change.

7Oliver Davies, “Holiness,” in Adrian Hastings, ed, The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000) p 303.

8Quoted in Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) p 189.

9Can’t go into this now. Start out with James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1893); H Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951); John H Yoder, The Politics of Jesus 2^nd ed (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B Eerdmans, 1993); Donald A Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B Eerdmans, 2008) and numerous works on culture from an anthropological stance, especially the works of Paul G Hiebert, such as Anthropological Insights for Missionaries (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1985) and Transforming Worldviews (2008), but note p 326. He thinks people who try to withdraw from “the world” still take it with them. In other words, he would not expect successful separation from the world or perfect love to occur in this life, but would expect growth toward those goals.

10See footnotes 1 and 2 in EMCC History Blog: “Nonconformity to the World: Part 3, Mennonite Brethren in Christ experience.”

11Ronald J Sider, I am Not a Social Activist: Making Jesus the Agenda (Scottdale, PA/ Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2008).

12It looks like he did: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/july/ron-sider-died-evangelicals-for-social-action.html

13Ronald J Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger 6^th ed (W Publishing Group, 2015, originally Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977). He edited Living More Simply (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1980) and Lifestyle in the Eighties: An Evangelical Commitment (Westminster Press, 1982).

14I forget who it was but two critics were Gary North and David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators, 3^rd ed, (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985). They associated Anabaptism with heresy, p 321.