Salvation on the Small Screen?. Nadia Bolz-Weber

      Allowing for the possibility that God may be at work in both my community and TBN is not the same as conceding that TBN’s theology and methods are sound. When I realized this, it disturbed me, but I haven’t been able to shake the idea. I wrote once in a prayer, “Dear God, your work in the world is always done by sinners, or else it would never get done; help us to realize this and practice the grace and forgiveness you first gave us.” But when I was talking about sinners in that case, it was just the broken beautiful people like myself and the others in my community, not my theological “other.” Rather than fortifying my theological and ecclesiastical entrenchment, the experience of writing this book has strangely done the opposite. While maintaining that the prosperity gospel, the rapture, and Christian Zionism (all TBN fare) are up there with the selling of indulgences and the existence of purgatory as the stinkiest Christian ideas in history, I still must admit that God’s redeeming work in the world does not happen only when we get all the theology and method right. As much as I hate to admit it, our theology, even when it’s “good” theology (like mine, seriously it’s so good; just ask me) does not save me from myself. One of the unexpected results of this project for me personally is that, surprisingly enough, I have developed a new friendship with an evangelical pastor. If you told me a year ago that this would happen, I’d say it would only be a sign of the end times, but there you go. We do not see eye to eye theologically, and likely we never will, but that’s not the point. What my friend and I get by being in a relationship is an exposure to that which we do not get from our own traditions, and there is a lot missing on both ends. Sometimes the body of Christ is so busy trying to pretend that our particular form of Christianity is the most faithful, or the most biblical, or the most liberating (I include myself here) that we don’t bother taking advantage of each other’s traditions to help fill the inevitable holes in our own.

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      Now might be a good time to explain something. I did this whole thing twice, not by choice but by necessity. On a Friday-Saturday last August I sat in my living room with about twenty-five of my friends (not all at once) and watched twenty-four hours of TBN (all at once) for this book. During the twenty-four hours I recorded the conversations onto my laptop and the twenty-four hours of TBN programming onto a digital video recorder in my cable box. (We actually had to get cable so I could do this project). Nine days later the hard drive on my DVR died. As in gone. Poof. Nothing. If you had come by my house that day you would likely have found me on the floor of my bedroom crying like a spanked child. After Kübler-Rossing my way through the stages of grief, denying the recording was gone, magically thinking maybe it had been erased due to a buildup of unconfessed sin on my part, and pleading with the cable company, my sweet editor suggested maybe I should just do it again. Some of my viewing friends from round one couldn’t do round two, but some new folks could. The new date: November 2, 2007. I would have loved to schedule it sooner, but at the time I was commuting from St. Paul, Minnesota, to my home in Denver and my options were limited.

      Putting together the guest list proved easier than I anticipated; all of the guests from round one whose schedules allowed agreed to come back, God bless ‘em. I filled in the time slots with as random a mix of people as I could muster: Bible scholars, Lutheran pastors, a couple of Jews, a gay Episcopal priest, a lesbian Unitarian, a stand-up comic turned Methodist minister, my non-Christian ex-boyfriend, my evangelical parents, my old preaching professor, my eight-year-old daughter, and three people I had never met until they came to my house to watch some televangelism. Twenty-nine people in all. These are simply people in my life and do not even vaguely represent America, Christianity in general, the TBN audience, the Denver populace, or any other desirable cross-section. They are just my friends (well, except those three I’d never met before, but they’re friends now).

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      The night before I try to think of all the details. I stock the house with snacks and beer, set up the DVR to record for twenty-four hours, talk my parents into providing a back-up recording, set my alarm, set up my computer and microphone, place the guest list next to the computer, recheck that I set my alarm, and then pray. Now all I need is a decent night’s sleep.