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Cavey tells a story that resonates in a climate of institutional and specifically religious skepticism and offers a way to be evangelical without the perceived stigma of conservative institutional religion.

Cavey’s book and the church slogan, “the church for people not into church,” epitomize the idealized vision of the church and its themes of radicalism and rebellion. Cavey has on occasion condensed the vision narrative into three words: “relationship, not religion.” When one combines such an approach

with his pacifist position, denominational connections, and civil approach to ecumenical encounter, Cavey has created a Christian community well-tailored to Canadian sensibilities.¹²⁴

In what follows, I present two storylines in this dramatic web, and I organize, arrange and interpret them by drawing from different moments in the life of this congregation, including from their electronic oral tradition. Most teachings will include some reference to one of these two storylines, which I portray as “the revolutionary community” and “the restorationist design”

narratives. Both plot a struggle to overcome the monster of established institutions—and especially religion—and carve space for revolutionary, restored community of what Giddens (1991) calls “pure relationships.”

The first core narrative performance includes Cavey’s hippie costume, including the long hair, T-shirt and jeans, and has been articulated most coherently in two related teaching series entitled

“The Way: Teachings from the Original Hippie from Nazareth” (April 2004, October 2009) and echoes the rhetoric of the hippies and the Jesus People Movement with Sunday teaching titles such as “Make Love, Not War” and “Give Peace a Chance” (employing the image of multi-coloured flowers).

In this series Cavey starts by saying he wants to give the audience a sense for the context of the sixties. He explains:

It was a crazy time, far out time. Tremendous upheaval. Old institutions were being questioned, and radical ideas were being investigated. The nation was at war and divided over whether to fight, but this radical subversive group said maybe freedom and peace are not just goals to be pursued but a way to live. They refused to see war as the answer and instead headed in the other direction, fostering intentional communities of peace, love and togetherness. They rebelled against the war and lots of things acceptable in society like capitalist ideals, rejecting materialism that ensnared so many in it, and with radical simplicity and sharing everything, living communally and saying what is mine is yours; and so they were a counter-cultural movement not only as far as war and peace issues were concerned but also as far as economics and material possessions were concerned, but going so far as to go against the flow by going against some of society’s most cherished institutions, like religion itself.

They were very spiritual people and spiritually questing in a variety of ways, creating all kinds of issues but they shunned organized religion basically with the idea that it had had its day and quite frankly it had failed. It was the great failed experiment of humanity, religion was, and instead they pursued spirituality and faith. They said we are moving on from a time of law to a time of love because all you need is love and love is all you need.

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124 John Ralston Saul (2008) offers one articulation of this character of Canadian culture, positing its origins in aboriginal civilization, especially a “Metis mindset” that embraces difference and social complexity. The official multicultural policy of Canadian society since 1971 has cultivated values of tolerance, diversity, and accommodation.

Cavey’s antipathy for loud right-wing evangelicals and even his recent distancing from his controversial colleague Greg Boyd (a megachurch pastor in Minneapolis with similar Anabaptist leanings) suggest a less polemicized religious vision consonant with Canadian evangelicalism (Reimer 2003).

After some more detail Cavey pulls the rhetorical twist: “Everything I’ve just said is about the 60s.

Not the 1960s.” He then explains that 30 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the first century, the original sixties, his movement, The Way, was calling for love and peace formed in radical community.

Glimpses of a dramatic web become more evident now. Cavey puts layers of stories together, creating a web of overlapping storylines, including the early church, the 1960s, the spiritual but not religious subculture, and as this sermon ends, he plays a clip from The Matrix: Revolutions where the female rebel character Niobe declares regarding the hero Neo, “I believe in him.” Pop culture and a re-mixed tradition reinforce each other to emphasize the all-encompassing imperative of overcoming the monster.

Cavey consistently associates his vision narrative with the rhetoric and symbolism of radicalism and revolution. A teaching series entitled “Revolution” (a word within which they highlight the backwards-spelled word “love”) uses a parody logo of the Che Guevera silhouette with a crown of thorns on his head. The pacifist Cavey delights in the irony of using a symbol of revolutionary violence to promote his rendering of the peace-pursuing community of Jesus. Such iconography also deliberately appeals to the “rebel consumers” who associate Guevara’s image with

“a challenge to authority in any guise, a ‘cry for freedom’ that no longer has any specific meaning in it” (Caistor 2010:xi, 134).

The Jesus figure at the centre of Cavey’s grand narrative is not the meek and mild pastel-coloured portrait of Sunday school; nor is it the muscular evangelical Jesus of the early 20^th century (Putney 2003; Kee 2006); neither is Cavey’s Jesus primarily the king who sits on the throne as the ruler of all creation in conservative theology (N. T. Wright 2012; Keller 2013). First and foremost, Cavey’s Jesus is the prophetic Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, who stands up to teach the crowds a counter-cultural ethic; this Jesus challenges the status quo of violence with a promise of peace, and eschews riches to comfort the poor, and follows a path to suffering rather than personal security. In middle-class urban Toronto culture, Cavey’s faux Guevara/Jesus may carry the intensity and urgency of socialist revolution, but it does so apart from the context of murderous political struggle, apart from the radical sacrifices that such revolutions demand, and apart from the social transformation of the political economy. Comparatively speaking, Cavey’s “revolution” entails convictions that often remain open-ended, nurtures relations that are respectful and tolerant of others, and as a conservative Anabaptist, negates the possibility of political protest or involvement of any kind. In effect, such

“revolutionary” language does not refer to overcoming the current political-economic system to reconstruct a new society but rather to develop a parallel society to the current configuration, centrally based in church community and its intermittent forays into broader society through “compassion”

activities. A Jesus who avoids violence, riches, and institutions remains modestly at the margins, in the tradition of “separation” from the world which has been characteristic of the social ethic of the Radical Reformation. Cavey’s use of the word “revolution,” similar to his use of the word “religion,”

is idiosyncratic and requires the context of his larger oral and theological tradition to be properly understood.

Cavey’s social ethics share with liberation theology a concern for praxis—an emphasis on what participants can do to make a difference in their everyday lives rather than simply interpreting texts. This focus on discipleship is also characteristic of his theological tradition. All his teachings end with practical suggestions for action that most busy professionals could incorporate into their lives. “Compassion” initiatives stretch beyond the private sphere through collective action in concert with other Christian mission agencies: TMH concentrates attention and millions of dollars in finances toward the poor, especially those communities affected by AIDS in southern Africa (through the global BIC, World Vision, and Mennonite Central Committee networks). To be clear, Cavey does not hold to the preferential option for the poor, nor does he seek any structural change in the political economy in Canada or beyond. His notion of the “kingdom of God” is much narrower and much more spiritualistic than the liberation theologians (Gutierrez 1988)—or many emergent church pastors, for that matter (Bielo 2011).

The revolution Cavey describes champions authentic relationship, community, living simply and generously, and while that may involve scaling down one’s purchases and assets it has little to do with structurally transforming society as a whole or pursuing the common good. The Meeting House’s entire “Transform” mission—their five-year plan for ministry begun in 2012—has no strategy for change in the culture or political-economy of Toronto. In traditional Anabaptist fashion, they interpret Jesus’ words “My kingdom is not of this world,” to be rationale for political quietism.¹²⁵ Cavey provides well-circumscribed boundaries for the “revolution”; in one 2008 “Drive Home”

podcast on gender differences, Cavey explains that “the gospel is not a social reform movement but a “heart reform” movement, not transforming society and institutional structures such as patriarchy and slavery but about the transforming freedom from slavery to our sin, selfishness, attitudes.” Cavey does not deny the significance of some social reform movements, but the gospel for him is something spiritual and of transcendent importance. It is ultimately a revolution of the heart; or to borrow the

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125 In a 2012 teaching on same sex marriage given at Woodland Hills megachurch in St. Paul, Minnesota, Cavey explains that the state, as a secular kingdom, will do what it thinks prudent. But Christians, as “visitors or tourists” in this land, are called to a different standard. He sees his church as accidentally located within a nation, dedicated to evangelism and acts of service but not investing energies in organizing rallies, policy change or political leadership.

This is not the traditional evangelicalism of prohibition, but it is typical of Canadian evangelical congregations today (Reimer and Wilkinson 2015).

title from a book from one of Cavey’s favourite thinkers, a “revolution of character” (Willard and Simpson 2005).

5.3 Restorationist Narrative

This leads directly into the second core storyline, which, contrary to American trends towards non-denominationalism, follows the megachurch’s denominational identity—Brethren in Christ (BIC), discussed in more detail in Appendix E.

One of their 2010 promotional lines summarizes this storyline: “The Meeting House is a church trying to push back through 2000 years of religious tradition to learn from the Biblical Jesus.”

Arguing historically that the 16^th century Protestant Reformers were not radical enough in their reforms, Anabaptists like Cavey claim the core of faith rests in discipleship with Jesus and that the first century church is the prototype of Jesus’ original vision: meeting in people’s houses, active in evangelism, and at odds with its surrounding culture. The turning point in the plot—the central conflict or complicating action of this story—is the “fall” of the Christian church in the fourth century, when the Christian movement calcified into an established institution linked with the state. Jesus’

message became obscured in rules, rites and religion and the violence of Christendom—the storyline’s monster—violence on occasion meted out against the Anabaptists in the 16^th century and beyond.¹²⁶ In sum, teaching pacifism, simplicity, and revolutionary community, TMH promotes itself as “urban-dwelling Amish” or “Mennonites with electric guitars.”

Anabaptism, the lesser-known underdog of Protestantism, offers resonance with current counter-cultural trends among the middle class that romanticize the local, authentic, green, and organic.¹²⁷ The Anabaptists were persecuted by the Christian establishment in centuries past, became known in Canadian literature for their controversial pacifist position in war-time through Rudy Wiebe in his 1962 book Peace Shall Destroy Many (Wiebe 2001). More recently they became the object of nostalgia, as one memoir recounts an almost fanatic pilgrimage to the culture of quilts (Bender 1991), another attests to the happiness that lies off the grid (Brende 2009) and more significantly, Harrison Ford brought their plain-dressed but charming lifestyle to the big movie screen (Witness 1985). Of late, Anabaptist life has been popularized not only through tourist attractions such as St. Jacob’s Market, just north of TMH’s Waterloo site, but also through such authors as American Beverly Lewis

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126 Cavey has a chapter in his first book (2007) entitled “Chamber of Horrors” in which he gives an inventory of the great evils of the church, including the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, and constant infighting. He concludes the chapter by saying the reason conservative Christians refrain from killing today is they lack the political power to do so. By identifying with the Anabaptists, Cavey dissociates from this history.

127 For a discussion of the tension between the evangelical and Anabaptist identities of TMH, see Appendix E.