Tony Campolo's Son "Comes Out" as an Agnostic

Bart & Tony

Bart Campolo, son of the influential evangelical speaker and author Tony Campolo, has "come out" as an agnostic. Bart was formerly a youth pastor and founder of Mission Year and Walnut Hills Fellowship. He says that his teenage profession of faith was not centered on Jesus Christ. Instead, he was "attracted to the idea of having community and making the world a better place" ("Son of Tony Campolo Comes Out as Agnostic," Christian News Network, Oct. 14, 2014). He says, "All the dogma and the death and resurrection of Jesus stuff was not the attraction." In our book What Is the Emerging Church? we give many other examples of "conversions" that are not biblically based. Perhaps the problem is that Tony Campolo could never give his son an example of a new birth conversion. In Letters to a Young Evangelical, Campolo described his salvation experience as follows: "When I was a boy growing up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia, my mother, a convert to evangelical Christianity from a Catholic Italian immigrant family, hoped I would have one of those dramatic 'born-again' experiences. ... She took me to hear one evangelist after another, praying that I would go to the altar and come away 'converted.' BUT IT NEVER WORKED FOR ME. ... It took me quite some time to realize that entering into a personal relationship with Christ DOES NOT ALWAYS HAPPEN THAT WAY. ... In my case INTIMACY WITH CHRIST WAS DEVELOPED GRADUALLY OVER THE YEARS, primarily through what Catholic mystics call 'centering prayer.' Each morning, as soon as I wake up, I take time--sometimes as much as a half hour--to center myself on Jesus. I say his name over and over again ... Jesus is my mantra, as some would say. ... I learned about this way of having a born-again experience from reading the Catholic mystics, especially The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola" (Letters to a Young Evangelical,2006, pp. 25, 26, 30, 31). There is only one way to have a "born-again experience," and that is the way that individuals experienced it in the Gospels and the book of Acts. We think of the woman at the well (John 4), Zacchaeus (Luke 19), the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8), Paul (Acts 9), Cornelius (Acts 10), Lydia (Acts 16), and the Philippian jailer (Acts 16). The Lord Jesus Christ said that salvation is a birth (John 3:3). That is not a gradual thing that happens throughout one's life; it is an event, a conversion experience! Tony Campolo believes in evolution, rejects the inerrant inspiration of Scripture, and believes that non-Christians might go to heaven. Bart Campolo says that when he told his dad that he is an agnostic last November, Tony replied, "You know me. I am not afraid you're going to hell because the God I believe in doesn't send people to hell for eternity for having the wrong theology. I'm sad because Christianity is my tribe, and I liked having you in my tribe."

(Friday Church News Notes, October 24, 2014, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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