Tall, tattooed and forthright, can Nadia Bolz-Weber save evangelism?

Andrew Brown



A little over six feet tall, well-muscled and extravagantly tattooed, Nadia Bolz-Weber little resembles the Vicar of Dibley. Also, she recognised the ringtone on my phone, an intricate guitar passage cut from the middle of a 20-minute Grateful Dead improvisation. So of course I liked her. She’s a Lutheran pastor from Denver, Colorado and one of the stars of the younger generation of American evangelicals because she seems to have found a way out of the trenches of the culture wars so she can uphold tradition without being homophobic or nasty.

She has in some respects the classical evangelical salvation story: brought up good, went to the bad, found Jesus once again and turned out – not good, she says, but “so so”. She parodies the hymn Amazing Grace: “It’s not like ‘I once was blind, and now can see’: it’s more like, ‘I once was blind and now I have really bad vision’.” She is an enemy of smugness.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/06/tattooed-nadia-bolz-weber-save-evangelism-christianity