One of NZ Christian Network’s objectives is to help NZ Christians understand and respond to secularism. The following article is relevant and hopefully might stimulate some local initiatives.
How UK Christians Can Respond to Secularism?
Instead of separating from our local government, churches in my hometown partnered with it. Danny Webster | 19 August, 2013
It is supposedly the place where King Canute stood and futilely ordered the sea to retreat. It’s certainly the place King Henry V set sail from to reach the Battle of Agincourt. The gate through which the troops marched stands in a forgotten corner of the city. It is the place where the Titanic set sail. On that fateful voyage, 549 people from this city lost their lives.
Illustrious history mixed with patches of ignominy. Sacked by the French in the 14th century, walls restored and strengthened, never again breached. Struck by the plague soon after and again, 300 years later. A city defined by fears of invasion as well as the prospect of prosperity brought through its docks. Its proximity to the sea and other countries both a virtue and a threat.
It’s also where I grew up. Several years ago, the leaders of Southampton, on the south coast of England 70 miles out of London, adopted a vision statement: Southampton would be a city that is “good to grow up in and good to grow old in.” A few years before, Eugene Peterson had used similar language to interpret Zechariah’s ancient words: “Old men and old women will come back to Jerusalem, sit on benches on the streets and spin tales, move around safely with their canes—a good city to grow old in. And boys and girls will fill the public parks, laughing and playing—a good city to grow up in.”
Praying on the City Walls
Around the time the City Council was unintentionally borrowing from the Old Testament, I stood on the city walls. Every other Wednesday night at midnight, a small group of us met here to pray. We looked out over the developments rising from land reclaimed from the sea. We looked down to see revellers staggering from bar to bar, and the homeless man shrunk beneath a park bench. On one occasion, a larger group gathered—too many for our regular perch—so we moved in front of the main city gate. There we knelt. And we prayed. We prayed for our families, for our friends, but most of all, for our city.
Five years ago I left Southampton, a place that will in some way always be home. My parents remain; my sister and her family too. My nephew Josiah, born a few weeks ago, entered this world in the same hospital ward I did nearly 30 years ago. It is a city I love, and a city in difficult times. But Southampton is also a city with churches committed to helping it prosper once again.
In 1925, the Methodist Central Hall was built in the center of Southampton. On the scaffolding stretching across the half-finished structure hung a sign calling for workers. But it wasn’t a call for carpenters and masons; it was a call for workers to carry out the work of the church: “Workers wanted with grace, grit, and gumption.” For a food bank, a clothing bank, a poor man’s lawyer, maternity care, Boys’ Brigade, Girls’ Brigade. It is not a new thing for the church to serve the city. It is just something it has on occasion forgot.
If the church really has good news, then it needs to make a difference to those who need it most. And Southampton, like communities across the United Kingdom, is in need. One London Borough produced a graph showing their declining income against the rising cost of adult and child social care. By 2022, they will afford nothing else. That means no libraries, no youth clubs, no pot holes filled, no bins collected. The funding crisis for local government in the UK is very real, urgent, and will get worse before it gets worse
About the time I was praying on the walls of the city, the Council was also reforming the governance of several schools. They invited bids from businesses, universities, and charities to take over running the schools. In a fit of outrageous desire to serve the city, my church, New Community Southampton, threw its hat into the ring. Four schools being merged into two, in two different but similarly deprived parts of the city, contracted out as part of the government’s academies program for 125 years. And they chose us.
It nearly brought the City Council down, I sat above the chamber as it tabled a vote of no confidence in the elected leader, then passed only because of a renegade councillor voting against her party. Billy Kennedy, senior leader of New Community Church, Southampton, signed on the dotted line. By doing so, he took responsibility for the schools for over a century to come. In the years since, the church has built relationships with the local government, and improving exam results have demonstrated credibility. In Southampton, and throughout the UK, local churches are becoming the preferred partners for local government.
Christians Creating Jobs
In the light of the budget cuts faced by the council—£25 million to go this year, and again the next, and the next; 300 jobs going this year alone—the council asked for churches’ help. And that little bit of grammar matters. It was the churches together, not one in competition or isolation from others, from across the city, all committed to seeing Southampton become a place that more reflects the kingdom of God. A place that is good to grow up in, and a place good to grow old in.
Southampton has prospered from its position as a trading port, bringing employment to many. This summer, Ford will close its assembly plant on the edge of the city. In 1910 Ford opened its first UK dealership in the city, with a manufacturing plant following in 1939. For generations the factory has provided work. One employee commented on the closure: “My dad worked here in 1972 for 25 years. I’ve worked here for 25 years. I’m not sure what I’ll do.”
The City Council leader met with the churches who wanted to help address unemployment. They could help with youth unemployment, they were told. They could help with youth clubs, childcare, and the shortfall of families willing to foster and adopt in the city. From across the city, 400 people from churches of every stripe met to hear the challenges and consider what they could do. They prayed and then got practical.
Christian businessmen and women started to ask what they can do to create jobs. There is the scandal of private fostering companies making money out of the lack of families able to provide a home for some of the city’s most vulnerable children. Because the local council cannot find enough families for children in care they pay private companies, at a very inflated rate, to find these places. The city needs 40 more families, and the churches have committed to find them—at last count 39 families from churches in the city have stepped up and applied to become carers. If they make it they’ll save the city £1.2 million by doing away with the need for private foster agencies.
Council budget cuts will mean all the youth workers employed by the city will lose their jobs, and children’s centres are under threat. An audit of churches discovered that between them there were 17 paid youth workers across the city and 37 mother and toddler groups. The church has resources and opportunities to serve both their own members and the communities around them.
Welcomed, Not Excluded
For many years, UK Christians have worried about the tide of secularism. They have worried that their beliefs are being squeezed out of public life. We have also had the call for Christians to run for office, take up positions of influence, and be a bulwark against this tide. And like Canute was mocked for his failure to roll back the waves, they have been judged for not doing enough to protect Christian values. From the sidelines, we have worried that our beliefs are being marginalised.
Southampton is just one example of churches across the UK bucking this trend. Behind the scenes and beyond the glare of newspaper headlines, churches are working for the good of their communities. And when they seek to work with local authorities, they are not turned away because of their beliefs but often welcomed as key partners. When church leaders met with Southampton City Council to discuss the issues facing the city, across the table from them sat the Head of Strategy for children’s services, the Head of Parenting, and the lead councillor, all Christians, along with a couple of others. At the time when the city needs the most help, the church is there to respond. To respond as congregations of believers and respond as individual Christians committed to finding ways to resolve some of the communities’ most intractable problems.
Christians are not excluded, they are welcomed. And when relationships are built, when credibility is established, when fears are dispelled and suspicions counted void, the church is there to serve the people of Southampton. When political tides turn, when programs are cut, when funding dries up, the church is committed to make it a city that is good to grow up in, and good to grow old in.
Danny Webster works for the UK Evangelical Alliance on political issues and helping Christians engage in public life. He tweets @danny_webster and writes on an eclectic range of issues, from relationships and church culture to politics and theology, on his blog, Broken Cameras & Gustav Klimt.
Danny’s essay won the This is our City essay contest run by Christianity Today
I wrote an article in one of the national newspapers a couple of weeks ago in praise of Lucinda Creighton and afterwards received an email that gave me pause for reflection. It was short and not so sweet. My correspondent didn’t like my views, and indeed seemed to like Lucinda’s even less. But what intrigued me was the graphic image at the core of the communication – of a teenage Down Syndrome girl who has been raped. People like Lucinda Creighton and myself, he declared, were standing in the way of her receiving an abortion.
The email didn’t change my mind about abortion, but it put me thinking about the way liberals have managed to win this debate, and will go on to win many more. I was briefly tempted to write back to this man (my correspondent was male) and ask him for the name of the teenage girl he referred to. In the end I decided against this course, feeling that it might give him a perverse kind of encouragement.
But of course there was no teenager with Down Syndrome. The girl had no name because she did not exist. It stuck me then that at least half of the argumentation put forward by the ‘pro-choice’ lobby is similarly lacking in any reality, being purely hypothetical. I can think of no other issue in respect of which the debate could take place in such abstract, dissociated terms. Imagine a debate about motor transport, for example, being conducted in this way: it would take just one or two instances of people being killed by motor vehicles to ensure that mechanically-propelled vehicles were banned for all time.
In the past 30 years, there has been a handful of real-life public controversies in which the issue of abortion was critical in the life of an actual woman – the X and C cases, for example, and more recently the Savita Halappanavar case. And yet, the pro-choice, building on this handful of cases, and augmenting its arguments with a series of creative hypotheses has, in effect, changed Ireland from being a nation inflexibly opposed to abortion to a society on the cusp of giving the nod to one of the most liberal abortion regimes in the world.
The debate of the past nine months confirms that this is going to happen, and there is no point in sticking our heads in the sand. Given the conditions in which these ‘debates’ occur, this is inevitable and cannot be prevented. For one thing, the ‘debates’ are almost invariably hosted by ‘liberal’ journalists, and, for another, the skewed dynamics of the ‘debates’ ensure that these are really dramas in which traditionalist forces are pitted against liberals in a manner than ensures only the liberal argument can win. Hence, it is not so much a question as testing both sides of an argument as dramatising the victory of ‘truth’ over ‘error’. If the present media culture is permitted to continue, abortion will eventually be introduced into Ireland. It is only a matter of time.
But those taking up the other side of the argument must take some responsibility also. Because of its outlook, ideology and tactics, the pro-life side has done much to deliver victory into the hands of its opponents, most notoriously in its promotion of the 1983 constitutional amendment, which had the effect of overriding a perfectly adequate anti-abortion law with a measure that in effect placed the rights of mother and child in diametric opposition, leaving the decision in complex cases to be decided by the courts. Once you redefine the relationship of mother and child outside its natural symbiosis, identifying the two parties as competing entities, the child has a diminishing chance of survival. Hence, that amendment unwittingly delivered the unborn child into a new dispensation of individualised rights, in which the balance of advantage – by virtue of ideology and the media’s capacity to manipulate public sympathies – would most likely be overwhelmingly on the side of the mother. Each successive case has resulted in a further erosion of the legal situation, which has now been formalised in the Protection of Life in Pregnancy Bill.
At the heart of this debate has been the recurring theme that pregnancy is always by definition an imposition on a woman, unless she chooses to define things otherwise.
Once this idea is accepted, abortion on demand becomes merely a matter of time, because the very bedrock of the culture becomes contaminated with a quite different understanding of human nature and purpose than was understood hitherto. Rarely is it pointed out that it is not in the nature of mothers to be opposed to their children, unborn of otherwise. On the contrary, the very idea of motherhood, and indeed fatherhood, is centred on providing for the needs of the child even at the expense of the parent’s personal well-being or even ‘rights’. Most parents, for example, would think nothing of risking their lives to rescue one of their children from a burning motor vehicle. And yet liberals use as a central bulwark of their debating tactics the idea that no woman should ever be expected to incur any risk by virtue of being pregnant.
Life is risk, and most people accept this. The number of people who are unwilling to run such risks for their children are miniscule, and yet the outlook of this tiny notional minority is used to effect the most fundamental changes in our understandings about the very nature and structure of human beings.
Another major failing on the pro-life side has been its attitude to the position of fathers in relation to unborn children. Irish Catholicism is by its nature mother-centred, and has therefore, unbeknownst to itself, been supplying a harmony to the feminist rhetoric emanating from the ‘pro-choice’ side. There is no point banging on, in different contexts, about ‘family values’, if you neglect to emphasis this aspect where it is most vital. The only person I heard alluding to fathers during the recent discussion was the (now former) Fine Gael TD Peter Mathews.
And there is an even more fundamental difficulty in as far as the Catholic contribution to these discussion is concerned. In recent times, Irish Catholicism has been asserting itself in the public domain almost exclusively in the context of battles to prevent the social drift of Irish society from taking a different direction to Catholic moral teaching. The word ‘abortion’ has become almost a synonym for ‘Catholic’, provoking public demonstrations characterised by extremist statements and intense rage. Meanwhile, the insistent and growing pressure in our culture to remove Christian thinking from the mainstream of education and culture attracts virtually no opposition from within the Catholic Church – apart from an occasional and timid resistance which might easily be construed as the straightforward protection of territory.
It is a problem that Catholic contributions to these debates rarely penetrate to the heart of the Christian teaching involved. Thus, the ‘traditional’ argument is easily dismissed as arising from simplistic positions, usually expressed in the form of unadorned and unsubtle rules – for example, that ‘all human life is sacred’, or that ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’. Such is the construction of the debate-drama that the reiteration of such reductionist rules serves merely to confirm that the interest of Christianity in this context is to oppose the impetus of modern society, rather than, for example, to make clear why Christians have come to think as they do. In the kind of public discourse we have arrived at, the telegrammatic expression of such values acquires precisely the texture and context which those on the other side of the argument rejoice in.
The Bible has to be read rationally as I have suggested and in the totality of its teaching, says Tallon. Photo / Getty Images
Originally published on nzherald.com on Wednesday Aug 7, 2013
Strange how some people are so fearful of religion. Nowadays it’s everywhere. A week or so back London officials banned the use of the phrase “in sickness and in health” in civil registry wedding vows as “too religious”.
Then, here, it was prayers in schools – to expunge these we would have to drop the National Anthem. And every day I hear passionate prayers from the most irreligious – all it takes is a finger caught in a door. Now it is the Bible in schools.
Why the fuss? Herald on Sunday columnist Paul Little asserts that religion amounts to “an intellectual transit lounge where the shackles of reason are thrown off and replaced with the loose fitting robes of superstition”. David Hines, “Rationalist”, is stuck in a time warp, still choking on Crusades and Inquisitions. Both are caricatures that fall little short of bigotry.
If rationalism means, as my dictionary states, “reliance on reason as the best guide for belief and action” then I am a Christian rationalist. And so are many of my Christian colleagues and friends. Indeed I would expand “reason” to read “reason and evidence”.
I am an orthodox Christian because of reason and evidence. I see no “shackles” piled up outside the door of my church each Sunday.
Does it not occur to these gentlemen, and so many others like them, that the institution that gave us modern empirical science is actually rather likely to engage with the mind?
Now in fairness I think we should be allowed to inspect Rationalist websites. What does one find? No end of bigotry, abuse and hatred of all things religious.
There is an issue about Crusades and Inquisitions and it’s this: People in the church have always distinguished between the church political and the church pious.
Of course the church political has lost its way from time to time. Look at any regime where accountability has been mislaid. But also time and again the church pious has pulled it back to its roots and reformed its practice. What are those roots? They are the Bible.
The Bible has to be read rationally as I have suggested and in the totality of its teaching. That core teaching lies at the heart of our institutions of democracy, freedom and justice, our understanding of the inviolability of human dignity, our very understanding of “the Western way of life”. Any denial of this is just modern-day medieval book burning.
So why would it not be taught in schools? If we want facts, data, evidence, archaeology – then all that can be provided. It forms part of my daily study.
And here’s the rub. All this data is actually substantial and requires a great deal of study to critically assimilate. I find people are simply unaware of the sheer quantity that is available.
Can we find the teachers who can teach this? That remains a challenge. I’m sure that in practice there are good examples and poor examples and, like all teaching, it requires excellent training.
It would be futile to attempt to remove religious terms from secular discourse. Here are some rather clumsy but illustrative few paragraphs:
There’s a fly in the ointment. It’s a sign of the times that politically correct busybodies, who are a complete law unto themselves, try to force us to set our house in order. Faith is the scapegoat. Religion, we are told, is the root of all evil, a thorn in the flesh for society which is wallowing in the mire of medieval beliefs. We need the patience of Job. How can we hold our peace? The PC powers that be, self-professed salt of the earth, have seen the light and seek to redeem us lost sheep from the howling wilderness of faith and bring us safe and sound back to sterile secularism. At the eleventh hour they hope to rescue us by the skin of our teeth.
Of course each of these phrases were introduced to the English language from the Bible.
Point made? Our historical religion lies doggedly at the heart of all our culture – our language, our institutions, even our science. Seems like there’s plenty to teach in schools.
Dr Jeff Tallon is a physicist specialising in superconductivity.
MEDIA RELEASE: With the amended marriage law coming into effect today, New Zealand Christian Network is asking MPs and others who advocated for the law change to respect the freedom of belief and conscience of those who hold different beliefs on this matter.
National Director Glyn Carpenter said, it would be a pity if those assurances are ignored and people are forced to participate against their consciences with ceremonies they do not agree with or face consequences.
“This affects far more people than just marriage celebrants. I have heard this week from people involved in service industries who are worried they may have to close their businesses if they do not provide services for marriage ceremonies they don’t agree with.
“Freedom of belief and conscience need to be taken very seriously, not just for ordained ministers, but for all people” said Carpenter.
Hoisted on his own petard – that phrase has kept coming to mind as I’ve followed the announcement, explanation and implementation of the so-called “PNG Solution.”
In 2006, then-Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Kevin Rudd wrote an article for The Monthly entitled “Faith in Politics.” It was about the role of churches and individual Christians in politics. His purpose was to critique the “privatised, pietised and politically compliant Christianity” of the televangelists and to challenge “those who would seek today to traduce Christianity by turning it into the political handmaiden of the conservative political establishment.”
In this argument, Rudd nominated the important German theologian, church leader and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the proponent and exemplar of authentically Christian political engagement. “Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I most admire in the history of the twentieth century,” he wrote, and I do not doubt him.
Rudd’s account of Bonhoeffer’s life, thought and ongoing relevance was informed and insightful. It still makes worthwhile reading. In particular, Rudd was able to crystallise a core principle to shape the engagement between Christians and the state – namely, “that Christianity, consistent with Bonhoeffer’s critique in the 30s, must always take the side of the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed.” He went on to show how such a principle would guide Christians’ engagement with some specific political challenges. One example is worth quoting at length:
“Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst. That is why the government’s proposal to excise the Australian mainland from the entire Australian migration zone and to rely almost exclusively on the so-called Pacific Solution should be the cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches. We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust, when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of Germany and the other occupied countries of Europe who sought asylum during the ’30s.”
But now Kevin Rudd is the Prime Minister in a government that has itself excised the Australian mainland from the Australian migration zone and adopted its very own “PNG Solution.” He leads a government whose policy on asylum seekers is inevitably “the cause of great ethical concern to all the Christian churches.”
Even if the so-called PNG Solution “worked” and refugees fleeing for their lives stopped arriving by boat in Australian waters seeking asylum, the “solution” is wrong. It is wrong morally and spiritually. It is wrong because it requires us to mistreat and harm a group of marginalised, vulnerable, oppressed people who have arrived asking us for help.
It also a poor way to treat those who have not yet taken to the boats. There is nothing wrong with wanting to give desperate people in war torn countries a better option than risking ocean voyages in crowded, inadequate vessels – quite the contrary. But the PNG Solution does not do that. It merely tries to remove the last – admittedly bad – option they have left.
In his 2006 essay, Rudd reflected on how Bonhoeffer might have responded to complex contemporary issues such as “militant Islamism,” “international terrorism” and asylum seekers. He wrote, “Bonhoeffer’s voice, speaking to us through the ages, would ask this simple, truth-based question: what is causing this phenomenon? He would also caution against inflammatory rhetoric that seeks to gain political advantage, rather than respond substantively and find a way forward.”
So what is causing this phenomenon? More to the point, why isn’t the political debate about those causes – war, poverty, racism – and how Australia can best involve itself in international efforts to address them?
Conveying the truth over the lies in this political maelstrom has become one of the most complicated challenges for us as Christians. With both major political parties – each led by a practicing Christian – trumpeting policies with language such as “waves of boats”, “flood of migrants,” “orderly migration” and “sovereign borders,” it is difficult to remember that at the heart of this “wicked problem” are the extraordinary lives of very ordinary men, women and children seeking asylum.
The uncomplicated truth – indeed, the unheard truth – is this: Our borders are not under threat. It is not illegal to seek asylum. There is no such thing as an orderly queue. We are not being overrun by asylum seekers on leaky boats. There is no “refugee emergency” or “crisis” in Australia. The reality is around 45 million people worldwide are displaced because of conflict, famine and persecution. This is the truth that Prime Minister Rudd has turned his back on and that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott wilfully disregards in this awful debate. In their desire to secure more votes in the upcoming election, Labor and the Coalition are engaging in what must be one of the hardest and most retributory round of policies we have seen in this country since the White Australia program.
Under Labor’s latest scheme, all asylum seekers arriving by boat will now be processed in offshore detention centres – most likely Nauru and Manus Island. Those whose applications are successful – and we know that just over 90% of those who arrive by boat are confirmed as refugees – will not be resettled in Australia. Instead, they will remain in Papua New Guinea, a nation with entrenched poverty, high levels of violent crime, poor healthcare and education and high unemployment.
Of course, this isn’t just about the utter inadequacy of a developing nation to provide a safe and secure future for a miniscule number of the world’s refugees. This is also about the fundamental abrogation of our commitment to human rights here in Australia. There are around 17,000 asylum seekers and refugees living in poverty in Australian communities who have been denied the right to work. There are a further 10,000 asylum seekers in detention centres, including 1700 children.
In 2006, Kevin Rudd was right about the clear implication of the biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst. He was right to draw lessons from the Good Samaritan to guide our response to the vulnerable stranger. He could have added the command of Jesus to treat others as you would want to be treated. He could have pointed to the Christian conviction that every human being is made in the image of God; that they have a dignity and significance as human beings that commands our respect and care, and that requires that we do not harm them. It requires that we honour them, extend hospitality to them and, indeed, love them. And against all these measures, his PNG Solution is just wrong. Indeed, against Kevin Rudd’s own measures of right and wrong, his PNG Solution is just wrong.
What would Bonhoeffer do about asylum seekers, Mr Rudd? You know as well as I do that it wouldn’t be this.
Andrew Dutney is the President of the National Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia, and teaches Systematic Theology at Flinders University.
The Christian message is in trouble. From a public relations point of view, our brand is hurting. Non-Christians find us to be hypocritical, judgmental, arrogant, and constantly telling other people how to live. Our own young people are leaving the church in surprising numbers. Christian influence in American culture is probably at an all-time low.
For Christians who believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the solution to the poverty, pain, and brokenness in our world, this is very bad news. The question is, what can we do about it?
During my career as a CEO, I have led companies that were on the rise as well as on the decline. There was a time in the early ‘80s when the electronic gaming industry hit a rough patch. Sales were down, and my shareholders wanted to see a turnaround. Times were tough.
In this situation, a leader has two basic options. You can retreat to your “core competencies.” That is, you focus on what you do best, and stick to it while riding out the storm. You batten down the hatches. This is what a bank might do during a market crash, focus on the core business of collecting deposits and making loans and avoid the fancy market speculation that can produce big payoffs as well as losses.
The other strategy is to take some risks, get aggressive, and step into what might be unfamiliar territory. You use the difficult situation to find an edge when the market changes. This is what a technology giant might do when new, nimble startups fundamentally change the nature of the industry.
I believe this is what the church needs to do today.
For the last century, Christians have largely focused on the first strategy. We have sought to clarify our doctrines and purify our congregations. We stuck to the basics of the faith: believe and be baptized, and you’ll go to heaven.
That strategy had its moment and saw its share of successes. When the basic truths of Christianity were being questioned—but Christianity was still widely accepted and followed—it was important to stick to our core beliefs. However, there are times when that strategy is no longer effective.
Today, Christianity is not only questioned but even disliked. The situation is fundamentally changing, and we need to look outward, not inward. It isn’t good enough to ride out the storm if the wind and waves are likely to break the ship to pieces.
Having travelled to dozens of countries, I have seen the church succeed wildly when it takes the gospel message boldly into new arenas, but it requires us to be willing to break out of our ghetto. It means we will have to engage in the messy reality of our world.
I’ve seen Christians earn a fresh hearing for the gospel as they worked alongside Muslims and Buddhists providing a day care for the children of prostitutes. In Africa I’ve seen Christians and Muslims learn to respect each other’s faith as they work to stop the AIDS crisis. I have seen Christians working on behalf of the poor but doing so alongside governments accused of human rights abuses. What I get to see in the arena of international development, the church must also do in the arenas of culture, politics, business, art, science and entertainment.
In each situation, Christians must earn the right to offer the whole gospel—one that moves from belief to action—as the solution to the brokenness and pain in our world.
The fact is, we have to get into the messiness of the world—and get messy ourselves—if we’re going to impact it. Instead of judging those outside the church, we must engage them. We have to risk offending other Christians who want to stick to our “core competencies” and avoid the grey areas in the world.
In 1 Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul advises the church not to associate with immoral people, but he offers this clarification. “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.” I think Paul is saying that while we are to be holy ourselves, we must also live with and love all the swindlers and misfits in our world.
We can no longer bar our doors and close our windows seeking a refuge from the turmoil outside. We can’t expect people to come to us looking for salvation. We have to find new ways, outside the walls of the church, to demonstrate to a hurting world the good news of the gospel. We need to show people a different and authentic faith. And we have to be willing to make mistakes, get dirty, and take risks. The times are changing, and we need a new strategy.
