Just Living Our Lives

In Romans 12, we see that Paul is essentially painting a picture of what the Church should look like
in and to the world:
10 Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love, in honor giving preference to one another;
11 not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;
12 rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer;
13 distributing to the needs of the saints, given to hospitality.

Out of the love of Christ, we can minister to one another and touch the world, and I believe we should be passionately defending the unity of the body.  We are bound together by His love, and we can, as verse 12 points out, "rejoice in hope."  We are the people of hope, called to shine the light of Christ into a world of darkness.  As we are mindful of the needs of people around us, we can demonstrate the nature of Jesus flowing through us.

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Paul issues this challenge in Ephesians chapter 4:
1 I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called,
2 with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love,
3 endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling;
5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
6 one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.

Well, at last, the 2016 election is over!!  Until tomorrow, or the next day, when there will perhaps appear another article - an op-ed piece - criticizing evangelicals for their support of Donald Trump for President.  And, of course, their continued support of the President, even amidst personal behavior in the past and personal indiscretion in the future.

There are those that believe that criticizing fellow Christians in secular publications or on social media over political matters is somehow a worthy call.  I would submit that Christians in general just want to live our lives, serving and loving Christ, and to keep political matters in balance.  Of course, Scripture encourages us to pray for our leaders.  We also have the incredible opportunity to vote.  And, we apply a Biblical worldview to current matters in the culture.

But, to write off evangelical Christianity just because of one election or because Christians like and support the policies of the current President and his Administration is short-sighted and does not reflect the robust dynamic of the Church - described in that Bill Gaither song, The Church Triumphant as "alive and well."

I think Jim Garlow and Tony Perkins have presented balanced approaches to how we regard the President in the last few days.  I believe, as it's been said on The Meeting House that we can appreciate the policies without necessarily embracing everything about his personality and behavior. And, no Christian leader that I am aware of, excuses the President's alleged or proven sinful behavior - to contend otherwise is blatant distortion.

The latest high-profile evangelical hit piece came from a former George W. Bush speechwriter who, to my knowledge, is an evangelical himself.   In a Family Research Council commentary, you can read:

Groundhog Day was over in February -- for everyone, apparently, but evangelicals. Every day, we wake up to the same headlines from people like Michael Gerson, whose incredulity over Christians' support of the president is new every morning. With biting predictability, Gerson and company spill an inordinate amount of ink recycling the same shock that people with social values would stand by a man whose policies protect them

Even David French of National Review, a "never Trumper" to the core, takes issue with elements of Gerson's piece, which was published on The Atlantic website.  He describes the piece as one that "attempts to explain":

...how Evangelicals “became an anxious religious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory.” Gerson is Evangelical, he has deep knowledge of Evangelical history, and his essay is compelling on a number of fronts. It suffers, however, from a rather curious omission — especially for an essay that’s explaining Evangelicals to a largely secular and progressive audience.

French is a noted champion of religious liberty, and takes Gerson to task for not explaining why Christians feel like said "anxious religious minority:"

He communicates the reality that Evangelicals feel embattled without providing sufficient explanation for that belief, belittling their concerns as hysterical and self-pitying. The effect is to make Evangelicals appear irrational when, in fact, Evangelicals made their political choice in response to actual, ominous cultural and legal developments that jeopardized their religious liberty and threatened some of their most precious religious and cultural institutions.

But, I take issue with French, who aligns himself with Gerson in criticizing some sort of fawning over Donald Trump.  He writes:

It’s one thing to face a tough choice between voting for a morally corrupt man and staying at home. It’s another thing to join the morally corrupt man’s tribe. It’s another thing entirely to excuse in him behavior that you’ve long condemned in anyone — everyone — else. We’re treated to the utterly appalling, continuing spectacle of watching Christian leaders excuse Trump’s worst characteristics and rationalize away his most obvious sins. Some of the worst even turn Trump’s vices into virtues and revel in his combative, vicious rhetoric.

 Perkins actually addressed that point in his response to the Gerson article:

No one is rationalizing or excusing his failings. But Americans -- evangelicals included -- elected Donald Trump with almost full knowledge of Trump's past. As I've explained numerous times, it came down to him or Hillary Clinton, so Americans gave him a chance despite his past. Now that he's earned their support with his actions as president, it's our job to hold Donald Trump accountable for what he does in office.

The Church is the earthly embodiment of the presence of Christ - it is alive and well, but nothing can bring it down like division.  And, I believe that the pitter-patter of social media and flowery rhetoric in blog posts and op-eds mischaracterizing the viewpoint of Christians about the President certainly threatens our effectiveness.

Last week, I published a blog post about the state of evangelicalism, and the stats were actually quite strong.  Trevin Wax, at The Gospel Coalition site reinforces information about the state of the Church today:

• Numerically, there are more evangelicals in America today than at any time in our history.
• As a percentage of the population, evangelicals shrunk 0.9 percent between 2007 and 2014, which means that the numerical increase wasn’t enough to keep pace with population growth. But that’s hardly a collapse.
• It’s true that the “nones” are on the rise among white people in the West, but globally, Pew Research Forum predicts that “secular” people in 2060 will make up a strikingly smaller percentage of the world’s population than they do today. Eric Kaufmann’s book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? does not portray the future as belonging to the secular elites, but rather the religious grassroots that adhere to some of the strongest forms of religious faith.

He contends that the predictions of the decline of Christianity "lead secular people to false optimism and Christians to false pessimism."  And, Wax continues:

As Christians, we’re not called to be optimists or pessimists. We’re called to be a people of hope. It’s hope, not fear, that should motivate a Christian’s action in the world.

Here’s how I put it in Eschatological Discipleship:

Christian hope has a distinctive shape. Society often reduces hope to a wish, a human longing for a future that may or may not be certain. The Christian sees hope as rooted in God and his promises. When cultural shifts take us by surprise and the obstacle of Enlightenment eschatology seems insurmountable, we may be tempted to replace hope with something else, either fear of the future or nostalgia for the past. Instead, the Christian must ask, “What time is it?”—firmly rejecting the Enlightenment’s false eschatology on the one hand while holding fast to biblical eschatology on the other.

 He writes:

Instead of reacting to negative reports as if we were Chicken Little, we need to look up to the sky, consider this moment in which we are called to be faithful, and ask the piercing question that missionary Lesslie Newbigin put before us:

What is God doing in these tremendous events of our time?

We recognize that our hope is in the Lord, not in politics - again, we participate in matters of policy so that we can be free to live our lives for the glory of God.  But, the focus is always to be to spread the love of Christ. 

When we see the government operating outside the parameters of the Scriptures, we have every right, covered in prayer, to speak out.  Jesus, in His earthly teachings, did not avoid political matters, but we can also see that His prime focus was on the state of the human heart - that should be our focus, and that brings us together in unity.

The Bible calls us to pursue unity with one another - not an homogenization of opinion, but a concentration on those principles that bring us together.  Before you post, before you tweet, before you lash out at fellow believers in a public setting, one must consider the effect on the body of Christ, the church - triumphant - alive and well and poised to make a strong statement to this world that Jesus is risen from the dead!!