Dear Christians: Every Christian will fall short of his or her lofty ideals. And, yes, this also includes church leaders. At some points along the way, each of us will fail. Sad, but you can’t ignore human nature. Even so, there are important lessons to be learned in every failure. And it would seem that God is all about the lessons. So when your turn comes, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, heed the lessons, change your direction (repent), and move forward. Otherwise, your failure will have been for nothing.
For some, it doesn’t really do much good to tell them “God loves you”. Why? Because a good number of people have looked for evidence of God’s love in what they have experienced, and they haven’t found it. What they have found is a world rife with stupidity and cruelty and deception. So for people like that, we Christians had better start offering them something more than bumper-sticker slogans and quick-fix answers and trite music. And if your current version of Christianity can’t do that, then you might want to start asking why that is.
I stopped paying attention to Evangelical apologetics a long time ago. But these days, I don’t really pay much attention to Catholic apologetics either. It’s not that I’m opposed to apologetics. I just no longer have an appetite for it. The fussy and hyper-focused specializations required for folks who do apologetics tends to make them treat the Bible as if it is a technical manual, and so I find apologetics to be unsatisfying. These days, I prefer narratives and stories and symbols to syllogisms and dissections. I prefer poetry in English to definitions in Greek. I prefer presentations of Christian faith that are expansive enough to leap off the page (or the screen) and pierce my mind and heart and imagination. I guess I’ve come to prefer the kind of faith that produces wonder and longing. None of this surprises me. I’ve always preferred telescopes to microscopes.
Love the sinner, yes. Always. But don’t ever think you’re required to tolerate the sin.
“We can pacify ourselves all we want with comforting notions of our liberation from the superstitions of religion, but as soon as we remove God as the object of our worship, something else will always take his place. And in our case, it has. And just like members of any cult, modern secular non-theistic culture is under the delusion that it doesn’t worship anything because it doesn’t name the thing it worships.” —Brian Holdsworth
The book of Romans is a developed theological treatise. In it, St Paul the Apostle explains that Christians of the New Covenant are not bound by the ritual requirements of the Old Covenant. But St Paul also wrote this: “For we [Christians] are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Eph 2:10).” St James put it this way: “Are you so slow? Do you need to be shown that faith without actions has no value at all (James 2:20)?”
So here’s the point: Christian discipleship isn’t just a matter of believing in Jesus. The authenticity of your Christian discipleship must be demonstrated by what you actually do, not by what you say you believe. And, yes, that’s biblical.
We Americans need to take seriously the lived experiences of our Gen-Z men. We need to stop dismissing them as mere whiners. Our younger men are experiencing real frustrations and inequalities, the feedback they are giving us is important, and we need to start listening to what they are trying to tell us about life in today’s America. And then, together, all of us need to begin to redress the moral and ideological mistakes of the last thirty years. If we still have hope for a saner society, then “All Americans First” should be our new motto.