Freedom of Religion
by Thomas Jefferson
The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths, 2 Tim. 4:3,4.
The short answer to the title question of, “So, what's different about Evangelicals?” is “not much,” as it turns out. In bumper sticker language, “Christians are not perfect; just forgiven.” If forgiven, why does it seem to be so difficult for evangelical Christians to forgive others? And why do Evangelicals seem to want everyone else to be perfect while their own lives follow a sloppy discipleship?
Those questions go to the heart of the nature of forgiveness. God does not forgive in order merely to offer an irrevocable pass into Heaven someday. God’s purpose from the beginning of time has been to set aside for His own glory a church unstained and unspotted by the values and politics of an unbelieving world.
That would seem to suggest that God’s focus is on the church rather than on the secular government which has no claim on grace.
If Evangelicals claim an exclusive corner on truth, which is universally agreed that they do, that truth ought to be developing an inner strength that is different and distinct from those who do not profess to be Christian, or it is not truth. Truth that fails to change the inner person is of no value, no matter how many times that person has repented at the altar. Salvation is demonstrated through the life of the church by the way we act and react in society with those who do not claim to be Christian.
Salvation is demonstrated in an unyielding belief in a Sovereign Being, making efforts to reform society through the ballot box irrelevant. Reforming society is God’s business carried out through the faithful witness of those who claim to know the truth. The notion that you can change the inner person by passing a law that outlaws certain behaviors is a rejection of the Christian faith.
And the notion that you can change a nation by forcing it to live by so-called Christian ideals is a rejection of the sovereignty of the God who offers a means of cleaning the outside of the person by first cleaning the inside.
This is not to say that there are not Evangelicals who have found inner peace and who naturally live out their lives acting and reacting in love. There are many. I would guess that perhaps as many as 20% of people who claim to have repeated the Sinner’s Prayer of repentance have actually walked in the steps of self-sacrifice behind their Savior, Jesus Christ.
Some say that I am being too generous, but I like to think that at least 20% of all Evangelicals are committed Christians whose lives are beacons of light. The rest, unfortunately, are either going along in order to get along or are making a racket in the marketplace that threatens to drown out the grace of God.
It comes down to a simple formula. Those making the racket in the public square want to restore in America what they consider to be its former Christian roots. I call that group the Christian Right that has in recent years physically and philosophically merged with the right-wing of the Republican Party. Their approach is hardly distinguishable from any other political movement, and they are not averse to condemning others with biblical pronouncements that are familiar only to those in the Christian ghetto that passes off as church.
It is appropriate to question from their angry tactics and their lack of Christian graces whether these folks are even Christian. If they are, they are Christians at the most immature and childish levels and need to be called out and culled out.
Since, however, it is those making the racket in the marketplace who have pronounced America as having abandoned its Christian roots, we should be suspect that what they are saying is of any value.
The UnChristian Coalition
The Associated Press, on August 22, 2005, reported that the founder of the Christian Coalition of America, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Robertson later clarified it as calling for a covert action to “take out” Chavez. That not having matched with the transcript, he later apologized.
Robertson was reported to have said on “The 700 Club” broadcast that it was the duty of the United States to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.” How that fits into his model of strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is not certain.
Also on August 22, 2005, professing born-again Christian, Eric Rudolph, was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison for bombings at two abortion clinics and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
While not addressing the abortion clinic bombings, he characterized the Olympic bombing as one meant "…to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand." The bombings, which left several dead and over one-hundred injured, were “…part of a guerrilla campaign against abortion, gay rights and the U.S. government.”
This may not touch you where you live, but it is a mindset that is silently endorsed by many in the community of the Christian Right and overtly by others.
Where is Jesus in this? In Jesus Christ, the thin line of legalism was erased between hate and murder; lust and adultery, requiring of all of us that we place the condition of our own hearts above that of the lifestyle of our neighbor.
The call is for a new reformation – not of America, but of the evangelical church in America.
Who Am I?
As a former state legislator and evangelical pastor, my approach is as an insider, from a theological and doctrinal perspective. It is a call for the Church to repent of its Christian atheism and get down to the business of living in the Kingdom of God.
Only then can we be successful in tackling the enormous social problems that have deeply divided our nation.
I began life as the oldest of five children in rural, dairy farm country on the outskirts of Portland, Maine.
My Mom and Dad were working class people, struggling to raise their family as one of the poorer families in the general neighborhood.
But we had our faith not unlike that of many rural families – fundamentalist, legalistic and tentative in the sense that it could be lost at a moment’s notice if we didn’t toe the line or “do something” for God.
I took that “do something” quite seriously, although its application to the Kingdom of God might be in serious doubt. I graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maine in 1962, the first of any family member ever to graduate from college. It was, at that time, one of the more promising professions.
Eastman Kodak Co., after putting me to work on spy satellites, sent me to law school at George Washington University, an experience that looked better from a distance than it did up close, and I gracefully departed both company and school after four years.
In 1994, I graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary with an MA in Theological Studies. I have since completed a doctoral dissertation through Trinity Theological Seminary. I later published that dissertation as Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship: A New Look at the Second Coming of Christ. My most recent book is McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.
I have built small businesses, rescued small businesses, built a few houses and additions, done some real estate development work and am, as I write, a member of the Maine State Legislature.
I am an ordained pastor, American Baptist Churches USA, of a little country church in Manchester, ME, where I try out my ideas before a small group of patient people.
I also am a hunting guide for a well-known Western Maine outfitter.
Some chidingly call me the “Honorable Reverend Doctor,” an irony not lost on this kid from the sticks who once brought home dinner by sneaking up on a pheasant one-hundred yards from the front door.
Edge of Anger
My writing will sometimes display an edge of anger despite my efforts at moderating that anger. Call it frustration, but I take solace in the fact that Jesus was angry as well – angry that all too many professing believers were leaving their brains on the way in and their hearts on the way out of the temple.
If the Kingdom of God is a reality, I want to live, breathe and work within its boundaries in a dynamic relationship with the King and His people. And I am betting that there are a whole lot of other folks who want the same for themselves.
My wife, Barbara, says that people believe what they hear. To some degree, I suppose that is true. She goes even further and suggests that the state of the evangelical church in America is the direct responsibility of its pastors. But the matter of which comes first, the shepherd or the sheep, is critical.
The “itching ears” argument in the Apostle Paul’s letter to his beloved disciple, Timothy, suggests that what comes first is the desire of believers to “wander into myths.” Those weak, accommodating pastors are then hired to turn those myths into self-fulfilling prophecies. Time certainly will tell, but in my experience, there are more myth-tellers than there are truth-tellers. The Gospel of self-sacrifice is just too painful for most of us.
The tradition of Protestant church life, particularly in rural America, is that a community of believers hires a pastor, puts him or her in a box called the parsonage, sits back and evaluates what is said and its impact on church growth. I have yet to hear of any breach of contract suits by pastors who have found themselves on the wrong side of the keeper of the coffee pot. They usually slink off to another assignment.
I hope to provide encouragement for the great majority of Christians out there in the heartland of America for whom drive-through, fast-food Christianity doesn’t work.
I worry about the young man with whom I had a recent conversation about discriminating against groups of people singled out by the church as evil. His response was that, while discrimination is wrong, we can’t condone their behavior. In his worldview, the way to discourage certain behaviors is to single out for discrimination people who engage in such behaviors.
That, as I understand it, is not the way of Jesus and therefore ought not to be the way of the church. Living and ministering in one of the more corrupt times in human history, Christ’s message was hope through repentance to people who sought change from within themselves.
He seemed to be saying that love of God and love of neighbor were impossible without a radical change in who we are and to whom we belong. He made clear that the world of Caesar and the world of God were separate and distinct realms and challenged us to declare ourselves to either but not to both. His purpose in coming was to offer the option of hope that our hearts and our minds might be renewed so that we might truly be enabled to love our neighbor.
Hope for the individual becomes hope for the neighbor. Hope for the neighbor becomes hope for the nation. Hope for the nation becomes hope for the world.
The Christian Right, in its preoccupation with superficial code words and phrases somehow has lost touch with the Gospel and has spawned such painful public displays as those witnessed in the antics of Pat Robertson and Eric Rudolph.
Shabby Witness
The witness that the Christian displays to the world in which he lives, works and plays cannot be put on and off like a suit of clothes. It has to be natural and come from within or it is no witness at all. For witness is nothing more than proof that one’s belief system works.
So long as the evangelical community elevates and supports these TV scions of self-righteousness who are more consumed with other peoples’ sins than with their own, there will be no witness to the life-changing Gospel in which we Christians profess to believe.
The record is a dismal one. The lifestyle fails to live up to the rhetoric of those who have declared themselves to be born-again, or changed from within.
Evangelicals are currently enjoying a divorce rate exactly the same as the non-evangelical community. They are gawking at their TV’s on average six hours a day, filling their minds with mush. They condemn the public school system as being anti-Christian but send their kids there anyway while they pursue the American Dream.
Recent research on pornography within the evangelical Christian church indicates that its addiction tracks equally or in excess of the general public.
Author Michael Horton tells it this way:
Evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general (Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Baker, Grand Rapids, 2005, p. 17).
The proverbial brass ring keeps the Christian lunging for success and distracted from a duty to seek the Kingdom of God and the righteousness of Christ first in their lives.
The Christian cannot fall back on the so-called Sinner’s Prayer for security anymore than he can on Baptism or First Communion or any other act from the past. Unless the Christian life becomes one of flowing out from that confession of faith, it renders the confession empty and meaningless both here and in Eternity.
McChurch is more about eliciting confessions than it is about changing from within. It is more about organization and expansion than it is about the Sermon on the Mount. It is more about America than it is about Christ.
Members of McChurch are quite satisfied with their level of grace, as cheap as it is.
But if you have given up on McChurch, you are in the silent majority of Christians.
You are a member of the Church in Exile.
The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths, 2 Tim. 4:3,4.
The short answer to the title question of, “So, what's different about Evangelicals?” is “not much,” as it turns out. In bumper sticker language, “Christians are not perfect; just forgiven.” If forgiven, why does it seem to be so difficult for evangelical Christians to forgive others? And why do Evangelicals seem to want everyone else to be perfect while their own lives follow a sloppy discipleship?
Those questions go to the heart of the nature of forgiveness. God does not forgive in order merely to offer an irrevocable pass into Heaven someday. God’s purpose from the beginning of time has been to set aside for His own glory a church unstained and unspotted by the values and politics of an unbelieving world.
That would seem to suggest that God’s focus is on the church rather than on the secular government which has no claim on grace.
If Evangelicals claim an exclusive corner on truth, which is universally agreed that they do, that truth ought to be developing an inner strength that is different and distinct from those who do not profess to be Christian, or it is not truth. Truth that fails to change the inner person is of no value, no matter how many times that person has repented at the altar. Salvation is demonstrated through the life of the church by the way we act and react in society with those who do not claim to be Christian.
Salvation is demonstrated in an unyielding belief in a Sovereign Being, making efforts to reform society through the ballot box irrelevant. Reforming society is God’s business carried out through the faithful witness of those who claim to know the truth. The notion that you can change the inner person by passing a law that outlaws certain behaviors is a rejection of the Christian faith.
And the notion that you can change a nation by forcing it to live by so-called Christian ideals is a rejection of the sovereignty of the God who offers a means of cleaning the outside of the person by first cleaning the inside.
This is not to say that there are not Evangelicals who have found inner peace and who naturally live out their lives acting and reacting in love. There are many. I would guess that perhaps as many as 20% of people who claim to have repeated the Sinner’s Prayer of repentance have actually walked in the steps of self-sacrifice behind their Savior, Jesus Christ.
Some say that I am being too generous, but I like to think that at least 20% of all Evangelicals are committed Christians whose lives are beacons of light. The rest, unfortunately, are either going along in order to get along or are making a racket in the marketplace that threatens to drown out the grace of God.
It comes down to a simple formula. Those making the racket in the public square want to restore in America what they consider to be its former Christian roots. I call that group the Christian Right that has in recent years physically and philosophically merged with the right-wing of the Republican Party. Their approach is hardly distinguishable from any other political movement, and they are not averse to condemning others with biblical pronouncements that are familiar only to those in the Christian ghetto that passes off as church.
It is appropriate to question from their angry tactics and their lack of Christian graces whether these folks are even Christian. If they are, they are Christians at the most immature and childish levels and need to be called out and culled out.
Since, however, it is those making the racket in the marketplace who have pronounced America as having abandoned its Christian roots, we should be suspect that what they are saying is of any value.
The UnChristian Coalition
The Associated Press, on August 22, 2005, reported that the founder of the Christian Coalition of America, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Robertson later clarified it as calling for a covert action to “take out” Chavez. That not having matched with the transcript, he later apologized.
Robertson was reported to have said on “The 700 Club” broadcast that it was the duty of the United States to stop Chavez from making Venezuela a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.” How that fits into his model of strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution is not certain.
Also on August 22, 2005, professing born-again Christian, Eric Rudolph, was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in prison for bombings at two abortion clinics and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
While not addressing the abortion clinic bombings, he characterized the Olympic bombing as one meant "…to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand." The bombings, which left several dead and over one-hundred injured, were “…part of a guerrilla campaign against abortion, gay rights and the U.S. government.”
This may not touch you where you live, but it is a mindset that is silently endorsed by many in the community of the Christian Right and overtly by others.
Where is Jesus in this? In Jesus Christ, the thin line of legalism was erased between hate and murder; lust and adultery, requiring of all of us that we place the condition of our own hearts above that of the lifestyle of our neighbor.
The call is for a new reformation – not of America, but of the evangelical church in America.
Who Am I?
As a former state legislator and evangelical pastor, my approach is as an insider, from a theological and doctrinal perspective. It is a call for the Church to repent of its Christian atheism and get down to the business of living in the Kingdom of God.
Only then can we be successful in tackling the enormous social problems that have deeply divided our nation.
I began life as the oldest of five children in rural, dairy farm country on the outskirts of Portland, Maine.
My Mom and Dad were working class people, struggling to raise their family as one of the poorer families in the general neighborhood.
But we had our faith not unlike that of many rural families – fundamentalist, legalistic and tentative in the sense that it could be lost at a moment’s notice if we didn’t toe the line or “do something” for God.
I took that “do something” quite seriously, although its application to the Kingdom of God might be in serious doubt. I graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maine in 1962, the first of any family member ever to graduate from college. It was, at that time, one of the more promising professions.
Eastman Kodak Co., after putting me to work on spy satellites, sent me to law school at George Washington University, an experience that looked better from a distance than it did up close, and I gracefully departed both company and school after four years.
In 1994, I graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary with an MA in Theological Studies. I have since completed a doctoral dissertation through Trinity Theological Seminary. I later published that dissertation as Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship: A New Look at the Second Coming of Christ. My most recent book is McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry.
I have built small businesses, rescued small businesses, built a few houses and additions, done some real estate development work and am, as I write, a member of the Maine State Legislature.
I am an ordained pastor, American Baptist Churches USA, of a little country church in Manchester, ME, where I try out my ideas before a small group of patient people.
I also am a hunting guide for a well-known Western Maine outfitter.
Some chidingly call me the “Honorable Reverend Doctor,” an irony not lost on this kid from the sticks who once brought home dinner by sneaking up on a pheasant one-hundred yards from the front door.
Edge of Anger
My writing will sometimes display an edge of anger despite my efforts at moderating that anger. Call it frustration, but I take solace in the fact that Jesus was angry as well – angry that all too many professing believers were leaving their brains on the way in and their hearts on the way out of the temple.
If the Kingdom of God is a reality, I want to live, breathe and work within its boundaries in a dynamic relationship with the King and His people. And I am betting that there are a whole lot of other folks who want the same for themselves.
My wife, Barbara, says that people believe what they hear. To some degree, I suppose that is true. She goes even further and suggests that the state of the evangelical church in America is the direct responsibility of its pastors. But the matter of which comes first, the shepherd or the sheep, is critical.
The “itching ears” argument in the Apostle Paul’s letter to his beloved disciple, Timothy, suggests that what comes first is the desire of believers to “wander into myths.” Those weak, accommodating pastors are then hired to turn those myths into self-fulfilling prophecies. Time certainly will tell, but in my experience, there are more myth-tellers than there are truth-tellers. The Gospel of self-sacrifice is just too painful for most of us.
The tradition of Protestant church life, particularly in rural America, is that a community of believers hires a pastor, puts him or her in a box called the parsonage, sits back and evaluates what is said and its impact on church growth. I have yet to hear of any breach of contract suits by pastors who have found themselves on the wrong side of the keeper of the coffee pot. They usually slink off to another assignment.
I hope to provide encouragement for the great majority of Christians out there in the heartland of America for whom drive-through, fast-food Christianity doesn’t work.
I worry about the young man with whom I had a recent conversation about discriminating against groups of people singled out by the church as evil. His response was that, while discrimination is wrong, we can’t condone their behavior. In his worldview, the way to discourage certain behaviors is to single out for discrimination people who engage in such behaviors.
That, as I understand it, is not the way of Jesus and therefore ought not to be the way of the church. Living and ministering in one of the more corrupt times in human history, Christ’s message was hope through repentance to people who sought change from within themselves.
He seemed to be saying that love of God and love of neighbor were impossible without a radical change in who we are and to whom we belong. He made clear that the world of Caesar and the world of God were separate and distinct realms and challenged us to declare ourselves to either but not to both. His purpose in coming was to offer the option of hope that our hearts and our minds might be renewed so that we might truly be enabled to love our neighbor.
Hope for the individual becomes hope for the neighbor. Hope for the neighbor becomes hope for the nation. Hope for the nation becomes hope for the world.
The Christian Right, in its preoccupation with superficial code words and phrases somehow has lost touch with the Gospel and has spawned such painful public displays as those witnessed in the antics of Pat Robertson and Eric Rudolph.
Shabby Witness
The witness that the Christian displays to the world in which he lives, works and plays cannot be put on and off like a suit of clothes. It has to be natural and come from within or it is no witness at all. For witness is nothing more than proof that one’s belief system works.
So long as the evangelical community elevates and supports these TV scions of self-righteousness who are more consumed with other peoples’ sins than with their own, there will be no witness to the life-changing Gospel in which we Christians profess to believe.
The record is a dismal one. The lifestyle fails to live up to the rhetoric of those who have declared themselves to be born-again, or changed from within.
Evangelicals are currently enjoying a divorce rate exactly the same as the non-evangelical community. They are gawking at their TV’s on average six hours a day, filling their minds with mush. They condemn the public school system as being anti-Christian but send their kids there anyway while they pursue the American Dream.
Recent research on pornography within the evangelical Christian church indicates that its addiction tracks equally or in excess of the general public.
Author Michael Horton tells it this way:
Evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general (Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Baker, Grand Rapids, 2005, p. 17).
The proverbial brass ring keeps the Christian lunging for success and distracted from a duty to seek the Kingdom of God and the righteousness of Christ first in their lives.
The Christian cannot fall back on the so-called Sinner’s Prayer for security anymore than he can on Baptism or First Communion or any other act from the past. Unless the Christian life becomes one of flowing out from that confession of faith, it renders the confession empty and meaningless both here and in Eternity.
McChurch is more about eliciting confessions than it is about changing from within. It is more about organization and expansion than it is about the Sermon on the Mount. It is more about America than it is about Christ.
Members of McChurch are quite satisfied with their level of grace, as cheap as it is.
But if you have given up on McChurch, you are in the silent majority of Christians.
You are a member of the Church in Exile.
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