by | Sep 25, 2024 | Uncategorized
If you’re in the midst of launching a child into adulthood, preparing them to keep the faith as they grow up, you’ve probably already begun to train them in apologetics.
It might not be formal apologetics, though that’s what comes to mind for me: debates, arguments, refuting other people’s beliefs point by point. That kind of apologetics can be helpful for people legitimately wrestling with faith and Scripture. For teenagers especially, it can be a wonderful tool—evidence that Christianity is not illogical, that there are answers to their questions.
But as my own children become adults, I’m also realizing apologetics has its limits. Some doctrines, like the Trinity, are beyond our capacity for total logical understanding. Some apologists work without humility, and that is an ugly thing. And not all challenges in the life of faith involve apologetics’ target, the intellect, for faith is a gift from God that pierces the heart.
More than these limitations, though, I find myself reconsidering the assumption that our proper task as parents is to teach young adults to “defend their faith.”
It’s an interesting turn of phrase—“defend the faith” or “defend your faith”—and not one found in the Bible. (Jude 1:3-4 speaking of “contend[ing] for the faith,” but the interest there is preserving orthodoxy within the church.) The closely related term “defender of the faith” doesn’t come from Jesus or Paul but Reformation history. It’s a title Pope Leo X gave Britain’s king Henry VIII for his writing against the Reformer Martin Luther (and it remains a title of British monarchs today). In that twisted and bloody time, the phrase very much meant defense in a legal and military sense. Henry would wield swords alongside arguments.
Instead of defending our faith, the Bible speaks of defending our hope. This comes from 1 Peter 3:13–17 (CSV):
Who then will harm you if you are devoted to what is good? But even if you should suffer for righteousness, you are blessed. Do not fear them or be intimidated, but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. Yet do this with gentleness and reverence, keeping a clear conscience, so that when you are accused, those who disparage your good conduct in Christ will be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil.
The word translated here as “give a defense” (or, in other translations, “an answer”) is apologia in Greek, and it’s where we get our word apologetics. But the passage presents a rather different scenario than the one we tend to teach young people as we train and encourage them to defend their faith.
Peter teaches that Christians don’t need to be afraid, nor do we need to go looking for arguments. On the contrary, he envisions other people noticing our hope and asking us about it, then us giving an explanation in gentleness and reverence. The best apologia to teach young Christians, in other words, is to give them a solid hope in Christ the Lord.
To do this, we must first address our own fears and lack of hope. After launching two of our six kids into adulthood, I’ve been astounded at the things other adult Christians have said to my children as they left our house to pursue the vocations God had prepared for them. There’s a consistent theme of fear and discouragement: If you go to that college or move to this place or aren’t super careful, you’ll lose your faith.
These statements come from a place of genuine and justified concern. Many young Christians go to college and never return to church. We’ve all heard of a young person who’s moved out of the house, begun dating an unbeliever, and rejected their faith to live a different life. We know the data. We know the stories. And we are filled with fear. So we impress that fear on our children, urging them to draw their apologetic swords.
But however good the intent, these warnings communicated something more to my kids: Have fear, not hope. Your faith is delicate. It’s fragile. It’s glass. At any moment, it could shatter forever.
Talking with my kids, I found I had to push back on that implicit teaching—because it pushed them toward a false and lesser understanding of God, his mission for each of them, and his role in preserving their faith. “God will never leave you or forsake you,” I told them (Deut. 31:6). “There’s nothing you could ever do that would make God stop loving you” (Psalm 139; Rom. 8:35–39).
And my husband and I talked about our continued role in discipling our children, even in adulthood. “No matter what happens or what you’ve done, you can always come home,” we said. “Going through dark seasons and enduring suffering in various ways is normal. Remember you are never alone. Pray. And reach out to us, and we’ll pray. We’ve all been there.”
If my children develop a passion for apologetics, wonderful. But what the Bible calls all Christians to do is to defend our hope. I tell my kids they don’t have to enter every argument they encounter. Not all questions are asked in good faith, and some of us don’t think on our feet as well as others. But when people ask us about our hope in Christ, that is the surest thing we know, and we can be ready with an answer. We can be ready to explain our hope—our confidence that Jesus will never leave us or forsake us, our trust that we can’t be separated from his love.
I don’t ignore the data about loss of faith in young adulthood, but instead of speaking fear and doubt to our kids as they leave home, we equip them by speaking hope and assurance over them. I want to speak that same hope and assurance to other parents and Christians in youth ministries too.
Don’t be afraid. Your children’s salvation does not rest in their own hands; it rests in the hands of Jesus. It always has, and it always will. Their hope—and ours—is not in having the most articulate answer or the government leaders we want, getting into the right school, having our professors’ or bosses’ approval, or leading a suffering-free, easy life.
Our hope comes from Christ, and Christ alone. Our hope is not in the strength of our faith but the object of our faith. There is nothing more certain we can give our kids.
Gretchen Ronnevik is the author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted and cohost of the Freely Given podcast.
The post Emptying the Nest in Hope, not Fear appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 25, 2024 | Uncategorized
I love the church, but I can’t say I always understand or even like it. And in my more than half a century inside it, I can’t remember a time when the American church seemed less clear about its identity and purpose.
The Lord decreed love as our signature characteristic (John 13:35), yet Christians have earned a reputation for hatefulness and even raunchiness. From our epidemic of leadership failures to the steady hemorrhaging of the disillusioned, it feels as if we’ve lost our moorings.
“It is an age of very great spiritual derangement and moral dissolution,” the Scottish preacher and theologian P. T. Forsyth shrewdly observed in his time. “The peril of the hour,” he believed in his time, was “a religious subjectiveness which is gliding down into a religious decadence.”
Forsyth wrote these words over a century ago, just before World War I, when modernist theologians were severely eroding trust in the Bible and orthodox traditionalists hunkered down in rigid defensiveness to stem the tide. Like today, the church of Forsyth’s time found itself in crisis and severely divided—and he felt a burden to help it recenter and regain its bearings.
“No religion can survive which does not know where it is,” Forsyth mused. “And current religion does not know where it is, and it hates to be made to ask.”
I first picked up his slim volume The Cruciality of the Cross back in seminary. And for more than two decades of pastoring, I’ve leaned heavily on Forsyth’s teaching to navigate a path across the treacherous terrain of cultural change, political division, and the ethical complexities of our technological world.
The core of his message to a beleaguered church is straightforward: Center on the Cross of Christ. That’s it. Forsyth’s writing unapologetically calls us back to our source of grace and meaning. Like the apostle Paul, he determined to know nothing but “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).
But let’s all be honest: That’s not our natural go-to for addressing our most pressing concerns. Placing the Cross at the center of our faith and daily lives might sound either (1) incredibly basic and too obvious to highlight or (2) narrow and imbalanced, elevating the death of Christ over his life. And it certainly doesn’t strike us as the cure for what ails the church today.
Yet Forsyth was insistent. “Christ’s supreme eternal work is in His cross,” he wrote, “which contains, along with the power, the principle which solves the problem of every age.”
Forsyth was neither simplistic nor myopic in calling us back to Calvary. Far from merely tacking “Jesus died for our sins” to the end of every sermon, he went much deeper into the everyday implications of the Cross, which alone anchors us to God’s action as opposed to our own.
“It is the Gospel of the achieved more than the call to achieve,” he declared. “It bids us not to make, so much as to rest in something we find made.”
“To rest in something we find made” requires us to stop trying to manufacture it for ourselves. Truly nothing else has the capacity to unburden our spirits more than the thoroughness and finality of Jesus’ words on the cross: “It is finished.”
Yet how easily we relegate Christ’s death and resurrection to the margins, even in our efforts to serve him. Too often, we treat the Cross as merely the starting point for our faith journey—but then we take over the reins, striving for a sense of control over our spiritual growth and seeing our efforts as a supplement to Christ’s work.
“The Kingdom as a reality exists outside of us since Christ finished His work of establishing it,” Forsyth observed. “And it makes a great difference in the agents of the Kingdom whether they think they are making it or bringing in what is already made.”
It is easy to lose sight of that distinction. Back in seminary, one of my theology professors asked everyone in the class why we were there. One aspiring pastor replied, “I just want to breathe a little life into the Word.” As if the God-breathed text needed his CPR to save it! That student articulated blatantly what we all do in more subtle ways whenever we overestimate the value of our contribution—inserting our endeavors in a place that belongs to God alone.
We may accept the Cross as the crucial center of the Christian faith in theory, but what does that look like on a practical level? How exactly does it change the way we approach the very real challenges facing the church today and keep us from the “religious decadence” Forsyth decried?
First, it calls us to read and interpret Scripture through a relentlessly cruciform lens. Since Jesus was the “Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8), the gospel itself existed prior to the Bible being written—it was action before it became words. That eternal truth enabled Jesus to show the disciples on the road to Emmaus how the entire Old Testament pointed specifically to him (Luke 24:27).
If the Cross came first in a “superhistoric” sense (as Forsyth would phrase it), then Scripture itself serves that gospel. The written word derives its true authority and unity through the way it bears witness to Christ and his work. Forsyth pointed out that “The Bible is not a compendium of facts, historic or theological, but the channel of redeeming grace.”
This principle serves as a litmus test for our own interpretation of Scripture. No matter the text, I try to begin my study with the question, What does this passage show me of redemption? How does this take me to the Cross? Instead of merely hunting for a life application or broad spiritual theme of a passage, I seek to be attentive to the very presence of Christ.
Some texts remain stubbornly opaque, but more often than not, I find myself surprised by fresh encounters with the living Christ that leap off the page and show me anew the vast dimensions of God’s love. Without fail, this posture—approaching Scripture with the Cross in mind—drastically alters my assumptions about a text. And it filters out many of my competing ideologies that might otherwise hijack the Scripture for their own ends.
Author and pastor Rich Villodas recently summed up this idea well: “Unless we read Scripture through the lens of the crucified Christ, with others, our exegesis is dangerously subject to personal preferences and political allegiances.”
A Cross-centered theology also recasts the way we think about the deep divides polarizing our culture and churches today. As Billy Graham once stated, “the ground is level at the foot of the cross” because it puts everyone on equal standing in our shared need for redemption.
There are nuances in every debate raging today, requiring us to hold certain truths in tension, and we find no better space for doing that than the Cross. Think of the paradoxes of our faith that sit unflinchingly side by side there: The giver of life facing death. Perfection becoming sin. Exclusive holiness offering inclusive love. The judge personally bearing all judgment.
The more attuned I am to the enormity of Christ’s mercy toward me, the more humbled I am and the more room I allow others to receive the same mercy. The Cross of Calvary demands a continual mindset of reconciliation and readiness to forgive as Christ has forgiven us (Eph. 4:32).
What’s more, as we grow in our appreciation of the Cross, it changes the way we experience and make sense of our own suffering. Reflecting on Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Forsyth noted, “It is a greater thing to pray for pain’s conversion than for its removal. It is more of [a] grace to pray that God would make a sacrament of it.”
When I was walking through my own deep valley of mental and emotional anguish, I first came across those words, and they became a balm for my weary heart and mind. Rather than simply asking God to eradicate my pain (as I had been doing), I began to view the pain itself as a vehicle for meeting the one who understands my suffering better than anyone.
The crucified Jesus personifies the love and character of God in ways we don’t find anywhere else. His death is a rugged, shocking display of his glory. In his physical body on the cross, the entire spectrum of human experience is given voice.
As theologian Jürgen Moltmann, author of The Crucified God, once wrote, “It can be summed up by saying that suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds. … Therefore the suffering of abandonment is overcome by the suffering of love, which is not afraid of what is sick and ugly, but accepts it and takes it to itself in order to heal it.”
Christ’s death says all the horrors of this broken world deeply matter to God. We matter to God, to an infinite degree. And isn’t that what everyone longs to know for certain—that we matter?
At the Cross, all our uncertainties and hurts, our questions and feelings, our hatred and judgment, our longings and fears—all of it is converted into prayer. All of it. The Cross is where Christ uplifts humanity’s aching plea, “Why have you forsaken me?” and prays it on our behalf until it gives way to the complete trust of his final words, “Into your hands I commit my Spirit.”
Forsyth understood that the death and resurrection of Jesus didn’t just address human sin but also all the suffering produced by the Fall. It’s this prophetic insight that has repeatedly drawn me to him as an author, and through him to Christ himself.
One of Forsyth’s biographies bears the Latin title Per Crucem Ad Lucem—through the Cross to the light. That was his endless pursuit. “We must clear and lighten the Gospel for action,” he wrote. “We must scrape off the barnacles that reduce its speed.”
More than a century later, P. T. Forsyth’s work continues to do just that. And if we let them, his words provide a trustworthy compass for a church eager to refocus on its true north.
J. D. Peabody is the founding pastor of New Day Church in Federal Way, Washington. He is the author of Perfectly Suited: The Armor of God for the Anxious Mind.
The post The Cross in an Age of ‘Spiritual Derangement’ appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
This story will be updated.
Steve Oh can trace his family’s Christian heritage back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 1800s.
“My family has been blessed by the global missionary movement,” said Oh, a Korean Australian pastor who leads Sydney Living Hope Community Church.
This week, Oh is one of 5,200 Christians from more than 200 countries in Incheon, South Korea, for the fourth Lausanne Congress. The gathering comes as a “full circle moment,” commemorating both the personal and corporate fruit of global evangelism in the past half-century.
Fifty years after Billy Graham and John Stott made history by convening 2,700 evangelicals from 150 countries, the movement’s leaders believe this collaboration can go even further.
“The four most dangerous words in the global church today are, ‘I don’t need you,’” said Lausanne Movement global executive director and CEO Michael Oh (no relation to Steve Oh). A fellow member of the Korean diaspora, Oh wore a traditional hanbok during his opening remarks on Sunday.
In the 15 years since Lausanne convened its last Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, the movement has sought to broaden whom it includes as essential partners in the Great Commission. It organized events for leaders under age 40 in Jakarta in 2016, and for “marketplace” Christians, or those not working in professional ministry, in Manila in 2019.
Since its inaugural event in 1974, Lausanne has deepened cooperation among evangelicals around the world, say the leaders CT interviewed on site during Lausanne 4. As the movement pays attention to developing younger leaders and extending its networks, it has released a massive State of the Great Commission report and the Seoul Statement, two documents reaffirming the movement’s commitment to serving as a thought leader on evangelism and theology.
In the leadup to the event, Lausanne began to challenge local churches to adopt a posture of cooperation.
Many Korean congregations have historically struggled to get along; in 2014, the World Evangelical Alliance canceled its general assembly scheduled for the South Korean capital because of divisions among the country’s evangelicals.
Early on in the planning process for this year’s Lausanne Congress, Onnuri Church, one of the largest Presbyterian congregations in Korea, brought more than 430 churches together to pray. Around 200 congregations began to preach collectively through the book of Acts. Many raised funds to cover conference costs. Around 4,000 local Christians are currently praying for the event.
Forging trust among Korean Christian leaders hasn’t been easy, according to Yoo Kisung, a local organizer who leads Good Shepherd Church in Seoul. But he recognizes the preparation as an opportunity for reflection and for inspiring the next generation: “Young people who worked with Lausanne are the future leaders in the Korean church.”
Lausanne’s leaders who traveled for the event, such as Menchit Wong, a board member from the Philippines, also emphasized the generational impact.
“Now that I am much, much senior, my task is to see younger and younger leaders take their place in bringing children to Jesus,” she said.
The Seoul Congress features an all-time high percentage of female delegates (29%) and of delegates under 40 (16%). More than 1,450 attendees work outside of full-time ministry. On Tuesday, it held a dinner for younger leaders who packed a massive convention center ballroom, and later this week Lausanne will have a commissioning ceremony for its marketplace attendees.
Spending the week with this diverse and disparate population reminds US-based Ghanaian Casely B. Essamuah, secretary of the Global Christian Forum, that “the church is greater and bigger and larger than any of our denominations or any of our enclaves.”
“When you come here, you cannot but be inspired to see what God is doing around the world,” he said. “Your heart is also broken by the persecution that others are going through, and it informs your prayer life. You see people and are able to network with them for the greater good of the global church.”
Hearing Christians from around the world tell firsthand stories of persecution and of God’s grace is a one-of-a-kind experience, says Christian Maureira, director and professor at Martin Bucer Seminary in Chile. “Hearing what God is doing in Pakistan, Malaysia, Europe, in the Muslim world … it’s very impactful.”
For Claudia Charlot, dean of business at Université Emmaüs in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, the conference has enabled her to connect with Asian missionaries from the One Mission Society, the organization that founded the school she works at.
“I never would have met those folks without Lausanne,” she said.
Each of Lausanne’s previous congresses has released a landmark evangelical document: the Lausanne Covenant (1974), the Manila Manifesto (1989), and the Cape Town Commitment (2010). Keeping with the alliterative trend of the two most recent publications, Lausanne announced on Sunday that it had released the Seoul Statement, a seven-part treatise that states theological positions on the gospel, the Bible, the church, the “human person,” discipleship, the “family of nations,” and technology.
“We were not trying to create a fourth document which would then replace or make obsolete those earlier three documents,” said David Bennett, Lausanne’s global associate director.
The statement—a 97-point, 13,000-word text—was issued on Sunday. Its release surprised some delegates, who anticipated the chance to offer input, since previous congresses had collectively hammered out statements over the course of a week.
“Building on a rich & diverse history, this @LausanneMovement statement has so much good, & I’m thankful for the theological clarity for this moment,” wrote Ed Stetzer, Lausanne’s regional director for North America on Instagram. “Yet, I wish it had a greater call to prioritize evangelism.”
At least one group, the Korean Evangelicals Embracing Integral Mission (KEEIM), organized a meeting on Tuesday for delegates to compile their concerns.
Ivor Poobalan, principal of Colombo Theological Seminary in Sri Lanka, and Victor Nakah, international director for sub-Saharan Africa with Mission to the World, jointly led Lausanne’s theology working group, which spent around 18 months on the statement.
According to Bennett, those drafting the document were asking themselves:
What needs to be done?
Are there areas of the fullness of God’s desire for the nations, his desire for his church, areas where we have not listened carefully enough, or where our changing world is raising new questions that were not answered fully enough in our three foundational documents?
This document followed on the heels of the State of the Great Commission report, released several weeks ago. The 500-page report explored the current status of world evangelization through data and research, and it offered ideas and opportunities for leaders in various regions to continue ministering effectively.
“There are hundreds of thousands of church congregations with hundreds of millions of followers of Jesus Christ,” Poobalan and Nakah, who also worked on this report, wrote in its introduction. “But to successfully execute the Great Commission, we need a fitting church with Great Commission hearts and minds.”
This commitment to deep theological work appeals to Tom Lin, the president of US-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
“It could be just one concept that comes out of a Lausanne that kind of trickles down over many years to many places around the world,” he said.
Kim Jongho of KEEIM learned about Lausanne’s documents as a college freshman. “Their commitment to integral mission inspired me that I could be a Christian in a responsible way in society,” he said. “They were a sign of hope for me.”
Although Lausanne has demonstrated this extent of influence on the evangelical world for 50 years, a movement like this one has to be careful not to just rest on its own history, says Ruslan Maliuta, network strategist for OneHope in Ukraine.
“In the ’70s, to gather [thousands of] people from all around the world, that, in itself, was an amazing, huge achievement,” he said. “It still is an achievement, but a megachurch network can do that. While it’s still a big endeavor, it’s not something that stands out.”
Instead, in a changing world, organizations with the ability to convene at this level ought to reflect on the type of gatherings they organize.
“Every significant global group, including Lausanne, needs to be very intentional about reimagining itself in this time and age,” said Maliuta.
To that end, Lausanne has set up a Digital Discipleship Center, a series of interactive exhibits to help attendees learn more about where evangelism and technology are colliding. Afternoon sessions deal with topics such as artificial intelligence and transhumanism.
And Michael Oh, during his speech on Tuesday evening, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Lausanne, reminded delegates that the movement was “passionately committed to three Ds: disciple-making in the world, disciple-maturing of the church, and digital.”
But technological advances are not the leading concern for all attendees.
“We are at a watershed moment in the body of Christ,” said Paul Okumu of the Kenya Center for Biblical Transformation. “On the one hand, there’s a lot of excitement and a lot of celebration about what God is doing. But on the other hand, there is exceptional concern because of the persecution and religious intolerance that are coming.”
“I am here to stand in solidarity with the global evangelical church—embracing both her beauty and resilience, as well as her imperfections and messiness,” said Lisman Komaladi, who serves in Singapore as IFES East Asia’s regional secretary. “I trust that together, we can become a more faithful witness of Christ to the world, wherever we are.”
The post Fourth Lausanne Congress Embraces Younger Leaders, ‘Marketplace’ Christians, and Technology appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
Most Americans don’t see either of this year’s presidential candidates as particularly religious or Christian.
In a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs, 64 percent of adults said they don’t consider former president Donald Trump religious and 53 percent said they don’t consider Kamala Harris religious. A majority also agreed that they wouldn’t describe either as “Christian.”
A plurality of Americans—41 percent—say neither Trump nor Harris represents their religious views.
Despite both candidates identifying as Christian, Trump and Harris have only glancingly discussed their own faith on the campaign trail. The topic didn’t come up at all during the recent presidential debate, which may fuel perceptions of their religiosity—or lack thereof.
A majority of white evangelicals have backed Trump for the past three presidential races, yet few associate him with their faith.
Among white evangelicals, only around 2 in 10 say the word Christian describes Trump “extremely or very well,” the survey found. Trump was raised mainline Presbyterian and later came to identify as nondenominational. During his time at the White House, he made a point to surround himself with evangelical faith advisers.
There are stark divides between white and Black Christians on perceptions of the candidates.
A majority of Black Protestants believe Harris best represents their religious views; however, only around 4 in 10 say the descriptor “Christian” describes Harris very or extremely well.
Harris belongs to a historically Black Protestant church in San Francisco, and her longtime pastor was among the first people she called when she decided to make her bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Her husband is Jewish, and she also grew up in an interfaith family, attending both Hindu temples and a Black Baptist church.
Conversely, half of white evangelicals say Trump represents their religious beliefs or views better than Harris.
Voters were also reluctant to ascribe terms like honest and moral to either candidate. About a third of respondents said descriptors like “honest” or “moral” fit Harris extremely or very well, and only 15 percent described Trump as honest or moral.
Hispanic Protestants were largely split in the survey. A slight majority did not think the words Christian or religious described Trump. About half of Hispanic Protestants described Harris as Christian, and less than half described her as religious.
Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told Axios that this presidential election is the first he remembers where faith hasn’t been a key emphasis in a candidate’s stories. “You usually hear a faith component. But take the debate … God wasn’t mentioned once,” he said.
Earlier this month, the Trump campaign announced it had brought on Ben Carson, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, as its National Faith Chairman. Carson is Seventh-day Adventist.
“There is only one candidate in this race that has defended religious liberty and supported Americans of faith. That candidate is Donald J. Trump,” Carson said in the announcement of his hiring statement.
Though Trump rarely speaks about a personal faith, he has invoked God at times when talking about the attempted assassinations. In one interview after the shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania saying he had been spared “by luck or by God.” Another post on his social media platform thanked supporters for their “thoughts and prayers” and added that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
In August, the Harris campaign hired Jennifer Butler, a progressive Presbyterian minister and founder of the nonprofit Faith in Public Life, to be national faith engagement director. Butler has been in touch with a grassroots group, Evangelicals for Harris, that also formed this summer to boost turnout among Christians for Harris.
“We want to turn out our base, and we think we have some real potential here to reach folks who have voted Republican in the past,” she told the Associated Press.
At her Democratic convention speech, Harris touched on faith as a value passed on from her family and other adults, including her downstairs neighbor. She’s previously spoken about the importance of that same neighbor, Regina Shelton, who often took Harris on Sunday mornings to church.
Pew Research Center found in a survey released this month that majorities of white evangelicals, white Catholics, and white mainline Protestants support Trump. Harris, meanwhile, has two-thirds or more support among Black Protestants, Hispanic Catholics, and Jewish voters.
The post Who’s the Christian Candidate? Americans Say Neither appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Sep 24, 2024 | Uncategorized
I flash my United Nations (UN) access badge to the police officer, and he waves me through the security barrier. As I approach the plaza, I see snipers with rifles on the roof and hear a dozen different languages. Black limousines are everywhere as presidents and prime ministers converge in New York City, preparing their speeches for the UN General Assembly, which kicked off earlier this month.
It’s been five years since I became Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) representative to the UN and first gained access to this community of politicians, humanitarians, and activists from around the world. I’ve observed the inefficiencies of this bureaucracy—its challenges in acting decisively and emphatically. I’ve seen many inside push for policies I fundamentally oppose because of my Christian convictions.
But through my role with MCC, I’ve also realized that my workplace is a mission field where I have daily opportunities to bear witness as Christ’s disciple to the world of political power. For instance, I know a UN ambassador on the Security Council who told a small group of Christian agencies that we inspired her to be true to her own Christian faith as she navigated the challenges of violence in Israel and Palestine.
I’ve watched the UN ambassador from Albania, who while serving on the Security Council, tell a group of 40 Christian college students that his calling was to keep exposing Russia’s lies to the world about their military invasion of Ukraine and that documenting the truth will matter one day. I’ve stopped at the statue in the UN building dedicated to Michael “MJ” Sharp, a former MCC worker who later served with the UN. After years of working with local Congolese mentors, MJ and his UN colleague Zaida Catalán of Sweden were ambushed and executed by an armed group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), with their interpreter and three motorbike drivers still missing.
Over 6,000 nongovernmental agencies have applied for and been granted UN consultative status, permitting them to officially engage UN diplomats and staff, enter the complex, and participate in UN activities. Through Caritas, the Catholic church has a presence here, as well as the Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. But of the most prominent US evangelical international agencies, including Compassion International, Hope International, International Justice Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Relief, only World Vision has a dedicated UN office and everyday presence in New York like MCC does.
But what if followers of Christ saw this community of 5,000 diplomatic staff and 8,000 UN employees as an unreached people group? What if they realized that influencing the political power in these halls had an outsize impact of compassion and justice on the people whom so many Christians serve in international ministries? What if we befriended and were inspired here by the public servants with moral courage from many faiths and nations?
A Rare Voice to Political Power
In a number of the 45 countries where MCC has relief, development, and peacemaking ministries, it has become crystal clear that political power often stands in the way of our mission.
The 2021 military coup in Myanmar sent many of our local Christian partners on the run, fleeing for their lives and continuing to help others while internally displaced themselves. When gangs in Haiti took control after the government’s collapse, it became nearly impossible to carry health and agricultural programs forward. Thirteen years of war in Syria have razed the country, created millions of refugees, and dramatically harmed the lives and work of our church partners.
For Christian ministries working across the world, it is local partners, living in such places of suffering and hope, who know what is happening in real time on the ground and who carry the expertise for solutions. That incarnational knowledge can become precious and persuasive at the UN.
After Myanmar’s military coup, we, working with a UN body, provided a secure UN channel for a partner to document a firsthand report of a chemical weapons attack on civilians. In meetings with US diplomats, we testified how the 2017 US travel ban to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) for people from the US in humanitarian agencies stopped our 25 years of work there. Working with other agencies, we persuaded the US to grant travel waivers that allowed teams to enter North Korea and ensure that food and clean-water kits made their way to children’s hospitals.
In a meeting with an ambassador from an influential European nation, my 26-year-old colleague Victoria Alexander shared how our on-the-ground partners in Gaza faced significant obstacles getting food and household supplies to families even as our partners were fleeing bombs and suffering the loss of loved ones. Victoria also shared how our US staff in Jerusalem was forced to leave when the Israeli government stopped visa renewals for humanitarian workers.
“Information is the currency of the UN,” a Christian diplomat from a Western nation told me. “Christian groups have a connection to and trust with the community and local church level that even a lot of elite diplomats from those countries don’t have. It gives [these] organizations credibility.”
Learning Healthy Political Engagement
In Christianity in the Twentieth Century, historian Brian Stanley argues that the failures of churches to publicly speak out in Germany during the rise of Nazism and in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide reminds us that “effective prophetic speech depends on a paradoxical balance between maintaining access to the sources of political power and preserving sufficient distance from those sources to enable moral independence to be safeguarded.”
Sadly, this temptation to either control or retreat from political power is something Christians still struggle with. Yet because Christian groups don’t have political representatives at the UN and because UN diplomats have no obligation to listen to us, being at the UN helps Christians learn to be a minority whose moral power is in persuasion and building relationships. We engage not to seize power but to bear witness to the values of the kingdom of God. Further, an audience of all nations presses us to think and speak beyond any single nation’s interests, grounded in our relationships with the powerless and the overlooked throughout the world.
In a time when politics is often loud and angry, one avenue for healthy engagement is the way of quiet persuasion. When a group of ministry colleagues visited our UN office in New York this spring, we met with a US diplomat. Over lunch, I told him about challenges MCC was facing in Gaza and the Korean Peninsula and the harm we believed certain US policies were causing those on the ground. He listened patiently. After the diplomat left, Clair Good, a development worker who served with MCC in DR Congo and Kenya, said, “Chris, you brought up some tough things with him, but over a very nice lunch, and by showing interest in him as a person. That helped us see how relationships of respect matter in our work engaging the political world.”
Other moments call for speaking up publicly in unexpected ways. Last spring, MCC and other groups carried signs saying, “a pilgrimage of mourning all trauma, loss of life, and suffering in Palestine-Israel,” and silently walked 25 circles in the blocks around the UN to represent the 25 miles of the Gaza strip. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice, 50 UN diplomats attended our service for remembrance and peace. If not for that event, organized by MCC and other faith-based groups, no UN event would have marked 70 years of a still-divided Korean people.
That same Christian diplomat from a Western nation told me that negotiations at the UN are long and frustrating, and progress is slow. “But I bring a Christian view of everyone being welcome at the table and listening to those who are in the worst situation. As well as people I deeply disagree with.”
Every year we hold a UN seminar for Christian college students from Canada and the US. Despite our best attempts to be honest about the UN’s limits and failures, the students leave testifying to greater hope, talking about ambassadors and diplomats they met who elevate the political vocation.
Growing in Biblical Peacemaking
As popularized by the Left Behind book series, many US evangelicals have historically expressed a deep suspicion of a “one world government” that is a secular threat to national independence, religious freedom, and the rule of Christ. At times, the UN is depicted as the center of that threat.
But rest assured that most days, highlighted by bitter Security Council battles between the US and China, the UN is more the “Divided Nations.” MCC’s partners in DR Congo and Myanmar have often reminded me that in their countries the UN is known as “United for Nothing.” And as the Christian diplomat from the Western nation told me, “The UN is a huge institution. There’s a tendency for this huge bureaucracy to think that money can solve issues. There’s not enough soul-searching here about UN failures, from Haiti to Afghanistan.”
It shouldn’t be surprising to find that the good, bad, and ugly of our world is fully represented in New York or that the UN is limited in its power—for all of humanity is here, both created in the image of God and estranged from God, fallen and fragile. Yes, there is moral courage and excellence here. Also waste, timidity, and powerful officials who stall, lie, obstruct, and abuse.
Yet this moral turbulence is more reason for disciples of Christ to be present.
“It’s the only room in the world where you see Ukrainians speaking with Russians, Israelis with Palestinians, Americans with Iranians,” said the New York diplomat, who can’t be named because of sensitivities related to her job. The headlines are about the issues where nations disagree. “But we can’t avoid each other here,” she said. “We have to sit and listen to each other and put our differences aside to find areas where we do agree, from clean water to artificial intelligence. I’ve got the WhatsApp for diplomats from other countries we don’t get along with. Even when we disagree, we text.”
In a time when we increasingly avoid those we disagree with, moving into church and neighborhood silos of “people like us,” being daily face to face with both friends and foes on these UN streets and hallways can create frustration and anger. But this context can become ground to grow in the virtues of biblical peacemaking.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas believes the UN is a necessary community of conversation Christians shouldn’t want to do without.
“The UN is not going to prevent war, but it provides a place to delay wars, and that’s not to be discounted,” he told me. “It’s good to have diplomats who are committed to making war less likely and then are frustrated when it doesn’t work. But that frustration is a source of energy that hopefully would have results after some time. Because peace takes time, and you have to learn patience. Because you have to listen to people you despise.”
To the Ends of the Earth
When I leave the UN General Assembly and pass the 193 flags outside, I approach the Church Center building where I work and see the piece of art on the chapel, which hosts weekly Christian worship services, open to all. The artwork, built into the wall of the building, is part sculpture, part stained glass. Called Man’s Search for Peace, it features human shapes around a large eye-like form, gazing both inside the sanctuary and outside across the street at the UN. I see this eye as representing the Lord’s.
Every time I pass work, this art reminds me that our living God, the Lord of all nations, keeps an eye both on the powers speaking across the street and on the church, urging us to bear witness among the powers to the Lord who “secures justice for the poor and upholds the cause of the needy” (Ps. 140:12).
In Acts, Jesus sent his disciples to the “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In our time, every day, members of all those parts gather at the UN. One day they return home, scattering back to all the nations. Inside those blocks in New York City, Christian witness can touch the whole world.
Chris Rice is director of the Mennonite Central Committee United Nations Office in New York City, and was previously co-founding director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation. His latest book is From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis (InterVarsity Press).
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