by | Oct 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
I first met the late William Pannell in 1993 in a hallway of Christianity Today. I was in my early 20s, just a year removed from graduating college. Dr. Pannell was visiting his old friend, former CT president Paul Robbins, and the pair was on a leisurely tour around the office.
I remember being enthralled by this dashing Black man in a tailored suit, his throaty laugh echoing around the building. Excited to see a young Black editor on CT’s payroll, Pannell greeted me with that winsome smile that had launched a thousand provocative sermons.
We were both slightly taken aback to see another African American in an office that was then so thoroughly white. At the time, I was one of only two or three people of color employed by CT and the lone Black person on the editorial team. What I didn’t know then was that I was shaking hands with one of the people who had helped create the conditions for me to hold that very role.
Pannell was a trailblazer whose leadership at organizations such as Youth for Christ, Tom Skinner Associates, and Fuller Theological Seminary had unlocked doors for later generations of Black evangelicals to enter through. Long after that first meeting, he would tell me, “When we [pioneering Black leaders] were taking our lumps in the ’50s and ’60s at evangelical ministries, colleges, and publishers, we were imagining a future where leaders like you could be possible.”
Over the years, I had the privilege of interviewing Pannell for various articles, books, videos, and other projects, both public and personal. In each interaction, he was brilliant and exceedingly generous with his time. Although he was a walking embodiment of “speaking truth to power,” he always led with humor and humility.
I quickly learned that I was not alone in my fandom; he was a mentor to scores of women and men—pastors and preachers, scholars and activists, folks who had passed through his classrooms at Fuller, as well as scraggly strays like me whom he happened to find along the way. When I wrote my 2006 book, Reconciliation Blues, about being a Black evangelical in mostly white settings, I was taking cues from what he did in his groundbreaking 1968 tome, My Friend, The Enemy, a passionate corrective to a white evangelical community that he both loved and distrusted.
Pannell loved Jesus and his church. As a preacher, his heart beat for the gospel and its biblically rooted values of evangelism, discipleship, and justice. His teaching was grounded in a strikingly honest understanding of how Christianity and the church really operate in the world. He was frank about how they are often accessories to the sins of racism and social injustice rather than proponents of reconciliation.
A lack of real discipleship was at the core of our troubles, Pannell believed. “Christ’s parting command was that we go and make disciples of the nations,” he wrote in his last book, an expanded edition of his 1993 release, The Coming Race Wars? “It wasn’t build more churches; it was make disciples. It seems fairly clear today that we have far more churches and Christians than we have disciples.”
Before going into hospice care earlier this month, Pannell more or less worked until his 95-year-old frame could go no further. He preached via Zoom, finished a memoir, and conducted interviews for two documentaries, including one about his life and ministry. Throughout our three decades of acquaintance, he and I would periodically call or send a text to check in on one another. I never took the gift of his friendship for granted, but now that he’s gone, I’m appreciating those exchanges even more.
My final text from him came early Sunday, September 22. I had sent him a message the day before to congratulate him on The Gospel According to Bill Pannell, a documentary that had its premiere that weekend. “Beautiful film about an amazing man of God! That Bill Pannell is a remarkable fella,” I wrote.
His reply: “Thanks be to JESUS! And to his friends like you.”
Edward Gilbreath is the author of Reconciliation Blues and Birmingham Revolution.
The post My Friend, Bill Pannell appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
In his 1990 essay collection, Wendell Berry considered the question “What are people for?” The answer, in true Berry fashion, is a beautifully intricate web of answers that add up to human flourishing.
That flourishing is connected to the flourishing of the environment around us, and this answer also has deep theological roots. God’s promises in the Old Testament repeatedly revolved around blessing the land and the people together, not separately. We flourish when planted, rooted, and nurtured together, with others around us. Most of all, we flourish when rooted not only in human community but also in a covenant with God.
From the premise that people are made for flourishing, we can ask the same question about specific human roles, like that of a parent: “What are parents for?” What guidelines does the Bible offer in answering this question?
The timing of my exploration is not accidental. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen vicious attacks within Christian circles against Christian parents who embrace public schooling and those who choose homeschooling.
And there’s no shortage of other parenting wars, both within the church and outside of it. Parenting Facebook groups have become legendary for all the wrong reasons. They’re the place to berate and be berated for every parenting choice imaginable: breastfeeding or bottle, Tylenol or no, travel sports or local only. Outspoken anti-vaxxers meet weekend-warrior dewormers meet all-natural-raw-foodists and many, many more—each convinced that their answer alone will save not only their children but also the world.
It would be funny, except the anxiety is far too real for anyone to be laughing. There’s no essential oil blend to help with this.
I contend that, like so many other problems we face, this one is theological at its root. We’ve lost track of any real theological imagination for understanding the purpose of parents. That’s true of the church and our broader society today, and we are the worse for it.
True, the Bible isn’t an encyclopedically precise instruction manual—you can’t just go to the index, look up “public schools” or “vaccinations” or “diapering options,” and find out exactly what the Lord has ordained on each particular issue. And if that’s what we are hoping to find, even subconsciously, that’s another problem that lies with us. It means we’re viewing parenting as a set of instrumentalized tasks—to feed, to wash, to chauffeur to activities—and losing track of the larger vision, a true calling for a purpose much larger than any list of tasks.
As it happens, the Bible does offer such a vision: Parents are called to be stewards of our children. Whether we’ve given birth to these children ourselves or have adopted or fostered them, we receive them as a gift for just a short time. During this time, we are but stewards appointed by God to hold in trust the treasure we have been given: image-bearers with immortal souls! At the end of their growing-up years, in most cases, off they go, on to adulthood.
But—and this is key—while the Bible’s teaching on this overall vision is clear, we also see repeatedly that there is more than one way to be a faithful steward.
In one of the most poignant passages, the opening section of the Shema prayer and the instructions that follow it in Deuteronomy 6:4–25, we learn of parents’ obligation to teach our children constantly about God, at home and outside, sitting and lying down and walking about during the day. Children raised in such households will ask earnest spiritual questions:
In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?”tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.Before our eyes the Lord sent signs and wonders—great and terrible—on Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. But he brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land he promised on oath to our ancestors.The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.” (Deut. 6:20–25)
We see here that it is our duty as parents to keep teaching our children about God at every chance we get. It is also our duty to be prepared to answer deep theological questions from our children when they inevitably arise.
Without parental teaching, the passage implies, how would the next generation even know anything about God? This makes the task of theological education and spiritual formation that is entrusted to parents all the more urgent and necessary. The loss of key theological truths is always just one generation away.
This process of telling children about God through every activity imaginable adds up to what we today call discipleship. Though direct teaching is commanded, too, this modeling of the Christian life is primarily caught, not taught. It’s through everyday life in family, in other words, that children learn to follow Jesus. Designated times set apart for explicitly spiritual things are not enough.
Of course, another way to see it is that all of family life itself is a designated time set apart for discipleship. Every moment of life is God’s, and we as parents should model this truth. Such discipleship is how we live out our call to be faithful stewards of our children.
God expects much from those to whom he has given a trust, 1 Corinthians 4:2 reminds us. The parable in Matthew 25:14–30 elaborates further. In this story, Jesus tells of a master who entrusted various amounts of gold to three different stewards—to each “according to his ability.” Two of them invested the funds and made a profit, earning praise and further rewards. But the third simply hid the gold in the ground and returned it to the master exactly as he had received it, without any profit. He earned a harsh rebuke for his laziness.
Presented in a series of stories illuminating God’s kingdom, this parable is not about the virtues of wise financial investment. The real investment, rather, is in people. The stewards are—or should be—sharing and growing their knowledge of God. That includes parents teaching our children in word and example, preparing them to become thoughtful believers themselves.
Other passages also describe the high expectations God has for stewards to whom he entrusts serious responsibilities. And yet, Matthew 25 also makes it clear that there’s more than one way to be a good steward. Not every praiseworthy steward made the same decision, yet as long as they each wisely invested the treasure given to them, the master was happy.
Of course, we could also note the many unfortunate stories of parents and children throughout the Bible. These are examples of what happens when parents do not steward our children well.
This is a major theme of 1 and 2 Kings, where the kings of ancient Israel repeatedly appear to be terrible fathers who neglect their children’s spiritual education, largely ignoring their sons except when considering their potential as heirs. The result is one disastrous king after another, failures not only in spiritual terms but also by any earthly metric. And in each of those cases, Scripture describes spiritual and relational failures within the family. The problem is never the sort of parenting choices we bicker about: education styles, sports teams, or diet.
I’ve written before about the strong preferences that I have for my children, the image-bearers I have personally been called to steward and disciple together with my husband. But my investment choices are not what every other good and faithful steward will select, and Christian parents have the right and responsibility—spiritually as well as legally—to make those investment choices for themselves, informed by prayer, Scripture, and sound counsel as needed.
This knowledge of God’s praise for stewards with varying investment strategies should reconcile us to differences in parental and educational decisions among Bible-believing Christians. We need not all steward identically to be faithful servants.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).
The post What Are Parents For? appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
Billy Adkison, 91, spent his life farming in East Texas; he never wanted to go to outer space.
“I don’t want to be higher than pulling corn and lower than digging taters,” he told CT.
All the same, he has watched the skies from his yard to catch a glimpse of the International Space Station passing by—“like a big old star,” he said.
Adkison wanted to keep an eye on one of his church elders, astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore, whose weeklong trip to space has been extended to eight months.
Wilmore and his fellow astronaut Suni Williams left Earth in June as the first humans to ride a Boeing Starliner spacecraft, but the craft had helium leaks and thruster problems during the launch. NASA decided to return Starliner to Earth without its human passengers for safety, leaving the two astronauts for a much longer mission than they anticipated.
NASA recently launched a SpaceX Dragon capsule to the International Space Station with two empty seats. It will bring Wilmore and Williams home in February.
This is Wilmore’s third expedition to space. Adkison has tracked him in space on his iPad since that became possible, knowing where Wilmore was any time of the day or night.
What Adkison didn’t know was that Wilmore, who is one of his elders at Providence Baptist Church in Pasadena, Texas, was keeping an eye on him too.
While Wilmore was in space this summer, Adkison was admitted to the hospital with a serious heart problem. Wilmore heard the news from his wife, Deanna Wilmore, and called Adkison to check on him from the space station.
“It surprised me, but it made me feel very good,” said Adkison, who is now out of the hospital and back at his assisted living facility, although he has struggled with other ailments lately.
In the 17 years that Adkison has known him through church, Wilmore has never acted “high class” as an astronaut, he said. “He’d find people like us that were having trouble.” Adkison said. He’s not sure why, but Wilmore always calls him “Mr. Billy.”
Over the years, the Wilmores have visited Adkison regularly and made him birthday cakes. Adkison said Wilmore would drive him home from visits, knowing Adkison didn’t like to drive at night. When Adkison’s wife of 64 years died in 2020, Wilmore gave a sermon at her funeral.
“I plan on him doing mine,” Adkison said, but since Wilmore is stuck on the space station, “I’m going to have to hold off for a bit.”
That wasn’t the only pastoral call Wilmore made from space. Providence Baptist pastor Tommy Dahn’s mother-in-law, Suda Smith, lives with him and his wife. Smith turned 93 this summer, and Wilmore called her on her birthday. Wilmore called her again at the end of August. She is blind and had just gotten out of the hospital.
“Her countenance of course lifted, her eyes sparkled, and that’s all I can say,” said Dahn. “She was just thrilled.”
She tells everyone she meets, “I got a call on my birthday from space,”he said.
NASA astronauts have access to the internet to make calls when they’re off duty. Dahn said other than calling the older invalids, Wilmore mostly stays in touch with his wife.
“That’s the epitome of Barry’s personal ministry—he looks for those who are down and outers,” said Dahn. “He could not have loved my mother-in-law and Billy any more than a simple phone call. … It’s more almost than him coming to see them in one sense, when he’s here.”
Other NASA employees go to Providence Baptist, a church of about 250 attendees. Astronaut Tracy Dyson, who just returned from the space station on a Soyuz capsule after six months in outer space, is a member there.
Wilmore and his family have been at Providence for 17 years, Dahn said.
“He’s really put his life into the church. … For us as a church, we miss him,” added Dahn. “All the glory goes to God. He does not take the glory to himself.”
The church had considered cutting the livestream of its services since the pandemic ended because leadership didn’t want people to stay home instead of coming to church. But they decided to keep it for the people like Adkison who were homebound and couldn’t attend. And now Wilmore is streaming the services from space.
Dahn said NASA allowed the church to be linked into the space station at one point for Wilmore to do a devotional, and the congregation on Earth sang songs like “Amazing Grace” with the astronauts at the station.
When Wilmore was last on the space station in 2014, he sent Adkison’s wife a video of him praying for her from the station’s cupola. Adkison said he accidentally erased the video from the iPad at some point.
“I thought I would send Barry back up there to get another ,” Adkison quipped.
In a NASA press conference after the announcement that the astronauts would be stranded for additional months, Wilmore and Williams remained upbeat about their extended stay. Wilmore, 60, said the gravity-free environment would give him relief from his aches and pains.
Retired astronaut Terry Virts, who commanded the space station in 2014–2015, was stranded on the station in 2015 for an extra month after a cargo capsule blew up. He saw that as “bonus space time.” But he said an eight-month extension was a long trip.
“There’s been astronauts that got stuck or delayed—never as dramatically as the two Boeing astronauts,” he said in an interview with broadcaster Pablo Torre. He added that the families of stranded astronauts are the ones who bear the brunt of the extension, often with spouses having to care for children on their own.
On a personal level, Wilmore is missing the bulk of his youngest daughter’s senior year of high school. In his press conference from the space station, Wilmore said astronauts train for the unexpected.
“It’s a very risky business,” he said. A reporter asked him about his faith sustaining him, and he said he didn’t want to speak outside of his role as an astronaut but said anyone interested could look at 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.
Those verses say in part, “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ … for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
He added: “You’ve got to be resilient and go with whatever the good Lord gives.”
The post When the Elder Calls—From Outer Space appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 11, 2024 | Uncategorized
Jack Iker, a Texas bishop who took 48 congregations and 15,000 parishioners out of the Episcopal Church USA and helped start the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), died on October 5. He was 75.
Iker was a conservative Anglo-Catholic who made common cause with evangelicals—whom he called “strange bedfellows”—in order to fight against liberal theological revisionism. He was especially opposed to the ordination of women. He would not accept women as priests in his diocese nor submit to the leadership of a woman elected as presiding bishop over the Episcopal Church in 2006.
“It puts me in a compromising position,” Iker told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time. “It’s not against women. It’s a theological position. We believe the ordination of women … is a fundamental break with apostolic tradition and biblical teaching.”
The Texas bishop became one of four bishops to found ACNA in 2009. He continued to quarrel with the more conservative ACNA over the issue of women in ministry, however. The Anglicans ordain women as priests in some dioceses, but not others. For Iker, this was a line in the sand.
“It would be a bad legacy to be remembered as the bishop who didn’t ordain women,” he said. And yet he believed he had to fight to protect Episcopalians and then Anglicans in America from becoming “a church that acts more and more like a rebellious Protestant sect and less and less like an integral part of the one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Iker was a polarizing figure, especially in Texas, where his followers were sometimes derisively called “Ikerpalians.”
“He didn’t back down from what we’ve received in terms of Biblical faith,” said Ryan Reed, the ACNA bishop who succeeded Iker in Fort Worth after Iker’s retirement. “His stance for the biblical Christian faith made him either a hero … or it made him despised.”
Many of the men who served under Iker in Texas praised him for his faithfulness in the face of sustained opposition. The word they used most often was steadfast.
Iker was “an incredible example of a Godly man faithfully living the gospel of Jesus Christ,” according to Mark Polley, an Anglican priest in Bedford, Texas. “God only knows how many people he positively influenced with his faith, courage, steadfastness.”
Iker was born in Cincinnati on August 31, 1949. He said little publicly over the years about his childhood, early faith, or call to ministry. He got married in a Methodist Church in 1968 as a freshman at the University of Cincinnati and pursued ordination in the Episcopal Church after graduation. He was ordained at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Dayton, Ohio, in 1974 and went on to serve quietly as a priest at Church of the Redeemer in Sarasota, Florida, for 15 years.
Iker didn’t become a public figure—or a lightning rod—until he was nominated to become a bishop in 1992.
The Episcopal Church had allowed women in ministry for 16 years at that point, but church canons could not force a bishop to ordain anyone. A bishop’s authority over his diocese was considered inviolate. And Iker said he wouldn’t ordain women, nor allow them to serve in any parish under his care.
One female priest said Iker’s nomination was “appalling” and predicted he would hold the Episcopal Church “hostage” to misogyny.
Iker was narrowly elected, however, with the support of John Shelby Spong, the liberal Episcopal bishop who rejected traditional Christian doctrines including Jesus’ resurrection and even theism itself. Spong said that though he wanted to force the church to evolve and believed it had to change or die, he thought Episcopalians should also tolerate traditionalists.
Spong later complained that “the act of gracious inclusion has never been reciprocated.”
Episcopal leaders may have also been reticent to oppose Iker because the church had a century-long tradition of electing those who were nominated. Episcopal elections were seen as polite and deferential, with the good manners necessary to maintain unity.
Some critics also said they admired Iker’s character even though they disagreed with his views.
“He was forthright in his opinions … and showed considerable integrity in remaining steadfast,” said one minister who supported him despite their disagreement. “He was patient and thoughtful in answering my questions.”
Five years later, however, the Episcopal Church decided bishops would have to accept women’s ordinations, setting Iker on a collision course with his church. He said at the time that radical feminists were trying to get revenge, seeking to oppress conservatives like him.
“In the heart of radical feminism, there is a lot of internal anger,” the bishop told the Associated Press. “I think we saw that here.”
Iker pointed out that Jesus’ 12 disciples were all male. He also argued that any hope of unity with Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox would require a return to an all-male priesthood. He could not seem to persuade other church leaders, however.
Despite the new rule, Iker managed to keep women almost entirely out of the pulpits and away from the altars in his diocese. He couldn’t stop women from guest preaching, though, and couldn’t stop the denomination from appointing a woman over him as presiding bishop.
Katharine Jefferts Schori was made head of the Episcopal Church in 2006. Iker and other conservatives were dismayed. In addition to differences over gender roles, Anglo-Catholics and evangelical Episcopalians were upset by Schori’s support for the consecration of Gene Robinson, the church’s first openly gay bishop, and by statements that seemed to suggest that Jesus was just one way among many that people could be reconciled with God.
“I think that we may well be at that point where there are irreconcilable differences in theology and church discipline and so on,” Iker said. “Perhaps the best thing to do is say, ‘How can we have an amicable divorce?’”
It was not amicable.
Iker left the Episcopal Church on November 24, 2008. He took the majority of the Fort Worth diocese with him: 48 out of 56 congregations decided to leave.
But leaving, for them, didn’t mean going anywhere.
The conservative majority said they would keep using the name “The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth” and maintain ownership of their church buildings, bank accounts, and other property, which was estimated to be worth about $100 million.
Texas Monthly called this “a startling assertion of temporal power,” but Iker maintained that the churches followed proper procedure, adhered to canon law, and had a right to the real estate. The breakaway group was, after all, the majority. The Episcopal Church decided to test that in court.
They sued. And then sued again.
Iker ended up defending himself in three different cases, in three courts, in two Texas counties. He called himself “the most sued Anglican bishop in all of North America.” His supporters gave him the admiring nickname “the lion of Fort Worth.”
Iker, who continued his oversight of about 80 clergy and dozens of churches and ministries, complained his time was too often dominated by legal matters.
“I seem to spend more time now with groups of lawyers than groups of priests,” he said in 2010. “Almost every day I am in conversation with one of our attorneys. We have engaged six different law firms to respond to the litigations brought against us.”
The legal battles dragged on for 12 years before Iker and the Anglicans ultimately won. Finally, a Texas Supreme Court judge ruled that “under the governing documents, the withdrawing faction is the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.” The national church appealed, but the US Supreme Court declined to take the case, letting the ruling stand.
Throughout the long legal battle, Iker maintained there really was only one thing at stake: whether or not the church was going to remain committed to the faith handed down by the apostles.
“The real issue is the faith. We are taking a stand for the historic faith and practice of the Bible, as we have received them,” Iker said.
For the Texas bishop, that was also the only real issue at stake in the new Anglican denomination. And there, again, he was deeply troubled by women in ministry.
A few years before he retired, Iker addressed the official gathering of ACNA leaders and told them that the compromise the church had worked out in its constitution, where some dioceses would ordain women while others would not, was no longer tolerable. Women in the pulpit and at the altar is a recent innovation, according to Iker, breaking from apostolic tradition and catholic order, and should not be acceptable among orthodox Christians.
As long as women were allowed to be ordained in parts of ACNA, “we are in a state of impaired communion,” Iker said.
The debate was not resolved in 2017. It still divides Anglicans today.
Iker predicted the tension would be a problem for the ACNA going forward, just as it had been the cause of so much conflict and the ultimate breaking point for the Episcopal Church.
“We see the ordination of women … as a departure from the witness of Holy Scripture and the apostolic practice of the ancient Church,” Iker said. “Pray for God’s guidance as we seek to resolve this deeply divisive issue, in the interest of deepening our unity in Christ.”
Iker retired in 2019 after receiving a cancer diagnosis. He is survived by his wife, Donna Bowling Iker, and their three daughters. A requiem mass for the bishop was offered on October 11 at St. Vincent’s Cathedral Church in Bedford, Texas.
The post Died: Jack Iker, Anglican Who Drew the Line at Women’s Ordination appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 11, 2024 | Uncategorized
Years ago, I taught a Bible study that I knew would be controversial. I was a couple years into seminary, and my church asked me to join a team of teachers for the weekly women’s Bible study. We were going through Genesis, and I received the sign-up sheet after everyone else had already selected their texts, leaving me with one option: Genesis 18–20. Next to the chapters listed on the sheet, it simply read, “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Though I was mildly horrified by my assignment, I ended up teaching a lesson on the theme of hospitality across the three chapters. I explained that God judges multiple nations in these chapters by their willingness or unwillingness to welcome foreigners. I employed all the tools of my seminary education, and I was confident in my interpretation.
But a few days before I was to give my lesson, our governor enacted a ban on any refugee resettlement in the state, preventing (carefully vetted) refugees from settling in the state. It seemed to me that there was a clear application of the text in our present circumstances, and while I was afraid of criticism, I decided to make the connection.
A few hours after my lesson, the pastor I was working under at the church texted me, “What did you say in Bible study this morning? Some of the women are coming to meet with me tomorrow to talk about it.” I was terrified and spent the rest of the afternoon working up my defense.
I had recently started spending a lot of time talking about politics on Twitter, and I’d interacted with lots of Christians critical of the refugee resettlement program, some of them making xenophobic or racist arguments in support of their position. As I prepared to defend my lesson, those were the voices shaping my approach. I regretfully returned to work the next day ready to fight, convinced of the malevolence of my detractors before I’d even heard their concerns.
Much has been written about the corrosive effects of the internet on our civic life: how virtual relationships have replaced in-person connections, how algorithms fuel polarization, how the proliferation of sources drives misinformation.
I am concerned, however, not merely about how the internet teaches us to talk to each other on social media platforms but also about how those exhausting interactions drain us of the resources we need to have hard conversations offline.
Our malformed communication habits do not stay on the internet. The way we learn to talk to each other in the cramped context of algorithm-fueled social media platforms shows up at our dinner tables, church pews, and neighborhood sidewalks. We learn to fear or detest anyone from the other party, we learn what form and tone criticisms should take, we learn where battle lines have been drawn.
Perhaps more concerning than all of that, though, is the way our energy is drained online—leaving us without the strength and emotional bandwidth necessary for discussing contentious issues with the people in our real lives.
Debating trolls, slogging through bad-faith arguments, and shielding ourselves from ad hominem attacks online leaves limited emotional and mental resources for in-person conversations. We might be forgiven for learning, over repeated interactions online, that people from the other party are unambiguously evil or stupid. It is natural to become defensive and frazzled after facing an onslaught of cruel attacks. It is reasonable to assume the worst of people when you’ve been exposed to the dark side of humanity over and over again.
We need more than good policy proposals and party platforms for a healthy election season. We need people who are “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry” (James 1:19), who rid themselves of “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language” (Col. 3:8), and who refuse to tell lies about their opponents but live peaceably and gently (Titus 3:1–2).
This is a task that sounds simple but may require us to actively detach ourselves from the platforms that drain us of the internal resources necessary to resist their corrupted norms.
The day after the Bible study, I went into my boss’s office with a ten-point argument prepared, but I never had to make it. I discovered that the women who had met with my boss, the pastor over missions and outreach, had come to him with one question: Why aren’t we doing more to serve our refugee neighbors?
I had been grievously wrong about the women I served. While I did later discover deep divisions and distrust in that community, I was wrong about this instance. I was wrong for many reasons that shape our dysfunctional political life these days: I made judgments about these women based on their age and race; I assumed the worst of others; I was quick to jump to defensiveness when I feared criticism. But there’s another reason I was wrong: I was spending more and more of my time debating about politics on the internet.
If that meeting at my church had gone differently—if the women had come with criticisms of my lesson or questions about the appropriateness of my application—I would not have had the addressed their concerns with kindness and grace. I was primed by my internet activism to treat their concerns with condescension and to assume the worst of their intentions.
More than that, I was exhausted by the constant criticism, anger, and cruelty all around me online. I was too tired to muster up compassion for their concerns, too beaten down to remain open to the possibility that they might have something to teach me.
I spend a lot of my time talking to pastors and churches about political life, and many of them ask me to come speak right before an election. They are rightly discerning that this season is uniquely challenging and they will need help guiding their congregations into healthier ways of living together. Yet I wish more of our churches instead asked together: What do we need to do now so that we have the capacity to serve our neighbors when the election is over?
This election will have material effects on our most vulnerable neighbors. But regardless of who wins the presidency and what party is in power, our neighbors and neighborhoods will need people who can serve them, be in relationship with them, and collaborate with them on the greatest needs of our communities.
We need to remember that we are finite creatures whose resources will be depleted by tense and difficult conversations—and to discern where those resources will be best spent. We should consider whether the energy we are exerting trying to persuade strangers on the internet could be conserved for the sake of our physical neighbors.
There are a variety of tangible ways to seek the good of our communities: showing up to a city council meeting, volunteering at a local public school or crisis pregnancy center, hosting the neighborhood for a potluck.
We don’t all need to swear off social media. But we can consider the cost of it more seriously and allocate our limited resources more thoughtfully.
Kaitlyn Schiess is the author of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here.
The post Why Can’t We Talk to Each Other Anymore? appeared first on Christianity Today.
