[This is an article in flux, email response are appreciated. I don’t present a perfect solution, but try to describe a perfect tension.]
Christians today stand at the collision point of a big picture perspective of gospel and church and an individual personal perspective of winning the lost to Christ. Neither negates the other, but the tension is real, and its navigation fraught with dangers. If you get a person wrong, you may struggle to reach them for one reason or another, but if you get people wrong all your methods for dealing with everyone will, more than likely, also be wrong. We need wisdom from the Holy Spirit.
I am the child of Charismatic and Pentecostal Church, Public Schools, New England, Blue Collar up-bringing, and decades of training in theological and scholarly academies. I’ve wrangled the frustrations and joys of everything from Homeless ministry to manual labor to educator to the haughty and often detached pomp of the ivory tower favored by philosophers and theologians alike. My sympathies are with many perspectives. At different times, I’ve been the designer, the builder, the roofer, the plumber, the painter, and the demolition man, literally. I’ve been the bagger and cashier, the boss, assistant, and plebe. I’ve been the tutor, Sunday School teacher, Youth Pastor, Assistant Pastor, Education Pastor, Professor and teacher’s aide. In all that time, I’ve rarely been intentionally rude or hurtful to anyone standing before me, no matter how odious and obnoxious they’ve proven. I’ve dealt with pedophiles, drug dealers and drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes, thieves and murderers. I must confess as we begin, however, that my first inclination is toward judging and establishing paradigms for society and the ages of man, systems of justice, methods of interpretation, and theologies, biblical, systematic, and historical. I crave an understanding of the whys behind all our doings.
Academics are often accused of answering questions no one is asking. Perhaps they do at times, but in my experience, they are, more often than not, answering questions people should be asking… for many have, in their intellectual inexperience, already answered them unawares… and have usually answered them badly. As bad methods in the hands of loving parents still prove disastrous for their children, these bad answers to unconsidered questions negatively effect their ministry in ways they scarce comprehend.
The bane of academics is the demand for checks and balances found in real world application of supposed knowledge, and the bane of practitioners is often to lack a meaningful sense of the roots and trajectory of their applied “instincts” and opinions. Academics glory in the big picture, while frequently struggling with the individual encounter. Practitioners live for the personal encounter, while frequently lacking a proper sense of the larger dynamics in play in that encounter, feeling their way through with an emotional landscape shaped by unexamined presuppositions about God, man, and reality.
This seems easy to type in a blog post, but I’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears for four decades wrestling with one foot in each camp, striving for a harmonious whole that will relieve the tension and give me some blessed assurance in my ministry. The direness of our times, (as is true of various times in world history) was building quiescently from before my birth, but has revealed itself in all its hideous strength only recently… though men like Lewis, Chesterton, Thomas Howard, and Allan Bloom saw it coming from a ways off.
This article is a call for a well-informed practicality in seeing and properly addressing both the big picture and individual need as we confront the worldview of this seeming juggernaut and strive to minister effectively to those individuals before us who are either under its thrall or in its path.
Most understand that cultivating the big picture without ever having to deal with individuals taints the quality of the big picture and can easily render the heart of the one cultivating that picture cold, unfeeling, and disastrously off the mark. Thinkers have a job to do; they want to save society. Unfortunately, the people that constitute society are in their way… very uncooperative. “Teaching would be a wonderful career if only we didn’t have to deal with students.” (A Friend) “I wanted to be a pastor but could never figure out how to do that without talking to individuals in the congregation.” (Another Friend) “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” (Attributed to Stalin by hearsay) “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” (Thomas Sowell) In the church and politics, social paradigms are often advanced with foolish indifference to those we claim to be trying to save, it is enough that the ideas sound so good… and since we are not directly confronted by the blood we shed, we can pat ourselves on the back for being so erudite and visionary.
Some even advance such visions when they do have to confront the blood they shed; “it will all be worth it in the end, though.” We saw this very thing with those promoting socialist visions of Utopia common to Nazis and Communists alike, who were willing to slaughter, imprison, torture, starve, and generally oppress any number of millions and even billions for the joy set before them… just a little more murder, just a few more enemies eradicated; Utopia is just around the corner and it will all be worth it in the end.
It is also true, however, that lacking the big picture taints the individual perspective. We call this state myopic. We promote methods for dealing with individuals that, while making us feel better about ourselves, (I’m such a loving person.) are, in point of fact, counter-productive; they make the big picture worse. This sheds blood, too, but we don’t pay attention long enough to track real world outcomes. So, we pat ourselves on the back and think ourselves loving and Christ-like as we strive to reassemble a small percentage of those our ignorance helped destroy.
I highly recommend reading my post titled, “So You Think You Have a Big Heart.” It is quite easy for us in the buzz of warm feelings for the hurt feelings of those we hope to save to accidentally destroy the soul of the mechanisms that would save them; our compromise of the message and our ineffectual discipline in delivering it often leaves nothing significant to win them to.
For example, I had one millennial unbeliever tell me once, “You know from a methodological stance, you’d win a lot more people to the Church and Gospel if you would all just drop this morality kick and stop resisting women’s health.” My wife responded, “Do you mean abortion?” He grunted, “Well, yeah!” I said, “And tell me (so-an-so), what would be left in the church worth winning them to?” The Church speaks to many things well beyond morality and infanticide, but, stripped of those, we would be as ineffectual as a tireless car without a steering wheel, windshield, and exhaust system.
Let us consider. The West (Built uniquely, if imperfectly, upon the Judeo-Christian worldview) is in a war for its own soul against a vast and powerful ideology advanced by a growing army of humanist devotees (Critical Marxists/theorists) and useful idiots. (Their term for them NOT mine.) Everyday we face confused and/or hateful individuals who both need our help and need to be defused as weapons of mass destruction. They are lost and need salvation. They are sinners just like all the saved once were. They are victims of this ideology… but they are also willing perpetrators of this ideology. They have been sinned against, but also daily sin against many others in their debauchery and run-amuck selfishness… villains and victims all in one big package of confusion, rebellion, hate and soul-bleeding longing for meaning, love, and real community, perpetually rejecting and lashing out at the very people who hold the map to the cure for it all.
They are enraged and triggered by the slightest hint that you don’t celebrate their life choices or support every last one of their manifold and foolish causes; their worldview is toxic to themselves and venomous to others. If you read the perpetrators of this humanist vision and they will tell you themselves… it is hate leading to revolution, demanding all the devastation that a total overthrow of Western Systems demands… a billion lives are on the line. Thus, there is a dilemma here. If you don’t see it as a dilemma, you’re not paying attention. You are either myopic in your feel good sentiments or emotionally disconnected from the consequences of your ideas.
Let me illustrate again: Most pedophiles, as I understand it, were once molested, but they have, unlike many others who were also molested, allowed themselves to become molesters. They made choices that others who shared their terrible plight did not make. Shall we set aside concern over their penchants in the name of winning them to Jesus? Can we minister to them and still protect children? And what of serial killers? They need the gospel too. Shall we avoid confronting the obvious in our ministry to them lest we trigger them and “turn them away from the gospel”? Should we negate the justice system in the name of mercy for those whose very existence is criminality and victimization of others? Should we minister only to their pain as we try to win them with the love of Jesus and give their predatorial natures a pass until after Jesus gets ahold of them through his love? Perhaps we should give up on them altogether and work ONLY to usher them all into Old Sparky’s loving embrace? These are not our only options, but the spiritually and socially myopic are not skilled at seeing tensions and the options for dealing with them.
This reminds me of the case in which a local preacher in the wild west who was also the local judge, condemned a young man to death for murder and then followed him all the way to the gallows preaching a gospel of repentance. The young man repented, cried out to Christ, and met him minutes later at the end of a rope. These are not easy situations, but we must maintain biblical tensions.
So, back to our present global struggle. We must know that those in the grip of the modern ideological plague ARE our enemies… not because we hate them, but because THEY HAVE DECLARED THEMSELVES OUR ENEMIES, and because they will destroy many lives… as has always been the case when such visions have taken hold.
We are their best possible hope, but they think many wrong things about us and in their hate and confusion imagine that our desire to see them saved and changed proves our hate toward them. They don’t believe you can hate the sin but love the sinner because they don’t; they are cancel culture and would be much worse if the times allowed. Indeed, they can’t imagine that one can love an enemy, love one whose every choice is deemed abhorrent. I have kids, however, so I know I can. Should we strip mine the biblical gospel message to prove to them that these prejudices are wrong? Should we evade their triggers at all costs? I don’t think so.
So, how does evangelism and the spread of the gospel go forward in such cases?
That is a serious question that DEMANDS exploration not quick feel good answers. Let me recommend that if you imagine yourself an evangelist and gospel preacher and have never studied the great evangelists of history… do so. Do not imagine that we should rewrite the gospel to avoid modern triggering altogether as if human nature has changed in these modern times and demands special tactics that avoid all offence. Triggering is not a modern evolution in man, it is the ages old sin response to righteous messaging. It is the rebel’s response to the very idea of restraint and order.
So too, if you have never studied successful missionaries of old and wrestled with the challenges of preaching cross-culturally, do so. It is quite easy, for instance, to get Hindus to embrace Jesus as LORD; they have 300 million gods, what’s one more. If you want to see saving faith, however, you must trigger them at the very core of their worldview—One Holy God, Creator of All, Omnipotent, Omniscient, All wise, Gracious but Just, love but full of wrath against sin.
So too, win a person under the spell of the prevailing worldview to Jesus but not to the idea of Truth, to a savior who loves them, but not one who also demands obedience and moral restraint, and you have the same dilemma as with those who merely take Jesus as their Guru. I’ve met many of both stripes.
Now, if I ignore the big picture, imagining that all I must do is to love everybody no matter what (thinking love means complete acceptance and avoiding offense at all cost), I risk allowing the ideology to grow strong in the face of my ignorance and weakness. Failed justice is rich soil for spreading evil, thus, my Pollyanna “just love everybody” convictions, my “don’t offend anyone or you can’t win them,” methods prove ruinous in ways I do not understand. Christians DO have enemies… Jesus told us so and commanded us to love them and pray for them. Those who cannot see the big picture do not know their enemies. Thus their love for them is misguided and their prayers for them off target.
The tension in Paul’s description of love in 1 Corinthians 13 should be explored here. He writes in verses 4-6, “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful,” (So far so good, but wait, there’s more) it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.”
Just so, Isaiah warned us in 26:10, “If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness, he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the LORD,” and Proverbs 25:26 set the stage, “Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked.”
Proverbs 29:18 tells it quite plainly, “Where there is no prophetic revelation, society casts off all moral restraint, but happy is the one who lives according to Torah.” A Torah rich society is a rich seedbed for the gospel, (i.e. more are open to the gospel) and a Torah poor society is rich soil for spreading evil (i.e. fewer are open to the gospel). Those who fill the airways, the highways and byways with the demands of Scripture even to the offense of those determined in their wickedness, just may win more, spare more, see more saved (without ever knowing that they did) than those who ignore that messaging so as not to trigger the lost.
One can easily count the victims spared by the person who pulls them from a burning building, but how can one even begin to count those saved by the one who installs fire suppression systems for a living? And what of those saved by the person who designed these fire suppression systems in the first place? Myopic thinking never goes there… never values that.
Even so, if I ignore individuals, seeing them merely as hateful material in a global plan that must be stopped, pawns in someone else’s game that I must defeat in order to win that game… then I am scarce an intentional instrument of the gospel, though my actions may shape an environment that is more open to the gospel. We must win the lost and love our enemies, but must never forsake biblical justice in society… (which has NOTHING to do with social justice paradigms by the way). We must preach truth and work tirelessly with the offended to draw them into that truth. Triggering is not the end of the line… it just may be the first step in reaching a wayward soul.
But what does it look like to love your enemies when those enemies are instruments of mass destruction against others whom we are also called to love? Given the suicide rates in the LGBT community, for instance, stopping its spread even by offensive means and delivering those in our community from its influence before it can take hold in their lives is an act of love; these are the spiritual designers and installers of fire suppression systems. Unchecked sin in one is a lethal contagion to others whom we are also called to love.
What does a parent do when one child whom they love with all their hearts, proves a danger to their other children whom they also love with all their hearts? These are not easy issues. I remember an interview once with a mother who discovered the body of a missing neighborhood girl stuffed under her son’s waterbed mattress. I paraphrase, “It is hard to explain the feelings that overwhelm you when you discover that the person you love most in this world is a monster.” If you want to explore those tensions you might read We Need to Talk About Kevin, written by Lionel Shriver. It is not a “Christian Book,” but it gives serious consideration to this issue.
Just so, “Useful idiots” in this “game” have been duped and brainwashed… they are perpetually triggered and ready to lash out against their sworn enemies… (That’s us, remember.) So working with these individuals demands some tact, some wisdom. We do want to see them saved and delivered after all. But, you cannot avoid triggering them at all costs. If you do, you cannot reach them true with the gospel. The gospel is more than “God loves you, and so do I.” Nobody comes to Christ with their pride and self-worship intact. Nobody.
- No confrontation with our sin? No repentance.
- No repentance? No salvation.
The gospel is not just, “Let me tell you what God can do for you!!!” or “This will help you live a happier, more prosperous life.” It is a call to confront our sin and rebellion against our Maker, repent, and hope on the provision that He made for our salvation through Jesus Christ. It is a call to transformation into the likeness of Christ.
Even so, it is unwise and unloving to be cruel and unnecessarily abrasive. So how do we know what is necessary and unnecessary in helping those in the thrall of this world’s contagion? How should we confront their spiritual delusion and assist them in escaping its grasp? The ultimate contagion is sin itself, but ideas anchor individual convictions and determinations, and the shape of these ideas today are powerful inoculants in the soul against gospel messaging.
There is no easy answer to this dilemma, and if you think you have an easy answer it’s not likely a good one.
Remember, we must also train the church, advance biblical worldview, make real disciples who obey all that Christ has commanded. This too creates drama, however, for when speaking to the disciples, we must of need say things that will trigger the lost, the wicked, the confused, the brainwashed… for their ears are always listening at the door for offense as we speak to our own, and they cannot bear reproach. Proof in point, a professional Catholic football player speaks to Catholics graduating from a Catholic school about Catholic teaching and the leftists around the world lose their minds. What’s a Christian to do? What’s a writer to do? For he cannot control who reads what he writes to the saints.
It may not satisfy those seeking objective answers, but… Listen carefully to the Holy Spirit and seek His wisdom. Be gracious with those who do it a little different than you do. Nay, be grateful for them, for you never know when some need different messaging and methods than you alone are able to bring to the table. Know that even if you do it perfectly, you will not win them all, or most, and maybe not even many. This modern ideological disease tends to vaccinate the minds of those sick with it from accepting the cure, no matter how inoffensive you try to be.
In the end, every man, woman and child is responsible for their reaction to truth no matter how it is delivered… but still, why be obnoxious and careless.
