Nathan (brother):

There are certainly those who should be followed, but after watching churches hire and fire and seeing leadership imported and exported based on resumes and DVDs, I have looked for leadership where there is no spotlight. I am looking for lives worthy of emulation based on proven hardship, vulnerability, brokenness, and hope. I am not looking for a superhero, but a brother.

ShackelMom:

Amen.

In response to Al:

We have given politics a special place in our society, a position with too much weight. It is called politics because it is polar, and it thrives on debate and conflict. If Christ’s commandment to “Love your God with your entire being, and love your neighbor as you love yourself” was the core belief of our society, where would that put politics? Christ’s “politics” went directly against the expectations of his followers because he did not attempt to be involved in any way. His teaching was radical because he told them their focus was wrong. Their lives, their attitudes toward God and their neighbors, their love of money, and their hypocrisy was what he talked about. When the politicians of the day tried to engage him in debate he gave them answers that defeated them because he saw through the politics, and into their hearts. The Christian faith is a way of being, living in the present, in the presence of God. Governments are people, in just the same way that church is people. The call of God to governments is no more than the calling of the individuals that make up the government, just as it is with churches. My point is that politics are false, and the real “power” of Christ is in the everyday choices of the people that together are called the church. Not the churches that pepper the country, but the whole church. It is not just how we traditionalize our faith, but the minute decisions we make, from where we live and work, to the food we eat, to how we interact with the grumpy lady down the street. It truly is about the individual because every organization consists of individuals.

Again, thank you for your comments. Very thought/heart provoking.

It seems to me that the Church often mislocates the problems of our society. We should really not be surprised when people in the world do evil things, when their marriages collapse, when they kill their unborn children and are drawn to violence and death. The way to address these problems is not primarily by means of compaigning for new laws to uphold ‘traditional values’, but by means of addressing the Church’s own problems.

The most important question in politics will always be Christ’s question, ‘who do you say that I am?’. This is the question that the Church needs to address to our political leaders. The Christian faith is, I believe, a political message, and is not just a message for the individual person. Christ calls all governments to recognize His authority as the true Lord of the World and to acknowledge the fact that they are but stewards, recognizing the greater authority of the King who will one day return and to whom they must vacate their thrones and before whom they must cast their crowns. In the interim, the Church is to live as the colony of Christ the King and to proclaim His authority in every area of life, by living as a city set on a hill, embodying the authority of God in its own life.

The most important battles that we face today are not political battles against some of the unhealthy values of political liberalism, which lacks any conception of a society united around a substantial conception of the ‘good’, but against problems within the Church itself. If we want to address the problem of abortion, for example, we might be better off seeking to deepen our understanding of what it means to worship the Triune God and reform our liturgies. It might be better to respond to the problem of abortion with a deeper attention to what it means for the Christian Church to be a place of hospitality and openness to the gift of life and with a renewed living out of what it means for the Church to be a family.

Political battles will generally be short-lived. They attack the symptoms of our culture’s disease, but fail to grapple seriously with the root cause — the fact that the heart of our society is corrupt. If our society is in darkness we would be far better off trying to live as ligth in the world, rather than trying to get new laws enacted to prohibit the darkness.

Once again, thanks for your thoughts.