“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” – Proverbs 14:34
With the presidential elections just around the corner, we begin the week with a timely new series called Vote Like Jesus. Some years ago, I was in Ohio at a coffee shop when an Amish family pulled up in a horse-drawn buggy to get drinks and snacks (and just in case you were wondering, they paid with cash and not with a credit card).
They were wearing handmade clothes – the boys wearing pants with suspenders and the girls wearing dresses that covered them from head to toe. The boys wore hats while the girls wore bonnets. There was no gender confusion in this family. The family members spoke to no one, did not make eye contact, and were visibly uncomfortable. People started taking photos near their buggy and posting them on social media from their phones, and I’m unsure if the family even understood what was happening.
In that moment, it felt like the past and present intersected in a most peculiar way, and as they slowly drove away, sipping on their drinks along the shoulder of the road while cars whizzed past their buggy, I thought to myself, “Most Christians are Amish and don’t even know it.”
The world has changed, and most Christians are still living in the past. As a result, most Christian organizations, ministries, churches, and church leaders are ignorant, naïve, gullible, vulnerable, and living in the past while surrendering the future.
The world surrounding the Church has, in the Western world, quickly moved from positive to neutral and now negative. The magazine First Things describes itself as “America’s Most Influential Journal of Religion & Public Life.” In an article titled The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism, a convincing case is made that, in my lifetime, the greater cultural context in which Christianity exists, with minor exceptions in small pockets of conservative populations, has forever changed from positive to negative. (1)
As we begin our Vote Like Jesus series, we will discuss these changes and how it has impacted our culture and our politics as a nation. Come back tomorrow for a deeper dive into the change from a positive to a neutral to a negative world.
Are there aspects of your own faith that are “stuck in the past” and not aligned with today’s cultural landscape?
(1) https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism
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