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Noise

When I hear people eloquently and passionately expressing their points of view about various things that, until the last few years, had never really captured my imagination before, I wonder where I have been and what have I missed. These include seemingly burning issues like neo-calvinism, open theism, emergent-emerging-missional-attractional churches, the cultural and/ or Biblical basis of complementarianism verses egalitarianism, the Christian approach to homosexuality, social justice; the list seems to go on and on and there are people passionately advocating for churches to wake up to each. I am in favor of the prophetic words of warning that God sometimes gives us. I want to heed them and obey them once they become clear, deconstructing what God wants to change, recalibrating our witness and contextualizing our ministries so that the gospel is clear to people who live in our time. However, I am not in favor of creating a ministry philosophy that is based on blame. I have never met a Christian who truly hated homosexuals. I have never met a Christian who did not know that we must help the poor. I have never met a Christian who believed that sexual slavery of women was not our problem. I have never met a Christian who did not believe that in some way God is in control of all things. I have also never met a Christian who did not have major blind spots in their life; we greatly err sometimes. I think there are probably too many prophets in our day; too many people who are telling us what they think. Some of it is simply noise. Some of it is worse than noise. One of the greatest tests a prophet can have is a sympathetic audience.

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