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.
Can you imagine Jesus telling his disciples to get a divorce or abandon their children so they can can follow him? Can you imagine your pastor preaching a sermon like that in an attempt to convince lukewarm Christians to surrender their lives to Jesus? Of course not; that would immediately qualify Christianity as a cult wouldn’t it? Every Christian understands that Jesus would never affirm that Christian conversion or discipleship implies abandoning your spouse and children, destroying your family, to follow him. Why, then, do we Christians sometimes expect non-Christians to risk destroying their family to convert to Christianity or serve Christ faithfully? Usually, we quote this scripture from Matthew 10: 34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — 36 a man’s enemies will be t
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