Hansen / Keller Blind Spots

Becoming a Courageous, Compassionate, and Commissioned Church
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4335-4626-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: Cultural Renewal

Christians talk a lot about church unity. Unfortunately, however, God's people are often better known for their divisions and disagreements than for a common commitment to the gospel. At the root of this disunity are the blind spots that prevent us from seeing other points of view and reevaluating our own perspectives. In this provocative book, Collin Hansen challenges Christians from various 'camps' to view their differences as opportunities to more effectively engage a needy world with the love of Christ. Highlighting the diversity of thought, experience, and personality that God has given to his people, this book lays the foundation for a new generation of Christians eager to cultivate a courageous, compassionate, and commissioned church.

Collin Hansen (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the vice president for content and editor in chief for the Gospel Coalition and the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and wrote Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. He is an adjunct professor and cochair of the advisory board at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. You can follow him on X at @collinhansen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hansen, Collin

Keller, Timothy

Leseproben

1

Pointed Fingers and Helping Hands

It can be embarrassing to identify as a Christian. Every time you turn on your smartphone, car radio, or cable TV, someone is mocking your antiquated, harsh, prudish religion. You’d better avert your eyes from the comments sections and message boards. You don’t want to scroll your mentions on Twitter. And that’s just the Christians talking about each other. Sure, we’ve lost some credibility with the culture. But how did we also lose trust in one another inside the church?

You’re not sure whom to believe in this hazardous climate of perpetual outrage. Yet you feel pressured to pick sides. At least I’m not that kind of Christian, you assure yourself. I’d never attend that church with the sign out front that says, “Stop, drop, and roll doesn’t work in hell.” Or that church across the street promoting a “50 Shades of Grace” sermon series. Body piercing may have saved your life, but you let your actions and not your T-shirts do the talking.

Even so, it’s not enough to disagree privately. You need everyone to know your disgust for whatever those bigoted/compromised/know-it-all Christians said this time. How dare that man on TV claim to speak for God and you! Hell hath no fury like an embarrassed Christian.

We talk a lot about church unity. So where is the evidence that we actually want it? If you’re anything like me, you’re as much of the problem as the solution. You love other Christians so long as they make you look good to the world. You lament the divided church, yet you’re quick to speak about the problems you see with other believers. You bemoan the church’s ineffective public witness in a changing culture, yet you offer the same self-congratulatory solution to every new challenge. You find problems at the end of your pointed fingers and solutions in the mirror. In reality the finger pointed toward the mirror tells you where to search first for the problem.

We all have blind spots. It’s so easy to see the fault in someone else or in another group but so difficult to see the limitations in ourselves. Unless you learn to see the faults in yourself and your heroes, though, you can’t appreciate how God has gifted other Christians. Only then can you understand that Jesus died for this body, which only accepts the sick. Only then can we together meet the challenges of our rapidly changing age.

Maybe God has softened your heart with compassion for the broken, weak, and abused.

Or he has gifted you with great courage to stand with truth.

Or he has commissioned you with particular zeal and effectiveness to make disciples in all the nations.

God doesn’t want us to look down on and suspect the worst of one another. Rather, he intends us to use these diverse gifts to love the world in a church united by the gospel of Jesus Christ. This moment demands our humility, bravery, and creativity. Why should the world know us by our disharmony, discouragement, and disillusion?

Never beyond Hope

As we point fingers at each other in the church, the world desperately needs our helping hands. Consider our predicament. We in the West learn from a young age that we’re happy only if we’re free to choose our life adventure. So we trust no one and commit nowhere. Until we turn to Christ, we worship nothing more sacred than self. And we have no greater goal than to be personally healthy and wealthy.

Thankfully, the gospel speaks to every age, including one with no higher aspirations for life than the freedom not to need anyone else except on our guarded terms. And God makes you, Christian, an ambassador of that good news: we can be reconciled to our Creator and live at peace with one another.

Rather than see us as ambassadors of peace, much of the world views the church as oppressive and self-interested. As a result, religious authority has been displaced, despite two millennia of Christian formation that gave shape to nearly every hope and right the West treasures. The new reality can hardly be considered an improvement. The world wonders why our social ties have frayed. Why neighbors don’t look out for each other. Why couples don’t want to get married and don’t stay together when they do. Why we’re plunging into demographic crisis as we wait so long to have children and then stop at one. Why corrupt, ineffective politicians think shouting at each other on news programs will solve problems. Why businesses subsume ethics to the bottom line. Why revolutions depose one despot to replace him with another. Why media promise leisure but leave us nervous and bored with yet another reality TV show intended to make our lives seem somewhat tolerable by comparison. Why our children feel the need to look and act like porn stars if they want to feel affection.

The picture looks bleak. You see it every day in your neighborhood, on the TV, and on your favorite websites. Christians dare not gloat over such suffering. We share in both the responsibility and the effects. We can relate to this disenchantment, because we’re tempted even inside the church to see life in terms of control and power. We, too, fear everyone else is out to get us by limiting our freedom. We can’t escape the culture wars.

Compelled by gospel love, however, we ambassadors of Christ know how to negotiate a truce—that is, if we’ll first lay down the arms we’ve taken up against one another.

This book aims to help you see where perhaps you’ve gone astray and how to reorient yourself to follow Jesus and love your neighbor. Let’s start small. Can you love a fellow Christian who sins differently than you do? That shouldn’t be hard. You’ve confessed sin. You know you fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). Now let’s get specific. If you live in an affluent area, do you regularly spend time with Christians tempted by laziness and gluttony? If you live in a middle-class neighborhood, can you identify close friends who confess their greed and arrogance?

If not, you may not understand the significance of God’s forgiveness of your sins, and you may neglect to point others to find that same forgiveness by believing the gospel. This good news unites you as family to someone who may seemingly share nothing else in common with you except humanity. And the gospel creates an alternate community that reminds the world how much we all share as we bear the image of God.

What a contrast this gospel offers to the world! Everywhere we see the need and longing for community. On this planet we’ve never been more closely linked together due to our social media, volatile climate, massively destructive weapons, and multinational corporations. To live together peacefully and in prosperity we need basic consensus on what makes life well lived. True community shares a vision for the kind of character we want to cultivate in our children. But you can’t even count on such agreement these days at your local PTA meeting or Little League game.

By the grace of God we Christians can show the world a better way. Jesus is our guide. He tells the truth about the world. And he gives life to all who ask. When his followers rest together in the love of a long-suffering God who does not share his glory with another, we can give up the fight for our reputation and get on with the work of the kingdom. Even now you can enjoy fellowship overflowing from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who from all eternity have loved in perfect harmony. If this God is for us, who can be against us? And how can we be against each other?

Because of this gospel, we can see opportunity in the rubble. We can find hope in the ruins.

Already you can see encouraging signs of this counterrevolution of grace. In your Christian community you can almost certainly find youthful zeal to love your neighbors near and far in practical ways. Look hard enough and you’ll see new churches that love their neighbors and welcome the stranger to hear about Jesus. You’ll see Christians standing courageously against injustice and telling the good news about Jesus at great risk. You’ll enjoy artists and musicians who beautify our world to serve our creative God. Our heavenly Father forgives our finger-pointing and forbears our foolishness. With Jesus we’re never beyond hope.

Three Responses

So that we don’t squander that hope, you and I need a new narrative to understand our debates in the church and engagement with the world. Since at least the late 1800s and early 1900s, American Christians have been preoccupied with the battle between fundamentalists and modernists. This struggle has sought to situate Christians along a spectrum where they tend toward one side or the other. Depending on your perspective, modernists either update Christianity as necessary for a changing world or sell out the fundamentals of the faith for popularity. As for fundamentalists, they either defend Christianity in a hostile world or consign their neighbors to judgment. You could try to make peace in the...