Usually, the call to be world-transformers comes from church leaders:
pastors and theologians. It comes in different forms. Sometimes it’s
the biblically defensible application of Christ’s announcement that his
church is a city on a hill, his followers “salt and light” in the world.
They are to be what they are where God has placed them, in their many
different callings in life.
On other occasions, though, it is a more general and somewhat vague
but nevertheless urgent call to a deeper, broader, and collective
activism. On the right, it tends to be a call to greater personal and
public morality. Reacting against a familiar agenda, many younger
evangelicals don’t want to be the Fox Network at prayer; whatever their
politics, they want to make a difference in the world by radical
discipleship, sacrificing their personal comforts for suffering
neighbors at home and around the world. No doubt sociological
demographics plays a role in where one lands. Younger people, either
single or without children, are freer to focus their energies on a
broader range of neighbors, while later they find themselves focusing on
the family, both at home and in the public square.
Maybe the obsession reveals more about the dangers of ministers
stewing in our own juices—perhaps even suffocating in the caverns of
regular ministry—that we don’t get out much. But what about their
parishioners? Is the most important thing we have to say to them that
they are not making a difference in the world, making touchdowns for
Jesus, and transforming culture?
Think of the nurse who dragged herself out of bed to attend the means
of grace after having worked a fifteen-hour shift. Ministers shouldn’t
feel guilty for not having cared for the physical needs of hundreds of
neighbors in the hospital this last week. But why should they load down
this nurse for failing to “live her faith” because she extended hours
of neighbor-love in her ordinary vocation rather than as an identifiable
church-related “ministry”? Continue at
Michael Horton
