Just Church (3)

In our last segment of this serialization, we were looking at how a new belief system is currently penetrating evangelical congregations. We saw that it begins with someone, or some group of people, who seems very, very nice ... well-intended, kind, and focused on making sure everybody is welcomed and included, and nobody is made to feel pushed to the margins, especially because of things like “race” and “gender”. It all sounds, at first, like a matter of simple Christian fairness, so it seems hard even to express a hesitancy about it.

However, as this new push for inclusion continues, it becomes apparent that more and more serious changes are involved. Every part of church life is starting to morph, and new people are becoming the voices that are heard first in important church decisions. Should you be concerned? You don’t know. Aspects of the new spirit that is coming over your congregation seem harmonious with Christian kindness; but if you’re attuned to the spirit of things, you’ll also notice a kind of hardness creeping in, a sort of coldness and unkindness to anybody who implies any problems with the new program might exist. And maybe you wonder if it’s all so thoroughly loving and Christ-like as it was first presented to be.

But even if you don’t have those intuitions of concern, you will notice practical changes are going on. Some seem necessary. Others ... you’re not so sure. And this is where we pick our story up.

Chapter 1: In the Side Door (continued)

As Time Passes

If you pause after a couple of years of this, you may notice that your church is starting to look very different from the one you’ve always known. You may even wonder if all the changes have been for the best; but you probably won’t speak those concerns because by now the momentum of church life is in that direction, and you’d feel like an unwelcome minority yourself if you were to let anyone know. So you’ll play along, but feel uneasy, perhaps. You’ll also realize that your church hardly does anything now without some gesture of affirmation of “inclusion” or “equity” or “justice”. Everybody now seems a bit nervous and guilty all the time, always sensitive that they might be being unfair in some way, and earnest to prove they’re not.

Theological issues and principles have also undergone a change. It’s not so much that the old confessions of faith have been eliminated as that they have been backgrounded in some ways; anything challenging or divisive, anything that might prove difficult for any particular group of people to accept for some reason, is no longer talked about, even if it remains encoded in some old mission statement still found in the dusty basement of the church. Inclusion has taken priority over doctrine, and the goal of being seen to be “loving” has taken precedence over any obligation to stand for truth — at least in an explicit way.

In the Longer Term

But the day will also come when you will no longer recognize your church as what it once was. The entire preoccupation has become about cultivating this air of inclusiveness, openness, and lovingness; but strangely, it doesn’t really feel very loving. It feels nervous, paranoid, anxious and agitated, despite the continual repetitions of how important it is for us to make everyone feel welcome, validated, content and loved. And you’ll realize that somehow you’ve ended up very far from where you ever thought you’d be as a church; and you’ll wonder whether you haven’t lost focus on what used to be important … being a community of believers who respond to the voice of the Lord, rather than continually obsessing over the this-worldly political concerns of various interest groups.

Then you’ll also notice a meanness creeping in, an us-and-themness that makes anybody who is uncomfortable with the new program eventually just leave the congregation, usually without telling anybody. And you may be uncomfortable with how risky it feels to ask any questions about what’s going on, or how summarily the current leaders now treat any dissent. Some of your friends will be gone and you’ll wonder why; but unless you’re really, really close to them, you probably will never know. More and more, you’ll see the average person who used to participate in church life no longer does, and more and more offices and roles are held by new people. You’ll also likely start to feel that the theology of the church is getting thinner and thinner, and more preoccupied all the time with the church’s political posture toward the outside world — to social issues, not to devotional life, and to current events, not to scripture.

In the End

Eventually, your church will be hardly anything like the one you used to be in. If you’re a sane person, you’ll begin to wonder why you’re there at all. It used to be so you could meet together with others who love Christ, worship, learn, and grow together. Now, it seems the entire purpose is to adopt militant postures to please the outside world, postures cynical toward your brothers and sisters in Christ. You’ll stop seeing a point to it, and eventually, maybe, you’ll make the move to a congregation more like your old one or drop out altogether.

To be fair, most churches today — at least most outside what have been called the “mainline denominations” — are not near that final stage yet. The forces producing the shift are too new for that. But many are starting down that sort of a continuum, and are already at the second or third stage in that pattern of decline.

What has happened is this: a strong current from the world has flowed into your church. And it came in not through the front door, with fanfare or an announcement, but quietly, amid the congregation itself, arriving through the side door.

What’s Going On?

It has come in, as scripture says, “unnoticed”. But it is not less present for all that, and it is not less dangerous for having crept in. In fact, that makes it far more dangerous than if it had arrived in a blaze of controversy or outright persecution. It became normalized and integrated before you even really knew it was there; but it has spread like a virus throughout the congregation. It came in by way of nice people — people whom you regarded as friends and fellow believers, and who maybe even are — but they’ve been affected and poisoned by the bad doctrine they picked up in their secular world. And now they’re a real problem.

What to do? These are our brothers and sisters. How can we refuse to listen to them if they are concerned about something? They’re so passionate and morally earnest: isn’t that apparent to everybody? How can we name them as the problem if they are our brothers and sisters in Christ?

But they just don’t seem content to quit … or really, to negotiate, and the church is morphing in very unhealthy directions, but we can’t seem to find a way to stop it. What can we  do?

Reasons for this Book

That’s the very question I’d like to help you to answer. My concern is for the local church in the face of this new belief system that has already started to make serious inroads. It’s part of a general social and ideological trend in the secular world, one of which I think most Christians are either insufficiently informed or to which they are completely oblivious. It’s the latest way the world is getting into the church — but in a much more insidious and aggressive form than we ever might have expected.

The name of the poisonous system is “Social Justice”. At first glance, those words seem like they’re indicating a good thing: don’t Christians want “justice”? And “social”, that sounds good too, like a lot of people are going to get justice. How could a Christian object?

But “Social Justice” isn’t what it seems. Instead of being about people getting a fair shake, it’s about making the way the world sees things into the way the church sees them too. It’s a whole package of highly questionable beliefs — and practices, because Social Justice advocates can never forget them — that amount to an alternate theology, a whole package of false doctrines and unbiblical things that stand to redirect the church towards the world’s purposes. Understanding how that can be so, and why Social Justice ideology has come into the church at this time is key to being able to recognize and deal with it.

Keeping it Positive

But I also am not setting out to be negative here. There are excellent books, both secular and Christian, on the subject of Social Justice — why it’s attractive, why it’s bad, where it comes from, and why we ought to resist it. All of that is abundantly done already.(1) What seems to me to be lacking is a strong positive response, a vision of the kind of church that God wants us to have instead of the Social Justice style of church, something that’s obviously even better than anything Social Justice ideology can ever offer, and something much more pleasing to the heart of God as well.

So I want to spend some time on being positive: on building that vision of a better church that can bump out and replace all the fervent but misguided projects of Social Justice without leaving a mere void in its wake. Something that can actually make the church better … happier … healthier … godlier … and more just.

Layout of the Book

The plan of the book goes as follows:

Chapter 2

In the next chapter I want to address the question “Why is this happening now?” Why haven’t we noticed any challenge coming in like this before, and where is it actually coming from? How is it different from what’s come before, and how is it different from a genuinely Christian way of looking at the same kinds of problems it proposes to address? We need a bit of that kind of understanding if we’re going to fend off objections like “Oh, you don’t really understand what we’re representing here” or “Why would you object to something so well-intended?” That means we have to talk a bit of history and philosophy here.

However, knowing (as I do) that some folks find lengthy treatments of that kind vexing, I’m going to try to stay light with it, bouncing off the high points rather than plunging deep into every dark crevice, and creating a sort of “helicopter view” of the landscape of Social Justice. The goal is simply to provide the broad map of the territory, not to bog everybody down in details. Useful is what we want this to be.

That being said, I’m also going to tell you the truth. I can assure you I have read and studied an abundance of Social Justice materials and the works of the theorists who came before them, and can back up what I say. Additional resources are going to be cited throughout, for those who have interest. But brevity will be my rule.

Chapter 3

In chapter 3 I want to turn our attention to the person I’ve been calling “the nice lady”. This is the person or persons likely to bring Social Justice activism into your congregation in the way described earlier in chapter 1. I talk about what she believes (and promotes), and why. My purpose here is to help leaders and decision-makers in the local church to recognize her quickly, to understand her, and to be aware of some of the strategies and attitudes with which she has been programmed. And programmed she is, a product of deliberate worldly propaganda and a system of lies. She may well be a victim in some senses, though she is not less dangerous for all that.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 deals with what gives the “nice lady” her power: primarily, the illegitimate call for guilt. I also want to deal with the consequences to the spirit of fellowship in the local congregation when she is given power. Throughout, I hope it will become apparent that there simply isn’t a healthy compromise between what she wants and what Christ has intended for the local church. We can either let her have her way or let the Lord have his, but it won’t be both.

Chapter 5

Those are the chapters about the negatives. In chapter 5, I want to turn to the positives — not to the positives of Social Justice, but to a positive biblical pattern for how Christians are supposed to relate to one another — one higher than anything the world, even with all its lofty ideologies, can ever understand or conceive. There, I want to help us to see what God’s purposes for our meetings are, because a church fortified with its own strong vision of the good is unlikely to be susceptible to the lies and strategies of Social Justice. We’ve got better things, things provided by God.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 follows up on the same theme: what have we got that’s so much better than Social Justice promises? But it’s also a chapter of contrasts, exposing the choices we have to make between the basic values of a biblical church life and the contentious, resentful and arrogant spirit that animates Social Justice ideologies. There really is a clear difference, and it’s never clearer than when we set these attitudes side by side.

Chapter 7

Finally, in chapter 7 I will share what I believe to be the biblical response to the intrusion of a “nice lady” into a local congregation. This chapter will be practical, linking specific strategies with specific cases, and showing how the word of God would instruct us to take action in each case.

A Road Map to a Response

Throughout the whole, my goal is to create the shortest possible manual for teachers, leaders, elders, committee members, workers and so on to respond to the threat of Social Justice quickly and with good knowledge of what they’re doing.

This book will not answer every possible question: it’s not designed to. It’s designed to provide that “map” of which I spoke earlier, the overview of the situation that will enable believers to recognize the dangers and make quick, effective responses to them.

But it has a further goal: to provide a very positive alternative. We don’t just need to know what not to believe, but what to believe in its place. The scripture has much to say about what we should have been believing and practicing all along in relation to our attitudes to one another; but perhaps we’ve forgotten that, or not felt the need for some time of refreshing our vision of that. The fact that Social Justice ideology has been able to make quick inroads suggests we need that.

In Short

Let me put all this concisely. The goal of this book is to fortify my brothers and sisters with the courage and supply them with the information to call out Social Justice Marxism for what it is, and to refuse its siren call and stand against it without feeling the illegitimate guilt that will be heaped upon them by people determined to make the church the latest engine of an utterly secular, this-worldly and fleshly social program. And it’s to keep the church what she must remain: a body of equal believers, undivided, in harmonious fellowship, worshipping without distinction, unified by the Spirit and being made into the likeness of the Son of God, loyal not to any human political project or ambition, but solely to the eternal objectives of our heavenly Father.

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(1) See, for example, Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.