Here’s one from John Stonestreet on the BreakPoint podcast:
“Christians are quick to believe all the worst news about ourselves and then to beat ourselves in public. I’m not saying we shouldn’t repent, we shouldn't confess, we shouldn’t acknowledge the things that are wrong. Of course we should. And we should do it publicly. And we should do it with humility. But it’s not a virtue to just believe every rumor about ourselves and to speak badly about each other. This is my issue right now with some of the more vocal public spokespeople that are getting a lot of traction in various areas of culture is that they really make their living by talking about how bad we are. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they’re not. But church is the bride of Christ and this colleague of mine chastened me by saying, ‘You might want to be careful cause that’s God’s bride.’”
I like Stonestreet and try not to miss when he’s interviewed for “Culture Friday” on “The World and Everything in It.”
I also resonate with what he’s saying. But I’d nuance it a lot more. I feel very uncomfortable with how he put it in this podcast. The first half of the snippet, in my opinion, is right on. The second half is problematic.
For one thing, I hope he’s not including people who still love the church and participate in the church but are quick to confess our failings and cover our failures thoroughly in that group that “makes their living by talking about how bad we are.”
I agree that some of these Christians who seem to focus on our dirty laundry sometimes get unhelpfully imbalanced by failing to share good news about the church. And sometimes they generalize about churches and American Christianity in much the same way they chastise Christians for generalizing about non-Christians, political opponents, or the culture.
At the same time, outlets like BreakPoint rarely repent and confess and expose our many hypocrisies and failures. I know that’s the case because I listen to them a lot.
Frankly, I never knew what it means to be an equal opportunity critic AND cheerleader of both the church and culture until I started listening to Justin Giboney and Chris Butler of the AND Campaign on their Church Politics Podcast. They’re not perfect on this front (and they will be the first to confess that), but they come closer than anybody else in my experience. And it’s made me sensitive to the imbalance in others and myself.
I’d like to see Stonestreet and others like him be less defensive and more broken-hearted about the brokenness of Christians and our churches.
I’d like for him and others to expect any human endeavor to be flawed by our tendency to sin. In other words, we need to take our theology of sin and temptation and spiritual warfare more seriously and apply it to our lives and our evangelical institutions more thoroughly.
In fact, I believe that if he and others like him did that, there wouldn’t be such a cottage industry for Christians that may over-focus on what’s wrong and may be too quick to believe the worst about ourselves.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
