I do believe the church has absconded its mission in the manner this lays out. Its been said here before more/less, and the comments here are pointing to the church's apathy and allowance and lack of real outreach poor and sick (I'll add that the requisite "drives" the churches have are not really outreach)
I like his mention of the idea of big churches having a clinic for example.
Having been plugged in in TX a bit to the benevolence ministry, it was a constaant struggle between halp everyone and dont let moochers take from real needs. I dont know how to thread that needle.
http://www.americanvision.org/article/second-group-christians/
In a parable about stewardship in Luke 19, Jesus tells His hearers
to "occupy until I come." The New American Standard translates the
verse this way: "Do business until I come." The verse prior to the
parable gives the context: "While they were listening to these things,
Jesus went on to tell a parable, because He was near Jerusalem, and
they [His listeners] supposed that the kingdom of God was going to
appear immediately" (Luke 19:11). Since this parable immediately
follows the story of Zaccheus' conversion, we have no reason to assume
that Jesus is speaking to a different audience. In this parable, Jesus
actually speaks of three groups of people: (1) faithful and productive
stewards, (2) unfaithful and unproductive stewards, and (3) His
enemies. The rewards doled out to the first group and the punishment
given to the third seem to be fair enough to our 21st century
sensibilities, but the parable is really directed at the second
group—the most populated of the three—the unfaithful and unproductive
stewards.
If we were really honest with ourselves, we would be quick to admit
that we do in fact belong to the second group. Each of us have been
given talents and abilities that are seldom used to their maximum
effectiveness. Far too often, we are more than willing to stand in the
shadows and allow our gifts to go unnoticed. And when this happens on
an individual level with alarming regularity, we should not be too
surprised when it begins to happen to the church as a whole. The Church
in America has an astounding physical presence—a church can be found on
nearly every corner in every town—yet the shadows loom large enough so
that even these buildings can remain hidden to the culture. Rather than
being the central point of contact in the community, the church has
become just another building on the landscape—visible yet invisible.
As the church has become more and more invisible, the federal
government has become more and more visible. This shouldn't come as a
revelation to most readers because as Robert Nisbet has pointed out:
Politics and religion are and will
always be adversaries; this, be it noted, by virtue of what they have
in common as much as by what separates them... Only in the mass
followings of the Caesars and Napoleons of history are we able to find
phenomena comparable to the mass followings of Jesus and Mohammed. But
what makes them analogous also makes them adverse. When religion is
powerful, as it was in the Middle Ages, the political tie is weak,
raddled, and confused. But when the political tie becomes powerful, as
in the modern totalitarian state, the role of religion is diminished—in
large measure as the result of calculated political repression but also
as the result of the sheer lure of the political-ideological "church." [1]
Nisbet echoes Robert Winthrop, who 150 years earlier said this:
All societies of men must be governed in
some way or other. The less they may have of stringent State
Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The
less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely
on private moral restraint. Men, in a word, must necessarily be
controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them;
either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the
Bible, or by the bayonet. It may do for other countries and other
governments to talk about the State supporting religion. Here, under
our own free institutions, it is Religion which must support the State.
[2]
What both Nisbet and Winthrop are saying is that when men are
self-ruled under God's law—that is, when the church is properly doing
its job—the civil government is all but unnecessary. But when men are
lawless and refuse to be self-governed and demand freedoms that do not
rightfully belong to them—that is, when the church isn't doing its
job—they will find a tyrannical dictator for themselves who will
promise to give them everything they want. It is this second state, the
unhappy one, in which America in the year 2009 finds itself.
It is one thing to say that America is in the state that it's in
because the church hasn't been doing its job, but it's completely
another to propose a solution to begin turning the tide back again. Not
only is the American church asleep at its post, it is completely
oblivious and apathetic in the few short hours that it is awake on
Sunday mornings. And, as Mark Steyn points out, this is exactly what
must happen for tyrants to flourish: "Big government depends, in large
part, on going around the country stirring up apathy — creating the
sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even
attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting
headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that
only government can deal with them." [3]
Steyn's phrase "stirring up apathy" is as brilliant as it is
oxymoronic, but this is exactly what government does. It seems rather
counter intuitive to think of creating apathy by calling attention to
it, but the government has been doing this for a long time and has
gotten quite good at it. By "stirring up apathy" the government creates
job security for itself by pretending to clean up each and every mess
that it has made. It was big government that got us into this mess, and
now we are expected to believe that only big government can get us out?
Stirring up apathy indeed.
But what does this mean for the rest of us, those of us in the
second group of Jesus' parable? I would submit that we are in the midst
of an unprecedented opportunity for second group Christians to begin
coming out of the shadows and exercising their talents and abilities.
Jesus said to "occupy" or "do business," and that is exactly what we
should be doing: taking care of business. There are two major themes in
President Obama's current dismantling of the American system: debt and
health care. It should have occurred to some of us by now that the
Bible has much to say about both of these areas; both are mandates
given to the church and should be taken seriously. The Bible tells us
that the borrower is slave to the lender and that debt is surefire way
to create a cycle of dependency, making slavery a habit. The Bible also
speaks about ministering to the sick and the hungry, alleviating pain
where possible and filling stomachs when necessary. These mandates were
not given to the government, but the modern-day "Church of the Dark
Shadows" has allowed government to walk right in and take its God-given
mission field away. This is unacceptable, not to mention unbiblical,
and the church can expect to stay right where it is, invisibly
attempting to reach the world for Christ, until it gets back to its
basic mission of being a father to the fatherless and a husband to the
widow.
Imagine—it's easy if you try—a world where every church member is
out of debt and every child that dreams of becoming a doctor will work
in the medical clinic that his own church operates. Imagine—it's not
hard to do—a world where second group Christians are being encouraged
and provided with nearly limitless opportunity to exercise their gifts
and abilities in a church that serves as the community center; a church
that provides education, restoration, rehabilitation, and
sanctification to a community of lost and hurting people, people who
have gambled everything on the government and lost. Imagine—I wonder if
you can—a world where the church doesn't need, rely on, or fear the
government, because it has each other and, most importantly, it has
Jesus and that is enough. In fact, it is more than enough because
there's always some to share. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not
the only one. The real dreamer is the one who—like John Lennon—puts his
hope and faith in man, rather than the God Who called us to these tasks
in the first place.
Mark Steyn ends his article with these words:
Of course we're "vulnerable": By
definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the
principle of preemptively "taking care" of potential "vulnerabilities"
is to make all of us, in the long run, far more vulnerable. A society
of children cannot survive, no matter how all-embracing the government
nanny... Once big government's in place, it's very hard to go back. [3]
He's right, of course, but one must ask: "Hard to go back to WHAT?"
Steyn and the rest of the conservatives must begin looking a little
deeper than simply getting rid of "big government." Big government is
bad, we agree, but what do you replace it with? The sweat, grit, and
bootstrap determination of the individualistic American making his own
way in life is a great story for Hollywood, but doesn't fit the bill
for the real world. What we need are focused occupiers, doing the
business of the church who have no need of the welfare and the
financial slavery that big government is peddling. They may be able to
make us pay for it, but they can't make us use it.
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Cool Im banned TOO.
Enjoy it Holten and Company!
