The Rise of Churchless Commentators
On giving ethical guidance to Christians without being an active member of Christ's body
On my desk sits a sign someone had made for me on the week, in 2008, that I was officially installed as a pastor in my first church. It’s a sign I’ve had on my desk ever since, even as my calling has moved away from full-time pastoral ministry. When I served as an executive at the ERLC, it was on my desk and today, as I teach and write and speak, it still sits there.
I keep it for a few reasons. First, though I love what I do now, I do miss pastoring. I’m not talking about preaching, which I have the opportunity to do frequently. I mean being someone’s pastor—the one they come to when their life is upside-down, the one they call when they are in the hospital, the one they ask Bible questions. I even miss having sweet old ladies ask me to pray for their digestive problems five minutes before I go up and preach. I miss holding the hands of sweet saints as they take their last breaths before heaven. There are some things I don’t miss about pastoring. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and often lonely. But man the local church is where it’s at. It’s the locus of God’s work in the world.
I also keep this sign on my desk to remind me why I do what I do. My calling has me writing about big, national issues, in politics and the culture. I want to help Christians think well about how to steward their citizenship and how to live on mission in the world. I want to help equip the next generation of Christians in my work in Christian higher education. This often means tackling controversial issues. It involves disagreeing in public and making arguments. It means critique.
This kind of work is necessary. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing it. Yet that sign on my desk reminds me who I’m talking to. I’m doing cultural commentary, not as a spiritually disembodied brand, but as a brother or sister in Christ. I’m a member of a body, not a byline or an avatar or a position paper.
I get nervous about Christian cultural commentary — blogs, podcasts, books, newsletters, tweets— that is so isolated from local church life. I heard someone say recently that few of the bestselling books and little of the popular commentary that is highly critical of evangelicals are written by pastors. There is much we should heed in the deluge of anti-evangelical tomes. But there is some truth to this specific criticism. Pastors are engaged in the day-to-day sweat of the Christian community. They see up close the faces of the people that pollsters and sociologists want to put into faceless voting blocks. Pastors don’t see cohorts, they see people: the father working two jobs, the grandmother living on social security, or the college student with a midterm next week.
Ordination isn’t a qualification for cultural commentary, of course, but at the very least we should pay attention most to those who are embedded in church life, who can see the faces of the people they are talking about. When I talk about church life, I’m not just referring to casual attendance, but the rhythm of following Jesus together with other believers in close relationships.
You are probably less likely to take broad, condemning swipes at large blocks of Christians if, for instance, you are in a small group with a brother in his sixties whose wife is slowly fading from dementia, a man who limps in every week with a faded Bible and a weary smile. You are less inclined to think everyone but you is holding fast to the truth when you volunteer with the single mom doing everything she can to raise her kids to know the Lord. She probably doesn’t know about the latest online kerfuffle that has you worked up. You are going to be slow to keep hate in your heart for those far from Christ when you hear the stories of the elderly couple who invites neighbor kids to VBS and who gives food and Bibles to the homeless.
There is a cynical kind of cultural and political activity interested in only defending or critiquing Christianity without actually living it out in a community with Christians. I am less inclined to accept critique from folks who aren’t especially churchy. Those of us who do cultural commentary—who write, speak, and advocate— have to remember we are, first, members of a body.
This is why I’m grateful to be a member of a local Baptist church and why I’m grateful to be on the faculty at an institution that takes both the Great Commission and the Great Commandment seriously. We care about politics and culture because we love our neighbors and care about the policies that affect our neighbor’s flourishing. We care about ethics because want to obey Jesus’ command to “teach them all I’ve commanded you.” But we also take seriously the “going into all the world.” We are an evangelistic institution which means those of us engaged in cultural apologetics are confronted with the call to love our enemies and find ways to engage those whose worldview is vastly different. I’m convinced that both evangelism and ethics go together. Without ethics, evangelism can resort to a lowest-common-denominator compromise. But without evangelism, ethics becomes Phariseeical. It sees the world as only winners and losers, scoring points and owning the other side. Without grace, activists become outrage merchants, peddling cheap fear on the digital streets.
Evangelism is increasingly inconvenient in today’s polarized world. Jesus’ demands become a weight. How do I love my enemies if I’m supposed to crush them online with another meme? Caring about someone’s soul means I have to make arguments full of truth and grace (1 Peter 3:15-16).
These two worlds don’t have to be in conflict. Christ is Lord over all of it. In the Great Commission, we are tasked with going to “all the nations or ‘ethnos’ of the world” and with “teaching them all I’ve commanded you.” The Great Commission tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Loving our neighbors means caring for and advocating for their physical welfare as much as I can and it it means telling our neighbors the truth about their need for salvation in Christ.
In a sense, the way of Christ is it's own apologetic. It’s a well of living water in a world that only offers cracked cisterns. Ethics can be evangelism. Yet, the evangelism part demands we care about the person, not merely the argument.
One such person who embodied this well in the previous century was theologian Carl F. H. Henry, who helped guide evangelicals in ethics and social engagement and was an intentional, passionate evangelist.
We need more like him. Let’s be people who engage the lies of this age with truth, but do it connected every week to a local body of brothers and sisters and burning with a prayerful desire to see those far from God come home. And perhaps let’s only take seriously the critiques of those who see themselves, first, as redeemed fellow citizens of another kingdom.
Note: My book, Agents of Grace, shares more about how to live as faithful Christians in a confused world.