Re: What's Wrong? [SK]

Jay,
I would suggest only one small change to your excellent post: The title should be "What's Wrong with the Church?"

I rarely--very rarely, in fact--say critical things about the church. My preference is to equip Christian leaders rather than criticize them. Yet you've raised a good point: If you talk to any pro-life group reaching out to students, you'll soon learn it's now axiomatic that with rare exception, campus fellowship groups want nothing to do with the pro-life movement. Generally speaking, they are too afraid they might turn people off if they get involved saving innocent human lives.

Well, at Cal Poly, the response of Christians to the abortion controversy did in fact turn-off at least one non-Christian, but not for reasons campus fellowship groups might expect. One of the students responsible for organizing the debate expressed her dismay that Campus Crusade would not attend the event or get behind promoting it with its members.

She asked me directly why I thought that was so. She thought for sure the Christians would show up and she was puzzled that they didn't. Their refusal to get involved turned her off.

I didn't know what to tell her. Perhaps CC had good reasons for not attending and I hold out hope it did, though it's hard for me to imagine what those reasons might be.

As Joe Carter suggested a few weeks back, one reason for the church's non-involvement is that Evangelical leaders by and large aren't all that troubled by abortion. It's simply not a priority for them:

If evangelicals--and Christians in general--truly cared about this issue, abortion on demand would not be the law of the land....Imagine if every pastor in America had the courage to stand in the pulpit and deliver the Gospel-centric message that God abhors this slaughtering of the innocent and that for the church to tolerate this sin is a fecal-colored stain on the garment of Christ's bride.

But it will never happen because the evangelical church isn't committed as the church to rectifying this grave injustice. We never have been.

As I've said before, Christian leaders have it all wrong. My own experience suggests that far from turning people off, a persuasive pro-life case, graciously communicated, suggests to non-believers that maybe, just maybe, the Christian worldview has something relevant to say to the key issues of our day. But when we fail to even put in an appearance at key debates, the message to non-Christians is that we simply don't care about the big stuff.

And then we bemoan the fact that few people take us seriously.

Wasn't it Woody Allen who once said that "eighty percent of success is just showing up?"