Keeping Our Priorities Straight
Copyright 2003 by Shea Oakley. All rights reserved.
An American Evangelical environmental group recently joined the National Council of Churches in asking the question ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ In fact they went so far as to run television commercials in four U.S. states. Apparently the idea was to pose the question to the world as well as the Church. The somewhat predictable response from the former was probably best summed up on the cover of the magazine, Autoweek shortly after the ad was run. It featured a drawing of a huge SUV made up to look like a rolling Orthodox church with Jesus at the wheel (and a couple of apostles at his side). So much for using environmental issues for outreach.
The response of the Church? There doesn’t appear to be much of one. Evangelicals are not known for being at the forefront of the movement to ‘Save the Earth’ and for good reason. It is not our priority.
Most Christians understand that the primary mission of Jesus Christ was to save human souls, not the planet, and that the same should be true of the people who bear His name. Yes, the human responsibility to be good Stewards of the Earth is biblical. However that requirement pales in comparison with the incomparably larger one known as The Great Commission. Souls are eternal. Nature, as we know it today at least, is not. At some point in the future the present heavens and earth will pass away. In the mean time is it impolitic to propose that our most urgent cause is to labor in the spiritual fields our Lord told us were ‘white for harvest’?
The military has a term, ‘mission creep’. It describes what happens when an organization starts with a focused purpose but then begins to take on other responsibilities which distract from that purpose. The danger is that the original goal, as well as whatever new ones have been added, will not be achieved. Mission creep for the Evangelical movement means taking on anything that distracts from the central purpose from which the movement took its name, evangelism. One has to wonder how much money was spent paying for that ad. What did it accomplish? Non-Christians found it, at best, mildly amusing and, at worst, worthy of scorn. As for believers it seems to have done nothing more than perhaps muddy the water a little. What sort of effective outreach could have been accomplished if the funds had been used differently?
It is not that we are to disdain our place as stewards of this present creation. Evangelicals are not excused from doing their part to carry on the original task given Adam and Eve in the Garden. The question is not whether we should avoid polluting the stream that runs through our property or stop being conscientious about re-cycling. The question, rather, is whether we should consider it so important that we begin to castigate ourselves for not being in the forefront of environmental activism.
There is a second issue here as well. The environmental movement is shot through with Neo-Paganism. For many ‘Earth-Firsters’ nature has become the measure of all things and this is a very obvious form of idolatry. No, not every activist worships ‘Gaia’, but the core worldview of the movement has little to do with the biblical view of creation. Perhaps the Christians who ran the ‘What Would Jesus Drive’ ad felt that, in order to reach these people, we have to be interested in what they are interested in. Maybe, but there are many other ways to reach a person without taking on whatever that individual’s personal mantra happens to be. We can just as easily meet them in the workplace or in our neighborhoods as we can at an ‘Earth-Day’ rally.
The Apostle Paul once said that he would put on different hats depending on what kind of hat happened to be worn by those he was trying to reach with the Gospel. This was a good approach. But it is questionable whether that ever included him getting involved with a non-Christian worldview to the point of sharing in its wrong priorities. Finding out what Jesus would drive is not the important thing, preaching His Gospel is.