A Problem of Perception: Changing How the World sees Evangelicals
Copyright 2005 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Thanks largely to the untiring efforts of Bono, social activist and lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, both the secular world and the church have been reminded of late of the pressing need to fight poverty in Africa. The results have been the recent agreements by Western nations to provide debt relief as well as increased aid to the continent. Bono recently acknowledged the evangelical contribution to this effort in a Rolling Stone interview in which he expressed some surprise at the generosity of a wing of Christianity that he once wrote off as hypocritically angry and socially unconcerned.
It is gratifying to hear that one of the leaders who galvanized the new initiative to bring hope to suffering Africans has rethought his view on the evangelical world. It is also disturbing to know that he had to. It shows that we are perceived as more interested in the ongoing "culture war" against public manifestations of sin than we are with the biblical mandate to feed the poor and heal the sick. This should not be.
There was a time when Christianity was more identified with "Good Samaritanism" on a global scale than with the perceived effort to legislate biblical morality in nations populated by people who are today largely ignorant of anything biblical. This is a bit ironic considering the Herculean efforts of Christian organizations like World Vision and Habitat for Humanity around the world, especially during the tsunamis and earthquakes of recent years. The fact of the matter is that evangelicals have given many millions of dollars; not only to spread the Gospel to disaster victims, but to also offer them critically needed material aid with no questions asked.
We have, to a large extent, an undeserved bad rap.
But it is likewise true that we have let some extreme (and disproportionately vocal) fundamentalists in our camp give the impression that Bible-believing Christians are mostly about self-righteously condemning the world to Hell. To the degree that we have not countered this impression we are in some sense corporately guilty for the reputation we have acquired in the West. Until Christians can effectively communicate that we love the lost more than we condemn them we will be pilloried as a people who hate in the name of the God.
While we do have a divine mandate to let our lights shine in dark places, in order to expose how dark those places really are, we do not have one to judge the sinner rather than the sin. Unfortunately this has sometimes been the case when evangelicals enter the public square. At times the impression we give is that we want to see homosexuals and abortionists punished more than we want to see them redeemed. This kind of pharisaical spirit turned off non-believers 2000 years ago and it still does today. What gets lost is our ability to reflect the winsomeness of our Savior, the kind of winsomeness that drew thousands of seekers into His presence during the three years of His earthly ministry.
The solution to the problem is to so actively encourage the love motivation to take hold of our churches that the words of the self-appointed "angry prophets" are drowned out by the grace-giving actions of the rest of us. While we can also counter fundamentalist excesses with our own public words it will be our deeds that will most likely speak more loudly. We would do well to take a page from the life of St. Francis of Assisi who told the believers of his time that he preached the gospel every day, and sometimes used words.
Hopefully Bono will not be the last representative of the prevailing culture to have his eyes opened to the authentic love and generosity of the true church, but this will only happen if we are intentional about it. It is up to the children of God to make certain that the same love that drew us to Christ we likewise extend to those who remain lost. We can and must do this, even if it is for no other reason than because we were just as lost as they before the Good Shepherd found us.