Election season invites a broad range of perspectives with countless candidates championing all points of view attempting to convince you and win your vote.
It’s always been this way – and it always will be.
In fact, experts predict that over $10 billion will be spent this year by all the candidates combined across federal and state races.
As much as that is, would it surprise you to learn that figure pales in comparison to the nearly $75 billion churches collect and spend each year in America?
Have you ever thought about what they spend it on? Naturally, it costs money to run a church – everything from construction, utilities and maintenance to the Bibles, hymnals and Sunday school curriculum. Then there are salaries of the pastor and others.
The unseen and even uncalculated spent dollars, though, revolve around the worldview a church produces and distributes via their preaching, programs and congregants.
We understandably spend considerable time absorbing, examining, and critiquing political messages that find their way into the cultural bloodstream. Yet the messages and themes promoted by churches often slip beneath the radar of most culture watchers.
Make no mistake: The local church has the potential to influence the culture every single day significantly and regularly.
“The church changes the world not by making converts but by making disciples,” observed John Wesley.
At Focus on the Family, we laud the local church and applaud its pastors and dedicated personnel. Yet, not all churches are equal in strength, effectiveness or doctrine. One of the untold and saddest of stories are those churches that have abandoned the Bible and converted their church into a social club that not only ignores Scripture – but heretically subtracts or adds to it.
Moderation seems to be a popular buzzword in both the political sphere and non-biblical congregations. From going along to get along, the temptation and near obsession to be seen as a “reasonable” person is preventing a lot of people from taking principled, albeit unpopular positions, on cultural issues.
To be sure, “reasonableness” is a biblical virtue, and Christians shouldn’t be going out of their way to provoke. After all, it was the apostle Paul who urged, “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone” (Phil. 4:5). But we can’t prioritize a desire to look sensible over the need to uphold Scripture.
By today’s cultural standards, it’s unreasonable to forgive, affirm the sanctity and exclusivity of one-man, one-woman marriage, oppose abortion at all stages of development, declare the reality of two genders – and believe there is just one way to Heaven.
As such, with culture going the wrong way, Christians must boldly and unapologetically go in the other. We can’t be moderates. We must be revolutionaries – countercultural champions who will endure the “slings and arrows” of the elites.
As a revolutionary, we don’t accommodate – we declare and uphold God’s truth with love and grace. We don’t water down or compromise doctrine to make our positions more palatable – we double down on the sovereignty and inerrant Word of God.
“The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it,” noted Dr. David Martyn-Lloyd Jones. He was right.
As Christians, we must not only dare to be different – but also daring in our willingness to accept and implement a countercultural lifestyle as we share the Good News of Jesus Christ.
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