In our first President’s Perspective of 2023, Ideos President, Christy Vines, gets personal and shares how Sunday dinners with her family shaped and molded her into the self-titled “empathy expert” she is today. Here is an excerpt: “I guess what I am trying to say is I know what it is like to feel self-righteous in these debates. To feel like it is my job to convince the rest of the world that what I believe to be true actually is. Not only that, but that people who do not see things as I do are somehow deeply flawed or in need of redemption. I even know what it feels like to damage and even lose relationships with people I care about. All because I was conditioned to believe that in the midst of battles over cultural norms and identity politics, my God-given role is to lead my side into victory. And in the pursuit of that victory, I have lost far more than I have gained.”

. . . there is also an economic price that we pay when empathy is largely absent a society or people group. That price means the suffering of some continues unabated. It means that some go uneducated or unhoused. It means we normalize large percentages of human beings behind bars irrespective of their crime or why they committed it. It also means that we continue to live as a divided nation where we intentionally look to build community with people who are just like us. More importantly, it means that we stop “seeing” others as worthy of our sacrifice or blessing. And not only are we paying that price here at home, places like Ukraine are paying an even dearer one as a result of a world order largely driven by a “me or us first” mentality.

. . . “the language called Esperanto was born of such considerations, and one more—the so-called Jewish question.” Esperanto’s creator, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof (1859-1917). . . was a Jew. One day he wrote to a friend, “My Jewishness has been the main reason why, from earliest childhood, I gave myself completely to one crucial idea . . . the dream of the unity of humankind.”

The evangelical church in America, especially over the past 75 years, has intentionally been built on homogenous growth principles. Popularized by the first wave of megachurch pastors and church growth experts, these principles encouraged churches to move out of urban centers into the suburbs, and to create cultures that were attractive to the growing middle class. Whatever the motives, the dominant form of evangelical church became large, majority white, and wealthy. There have been a host of unintended theological and missional consequences to this new reality. Some of these changes show up significantly and clearly when it comes to ethical questions around social issues that affect non-white populations in higher percentages.

The church’s life is to be one marked by sympathy and compassion, but more powerfully it is to be marked by an intentional and empathic understanding of the suffering and pain of others, and then living in active response to this knowledge. This is a calling to embrace, understand, and seek the blessing of all people. There are no barriers to this calling, just as the work of Christ had no barriers. Christ died for the sin of all, that all would be drawn to his kingdom. So too does the church engage in this work by being led along a path of  familial love that unifies us in our embrace of others. 

Tucked away in the 18th chapter of Acts, there’s a small scene with the Apostle Paul that, frankly, could have been written about any of us. Settling into Corinth, Paul goes about his normal work. He steps into the synagogue to reason with his fellow Israelites. It’s a strategy he’s used many times, and he’s encountered hostility before.