The Elephants in the Room.

Within some calls for unity and peace is a call to “just focus on Jesus.” Within this call is a desire to practice Christianity focused on salvation and eternity, not earthly things. This version of the gospel has a giant hole in it, denying our call to be peacemakers, reconcilers, and to walk humbly and do justice in the name of God. A Christianity devoid of justice or embodied practice has been a root cause for the divisions in our country. Without a whole Gospel, reflecting Christ’s mission statement echoing the words from Isaiah, there will be no unity with Christ or in the church, “

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

The origins of this gospel span the past two hundred years of American Christianity, reaching a climax with a mid-20th Century evangelicalism that prioritized the “decision for Christ”. Exemplified in Billy Graham’s crusades that ended with an invitation for stadiums full of people to respond to the gospel with a prayer or coming to an altar, this gospel was displaced from community, location, or transformation. The introduction of “political elements” to a gospel that is “just about Jesus” feels foreign and distracting for those focused on a gospel of a decision for Christ and awaiting eternity.

It is vital that our call to unity be holistic, with a focus on radical transformation, community, justice, and putting Christ's commands into practice.

In Letters from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated his frustrations with what he called the “White moderates” whose cautious nature, and lukewarm empathy for the cause of the Civil Rights Movement did more to preserve the status quo than the most outspoken opponents of the movement.

”First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season.”

As we enter any “peace making” or “unity” movement, we must acknowledge and confess the failure of espousing the values of peacemaking and refusing to do the actual work necessary to cultivate peace. Life in the middle, trying to “both sides” important issues, and maintain the status quo through a false peace or lack of conflict maintains injustice, brokenness, and the power of the majority. To deny this reality is to add to the suffering of those who have most longed for the true peace of the kingdom while they have suffered unjustly. Any conversation about politics, government, and law, must acknowledge the suffering of those who pray most for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done here, in America, as it is heaven.

When we speak of peace, we are speaking not of any absence of conflict, but a revolution of love. This is reality made possible by the kingdom breaking into our world.

There are so many factors that combined to create the perfect conditions for us to be terrible at meaningful dialogue in the church!

• The rapid expansion of denominations and non-denominational churches

  • Without enforced unity (through hierarchy), Protestants are all the children of theological divorce, played out time and time again. The freedom of exploration and ecclesial entrepreneurship has lead to huge blessings, new movements, and the creative expansion of the kingdom. It has also been detrimental to learning the skills of staying in a relationship with those we disagree with.

• Hyper Individualism

  • In a culture dominated by individualism, which has grown into a hyper individualism dominated by identity politics, we are hardwired to get things our own way. We want to customized and consume everything in our life, according to our preferences.

  • This has decimated spiritual formation efforts in the church and shaped a generation of church consumers who have little sense of the inherently communal nature of the kingdom of God

• Social Media!

  • So many studies show the ways in which social media has trained us to favor outrage, anger, and fear in our communications.

  • It is hard to imagine a more perfectly formed weapon against meaningful dialogue than the disembodied trolling of social media filled with misinformation and algorithm-fueled consumerism.

• Homogeneity is hard to overcome

  • The homogeneity of most Christian communities is difficult to overcome. Stasis is a seeming superpower for all of us. Crossing cultural barriers around ethnicity, race, and economics is rare and not highly valued.

  • This homogeneity principle was actually a founding principle used by church growth experts for the past 50 years. They celebrated the speed at which you could form communities that all looked alike, lived similarly, had the same socio-economic status, and voted the same. This was woven into the DNA of many churches.

• The Enemy-Making Machine is powerful

  • There are a host of ideological forces that are expertly teaching us to make enemies of those who do not share our beliefs or practices.

  • This is not a new sociological phenomenon, as humans love to organize themselves around a common enemy. We use the scapegoat of our enemy to justify our actions and to organize our common life.

  • Media, political parties, and companies, have figured out how to utilize these tendencies to manipulate us for their own agendas and goals. Finding Christian communities that understand this and are actively discipling their congregations against this malformation is very rare.

  • Even in communities where this is talked about and there is active resistance to the enemy-making machine, it is a long, hard, and uphill battle against a foe that is way ahead of us and has way more resources. This was just as true for Jesus as it is for us.

  • We have the resources of the kingdom of God at our disposal, but the kingdom works in such different ways than the ideological forces around us. God is non-coercive, the kingdom subverts, God heals rather than wounds… and it is a slow process to learn the ways of God.

• No matter your political persuasion, race, gender, or theological background, it is hard to live in this current cultural moment and not experience judgment, dismissal, or relational violence because of who you are or what you believe.

• Minorities, members of the LGBTQi+ communities, Native Americans, women, and others will point to these experiences as a normative part of their life. Now that they have been brought into the light and named, there is a new backlash of dismissal and threat of violence that is delegitimizing their experiences and working to silence their voices.

• Majority populations in the church (especially white evangelicals) have encountered what they experience as being stigmatized or dismissed in ways they have not experienced before. For politically engaged people, there is a deep sense that much of the nation is against them and that they are fighting for their vitality. Many of us, myself, especially included, are dismissive of this experience and carry little empathy for the religiously conservative and their experience. However, this data is vital to understanding what is becoming a ubiquitous impact of polarization. In a world of deep polarization, even those in the majority who have not had their rights denied and who wield considerable power feel marginalized, martyred, and rejected.

• At the core of why Ideos is engaging in this work of healing the church is the belief that empathic intelligence, the relational wisdom incarnate in Christ, is a necessary and often missing ingredient to partnering with God in reconciling all things.

• If we do not learn how to see the inherent dignity of all people, grow in our ability to relate across cultural boundaries, pay attention to how God is at work in the world, and grow in Christ-like humility and sacrificial love, we will never discover God’s power to heal what is broken

• The lines that divide us are crystal clear, and the only hope for breaking through these boundaries is to follow Jesus, to walk the way of empathy.

• This is primarily a spiritual transformation, not a political solution. But, when we learn to embody this wisdom, a politic rooted in the ethics of Christ will emerge and shape our imagination for the world. This will require a repentance of imagination, a surrender of all the ways that our minds have conformed to the patterns of this world. We need, as Paul says in Romans 12, the renewal of our minds, through unity with Christ, that we will no longer conform to the patterns of this world.

• The reason we are working at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, theology, and social sciences is so that we can utilize every resource for understanding how God has wired our brains and shaped our faith in order to renew our minds and to heal the malformations of our world.