The Call and Challenge of Re-Presenting Jesus

We tried out a new section this year in our annual Christmas letter by providing a brief description of the notable books for the year. Although we are just one month into the new year, I’ve already read one of the books I’ll surely pick for next December’s letter.

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” by Tim Alberta, starts out by recounting a personal story about the unexpected death of his dad and his journey back home to pay tribute to his dad’s life. His dad had been the pastor of a large evangelical church outside of Detroit.  Tim had grown up in this church and called it “home.” 

Following the day’s services, where Tim had provided a heartfelt tribute, he and his wife, while resting in the living room of his parents’ home, were given a handwritten note from one of his dad’s friends and a long-time elder of the church.  This note, composed and delivered on the day of his dad’s death, excoriated Tim for not supporting Trump.  Tim’s criticisms of the president amounted to treason against both God and country. There was an evil plot to undermine God’s ordained leader and Tim was a part of it.

The in-your-face note sickened Tim despite the elder promising to “pray” for him.  His dad, his hero, had just abruptly left this earth and this was neither the time nor place for such a note. It was flat-out disrespectful, to both his dad and him.  As my dad used to say in his typically understated way, it was “uncalled for.”

Tim passed the note to his wife, the calmer of the two within their marriage, who then shrieked, flung the note into the air, and loudly asked, “What the hell is wrong with these people?”

Tim and I are dissimilar in many ways. I came from Alaska, and Tim from the East Coast. I’m retired with grown kids and Tim still works and has younger children. Tim’s a nationally known journalist, and I was a fishery scientist and science administrator.

But we also have a few things in common. We both came from well-adjusted families with good parents.  We are both evangelicals who are outspoken in our faith. We both “grew up” in church.  And in the past few years, we both have embarked on a search for answers, Tim through his reporting and me through my blog, to the more general question: what has happened to our faith tradition? 

“The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory” provides a fascinating insight into the current state of the evangelical church. Tim answers his wife’s question by weaving together the stories of a diverse group of evangelical leaders representing different perspectives about the state of the church. It’s not a condemnation of churches or conservatism, but a chronicle of the politicizing of the evangelical movement in America by an insider who, like me, is still a devout evangelical Christian.

As I read the book, several repeated topics appeared, and I’ve organized them into a list of seven themes that together provide a useful summary of the book as well as a detailed answer to the question his wife first asked. Entire articles could be written on each of these themes, which have long been debated throughout American history. I’ll leave those for another time.

For now, I’ll lean heavily on points made by Alberta to provide a brief perspective on how I (and likely Tim) believe the evangelical church is currently missing the mark. Note that I’ve used the word “we” rather than “they” to describe the following seven areas of deficiency, given that I’m still part of that tradition and given that in times past I’d likely embrace at least a few of these shortcomings.

We’ve normalized the currency of fear  

The book of Proverbs says, “The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.” Bruce Springsteen, although no modern prophet, provides a more graphic characterization of that snare: “Fear’s a powerful thing. It’ll turn your heart black you can trust. It’ll take your God-filled soul. Fill it with devils and dust.”

Yet fear’s been a constant ingredient of American Christianity. I still remember the feeling of torment by the church sermons of my youth, especially those meant to “scare the hell” out of us. I remember the feeling of hopelessness because I inherently understood that if I had unforgiven sins the second before Jesus came, I would go to hell. Given the uncertainty of Jesus’ return, the fear of unforgiven sins became a constant torment which was then compounded by the threat of the unpardonable sin.

The “fear of neighbor” has been another constant since the Pilgrims first landed in America.  The Puritans hung four Quaker “Boston martyrs” over fears about differing religious beliefs. Concerns about moral decay fueled additional unjust hangings based on accusations of witchcraft which proved false. Fears over the loss of America’s civil and religious liberty inspired 19th-century Protestants to form the nativist Know-Nothing Party in defense of traditional religious and political values from the growing and subversive immigrant Catholic influence.

(Note that the fear of immigrants continues today, with 65% percent of white evangelical protestants saying that they fear immigrants are eroding the nation’s character and traditions. Fifty-one percent completely or mostly agree with the statement “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background”)

In the early 1980s, partisan fear helped launch the Christian interest group Moral Majority. They said America was “floundering to the brink of death” through the onset of moral decay. Liberal Issues such as abortion, divorce, feminism, and gay rights were attacking American families and destroying traditional values.   

Now fast forward thirty years and you will learn from Alberta’s reporting that many in the church believe that not only is America still racing down that road to imminent death, but that your children are being groomed, your guns will be confiscated, medical treatments questioned, faith banned, and that America is on the road to nazi Germany through the IRS attack on churches. “They” (global cabal?) have also seized control of American political parties, manufactured a deadly virus to control the population, aborted babies to create a deadly vaccine, and are banning faith from public life.  Clearly, the barbarians of the godless, socialist, left are at the gate and just one step away from destroying the Christian way of life. 

This constant and sustained diet of fear has led evangelicals to recently assert that they are the most persecuted group in America. The world is out to get them, they believe, and destroy their way of life. Their champion, God’s chosen vessel, is under constant attack. And if you were able to extract yourself out of that partisan echo chamber, you would find that all of those narratives were at best, half-true.

Now compare these fabricated persecution narratives with the mindset of the early church. They experienced real persecution, the type that led to public martyrdom. Yet they showed grace and kindness through a posture of faith. They honored Christ’s teaching: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” They followed Peter’s admonitions of “repay evil with blessing,” but “Even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.”  They knew the story of the apostle Paul who had taught the same message and then practiced what he preached.

The early church believed the passage my mom taught us as kids: “God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” Then they practiced what they believed, living a life where faith triumphed over fear.

Hebrews 12:1-3 says “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up.” 

Given that fear is one of those sins that weigh us down and trip us up, isn’t it time we strip it off?

We’ve exchanged fact-based truth for lies

This was the opening song of Bob Dylan’s first gospel album after converting to Christianity in the 1970s.  It was a big deal in my day, especially within my fundamentalist circle.  One of the cultural “bigs” of the other side had crossed over to ours.  Plus, it spoke our language that you either served the “world” or God. 

Dylan could as well have sung, “You gonna be discipled by somebody” (or some philosophy). It may have lacked the same easy-to-sing cadence, but it conveys a similar message as service and discipleship are joined at the hip, often two sides of the same coin. Serving Christ, for example, means we will arrange our lives around the practices, life, and truths of Jesus so that we can be like Him, changed into His image. When we do that, we are called His disciples. 

But discipling is an equal opportunity taskmaster. We are constantly being formed by the world around us.  Every day we encounter influential people and messages, all vying for our attention. Those “influencers,” along with our family, peer group, sociocultural environment, and many other factors, create a complex fabric through which we see ourselves, develop our identity, and create our life stories. Then the stories we end up with reveal our values, aspirations, and what we see as meaningful.

This penchant for storytelling is an innate part of our nature. Our stories serve as a fundamental mode of cognition, a feature of our neurological system built to impose story structure on life experiences.  And even when those life experiences don’t make sense, our storytelling mind keeps on working, able to “churn out true stories when it can but will manufacture lies when it can’t.” 

Alberta documents how millions of evangelicals still believe that the 2020 election was stolen as part of a demonic plot against America.  They explain away the 60+ election court cases lost by the Trump legal team by asserting a global cabal had seized control of American institutions including the courts. They assert that the COVID-19 virus had been manufactured to control the population and that the COVID vaccine was made from aborted baby parts with Christian leaders such as Francis Collins in the know.  Many continue to assert that Trump is the legitimate president and will be returned to office before the end of Biden’s first term. 

None of these stories are founded on evidence.  All of these fabrications are the fruit of a long-term discipleship campaign from a powerful media messaging machine. Ministries and nonprofit organizations, driven by political agendas, then pile on, finding it profitable to bombard the mail and social media of church-going evangelicals. Many of them sell and stoke evangelical fear about the cultural decline of America.  Others provide selective historical evidence to promote the myth that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”

Pastors can’t compete with the multiple hours each day given to these ideological messaging machines. An hour on Sunday neither provides sufficient time for producing spiritual formation nor sufficient time to counter the machines’ messages. Recall how the apostle Paul repeatedly admonishes us to “put off” so that we can “put on” Christ.  That’s because we must first be discipled from certain attitudes and beliefs before we can be discipled into a Christ-likeness spiritual formation. 

When that spiritual formation doesn’t happen, discipling will still occur, but the church now marches to the beat of a different drummer.  Michele Margolis, in her book “From Politics to the Pews,” shows how politics rather than religion has now become a first cause for people’s beliefs. Our religious language then becomes a type of mask used to justify issues we’ve evaluated based on political rather than scriptural criteria.  And lies and misinformation become just another tool because in this deeply divided world, where everything lies downstream of politics, the ends justify the means.

We fabricated the story of America.

While making a speech to the Republican National Convention, Alberta recounts how Vice President Mike Pence took a passage from Hebrews 12 and then revised it to say,” Let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents.” 

For those of us who grew up in Sunday School or with moms who daily made us memorize the Word of God, this was flat-out idolatry.  “Old Glory” isn’t Jesus, the subject of the uncorrupted and sacred passage of scripture.  The race “marked out for us” points towards an eternal, not political, destination.

America isn’t the new Israel, God’s chosen nation, or anything remotely related to that. Scripture calls nations like America “as a drop of a bucket and are counted as the small dust of the balance.”

Yet many believe that God’s plan for America is connected to God’s plan for Israel.  America, they say, echoing the Puritan John Winthrop, is a city on a hill, the new Israel established by Godly men adopting Godly principles and designed to live by God’s chosen laws. 

It’s true that most of the founding fathers were religious. Some were professing Christians, and four might be considered evangelical. But that doesn’t mean that they wanted to form a Christian nation.  Many of them came from families that had fled religious persecution. This persecution had come from the church – from other Christian traditions similar in tradition and doctrine.  They didn’t want that repeated in America, forced to live under the thumb of someone else’s “Christian Values.” 

Other founding fathers and pastors thought differently, believing America should be declared a Christian nation. They favored theocratic rule over government, the legal system, and cultural institutions. The relationship between church and state should not be separate but connected, with the former ruling the latter.

Those favoring a Christian nation lost the day. The Constitution became a secular document bounded by the no establishment doctrine and the no religious test of Article VI. Rather than ensuring America would be Christian, the framers chose to guarantee that all sorts of beliefs, whether religious or secular, were welcome in the public square. 

But the spirit of the opposing side lives on through an ideology called Christian Nationalism and through pseudo-historian proponents like David Barton – a debunked yet highly popular speaker throughout much of evangelical America. Barton shows up in several places in Alberta’s book, and rightfully so, because the nostalgia about a mythic America, which Barton preaches, is a powerful drug and underlies much of the cultural anxiety on the right about a lost American heritage and Christian identity.

Folks like Barton skillfully pick and choose through the Founding Fathers’ statements, especially from those who favored a Christian nation. The separation of church and state was a myth, they say, according to their historical narrative. Those Fathers wanted a Christian government to regulate all aspects of society – even cultural institutions traditionally outside of governmental control. And they used an extrabiblical narrative about America’s special relationship with God to justify their views.

But Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden, perhaps the three most venerated Christian historians of the past 50 years, present a completely different story.  In their book “The Search for Christian America,” they write “We feel that a careful study of the facts of history shows that early American does not deserve to be considered uniquely, distinctly, or even predominately Christian if we mean by the word “Christian” a state if society reflecting the ideals presented in Scripture.  There is no lost golden age to which American Christians may return.”

There’s a difference between patriotism and nationalism.  You can care for America without worshiping a fabricated story of America’s origins or elevating its role in the world through an errant interpretation of scripture. Barton’s mixing of Christianity, nationalism, and mythic-based nostalgia binds the gospel to a culturally centered agenda. It uses fear plus the abandonment of evidentiary truth to create a we-versus-them world where the ‘them’ becomes a threat.

Then, when those fires of fear constantly stoke an apocalyptic narrative that “they” are stealing the true America that “we” define and control, it weakens the church by corrupting its mission, sabotaging unity, and flat-out disregarding the scriptural admonition to “think of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.”

We’ve exchanged the gospel for political power

Suppose there was a politician who called immigrants rapists, insulted the appearance of their opponents, openly flirted with white nationalists, disparaged an entire people group through a proposed entry ban to America, willingly characterized his daughter as a “piece of a$$” and even once said “Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father…,” boasted about moving on a married woman “like a bitxx,” believes he’s entitled to “Grab ’em by the pxxxy” because “You can do anything,” paid hush money to a porn star to keep quiet during a campaign, convicted by a court for rape, caught in over 30,000 demonstratable lies during his presidency, and violated his oath to uphold the constitution by attempting to overturn an election.

Now, suppose one of America’s leading evangelical pastors, Robert Jeffress, joined with other leading pastors to become the chief apologists for this politician. That’s impossible, you might respond, because God hates sin and how could any anointed man of God be an apologist for such rampant and deliberate sin? 

Jeffress, I’m sure, would object and say that he, too, hates sin. But if you pressed him further, as Alberta did, you’d find his focus was on the three big sins of the culture war. You’d hear a resounding silence about Trump’s many sins, from the infidelity, the rape, to the stolen election lies. After all, if your way of life is under siege, as Jeffress believes, then all bets are off. Overcoming evil with good just doesn’t cut it.  You need to fight and if you find a good enough fighter, then all can be forgiven.

Like yeast leavening a lump of dough, this all-holds-barred fighting mindset has changed the nature of faith across a large swath of the American church. It has led pastors like Jeffress to trade their pulpits for campaign stages, turning God’s house of prayer into a den of ungodly men and women selling their political wares. It has led those pastors to hit the airwaves of one-sided media to promote an unholy fusion of Christianity and partisan politics. It has discipled the laity into a new set of secular values where the ends justify the means and winning with vice trumps losing with virtue. 

Alberta’s story about Steven Strang, the publisher of Charisma, hit close to home. For decades, Charisma entered our home via a yearly subscription from my mom.  We attended a Pentecostal church so Charisma’s articles and news about the Charismatic world were of interest.

Strange’s interview with Alberta is simply remarkable, one of those moments you never believed possible.  Strange calls Trump “our hero,” and sees his moral shortcomings, some of which are vile under any standard, religious or secular, as a plus, not a minus.  Christianity, according to the gospel of Strange, needs a Trump-like man to defeat the forces of evil in this world. Evidently, God was out of other options which is why God raised Trump up. Healthy Christianity, he says, just isn’t going to “move the needle.”

Now contrast Strange’s anemic view of Christianity with two of the many verses mom taught us when we were small: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us;” and “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.”

Jesus said, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”  Applying this teaching to the church at large, what does it profit the gospel of Christ if we triumph in earthly power but disdain the principles and power of God? For the “message of the cross may be foolishness to some, but it is the power of God that is “mighty to save.”

We revised the mission of the church. 

“These impious Galileans (Christians) not only feed their own, but ours also; welcoming them with their agape, they attract them, as children are attracted with cakes… Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans devote themselves to works of charity and, by a display of false compassion, have established and given effect to their pernicious errors. Such practice is common among them, and causes contempt for our gods.”

Those were the words of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome. The early church had chosen to live as exiles in the fallen and depraved world of ancient Rome, a world that Revelation likened to a type of Babylon.  They saw themselves as citizens of an eternal kingdom and, hence, a countercultural force within this earthly realm. Their loyalty was to their heavenly kingdom and Jesus was their model. 

The Great Commission, as they understood and lived it, wasn’t about opposing a secular worldview.  It wasn’t about taking a stand against a depraved culture.  It wasn’t about beating back the forces of secularism.

It was about going forth and making disciples through baptism and instruction.  It was about exhibiting a complete gospel transformation that would show the world what their God was like.

It wasn’t about fighting for a culturally-shaped selected set of “Christian values. It was, in the words of Theologian NT Wright, a calling “to be instruments of God’s new creation, planting signposts in hostile soil that show a different way to be human.”  

And the outcome?  Listen to Julian’s dying words in AD 363: “vicisti Galilaee” (You Galileans [Christians] have conquered!

But for many today, the church is on a different mission. The country is in a state of crisis and Christians must stop the cultural decay. The soul of the nation is on the line, they say, and churches can no longer afford to stay neutral. A love-your-enemy strategy isn’t enough as the point of no return is fast approaching.  It is an all-hands-on-deck fight and all available tools, especially political power, must be used to preserve this once-godly nation. And in this upside-down apocalyptic world, the best weapons of our warfare are carnal and mighty through politicians thirsting for a fight.

Yet the kingdom of heaven comes through a crown of thorns, not with a sword. Nor through the might of worldly power but through the upside-down power of the cross.  Peter chose to swing the blade, but Jesus chose the path of submission, marked by service and humility with a singlemindedness towards His Father’s mission.   

The church today is at a crossroads with two different understandings of what it means to press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling within the public square.  Two pathways lie before them, each with two different missions and two different understandings of Christian values.

The Book of Revelation describes the mission of a church when confronted with a culture like ours.  It calls us to be “Witnesses of the Lamb” through a whole life of worship and unwavering devotion to God. The authenticity of our witness is in the fruit of our worship, known through our attitudes, behavior, and deeds. Hence, our mission in the world, as faithful witnesses of the Lamb, is to reflect Christ’s image through a lifetime grounded in worship.

But this witness shaped by worship must also embody a dissident type of spirit in the face of a fallen culture. It requires keen spiritual alertness of how Babylon’s influence can subtly impact the church’s priorities and values. For when our worship is rightly oriented, we will reject Babylon’s values. Hence, the pull of whole-life worship combined with the push of our dissidence describes the overarching mission of the church.

We’ve marginalized the teachings of Christ. 

Jesus told us to love our enemies, help the poor, clothe the naked, and bless those who curse us.  He said to be not afraid.  He taught us Godly character by example, through His practice of humility, service, compassion, and kindness. He singled out love and unity as the two marks of His divinity and, hence, the marks His followers should wear.  He illustrated the nature of divine love through the parable about the Good Samaritan: it was through our care for the stranger, the alien, and those we considered our enemies that our love passed the test of a Christ-like nature.

Alberta interviews Miroslav Volf, the prominent theologian, who believes that “the Christ of the gospel has become a moral stranger to us. If you read the gospels, the things that profoundly mattered to Christ marginally matter to most evangelical Christians.” This current-day crisis in the church, he says, stems from the evangelical preoccupation with the culture war which marginalizes things that matter to Christ.  Volf again: “If you say anybody’s conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point? 

The church’s current panic about socialism, CRT, and anything related to the social gospel reveals the dominion of partisan ideology. The constant fixation on fear affixes our eyes upon the angry sea instead of the Jesus who can calm the seas. The constant barrage of outrage might help swell the Sunday morning attendance and increase the church’s political power.  But such attitudes are called, according to Galatians 5, the “works of the flesh,” and ”those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

If the teachings and life of Christ profoundly mattered to Christians, would they condone a constant barrage of vicious personal attacks, use of vulgarities, and violent innuendo inside of their church, home, or offices?  Would they condone blatant abuses of power at their local school? Or the rampant practice of lies and hate speech outside of the political realm?  Or an adulterous and sexual braggadocio in front of their children and their children’s friends?  And for those who call Jesus their “Savior,” how could they condone demeaning and insulting attacks against marginalized foreigners and then “pray” to a God who calls those foreigners made “in His image?”

But what if those blatant works of the devil lead to political power so that “Christian values” may be preserved? What if those works of the devil can turn back the cultural doomsday clock that is three minutes to midnight?  What if those works of the devil can restore America back to its God-ordained mission that’s part of His end-time plan? 

Yet Jesus came into the world, according to John 3:8, to destroy the works of the devil. So when those in the church rationalize the repeated and flagrant rejection of Christ’s teachings to preserve “Christian Values” so that America can be its God-ordained “city on a hill,” isn’t that a repudiation of the mission and life of Christ?

We would do well to listen to James 3:11-13, “Can clean water and dirty water both flow from the same spring? Can a fig tree produce olives or a grapevine produce figs? Does fresh water come from a well full of salt water?”

We’ve pledged allegiance to the wrong kingdom

“The devil took him to the peak of a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. “I will give it all to you,” he said, “if you will kneel down and worship me.”

 “Get out of here, Satan,” Jesus told him. “For the Scriptures say, ‘You must worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’

Now many like Eva, Keith, Dave, Karen, Dianna, Gerry, and a host of others whom I’ve previously mentioned in my blog have stayed pure to their calling. Although thoroughly evangelical with some politically conservative, they have all refused to bend, bow, or burn the pure gospel for a counterfeit message that the culture war demands.

But when a portion of a church, which may be the majority of the white evangelical church, creates manipulative narratives through a constant discipling of fear and nostalgia; exchanges the teachings of Christ for a situational ethical worldview, replaces the power of the gospel with a thirst for political power, and exchanges the mission of the church to fight a cultural war, haven’t they essentially accepted Satan’s wager that Jesus refused?

John Dickson, a professor at Wheaton interviewed by Alberta, believes the church is at another 500-year moment in its history. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD changed the nature of the church. So did the Schism of 1054 when Pope Leo IX excommunicated the entire eastern half of the Church, and patriarch Michael Cerularius did the same for the western Church. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 and not only further changed the church, but it laid the seeds of change for the foundation of the modern world.

The next change could go either way, but I’ve cast my vote for a positive change. My hope and prayer is that the 21st-century church will return to the focus of the early church, where their attitudes and actions were centered on the life and teachings of Jesus. It would mean that the preoccupation of the cultural war would have to end. The church would have to again become countercultural, shunning political power and the alliances such political power demands. They’d have to hold political associations at arm’s length, wary about the change of identity they impose. The preoccupation with “biblical worldviews,” which is easily malleable according to cultural sensibilities, would have to be exchanged for a Jesus “worldview” that privileges the timeless Sermon on the Mount.

In short: the church would have to change kingdoms, reject Satan’s wager, take up its mantle as a countercultural force, and end the 1600-year flirtation with Christendom.

Yet looking across the landscape of the church today, it’s hard to find a pathway for this change. The culture war lives loudly across American Christianity, and those who oppose this war pay a price. As a result, many American pastors or theologians choose to stay quiet rather than speak up and face widespread shunning, financial loss, or even the angry mob that puts their families at risk.  This week, for example, the conservative senior pastor of Parkside Church in Cleveland was canceled from several high-profile Christian media venues because he advised a grandmother to attend her grandson’s wedding to a transgender person. He said that she should be clear about not “affirming of his life choices,” but perhaps “your love may catch them off guard.”

WWJD? Wouldn’t he likely do the same thing and receive the same response given his treatment by the religious leaders of His day who criticized Him for being a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners?”

In the meantime, the beat goes on. This week, a Super Bowl ad featured people washing each other’s feet in a poignant display of humility and service.  But when it showed a protestor washing the feet of a woman outside a family planning clinic, then the knives came out from the religious right.

In the same week, a group of prophets associated with Kenneth Copeland, an evangelist known from my past church tradition, hit the road for Donald Trump.  Asserting that Donald Trump remains the U.S. president, and those who persecute him face death, they declared and decreed that Joe Biden was the antichrist and guilty of treason. Ancient Faith Radio, a media ministry aimed at Orthodox Christian listeners, received an “eruption” of hate and misogynistic responses for hosting a panel on female deacons. A convoy of people arrived at the Texas border to “Take Our Border Back.” One of the supporters called the convoy “God’s army,” saying, “This is a biblical, monumental moment that’s been put together by God.”

We need courageous Christian leaders to rise up and draw a line in the sand and say, “Enough.”  We need those willing to flip the script and elevate Jesus rather than a syncretistic gospel that’s more political than Jesus.  We need those who would prioritize a Sermon on the Mount-based spiritual formation while rejecting the church’s Christendom-type pursuit of earthly power.

We need a modern-day version of Luther’s Wittenberg Door-like declaration that begins by elevating Jesus:

“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Follow Me” (Mt 16:24), he willed the entire life of believers to be an imitator of his life and teachings.”

And then rejects Satan’s wager through a set of admonitions targeting spiritual formation and gospel priorities:

 “Christians are to be taught that following Christ makes us dissident to culture, alert to its subversive influence on our beliefs, priorities, and practices.”