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Leviticus 19:18 You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19:34 The stranger (immigrant) who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement.
Many people today, especially among emerging generations, don’t resonate with the church and organized Christianity. Some are leaving the church and others were never part of the church in the first place. Sometimes it’s because of misperceptions about the church. Yet often they are still spiritually open and fascinated with Jesus.
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While God certainly cares for your deepest needs, Skye Jethani wants you to know that prayer is so much more than a two-way transaction with a heavenly vending machine. Jesus didn’t pray like that. And with a pastor’s heart, Skye wants to take you deeper into what Jesus, the lover of your soul, had to say about talking with God.
Alberta, Tim. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (p. 1). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet. The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post– George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was that important. When the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled inside the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network. All in a blur, the producers took my cell phone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of those white evangelical voters. But, as I’d written in the book, that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church.
Kimball, Dan. They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations (p. 253). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
I am not a confrontational person. In fact, I avoid confrontation and dread even having to dispute anything. Nor do I enjoy labeling people or calling people names. But in this very unusual instance, I shocked myself. I was speaking to a group of around five hundred middle-aged pastors of a conservative denomination, and something happened to me as I talked. I started to shake because I was getting so upset and nervous, and a word that I’ve never even used, at least not since elementary school, just blurped out. I called them all weaklings. Why I called several hundred pastors weaklings The focus of this particular event was on evangelizing emerging generations and on the implications of cultural changes for our methods of evangelism. During a main session, I presented the irony of how people in emerging generations are very open to talking about Jesus, though they are not interested in church. Using examples from culture, I showed how emerging generations are very spiritually minded and open. I painted an optimistic picture of the exciting times we live in, when Jesus is becoming more and more respected in our culture by non-churchgoing people. And I shared how the church is perceived by those outside of it. I built a case for our need to think of missionaries not only as those you send overseas somewhere but also as ourselves here in our emerging culture in our own towns and cities. I then pleaded with the pastors to consider how we might spend our time and how our lives in our churches that the Bible has some very strange things in it.
Jethani, Skye.What If Jesus Was Serious about Justice?: A Visual Guide to the Good News of God's Judgment and Mercy (p. 10). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
Back in 2010, Glenn Beck, the popular cable news political commentator, told his millions of viewers to “run as fast as you can” if your church ever talks about “social justice.” Unfortunately, Beck never bothered to define what he meant by “social justice,” except that it was a “perversion of the gospel” because, he argued, Jesus spoke about only individual compassion and not systemic evil. This kind of rhetoric has been commonplace within some streams of the American church for the last 150 years, and its origin is important for understanding the current shape of popular Christianity. So let’s start with a brief journey through church history. In the beginning, Christians understood their mission as having two dimensions rooted in the words of Jesus. When asked what the greatest commandment was, he said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ . . . And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22:37, 39). This is why for centuries Christian mission involved both proclaiming the good news of peace with God through Jesus Christ (loving God) and the reformation of social evils (loving neighbors). And it is why the earliest Christians, as recorded in the book of Acts, cared for the poor, overcame barriers of race and class, and proclaimed the gospel to people outside the church.