Revolutionaries

    "The church today should be getting ready and talking about issues of tomorrow and not issues of 20 and 30 years ago, because the church is going to be squeezed in a wringer.  If we found it tough in these last few years, what are we going to do when we are faced with the real changes that are ahead?...
    One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative.  Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.  To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us...
    If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo."

Francis Schaeffer in 1970 as quoted in The Church on the Other Side by Brian McLaren, page 16.

Comments

I don't really understand what is meant by the term "revolution" here. What needs to change? I'm not implying that nothing needs to change. What is it that worked 20 years ago or even 100 years ago to advance the gospel that won't work today?

[Wes]

Umm...that was me that posted that.

[Wes]

To say it better: What is the object of "revolution."

[Steve McCoy]

I think the change is in large part to a selling out to be like the culture rather than transform it through the gospel. Jesus didn't come belonging to an earthly party. He didn't play our silly games. He was a revolutionary. He thought about the world from a different persepective. The object of revolution, I would say, is redeeming culture. Jesus did that. Do you see most Christians doing that? Is that what witness wear and Bush voting gets us?

[Wes]

I am still a little uncertain here about your views on this. Certainly we as followers of Christ are called to be different from the world. So do you think that Christians are just different in the wrong ways? It seems that you think we should be like the world in some aspects (i.e. enjoying quality secular art and music).

I think Paul's encounter with the Greeks in Acts 17 is one of the best models we have for engaging our American culture. In some ways Paul focused on some common ground with them, but he also shared the gospel and told them that they can't continue in the ways that they have been living.

[Steve McCoy]

"So do you think that Christians are just different in the wrong ways? It seems that you think we should be like the world in some aspects (i.e. enjoying quality secular art and music)."

Of course we should be like the world in some aspects. How can we NOT be like the world in a zillion things? We are creatures in the image of God like them, so we will have many similarities. It's where we differ that makes the difference. That's the difference between holiness and worldliness.

I DO think most American Christians are trying to be different in the wrong things. Take alcohol for example. (In the South this is much more polarizing, but it's all too similar in the North.) We are more holy if we abstain, some will say. How so? Holiness to many means no gambling, drinking, smoking, R rated movies, etc. Emphasis here is the "no", that we now define holiness by what we don't do, not what we do.

"I think Paul's encounter with the Greeks in Acts 17 is one of the best models we have for engaging our American culture. In some ways Paul focused on some common ground with them, but he also shared the gospel and told them that they can't continue in the ways that they have been living."

Yep.

Are we connecting here?

[Wes]

I think so.