{"id":66117,"date":"2023-04-12T06:00:40","date_gmt":"2023-04-12T10:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=66117"},"modified":"2023-04-08T18:42:37","modified_gmt":"2023-04-08T22:42:37","slug":"should-churches-hide-their-controversial-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2023\/04\/should-churches-hide-their-controversial-beliefs\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Churches Hide Their Controversial Beliefs?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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The\u00a0He Gets Us<\/a> campaign, with its billboards and Super Bowl ads, presents Jesus in a very positive and relatable way, as someone who was born to a teen mother, was a refugee, was fed up with politics too, hated injustice,\u00a0 and promoted love instead of hate, etc.<\/p>\n

Now some people are complaining that at least some of the people who paid for those ads don\u2019t believe in transgenderism! or same-sex marriage!\u00a0 They are evangelicals<\/em>!\u00a0 And other horrors.<\/p>\n

And the problem goes beyond that.\u00a0 CNN political analysis Kirsten Powers has written an essay entitled The \u201cHe Gets Us\u201d Super Bowl Ads Brought Back Bad Memories:\u00a0 How the Christian \u201cseeker\u201d movement can cause serious harm<\/a>.\u00a0 She tells about how she started going to a church in New York City that was intellectual, friendly, stimulating, and that really helped her.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t \u201cfundamentalist\u201d or \u201cpolitical,\u201d and she got involved in its work.\u00a0 (She is pretty obviously referring to \u00a0Redeemer Presbyterian Church<\/a>, an evangelical congregation whose pastor, Tim Keller, has been a pioneer in successful ministry to young urban professionals.)<\/p>\n

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Then she learned that the church held to conservative theology and Biblical moral positions.<\/p>\n

If the day I walked into that Upper East Side church service the pastor had given a sermon calling homosexuality a sin or said that women should submit to their husbands I would have gotten up and walked out. I only learned that these were core teachings after I had been attending a year and a half and was in too deep. Abortion was never addressed from the pulpit (at least to my knowledge), but once I started asking, I found the church community fairly homogeneous in their anti-abortion beliefs, a view that the pastor expressed publicly many years after I left the church.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mark Tooley<\/a>, an evangelical Methodist who heads the Institute on Religion and Democracy, discusses her article and her call for \u201ctransparency\u201d in what churches believe.\u00a0 He sums up her argument:<\/p>\n

Powers calls this \u201csecretiveness\u201d a \u201cred flag\u201d and complains that \u201cseeker movements hide what they really are.\u201d Instead, they \u201cfocus on the things that will draw people in, and that ironically ultimately play a tiny\u201d role in the church\u2019s overall ministry. Powers claims that the controversial views are only revealed \u201ccasually\u201d after new believers are already embedded in the community, and feeling at that point that it\u2019s \u201calmost impossible to leave.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tooley responds,<\/p>\n

Perhaps Powers has a least a partial point. Churches and Christian ministries should be transparent. But such transparency does not automatically necessitate heavy emphasis on potential controversial points. Powers, when she became active in Redeemer Church, could easily have researched the Presbyterian Church in America and its official stances.<\/p>\n

Churches, modeled on Jesus Himself, if they are evangelistic, mainly focus on the simple message of Jesus as Savior who came to save sinners.\u00a0They don\u2019t, especially with new believers or visitors, focus on the intricacies of the Trinity, the detailed forensics of justification and sanctification, or the wide tradition across 2,000 years that informs the church\u2019s ethical teachings. Jesus says: \u201cCome, whosoever will.\u201d\u00a0So does His church.<\/p>\n

Learning the details of the Christian faith, including the church\u2019s ethical teachings that are often at odds with the world\u2019s, typically comes later as new believers grow in faith and are catechized by the church.\u00a0Powers seems to have found this process deceptive and manipulative. But St Paul distinguished between the milk and the meat of the faith, with the former reserved for new believers, and the later for more mature believers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I suppose Tooley too has at least a partial point.\u00a0 But I am uneasy with what he says too.\u00a0 I suppose this is an intrinsic issue with the \u201cseeker sensitive\u201d approach, as opposed to the traditional congregations that I favor.\u00a0 The church should not orient its teaching and its services to non-believers,\u00a0 but to the baptized and catechized community of faith.\u00a0 Of course it should emphasize the Trinity, justification, and \u201cthe wide tradition across 2,000 years that informs the church\u2019s ethical teachings.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think campaigns like \u201cHe Gets Us\u201d can be helpful in challenging stereotypes about Christianity and bringing attention to the person of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 They can get people to come through the door of the church.\u00a0 But once inside, they should find Biblical substance and a sense of transcendence.\u00a0 Specifically, they should hear God\u2019s Word, both the Law\u2013which indeed should make them \u201cuncomfortable,\u201d to say the least\u2013and the Gospel of how Christ has redeemed them and offers free forgiveness.<\/p>\n

In evangelism I have argued<\/a> that we Lutherans should lead<\/em> with our most mind-blowing doctrines\u2013with our conviction that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present in the Bread and Wine of the Lord\u2019s Supper, that Baptism saves us, that God is actively present in our vocations, that God actually speaks to us in His Word, that we are all sinners as well as saints, etc.<\/p>\n

Also the other mind-blowing doctrines that all Christians believe but do not always express:\u00a0 That Jesus took all of the evils and griefs of the world into Himself on the Cross.\u00a0 That Jesus is God in the flesh<\/em>.\u00a0 (Why didn\u2019t the \u201cHe Gets Us\u201d campaign bring up that fact?)<\/p>\n

As for the \u201ccontroversial\u201d moral teachings of the Bible, I have found that it\u2019s helpful to make clear that Christianity is not, contrary to common opinion, about moralism.\u00a0 That it is about forgiveness when we sin.\u00a0 Many people in bondage to sexual sin feel more guilty than they will admit, which is why they are so defensive.\u00a0 They may be broken by the law already and be primed to hear the good news.<\/p>\n

Unbelievers, hearing those kinds of things will see that Christianity is \u201cother\u201d than themselves, as well as different from the boring moralism that they probably expected.\u00a0 And the full-strength Word may be used by the Holy Spirit to capture their attention and bring them to faith.<\/p>\n

Here is the irony:\u00a0 Tooley brings up a fact that Powers does not\u00a0 mention in this particular essay.\u00a0 She has quit Redeemer Presbyterian, as she says, and evangelicalism as a whole.\u00a0 She has become a Roman Catholic!\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Hasn\u2019t she noticed that Catholics too disapprove of abortion, homosexuality, and all of the other things that bothered her about Redeemer Presbyterian?\u00a0 Does she think Catholicism is not \u201ctransparent\u201d?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t she look into what Catholics believe\u2013indeed, wasn\u2019t she catechized\u2013before she became a Catholic?<\/p>\n

Perhaps she has fallen in with \u201cprogressive\u201d Catholics who do resist the teachings of their own magisterium.\u00a0 But I daresay that the reason she found Catholicism attractive is that it did hold out to her a sense of substance and transcendence.\u00a0 She must have perceived that in the liturgy\u2013so different<\/em> from the seeker-sensitive worship she was used to\u2013and was so taken with it that she became willing to put up with the other stuff, perhaps someday to the point of believing it.<\/p>\n