8:58 AM Good morning, cyber geeks of the world. I feel a need to respond briefly to the pushback I’m seeing in the evangelical world against the federal government’s incursion into our personal affairs through reading our private emails, monitoring our website usage, etc. One of the essays I read yesterday made much of our “Founding Fathers” and their concern about government “overreach and abuse.” The author suspected that had the Founders lived in the 21st century they would have called a new constitutional convention to “deal with the erosion of our freedoms.” I’ve also noticed a sort of cynicism toward “silent” Christians who sit idly by and say nothing. One author said that “there will simply be no privacy unless someone speaks up. That someone should be Christians.”
I understand where these evangelical patriots are coming from. America once seemed invincible. After all, we were founded on principles of personal liberty and a high work ethic. When our freedoms are being eroded, we Christians cannot remain silent.
Or can we?
Continue reading Christians, Silence, and Protest →
8:52 AM Last night I was perusing some of the agrarian websites and was surprised to see that the argument is still being made that our country was founded as a “Christian-agrarian” nation. I empathize with this view. After all, I am an agrarian. But if I am honest with myself, this seems to be exactly what Jesus and others in the New Testament are ruling out. To the best of my knowledge, nowhere in the New Testament do we find anything that comes close to supporting an agrarian lifestyle. Every person who has pledged allegiance to live in the way of Jesus has to wrestle with the issue of what they will become apologists for. I cannot judge the motives of those who espouse an agrarian lifestyle as being “biblical.” But neither can I claim to understand how they can reconcile this point of view with the constant kingdom focus of the New Testament. Yes, I enjoy the agrarian life. On our farm we have
- processed our own chicken
- slaughtered and butchered our own beef and goat meat
- raised our own vegetables
- canned our own fruit and jam
- fertilized our fields with natural manure
Yet I want to say that this doesn’t mean I’m an apologist for agrarianism as a “Christian” lifestyle. Jesus can use us wherever we live and however we live. In short, I want to be known as an apologist for the Gospel, plain and simple. Why, I even wrote a book on this subject. I urge all of us to live for the upside kingdom of God by leveraging whatever we have for the Gospel, whether or not you ever you get your hands dirty working in God’s good earth.
(From Dave Black Online. Used by permission. David Alan Black is author of Energion titles The Jesus Paradigm, Christian Archy, Why Four Gospels?, and Will You Join the Cause of Global Missions?)
Christian Archy – when Christ is the ruler!