A different take on separation

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. (John 15:18-21)

If that is true, and I believe it is, why is Christianity so cozy with the culture in America?

When we think of separation, not being conformed to the world, we typically think of avoiding what we see as worldly in our modern context. The picture in our mind is of Fundamentalists preaching fire and brimstone in a ill-fitting suit or perhaps even the Amish. That raises an interesting question. When the Bible spoke of being separate from the world, what does that mean? Was it avoiding R-rated movies and rock and roll music? Well clearly not although that is certainly a possible outgrowth of the concept. Isn’t it the case that a major part of the worldly culture of Jesus’ age was the prevailing and accepted religious culture? Not exclusively to be sure but it most assuredly was a major part of it. It was a highly formalized and hierarchically controlling system that was an integral part of the culture and at the same time the greatest impediment to men and women following God. In many ways, it was the dominant religious system of the Jews that not only was Jesus most opposed to but that was an integral part of His crucifixion. When Jesus said that the world hated Him, He was speaking of the dominant religious system during His incarnation. You don’t really see people in open sin opposing Jesus, He wasn’t being attacked by the major atheist leaders or gay rights groups. He was attacked over and over again by the religious authorities and they did so while falsely invoking the name of God. He reserved His greatest condemnation for the religious, not for the pagan Roman government. The greatest enemy of Christ during His earthly ministry was the dominant religious culture.

So how did we get from there to here?

The “here” I am referring to is a culturally comfortable religion. A religion where we are not only not particularly opposed and hated by the world but in large measure are a welcomed and nostalgia-filled part of the world. Christianity as it is understood in most of the church, even the most “conservative” expressions, is as much a part of the warp and woof of the worldly culture as pagan idol worship was in the time of the primitive church. The notion that the United States, a nation founded some 1700 years after the crucifixion, resurrection and Pentecost and some thousands of miles across an ocean is a land of people more prized and favored by God than His early disciples is sacrosanct in the church. After all, there are more “Christians” in America than anywhere else except maybe China.

I question whether Christianity ever has or even ever can be the dominant religious expression in a given culture. It seems antithetical to a faith where the adherents are warned repeatedly and graphically that they will be persecuted and hated by the world, a warning that has been demonstrated throughout the history of the Church in acts of unspeakably brutality inflicted on the followers of Christ. How does that translate into a culturally acceptable, politically powerful religion? When I look at the condition of the church in China and India and Iraq, places where Christians are a distinct and often persecuted minority, that looks to me like what we are told to expect in the Bible. When I read about the persecution suffered by the Anabaptists all over northern Europe at the hands of the prevailing religious authorities, Protestant and Roman Catholic alike, that looks like what we were told to expect the Bible. When I see nice, shiny church buildings on every corner and people who allocate an hour or two a week to God, I can’t reconcile that in my mind with what Jesus is saying. I can’t see a faith that has as its pivotal moment its Founder being crucified at the hands of the ruling secular authorities with the blessing and urging of the religious establishment somehow transforming itself into the dominant cultural religious expression for hundreds of millions of people.

So that leaves a couple of possibilities for me. One is that Jesus was wrong or at least that He was only speaking of a particular time and place. That doesn’t work. The truths that He spoke were universal and the tension between the upside-down Kingdom and the world are every bit as relevant and real today as they were 2000 years ago. The other option is that we have somehow perverted the faith into something that is comfortable with the world and palatable to the world. THAT I can believe. The church in America is full of polite, proper, professional ministry. It is all very nice and non-threatening, at least non-threatening to middle-class families. Homosexuals often take a beating as do abortionists but there is nary a word that would discomfort a family with a dad, mom, 2.5 kids, two incomes, a dog and a mortgage. Where is the prophetic voice? Where are the voices of men who stand on the brink of martyrdom praying for their persecutors and calling their executioners and onlookers alike to repentance? Have we so evolved as the church as to make such primitive, noisome stuff superfluous?

When we think of the Enemy contending against the Kingdom, we think of the big stuff. Stuff that happened long ago or that is happening far away. We see persecution as the work of the Enemy, and it certainly is, but out of persecution and hatred the Church has always thrived. In the earliest days being a follower of Christ was a sure way to get yourself in trouble and often imprisoned or executed. In spite of (because of?) this persecution, the Church exploded and the Gospel spread. When the state churches persecuted the Anabaptists, they spread like wildfire and they couldn’t be executed fast enough. God uses persecution to expand His church. What are we to make of the Church on its comfortable pedestal in our culture? Is a powerless, perfunctory church not the perfect device of Satan, making people feel religious while they walk in darkness? Perhaps what we should be separating ourselves from doesn’t start with pop culture and Democratic politics but rather from the dominant religion of the culture?

This has been pretty dark and grim but it matches how I am feeling. We cannot walk with Christ while we sleepwalk in lockstep with the religious culture. Our comfortable co-existence with the world in America has left us adrift and unfocused. We lament the state of the cultural decline, never seeming to see that we are the culture. What the church needs are not more men like John Calvin to preach sermon after sermon. Nor men like Wesley to pen more uplifting hymns. We don’t need more men to write more books. We need men like Jim Elliot who went to the hard places of the world and laid down his own life rather than kill an unbeliever. Men like George Muller who cared for some 10,000 orphans in his lifetime without a financial safety net. We need men who will count others as more important than self, who will cherish sacrifice in the service of others as more important than defending their “rights”, men who will lay down their life gladly, men who will not be comfortable in the dominant religious culture of our day. I pray that God will raise up men like this and transform me to be a servant of His, however poor and inadequate. May we no longer see discipleship as an academic exercise and ministry as a profession. May God make us uncomfortable with our comfort, uneasy with our ease, discontented with our joyless happiness. May God cast off the enslaving yoke of religion and grant His people the freedom that comes with losing all for His sake.

Better that we should be a persecuted minority that stands for the truth and apart from the world than a willing accomplice to the cultural stupor we find ourselves in.