2025 August news-letter article

Dear fellow follower of Jesus,

In recent months, I hope you have joined me in chewing on what missions could, or should, look like within our church family.  Last month, we considered what it means to live life on mission.  During Adult Bible Study, on Wednesday evenings, June 25 and July 09, we studied II Corinthians 6:14, which calls believers to “not be mis-matched with unbelievers”.  I love the ol’ King James Version’s language of being “unequally yoked”.  If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to continue to think aloud as we ponder what it means for these two thoughts to converge.

As I emphasized in our study II Corinthians (and recently from Hebrews on Sundays) to be “holy” is to be “set apart” as “different”.  As we walk in sanctification, pursuing holiness (Hebrews 12:14), we should think, and act, and perhaps look differently from the rest of the world.  We view marriage, and therefore, human sexuality, differently than our neighbors do.  We view the sanctity of human life (because we are made in the image of God) differently than the broader society values human life.  We naturally treat the “least of these” like Jesus (moved with compassion), which is differently/better than our neighbors naturally treat one another.

Historically, many groups of disciples have taken this principle, and apply it by largely removing themselves (ourselves) from society.  As I joked July 09, my church history professor loved to describe this tendency with the phrase: “anything you can do, I can do baptist”.  Christians have segregated ourselves out from the world to produce “Christian movies” and “Christian contemporary music” and “Christian clothing”.  As a child, I remember owing a drawer full of t-shirts that looked like designer clothes, but were tweaked with “cool” biblical branding!  As a middle school student, I was encouraged at church to not listen to “secular music”, instead only listening to “God-honoring music”, because “garbage in: garbage out”.  Do you understand how difficult that was for a band kid?  While we all must exercise discernment when it comes to what we ingest as entertainment, especially with our young people, it’s never so simply black-and-white.
 
Over the past five decades, especially since the pandemic, “Christian parents” have elected to withdraw their children from government schools and educate their students at home, or in co-horts, or establish their own “Christian schools”.  I went to seminary with some peers that had been home-schooled and attended very strict “Christian colleges”.  That made for some interesting conversation during an ethics course when one of these peers had never met someone in the group of people we were discussing.  I challenged a peer who used harsh, prideful language about “them”, by asking if he had ever met or befriended one of “those people”.  I’ve never been more thankful for a liberal arts education than I was that day.

To be clear, parents unquestionably have the right to make the best decision for their children, especially given the quality of our current governmental education systems, which seem to be openly hostile to biblical values, and increasingly so.  [I am so thankful that schools in Stokes County are much less hostile than those in Guilford County.]  I am also grateful for high-quality primary schools, secondary schools, and even universities that are over-seen by churches, or Christian groups, or individual disciples.  I am most certainly not disparaging “Christian education”; I am a product of one of these schools!  That being said, if all Christian parents remove their children from government schools, can you imagine how much worse our culture would be?  If our public schools/colleges were devoid of disciples altogether, just think about how much worse they would be, culturally and academically.

Thinking about this “yoked” principle, the idea that we should be in “the world” but not “of the world”, let’s consider how we might apply the idea of living “on mission” together!  What if we have a few hundred kids, grounded in the truths of scripture, living on mission in their respective school houses every day?  What if a majority of our schools’ teachers were committed followers of Jesus?  What if our best and brightest young people were flooding college campuses, graciously challenging their atheistic classmates in the ivory tower?  What if our most talented, creative folks were influential in the secular music industry, or in Hollywood, or on Wall Street?  What if the Church’s smartest, were leading major corporations, and spear-heading scientific research, and running hospitals, and getting elected to public office?  Like a virus, can you imagine churches commissioning their own members to live on mission daily, in all of these areas of society?  Can you imagine if evangelism and spiritual awakening were “infecting” academia and the arts and the sciences and Fortune 500 companies and governmental institutions?  How different would our culture, our world appear to be?  I’d like to live there!

This assumes two things.  A society like I’ve just imagined assumes [firstly] that we, the Church, are making disciples in a high-quality way.  It assumes that we are equipping our kids to bear more influence upon their classmates than their classmates bear upon them.  It assumes that we send our college students off with a robust understanding of what personal responsibility and holiness looks like.  It assumes that we are raising leaders, who are committed to honoring God in their personal lives, and who are willing to leverage what influence they have in their positions of leadership.  It assumes that the average pew-sitter is grounded God’s Word and committed to biblical values.  This vision also assumes [secondly] that, from cradle to grave, we as followers of Jesus are living on mission.  We must be high-quality disciples personally, who are committed to missions and evangelism.  When we find ourselves in the school house, or the job site, or the halls of power, we actively want to serve and love those with whom we rub shoulders.  We want to be agents of grace, promoting human flourishing.  We want to be a blessing to those around us.  Are others better off today, because they had the pleasure of getting to interact with us?

As we strive to be the holy people God calls us to be, let’s go where we go and do what we do, being disciples who make disciples along the way.  This requires us to keep the Great Commission in the front of our minds, living on mission with intentionality as we rub shoulders with neighbors each day, who may be lost.  May our hearts be broken over the condition of our friends and neighbors who do not personally have a relationship with Jesus …yet!

So send I you, to take to souls in bondage
the Word of truth that sets the captives free
to break the bonds of sin, to loose death’s fetters,
so send I you, to bring the lost to Me.
--A.J.