Preoccupied with Love: Lifting High Evangelism Again

By amazon Wednesday, January 2, 2019 Comment Edit

An interview with Dominique Dubois Gilliard.

Ed: It’s hard to deny that we are living in challenging times culturally. The church’s influence is fading, and we are struggling to find answers to some hard questions. What’s your take on the health of the church today, especially as it relates to our witness?

Dominique: Amid increasing political polarity, the church must be reminded that Christianity cannot fit neatly into partisan politics. Both the left and the right are inadequate. Neither party is God-ordained, and both have championed principles that are antithetical to the Kingdom. In this critical moment, we must remember that our hope is exclusively in Christ, and that our ethics, values, and virtues must be biblically rooted.

Moreover, the church is called to be a prophetic presence in the world, not merely an echo chamber that only resounds once there is no longer any social risk involved in speaking up.

However, far too often, fear prohibits us from faithfully responding to the needs around us. Fear domesticate our witness—be it the fear of being perceived as “too political” when we strive to embody passages like Proverbs 31: 8-9, Matthew 25, or 1 John 3:16-18, or political fear-mongering—which both parties deploy—that we succumb to, which leads us to “other” or dehumanize individuals made in the image of God.

In this watershed moment, we must remember the wise council of Dr. King, who said, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.”

Dr. King also spoke about the urgent need for the church to recapture its prophetic zeal and remember its missional purpose. In his legendary “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” ...