peterkim blog

The top emailed article on the New York Times right now is about Gregory A. Boyd, a pastor of a large church in the St. Paul area and author of the popular book, Letters from a Skeptic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30pastor.html

According to the article, Boyd got so fed up with people making requests to use his church for promoting certain political ends that he decided to take action from the pulpit and make it clear that “the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.”

I wholeheartedly agree with him. That might be surprising to you that I would say that, since many of you probably consider me part of the “Christian right”. However, it’s completely in line with my previously stated belief that the institution of the Church should stay out of politics and focus on preaching the Gospel.

My concern with people’s response to Boyd’s teaching is that they’ll think he’s promoting what Jim Wallis talks about in his book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. That is not the case; I get the sense that Wallis still believes that churches should be politically active but it should just be open to embracing elements of liberal and conservative political philosophy. Boyd seems to be saying churches should not be involved with politics at all. I would agree with Boyd.

This is not to say I don’t believe Christians should not be involved in politics. Now this goes back to something else I posted about in the past, which is that we need to distinguish the function of the church (as an institution) and the Church (the worldwide Body of Christ). The responsibility of the institution of the church should be VERY small and limited. The responsibility of the Church (the collective efforts of individual Christians) is MUCH greater.

I believe the overarching problem behind all of this is we intimately tie the concept of “ministry” to the institution of the church. Should Christians be involved with politics? Yes, but the problem is that because almost everyone ties the idea of faith-action to the local church, they therefore conclude that the local church should be involved in politics. “Ministry” happens completely independently of the institution of the church. I’m not saying the local church doesn’t/shouldn’t do ministry; but it is not the only means by which ministry happens. Ministry happens through the institution of the church, through individuals, through small groups of friends, etc.

Let’s take patriotism, pro-capitalism, etc. out of the church, but let’s also take “social justice”, environmentalism, etc. out of the church. The institution of the church works best when teaching the Bible; let individuals figure out the best means of implementing economic, social and environmental policy.