Christian Living

Country a Mess? Blame the Church Again

by Andrew Tuttle
07/01/21
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Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. – Matthew 7:21

In 2009, prominent Christian apologist Frank Turek wrote an article placing much of the blame of the country’s problems at the foot of the church, and he meant the entire body of believers. He said “Believers are God’s ambassadors here on earth, called to be salt and light in the world and to the world. Our country is failing because too many believers have abandoned this calling.”

He attests this abandonment began in the 1920s when “fundamentalism led believers to separate from society rather than reform it, and to bifurcate life into two separate spheres—the sacred and secular. Reason was given up for emotionalism, and only activities that directly saved souls were deemed sacred.”

100 years later the church again fails to be salt and light.

On June 3, 2020 my now ex-church of 10 years sent an email to the congregation. An immensely long email discussing race relations, the supposed prominent problem of racism, along with a newly created page on the church website discussing racism including links to prominent social justice warriors in America.

This email, in response to the George Floyd riots, came just a few weeks after an associate pastor referred to himself as “just a white boy from Texas” during his sermon and a week later another pastor inexplicably showed a photo of his black high school football coach that ultimately had nothing to do with the subject of his sermon. 

I already had one foot out the door on this church for a number of reasons but I could see the infiltration of the Social Justice Gospel creeping in for some time. The email was the final straw. Ironically, the new lead pastor, of about six months at the time, would leave six months later, citing burn-out.  After just one year. 

After just a year of trading off sermon Sundays with the other pastors and thanks to the pandemic not having the stress of an in-person audience or the grind of interacting every week with the congregation before, between and after services. Hmm, sounds like maybe something else happened.

Sadly, I noticed the previous lead pastor who left, because he didn’t like how big his flock had gotten, felt led to put a blackout box on his Instagram page. Remember black out Tuesday? I guess, in hindsight, he wasn’t much better. Too bad, all those wasted years. And the church I attended prior to this one also sent a similar email (I was still on the list) and created their own racism page. I later learned of another area church pushing their congregation to read Critical Race Theory.  I can’t forget Switchfoot either, a band that without their Christian audience would be relegated to the dustbin of history, promoting Black Lives Matter on their social media pages while adherents to the cause burned cities and looted business as innocents were killed.

I’ve had a personal encounter with BLM activists. I watched two men wearing all black with just their eyes showing chanting “Black Lives Matter” in a demonic husk intimidating a small crowd of American flag waving patriots along a freeway overpass. I wonder what my former pastor(s) would have to say about that?

My church experience was not an isolated event. This new “woke church” spread across the country shaming the whiteness of its congregants and indoctrinating those who sat in the pews with a false narrative about race and race relations, denying what’s really going on in the inner city while embracing a political movement that is anti-Christian, anti-Israel, pro-abortion, calls for the destruction of the nuclear family and defunding the police and, adheres to a Marxist ideology.

Political correctness led these “believers” to conform with society spreading lies and misinformation rather than telling the truth. This bifurcated the church into two separate spheres—the adherents and the secular. The adherents stuck to sound theology and quickly identified the perils of going with the flow.

The secular church, like 100 years ago, gave up reason for emotionalism but this time around no longer seemed interested in directly saving souls but condemning those who simply shared the same skin color as Derek Chauvin, the white police officer who left his knee for more than nine minutes on the neck of a black man dying of a drug overdose, and was found guilty of Murder 2, Murder 3 and second degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to 22 ½ years in prison for his role in Floyd’s death.

Did you know Keith Ellison, attorney general for the state of Minnesota where the Chauvin/Floyd incident took place, said there was no evidence race played a role in Chauvin's behavior?

On the day of Chauvin’s sentencing last week, Floyd’s brother Philonise Floyd said, "I just want to reiterate: not just black lives matter, all lives matter."

Sounds like a bit of wisdom Jesus would have said to the Pharisees and Sadducees 2000 years ago.

For the time will come when they will not tolerate sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires. – 2 Timothy 4:3