on Aug 4th, 2006Untying Evangelicals from the Religious Right
even older post. I wanted to wait until I had read it before posting the link.
The Rev. Gregory A. Boyd at Woodland Hills Church preached a series of 6 sermons that attempted to articulate his thoughts on Christians and politics, much of it apparently delinked Christianity from a narrow allegiance to the Religious Right. Unsurprisingly they lost about 1000 members from the 5000 member church.
The news story itself doesn’t go into much detail, but it does include this quote from Boyd:
In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others ? by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others ? “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.
This idea of coercion versus persuasion is something near and dear to me. I haven’t really explored it here, but that’s only because its a tricky thing to articulate. In many cases one man’s coercion can be another man’s persuasion. When you start thinking about specific test cases there’s doesn’t seem to be a single litmus test that says, “This is ok.” or “This is not ok.”
But, either way its an issue that more Christians should think about. Are our actions working to dominate others to our will?