The Culture War Spills Into Church, Part 1
Comments on BLM's bum-rushing Cities Church in Minneapolis
This past Sunday “Black Lives Matter” forces - yes, “forces” - interrupted the worship service of Cities Church in Minneapolis. Aided by failed TV personality and ever-aspiring journalist Don Lemon, the “forces” - “protesters” is inaccurate1 - surrounded worshipers and began shouting over and over again, “ICE OUT.” One protester - a white man who did the same thing at a church in Washington D.C. - shouted obscenities at the “comfortable white people” and their children for their thought-crimes. They justified their actions because they said one of the pastors was “a member of ICE.”
I should note that Cities Church has more than a passing interest to me. I have a nephew who is a member there, and many of us here in Sacramento have benefited from Joe Rigney’s work, who used to pastor there. Regardless, we are in a non-shooting civil war, and we got here in part because the church has committed two sins: being ambiguous - so as not to offend anyone - and being naive.
Commendations
Before we get to those, I want to commend the pastors and members of Cities Church. They handled themselves with godly aplomb. Good on you, brothers and sisters. I trust you will gather back next week, and I trust God will use this to multiply your numbers. I suspect much of what I have to say in this article does not apply to this church, given that they were targeted and given their response.
The Sins of Ambiguity and Naïveté
The enemies of our culture have used the larger evangelical church’s ambiguity and naiveté to their great advantage. For so long the church has not had any specificity on matters driving our culture. Take racism: we have taken the word at the face-value when our enemies hurl it at us, which then allows us to be pinned down. We are so concerned with being thought of negatively that we never stop to ask, “So just how does the Bible define racism?” By this we allow our enemies to determine the terms of engagement.
This is where the characteristic naiveté of Scandinavians comes into play. Scandinavians have made a remarkable footprint in North America, both here and in Canada. They have mastered the art of getting along in order to get by and thrive, even in harsh, unforgiving climates. The existence of my own church denomination - the Evangelical Free Church of America, or EFCA, which is headquartered in Minneapolis - is a prime example of this success. They figured out how to join together different religious traditions under one “roof” in order to pool resources and further the work of Christ despite their differences. They were real men of genius.
But the soft, vulnerable underbelly of being good at getting along and joining together is the sin of naiveté: that is, willfully not seeing the obvious game being run against you and yours. It’s assuming the best when that defies what your eyes clearly see. Operatives aligned with the Democratic Party have long used Minneapolis as a seedbed to grow a new voting bloc, via scam immigration maneuvers.
So when some clear-thinking fellow gins up the courage to say, “Hey, maybe it’s not the best idea to resettle scads of Islamic, Somali pirate clans in Scandinavian, evangelical Minneapolis,” he’s shouted down as a racist, and that is that. Never mind that if you asked the person shouting “Racist!” to define racism, they would not be able to either, not in any way that a non-communist-sociologist could understand. Ironically to BLM “racism” is more a tactic than a thing. It’s a cudgel to knock down with, not an issue to be defined and solved.
And they succeed (temporarily) because evangelical Christians have long operated with the view that there are magical, neutral spaces in the world, where people can simply talk and hash things out. It’s into these supposed neutral spaces that the sowers of chaos have squatted and taken ownership. As the saying goes: you may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you. The BLM organizers know better than modern evangelicals that the idea of neutral spaces is a fallacy - that even a church worship service is not neutral. And they’re right. After all, Jesus himself said that “all authority . . . on earth” had been given to him (Matthew 28:18). As Kuyper famously put it: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
Thus in response the lust for power never stays in its place. It never plays fair, because it always wants more, more, more. It’s like an unruly river that floods whenever it wants. Thus sometimes - I think at Cities Church - it foolishly punches through to the other side and harms its own cause. Yet sometimes it works: it’s no coincidence that Stalin saw fit to disrupt, invade and eventually destroy churches. The church of Christ is the body of the reigning, all-authoritative Christ and therefore the only alternative power that can call people together in a solid force of inconveniently immoveable resistance against tyrants.
So then, what shall we do? I’ll discuss this in Part 2.
A protest addresses government for redress against claimed grievances. These however were commie thugs, disrupting and terrorizing lawful worshipers and infringing on their rights. I hope the church enjoys winning its multiple lawsuits.