The Culture War Spills Into Church, Part 2
What do we do when a mob interrupts church?
In the first part I sought to give context to what’s happening in Minneapolis, especially BLM forces - not “protesters” - bum-rushing Cities Church on Sunday. So what do churches do going forward?
“Act Like Men”
Paul commanded the Corinthian church to “act like men” (1 Cor. 16:13). He meant that they should exercise manly courage to do the hard things they didn’t want to do and to do it all in love. This balance of manly courage and love is not always easy to pull off. But we have Christ as our guide. First the “act like men” part, then love.
To “act like men” first means not defining our actions reactively, in equal measure to the chaos sown by our enemies. Instead we must doggedly hold to Christ, still taking orders from him. When our enemies drive into one ditch, we must not react by driving into the other. An example is obeying God’s command to pray for our governing authorities by name when we worship, so that they would wield their metaphorical sword to ensure we live in peace, not in chaos (1 Timothy 2:1-4). By this we leave vengeance with God. Christians in Minneapolis should therefore pray this Sunday that the authorities would arrest and prosecute those who broke the law at Cities Church, including Don Lemon.1
God never allows us to go further and use the devil’s tactics. Our weapons are still water, bread and wine, deployed first through worship. The BLM protesters seem to see the centrality of worship more accurately than many modern Christians. For in disrupting a Bible church’s worship, they are instinctively acknowledging ground zero of the fight - worship. Worship is warfare. If you change what a culture worships, you will change everything else in that culture, too.
Yet there is a balance to calls for restraint. The Bible does not permit Christians to sue each other, but it does permit Cities Church to sue one and all who took part in this crime. Their civil rights were clearly violated, and if their lawsuits bankrupt BLM of Minneapolis, so be it.
In addition a church security team can be very helpful in maintaining order, so as to avoid being run over but also avoiding a worship service turning into the final scene of “Blazing Saddles.” As Andrew Walker put it:
But do not use this as a cover for not taking manly action yourself. If a “protester” barged in to our church and began shouting obscenities at a child, I would understand if the father gave him a Chicago free lunch, a five-finger, closed-fisted kiss to the cheek. After all, Jesus himself tossed tables in church. Twice. “Don’t take the bait” never means “don’t act like men.”
Repenting From Ambiguity to Clarity
Secondly, we must learn to be unapologetically and biblically specific. We must have the courage to draw bright lines, painted by Scripture. Take again the matter of racism. Here is a good definition (with credit to Douglas Wilson for the word “ethnicity” instead of “race”):
Racism is having pride (or the biblical word “vainglory”) in myself or wishing harm (or the biblical word “malice”) for another based on ethnicity (mine and/or theirs).
This definition can be clearly supported from Scripture, foremost from the fact that the Bible clearly condemns pride and malice. Moreover, it states that there are only two races: that of Adam and that of Christ (Romans 5:17-18). Yet Scripture says there are many ethnicities, even within human melanin groupings (Colossians 3:11 - “Scythian…barbarian”). What separates people today is not an inherent morality of skin pigment but of sin and salvation. Take my own race: we have succeeded because God in His wisdom graciously gave us the gospel before others. Before then my people were still wearing blue face paint and raping and pillaging as they saw fit.
So we must have a clear definition of racism, for three reasons. First, to ensure before God that the charge is always false. Secondly, because it’s become almost axiomatic that a “racist” is someone winning an argument against a leftist. It’s the sin du jour, so the pastor or church doing their job should expect to called it now and then. And thirdly, to not let communist sociologists and race agitators define terms instead of the Bible.
By this when the BLM chaos-troops come accusing, we can ask ourselves if we really are racist, and then reply with either, “Thank you; I repent,” or “Uh nope. Have a nice day, comrade.”
Repenting of Naïveté to Knowing the Times
At the same time we should not naively kid ourselves as to what’s happening when we are called “racist” or “bigot” or “nazi.” Some might argue that it is soft to call name-calling “persecution.” But hateful name-calling always precedes flying bullets. False witness and slander are rehearsals for murder. In order to do the deed, you must first dehumanize your target as being unworthy of even the basic respect of life. As Jesus put it:
But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. Matthew 15:18-19
So we must repent of our naïveté and, like the sons of Issachar, understand “what time it is” (1 Chronicles 12:32). In his famous sermon on decision-making, John MacArthur spoke of having UCLA resist their on-campus evangelism by comparing them to KKK members on the front cover of the campus magazine.2 Charlie Kirk’s assassination is just the fulfillment of that long-simmering impulse. God grant us to understand the year is not 1995.
Some Backbone Required . . .
Our times require a thick skin. The good news is we can get one simply by obeying the commands of Christ. After all, he said that when they come accusing you, falsely calling you “racist” or whatever, go ahead and do a little celebratory moonwalk, for so they persecuted him, and so their persecution serves as God’s confirmation that you’re headed on the right trajectory (Luke 6:22-23).
. . . Wrapped in Love
Then we should ask ourselves afresh just what it means to love in the kingdom of God. It is not love to allow the godless enemies of the kingdom to continue the game they’re running. To give but one example: since illegal immigration has slowed dramatically, so has the number of fentanyl deaths in America. Real people are alive today that would not have been, due to their game being opposed.
Love is doing the law of God to your neighbor (Romans 13:9-10). By extension this means we wish for, pray for and seek in the real world that the law of God be done to our neighbor. For God’s law has the added advantage of agreeing with how God designed the very fabric of the world. It’s therefore within the matrix of God’s commands that people thrive and flourish, which Christians should lovingly want both for ourselves and our neighbor.
Yet love means welcoming our neighbors who hate us. So this Lord’s Day Cities Church and my own will join with thousands of others to joyfully worship and feast and laugh together again, with jolly, open arms to Don Lemon, BLM agitators, paid protestors, ICE agents and everybody else. To you who would tear down God’s house, know that a feast is prepared, and you can come, too. Christ was crucified on a Roman gibbet, the victim of an unjust mob, to pay for the sins of unjust mobs, and mine too. His side was pierced, the water of cleansing from all our sins is poured, and it’s for you, too. The resentment and bitterness that hollows out your soul can be washed away, replaced by the solid stuff of love, light and life. All you have to do is leave behind yourself. But in the exchange God promises to give you back yourself, only new - the “you” you’ve always searched for.
And in the process, He throws in as grace upon grace the unity among the peoples we so desperately want. So come, come one, come all. Come home to Christ.
What a grim and macabre irony that during the Biden years the FACE Act was used to arrest protesters who disrupted the operations
https://www.gty.org/sermons/1217/how-to-know-the-will-of-god (Accessed Jan. 19, 2026).