I believe in God, an artistic designer and good developer. He has called us to join with him in caring for the earth and building human culture. Instead, we have fought against him in this great project by trying to replace him with our own prideful empires. In seeking to make names for ourselves, we have ignored him, neglected the poor, devoured each other, and harmed his environment. Yet God has never stopped being kind to us. I believe he loves us passionately and even likes us! He is determined to rehab our communities and restore us personally to relationship with him and with one another, and to the quality of living he always intended for us. This is God’s initiative.

I believe that God has brought his gentle rule into our world by sending his Divine Son to become the real human being Jesus of Nazareth, letting us kill him unjustly, and then raising him physically and verifiably from the dead. In these acts, God our Father has provided, and Jesus his Son has accomplished, atonement for our sins; the Holy Spirit applies this salvation to people when we believe, spiritually uniting us with Jesus.

God is advancing his mission of world rehab, not through any kind of coercion, but only through this simple message, empowered by his Holy Spirit: God loves humanity, hates death, and is restoring us to him and to each other through Jesus. As the Word of God become flesh, Jesus is the embodiment of God’s message, the focal point of his mission, and the focus of his inspired scriptures.

The Old and New Testaments are the word of God, which he exhaled in both their content and language. Rightly interpreted, they are completely trustworthy in all they teach, and are Christians’ only authority for what we must believe and how we must live. The Bible is not a rule book or an answer book, nor is it an epistemological foundation for justifying claims to knowledge. Rather, God’s word preached is useful as the Spirit’s tool in cutting through our resistance to God’s message and triggering faith in our hearts. The Scriptures are God speaking words of life into human history. No ideology and no other message besides the gospel which these Scriptures announce to us has the power to break down the dividing walls of hostility that exist between people groups, or to break down the imperialism rising from within every human heart that leads nation (or neighborhood) into war against nation. Because of my confidence in the usefulness of Scripture, interpreting, communicating, and applying this living, powerful word of God will be the focus of my ministry.

In the American political context, there is a desperate need for believers to articulate how the Christian message meets the challenges of human poverty and violence. Rich and poor, black and white and Hispanic, urban and suburban all want these intractable social problems solved, but none of us seem to know how to solve them. I don’t pretend to have the answers either, but I do know that in Jesus’ ministry, his message about God’s rule coming to earth had everything to do with people trusting in God for salvation in this world instead of hording wealth away from the poor or resorting to violence in order to make things right.

There is a sense in which every church must refuse to be political. Everyone needs the gospel, not just rich or poor, Republican or Democrat. Jesus did not allow his most ardent disciples and excited crowds to crown him king. He said that his kingdom was from another world and that it was for this very reason that his followers did not use violence to prevent his arrest and crucifixion. The cultural transformation that the gospel brings does not advance with the coercive arm of the state, the protection of police and military forces, or any use of violence. Every time the church has attempted to use these means to aid in the propagation of the gospel, it has backfired. For example, in our American context, we must be careful never to use evangelism as a back door strategy for creating a voting block that holds power over non-Christians.

But this does not mean that the Christian message about God’s rule on earth in Jesus has nothing to do with politics. As the parallelism in Jesus’ prayer teaches us, the coming of his kingdom means God’s will being done on earth as it already is done in heaven, and God’s will involves those things we often think of as political values: liberty, social order, peace, human equality, and justice. The most basic sins that spring from the human heart, such as pride, greed, malice, and vengefulness, lie at the root of social and political misery. Further, evil becomes systemic within cultures through spiritual forces, human leadership, idolatrous ideas, and poorly designed structures. Feeling hopelessly trapped by these systems, people often become fatalistic, bitter, and self-destructive.

Even though he refused to accept political authority or use political power to advance his cause, Jesus did have a political agenda. Jesus tried to persuade his fellow countrymen to follow him in loving their enemies, the evil empire of their day, instead of violently fighting for their liberty. When it became obvious that they would not accept his spiritual leadership, Jesus warned them that their chosen path would lead to the destruction of all they hoped to preserve. The gospel about God’s rule that Jesus announced was his alternative story about Israel’s past and future, a story that centered on him and functioned as a replacement to the violent and moralistic stories all the other would-be leaders were telling.

Moses had warned that if Israel abandoned the Lord’s covenant or rejected his covenant representative, then he would abandon them to imperialistic violence. But even though Israel rejected him, Jesus offered himself as a victim to the violence of empire, handed over by those he came to save. As Israel’s representative before God, and through Israel representing all the families of the earth, Jesus absorbed on the cross the covenant curse we all deserved. In his resurrection, God vindicated Jesus as his chosen man on earth before his followers, his people who rejected him, and before the empire that sought to crush him. Jesus’ resurrection also vindicated his message, the gospel, as both true and victorious: we’re not crazy to think that God’s rule of peace and justice could come into a world plagued by violence and poverty through a man who refused to use the political violence of empire to advance his cause.

The church in America today needs prophetic voices that will challenge the ideologies of empire with the truth of the gospel. Young boys playing video games and being recruited by gang leaders and military recruiters need to be told that mastering the skillful use of violence does not make them more manly or human. What about the common idea in political science and philosophy that violence and war are essential components of human progress and development? Should we think about the struggle between good and evil in terms of benevolent empires extending the efficient violence of order into a world of chaos?

It’s never legitimate to get what you want through war or extend your power and influence through violence. Human history does not make progress through violence and war. War should never be used to determine who governs any part of the world, whether that means removing a government through violence or establishing one. Violence is only legitimate when an existing government must use it as a last resort to enforce justice and protect human life—never to extend the reach of its law enforcement jurisdiction, its geopolitical influence, or its territory. Violence is not a legitimate means of state building or seeking political legitimacy.

When human pride makes us discontent within the spheres of influence and responsibility God has given us, we begin to build empires instead of communities. One of the first symptoms of this dysfunction is poverty. In Jesus’ teaching as well as the rest of the Old and New Testaments, we find repeated those who have more than they need to live and enjoy life are responsible, both personally and corporately, to provide for those who do not have enough to live or enjoy life. In America, our racial and class history has created an environment in which most of us look down on poor people for the way they under-value work and education, but we refuse to recognize that we have made it next to impossible for them. Rich and middle class whites and blacks have fled poor and working class communities, and we use exclusionary zoning and opposition to Section-8 housing to make sure they can’t follow us. This process perpetuates itself because the drain of economic resources, political clout, and family stability makes it harder on those left behind who feel trapped, angry, hopeless, and alienated from the system that is helping everyone else get ahead. Eventually, any individual who succeeds moves away, which further hurts the community. No wonder those communities don’t value individual success and make fun of kids for acting white or uppity! The same issue is afflicting rural communities where any kid who succeeds moves away–hence the meth epidemic.

Part of the solution is to rule out the use of exclusionary zoning, which imprisons poor people in ghettos far away from job opportunities, with unreliable transportation, in dangerous neighborhoods where the rest of us don’t want to live either. Another answer is for plain heroism: large numbers of people willing to buck environmental and economic incentives and start valuing poor people the way we should. If we want poor kids to heroically face peer pressure and value work and education in ways that make them stick out, then we need to be willing to stick out, too, even if that means living closer to or even in unstable neighborhoods. We shouldn’t become little rich messiahs come to save the day, just the good neighbors our “people” have failed to be for too long. Simply by including poor people in our social and friendship networks, and by opening our lives up to their involvement, we can do a little bit toward overcoming the great gulf that class has become in our society.

True human development is essentially a peaceful process of creating beauty out of normality, complexity out of randomness, and culture in harmony with nature. God made this world, filled it with abundant resources, and set us humans on a track of peaceful development. That’s why we should participate in his fight against poverty and violence; they don’t belong in his world! Pastors should make it their central mission every opportunity to explain how the good news about Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and future coming spell the end of evil and misery in this world, especially the violence and poverty in our neighborhoods and among the nations. Jesus is calling rich and poor people alike, powerful and powerless, liberal and conservative to turn away from their pride and the ideologies they have come up with to solve their own basic problems and, instead, put their trust in the gospel of his Kingdom.

Author Bio:: Bill is a senior at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis and is passionate about applying non-violent theologies of liberation to the context of planting churches in U.S. cities.

About Bill McLellan