I know, some will gasp in abject horror and even cry out while tearing their clothes, “Why do you hate the poor?” This is an emotionally charged issue to be sure but MCOI has never really shied away from controversy. Although I am not suggesting we forsake the poor I am suggesting we follow the arguments used for abandoning the war on drugs to answer whether we should continue the War on Poverty. Consistency in political social policy is as important as consistency in an individual’s life. The parameters are fairly simple and I think Sting did as good of a job as any in his March 2010 piece, Let’s End the War on Drugs. He argues that is has been, “…the most unsuccessful, unjust yet untouchable issue in politics…” While it may not be the “most” unsuccessful” it has been pretty unsuccessful and it is for the most part “untouchable,” politically at least. What are the criteria Sting used to demonstrate his point? Continue reading …

Over 20 years ago when Joy and I taught on homosexuality we suggested that in our opinion pedophiles would follow the road map which homosexual activists were developing as the path to “normalizing” and main streaming homosexual behavior. In the early 1990s at one of the MCOI conferences we did a panel Q&A. One of the questions raised was where did we see culture heading? Joy submitted that we but look back 20-25 years and note homosexuality wasn’t mentioned in polite society but was becoming normalized in the 1990s. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t homosexuals and there were even some very famous ones like entertainer, Liberace. Sexual activity of any kind simply hadn’t been the stuff of polite conversation in the past. She suggested Continue reading …

In two previous blog posts I examined the Christian engagement with the post-Christian culture. Those posts implied that the dominant paradigm of Evangelicals preserving our culture by “Taking back America” is wrong-headed. It is wrong-headed because it denies the moral strangeness that exists between Christianity and Secularism. In the next post I opined that the Christian efforts to preserve traditional marriage will fail. I was pretty pessimistic.

My prediction is that gay marriage is an inevitability. Eventually there will be a federal law.  I predict that same-sex couples will not settle for tolerance and being left alone with their right to marry. Instead many will demand non-discrimination from religious organizations. They will insist that churches rent out their fellowship halls to same-sex weddings if they are going to do weddings for any hetero-sexual couples and will sue if they are denied. . . To be clear I don’t think there is any amount of voting or lobbying or grass roots efforts that will change this.

Christians need to shift from the dominant paradigm to something else. In this last post I want to propose what that “something else” might be. As always these ideas are mine alone and do not necessarily represent Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc.

Rodney Clapp the author and former editor of Christianity Today says that in the dominant paradigm of engagement with culture the Church sees itself as the  “Sponsoring Chaplain” of society. Continue reading …