the Outlook Blog

Reading Jim Wallis' Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street.

Makes me wonder: Where has the church been the last 50 years?

What kinds of questions have we been asking of ourselves? Of our politicians and our financial captains?

Have we been asking questions at all?

Or have we retreated into our theological havens, our self-help retreat centers, our feel-good-and-be-prosperous  church growth stategies?

Have we offered a creed without a conscience? 

Jesus without justice?

Heaven without earth? 

A spirituality without a witness to the culture?

Have we been so preoccupied with numbers and buildings and programs and projects that we have missed the heart of the gospel?

If any of the above questions can be answered, in full or in part, with a yes, then we have failed, and our failure is part and parcel of our nation's plunge into economic chaos.

Whether we have been liberal or conservative, the tide of culture has weakened the church, turning the church into a little afternoon tea-party or Monday-night pub discussions about supralapsarianism. 

Conservatives have sought refuge in bedroom theology and politics; liberals have found similar refuge in various causes - but all of us have been afraid to ask the deep questions so badly needed by our nation.

We have winked at the accumulation of wealth without restraint; we have blessed the stock market with a carte blanch; we have made happiness the supreme goal of life; we have lost our sense of the common good, and are morally adrift on Pinocchio's Pleasure Island - which, by the way, is a parable of the times in which we have lived for the last 50 years!

Where and how has the church failed to ask the good questions needed to keep our nation's moral compass rightly calibrated?

How have we failed to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world?

If we've failed, there is sufficient fault to go around - neither the conservative nor the liberal wings of the church can claim exemption.

I look forward to some comment here, and let it be confessional, not accusatory.