The Church Against the World: When the Music Fades+Personal Updates

When the Church Stops Singing

Politics, Speech, and Authority in a World That Wants Our Song

In my first essay, I addressed the church’s posture to the world, and then the church’s posture for the world, and in this final essay, I’d want to give an overview of where the Church is in danger of being in the world, or more precisely, where she is tempted to adopt her song to worldly standards.

The Church is a colony of heaven. Her authority is not derived from government bureaucrats, cultural elites, or from the moment when Dad decided to become a pastor of his own home-church experiment. Her authority comes from above. And that means there is a fundamental difference between going to the world, being for the world, and being in the world.

It is good for the Church to go to the world.
It is good for the Church to be for the world.
But it is disastrous for the Church to be in the world.

To be in the world is a negation of the other two postures.

So the question we must ask is simple, but searching:
Where has the Church stopped singing?
Where has she become comfortably numb?
Where has she compromised in ways that make her feel at ease with worldly categories?

I want to argue that the Church is comfortably in the world in three specific ways:
in her politics, in her speech, and in her hierarchy.