Category: Gospel and Culture

What to Do with News Fatigue

 

Impeachment hearings. Mother allegedly kills her three children. U.S. drinking water filled with “forever chemicals.” Coronavirus in China. Unsanctioned bombings by Iran. It seems like a new crisis hits the headlines everyday.

This is why I wrote Our Good Crisis.

Overwhelmed, I needed to find a way to cope with the calamity. Turns out many of us feel the same way. In 2018, 70% of Americans reported feeling news fatigue. When we’re worn down, it’s easy to cave into despair and check out, or click into outrage. Perhaps even worse, go numb.

How do we navigate what feels like constant crisis? Is it possible to make some good of it all? I believe there is. I want to do my small part to help. We’re giving away the first chapter, well ahead of the book release (March 17).

I hope it brings you hope and gives you light.

Nitty Gritty Training for Missional Communities

Acts 29 recently hosted the Gospel Formed conference aimed at equipping communities groups to practically live out the essentials of Gospel, Community, and Mission. Each talk got nitty-gritty with challenges and opportunities in each area. I found so much of it to be insightful and encouraging that we posted the videos to our City Group leaders Slack channel.

Will Walker: Gospel

  • Provides a couple “gospel grids” to help lead discussions deeper into Jesus.
  • Guidance in how to draw out vulnerability and lead people into application for real life change.

Todd Engstrom: Community
  • Marks of true community: intentionality, sacrifice, imperfect.
  • How a community can deeper grow: affinity, proximity, crisis, mission.

Jonathan Dodson: Mission
  • What to do when facing challenges and fatigue in mission.
  • Guidance in how to organize, diffuse, and stoke evangelism, mercy, and justice in your groups.

3 Great Untruths Affecting Society

Have you had the sense we’re losing our moral bearings? Been dismayed by the outrage culture creeping into social media, rendering Twitter and Facebook more acrimonious than ever? How can we make progress toward civility?

Christians, whose faith is summarized in “love God, love neighbor,” should lead the way. But to get there, we may need help assessing what makes things so contentious.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt give us a big hand up in their recent book The Coddling of the American Mind. By “coddling” they mean “overprotecting,” the modern tendency to insulate one’s self from disagreement, risk, and adversity. For instance, college students are protesting assigned textbooks, and visiting speakers, not because their ideas are immoral but because they “harm” or “trigger” the student.

The authors argue that refusing to engage ideas that you disagree with, in the name of harm, actually does more damage to the self and society.

Our society has become so accustomed to comfort, that differences of opinion and the exchange of ideas are seen as threatening. They argue this is damaging to society:

We are not saying that the problems facing students, and young people more generally, are minor or ‘all in their heads.’ We are saying that what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them.

With this in view, they identify three Great Untruths that must be overcome:

  1. Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker (retreat from hardship and difference)
  2. Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings (emotional intuition trumps reason and truth)
  3. Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and bad people (I am good; they are bad)

They note, “Anyone who cares about young people, education, or democracy should be concerned about these trends.” I would add, anyone who care about their city, neighbor, church, small group, or children.

Hope for Dizzying Times

A friend recently confessed political views in her church are so tense and divided, she can’t bring up politics with her fellow Christians. A member in my own church asked me if it was okay to not call himself an evangelical at work because he’s concerned people will draw the wrong conclusions. Many people I talk to are reluctant to evangelize for fear of losing their jobs. It’s been a dizzying year, asking it easy to feel disoriented within our own society, churches, and even with God.

Dizzying Times

Although the details were different, the Apostle Peter wrote to people facing similar challenges. He sent a couple of letters to Christians from across five diverse regions who were experiencing cultural disorientation. His letters are saturated in wisdom for times like ours. Perhaps the most important piece is this: cultural disorientation is an opportunity to re-center hope.

Cultural disorientation is an opportunity to re-center hope.

It’s easy to slip into hoping people will accept us or our views. We often go to considerable lengths to make sure people think being Christian doesn’t mean being weird, “You should come on Sunday, there are a lot of really cool people there.” Or we may avoid gospel conversations altogether. But shouldn’t being holy make us stick out a bit in an unholy culture? When cultural relevance becomes dear, we compromise our hope. Peter steers clear of this impulse to soften Christianity with the hope of cultural acceptance.

He also steers clear of cultural dominance, a posture more assertive and critical, more prone to attack or withdraw than to appease. When our hope slips into cultural dominance, we tend to get heated in political conversations, rant on social media, and subtly hope the government will become more like us. Sensing this temptation, Peter writes: “Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless” (1 Pet. 3:9). He heads off a domineering, tit-for-tat attitude with an exhortation to bless those who call us names or show us evil.

Recentering Hope

So how do we move toward blessing others amidst the confusion?

Whenever we get lost, we’re told to find a landmark, a star, a street name, something familiar and fixed, and work our way home from there. To re-center, we must fixate on God’s call to be exiles of hope.

Biblical hope is neither passive nor aggressive; it does not strive for cultural relevance or dominance. Instead, it operates on a different plane. It steps out of the cultural moment, refuses to be defined by it, and tries to view everything from the “eternal moment.” Peter writes: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:3–4).

Peter expresses hope sometimes in an event, other times in an age, but always in a person: “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Jesus came from the future into the present, bringing some of heaven with him, to secure a resurrected future for us. In Jesus, life climbed out of death . . . and we climb out with him, with hope for a whole new world. So how does re-centering around this hope alter the way we respond to those around us?

The Difference of Hope

Immediately, Peter says our hope affects how we suffer: “In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials” (1:6). When our hope is recentered in the risen Christ, we can rejoice in trials of all shapes and sizes. If the conversation gets tense around politics, we need not grow angry and embittered because we share a joyful inheritance in Christ’s future and just rule. However, we shouldn’t avoid uncomfortable debate either, knowing that our hope compels us to bring some of heaven to earth now. Viewing our work from the eternal moment, we can risk disapproval by sharing hope for a just world in Jesus, while also laboring towards one.

A version of this post originally appeared at Crossway Books as a part of a Knowing the Bible series, for which I recently wrote the 1-2 Peter & Jude study.