Conservative No More

A cold and blustery day assaulted my morning as I filled up my second cup of joe in meager defense.

I have returned from a weekend deer hunt where this closing youth weekend saw my only deer-hunting son who hadn't bagged a deer (the other two have held this over him for over a year), nail a sweet doe from 80 yards with raw sights (no scope) ten minutes before sunrise on that first morning. You've got to like it.

Tyler and Bambi (Bambette?)

Anyway, I sat with my youngest son in his deer stand, we saw nothing but cardinals, squirrels and other mid-Texas fauna, all seeming to mock our safetied weapons. With little happening on our stand, I read through Francis Schaeffer's "The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century." It's a twenty-five year old masterful work by Schaeffer which does not stray from the title nor from his typical rigorous adherence to the Bible as his framework.

Much within it caught my eye and you'll likely see chunks of it blogged upon in the days to come. Here's the first:

"One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity today is not conservative, but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservativism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us. Today we are a minority."

Whoa! As I'd always considered myself conservative (at least since my musings over Jimmy Carter in the sixth grade), I saw the group which I had always considered "conservative" moving further and further away from the biblical convictions I held. It is true. In a post-modern age, the Judeo-Christian ethic of our heritage has become a foggy memory.

Schaeffer encourages the Church to encourge the young to be revolutionary, not in the Islamo-fascist sense and not in the storming-of-the-Bastille sense, but in the Christian sense where no greater love has any man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends. This is often revolutionary within the conservative Church.

But even this is cannot be held within the contentless, Kumbaya feel of much of the social gospel. It takes place within the objective content of the entirety of the word of God. That is revolutionary within the liberal churches in America today.

Who'd have thought that Christianity would ever become "revolutionary?" So it has.