We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

The Life and Death of MLK and What it Might Have to Say to Us

"I Have a Dream"Creative Commons License

Tony Fischer via Compfight

Here is an EXCELLENT reflection from Jonathan Martin in answer to a question that was posed to him on how he reconciles his rejection of the politics of this world with the social justice work of MLK. This is a must read.

From the article:

So to come to the question, I feel like the best thing I can do as a pastor is to form people in the shape of the cross and the hope of the resurrection.  This will have political implications, but they do not come first.  It may be that God works through us to an extent in the sphere of American politics, but that will be an extension of people shaped and formed by the message of the Kingdom of God and cannot work the other way around.  If we do impact that political world, my sense is that it will also come as it did for King—less through lobbying and more through sacrifice, less through legislation and more from not loving our own lives even unto death.  I also think as it was for King, it will come from power exercised underneath the established powers rather than from on top of them.

Related Reading

5 Distinctions of God’s Kingdom

Jesus said that his kingdom was “not from this world,” for it contrasts with the kingdom of the world in every possible way. This is not a simple contrast between good and evil. The contrast is rather between two fundamentally different ways of doing life, two fundamentally different mindsets and belief systems, two fundamentally different…

12 Reasons for Keeping the Kingdom of God Separate from Politics, Part 2

Image by the justified sinner via Flickr Satan is the “god of this age” (2 Cor 4:4) and “ruler of the world (Jn 12:30; 14:31) who “controls the entire world” (1 Jn 5;19) and possesses all the power of “all the kingdoms of the world” (Lk 4:6). While governments are ordained by God to preserve…

Is the Separation of Church and State Satan’s Idea?

I encourage you to read this article. In it, Rick Perry claims that the idea of the separation of the church and state is from Satan, and he and others will next week embark on a 40 days to save America campaign, which (as far as I can tell) means “40 days to save America…

Memorial Day

For Memorial Day, we thought we would repost Greg’s thoughts from 2007. In this post, Greg expresses his conflicted feelings over this holiday and gives a brief defense of Christian pacifism.  *** Hope you all had a happy Memorial Day. (Isn’t that something of a misnomer — a happy time remembering people killed in war?) Memorial Day…

How to Overcome the Flesh Mindset

Unless you have taken intentional steps to change, the way you presently experience yourself and the world around you was mostly chosen for you, not by you. Think about that. You inherited a way of interpreting the world. Your brain has been in the process of becoming programmed by factors outside your control from the…

Conservative/Liberal are not Theological Categories

We wanted to repost something by Jonathan Martin today that struck a chord with us about the theological emptiness of political boxes. It’s brief and beautifully written and we hope you’ll read the entire article here. For those of you who are weary of the political tug-of-war for your soul, here’s some hope: And so…