Russell Moore: The Next Billy Graham Might Be Drunk Right Now (CP Interview 2/2)
CP: You try to remind yourself every day that the next Billy Graham could be drunk right now. People who are today alcoholics, porn stars, abortion clinic workers, or marching in a white hood in South Carolina could be our brothers and sisters in Christ tomorrow. How does it help you in your cultural engagement, to remind yourself of that?
Moore: If we lose sense of the power of God in conversion, then we tend to see our opponents as our eternal enemies. We tend to see them only in terms of the arguments that we've come to demolish, when every one of these people, including the ones who may be the most hostile to us right now, are people who are in need of redemption and grace.
God can change hearts in an instant, and not only include those people within the people of God, on condition of repentance and faith, but also turn those people around to be leaders.
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No one would have assumed that Saul of Tarsus would be an ideal candidate to be a missionary to the gentiles. That's a reason the apostles in Jerusalem were wary at first, until they heard his Gospel and encounter with Christ.
So we need to make room for the grace of God and realize that our task is advocacy and we have to be advocates, but our task is also evangelism. We can never sacrifice evangelism as we're doing advocacy. As we're arguing with people and debating with people, we're praying not just that their arguments would be defeated but that they would come to Christ and receive the grace that we have received.
I think that changes the way that we see people. It humanizes the people around us. They're not just talking heads on television and they're not just people screaming at us from a protest line — they're sinners for whom Christ died.
CP: Os Guinness has a new book out in which he argues that Christians have lost the art of persuasion and they need to get it back. It sounds like you would very much agree with that?
Moore: I do. It's not just Christians who have lost that. I think across-the-board in American culture, we have fallen into a mode of discourse that is simply looking for "amen's," or the secular equivalent of an amen, from our respective tribes. So, when we have debates, we're not really talking to people on the other side, we're talking to the people on our side, in order to assure them that we're one of them.
That's not the way Jesus is operating in the New Testament. He is speaking a Word to consciences in order to persuade with the power of Spirit authority, and we have to reclaim that.
That means, if we actually seek to persuade people around us, we can't assume that arguments are won and settled in an hour's work of debate. Rarely do people change their minds or hearts that way. A seed is planted, someone waters, someone cultivates. And we ought to have that realization as we talk to people who disagree with us.
