An Urgent Appeal to Church Leaders: Don't Get Sidetracked in the Souk
The Kavanugh hearings have assaulted our ears with faux threats, inflated promises, and contrived indignations to the extent that the Capitol Hill circus is a microcosm of our garish, wild, untethered political culture.
Midst it all it's easy to forget the overarching Constitution and its values that should be at the center of the hearings.
Sadly, the confirmation process has been diverted too often from constitutional priority. The outcomes have been judges who presume to tell us when life begins and even redefine marriage.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The latest swashbuckling over Kavanaugh shows that many who govern have lost their focus in this crazy age.
But so have some of us who seek to lead churches, as contemporary scandals reveal.
Strangely, in contemplating all this, my mind was drawn to a certain sector of modern Jerusalem. I have been to the Holy City several times to see its sacred treasures, but found myself losing that focus in the exotic souks, or markets inside the Old City.
Walk through the narrow passages, and a thousand hands reach out from stalls and shops, beckoning with exotic trinkets, offering a sip of fresh orange juice, dangling colorful fabrics, promising the best buys on memorabilia of the trip of a lifetime.
A sometimes delightful, sometimes aggressive dissonance of voices invite, lure, and call to the tourist to come in and sample the bargains.
Inside the intriguing souks on the narrow alleys behind the ancient wall it's easy to forget why one came to Jerusalem in the first place.
Our culture has become a bazaar of voices screaming at us to look here, go there, do this, focus on that, forget this, embrace this cause, divert our energies to this movement, believe this allegation, disbelieve that accusation, trust this person, suspect everything that individual says...
Every day we are blasted with texts, tweets, emails, messages, pleas, charms, entreaties telling us that we must abandon all else and go all out for this or that movement, candidate or party on whom, the peddlers tell us, the survival of civilization itself depends.
We are torn, pulled, fragmented, and face so many appeals for focus that we become unfocused.
Deep inside the garish marketplace of movements and causes we can too easily forget why we are here.
In the midst of all this we must hear one voice and one alone, that of Jesus, who says now with the same authority and urgency He spoke 2,000 years ago: Do the business of the Kingdom.
Shrilling voices immediately shout: "Mine is the business of the Kingdom!" Another blurts, "No, mine!" Soon there is a cacophony of assertions and claims.
In the bazaar of urgencies and appeals and desperate shrieking we have lost the one focus: the business of the Kingdom.
I have taken groups to the D-Day beaches of Normandy several times since the 1990s. Every time I go I am freshly moved and instructed. The Nazis wanted to do all possible to divert the Allied invasion forces to any direction that would keep them from reaching Berlin—the seat of the monster, Hitler.
Any soldiers taking the false routes would have been suckers. So our adversary makes suckers of us when we fall for the voices in the socio-political-cultural bazaar that get us off course.
Sometimes our motives are good, desiring to be engaged, to bear witness in the public square, wanting to prove the relevancy of our message. Yet some of us have been huckstered, and wasted our resources on the sham in the souk.
Instead we must turn our eyes and ears away from the hawkers and give our total attention to Jesus, and His consummate commission to us. Our kingdom business must be to "make disciples." (Matthew 28:18-20)
A society full of the "company of the committed" (to borrow a line from an Elton Trueblood book) would experience personally and bring to their world the transformation that characterizes what we seek: righteousness-justice, peace, and Spirit-given joy. (Romans 14:17)
In His Great Commission, Jesus told the disciples around Him that day to go into all the world, and teach those they win to Him to observe, or do all He had commanded the original band.
True discipleship is the linkage of knowing and doing, orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The content of disciple-making is "all I have commanded you": the lifestyle qualities of the Sermon on the Mount, the miraculous works of Matthew 10 (see also John 14:12), the sacrificial, compassionate risk-taking of incarnational ministry, and much more seen in Jesus Christ's earthly ministry.
We are to be apprentices of Jesus and train others to be as well.
Through evangelism we prepare people to meet God in eternity, and through discipleship we instruct them how to live and minister temporally.
In this defining moment in our lives and culture we must not allow the slick purveyors shouting at us incessantly to pull us away from the making of disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is at the heart of the business of the Kingdom.
Don't get sidetracked in the souk.
