How To Be Effective

What is an effective way to bring God's kingdom to earth from a biblical point of view? God has all the resources and power He needs and only relies on us to the extent that He chooses to. The only limits on God are the limits He places on Himself.

God is big on free will and human choice in general. This is because He wants some of us to choose to serve Him rather than all serve Him because we have no sentience. Furthermore we find out throughout the Bible and likewise with Jesus on earth that God's kingdom is very different from the governments of this world. Christians are members of both worlds.

God not only values freedom but justice as well. God is perfectly good. To reconcile justice together with our bad behavior enabled by allowing us free choice God has made this possible because of His mercy and suffering for us. If we ran the world, every one who did something we consider bad would be punished severely for every infraction.

Instead of being pragmatic or “realistic” about how humans turned out, God decided to sacrifice Himself so we would not have to bear the full consequences of our actions or inactions. God is not willing to leave us to our own evil. He has made a way for everyone without regard to anything people find important.

What God wants of us is to be part of Him in heaven by having us turn away from our evil and accept His forgiveness, learn more about Him though mixing His ideas in our heads via the Bible, and treat Him and His creation with respect. Basically Christianity is about a person (who is also God) and it is a devotional religion. This means that Christianity is more like the Bhakti movement in Hinduism or the Sufiists in Islam than Science or most of modern Western Philosophy. This means in many ways the lifestyle of a monk is closest to what God would want our lives to be like.

We can do everything under the sun that is good, but the most vital things are turning from evil and drawing near to God. The biggest obstacle to this is the technology of the modern world. The big challenge seems not in knowing how to live but getting pulled in more than one direction. And witnessing today is a very delicate matter because so many people associate Jesus with hell.

We have made a bad situation for ourselves in fighting internal fights at any cost we ended up showing the world an ugly side of us. Most people in America today associate the words Christian, Evangelical, Fundamental, Republican, and Conservative as the same thing. This is not just an oversimplification. Most people who are Christian in America today are conservative Republicans. We are known to others by many things but mostly in our opposition to abortion and accepting gay people as psychologically normal and fit for church leadership.

I am not for dodging anything in the Bible, but do we want to be known as the above if we had only a short time with someone? Maybe we need to change our focus onto something that is more essential to the faith and less needlessly offensive to the non-believers in this country. If we truly do have a limited time left as some believe and we all have little time because none of us live really long in the grand scheme of even human history, we need to prioritize.

I think that maybe it would be good for the Church to actually tone down the intensity of the political involvement and the amount of media exposure they have. Do not get pulled into debates and do not sponsor candidates from any organization that uses one of the words I described above.

Instead, put our time and money in fighting the cultural battles in Europe, where most the ideas start. To be accepted within this circle we need to have good knowledge of the humanities which means studying world religions, world history, world philosophy, world literature and world arts.

The future of the Church is going to be in Africa and Europe is becoming a backwater economically. The reason why we forfeit these cultural wars is because we have so little presence in the academic world. Whenever we seem to get a foothold, we get so aggressive that we never build large scale networks in these institutions. This is more an American thing and a modern thing than a Christian thing.

America currently has essentially no philosophical schools that it created on its own, it has no interest in learning other languages on a large scale, and art has basically no place in the life of most Americans. We then let Hollywood and science fill the void. And we end up with what makes the most money with the least amount spent which means it is loaded with violence and sex.

So maybe we should think more about how monks live as an example than how politicians, sports figures, or celebrities live as examples of a life of faith and devotion. We could also learn more about our beliefs by picking up a non-fiction book rather than watching a Hollywood movie or play an online game.

He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?