the Just Gospel conference

At the beginning of last month, before Coronavirus lockdowns, a sizable and impressive conference took place at Garrett Kell’s Del Rey Baptist, in the Washington, D.C. area.

It was not bad that those Americans dared to look at the issues of politics and the church and touched on issues from poverty to immigration as well. In what will be a volatile election year with many evangelicals involved in Christian nationalism the Just Gospel looked like a healthy and solid event.

The Del Rey Baptist church is a daughter church of Capital Hill Baptist.

The Just Gospel described itself as following:

No one saw the 2016 presidential election coming. No one predicted the effect the election would have on the country — and the Church.

To some extent, our tribalism has been exposed and perhaps deepened. Unity has become more fragile.

In all likelihood, the Church will face the same stark choices and the same potential for misunderstanding, disunity and tribal politics. This time, however, we have an opportunity to approach politics and the election differently… like Christians… like the pilgrims and aliens we are in the world.

The goal of Just Gospel 2020 is NOT to engage in partisan debate or endorse any party’s platform. Nor is our goal to bind the consciences of attendees to a particular policy prescription the Bible does not require. We will not recommend or even comment on any candidate.

The Just Gospel 2020 conference goal is to help Christians think biblically and deeply about being Christians and taking our Christian identity and perspective into our political lives.

The organisers of the conference in any case had good intentions/

We hope to aid each other in our discipleship. We are “strangers and exiles on the earth” who “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:13, 16).
We hope to model how Christians who differ in secondary and political matters can nevertheless do so charitably and in a way that preserves both unity and freedom of conscience. We hope to make a difference — for the Church and the country.

We need and want healing conversations that serve the Church We need pilgrim politics that bear witness to Christ and Kingdom to which we are headed. Join us!
 

The Neo-Calvinist movement addresses the situation of racism or even hate groups. Traditional evangelicals and Trinitarian Baptists have failed substantially on this issue and have ignored, downplayed or just haven’t really spoken to this topic. Garrett Kell in his ministry has been consistent on pushing back against those in the Southern Baptist Convention who embrace Christian nationalism and marry faith and politics. When the Southern Baptists had their regular meeting in Dallas, Texas in 2018 it was Garrett Kell who tried to replace Vice President Mike Pence speaking to the Convention with a time of prayer.

The conference was well balanced and covered a large number of issues form immigration, to poverty,  to politics and the church. What surprised me is that there were more outsiders than the traditional 9 Marks church circuit speakers. That made this conference well needed and necessary.

Capitalism and economic policy and Christian survey

Thursday last week the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution released a new survey on the intersections of religion, values, and attitudes toward capitalism, government, and economic policy.

On July 18, the religion, policy and politics project at Brookings co-hosted an event with the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) to release the new survey and accompanying report co-authored by Brookings Senior Fellows E.J. Dionne and William Galston and PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones, PRRI Research Director Daniel Cox, and PRRI Research Associate Juhem Navarro-Rivera.

The 2013 Economic Values Survey tackles a range of topics, including perceptions of economic wellbeing and upward mobility, the role of government, how well capitalism is working, the importance and availability of equal opportunity, values that should guide government policy on economic issues, and specific economic policies.  With its large sample size, the survey explores a range of fault lines on these issues, including racial and ethnic or generational divides.  Additionally, the survey takes up the question of the existence and vitality of religious progressives, compared to religious conservatives, and examines the relationship between theological beliefs and the views of both groups on capitalism and economic policy.

Nearly six out of 10 Americans (59 percent) say that being a religious person “is primarily about living a good life and doing the right thing,” as opposed to the more than one-third (36 percent) who hold that being religious “is primarily about having faith and the right beliefs.”

Religious conservatives are far more likely than religious progressives  to say religion is the most important thing in their lives.

“Among people of faith in general there is a strong consensus on the need for compassion and fairness for those in need,” Dionne said, even among conservatives. He said that more than 60 percent of both theological conservatives and social conservatives “support increasing the minimum wage to $10 an hour.”

Both groups also by large margins see the gap between the rich and poor as growing, and see a role for government in taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves.

While Dionne said that this pattern is not consistent — three in five Americans, for example, think that government has “gotten bigger because it has gotten involved in things that people should do for themselves” — he suggested there was at least an opening to use religion as a bridge across the ideological divide.

Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI, said that Americans’ two views of what makes a person religious harken back to the Protestant Reformation and to the Bible itself.

“This has been a perennial debate through the ages in Christianity,” said Jones. “The Pauline literature, especially in the Book of Romans, makes the case for religious justification by faith alone, while the Book of James seems to state the very opposite — ‘faith without works is dead.’”

The religious conservatives are holding an advantage over religious progressives in terms of size and homogeneity. “However, the percentage of religious conservatives shrinks in each successive generation, with religious progressives outnumbering religious conservatives in the millennial generation. “Religious progressives are significantly younger and more diverse than their conservative counterparts,” Jones said.

Forty-seven percent of the Silent Generation (ages 66 to 88) are religious conservatives, compared with 34 percent of Baby Boomers, 23 percent of Gen Xers and 17 percent of Millennials.

While the Christian right makes up 28 percent of the population and garners more cultural attention — Jones found that there are 27,000 global monthly Google searches for “Christian Right” compared with just over 8,000 searches for “Christian left” – religious progressives are only 9 percentage points behind, with 19 percent of the population.

“What we see is not a one-to-one replacement of religious conservatives with religious progressives,” Jones explained. Instead, the ranks of religious conservatives over time are declining, while religious progressives maintain their share of the population. “But there’s also this growing number of non-religious Americans.” If the trends continue, religious progressives eventually will outnumber religious conservatives.

The report, dubbed the “Economic Values Survey,” uses respondents’ views on everything — from God to the Bible to the role of government in the economy — to create a new scale of religiosity that divides Americans into four groups: religious conservatives (28 percent), religious moderates (38 percent), religious progressives (19 percent) and the nonreligious (15 percent.)

According to the survey, white evangelicals are more likely to say the  free market and Christian values are at odds than black Protestants,mainline Protestants, Catholics, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.  Strangely enough lots of white Americans give a lot of attention to the attachment to objects and like to have many gadgets from the first hours.

 

> Follow the discussion at #EconValues

Please do find:

Materialism, would be life, and aspirations

+++

Related articles

• Report: Americans hold different views of what "religious" means
• Survey finds surprising results on religion, politics
• Event: "Faith, Values and the Economy"
• Religious Progressives Predicted To Outnumber Conservatives, Survey Finds
• A new problem for GOP: Religious liberals will soon outnumber conservatives
• Report: Americans hold different views of what "religious" means - Articles
• This Week in God
• Religious Progressives Predicted To Outnumber Conservatives, Survey Finds
• New Study Shows Breakdown of People Who Believe You Need God to be Good
• Majority of Catholics and Mainline Protestants Support Marriage Equality

Compromise and accomodation

A summary of the Bible Hour presentation at the Christadelphian Hall, Blackpool Street, Burton-upon-Trent on Sunday 5th December 2010 on the compromise and accommodation between Christianity and the religions and philosophies of the world can be found in: The Trinity: paganism or Christianity?

What had once been a simple faith which could be understood by the man in the street, became a complex system of theology which was the preserve of an educated elite. The Christian church became an establishment with political influence and political power. It also became divided.

You also can find more about the historical developments how the Trinity came in to Christianity at the Belgian Biblestudents in the continuation from the articles:  The First Century of Christianity & Positioning of those in power, in Power and position and to be published later Early days of Christianity: Minimizing the power of God’s Force the Holy Spirit; Second Century; Hellenistic influences; Politics and power first priority; Blending of Jewish, Oriental, and Hellenic thought; a.o.

Our political systems and juggling with human laws

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
- George Washington

"You may juggle human laws, you may fool with human courts,
but there is a judgment to come, and from it there is no appeal."
- Orin Philip Gifford

"Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance,
God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness
through a Man whom He has appointed,
having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead."
Acts 17:30-31

God, teach me always faithful to obey your laws
and let me in your opinion be justified
to enter Your Kingdom.

Dutch version / Nederlandse versie > Ons politieke systeem en het jongleren met menselijke wetten

Whom can we trust to govern us?

This month's survey question:
Whom can we trust to govern us?

POSSIBLE ANSWERS:

- There are some good politicians but they are the exception
- All politicians are unreliable and cannot be trusted
- We can only REALLY trust the Lord Jesus Christ when he rules in the Kingdom of God.
- We should implicitly trust our elected politicians
- Don't know.

Go to www.thisisyourbible.com to submit your answer!

If you look around you can find people that you think you do best not to tell too much and others where you could tell your deepest secrets.
What about your living conditions and for the future that lays in front of you? You might think that there are politicians you can rely on or not trust. Or maybe you think that no one in politics is to be trusted. You think that they are slime balls or still do those things they find important to them. Or that they do not keep to their word.

If you think politics is nonsense perhaps you can ask whether you should be engaged. But as a Christian you can examine to what extent we agree with our politicians or may have to attend to it.
You may wonder whether we actually need to vote or whether we can join a political party or even go further and imagine us to come forward as a candidate?
In the world so many things that happen there are plenty of events or things we want to resist to. But to what extent we can resist against the chest punching things? Can we join reactive groups or join a group demonstration? Which are groups we would consider valuable to join and which not worthy or even wrong to join?

What we also need to ask is how it is about the obligations of the country where we live or are citizens from.
I think you must obey laws of that country if they do not go against the will of God. And nowhere has God forbidden voting. If it is required to vote, as in Belgium you should keep to that commitment. (Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar) How you vote is up to your conscience. This is not to imply that you would not think that God is the only one who can solve everything.

Because we believe that it will ultimately be Jesus Christ that will bring the world order in its place, and give the start to the most complete and accurate Kingdom. The Kingdom of God will have the best management and is the only way to give full happiness.

Dutch version >