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Letter from America

What then should we do?

It's been quite a year in America. First, there was the 'millennium' (remember that?), then there was the tech-bust, and then (of course) September 11, Afghanistan, the Taliban, and one Osama Bin Laden.

In some ways, you might be forgiven for feeling if you lived in America that despite all this nothing has changed at all. Shopping is still the national sport. Pundits are still predicting a soft-landing for the economy. Microsoft is still selling Apple Mac's software cunningly disguised as Windows.

Survey

But then again, then again, things have changed. One of the most startling pieces of information I came across recently was the survey of the opinions of professors and students at America's universities about the war in Afghanistan. Survey, you say, that sounds interesting. Ah yes, but this survey had a spin. And its spin was the recording of any and all anti-war statements and comments from the universities. Macarthyistic black listing it may not be - but a list of casual, perhaps off the record, comments which do not toe the national party line is a little bit startling in the land of the free.

Actually, let it be said, this kind of restrictive code is by no means unusual. This column has mentioned before the remarkable number of rules and regulations and bureaucracy that America embraces like meatballs in spaghetti. Everyone finds it frustrating. Our nine month-old little boy gives us an easy way of calculating the number of months we have been negotiating bill payments with our medical insurance company to pay for his birth (nine months).

It can sometimes have a vaguely sinister feel to it. We were shocked to hear a news report of a suspect under investigation where the journalist supposedly reassuringly commentated that we should not assume he was guilty until he had been charged. Charged? How about 'until he had been convicted'? What happened to guilty until proven innocent (whoops, I mean the other way around)?

'Thermostat' needed?

In all this the evangelical church continues, and in some ways especially at this time, to face a remarkable challenge. It needs to speak prophetically. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that church should not be a 'thermometer' to reflect the opinions of society but a 'thermostat' to change society's morals.

The grand danger of the Christian church in a morally charged war-like atmosphere is to cave into the natural desire for revenge and the predominant feeling of righteousness. There is such a thing as a just war. There is no such thing as a just people, outside of faith in Christ. Churches have in the past all too easily become 'thermometers' not 'thermostats' in our Western society. We need to rediscover the prophetic urge to speak boldly.

But not only does the church need to speak prophetically it also must speak evangelically. That is, the church needs to find the ability to centre on the gospel. To keep first things, first things, the main thing, the main thing - to preach Christ and him crucified, as the Apostle Paul put it.

I was just talking with someone about all this. 'Simple but profound', he said. Exactly - prophetic and evangelical, the one because the other.

Josh Moody