Pastors as Political Agents

This is the third installment of the Common Culture series. The first one dealt with Common Culture and Christian Nationalism. The second one offered a way to promote a common culture in the church. In this third and last installment, we’ll look at how pastors can promote the common culture of their churches and that will result in the most effective defense against a hostile culture— the culture of the church.

If these articles are helpful please feel free to forward them to others via email. Or subscribe yourself.

Individual Christians who see no other common culture or unified institution that can withstand the Marxists are turning to pastors as the only leaders left to fill in the gap. Pastors may speak truth to power, call politicians to repentance, and generally testify to God’s truth over against the world’s lies. But the pastor’s main job is to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. In other words, the pastor works on aligning the culture of the local church’s members to conform with the Word of God, and to support the local church members to carry out all their duties under God, in the church gathering and outside of it.

This makes the pastor’s work focused inwardly more than outwardly. He is to do the work of an evangelist, which is an outward work. But his main task is inward. Unfortunately, when no other leaders are doing their duty in the outside sphere, pastors are left as one of the few leaders who have a cohesive group they are leading. Pastors have a constituency, even a captive audience. So there is great pressure on pastors to adopt a new mantle and turn outward to engage as the tip of the spear in the public square leading the church and its common culture into the political conflict.

Some pastors have taken up this new role. They see themselves as prophets and they are comfortable engaging in the cut-and-thrust of public debate. It remains to be seen whether they can do that work while still sustaining their inward-focused work of equipping the saints. Usually in such scenarios, the pastor neglects his own flock’s spiritual health as he battles dragons or tilts at windmills.

Other pastors have shrunk back from speaking into the public square at all. This is consistent with the seeker-sensitive methodology that has dominated Evangelicalism for fifty years. The philosophy held that you should not express any definitive viewpoints out of fear that you could alienate potential “seekers”. Speaking truth to power could offend people, so pastors refused to speak on difficult ethical issues. The churches came to think that they didn’t have a common culture of ethics, so they simply adopted the ethics of the world.

Getting Serious About Equipping the Saints

Pastors must be able to speak into the public square, but their constituencies (the local church) need more attention because they ought to be better equipped to be active witnesses in that task as it fits into their well-ordered, common culture. So pastors should equip individual Christians to be good church members, good spouses, good parents, good friends, good neighbors and good citizens. They cannot equip them to do this in a generic way. They must equip them like a soldier is equipped. People must be equipped for spiritual battle.

The battle is a spiritual one expressed in two ways. Spiritually, the flesh principle makes individuals want to take short-cuts and pursue selfish ends by selfish means. People need to be equipped spiritually to deny the flesh and be filled with the Spirit in their duties. But the battle is spiritual on a second front, namely identifying the principalities and powers and the stoichea tou cosmou, the elementary principles of the world arrayed against them. This kind of spiritual equipping will recognize the spiritual warfare going on, as well as the way that ungodly, demonically influenced ‘systems’ are assaulting the Christian to make them be pressed into their mold (cf. Romans 12:1-2).

The former seeker-sensitive pastor got away with chastising materialism and offering self-help tips. The contemporary pastor must offer a biblically applied interpretation of what is happening. The pastor must show the Scriptures’ view of the elementary principles of the world and then apply the Scriptures to individuals’ lives to equip them for the fight (Col 2:20-23).