Donald Wildmon's organization the American Family Association is pretty miffed about it. This email broadcast was sent out.
Take Action |
| Send an email to the MPAA asking them to stop their anti-Christian bigotry. |
Click Here to Email the MPAA Now!Or paste this link to your browserhttps://secure.afa.net/afa/afapetition/takeaction.asp?id=201 |
NOw if you want to click on it go ahead. But before you do, ask yourself the following.
1. Does it surprise us that people would find a story about "following Jesus" something that parents ought to be aware of? If so, why? A call to discipleship is, of course a great blessing to all who respond to the invitation, but to come to Jesus is to have one's life radically altered. Has the church ceased to believe this and now we think of Jesus as 'harmless?'
2. Isn't Jesus always going to be "objectionable" to the world? St. Paul said that he was foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to Jews. So, why the outrage? Do we just want everybody to make nice about Christ?
3. When the early Christians were called Athiests because they worshipped God in Christ exclusively, did they complain?
4. Even if the MPAA is really trying to hinder a Christian witness, should the first response of Christians be to petition them?
5. Do we have no memory of the believers in the book of Acts who "counted it a joy to suffer for Christ (Acts 4)?
Let's give thanks that the exclusive call of the Gospel that is inclusive of all is thought of as challenging and scary. Maybe in our multi-cultural, relativistic world it might begin to get noticed again. But, the church will have to be willing to be seen in marginal terms.
3 comments:
This is a great post. It dances on the razor's edge of how much influence the church is meant to have over culture... i.e. how much control and pressure should we exert on the MPAA?
But more importantly it exposes our drive to be "acceptable" and "applauded" by American culture. It seems to me that, evangelicals and media elites are like two rival school children, each competing for the attention of the crowd, each striving to be voted "most popular" by the rest of the class. Name-calling and demonizing of enemies and their causes are their overwhelmingly overused weapsons of warfare. The childish politics of culture becomes old about the age of twenty-five!... at least it did for me.
The questions you ask are excellent. For too many of us Jesus and Uncle Sam are best buddies... the real Christ might not be so easily co-opted by politics or religious leaders.
Thanks, Doug. It's good to hear from you. You are right there is a "politics of culture" that people get caught up in. It causes us to forget how to bless our enemies and persecutors.
The best way perhaps for us Christians to complain is for us to cut it off. Stop watching it. It's the same for many other things. Why in the world should we Christians expect the world to live by God's standards. They never will. You can't even force them to, because God's standard concerns the heart which can never be changed by complaint letters, stricter laws, picketing, or any such thing.
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