We live in a disorienting and disoriented world offering an endless stream of new ways to ignore, distort, marginalize, or deny God and diminish human dignity.
Thankfully, Christians are not responsible for fixing the world but for living faithfully in a broken world, only God can fix. We are not a people called to be effective at policing morality but faithful in proclaiming the gospel.
Even though we aren’t responsible for fixing the world doesn’t mean we are not to practice a “pure and undefiled” religion by visiting “orphans and widows in their affliction” and remaining “unstained from the world” (James 1:27). Instead, it means we obey God even when doing so leaves the world broken.
I won’t pretend to have the answers to all of these questions, but I think we need to be asking them. I am not offering a final word on these matters but encouraging Christians to think beyond the immediate, the popular, and the present to ensure we are not diminishing our ability to save some to ensure the world is only broken in ways we are willing to tolerate (if not enjoy).
We would do well to consider how biblical patterns might inform our contemporary actions.
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