Some Churches Are Driven By Fear, Others By Love
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(OPINION) The criticism of my preaching I’ve heard most across the decades is this: I don’t preach enough against wickedness. I’m too easy on reprobates. I don’t threaten rebels with hellfire.
In a word, I’m soft on sin.
By sin, my critics tend to mean something naughty the critic himself doesn’t happen to be doing. Or something naughty the critic is doing secretly but hopes to pin on others. Or something the critic would like to do but doesn’t have the guts for. Or something that’s on the wrong side of the culture wars (depending on which side the critic’s on).
Actually, I’m not soft on sin. Sin is real and bears real consequences. It produces untold misery for everyone.
I think just about everything humans do is sinful. We’re wired that way. The biggest sin of all? Being a self-righteous religious prig. (Seriously! It’s in the Bible! Look it up!) That particular sin especially afflicts us preachers.
Long ago, though, I decided to focus on something different: God’s grace and mercy in the face of our sins. I figured if people wanted to hear yet another sermon damning reprobates they could easily find a half-dozen ministers within a five-minute radius of their house who would oblige.
I hoped to offer an alternative. Namely, love. God’s love for sinners. Our love for God in return. Our love for our fellow fallen humans.
Some have suggested I chose this path because I wanted to be popular more than pure.
Well, if popularity was my motive I failed. The joke’s on me. My congregation is about as small as a congregation can get and still keep the church-house doors open.
I inherited the love message from my dad, God rest his soul, who was raised in a fearsome brimstone tradition. He preached an old, exacting, legalistic message for years. His God would get you if you didn’t watch out, and maybe if you did.
Then in midlife Dad was radically filled with the Holy Spirit and changed directions on a dime. I saw, and felt, his transition into a new man full of joy, acceptance and freedom.
This is a roundabout way of saying (a second criticism of my preaching is that I’m longwinded) that I lately read a wonderful column by David French of The New York Times, who’s among the best commentators on spirituality.
He wrote about the differences between churches focused on fear and those focused on love.
“When I talk to Christians who are struggling with their faith, one of the first things I ask them is, ‘Were you raised in a fear-the-world church or a love-your-neighbor church?’” French said.
“The culture of the church of fear is unmistakable. You’re taught to view the secular world as fundamentally a threat. Secular friends are dangerous. Secular education is perilous. Secular ideas are bankrupt. And you’re always taught to prepare for the coming persecution, when ‘they’ are going to try to destroy the church.”
A church based in love is different:
“It’s so different that it can sometimes feel like a different faith entirely. The distinction begins with the initial posture toward the world — not as a threat to be engaged, but as a community that we should love and serve.”
The fear-the-world church is the kind I was trying to avoid leading. Fear-the-world Christians are the same ones obsessed with sin, sin, sin.
At their core is not just fear of “the world,” which is Christian slang for anything that’s not explicitly Christian, but also fear of God, of hell, of losing faith, of being called out by other believers, of church leaders’ wrath.
When we live in fear we eventually come to hate something or somebody, maybe even ourselves. Fear breeds fury.
But that isn’t what Christianity is supposed to look like. As I explained in a 2023 column, the most-repeated commandment in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid.”
And the New Testament writer John said God’s perfect love “casts out all fear.”
We Christians just weren’t made for fear or rage. “They will know you by your love,” is how Jesus put it.
We’re called to embrace even those with whom we disagree. We’re not told to condemn sinners but to love them, because each of us is a sinner, too. This approach could be a world-changer if we put it into practice.
French again: “We live in a time of great anger. We live in a time of great pain. And everywhere we look we seem to see people of faith stoking anger and inflicting pain. But a resurrection church that follows a resurrected savior should be a balm, not a blowtorch. … Its default posture toward difference isn’t suspicion, but affection.”
He mentioned those “He Gets Us” ads we’ve all seen on TV. Secular viewers have found the ads annoying or threatening.
“But did you know that there were Christians who hated them even more?” he said. “The images of Christians loving and serving people on opposite sides politically was deeply triggering to the most pugilistic Christian voices online.”
After last year’s Super Bowl, French said, some Christians “were particularly offended by ads that showed a police officer washing the feet of a young Black man, an older woman washing the feet of a young woman outside an abortion clinic and a priest washing the feet of a gay man. The ad ended with provocative words — aimed at Christians as much as anyone else: ‘Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet.’”
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.