Love First

Ending Hate Before It's Too Late

Don McLaughlin

• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780891126188

This is not just a book to inspire more love; it's a revolutionary call to love better."A terrible virus has spread across the planet and turned the human race into bloodthirsty monsters. Mankind's only hope for survival is..." Originally part of the tagline for the sci-fi thriller, I Am Legend, these lines describe the undercurrent of unrest and turbulence in our world. The virus we face is hate—an epidemic infecting social media, politics, neighborhoods, and homes. Communities of believers, which should be clinics with the cure, are instead suspected of being primary carriers of the virus. But there is hope. Hate, even in its most nefarious forms, is no match for the matchless love modeled by Jesus. Love is his cure for the sick and dying world. Historians, sociologists, and theologians agree that we are experiencing the most fundamental changes in global society in the last five hundred years. And while the church has a lofty vision and mighty power, we are disastrously unprepared. This book presents an understandable, practical, and doable approach to loving others with such clarity and conviction that the world will truly know the God who loves us first.

Part 1

THE LOVE/ HATE CRISIS

1

A SICK CHURCH IN A SICK WORLD

Few health crises have rocked the world as totally as the African outbreak of Ebola, a disease virtually unknown before it hit our headlines. The following story appeared in Reuters on June 27, 2014:

Were Good Doctors Making People Sick? An Ebola patient whose family forcefully removed her from a hospital to take her to a traditional healer has died. A nationwide hunt was sparked for the patient after she was removed from the King Harman hospital in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown. Amadu Sisi, a senior doctor at the hospital, said police found her in the house of a healer. Her family refused to hand her over and a struggle ensued with police, who finally retrieved her and sent her to a hospital, he said. “She died in the ambulance on the way to another hospital,” Sisi added. Health officials say fear and mistrust of health workers in Sierra Leone, where many have more faith in traditional medicine, are hindering efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak which has killed more than 450 people in the country. . . . A 33-year-old American doctor working for relief organization Samaritan’s Purse in Liberia tested positive for the disease on Saturday.

As the Ebola crisis unfolded, it would emerge that the American doctor in that news account was Kent Brantley, nephew of my co-pastor, Ken Snell. I had met Kent and his family in Indianapolis when he was a boy. Now he was international news, the face of medical heroism, and now infected with that dreaded, deadly disease. After his miraculous healing and recovery at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Kent came to our church one Sunday morning to share his story.

He noted that generations of superstition, complicated by mistrust of health workers, led many to believe people were contracting Ebola at the hospital. This led to a family forcibly entering the clinic to “rescue” their family member, only later to watch her die. Protesters gathered outside hospitals and clinics, clashing with police and threatening to burn down buildings and remove the patients.

Kent’s family has a history of wrapping the love of Jesus in the gift of medical care. He and his wife moved their family to Liberia to serve. Being the Time Magazine Person of the Year was the furthest thing from his mind. When their story was published in 2015, the book was titled, Called for Life: How Loving Our Neighbor Led Us into the Heart of the Ebola Epidemic. The whole journey was about love. But the very people they came to help believed Dr. Brantley and his co-workers were the problem. What a tragic twist in an already terrible situation.

Kent’s story resonates with my reason for writing this book. I believe the crisis of our time is that those commissioned by Christ to bring healing to the world often are seen as the problem, not the solution. This may be the most serious crisis Christians face today. Is there a greater crisis than a problem masquerading as a solution, an illness disguised as a cure?

Is the World Sick of a Sick Church?

The church’s falling favorability rating has been documented for more than four decades. Some fascinating research revealed that church people give themselves a consistently higher rating than the world does. Some even suggest that any lack of popular favor is witness to the church’s counter-cultural message of holiness and truth. In essence, they say we are so holy the world hates us. But this doesn’t seem to bear the weight of research. Most who diss the church cite its unloving and judgmental disposition, not its fundamental doctrines. In fact, most who experience the judgmentalism of the church do not see this as an indication of our holiness!

The doctors and medical providers in West Africa worked tirelessly to win the trust of those who desperately needed them. Could the church take a chapter out of their book? These dedicated medical personnel couldn’t serve the sick unless they changed how the sick perceived them. As painful as it is to confess, the church also has a credibility problem, and we must face it to fix it. I believe we can diagnose and heal our disconnectedness with the world, but to do so effectively, we must view our symptoms through their eyes. This exercise is essential for the church to regain a place of trust and healing in the marketplace.

Symptoms of a Sick Church

Let’s begin with the most noticeable symptoms first and then work toward the more difficult. I promised in the introduction to be candid, even if it makes us feel uneasy or frustrated. It is not my mission to frustrate anyone, but we can’t get well if we don’t acknowledge that we are sick!

Symptom One: The Best People Fit in with Me

The church has the reputation of believing we are better than everyone else—that you have to be a “certain kind of person” to fit in with us.

Consider my friend Cynthia. Here is the love deposit she left on my Facebook page: “I love, love, love our church!” I reached out to her with a private message and asked her to tell me more about why she was really feeling the love. She said, “I feel so at home. I’m accepted, respected, and loved at North Atlanta. Look, I’m a single, black professional woman making my way back from two years of hell in cocaine addiction. I don’t know where else I could have fit in.”

Although to me Cynthia is simply my sister in Christ, her self-description is full of demographic markers. She’s an African-American, unmarried female, who is both a corporate professional and a recovering addict. Cynthia is not an anomaly in our church but that means our church is an anomaly in American Christianity. A LifeWay Research poll showed in 2015 that 86 percent of churches in the United States are ethnically homogenous. In response to these findings, former executive director of LifeWay Research, Dr. Ed Stetzer notes, “Surprisingly, most churchgoers are content with the ethnic status quo in their churches. In a world where our culture is increasingly diverse, and many pastors are talking about diversity, it appears most people are happy where they are—and with who they are.”

Bryan Loritts, lead pastor at Abundant Life Christian Fellowship, Mountain View, California, follows Stetzer’s observation with his own: “There remains little to no desire to change when it comes to issues of diversity. The recent statistics unearthed by the LifeWay Research team serve, on a much deeper level, as a stethoscope, allowing us to hear the rhythms of our hearts. Rhythms that I believe are out of step with the gospel. That’s the tragic takeaway.”¹

As of this writing, the U.S. population is nearing three hundred twenty-five million, positioning us as the third largest nation in the world behind China and India. We make up only 4.4 percent of the world’s population. There are other industrialized countries with greater percentages of ethnic diversity, but none with our raw numbers. Over 80 percent of our population lives in large, urban/ metro centers.

Especially in our cities, we shop, work, play, and go to school with people who are different. I believe that most Americans want to come across as informed, just, and ethical people, but many harbor deeply polarizing internal beliefs and preferences that serve to exclude others. These beliefs and preferences are manifested in what Chester M. Pierce termed “microaggression.” Casual insults, slights, and dismissals may amount to a degradation and marginalizing of people. Microaggressions are sweeping statements that express an existing negative view of a particular gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic group. For example, someone suggests in the lunchroom at work that “the illegals are nothing but criminals and rapists,” or “it’s the gays who are destroying the morals of our great country.” And though some will nod in agreement, there are others who sit silently in dissent. They know these opinions are neither verifiable nor based in any factual study, but they also don’t want lunch to turn into an argument. The person making the comment usually sees nothing wrong with what they said. In fact, they might believe they had a responsibility to stand up for what they think is right, though they do not recognize the damage to others caused by their negative categorical characterizations. And yes . . . there are casualties.

In an article titled, “The Ugly in Christianity,” Hillary Ferguson notes,

I proudly called myself a Christian. Now I shy away from the term. I avoid discussions about it because I have family members I love so much who are still part of the Church. But, I will never again be one of them.

And I’ll tell you why: when I was 18, a freshman in college, on the cusp of adulthood, already questioning my faith and whether or not I even believed in organized religion, a woman stood up in a Wednesday Bible class and said, “Praise the Lord! Ted Kennedy is dead!” I sat there slack-jawed, shocked and disgusted, and the dimming light to my already fragile faith flickered out as everybody in the room—even an elder—laughed.

They laughed and laughed, and the woman said, “If I could, I’d go dance on his grave.” She did a little jig and turned around with her hands in the air and again, once again, there was more laughter. Louder laughter. I wish I could say that was an isolated event. But things like that happened often. They happened and nobody stopped them, and judging by Facebook comments, I’m pretty sure they probably continue today.

The truth is, that kind of attitude cannot coexist with God in any form. And I refuse to be a part of any organization that would affiliate with that kind of rhetoric. Perhaps that one room doesn’t define the Church of Christ as a whole, but I’ve been to enough of them, met enough of the members, to know that the people who wouldn’t have laughed are the outliers. And for every one outlier Church of Christ member I’ve met, I’ve encountered nine others who would dance on a dead man’s grave, or laugh at it.

I loved that Church dearly, I truly did. But at some point, I learned that the love of the Church only extended to the end of its borders, to the end of the doors [emphasis added]. Outside those doors, there was very little love to give. I felt betrayed by their laughter, by their dirty words. I felt disheartened, and I was turned away from God—most likely never to return. If that was an example of God’s love, I’d rather seek love elsewhere.²

My heart breaks for Hillary, but first it breaks with her. I am a preaching minister in a Church of Christ. As I read the lines she wrote, and the ones she didn’t, I wanted to say, “Hillary, please come and stay with us in Atlanta . . . Come to church with us . . . Experience the love God has been growing in this place.” But then reality humbled me. I would have to make sure to steer her away from those who speak like the very people she described. I still want her to come and experience the amazing love I’m immersed in through our church, but I would have to first say, “Hillary, we are sick too, but we want to get well!” Eighteen-year-old Hillary didn’t fit in because she couldn’t catch even a hint of hope that Christians would honor the humanity of others, displaying the love of Christ even in disagreement.

Symptom Two: The Smartest People Think Like Me

The conversations in our church hallways, small groups, and after-worship lunches reveal the thinking of a church.

In his book, Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard notes (and I paraphrase him here) that our inner self has been formed by the world, but it must be transformed by the Spirit of God. Paul urges this “renewal of the mind” so that we may know God’s perfect and pleasing will (Rom. 12:1–2). How good is our thinking? Does it go through a renewal process that holds it up to the perfect will of God for habitual refinement?

The racial divisions in our world are present in our churches, and this is a relevant test case for examining the health of our thinking. Over the past few years as the African-American community has brought focused attention to race-related inequities in our policing, prosecution, and prison institutions, many white Christians have closed their ears and hearts. Instead of offering empathy, they shouted back and quoted statistics of black-on-black crime, as if black-on-black crime is responsible for white-on-black racism. This has painted a fresh coat of racism on the church. The more that white Christians have repeated these ideas to each other over social media and in face-to-face social gatherings, the more we have believed our thinking was correct.

We are what we think. Whatever is stored in our minds will come out in our words and actions. So if we assume our assessment of others is fully informed and completely correct, we will act in accordance with these notions.

Our Scriptures offer a huge advantage for those who desire clear-minded thinking. In them we are taught how to listen, learn, and discern. Along with teaching us the processes and attitudes required for good thinking, Scripture also outlines the rewards that attend those who energetically pursue godly wisdom.

For example, love that humbly listens to others with empathy has an enormous peacemaking influence, thus expanding the possibility for unity through love. Those equipped with the divine mind can construct love and deconstruct systems of hate (Jas. 3:13–18). Those who plant peace harvest harmony. But it proves to be easier to teach a Sunday school class about humility, peace, and wisdom than it is to actually be humble, peaceful, and wise. As Hillary Ferguson so painfully pointed out, we have normalized combative reaction rather than thoughtfulness. Those watching us are both inside and outside the church walls.

We have been seduced into the mire of false dichotomies, seeing irreconcilable points of view in nearly every religious and political discussion. In The Mosaic of Christian Belief, conservative Christian author and professor of theology at Baylor University, Roger Olson, offers this observation: “Perhaps many of the doctrinal divisions that have arisen are due to unnecessary bifurcations—false alternatives. Either/or thinking becomes a habit. People

fail to look for combinations, the truth in both sides. What if instead . . . God’s people looked long and hard for the truth in seemingly irreconcilable but equally biblically supported beliefs and doctrines?”³ Could it be that we place a higher value on individual expression than on individuals? Many confessing Christians lack the self-discipline necessary to give facts a fighting chance to influence our thinking. Along with this lack of passion for meaningful information, we also lack both the maturity for wisdom and the courage for truth.

Could it be that we place a higher value on individual expression than on individuals?

Our overly individualistic culture in the West is partly to blame for how we think. We are addicted to self-expression, and we have an inflated estimation of the value of our thinking. We say much, but without critical thinking or research. Then we feel the need to defend our statements or suffer embarrassment. A friend of mine who preaches for a church nearby refreshingly confessed, “I’ve never held an opinion I didn’t think was right, but with age and reflection I’ve learned that all were either incomplete or incorrect in some way.” Opposite this preacher’s transparency are the church leaders who accuse anyone who thinks differently from them of being “intellectually dishonest.” Their assumption is, “When you believe di...