The unsettled nature of voluntary participation is by no means limited to religious professionals. Religious professionals have a special role, however, and a special vulnerability in the face of squishy participation in faith communities.
We must disabuse ourselves of the false notion that the church is apolitical. We must overcome the concept, so commonly taught among us, that we might somehow, in separating church from an influence over the state or the state having influence to keep us from being church in certain ways, arrive at some spiritual state of political innocence in which spirituality or religious life is not political.
Antisemitism is among the most entrenched and pervasive forms of hatred and bigotry in the United States.
Against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer charged his youngest new church members that “Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the Holy.”
For effective Christian leaders, Christ is the cornerstone of our leadership as much as he is the chief cornerstone of our faith. This is when our leading becomes servant-leadership and spills over into our discipleship and our evangelism. It is the kind of leadership that we are called to by the one who calls us to serve and to lead others.
For our churches, perhaps the zombie Jesus memes might cause us to pause and recognize where we have lost our purpose as followers of Christ. Are we following the one who rose from the dead and leads us into new life now, or are we continuing to consume resources to perpetuate old models of ministry that feed ourselves and not the world in need of Christ around us?