It isn’t conservative, it isn’t Christian, it isn’t even the best of being American. What is this boiling pot of rage and hatred against the weakest and most frail of God’s children? How is it that we who bear Christ’s name are so indistinguishable from local culture and the latest bubbling fear? Time to go back, not to the beginnings we imagine them to be, but the foundations that, in fact, we may need to encounter afresh or for the very first time.

“What is true in the position of the social activists is that a Church which exists only for itself and its own enlargement is a witness against the gospel, that the Church exists not for itself and not for its members but as a sign and agent and foretaste of the kingdom of God, and that it is impossible to give faithful witness to the gospel while being indifferent to the situation of the hungry, the sick, the victims of human inhumanity.”

Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society