John Stonestreet Points To Signs of Hope
During a Q&A session after his presentation at the Centennial Impact Summit, author and radio host John Stonestreet said no matter how humans misunderstand the world and humanity, this is still God’s world. “He has home-field advantage and will make all things new,” he told attendees.
Stonestreet also pointed to recent backlash against secularism. Church attendance is up among younger people—especially men. And the emerging generation is attracted to churches with strong doctrinal requirements, he said, not an entertainment focus.
Another hopeful sign: Strong pushback against politicians who deemed the church non-essential during the pandemic. “The world needs the church to be the church,” Stonestreet said, so we can’t just submissively follow orders and go to “our own corner.”
Amid the rise of technology, Stonestreet encouraged Christians to cultivate virtues and to reflect their nature as dependent, not autonomous, creatures. Christians must respect other people and can’t view tech “as substitute wisdom or as substitute friends,” he said.
When asked how Christians can openly love people who celebrate death, Stonestreet noted that the Sept. 10 assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk is just the latest example of that. Followers of Jesus can’t “sweep morally reprehensible things under the rug,” said Stonestreet, because addressing tough issues publicly is a way to love people and lead them to Christ. “Christians have bought into the idea that if we share hard truths, we’ll offend others,” Stonestreet said, but that leads to a “tyranny of low expectations.”
Erika Kirk, by publicly forgiving her husband’s killer, modeled the restoration that God gives us, Stonestreet said. Jesus, through his forgiving and saving work on the cross, restores us in God’s image—something no other theory or worldview offers.
