While I would be happy to see the Ten Commandments back on the courthouse wall, the fight over symbolic issues is backfiring, alienating people from the truths of the Gospel rather than attracting them to it.
The kind of Christianity the world responds to is the authentic “love your neighbor” kind. Its appeal can’t be legislated through court battles and neither can courts stop its spread.
Dean Curry, senior pastor of Life Center Church in Tacoma, Wash., is a pastor who has made this change. He told me that a decade ago people would say to him, “You’re the church that has that neat Christmas pageant.”
Like many churches, Life Center was also best known for what it opposed.
But that began to change after he made a trip to Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa in 2005.
Dean had an encounter with suffering and an encounter with God. After witnessing the ravages of AIDS and the plight of orphans he had met one day, Dean lay in a bed in a grass-roofed hut weeping.
He was overwhelmed by a problem that was so much bigger than anything his church could address.
“This is too big for our church,” he said. “We can’t just add this to our missions budget. How can I do this?”
Dean believes God gave him an answer that night: “You need to mobilize your city to care for these orphans.” The group returned to Tacoma with broken hearts and a determination to come together as a city to help this tiny country of Lesotho 10,000 miles away.
The Global Neighbor project was born.
