Instant gratification vs. the prophetic task

I recently emailed about 25 or 30 pastors/priests in the local community to get feedback on a letter of invitation to churches to participate in our annual Life Chain. You may have witnessed, or even participated in, such an event in your community. Church members are invited to take a portion of a city block and, for a couple of hours, hold up signs regarding the sanctity of life. This is viewed as a kind of prophetic witness that there is a huge moral issue in our country that is becoming a non-issue through benign neglect.

Sending the request for feedback in August guaranteed that the response would be low. Unfortunately, the timing of events made it necessary that it happen then. But I did expect more than the three responses I received. However, the replies were very useful and have motivated me to write a couple of blog posts by way of a general response.

The three pastors all agreed that the problem with waning involvement in Life Chain over the years had nothing to do with our letter of invitation. In fact, they were happy to again promote the opportunity in their respective churches. They didn't even object to the signs that are typically held while promoting the cause. This surprised me as I do have personal qualms with signs that suggest that people who support the availability of abortion are by definition sinners who delight in the slaughter of the innocents.

The feedback had more to do with how people in their congregations view participation in annual events such as Life Chain and whether such activities are effective. I would now like to address this feedback in this and my next blog.

Pastor number one has strong pro life convictions and has promoted these in his church. So I take his feedback very seriously. In part, he responded as follows:

"We do get the letter re this event and the event is publicized in our bulletin as well as announced during the worship service, so the letter is not the issue. From my perspective, it has nothing to do with people having qualms about this public event either, because in the first few years attendance from our congregation and from the churches over all was very good. My sense is that people are simply tired of doing the same thing year after year and doubting its effectiveness. This particular form of protest and method of keeping this moral issue in the public eye, in other words, has just lost steam."

I want to deal with two aspects of his response: effectiveness and long-term commitment.

I know that people's commitment to some kinds of routine events (e.g., Life Chain) tends to wane because they think that they are not contributing to something that is effective. Even great prophets with a strong sense of calling such as Jeremiah and Habakkuk sometimes thought that way.

Jer. 15:16-18 When your (i.e. God's) words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, O LORD God Almighty. I never sat in the company of revelers, never made merry with them; I sat alone because your hand was on me and you had filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable? Will you be to me like a deceptive brook, like a spring that fails?

Hab. 1:13 Your (i.e. God's) eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?

They, like us, concentrated on the here and now while forgetting for the moment that we are in the morality business for the long haul.

But what is the alternative? The great Christian leader Tertullian complained in his day (3rd century A.D.) that Christians were pushed to the margins of society because they couldn't comply with the established culture (e.g., Roman emperor worship, etc.). But I don't recall that he ever counseled his people to stop acting like Christians because of the enormous price that they were paying in so doing (e.g., couldn't get jobs because of the worship of idols required at the work site). Whether a very public display of counter-culture faith was "successful" or "effective" was no more important to him than it was, I daresay, to Mother Teresa in our time.

And within a century of Tertullian's death, Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and Tertullian's faith became the norm.

When Martin Luther wrote: "Let goods and kindred go; This mortal life also. The body they may kill; God's word abideth still...", he wasn't speaking hypothetically like we do today as we glibly sing his words. He was advocating a return to biblical theology and morality that was highly counter-cultural and was sure to meet with ridicule as a minimum and death as a maximum. Unlike Tertullian, he saw success in his lifetime but it took decades of hard and dangerous work to achieve it.

William Wilberforce spent two decades (1789-1807) raising the issue of slavery in the British Empire over and over again. It would have been easy enough to stop his decades of lobbying efforts and making the same unsuccessful motions in the British Parliament, but he persisted and finally realized his history-changing goal.

[An aside: No one will ever mistake any of our present parliamentarians for a new William Wilberforce. Wilberforceless maybe.]

What do Life Chain participants face? Two hours lost in their day? A few rude people honking at them?

As for effectiveness, I remember the Earth Days of university students in the 1970s when few people were thinking about the environment with any seriousness. Now we have Kyoto.

I remember Ralph Nader and his youthful raiders of the 1960s and 70s advocating for consumer protections that didn't exist (e.g., safely built cars) and were told that what they wanted was too expensive and not desired by the majority of the buying public. General Motors hired detectives to trail Nader in hopes that they could find something with which to discredit him. They even stooped to using prostitutes to attempt (unsuccessfully) to lure Nader into compromising situations. Now we have bills of consumer rights up the ying yang and Ministers of Consumer Affairs.

I remember in my last year at Queen's (1969-70) that some of my classmates held get-togethers that were called "smokers" with professors. In those days, smoking was still the norm. Anti-smoking crusaders were viewed as a minority of eccentrics complaining about a legal product that produced jobs for farmers and factory workers and tax revenues for the government. Now we have health warning labels on cigarette boxes and smokers are the eccentric minority.

I also remember countless highly controversial marches held by people with names like Martin Luther King.

This is not the time to flag in our efforts to seek first the Kingdom of God regarding the dignity of life. It was to the smallest of the seven churches in Revelation (see 3:7-13), the timorous Philadelphians, that God said, "Behold I set before you an open door." Note that God did not phrase his challenge in terms of short-term success--or any success at all. He simply provided them with an opportunity. Two thousand years later that door is still open. And to a large degree, the church is still timorous.

And if Life Chain is not the way to do it, please suggest an alternative. Don't let the momentum die.