Recovering Evangelical or “Social Gospel” Re-tread?

Is the church really neglecting the hungry, the poor, and the sick and spending all its energy on abortion and homosexuality?

 

By Kenny Burchard email me

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I decided to post this after watching this interview with the supposed “new face” of the evangelical movement today.  

 

According to Chris La Tondresse, younger evangelicals are not more concerned about the issues of abortion and homosexuality than other issues like poverty, aids, and hunger.  No, just the opposite.  In fact, according to La Tondresse, there are more verses about poverty and hunger in the Bible than abortion or homosexuality. This supposedly serves as a mandatory pretext for a change of focus by the church these days.

 

According to La Tondresse, we should pay attention to the obvious scripture ratios and re-focus our energy on “bigger” issues (which are bigger because they are supposedly more frequently referenced in the Bible).

 

After watching the interview, I was momentarily left feeling like La Tondresse really believes that evangelicals have lost their way, and are suffering from a terminal case of myopia about homosexuality and abortion. 

 

All the while, the poor, the sick, and the needy are being comparatively overlooked by the church.  “Recovering Evangelicals” to the rescue!  According to La Tondresse, this new generation is “chomping at the bit” to take on these heretofore overlooked, more biblically weighty issues.  

 

But then I woke up and did the math…

 

The Church and the Hungry

 

Has La Tondresse ever heard of the Salvation Army?  This world-wide Christian organization has perhaps single-handedly done more to address the ongoing issue of hunger in cities and towns across this nation than any other.  And that’s just one of the many things they do.  How about the hundreds of rescue missions and food pantries in small towns and large cities across the nation?  How about the Christian Children’s Fund?  How about Mercy Ships?  What about Convoy of Hope?  I could go on and on.  In fact, thousands of churches have their own food pantries, benevolence ministries, soup kitchens, homeless feeding ministries, etc.  Many of the short term missions agencies that help churches do international missions incorporate some type of ministry to those who are hungry and thirsty (digging wells, gardening and farming, or just hauling in food).  In our town, you can eat two good meals, seven days a week if you are homeless, and if you need more food, you can go to two food pantries, and several churches that give away food.  

 

It is true that there are a lot of hungry people in the world, but the false notion that the church has somehow been asleep at the wheel on world hunger is a bit offensive.  The Church of Jesus Christ gives away millions of dollars and billions of tons of food every year through every kind of imaginable means (more than any national or international government agency).  Has the recovering evangelical missed this? 

 

The indisputable fact is that exponentially more money and energy goes into addressing hunger by the Church of Jesus Christ than protecting the unborn.  If you take La Tondresse’s word for it, you’d think that just the opposite is true, and with his revelation of more verses about hunger, he and the recovering evangelicals are going to set things right.  Why then, do young evangelicals like me put more emphasis on abortion than hunger?  Because so much energy is already spent on hunger, and not enough is spent on combating the murder of the unborn.  La Tondresse has it exactly backwards in my view.

 

Contrast the manifold ways in which the church combats hunger across the globe with the number of Crisis Pregnancy clinics that minister to women who are contemplating abortion.  By comparison, there are very few of these, and most of them are under-funded.  What La Tondresse misses in his understanding of the hunger issue (which I will repeat several times) is this:  The reason we are so loud about abortion and not so loud about food is that we’re giving away food like crazy.  In fact, it’s the easiest kind of outreach to do.  Saving the life of an unborn child in a pro-choice culture is much more difficult.  Don’t believe me, watch this!  MOVIE CLIP HERE.

 

A final thought here is that La Tondresse uses a false numbers game when comparing abortion to hunger.  He says “3000 babies are aborted every day” but “30,000 people die of starvation every day.”  He quotes the U.S. figures on abortion, and the world-wide figures on hunger, and implies a “See, the hunger number is much bigger” rationale.   This is totally deceptive.  See the actual stats HERE.  The fact is, world-wide, four times as many children are aborted every day than those who die from any issue related to poverty or starvation.  La Tondresse is either ignorant or deceptive.  Both are unacceptable if he’s the new face of evangelicalism.

 

Here’s a figure you can’t argue with:  Your tax dollars are being used to feed the poor in this nation and abroad through our welfare and humanitarian programs.  And your tax dollars are also being used (to the tune of 300 million dollars a year) to provide abortions to under-aged girls who are allowed to keep this information from their parents.  Does La Tondresse really believe that more Bible verses about hunger eclipse this horrific and murderous injustice? 

 

My biggest question about this is, “Does he really feel that the church has been too myopic about abortion and not focused enough on world hunger?”  Are we living on the same planet?

 

The Church and the Poor

 

Again, it’s simply too easy to demonstrate that the church dedicates more money and energy to fighting poverty than abortion or homosexuality.  As I already said, most local churches have a benevolence fund, missions funds, and special programs for people in financial need.  Most of the work conducted by over-seas missionaries has some kind of emphasis on helping people with issues surrounding poverty.  Contrast that with the numbers of dollars spent fighting the national sin of abortion, or abortion around the world.

 

If you want to throw the issue of dealing with human sexuality into the mix, it is only recently that the church has been dedicating hard resources (money, time, counselors, training, teaching) to this issue.   

 

Maybe that is what’s confusing to La Tondresse.  He is a young man, and he has probably heard a lot more about these issues in his lifetime.  But that has to do with the fact that the church has had to wake up to these issues in this generation.  However, “The poor you will always have with you.”

 

If we polled only the churches in the United States, and asked them for a dollar figure, a project report, and a list of activities that in some way helped to address the needs of the poor, and then asked for a report on what they did to fight the spirit of abortion or deal with issues surrounding sexuality, the numbers would demonstrate an incredible disparity.  

 

So again, the reason so much is said these days about abortion, for instance, and not as much noise is made about the poor is that the church of Jesus never stops dealing with the needs of the poor, but is relatively new to the battle of stemming the tide of abortion.

 

The Church and the Sick (Healthcare, AIDS, etc).

 

Go to the far reaches of the globe, to the villages in the middle of nowhere, and ask if there is a clinic.  Chances are you’ll find a Christian there – or a church-sponsored health-care operation of some kind.  Come to Hanford California where I live, and notice that the Seventh Day Adventists just built a community clinic offering lots of free health services in the poorest neighborhood, to the poorest people in our community.  They’ve been doing that kind of thing for decades – even before there was such a thing as a “recovering evangelical.”

 

Why do I bring this up?  According to the recovering evangelicals, we’ve been spending all our time talking about abortion and homosexuality, and neglecting the sick, dying, and diseased.  I can only chalk this perception up to total youthful ignorance and pride.  

 

The fact is, were it not for Christians, some cities (even in the U.S.) would not have a hospital or a clinic.  Some denominations give millions of dollars a year to provide healthcare to people who can’t afford it.  Let me bring up (again) the Mercy Ships, and the untold and unnamed hundreds of Christian doctors who give up months every year to travel to foreign lands to offer free surgeries to orphans and severely handicapped children and adults.  Once again, the figures are staggering by comparison. 

 

 

 

If you want some hard evidence about this, check out a U.S. News Article on “America’s Top Hospitals” and notice how many of them have the word Lutheran, Presbyterian, Adventist, Baptist, Methodist,  and other denominational or church-affiliated references in the very names of the Hospitals.  Some of our nation’s best hospitals are on the map because Christians gave the funds to build them.  How many hosptials have the recovering evangelicals built?  They do have a website though. And it must be said that this generation of “new evangelicals” gives very little money or time to actual ministry.  It’s the older, supposedly wayward evangelicals who have built the hospitals, schools, churches, universities, clinics, counseling centers, missions agencies, etc.  – putting their money where their theology is.  It seems like the “recovering evangelicals” want to “tackle the issues” by talking about them on blog sites and discussion groups (which usually means criticizing organized religion, pastors, and institutions) - but they actually do very little when substantively compared with their highly-criticized fore-bearers.

 

The fact is, more energy, money, programs, facilities, resources, and man-power is spent dealing with hunger, poverty, and disease by evangelical Christians than abortion and sexuality issues combined.  How can La Tondresse not see this glaring reality?  How does he conclude that the opposite is true, and that a “recovery” is necessary?

 

In the small Ukrainian town where we adopted our son (who was born with a birth defect), the only clinic offering free medial attention to the community was operated by a Presbyterian church.  Where did they get the funds for this?  American Presbyterians!  But again, we don’t soap box about this because it’s an ongoing reality in the church world-wide.  So is adoption, and caring for widow and orphans, etc.

 

I also find it interesting that La Tondresse mentions casting his vote for one candidate over another in this most recent election because that candidate supposedly espoused his value of caring “for the least of these, my brothers.”  But his candidate has a flesh-and-blood brother living in a shack on a few dollars a month in Kenya, and an aunt who was living in poverty, in government housing in Boston (while in the country illegally).  

 

Ironically, the candidate that he chose not to vote for adopted a young Indian orphan from Mother Theresa’s orphanage in India where his wife traveled to do medical ministry.  He has raised the girl as his own daughter.  The second candidate did not quote a verse about his values, but he did live them out.  

 

The other quoted a verse, but I can’t find where he has demonstrated his values in his own birth-family.  I fear that “younger evangelicals” are falling prey to soaring speeches by politicians who tell them what they want to hear in order to sway them emotionally.  It’s the worst kind of manipulation, and many Christians are deceived by it over and over again by politicians. 

 

Oh, by the way, check out what you can expect from the candidate of “Recovering Evangelicals” when it comes to protecting the unborn HERE.  If you voted for the “neo/post/recovering evangelical” candidate, then read the last paragraph in that post to see what you have helped to make possible.  Be comforted by the fact that there are more bible verses about the poor if it helps relieve the sting to your conscience.

 

Not Really a Recovering Evangelical…

 

La Tondresse is really just a young man waking up to the needs all around him, in my opinion.  He lives in a country where the moral crisis of abortion and homosexuality are widely discussed by Christians.  He seems to assume that there is therefore a corresponding disparity in the attention that needs to be given to hunger, poverty, and healthcare.  

He does not realize that these three items are the biggest things we Christians do (and you can add education to the list, too, if you want).

 

We don’t talk about them as much, perhaps, because we’re busy doing them – sending money, building schools, clinics and hospitals, taking teams on medical missions outreaches, digging wells, and running soup kitchens and food pantries.

 

Maybe some day it will be the same when it comes to abortion and the human struggle with sexual issues as they are more faithfully addressed by the church.  But for now, we are talking about them a lot.  Perhaps the reason could be summed up by an old quote by Martin Luther…

 

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”

 

At this moment, to use Luther’s language, “The world and the devil are attacking” our view of human sexuality, marriage, and the value of human life.  Forgive me for saying it, but La Tondresse’s candidate-of-choice to lead our nation does not know when human life begins.  It is an issue that he feels is “above his paygrade.” 

 

La Tondresse genuinely believes that his focus is newly-discovered, and that it’s “where the church is headed.”  But he doesn’t realize that it’s what the church is already doing.  What we’re not doing very well is strengthening marriages, helping people understand sexuality with a biblical mindset, and protecting the lives of the most vulnerable people in the world – the unborn.  That’s why we’re so loud about it. 

 

La Tondresse has uncovered, and is dusting off the old “social gospel” while he tells us that “feeding the poor is really where it’s at” and we should “tone it down” on the other stuff.  

 

“After all,” he reminds us, “there are more Bible verses about the poor and hungry than abortion and homosexuality.”

 

The Oasis Foursquare Church, Hanford, CA