Prophetic solutions

There have been a lot of conversations around here lately about different issues in the community and how and even if the church can solve them. There are pockets of poverty here and all over. There are hungry, desperate people. There is crime. There are robberies. There are killings. It seems to be getting worse every day, every month, every year. What can the church do? What can anyone do?

The first thing the church can do is the work of evangelism and discipleship. Making more and better Christians is a good way to solve any issue. Do we trust God? Can we do God's will and trust that God will provide? I think we can.

But the church does not have the financial resources to deal with the systemic issues that create these crises. So what do we have? A prophetic voice to culture. We can shape culture using our prophetic voice, or at least we could. What we need is credibility.

How can the church have credibility on cultural issues of poverty, care for the needy, and social justice if we are plagued by the same issues as culture? If we focus our resources on more, bigger, and better buildings and stuff how can we argue that others should care for the needy at the expense of their own material ambitions? We need to check to see how we use our resouces and ensure that they go primarily to building the Kingdom of God and caring for God's children and not just to building our churches and buildings.

If the thousands of churches and millions of Christians in the US got serious about having a credible, prophetic voice about materialism and poverty in our culture can you imagine what we could accomplish?

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