Society

February 17, 2026February 16, 2026

Why and How to Go to Church

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius began his remarkable book Meditations with a reflection on all the people who had shaped him: his teachers, his adopted father, his mother, his grandparents. He recalled the lessons they had taught him—lessons that continued to guide him. That was Book 1.

In Book 2, he turned to a different subject: how to deal with difficult people. He argued that we should show patience and kindness toward them. Why? Because human beings are made for cooperation—like hands, feet, upper and lower teeth, and eyelids. When we live in an uncooperative way, we live contrary to nature. When we resent others or withdraw from them, we contradict what we are.

Marcus presses this even further. If another person refuses to live cooperatively, he says, that person harms himself more than he harms us. We must not allow someone else’s failure to live according to nature to pull us away from living according to it ourselves. That is why we should maintain a gentle spirit, ready to forgive and ready to be reconciled. We are made for one another. Others may frustrate that design, but we must not abandon it.

Why begin a talk about church with a non-Christian Roman Emperor? Because Marcus grasped something we do not—what a human being is. A human being is a social creature—made for fellowship, made for cooperation. We are not designed for isolation.

Everything we accomplish and everything we become comes through others—even if those others lived 1800 years ago and reach us only through a book. None of the comforts or technologies we enjoy exist without the cooperation of millions of people. Try building your iPhone from scratch, including mining and refining the materials. The idea is absurd. Yet we often imagine we can construct our lives independently.

Like Marcus, we are who we are because others have invested in us. And we will grow into better versions of ourselves only through continued interaction with others.

I have watched people attempt isolated lives. They stagnate. They do not mature. Growth happens in engagement. Alone, we reinforce our assumptions. In community, we are sharpened. Our immaturity is exposed. We are compelled to grow into what God intends us to be. The church is the community designed for that growth.

Why Church as the Community?
Why would we say that church is one of those communities we should be a part of? There are at least three reasons.

First, you are a Christian (if you are!). You desire to follow Jesus and worship the Triune God. There is no other setting where you will regularly find a diverse group of people gathered around that shared purpose and committed to helping one another grow in it. You need that community.

Consider 1 Samuel 23. David was hunted by Saul and uncertain whether he would survive from one day to the next. In that dark season, Jonathan came to him and reminded him of God’s promise that he would be king. The text says Jonathan helped him find strength in God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together, the word of God in the mouth of a brother is often stronger than the word of God in our heart. Continue reading “Why and How to Go to Church”

October 20, 2022

7 Principles for Christian Social Engagement

As Christians, we want to see the world be a better place. Jesus has taught us to love our neighbor and to be concerned for the least of these. The problem is that when we try to get involved, we do not know what to do. We find it harder than we supposed. This can lead us to give up, but then what of our obligation to love the world?

In my view, few Christians have thought about this issue with as much clarity as the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. I have learned much from him. What I have learned has enabled me to keep going in big and small ways with outreach to the communities of which I am a part. Here I want to summarize seven principles that continue to be sources of wisdom, challenge, and encouragement to me when social engagement gets hard. I will not quote Niebuhr here. You can see my summary of his views on Christian political engagement here. I am just writing these in my own words, but my thought owes much to him.

1. There is no limit to human anxiety, insecurities, and ambitions. One reason it is so tough to engage with people is because we are filled with anxiety. Anxiety is part of human life. It arises from the fact that we can see all sorts of problems that we can do little or nothing about. We are anxious about our survival, our life, our possessions, our money, our kids, our nation, our significance, and on and on.

And there is no point where this stops. No matter how much we succeed there are always new problems. We have anxiety that we will lose the things we have gained or not reach the next level. In America and the West, we have solved a lot of problems that were huge issues for our ancestors, but we have simply run into bigger problems. Anxiety explains why people accept even bad situations. They fear that if they change them, they will encounter something much worse. In engaging with society, we are dealing with anxious people.

2. Human pride is born out of anxiety. Why do people exalt themselves at the expense of others? Why do they act in selfish ways? It is in part because of their anxiety. They are worried about their survival and the survival of the things they enjoy, and they will fight for their position and prestige as much as if it were their very life. Why does a nation invade others? It is in part out of the anxiety over the prosperity, prestige, or survival of their own nation. Why do people amass goods and not worry about others? It is in part anxiety over their own position. Why does a parent think they can continually make their child happy? Some of it is anxiety about their child, but it is also pride in their own ability to solve every problem for someone else.

Pride born of anxiety is a factor in human life. We stubbornly cling to our own position and power and exalt ourselves, our things, our people, and our ideas above others, even at the expense of truth and justice. This deserves our condemnation, but it also calls for compassion because it is born out of an attempt to solve the basic problems of life, relationships, meaning, and security that we all deal with. This can take some of the edge off of the opposition of others because it is born in part out of trying to solve the same problems that we ourselves are trying to solve.

3. Religion is not a pure quest for God, and reason can be just as fanatic as religion. Religion and reason should mitigate our anxiety and humble our pride. However, religion can easily become a tool of our pride. Thinking on the absolute, we identify ourselves with the absolute. We borrow the sacredness of the holy and apply it to our own faulty and sinful ideas and actions. We use it to exalt ourselves at the expense of others. Even the idea of grace, which should humble us, can become a way of looking down on others who don’t get it and baptizing all our ideas because we “understand” God’s grace. Continue reading “7 Principles for Christian Social Engagement”

April 14, 2021

What Would Our Society Do with Peace and Prosperity?

If we had basic provision, leisure time, and peace, what would our society do with it? What should society do with it?

Most of our time and energy is consumed with making sure that we will have enough provision, food, clothes, housing, security, savings. This is true on an individual level, and this is true on a societal level. If we do not feel we have enough, we want to figure out how we can have enough. If we do have enough, we worry about threats that would keep us from having enough.

But what if we didn’t have to worry about that, either on a societal level or an individual level? What would we do with our lives? What is the purpose of human life beyond merely staying alive and well-fed?

That’s the question that Aristotle considers in his books on ethics and politics. He believed that the question of politics was a question of what form of state would allow the most people to realize the ideal form of life (Politics, 2.1). For, as he said, “a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only . . .” (3.9). His answer was that the best form of government was one “in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily” (7.2). So, politics should ask not only what is the way for people to have enough, to have mere life, but, how can they live well, how can they live the best life, and how can they live a happy life. Continue reading “What Would Our Society Do with Peace and Prosperity?”

January 6, 2021January 20, 2026

A Theology of Social Action

Without question, there is a need for social action. The injustices and the needs in the world around us call us to action. At the same time, social action is daunting. The social realm is a place of conflict and intense drama. Progress in the social realm does not come cheap.

So, how can we think about this extremely important yet extremely challenging field of endeavor while at the same time keeping our heads and not sliding into injustice ourselves? Reinhold Niebuhr believed that the Christian faith offered the perspective that we need in order to keep us involved, keep us from despair, and keep us from being consumed. Here is a summary of Niebuhr’s theological vision for social action. Under each point, I have offered a suggestion for its benefit for social action.

[Read a longer version of this article here]

Part 1 – Human Social Potential and the Human Social Problem

1.1. The Proper Way for Humans and Society to Function

God did not create human beings to exist in their current state of individual and social disfunction. God created human beings good and in a good society. This goodness was rooted in acknowledging their place as creatures in God’s universe. Humans are able to see a long way off but limited in their ability to change what they see. By a faith trusting God with what they could not change, they would be able to exist in tranquility, creativity, harmony, and productivity.

This trust in God would serve as a foundation for community. God created humans as social creatures. Freed from the need to establish their own significance or security, they could serve their communities. As they served others, they would be “drawn out of themselves to become their true selves” (The Children of Light & the Children of Darkness, 56).

Benefit: understanding we are social beings at root and created for social harmony.

1.2. Anxiety Tempts Humans to Sin

Humans are amazing creatures in that they can see far beyond their current situation, but they can only effect a small portion of it. Seeing this gap produces anxiety. The question is, what will they do with this anxiety? Will man be able to “accept his finiteness and to admit his insecurity”? (The Nature & Destiny of Man, 1.150). Or, will he attempt to “regard himself as the go around and about whom the universe centers”? (ibid., 1.124). Humans’ great abilities and yet their limitations tempt them to seek a greatness that is beyond them in order to overcome their limitations. This is a temptation to give themselves an outsized place in the universe that manifests itself in seeking an outsized place in the human community. This is the temptation of the human situation, but there is always “the ideal possibility that faith would purge anxiety of the tendency toward sinful self-assertion” (ibid., 1.182).

Benefit: understanding that social problems are not simply rooted in recalcitrant wills. They are also rooted in the anxiety of the human situation. Continue reading “A Theology of Social Action”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: