By John Cole

ONE-EYED CHURCHES

    "..becomes effectively a political party.."

This church focuses almost exclusively on the corporate concern. People are concerned more than anything else with the material and social needs of the community in which their church is set. Perhaps these needs are obvious, as in many urban areas. Perhaps the concern is something which comes directly from the way the minister understands his or her job.

Of course the Christian gospel is very much ‘good news for the poor’ and poverty’ has to include people in material need as well as carrying more spiritual connotations.

But social concern can absorb people’s energies to the exclusion of almost everything else. Things go wrong when church people forget that God is already involved in the midst of even the worst social injustice, and when they forget that they themselves can only operate effectively as Christians within the grace of God.

It becomes absurd when church people end up looking only for political solutions to the problems they see around them. Christians cannot avoid involvement in political issues, but the church must never become in effect a political party. This, when it is taken to extremes, can perhaps be seen as a typically ‘radical’ failing.

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