While the wealthiest nation on earth struggles through what our leader who ran on “hope and change” repeats incessantly is a “crisis,” the World Council of Churches, or WCC, has stepped up and declared that the church must speak to the “moral crisis.”
I could not agree more. The problem, as always, is looking past the surface rhetoric to the core worldview being used as the platform of ideas. How do they define moral crisis, and what are the primary symptoms?
For example, in an article reporting on the results of a summit hosted by the WCC, the symptoms of the moral crisis are identified as follows:
- “Capitalism tells us that to be more, we must have more”;
- “So long as overt and covert greed undergirds an economic system which impoverishes people in many parts of the world, humanity is building up fragmented societies”;
- “…causes of suffering include deaths in the family, global warming, struggles facing illegal immigrants, the battle against HIV/AIDS …”
While those statements at face value have some merit, the devil in the details of how those crises are addressed has often led to anti-biblical, humanistic and socialistic approaches that have left carnage in their wake. Both the United Nations and the WCC were founded over 70 years ago to bring about world peace, religious tolerance and economic parity – how are they doing?
Not so good. Why?
Since I still encounter Christians and certainly many non-Christians who don’t understand what a worldview is, I point to Webster’s: “A comprehensive, especially personal, philosophy or conception of the world and of human life.”
Everyone has a worldview. The reality is that the worldview of the Marxist/Communist and anti-Western forces that have dominated the U.N. and the liberal, neo-pagan, polytheistic direction of the WCC have made them part of the problem rather than the solution.
In a profound book, “A Letter To Africa About Africa”, (available through Trans World Radio-Africa) written by native Pastor Kasongo Munza before he went home to be with his Lord in 2005, we are given a powerful perspective of not only what is the root cause of chaos in Africa – including poverty, corruption, the HIV/AIDS crisis, etc. – but also what ails much of the American church today.
His diagnosis was revealing and, in my opinion, spot on: “I have become convinced that the ‘virus’ that has entered out continent and made us prey to these many disasters is rooted in our worldview.” Munza’s illustration for the remedy was grounded in the belief that much of what was presented as Christianity was shallow, experiential in nature and reflective of the pietism that has also weakened the cultural influence of Christianity in the United States as well as worldwide.
His examples of tribalism, ancestor worship, witchcraft and other pagan practices as common among many people and even clergy who claimed faith in Jesus Christ reflect the same failure to develop a biblical worldview in the church as a story related by a new archbishop of the Anglican Church in Nigeria in a meeting with him I attended a couple of years ago.
He related how in the slaughter of millions of men, women and children in Rwanda during the chaos of the 1990s and since (instigated significantly, by the way, through radical Islamic influence), many “Christian” clergy and laymen rose up and killed their own parishioners. What? Isn’t that unthinkable?
Yes, if it were historic, biblical Christianity being taught that transformed nations from dark to light for 2,000 years. While there have been improvements and much good is being done on the “Dark Continent,” somewhere we need to ask how a continent that has been increasingly evangelized for over 150 years still has so little moral, cultural, political and economic fruits to show for it.
There are certainly many other factors such as the colonialism of European powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, America’s ill-advised colonization of slaves to newly formed Liberia and the continued violent aggression of Islam that has purged many formerly Christian nations and cultures in that part of the world.
However, are climate change, world poverty and the AIDS crisis stand-alone moral problems that we can fix apart from dealing with First Principles of Reformation?
Are those issues truly more important than personal and cultural virtue, sexual purity, restoration of marriage and the nuclear family, the suppression of evil, corruption and injustice, ethics-based free-market economics and government limited to its God-ordained and limited purpose?
The only sustaining solution to global poverty is what it has always been – allow people to benefit from the fruits of their labors with minimal interference and to exchange those goods and services with others in a market-based system. The political, religious and cultural left derisively calls this “capitalism” with the same hostility they show toward biblical Christianity for the same reason they hate the latter – it empowers and fosters independence rather than creates dependency on centralized powers.
Our pulpits are overflowing with pastors who are focused on dressing, preaching and performing to Madison Avenue standards rather than following in the steps of our predecessors to teach our people to think and live out the biblical worldview that birthed every freedom and blessing this country has enjoyed. It’s time to apply 2 Chronicles 7:14 and listen to the courageous call of our brother from D.R. Congo to restore a biblical worldview in the church.
Pastor Munza closed his admonition to his African brethren as befitting a call to us today as well:
Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36:25-28)
Helene and the ‘climate change’ experts
Larry Elder