The Christian Institute As A Blunt Instrument In The Political Process

On its website the Christian Institute has a section where you can see how MPs have voted on certain issues dear to Christians. The Institute then puts a tick or a cross by each issue, according to how whether that MP's vote was favourable or not to the Christian cause. A good number of Christians are using this site to decide whether to support their sitting MP at the General Election. But there are two major problems with this approach.

The first is that the Institute confines its list of 'Christian issues' to those of personal morality. So is an MP pro-life, in favour of the sanctity of marriage, and what does s/he think about religious liberty? The difficulty here is that the list is so truncated. It might look like the traditional agenda of the evangelical church and maybe twenty years or so ago it was, but British evangelicals have much wider concerns. The think-tank Ekklesia reports an Evangelical Alliance survey conducted at Spring Harvest regarding which issues evangelical Christians were most concerned about at the election. The top issue was world poverty. Next came education and the health service, and fourth came religious liberty. The top three issues in the survey do not appear in the Christian Institute's list at all.

The second concern is the way in which the Christian Institute conducts its campaigning. In the Spring 2005 issue of Headline magazine, the journal of the Methodist evangelical group Headway, Andy Reed, the Labour MP for Loughborough and an evangelical Christian, makes these observations about Christian parliamentary lobbying:

'The church needs to learn the political discourse, but not in an aggressive way. It doesn't need to try to be like other lobby groups - it has a unique voice and a worthwhile contribution. But this is in the balance. The lobbying tactics of many Christians are becoming a turn-off for non-Christian MPs and we are in danger of being marginalised by our attitude. However, the sensible and constructive lobbying by the Methodist Church and The Salvation Army on the Gambling Bill is a great example of how to engage in the parliamentary process. THe contrast has to be almost anything produced by the Christian Institute, which seems to feel that confrontation is the best way forward. Not only have they scared off the non-Christians in Parliament, but even most Christian MPs admit privately to finding them unhelpful. I am constantly amazed at the lack of grace demonstrated by some Christians in their lobbying and their letters. Rude, aggressive letters rarely achieve anything anyway, but when they come from fellow Christians I wonder if we have missed the point somewhere! No, we must be different - salt and light.'

A Bit Of Fun With The Election

Enough with the serious stuff. If you want some mischief and satire from the current British General Election campaign, go to Spinon.

Thanks to .net magazine's weekly email for the link.

Outside the church, no salvation?

In the States, Barna Research Group has shown that more than a million Americans leave the church each year, but they don't necessarily lose faith. They find other networks of support among friends, the Internet and other media. Read a report on this here.

So what constitutes Christian community and the church? How do those of still in the institutional church (despite also having some deeply ambivalent experiences of it) show Christian love? Is the Emerging Church in the best place to serve these people, because it has the worldviews and theologies that most naturally lead to an empathy with such folk? Or does there still need to be a prophetic critique from those more wedded to post-Enlightenment 'absolute truth' models?