Doing Something

Talk is cheap, and I’m a good talker. This past Sunday I visited a new Sunday School class and met a young man who told me that he was opposed to abortion. He went on to say that he believed that if you talked about something you should be willing to act, and in his case, that meant going out and getting the home study done and being willing to adopt. He and his wife had done precisely that and had adopted an older child.

I deeply respect someone who takes that sort of action. There are many ways in which one can act. Some of us are called upon to proclaim, but even then I think the proclamation gets weak if one isn’t personally involved in taking action in some way.

Today Allan Bevere has a great post on the health care debate and how the church should be engaged. What can we do? Do we really believe the gospel has power? Consider this near Allan’s conclusion:

… But in the midst of the debate over how the Principality and Power called the United States can initiate health care reform, I believe that the church should be ahead of the game and work to cover as many people as it possibly can, and thereby demonstrate a powerful witness to others concerning what is possible. The church is a sleeping giant with resources available to it, both spiritual and physical, that can shake the very foundations of every civilization, but they are under-utilized because we continue to think the nation-state is where the real action is. We continue to believe that Caesar is more effective in accomplishing tasks than the people of God brought into existence by nothing less than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. [emphasis mine]

I think our greatest difficulty with sharing or proclaiming the gospel in this country is that we do not show the power of the gospel in the way we live as a church. If the gospel has power–resurrection power–then we should be able to point to something to show for it, as the early disciples pointed to an empty tomb.