Why Progressive 'Christians' Are Ineffective and Unpersuasive — Loving like Jesus means caring about what He cared about

Jesus didn’t support a welfare state and ObamaCare. Jesus called people to take up their cross and follow Him. And churches then helped the people directly, spiritually and physically, often supernaturally, because they abided in Christ, living holy together.
Jesus didn’t support the government forcefully extracting money from the people to make Big Pharma rich as they drugged up the people with pharmakeia, and performed the most expensive operations possible.
Jesus dealt with the demons that caused the illnesses, and certainly would support eating the proper nutrients to take care of our bodies so we don’t need doctors.
These guys are out to lunch, teaching a different gospel.
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From: The Christian Post

Why Progressive Christians Are Ineffective and Unpersuasive

One of the most fascinating speeches in the Bible happens in Acts 5 with Jewish Pharisee Gamaliel addressing the Sanhedrin. He warns them that if the message being preached by the Apostles of Jesus was of man, it would fail. But if it was from God, it couldn’t be stopped.

It was of God, and it wasn’t stopped.

I find that passage particularly relevant today within American Christendom.

There is a reason that liberal Christian movements like those championed by Jim Wallis, Rachel Held Evans, Shane Claiborne and others are so ineffective and unpersuasive in American culture. Rather than seeking to glorify and build the Kingdom of God, they regularly appropriate the language of Scripture to advocate for earthly, largely political causes that never address the principal need of humanity: redemption from sin.

For instance, preaching the words of Scripture when it comes to our nation’s policy towards refugees is admirable (provided it is done in context) only if you don’t ignore, downplay, or reject the counsel of Scripture when it comes to policy regarding abortion, marriage, and human sexuality. So-called progressive Christians have long chastised their conservative brethren for cherry-picking Scripture to support certain political causes. And to the extent that conservatives have done that, it has been to our detriment.

One need only walk through the graveyard of the “Religious Right” for confirmation of that reality. The Religious Right did not fall apart because it sought to apply the truth of the Bible to politics. It was when it tied the message of the Gospel to a political agenda. Before long, the Republican Party became an idol, and its success was seen as the most effective way to advance righteousness in the land. The Religious Right ceased to be about God, and thus it ceased to be.

But the same is happening with the Progressive Christianity of Wallis, Evans, Claiborne, Brian McLaren, and Tony Campolo that so desperately wants to be a formidable political force in America. In an effort to become such, they use the Bible as a weapon not against the sin and unrighteousness that plagues humanity, but against those who don’t share their politics.

Loving like Jesus means caring about what He cared about, wanting what He wanted, acting like He acted. And any rational reading of Scripture reveals that Jesus always cared first about the spiritual health of the individual, second about their physical health. Healing the physical was His way of demonstrating He had authority to heal the spiritual — which was far more important.

Progressive Christians who focus only on physical poverty while ignoring spiritual poverty are not contending for the faith. They are a political movement that finds themselves in a flesh-driven struggle for power rather than a spirit-driven struggle for Kingdom building. They mistake seeking social “justice” for the poor with seeking eternal justification for the sinner. That is a tragic confusion. …

Until that changes, they will remain a movement of man, not the cross. Gamaliel tells us how that story ends.

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