From Personal Faith to Public Engagement
Embracing God’s Call to Transform the World
We often talk about faith as a personal relationship with God, which is for the individual. Sometimes, the opposite carries connotations of Christian nationalism and militarism. As someone raised in a protestant tradition, talking about personal faith makes sense to me.
It seems so obvious.
Of course, faith is personal; it’s about your relationship with God. There is truth in this as well. Faith is a deeply personal experience; its impact reaches our depths and changes us. God’s love and grace are deeply formational. However, this formation and transformation aren’t meant to stay private. If we’re being changed, then the change should be visible. Yet, too often, we keep God to ourselves and do not share how He changes things.
This is where we get this wrong. God doesn’t stay in our private space. Instead, He is out there interacting with everything in the world. He doesn’t stay in the boxes and categories we try to put Him in. It goes beyond we are called to join him in that, to interact with the world outside of our relationship with God. Suppose we are engaging in a relationship with God. That formation will shape our outward behaviour, changing how we engage with everything around us.
We often focus on our relationships and moral sins when we think about God. We lose the aspect of “God so loved the whole world” (John 3:16) because it is all about “God saved me.” It becomes about the individual relationship instead of his relationship with the whole world.
The individual relationship is a part of his relationship with the entire world but is not more important. Sin is seen similarly, often focusing on what I do or don’t do. Sin is about more than our actions. It is about how the whole world has fallen into sin. Our actions can be a part of making the world more fallen or more redeemed. The Bible is about God’s love for his creation and humanity. Therefore, we must respond to the call to be His body, making our faith public, not private. We are saved individually for the many.
John Mark Comer captures this idea beautifully in his book Live No Lies.
“Whether you define church as a Sunday gathering around a stage, a much smaller community a round a table, or, as I would recommend, a mixture of both, we can’t follow Jesus alone. Jesus did not have a disciple (singular); he had disciples (plural). The call to follow Jesus was – and still is – a call to join his community of the Way.”
Recently, when we see how Christians have engaged their faith with the public, the focus has been on other people’s sins. We see this through cancel culture and how individuals are guilted and shamed years after doing something wrong, even if they have sought to reconcile and repair those relationships. There is a certain amount of this that makes sense. Encouraging accountability and sin not being hidden is important. For Jesus will bring all of us into the light, including all our wrongdoings.
Yet the world’s fallen nature expresses itself in so many other ways. There is so much war, violence and destruction in the world. If we are going to speak on sin, we need to look at all the ways the world is broken and enter into conversations holding that. It balances the personal, the global and ever, and everything in between. All of this must be done because we believe we have an active and living God with whom we are called to partner in redeeming the world. We are told to be the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12).
To be the Body of Christ, we must engage with the public. We are still learning how to do this. Western culture was predominantly Christian or assumed to be for hundreds of years. Modern Western culture is now incredibly self-centric. This is also prevalent in the church as ‘the West’ is increasingly post-Christendom, with personal faith dominating. The importance of individual faith links back to the Reformation. The Enlightenment then pushed this shift to become more privatized. This privatization of faith is part of a larger cultural shift towards a self-centred focus. It has become about what we can get out of the world instead of what we can add to the world. This is further emphasized by the capitalistic nature of modern Western society as capitalism becomes centred on the individual’s needs, wants, and desires, and it no longer thinks first of the city’s welfare.
This is part of how the world changes, so we must interact differently. This change starts with a mentality shift where we need to think less about God in self-focused terms (me, myself and I) and more about God in world-focused terms (us, humanity, creation). This will then help us engage with how God is currently moving in the world.
God is active in the world today, one way being the church. The church also exists in the public space and should be an active participant in world affairs. There is a complex interrelationship between religion and public life, particularly when focusing on politics. As a response, public theology helps acknowledge the tension the church is meant to hold.
The matters of the church are not private internal matters. Often, they get played out on a public stage. The church cannot see itself as entering and leaving the public space. Whatever the church does is in a public space because the church is an institution that makes up the public square. This is a significant reason why it should be included in contemporary debates. However, the privatization of faith may have people under the false assumption that a church is a private space. Still, the church is meant to actively participate in the community and, by default, is a part of the public square. The matters of the church will be visible to the public, so how we approach our problems will shape the perception of the church in the public square.
As Christians (who are the church), we are meant to engage with the world through our faith. How would we go about this? It definitely includes thinking and talking about God, and the areas that he is concerned with. This is theology, which means “God talk” or “God thought”. Theology has often been described as faith-seeking understanding. This is about understanding and explaining our faith and how it could interact with the world around us. Theology is also about our beliefs and ideas about God and the areas that He impacts. Doing theology by sharing our thoughts on public issues from our faith is important, but it also needs to be done with care and consideration for the people we are in conversation with.
What could this look like in practice? Let's focus on the environment. We want to answer a few questions: What truth does the Bible offer about the environment? How should that drive our interactions with it? What does Christianity have to offer to these conversations?
The environment is God’s creation, which he has said is good (Genesis 1). People are then given the job of stewarding the earth by caring for it (Genesis 2:15). However, creation needs to be redeemed after the fall, and God has a plan for its redemption. While we are to look after creation, God owns it. We can see aspects of the environment changing but we have hope for full restoration. This doesn’t dismiss us of our job to care for the earth now, as God’s plan has been for restoration from the beginning. We can worship and respect God by loving and caring for creation. This helps set us up for where our thoughts and reflections might come from to engage in conversation.
To understand what Christianity offers to these environmental conversations, we need to listen to the current conversations. We should start from a position of silence and engage in a conversation instead of a monologue. Two characteristics of current debates are a lot of despair (or Eco-Anxiety), and the lack of unified response from countries. Christianity has a response to both. First is by offering and continuing to bring hope that things will change as hope is one of the key characteristics of Christianity. How we offer this hope will vary across situations and conversations. I would probably engage hope in the conversation through psychological research and balancing negativity in the conversations with ways positive change is being made. The offer doesn’t always have to be explicitly Christian, but because I am Christian, that should always shape what I say and how I say it. Our speech should be guided by respect and a desire to see redemption. Another is that borders do not bind Christianity, so we can offer a perspective that focuses on the world, not individual nations or people. The perspective could be about environmental action not stopping at country borders. We can begin to see from this how God values the environment, and then by using other principles of Christianity, we can see how we could value the environment as well. If I was to bring this into a conversation, I would bring it as my perspective, with the acknowledgement that my faith shapes my perspective. This is all about looking at how theology and God can impact the whole community we’re a part of.
The Bible is about a redemption story for the whole world and the church carries this story. The world is full of problems, and the church can be a part of the solution. If we want to help, we need to be postured correctly. This posturing requires us to think about the community and the city first by conversing with them. This conversation means we must be bilingual, translating between the world and the church. When we offer insight from our faith into the situation, we must offer it as a gift, not a command. Just as was given to us, we are to freely give to others. This list is not meant to scare us. It is meant to help us figure out how to engage. We are still learning, and we learn best through practice.
Gift-giving is a central idea of public theology. A good gift can only be given through knowing the person and having watched and listened carefully.
Giving a gift to society requires careful watching and listening. One of the critiques of the church and part of the reason it isn’t invited into many contemporary debates is that people don’t see the value it has to add. At times it can result in the church assuming a privileged or entitled position in the conversation, instead of taking a place of humility and servant hood. This servant hood that should be taken in conversation is modelled after Jesus, how he walked with humility which enabled him confidently. He watched and listened to what was occurring for years.
Jesus gave his life as a gift. He didn’t try to make himself important, instead, the truth of what he was sharing came out.
Jesus, particularly in debate-like situations, would listen first, responding to the people's words. Even the points where he acted boldly, i.e., flipping the tables in the temple (Mk 11:15-18), he was doing it to better serve the people (a topic which I’m sure we will discuss more another time). When following this model of gift-giving and humility, we cannot assume a position of entitlement and privilege.
My faith should be something that shapes how I view the world and interact with it. However, knowing how best to engage with the world takes practice and learning how to respond. We would want to be looking at the whole story of the Bible and reading it through an understanding of what Jesus has done for us and the whole world. It all needs to be done in conversation, letting God speak through us and into our situations. These conversations could be with our friends, in our workplaces or any space of our lives where a conversation topic could be the issues of today.
A good conversation is best when both parties listen, respect, and value what each other must share, especially when there are disagreements. We have nothing to fear in these conversations. Instead, if fear and culture are driving us not to speak, we need to trust that God will guide our words and ask him for that guidance.
Ultimately, God will transform and redeem everything with or without us. But wouldn’t it be amazing to be a part of his plan for the world and let him work through us to see the world transformed? If we want that, our faith must become public. We can’t hide anymore. The best place to start with going public is to join the conversations.
