Check Your Mind at the Door
While I may stink at social networking, I do have to say that I find a lot of material for blogging just from scanning what FaceBook friends decide to link to on their status updates.
This blog post was recently linked to by a FB friend, which in turn is actually linked to this article here.
This reads like a pretty feel-good story about a church doing the right thing and playing nice with their non-Christian neighbors, rather than, oh, say, attempting to burn a pile o' Qurans. But it's problematic. And the key for me is a single quote from the article author about the motivation of the pastor in this situation (a Christian church allowing Muslims to worship in their building until the mosque next door is completed):
But fear and and ignorance weren't part of the gospel Stone preaches, so he looked beyond the pit of his stomach to what his mind believed was right.
So to combat his "fear and ignorance", Pastor Stone looked to his own mind for an answer. That's kinda problematic. Fear and ignorance are problematic to be sure, but shifting the source of the fear and ignorance from your stomach to your mind is probably not the best solution. It's not really a solution at all, just a different sort of reflex motion.
The article is problematic as a whole because it portrays concern or worry about Islam as something "not positive". While this is pretty typical media spin, it's still discouraging. I tried to figure out a little more about the Good News Now network that hosted the story, but other than an affiliation with (owned by?) AOL, there aren't any obvious links telling how this site defines good news. Based on the wide variety of article types (archaeology is good news?!?!), it seems like the definition is pretty broad.
Let's think about this. I'm all for being a good neighbor. I'm all for being a good neighbor to people who don't believe what I do. I'll gladly share my meager selection of gardening tools, share meals, have our kids play together, and generally do whatever I can to truly love that person and be a good neighbor. But I don't think that I could allow my church building to be used for the worship of a foreign god. That seems to be crossing the line of neighborliness and wandering into the fields of blasphemy.
I believe in a God who issued as His first commandment Thou shalt have no other gods before me. I tend to think He's pretty keen on this. Love your neighbor, but love the Lord your God as well. You can't love your neighbor if you aren't loving God, and you can't love God if you aren't loving your neighbor. In other words, we don't define what it means to be a good neighbor arbitrarily - it is couched within an understanding of what it means to be faithful to our God. You can't be a good neighbor (truly) if you are acting contrary to the expressed will of God.
I understand that not all Christians are clear on the differences between how Islam and the Qu'ran describe Allah, and the God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. A lot of folks hold the line (a line created by Muslims) that Allah and God are really one in the same. However the only way you can reach that conclusion is if you ignore most of what the Qu'ran and the Bible say about God, and faithful folks on both sides should be pretty reluctant to go down that path.
As an individual there are lots of ways that I can be a good neighbor without compromising my witness to the one, true God. Being a good neighbor is *part* of that witness. However as a church, it's a more complicated matter. Or perhaps a less complicated one. What is a church? Is it a building? No. However in our culture buildings dedicated to use as churches have become synonymous with the idea of 'church' as a place you go to rather than a thing you are. A building is just a building, but a building serves a purpose. A public room at the local YMCA or civic center that can be rented out might be rented by both a Christian congregation and a Muslim one at different times. The Christian congregation might even decide to be neighborly and change their rental time of the room so that it better accommodates the Muslim congregation's needs - or visa versa (though I don't hear many of those stories).
This is different than a building that has been built with the express purpose of being a Christian house of worship and continues to function in that respect. And while it might be a witness to neighborliness, it's not a witness to the commands of Scripture - the place that Pastor Stone should have looked rather than his own mind or heart or big toe to decide what the best course of action should be. I don't think that you can take the first commandment seriously (as every Biblical Christian must), without also recognizing that sharing your sanctuary with a non-Christian faith seems to contradict this most basic of witnesses. For anything other than worship, I can see sharing part of your facility with a group that explicitly denies the validity of your faith (though I think there needs to be a lot of thought & prayer put into that decision). But to share your worship space for the purpose of the worship of a false god...I can't see a way of justifying that.
I find it interesting that there's no mention in the article of Pastor Stone or members of his congregation giving witness to groups of from the Muslim congregation. It would seem to me that it would only be neighborly of the Muslim group to welcome that sort of sharing as well. And the article makes no mention of the rationale that Pastor Stone used to reach this decision, other than the desire to be neighborly. Which is great - but being neighborly by effectively denying the fundamentals of your own faith seems to be something other than neighborly.
Am I reading the Bible wrong on this one? Thoughts?
Posted by Paul Nelson at 9/15/2010 9:20 AM 
Categories: Citizenship, Church, Theology, Apologetics, Current Events
Categories: Citizenship, Church, Theology, Apologetics, Current Events
I believe that a "building" constructed for the worship of God as we Christians know him (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit) is a Christian Church. There is a "Christian" church in our community that has opened its doors to a Jewish congregation. I wondered about that. I'm all for being a good neighbor, as all of us are; however, this just doesn't seem right to me. We, as Americans, as well as those of us who are Christians, appear to be compromising too much so we won't be thought of as racist or bigots.
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That's an interesting situation - sharing with a Jewish congregation. Part of me feels like is somehow better because at least the Jews and the Christians worship the same God and share some of the same Scriptures (even though the Jews don't acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God or the Biblical concept of the Trinity). Christianity is essentially a Jewish sect (the sect of Judaism that believes the Scriptures have been fulfilled in part regarding the coming Messiah), and there is New Testament witness to early Jewish Christians that met together in synagogues until they were finally driven out by the Jews who denied Jesus as the Messiah.
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You do have a good point regarding the Jewish people who worship the same God as we Christians. I'm just wondering who lets Jesus in on Sunday Morning and who ushers him out on Friday morning. I once belonged to a church which practiced religion but, in my opinion, didn't practice Christianity. Very complex issues.
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Definitely a blunt way of putting it
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I'm usually not so blunt! If I were not a Christian, I would for sure be a Jew. I have many Jewish friends and I've enjoyed the Bar Mitzvas, Bat Mitzvas, Conformation and danced the hora with them and then had wonderful food to eat. Their way of life is wonderful. Having said that, I'm thankful to be a Christian. And, I will add, that there is enough space that this should not be an issue.
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Never worry about the bluntness here
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Glad your're not beating around any bushes and I'm happy to handle any agreement or disagreement!
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Thanks for your comments. I had the same red flags go up too. I agree- Christ would want us to be neighborly, but we must also honor God's commandments. I remember the story of Jesus cleaning out the temple because of 'unclean' things that were occurring... this situation in the article is different, but it's nevertheless an example of people not taking the place of worship seriously enough.
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That's a good event to remember. While the Jerusalem temple is probably best understood in a different light from a New Testament covenant house of worship, I think it's instructive that there are limits to what we can do in the name of neighborliness/convenience/making a buck. There's a line that can be crossed when what we do in order to hopefully share the faith actually begins to change and obscure the faith we claim we want to share.
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