Missions Resources - Bibliography
The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience
Authors: Ron Sider
ISBN: 0801065410
Publisher: Baker Books
Number of pages: 140
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary: Why are Christians living just like the rest of the world? Ron Sider wants us to courageously face the truth. Racism, Sexual Immorality, Divorce, Consumerism, Domestic Violence, and more: it’s a pretty ugly mirror to look into.
Study after study shows that professing evangelical Christians are on balance an immoral lot. That is, we are every bit as selfish with our money, unfaithful in marriage and promiscuous as the “world” from which we are called apart. When it comes to domestic violence and racism, evangelicals even lead the rotten pack. We’re more likely to beat our loved ones, and we’re more likely to relocate when people of other ethnicities move in next door.
Ron Sider is not airing dirty laundry; he’s calling us to wash it. People are dying, lives are being ruined, because of immorality in the church, and nobody is fooled. The laundry is already aired. Even unbelievers smell it. While Jesus promised his followers the world’s hatred, North Americans hate the hypocrisy of the American church far more than our actual beliefs. The world would rather have a strong church that vigorously acts on its beliefs, than a church that only talks about those actions.
The problem lies in what is often called “cheap grace”. Having reduced salvation to nothing greater than a passport to heaven – as important at that is – we evangelicals have left out of the discussion any confrontation on sin and lifestyle. Sider quotes Alan Wolfe, an agnostic sociologist: “In no other area of religious practice, especially for evangelicals, is the gap between the religion as it is supposed to be and religion as it is as great as it is in the area of sin”.
“Even more striking,” adds Sider, “ this self-confessed nonbeliever laments this “retreat from sin.” As Brenda Salter-McNeil put it at Urbana 2000, “We don’t care and we don’t care that we don’t care.”
So what should we do? Ron Sider believes the church’s problems are spiritual in the first instance and moral as a consequence. Repentance must mean confronting sin in all areas of our lives and taking it as seriously as Jesus did: a matter of cosmic and eternal consequence. Unless we begin to care more about our salvation, we won’t really have a reason to care about our immorality.
But repentance is also a gift from the Holy Spirit. When our hearts are hard, God’s Spirit can re-sensitize us. The paradox of the Christian life is the simultaneity of our helplessness and power. We have to repent, but before we get the attitude that we’re entering the pearly gates, we realize that God is actually helping us repent. Our dependence on God is absolute.
Moving beyond sin, Sider looks at the church. The root of the church’s impotence is our profound individualism. We simply don’t understand the miracle of God’s sent community. The church is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, but we’ve taught a message of individual believer-by-individual-believer for so long that we no longer have much of a foundation upon which to build a structure to withstand evil. The power of the triune God lives in his church, but the American incarnation of the church doesn’t seem to believe him.
This short book is no Jeremiad lamenting spiritual deadness. It’s a passionate and hopeful call for Christians to take sin seriously, because life and death are at stake. The world is going to hell in a hand basket, but God offers abundant life, and presents his Church as the home for that life. We the church should take a serious look at this message.
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