Oklahoma Pastor Running For Senate, Vows to Investigate 2020 Election
“Lead pastor of Sheridan Church in Tulsa, OK Jackson Lahmeyer told his congregation this past weekend that ‘It’s time to shout it in the halls of Congress that Jesus is King.’…Lahmeyer has said that he has signed thousands of vaccine exemption forms, a service he has offered for a one-time donation of any amount to his church.” - C.Leaders
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Any Christian who runs for public office has to understand how to be a Senator, Congressman, etc., for everyone, not just for church members. That means he has to know how the Christian faith relates to the responsibilities of high office and how to talk about his faith appropriately—which is about as far as you can get from language that sounds like theocracy in Congress. If you’re going to be a legislative leader for everyone, you have to mostly use arguments that are accessible to everyone, not just Christians.
… and then there’s the whole vaccine exemptions for money thing. This kind of leadership is so not what we need.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Sheridan Church is a “name it, claim it” health and wealth gospel church connected to people like Kenneth Copeland. One of the scary aspects of this stripe of Pentecostalism how they’ve adopted their own form of dominion theology that they want to impose on America.
Looked at the church’s website, they’re trying to look like a megachurch—laser light shows and fog machines and all—with only about 100 parking spaces. Lot of blowing smoke around there, and it’s worth noting as well that during COVID, they’d have been easily able to move services outside, as a junior high school is right across the road from them. That’s what my church did, and it worked great.
But, of course, it’s hard to get the fog machines and laser light show working outside, and of course, the Spirit of such churches only moves with the fog machine working. Might not be exactly the same as the Spirit that ought to animate churches, though….
I’m looking for James Lankford to squish him like a bug, thankfully. The GOP has too many people with crazy ideas already.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Running for office or churches going public against the 2020 election, CRT, Anti-Vaccination, Anti-Masks have become church growth strategies. Creating tirades of anger and rage against the government is a sure way to get anti-government folks to leave their current churches (who they believe are not standing up against tyranny and not publicly standing for freedom). There’s one pastor in our area that has created over 100 youtube videos railing against the government and against what he calls cowardly pastors and churches for not publicly standing against Biden, Govener Whitmer, and anyone else who is pro-mask, pro COVID vaccine, and etc… For 7 years, his church only had 30 people, but now it is at 130 because of his anti-government message.
What you win them with, you win them to…
Dave Barnhart
[Joel Shaffer]Running for office or churches going public against the 2020 election, CRT, Anti-Vaccination, Anti-Masks have become church growth strategies. Creating tirades of anger and rage against the government is a sure way to get anti-government folks to leave their current churches (who they believe are not standing up against tyranny and not publicly standing for freedom). There’s one pastor in our area that has created over 100 youtube videos railing against the government and against what he calls cowardly pastors and churches for not publicly standing against Biden, Govener Whitmer, and anyone else who is pro-mask, pro COVID vaccine, and etc… For 7 years, his church only had 30 people, but now it is at 130 because of his anti-government message.
So I’m not the only one who sees a strange and shocking trend of anti-government thinking among ‘conservative’ evangelicals these days? It’s shocking to me that this sort of attitude managed to even get off the ground in Bible-believing churches. I had long assumed that viewing government as an institution of God for man’s good was pretty much right up there with belief in creation, as far as clarity and non-negotiability for Christian belief goes. So it’s an addition to my personal pile of “Trump and COVID era shocking discoveries” to find that this increasingly not the case.
And I’m seeing forms/expressions of anti-government thinking all over fundamentalist heritage Christianity right now, though most of them are relatively small.
I think it comes back to worldview. At some point, we stopped effectively teaching believers an understanding of the human person and human society as a component of Christian worldview, and we may be reaping the whirlwind.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]It’s shocking to me that this sort of attitude managed to even get off the ground in Bible-believing churches. I had long assumed that viewing government as an institution of God for man’s good was pretty much right up there with belief in creation, as far as clarity and non-negotiability for Christian belief goes. So it’s an addition to my personal pile of “Trump and COVID era shocking discoveries” to find that this increasingly not the case.
And I’m seeing forms/expressions of anti-government thinking all over fundamentalist heritage Christianity right now, though most of them are relatively small.
I think it comes back to worldview. At some point, we stopped effectively teaching believers an understanding of the human person and human society as a component of Christian worldview, and we may be reaping the whirlwind.
I’m not sure why you are shocked (shocked!) that sinful people can take something to a non-biblical extreme.
There are at least two pieces of background information/history that go into Christian thinking on politics, one affects all Christians, and the 2nd one affects those in the U.S.:
1. There is a difference between on one side understanding the need for government and respecting the office and on the other side blindly taking everything government does as good, and unthinkingly following people who use the office poorly or even sinfully.
Paul is our best example of respecting the office (“most excellent Felix”) while still forcefully resisting and bringing up the law when it has been misused (as it was when he was unlawfully beaten without legal examination) and protesting government actions appropriately. The fact that Christians need to be deferential to government and generally obey does not exclude speaking out or even acting when government acts inappropriately, or against its own laws. Obviously, there are limits to this, but such action is not completely out of the question.
2. Our government (in the U.S.) has, as even part of its founding documents the principle that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Clearly, our actions against government need to be done appropriately and legally, and not just espousing disobedience or rebellion, but unlike what Paul faced, our government has built in an assumption that government action is not absolute, and it gives ways to protest and change it.
Unfortunately, some Christians (or maybe many) have the idea that since our government is not absolute, they can just resist any ordinance of government, and worse, it’s now seen as appropriate by them for Christian churches to take up this political cause and resistance instead of preaching the Word. However, I’m not shocked by it. Humanity hasn’t changed, and Christians are not immune to sin.
Churches have allowed this to happen, because they didn’t stop politics from the pulpit. It starts out innocently, like announcing a right-to-life event either sponsored by the church, or the church sending a group (rather than believers as individuals going), and then goes to things like preaching messages on “Why a believer should support X,” where X is the political position of the day, and eventually gets to either full-blown support of or rejection of government positions on things (depending on the leanings of the church). Before you know it, church is about politics, rather than the Word.
We should keep politics out of the church and preach the Word. Christians can form their own political organizations if they wish, but they should be outside the church and stay there.
Dave Barnhart
As for why the shock, because like I said, I thought that was a much stronger understanding among Christians than it apparently is. Would you be shocked if, say, John MacArthur stood up and denied the reality of Hell and embraced universalism? For me, multiple events have felt like that over the past year. Shocking.
I agree with your two numbered points, though, essentially. The problem is that so much of the rhetoric of the right now is indiscriminately anti-government. Weirdly, it was even that way when their guy was the President, which just shows how incoherent it has all become. Trump somehow managed to claim to be the fix government guy and the anti-government guy and the chief executive of the government all at the same time, and people danced to his tune. It’s still bizarre to me.
But back to the point: it means that Christian leaders especially need to distance themselves from anti-government attitudes and statements to frame whatever criticism they’re going to make of policy. And if they’re Trump backers, character is off the table, so they should also distance themselves from personal attacks on Biden or Pelosi or even AOC. Either character matters or it doesn’t. Decide. But the Fox News punditry are pouring out venom and distrust of motives (that’s character, folks) of everyone on the left on a daily basis. And people can’t seem to see the inconsistency. So if only policy matters, then lets just talk about policy. I could live with that. (Though I think character matters and we should apply standards to our guy even more rigorously then we do to their guy.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]As for why the shock, because like I said, I thought that was a much stronger understanding among Christians than it apparently is. Would you be shocked if, say, John MacArthur stood up and denied the reality of Hell and embraced universalism? For me, multiple events have felt like that over the past year. Shocking.
I agree with your two numbered points, though, essentially. The problem is that so much of the rhetoric of the right now is indiscriminately anti-government. Weirdly, it was even that way when their guy was the President, which just shows how incoherent it has all become. Trump somehow managed to claim to be the fix government guy and the anti-government guy and the chief executive of the government all at the same time, and people danced to his tune. It’s still bizarre to me.
But back to the point: it means that Christian leaders especially need to distance themselves from anti-government attitudes and statements to frame whatever criticism they’re going to make of policy. And if they’re Trump backers, character is off the table, so they should also distance themselves from personal attacks on Biden or Pelosi or even AOC. Either character matters or it doesn’t. Decide. But the Fox News punditry are pouring out venom and distrust of motives (that’s character, folks) of everyone on the left on a daily basis. And people can’t seem to see the inconsistency. So if only policy matters, then lets just talk about policy. I could live with that. (Though I think character matters and we should apply standards to our guy even more rigorously then we do to their guy.)
Well, back when the whole “MacArthur and ‘the Blood’ ” issue happened, and I was hearing only one side of that issue, I was pretty shocked at MacArthur’s position then too. Taking more time to understand it made the differences much less shocking.
I think my lack of shock about Christianity and politics now comes from my experiences in churches over the last 50 years or so. The U.S.A. is a big country, and I don’t know which strains of Christianity and/or fundamentalism you’ve been in contact with, but a number of the churches I have experienced in that time have been a little more comfortable with the equivalence between America and Christianity than I am now comfortable with. In addition, some of those churches have been clear fans of movements like the Moral Majority and similar.
As I wrote in my last post, I now think churches have spent too much time with American politics and not enough time teaching Christians what the Bible actually says so that they can make good decisions themselves when individually interacting with politics. Obviously, we’ve seen this merging of churches and politics for years with the “Christian left” and their “souls to the polls”-type preaching, but it has now infected much of the Christian right just as strongly. It just doesn’t shock me any more.
To be clear, I’m not against Christian political organizations. However, I do think that if they really intend to be Christian in nature, they need to be based on Christian principles (like our submission to government), so that any protest needs to be done not only legally within the American system but also not going against what the Bible says on our attitudes. Paul’s experience gives a good example to follow, but the fact that such incidents are rare in the scriptures mean we need to be extremely careful to not extrapolate what is there to our resisting government any time we choose. Plus, these organizations, at least in my opinion, need to be separate from the church, AND go to some lengths to stay that way.
The church’s job is not politics, and we cheapen what it is supposed to be when it becomes a political organization. However, I think even going too far down the “preach the application” path (e.g. “What should Christians think about Covid vaccination?” preaching) can also lead to getting too much into politics. Application is appropriate, but often taken way past what the scriptures support.
I still believe that if pastors and churches understood their proper role, they wouldn’t be preaching politics, and they would be tamping down anti-government attitudes by preaching what’s actually in the Bible. And the Christians that come from these churches would be more principled when forming and/or joining political organizations.
As to character of politicians, I agree with you in principle. However, that is tempered by a few things. 1. We can’t expect unregenerate people to act like Christians. 2. The “Judeo-Christian” cultural influence previously part of the U.S. is waning in our day, and it doesn’t take a lot of insight to see how much has changed over my lifetime. 3. That means that unregenerate people are much less in line with the “Christian” cultural influence we might have once expected and are getting closer to the choices that would have been available in Roman times. 4. That means that the choices for most elections, which in most cases will not include actual believers, will be between people with which Christians will share much fewer character similarities.
I wasn’t expecting either Trump or Biden to have solid character, so I made my decision on other factors. Biden certainly “appeared” more normal and/or decent on the outside, but his actions since taking the office have shown a character that is really no better than Trump’s with much worse policies to go with it, not to mention a cognitive decline that is even more obvious now than it was last year. A careful study of his whole career would also have given anyone who looked a pretty good idea what his “actual” character was like. In any case, that made policy the big deciding factor for me.
Dave Barnhart
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