I love this article I have linked, with one problem, that I struggle to articulate, but feel I must.
Please read this OP and Like or React to it rather than the linked article, because John Pavlovitz will no doubt (and deservedly so) get a whole lot of LIKES (on Facebook and on his website) on this. But I am posting this to highlight something about it that is yet another reminder of something that has bothered me greatly for nearly 5 years now.
I love John Pavlovitz’s writing and his complaints about the church. Such as: “Church, people are leaving you because you are silent right now in ways that matter to them.
You aren’t saying what they need you to say and what you should be saying—and it makes them sick.
They spend their days with a front row seat to human right atrocities, to growing movements of cruelty, to unprecedented religious hypocrisy, and to political leaders who are antithetical to heart of Jesus.
….They’ve been waiting for you to oppose the separation of families,to declare the value of black lives,to loudly defend LGBTQ people,to stand alongside your Muslims brothers and sistersto denounce the degradation of the planet—to say with absolute clarity what you stand for and what you will not abide.”
They’re DEFINITELY noticing how the church hardly EVER talks about the problem we have with this ecological crisis more than anything else!!!!!!! Waiting for the church “to denounce the degradation of the planet”
You write: “If you really want to be relevant again: say everything.”
So why, John, do you rarely mention our ecological crisis? You do here (“to denounce the degradation of the planet—”) , but I just barely noticed it, in a list. One problem I have is that we so rarely mention it, and when we do mention it, it’s in a list of things that are all talked about much more and with regularity. It’s like the ecological crisis is an afterthought. And most of all, it’s so often in a list, and hardly, if ever, expounded upon or treated as the main subject.
Why is this? It’s because we don’t know how to talk about it. We have to educate ourselves about this! Young people are definitely concerned about our ecological crisis, and are so , according to polls, more than any other single issue (and it’s not even really a “single issue”. Our ecological crisis is a crisis of life balance, and this touches nearly everything! But PLEASE! Let’s learn to talk about it! This is a problem not just in John’s writings, but in most of Progressive Christian writing and speaking. And this is a problem. It’s going to be really hard to turn this thing around and get moving along the right path to a sustainable future if we don’t learn to talk about it in the first place, and identify it as what it is: An urgent, existential threat that grows harder to work against the longer we fail to focus upon it!
People are leaving in droves because they see the church ignoring what is a pretty hefty ethical issue: The tenuous future of life as we know it. How about some articles dedicated to this? I think it’s big enough. We need voices like John spending quite a bit more time on this. (I also think the same about a lot of our Progressive voices, and also in the secular political world…such as Michael Moore). John and Michael are such good communicators! The world needs them to speak up and help us think about this a whole lot more!