2 of 4

You say that the most profound picture of the church being the body is not in a successful megachurch, but in a gathering of society's losers, namely prisoners. Why is a group of believers behind bars closer to God's vision for Christ's body than a suburban megachurch is?

Because they concentrate on what life is all about. They are asking the fundamental questions. They cannot be taken in by the trivial and the banal, because they have to fight for their faith. It is a matter of life and death inside the prisons, where rape is an ever-present threat and where Christians are often abused and discriminated against. So they recognize that they can't survive individually. They can only survive as a community.

We haven't figured that out in the church on the outside. I love to be in prisons, because there isn't a person there who is not hungering for truth. There is not a person there who doesn't recognize that the Christian church is the community against which the gates of hell can't prevail. And the people in prison are up against the gates of hell.

Many of those people are undereducated and yet you have a strong worldview dimension to your ministry. How do you speak to these important issues at their level?

Worldview is not a necessarily a sophisticated academic term. It is best defined as C. S. Lewis did—I'm paraphrasing—Understanding the way the world works and how you fit into it. People in prison ask the right questions. People outside are basically distracted, amusing themselves to death, as Neal Postman put it.

The minds of people in prison are concentrated on what counts: how you live in this world. In prison I don't talk about how you deal with the postmodern impasse. I talk about the basic things: where we came from, why there is sin and suffering, the hope that comes in our redemption, the way in which we restore culture. Prisoners are really concerned about this. They want to make the place they live a little bit safer, a little bit more decent. In their confined environment, they see starkly the difference between good and evil.

In the 20th century the church played an important role in toppling oppressive regimes in places like East Germany and Poland. What can North American Christians learn from believers in those lands about political engagement?

In Kingdoms in Conflict (1987), I wrote that the church would be the one agent that could topple Communism. And now I can write about how the church actually did it—by walking the fine line between obedience to those in authority, because they're appointed by God (and even evil governments are better than anarchy), and also recognizing when evil governments are no longer acting within the authority God gave them and need to be resisted. Now the church has to draw that line with great care. It did it too late in Nazi Germany, but it did it very well and consistently in Eastern Europe.

It is imperative that the church be countercultural and be independent of the state. It is important that it recognize that Christ is King of all, which is why the cross is such an offense and a scandal to tyrants—as is the Star of David. The church in Poland and Romania, to a lesser degree in the Czech Republic and to a considerable extent in Russia, was the chief contributing influence to the sudden fall of the Communist empire.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47