Salt

Some people think that the claim that human equality comes from Jesus is just biased. But when the British historian Tom Holland set out to write his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, he was not a Christian. He'd always been far more attracted by the Greek and Roman gods than by the crucified hero of Christianity. But through years of research, he concluded that he, agnostic as he was, held many specifically Christian beliefs. For example, his belief in universal human equality and the need to care for the poor and oppressed.

Holland writes:

That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely a self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle—as the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche had contemptuously pointed out—lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.

When Krish Kandiah was young, growing up in the United Kingdom, his family could always count on their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Oglive, to be around. They left a spare key with her in case they got locked out, because she was always there—morning, afternoon, and night—to let them in.

Mrs. Oglive never went out. She suffered from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. Having lived next door to her for 40 years now, they still haven’t seen her venture past her doorway. She wasn’t always this way. She has pictures on her mantelpiece of less anxious days, from her honeymoon with Mr. Oglive and from a day at the beach with her children. But after her husband died, Mrs. Oglive began to isolate herself.

One can only imagine the heavy cloud of fear and frustration that surrounds her. Now frail and in the twilight of life, Mrs. Oglive’s curtains are almost always drawn.

There are some parallels between Mrs. Oglive and the contemporary church. Many Christians observe the world from behind closed curtains, bemoaning culture instead of engaging it. Many local churches are isolated from the wider community and world, bunkered up like doomsayers, suffering from fear of an open public square with divergent viewpoints and lifestyles.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Only by encountering the risen Christ and receiving the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit are we able to step beyond our doors and carry out God’s mission. When we do so, we are transformed from an agoraphobic church to an apostolic church.

Christian leader Mark Labberton relates a personal story about when he had a seemingly unsolvable problem with the IRS. Labberton writes:

After several months of correspondence and legal advice, the day finally came to begin the talks in person. Those who knew the IRS suggested this would take many months, probably longer, to get settled. I went to the IRS office in Oakland. I waited. And I waited. Eventually I was escorted through a warren of cubicles to meet the agent who would assist me. The agent there listened to my case, took all the relevant paperwork, and excused herself to consult with someone else. I waited ten minutes, 15 minutes … 45 minutes but no one checked in. As far as I could tell, the agent had disappeared …

Suddenly, the agent was back. She handed me a sheet and said simply, "There, it's all done. It's settled." I assumed she was saying that she had taken the first step. What she meant was that the whole process was settled. She turned the paper over and revealed the nine signatures she had acquired all the way up the IRS ladder so the case was now closed, and closed in my favor.

There, in the midst of a warren of bureaucratic anonymity and powerlessness, I encountered a person who became my advocate, who heard my appeal and who took the initiative to do on my behalf what I could never have done for myself. She met me at a moment of isolation and fear and sent me out with resolution when I had anticipated nothing but delay.

Possible Preaching Angles: Mark Labberton comments: "For me, this has been a parable of what the body of Christ can be in the world. We are to be those who, in the vastness of the universe and in a context of human powerlessness, show up as advocates who represent and incarnate the presence of God, who is the hope of the world. We can, of course, choose instead to be bureaucrats. Show up and shuffle paper, engage very little, put in our time, and watch out for our own interests. At the Oakland IRS office, there was a system, but there was a person in the system who was ready to be an advocate. I don't know why, but she did it. And it changed everything for me."

A man goes into a store to buy some razor blades. They're locked up. He tries to get in, but it's like robbing Fort Knox. No one is around to help. He tries harder, which sets off alarms that lead to him being assaulted by the staff. Blow darts, punches to the stomach, and so forth. Then the tag line: "It's like they don't want you to buy razor blades."

So when someone came along and offered a different way to buy razor blades, it struck a chord. According to the Wall Street Journal, web sales of razor blades through such companies as Dollar Shave Club. They've gone from no slice of the market to nearly ten percent, with little sign of slowing down.

So how did a company like Dollar Shave Club storm onto the scene and take such a big bite out of a company like Gillette that has been in existence since 1901? That's easy. Gillette and its distributors looked at things from the inside—from their perspective—not the consumer's. They made the experience of buying blades negative for shoppers. So when someone came along and listened to the consumer and then thought like a buyer, not a seller, they got a lot of buyers flocking to their side. You can only imagine the Dollar Shave Club people thinking, "Okay, people hate the way razors are sold, but stores don't want them stolen … let's just rethink how to get them in people's hands!" And they did.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Church; Outreach—As James Emery White argues, "Too many churches look at things from the inside." But as Christians we can take the time to look at things from the perspective of those who don't know Christ. As a result, people won't come to our churches and say, "It's almost as if they don't want you to accept Christ." (2) Listening; Communication; Conflict; Marriage—How often do we take time to look at issues, events, conflicts from the other person's perspective?

When I was young, growing up in the United Kingdom, my family and I could always count on our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Oglive, to be around. We left a spare key with her in case we got locked out. We forgot our keys quite often, and she was always there—morning, afternoon, and night—to let us in.

Mrs. Oglive never went out. She suffered from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. Having lived next door to her for 40 years now, I still haven't seen her venture past her doorway. She wasn't always this way. She has pictures on her mantelpiece of less anxious days, from her honeymoon with Mr. Oglive and from a day at the beach with her children. But after her husband died, Mrs. Oglive began to isolate herself. As a child, I saw opportunity in this: Her garden resembled a jungle, and I earned some pocket money by pretending to be Indiana Jones armed with a machete slicing through the undergrowth, clearing the path to her front door.

As an adult, I can only imagine the heavy cloud of fear and frustration that surrounds her. Now frail and in the twilight of life, Mrs. Oglive's curtains are almost always drawn. But now and then, I still get locked out, and as she hands me the spare key, I am glad to see she is still alive.

I see parallels between Mrs. Oglive and the contemporary church. Many Christians observe the world from behind closed curtains, bemoaning culture instead of engaging it. Many local churches are isolated from the wider community and world … suffering from fear of an open public square with divergent viewpoints and lifestyles.

In his book Vanishing Grace, Phillip Yancey writes about a Muslim man who told Yancey, "I have read the entire Koran and can find in it no guidance on how Muslims should live as a minority in society. I have read the entire New Testament many times and can find in it no guidance on how Christians should live as a majority."

Yancey comments, "Christians best thrive as a minority, a counterculture. Historically, when [Christians] reach a majority they have yielded to the temptations of power in ways that are clearly anti-gospel."

Possible Preaching Angles: The body of Christ, followers of Christ—we can have a tremendous impact on society even if we have been marginalized and persecuted.

Steven Galloway's 2008 novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo, tells the following fictional story about the real cellist Vedren Smajlovic. In the novel, Smajlović, the lead cellist in the Sarajevo opera, put on his formal black tails and sat down on a fire-scorched chair in a bomb crater and began to play. The crater was outside a bakery in his neighborhood where twenty-two people waiting in line for bread had been killed the previous day. During the siege of Sarajevo in the early 90s, more than ten thousand people were killed.

The citizens lived in constant fear of shelling and snipers while struggling each day to find food and water. Smajlović lived near one of the few working bakeries where a long line of people had gathered when a shell exploded. He rushed to the scene and was overcome with grief at the carnage.

For the next twenty-two days, one for each victim of the bombing, he decided to challenge the ugliness of war with his only weapon— beauty. He became known as the "Cellist of Sarajevo." After that, Smajlović continued to unleash the beauty of his music in graveyards, at funerals, in the rubble of buildings, and in the sniper-infested streets. Although completely vulnerable, he was never shot. It was as if the beauty of his presence repelled the violence of war. His music created an oasis amid the horror. It offered hope to the people of Sarajevo and a vision of beauty to the soldiers who were destroying the city.

In the novel, a reporter asked him if he was crazy for playing in a war zone. Smajlović replied, "Why do you not ask if they are crazy for bombing Sarajevo?"

John Marks, a producer for television's 60 Minutes, went on a two-year quest to investigate evangelicals, the group he had grown up among and later rejected. He wrote a book about the quest called Reasons to Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind. The church's response to Hurricane Katrina turned the corner for him and became a key reason to believe. One Baptist church in Baton Rouge fed 16,000 people a day for weeks; another housed 700 homeless evacuees. Years after the hurricane, and long after federal assistance had dried up, a network of churches in surrounding states was still sending regular teams to help rebuild houses. Most impressively to Marks, all these church efforts crossed racial lines and barriers in the Deep South. As one worker told him, "We had whites, blacks, Hispanics, Vietnamese, good old Cajun … . We just tried to say, hey, let's help people. This is our state. We'll let everybody else sort out that other stuff. We've got to cook some rice."

Marks concludes:

I would argue that this was a watershed moment in the history of American Christianity … nothing spoke more eloquently to believers, and to nonbelievers who were paying attention, than the success of a population of believing volunteers measured against the massive and near-total collapse of secular government efforts. The storm laid bare an unmistakable truth. More and more Christians have decided that the only way to reconquer America is through service. The faith no longer travels by the word. It moves by the deed.

The United States has the largest prison population in the world, with 2.2 million adults behind bars. The United States also consumes more coffee than any other nation—146 billion cups of coffee every year (as of 2/2024). Those two facts may seem completely unrelated, but to a Christian businessman from Wheaton, Illinois, they provided a creative way to do something he loves and minister to former inmates in his community.

It all started when Pete Leonard, a businessman involved with a local software company, started roasting coffee out of his garage. About the same time, Leonard watched as a family member fruitlessly searched for work after serving time in prison. Leonard said, "He'd always get interviews, but the instant he had to check the box 'I'm a convicted felon,' that was the end of the story." Leonard also realized that his relative's story was typical of a much larger problem: Many ex-convicts can't find work, which drives them back into unemployment or crime.

Over breakfast one morning, Leonard and two close friends took a napkin and sketched out an idea of starting a business that would hire ex-offenders. But Leonard was also committed to making excellent coffee. "If the coffee is bad," he said, "you're not going to buy it again." So Leonard and his friends started Second Chance Coffee Company, which markets under the brand I Have a Bean. Leonard and his wife, Debbie, invested thousands of dollars to launch the business, and Leonard eventually left his job to pursue it full time. Today, Second Chance makes quality coffee while hiring mostly ex-convicts. For a mom or dad coming out of prison, that means being able to be a provider and pulling the family out of the cycle of poverty. According to Debbie Leonard, for her and Pete it's also meant realizing that "your security is in God and not in your bank account."

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The Christian scholar Larry Taunton launched a nationwide campaign to interview college students who belong to atheistic campus groups. After receiving a flood of enquiries, Larry and his team heard one consistent theme from these young unbelievers: they often expected but didn't find more spiritual depth from their Christian neighbors. Larry writes:

Some [of these young atheists] had gone to church hoping to find answers to [tough questions about faith]. Others hoped to find answers to questions of personal significance, purpose, and ethics. Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: "I really started to get bored with church."

In contrast, these young atheists expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously. Larry writes,

Without fail, our former church-attending students expressed [positive] feelings for those Christians who unashamedly embraced biblical teaching. Michael, a political science major at Dartmouth, told us, "I really can't consider a Christian a good, moral person if he isn't trying to convert me …. Christianity is something that if you really believed it, it would change your life and you would want to change [the lives] of others. I haven't seen too much of that."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Worship; Preaching—Surprisingly, many young atheists aren't looking for Christians who will water-down the faith. They want us to worship and preach with wholehearted devotion. (2) Commitment; Zeal; Discipleship—This story shows what lukewarm discipleship looks like to the watching world—it's blah. (3) Evangelism—These young atheists want and expect us to share our faith—assuming that it's done in an appropriate way.

Tim Winton is Australia's most celebrated novelist today. Author of more than a dozen bestselling books and winner of numerous literary prizes, Winton resides on the coast of Western Australia, where he lives with his family. Winton was interviewed on the popular ABC television show Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. At one point, the conversation turned to Winton's well-known Christian faith.

"I want to talk about faith," said Denton. "When you were, I think, about five, a stranger came into your family and affected your family quite profoundly. Is that right?"

Tim Winton went on to tell Denton how his father, a policeman, had been in a terrible accident in the mid-1960s, knocked off his motorcycle by a drunk driver. After weeks in a coma he was allowed home. Winton said he remembers thinking, "He was like an earlier version of my father, a sort of augmented version of my father. He was sort of recognizable, but not really my dad, you know? Everything was busted up, and they put him in the chair, and, you know, 'Here's your dad.' And I was horrified."

Winton's father was a big man, and Mrs. Winton had great difficulty bathing him each day. There was nothing that Tim, five-years-old at the time, could do to help. News of the family's situation got out into the local community, and shortly afterward, Winton recalls, his mother got a knock at the door. "Oh, g'day. My name's Len," said a stranger to Mrs. Winton. "I heard your hubby's a bit [ill]. Anything I can do?"

Len Thomas was from the local church, Winton explained. This man had heard about the family's difficulties and wanted to help. "He just showed up," continued Winton, "and he used to carry my dad from bed and put him in the bath, and he used to bathe him, which in the 1960s in [Australia] in the suburbs was not the sort of thing you saw every day."

According to Winton, this simple act of kindness from a single Christian had a powerful effect: "It really touched me in that … watching a grown man bother, for nothing, to show up and wash a sick man—you know, it really affected me." This "strangely sacrificial act," as he described it, was the doorway into the Christian faith for the entire Winton family.

In his book A Meal with Jesus, Tim Chester shares the following stories about how various church communities in England are sharing Jesus through shared meals:

To celebrate the Kurdish New Year … we provided kebabs and live music. Over one hundred Kurds from across the city converged on the party. Our main worry was whether the floor would hold. Standing in the basement, we could see that the Kurdish men dancing in sync above was causing the floor to flex by at least an inch. The floor held, and the evening ended with my friend Samuel telling everyone we'd put this party on to express God's love for Kurds.

Every month one of our missional communities hosts a curry night for Pakistani men. A dozen or so come to enjoy homemade curry and conversation. That's it …. Except that relationships are growing and gospel opportunities are increasing. More recently they've started a similar venue for Pakistani women.

In a community hall underneath [a soccer stadium], more than a hundred people of all nationalities gathered. Our church had paid a Pakistani friend to make biryani curry, and church members provided desserts. At a couple of points in the meal we told stories of meals—the story of the woman who washed the feet of Jesus in Luke 7 and the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15.

Chester concludes:

These are all forms of mission Jesus would recognize. They are the kinds of events he might have attended …. But they are also ways of doing mission that you could do …. When you combine a passion for Jesus with shared meals, you create potent gospel opportunities.

In 2011 New York Times editorialist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column praising the work of many evangelical Christians. Kristof begins by noting that at times evangelical leaders act hypocritically and don't reflect Christ. However, he also goes on to write:

But in reporting on poverty, disease and oppression, I've seen so many others. Evangelicals are disproportionately likely to donate 10 percent of their incomes to charities, mostly church-related. More important, go to the front lines, at home or abroad, in the battles against hunger, malaria, prison rape, obstetric fistula, human trafficking or genocide, and some of the bravest people you meet are evangelical Christians (or conservative Catholics, similar in many ways) who truly live their faith.

I'm not particularly religious myself, but I stand in awe of those I've seen risking their lives in this way—and it sickens me to see that faith mocked at New York cocktail parties.

In a moving tribute to Fred Rogers, Jonathon Merritt recounts how Rogers chose to reform society through his gentle and persistent influence on a children's television show.

In 1965, a thin, soft-spoken man sauntered into Pittsburgh's WQED, the nation's first public television station, to pitch a show targeting young children. The concept was simple enough: convey life lessons to young children with the help of puppets, songs and frank conversations. It doesn't sound like much. That is, until you realize that the man was Fred Rogers, and the program was Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

But Rogers was more than a great neighbor or good host; he was a restorer. According to Gabe Lyons in The Next Christians, a "restorer" is someone who views the world as it "ought to be." Faced with the world's brokenness, restorers are "provoked, not offended." They work to make the world a better place by "creating, not criticizing" and by "being countercultural, not relevant." Using this definition, Rogers may be one of the greatest American restorers of the 20th century.

Rogers got into television because he "hated" the medium. During spring break of his senior year in seminary, he encountered television for the first time and what he witnessed repulsed him. "I got into television," he recounted, "because I saw people throwing pies at each other's faces, and that to me was such demeaning behavior. And if there's anything that bothers me, it's one person demeaning another. That really makes me mad!"

In the wake of WWII …., [Fred Rogers] worried that the type of programming that was becoming normative would create a generation of emotionally-bankrupt Americans. Faced with the decision to either sour on television itself or work to restore the medium, he chose the latter. He dropped out of seminary and began pursuing a career in broadcasting. Fourteen years later, he would create one of the most beloved American television shows of all time, and one that would shape entire generations of children.

Rogers was a devout Christian that almost never explicitly talked about his faith on the air, but the way his show infused society with beauty and grace was near-biblical …. "You've made this day a special day by just your being you," he'd famously sign off. "There is no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are."

In many ways, the lasting legacy of Fred Rogers will not be the greater emotional stability of generations of children or even a reinvigoration of imagination. It will be his example of how to restore the world through impassioned creativity and craftsmanship. For nearly four decades, Rogers entered our homes and entered our hearts. And each day without fail, he left our collective neighborhoods better and made our days a little bit more beautiful.

"For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining." That's the first line in a 2010 cover story for Newsweek. The data on creativity comes from decades of research based on a "creativity quotient" test designed by Professor E. Paul Torrance. For the past fifty years, Torrance and his colleagues have been administering the 90-minute test to millions of people worldwide. For nearly thirty years the research showed a predictable trend: creativity quotients kept increasing. In each generation children were becoming more creative than their parents.

But, suddenly, in 1990 that trend ended as creativity scores in the United States started inching downward. After analyzing over 300,000 creativity tests given to children and adults, researchers found that this downward trend has continued for the past twenty years.

In a 2017 follow-up study, data indicate that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”

Experts mention numerous possible causes for the loss of creativity—video games, too much television, the educational system. But the Newsweek article argues that results are not debatable: "The potential consequences are sweeping … . A IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 'leadership competency' of the future … . All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions."

Commenting on the Newsweek article, Christian blogger Jonathon Merritt wrote,

Followers of Jesus feel an additional pinch. One of the attributes of God is creativity, and as image-bearers we have an obligation to cultivate creativity in culture. This is part of our 'saltiness' as Christians. We should have masterful artists, revolutionary thinkers, and brilliant scientists among our ranks. In this way, a creativity crisis becomes an opportunity for [the church] to fill a cultural void with creative, redemptive energy.

Editor’s Note: This illustration was updated in March of 2024

In seminary my Bible professor was Manfred George Gutzke, a Canadian like myself who had an impressively large physique and had been the boxing champion of the Canadian Army in his youth. Everything about him seemed oversized: his huge hairless head, his enormous eyebrows, his low gravelly voice, his sweeping knowledge of the Scriptures.

Not only did he hold us spellbound with his grasp of the Bible; he also fascinated us with stories of his own life. …

Manfred Gutzke was a man of God, as well as a teacher of preachers, but he had not started out religious in any formal sense. For many years he was an agnostic. Yet in the years when he was teaching in a one-room rural school on the prairies of western Canada, he began to be a seeker, wondering whether there might be a God and he could know him.

He was especially impressed by a devout farmer who moved into that small community. This man sold two cows and donated the proceeds to missionary work on the annual missions Sunday. This was cause for amazement at the small prairie church, where most of the farmers came because there was nothing better to do on a Sunday morning. Most of them stood outside and gossiped with their friends until long after the service began. But this new man arrived carrying a Bible, went straight into the church, and bowed his head in prayer.

Here was someone whose faith seemed central, and the young teacher was intrigued.

One afternoon after school, making his way across the fields to his boarding house, [Gutzke] was struck by this thought: If God exists, then he can see me right now!

"I stood in that field," he told us, "and pondered that thought. If God exists, he could see me.

"So," he said, "I took off my hat! That may seem strange, but like most men in those days I wore a brimmed hat, and I always took it off in the presence of women, older people, or other important persons. So I took my hat off to God.

"And then I prayed: 'God, I do not know whether you are there or not. And I don't mean anything bad by that. I just don't know. But I want to know, and you know that too. So please show me if you are real.'

"I felt," he said, "as if something very important had happened."

Then he put his hat back on and made his way home.

He had taken the first step toward his spiritual home that day. For the very first time, Manfred Gutzke paid attention to God—the God who was already paying attention to him. And before much more time had passed, he would come to prove in his own life the affirmation of Jesus, "Seek and you shall find," and the promise in Hebrews 11:6 of a God who "rewards those who earnestly seek him."

An article syndicated in the Agence France-Presse told of a town in Southwest Nigeria that calls itself "The Land of Twins." Why the odd nickname? The majority of families in that region have at least one set of twins, a phenomenon that baffles fertility experts. The only possible explanation scientists have come up with is the vast amount of yams the people consume. Yams contain a natural hormone that stimulates the ovaries to produce twins. However, another possible explanation is found in a short sentence tucked away in the middle of the story.

In pre-colonial times, the people of that region of Nigeria would often kill twins and their mothers. The people believed twins were an evil omen and that the mother must have been with two men to bear them. The article follows this startling piece of historical background with this single sentence: "A Scottish missionary is credited with ending this practice." The rest of the article goes into greater detail about other issues from history and how scientists continue to scratch their heads over the matter. The Scottish missionary is never mentioned again—despite the fact that history shows she may have a little more to do with the matter than a pile of yams.

If you do a little digging, you'll find that the name of the Scottish missionary is Mary Slessor (1848–1915). According to the Christian biography website www.wholesomewords.com, Slessor was a missionary to the Calabar region in Nigeria. She traveled throughout the many villages along the Calabar River, meeting the physical and spiritual needs of the people she encountered. In these communities, twins were indeed cruelly murdered and mothers were driven into the jungles because of supposed immorality. Through proclaiming the gospel, Slessor opposed such practices and saved the lives of countless babies.

Mary could have easily turned around and gone back home after seeing the horrors of some of these rituals, but the Wholesome Words site sums up her life story, saying, "Mary Slessor, seeing beneath the surface, was far more interested in the work of saving babies' lives, relieving sorrow, [and] hunting for opportunities to spread the knowledge of the Prince of Peace throughout the blood-drenched villages and hamlets of the natives"—a region of Nigeria now called "The Land of Twins."

In The Journal of Biblical Counseling, Timothy Keller makes the following observation about salt:

The job of salt is to make something taste good. I don't know about you, but I can't stand corn on the cob without salt on it. When I have eaten a piece of corn on the cob that I really like, I put it down, and what do I say? "That was great salt." No, I say, "That was great corn on the cob." Why? Because the job of the salt is not to make you think how great the salt is, but how great the thing is with which it's involved.

What if you are salt in your small group Bible study? If you're salt, people won't go away saying, "That person really knows the Bible and had all the answers. Showed me up!" No. What happens is when you go away from a small group in which you have been the salt, people don't say how great you were. They say, "What a great group." "What fascinating truth."

This is pretty simple. Salt makes you feel better about life. Christians make you feel better. But religious people always make you feel condemned. They make you feel worse.