Breakpoint

The media narratives that have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic are varied. Some, like the lack of supplies for medical personnel and first responders are important. Others, like the stories about churches and their defiant pastors who refuse to comply with physical-distancing and stay-at-home orders, are mostly selective and overblown.

Of course, there are a few churches and pastors behaving badly. A few. A very few. Less than one percent, in fact. To suggest that they are representative of all Christians is both misleading and slanderous.

Also largely ignored in so many of the stories about these churches is the fact that in many towns, counties, and states, the stay-at-home orders are confusing. Some are even illegal.

Understandably, many Christians struggle to know how to take the alarming headlines about pastors being arrested, and many churches and Christian ministries struggle to know how to carry out their mission at this time. Kristen Waggoner, vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, told me that ADF is receiving about 100 calls a day from churches and other ministries about COVID-19 related issues, asking for help in understanding and complying with federal, state, county, and municipal orders. That regulations are being issued at four levels of government is just one of the potential problems. The orders not confusing and inconsistent are, at times, being applied and enforced inconsistently, or in ways discriminatory against the free exercise of religion.

The most important thing to remember, as Kristin Waggoner stated emphatically during the podcast, is that First Amendment rights cannot be suspended permanently. This is why the threat from New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio to permanently close some churches even after the crisis is manifestly absurd.

Two main requirements must be met for any infringement on religious freedom, including during a time of national or local emergency. First, any infringement must advance a compelling state interest and, second, it must be done in the least restrictive way possible.

What constitutes a “compelling state interest” will, of course, vary according to the circumstances. For example, the government could have a compelling interest to limit how people can gather during an emergency or, even, how many people can gather, though this would infringe on religious liberty. That’s what the Kansas Supreme Court ruled over the weekend.

The orders, however, must be clear. A person should be able to understand what is and what is not restricted without having to hire a lawyer. According to Waggoner, many of the COVID-19 restrictions fail this clarity test, especially at the local level.

Unclear restrictions make inconsistent enforcement by government nearly inevitable. This is especially true when local officials have an agenda and see an opportunity to take advantage of a crisis to crack down on groups that they don’t like, including religious ones. For instance, in Charlotte and Greensboro, North Carolina believers were arrested for praying outside abortion clinics, even though they were obeying local distancing orders.

Last week, the mayor of Louisville, KY, inexplicitly attempted to bar a church from holding a drive-in service, a service where no one gets out of their car. A federal judge sided, scathingly so, with the church, writing in his opinion that “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter. That sentence is one that this Court never expected to see outside the pages of a dystopian novel, or perhaps the pages of The Onion.”

I was encouraged when Kristin Waggoner told me that, most of the time, a simple letter written to state and local officials pointing out problems or seeking clarification in their orders, is all it takes. The professionality of Alliance Defending Freedom is one of their best tools, but they are pretty good in court too.

Even in the best of times, guarding our First Amendment freedoms can be an uphill battle. And these are not the best of times. That’s why I am grateful that Kristen Waggoner and ADF are there to help guide us through these confusing times.

My interview with Kristen Waggoner is live on the BreakPoint podcast.

One of the most important effects of embracing a deliberate, self-conscious Christian worldview, and losing the sacred-secular distinction so many Christians have absorbed from the world around us, is seeing the depth, the breadth, and the width of the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every sphere of life. Once we see life this way, our understanding of serving Jesus is radically re-shaped in light of the unassailable, undefeatable, and advancing Kingdom of God.

Once Chuck Colson embraced that vision of the Christian life, he poured it into every single BreakPoint commentary, each and every day, desperate to help Christians think clearly about cultural issues and trends from a Christian worldview.

And, during the last decade of his life, Colson decided that the best way He could advance this vision would be replication. That’s why he invited Christians to study with him through what is now called the Colson Fellows Program. Inviting Christians to take a deep dive into Christian worldview over a ten-month course of study, trained and mentored by top Christian authors and thinkers, he saw class after class of Christians become the kind of culture-shaping leaders that could look at the world around them, effectively analyze, critique and discern what was happening, and become catalysts of cultural influence and change for Jesus Christ.

What makes the Colson Fellows Program so different and so vital is that it’s not just an exercise in learning new things, as important as that is. Commissioned Colson Fellows are, well, commissioned. Because the training includes a teaching project, a three-year planning process, and self-inventory on who God has made them to be, they are able to apply a Christian worldview in real-world, practical ways.

Here’s how the program works: Those who are accepted learn how to articulate and defend biblical truth in the marketplace of ideas through intensive instruction on worldview and cultural analysis. They read both Christian classics and the best contemporary writers, many of whom they interact with on frequent webinars. Colson Center faculty includes folks such as Os Guinness, Joni Eareckson Tada, Dr. Glenn Sunshine, J. Warner Wallace, Jennifer Marshall, and Scott Klusendorf.

And, in what may be the best part, Colson Fellows study together, either in one of 45 Regional Cohorts around the country or, for those with no local cohort available, through one of our Online Cohorts. So we have doctors and business professionals learning alongside of academics and lawyers, who are also learning alongside of pastors and educators. The cross-pollination of applied faith is rich, indeed.

Those who complete the program join a network of more than 1,500 commissioned Colson Fellows, who have studied with us and are living out a deeper faith in a broken world. This network includes people like Colson Fellow Kristin Waggoner, one of the leading religious freedom attorneys in the nation, who represented Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips before the Supreme Court. In fact, my interview with Kristin about religious freedom in this age of coronavirus airs today on the BreakPoint podcast.

Colson Fellows Program Director S. Michael Craven likes to say that as people study with the Colson Fellows, many have this moment of conversion. Serious-minded Christians who have been walking with the Lord for many years discover more clearly, some for the first time, that they are a part a much larger story—one that certainly includes, but goes beyond our personal salvation in Jesus Christ.

Christians often say, “I've invited Jesus into my life,” but the reality is that Jesus invites us into His life. His purpose. His restoring work in the world He created. To this life, His Life, we are invited to join Him in the work of making all things new.

If you are stirred in heart and mind around this kind of faith, this kind of Life, come to ColsonFellows.org to learn more. We respond to all inquiries and are happy to answer any questions you may have. We’re taking applications now for next year’s class of Colson Fellows.

Does the government have the constitutional power to suspend church services? How about socially distanced prayer outside of abortion clinics? What do Christians need to know about their rights during a national crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic?

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Vice-President Kristen Waggoner joins John Stonetreet to answer these questions and more. Waggoner is one of America’s leading attorneys on religious freedom, and you may recall that she successfully represented Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips before the Supreme Court.

Apply for the Colson Fellows Program!  

Alliance Defending Freedom website

When Will It End? Jack Is Back in Court for a Third Time

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris remind us that  the pain and suffering inflicted by the coronavirus--including being separated from our brothers and sisters in Christ during Easter--are not the way things are supposed to be.  But even that realization reminds us how much God has given us in the Church and in His Son, whose passion and resurrection we remember this week.

Also on today's program: China bans even online worship; John Lennox's outstanding new book "Where Is God in a Cronavirus World?" and Queen Elizabeth's remarkable address to the people of the United Kingdom.

“Where Is God in a Cronavirus World” by John Lennox, available with your next gift of any amount to BreakPoint and the Colson Center

“Passover and the Discipline of Remembering,” John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint

“Why We Shouldn’t Get Used to Online Church,” John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, BreakPoint

It doesn’t happen every year, but this year it did. Yesterday, Maundy Thursday fell on the first full day of the Jewish Passover. What makes this an especially poignant convergence is that the meal we remember every Maundy Thursday, which the disciples shared with Jesus on the Thursday of Holy Week, was the Passover Seder.

The roots of the Christian faith are, of course, Jewish. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the Father of Jesus. Of course, followers of Jesus are no longer bound to the Old Testament requirement to observe Passover. In fact, Jesus Himself replaced the command for God’s people to observe Passover with a “new command,” to remember His body broken for us and His blood shed for us.

Still, there’s so much beauty here in the Passover.

As a Jew, Jesus would have celebrated Passover, diligently, every year of his life. All Israelites were to remember and celebrate how God delivered the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. When the Angel of Death, seeing the lamb’s blood on their doorposts, passed over Israel and plagued the Egyptians, four-hundred years of bondage came to an end.

Immediately, even as the original Exodus was unfolding, God instituted its remembrance. On the night before God sent the angel of death, He made a plea to Moses: “Celebrate this feast,” God tells him in Exodus 12. And when your children ask you what you’re doing, tell them what I did for you.

One of our worst faults, as God knows, is that we are very forgetful creatures. Our memories are, at their best, selective and, at their worst, untrustworthy. So much of the Old Testament reads like bad deja vu: God delivers His people, from thirst or hunger or their enemies, and they quickly forget. It’s almost like the Old Testament authors simply copied and pasted the phrase, “The people of Israel grumbled against the Lord who brought them out of Egypt” over and over again.

In fact, immediately after the Exodus, the Israelites proved they need reminding to remember. “Did you save us just to leave us in the desert?” they ask. “We were better off in Egypt.” How quickly, how shamefully, we forget.

The Passover gave flesh to the spiritual discipline of remembering. The Mishnah, one of the oldest Jewish texts about Passover observance, instructs Jews “of every generation to regard themselves as being personally freed from Egypt.” By remembering, observers are brought into the pain of slavery, so that they can experience more fully the shock and the sweetness of freedom.

Passover also points to a Savior who brings that freedom. The lamb shank bone on the Seder plate is a reminder of the lamb without blemish, whose blood the Israelites painted on their doorposts as a sign to the Angel of Death to pass over their houses.

The first time John the Baptist saw Jesus as an adult, he yelled (rather shockingly, actually) “Behold the Lamb of God!” Paul called Jesus “Christ, our Passover Lamb” in First Corinthians. Jesus knew that in breaking the matzah and calling it his body, and in drinking the cup and calling it a new covenant, He was translating to onlookers that He Himself is the true Passover Lamb, the one without blemish whose blood will save those who paint it on the doorposts of their own lives.

We are just as forgetful as the fathers of our faith were in the deserts outside of Egypt, especially in times of crisis like these. That’s why it’s so important that we remember, intentionally, the times God has delivered us, from our spiritual Egypts and from eternal death. Today, Good Friday, is an especially good day to remember that God’s faithfulness isn’t just an emotional salve during our times of distress, but by the blood of Christ our sin is forgiven and our guilt taken away.

This week, on a special BreakPoint Podcast, Shane Morris and I remember and discuss the very best BreakPoint commentaries by Chuck Colson on Good Friday and Easter. It’s at BreakPoint.org or wherever you download your podcasts.

The question that never goes away for Christians is “Why does God allow evil and suffering?” The latest version of this question is “Where is God in a coronavirus world?”

This question in its various forms is asked in different ways by different people. Some ask with a philosopher’s edge, as if calamities like the coronavirus are “defeaters” of Christianity, proving that the idea of a loving God watching out for us is obviously not believable. For others, the question is asked through tears, by those deeply wounded by personal experiences of loss, abandonment, or hurt.

Almost as soon as this question became relevant again—in the face of the coronavirus pandemic—Dr. John Lennox turned around a book with answers. If you know anything about the publishing world, the speed of this is stunning. And, if you know anything about Dr. Lennox, it’s probably not because of his work in group theory as “the building block of abstract algebra.” Lennox is an Oxford mathematician and also a Christian apologist who has debated the top atheists and religious skeptics of our time, including Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

In these debates, he's faced the skeptic’s claims about how the existence of evil and the existence of God are incompatible. His outstanding little book, published in what must be record time, is called “Where is God in a Coronavirus World?” In it, Lennox gives answers to the skeptic’s arguments, but that’s not really what this book is finally about.

Lennox wrote this book in order to “convey some comfort, support and hope,” to people who feel disoriented, concerned, even fearful because of the coronavirus pandemic and all of its consequences and disruption in our lives.

And to this end, Lennox succeeds.

Like C.S. Lewis, whose essay “On Living in an Atomic Age” he quotes, Lennox notes that ours is not the first generation to face some kind of severe threat to our lives and well-being. But, unlike many previous generations, we tend to think of these kinds of threats as things of the past, and of personal safety as our God-given right.

Like Lewis, Dr. Lennox also uses our collective shock when bad things happen to point out problems with atheism. For Richard Dawkins, the kind of suffering caused by pandemics is to be expected since, in his view, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

In the universe according to Dawkins, “some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it.” Thus, as Lennox says, for the committed and thoughtful atheist, “moral outrage is absurd. The so-called ‘problem’ of evil— moral or natural— dissolves into the pitiless indifference of uncaring matter.”

Of course, most people, even committed or thoughtful atheists, cannot live this way, much less say it out loud. Still, it’s impossible to derive comfort or hope from atheism without contradicting the worldview it implies.

In contrast, while moral evil, natural disasters and diseases like COVID-19 do pose a real challenge to the Christian belief that this universe was created and is governed by a good God, within the Christian story itself is an answer to that challenge.

The universe is not the way it’s supposed to be. Humans were not the only part of creation affected by the Fall. “Nature itself was fractured by that same event,” Lennox says. As Romans 8 describes, “creation was subjected [by God] to futility.” The Greek word for “futility,” or “ineffectiveness” means “something . . .  [that] has not achieved the goal for which it was designed.”

But our current state is not, praise God, the end of the story. Through the suffering death and resurrection of Christ, a process has been inaugurated by which not only humans, but the rest of creation also, will be rescued from the effects of the Fall.

As Dr. Lennox says, a Christian “is not a person who has solved the problem of suffering, but one who has come to love and trust the God who has suffered for them.”

 If you are dealing with doubts and questions about God’s goodness because of the coronavirus, or you know someone who is, Dr. Lennox’s book, “Where is God in a Coronavirus World?” will help. This month, I’d love to send you a copy as a thank you for any gift of any amount to BreakPoint and the Colson Center.

Next Wednesday, Dr. Lennox will be my guest on the BreakPoint Podcast.  You won’t want to miss it.

In his novel “Hard Times,” Charles Dickens introduces us to Mr. Gradgrind, an “eminently practical” man who runs a school in northern England. In this book, as in so many of his novels, Dickens exposed the darker side of the industrial revolution.

Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarian view of education valued “Facts…nothing but Facts,” often at the expense of developing imagination or learning how to think, instead of merely what to think. His industrial model of education prioritized a one-size-fits-all curriculum intended to produce workers, with highly-structured school days marked by ringing bells reminiscent of an assembly line. You might say that Mr. Gradgrind’s educational philosophy fails to teach children how to evaluate or intentionally develop a worldview.

Now that school has been moved home for everyone, at least for the remainder of this school year, we’ve been given an unexpected gift. We now have the opportunity to re-think and reclaim what education is really for, or in other words, what it means to be an educated human being.

In no way am I suggesting that every family in the U.S. should now homeschool. In fact, many are learning a deeper appreciation of their schools and teachers. (Or, as one of my favorite COVID-19 memes put it, a bunch of parents are learning it really wasn’t their kids’ teacher’s fault after all). Still, at the same time, the COVID-19 crisis is reminding us of an uncomfortable but essential truth: Parents are the primary stewards of their children’s education, not the state.

“Primary steward,” of course, is not the same thing as “sole teacher.” I know countless parents who successfully pursued just about every type of school and education route, and I’ve met countless remarkable students who are the product of each one. Yet, so many parents fail to recognize that it isn’t the job of a school to educate their kids as whole people—mind, body, heart, and soul. It especially isn’t the school’s job to shape their child’s worldview. In fact, schools simply can’t do that job. It belongs to mom and dad.

Now that schools have closed, many parents feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped to continue the school year at home. Well-meaning schools have responded by implementing distance-learning programs, some that even attempt to mimic an average school day, right down to breaks from the computer in order to have “recess.”

On the other hand, many bloggers and curriculum companies are sharing their abundance of resources for the thousands who have unexpectedly joined their homeschool ranks. It’s easy to see why some parents, flooded with so many resources and ideas, are ready to throw up their hands and give their kids over to Netflix for the next few months.

Here’s the good news: There’s a middle way between mimicking a rigid school structure at home and doing no school at all. After all, the goal is learning, and learning is something that kids do naturally. And, this cultural moment is rife with opportunities for families to reflect on what truly matters in life.

If you find yourself lost about where to even start to educate your kids at home, here’s three things you can try:

First, read aloud as a family as much as possible. Not only will this develop literacy skills, it’s a meaningful opportunity to connect with your children on a physical and emotional level during a stressful time, having conversations about things that really matter. Thankfully, there are many great book lists that can help parents choose age-appropriate stories that also build moral character, not to mention library apps that provide access to thousands of audiobooks and e-books for free. We’ll link you to some of our favorites at breakpoint.org.

Second, engage in worldview conversations. Current events have turned our world upside down. Ask your kids what they are thinking about all of this. The coronavirus pandemic will be a marker in their life they won’t forget, and an incredibly opportunity for so many real-life lessons. My recent book, “A Student’s Guide to Culture,” as well as our upcoming Truth.Love.Together. virtual event, can help fuel your worldview discussions around the dinner table. I hear from many families who use these daily BreakPoint commentaries as fodder for their meal-time conversations.

Finally, create space for self-directed learning. Invite each child to pursue a special project during this extra-ordinary time. A budding writer can start a diary about what life during the 2020 Coronavirus Quarantine was like. A young entrepreneur might work on a website to support a charitable cause. Sometimes the best schooling looks nothing at all like school.

This unusual time will be one of the most profound learning experiences every single one of us will have. So, have confidence in your ability to lead and guide your children through it. You can do this.

ohn Stonestreet and Shane Morris share and discuss some of their favorite BreakPoint commentaries by Chuck Colson on Good Friday and the resurrection of Jesus:

“The Truth about Everything”

“Watergate and the Resurrection”

“Whither Christianity?”

“Resurrection Hope”

From all of us at BreakPoint and the Colson Center, may God bless you and your loved ones as we prepare to say with joy this coming Sunday, “Christ is risen!”

Resources:

Chuck Colson on Watergate and the resurrection; meme on John Stonestreet’s Facebook page

“The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus: An Interview with Dr. Gary Habermas” the BreakPoint Podcast

“Telling the World It’s Own True Story,” by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Education Resource Center

“Death on a Friday Afternoon” by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, available at the Colson Center Online Book Store

Last week, a pastor at a megachurch in Tampa, Florida was arrested for holding services in defiance of a ban on public gatherings. The very idea of the government arresting s pastor for holding worship services in America raised plenty of red flags.

However, (and I say this as someone who spends a lot of time raising alarm about religious freedom issues—including about the recent despicable threat by New York City Mayor DeBlasio to permanently close down churches), in the face of a global pandemic hitting the United States particularly hard right now, temporarily suspending church services is not only justifiable, it’s wise. And, it is a very real and tangible way to love our neighbors.

There’s historical precedent for what the government is asking and for what churches are doing. During the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, for example, state governments closed churches, schools, theaters, and other public gatherings to slow the spread of the disease. By all indications, it helped. Once the pandemic had passed, churches reopened their doors.

Back in the 1600s, Puritan theologian Richard Baxter wrote in his Church Directory, “If the magistrate for a greater good (as the common safety,) forbid church-assemblies in time of pestilence...it is a duty to obey him.”

Baxter based his case on no less than the words of Jesus Himself. Just as the Lord insisted in Matthew 12 that healing on the Sabbath is lawful, Baxter argued, preventing the spread of serious sickness to our most vulnerable on the Sabbath is also lawful. After all, as Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Of course, none of this makes being stuck at home on Sundays any easier, especially during Holy Week. Nor should it. Being unable to gather with God’s people to worship, to read and hear the Word together, and to partake of the sacraments is a real and profound loss.

My church, like so many others (probably yours) has moved services online, taking advantage of technologies that weren’t available until quite recently in church history. That we can still meet online isn’t enough, but it is still a gift for which we can be thankful. Pastors and churches everywhere are doing their best to help their flocks through this crisis, and God bless them for it. (Plus, we’re going to have some terrific bloopers to laugh at together when this is all said and done).

Still, it’s not the same. The worship Scripture commands in places like Hebrews 10, where we are told to not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, cannot be fully experienced online. I’m feeling this loss keenly as are so many other believers I talk with: This just hurts.

This pain we feel should also encourage us, however. Our thankfulness for these very good things such as “online services,” home worship, and listening to sermons on podcasts should contain more than a hint of disappointment. They simply are not adequate replacements for what the life of the church should be, not to mention there simply are no substitutes for the sacraments of baptism and communion.

In fact, if we’re not feeling a serious loss right now, we should be worried. If remote services on a laptop feel normal, then church has become nothing more to than a spectator activity, and we have become, well, spectators to worship rather than worshippers.

Among the most consistent and foundational teachings of Scripture and church history is that humans are embodied beings. Or, to put it simply, our bodies are not incidental parts of our humanity, or convenient carriers of our real spiritual selves. To be human is to be physical and spiritual. Both aspects matter. That’s how God made us.

Jesus, who is God in flesh, saved us into a larger corporate body which He will make fully into His Bride. We can no more permanently carry on our Christian relationships with God and church over an Internet connection, than spouses could carry on a marriage that way.

This is the difference between “doing church” and being the Church. While we are unable to meet for worship, the hunger for something more is a sign of spiritual life. We should encourage that hunger, and certainly look forward to coming together, again.

To do so, especially in the midst of the current threats of death and disease, is to ultimately be a sign to the world of that day when Christ will fully bridge all distance between Himself and His Bride, when He heals all sickness, finally restores all things, and makes His dwelling with His people.

Though the world has changed dramatically in the last few weeks, the call for Christians to be salt and light hasn’t. That’s one of the difficult things about our faith. The Biblical instruction is clear enough: Here’s what God is doing in the world, our call is to follow Him and, in Christ, bear witness to Jesus by sharing our faith and doing good in His name. But those Biblical instructions were given in a cultural context much different than our own.

In other words, translating between God’s word and God’s world isn’t easy. If we’d woken up this morning and seen an army of Philistines outside, well, good news, there’s like 40 chapters in the Old Testament about what to do in case of Philistines. Instead, we woke up to another day of spiking infection and death numbers, many of us with friends and family members who are vulnerable or sick, and another day on lockdown. I’ve looked through the whole concordance. “Coronavirus” isn’t in there… not even in the King James version.

And, of course, all of this seems overwhelming. What can I do? How can I help?

I want to suggest four questions that every one of us can and should answer, so that we can, as the sons of Issachar did, “understand the times” and “know what to do.” But first, let me say something about the where before we get to the what.

God determined that you and I should be in this time and this place. Let’s not ask what we can’t do, but what we can do. Where has God placed you? In what family? What community? What church? Near which business and in touch with which charity?

This is the Great Commission, in fact. In Matthew 28, Jesus issues this command to his first followers… “make disciples.” Believe it or not, at least in the original language, the word “Go” in verse 17 is not an imperative. It could, and maybe should, be translated “as you go” or “wherever you go.”

T.M. Moore, a long-time friend and adviser to Chuck Colson, called this “your personal mission field,” and once that is identified, these four questions can help us develop an action plan.

First, what’s good that we can celebrate and promote during this crisis?

As my friend Ed Stetzer shared on a recent Colson Center webinar, there are plenty of things to celebrate, promote, and even emulate. Obviously, the charitable works around us are worth our celebration and support. Soup kitchens, and homeless shelters, and others doing the hard work of victim care.

But there’s also birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones. These things are still a good part of our humanity together, and there are still ways to celebrate with others. On the inaugural SGN (or Some Good News) broadcast, former star of The Office, John Krasinski showed a video of Alabama man John Kline, visiting his bride of decades through the window of her retirement home that he’s no longer allowed to visit. Though she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, she remembered the words of “Amazing Grace,” and they sang it together through the window.

With all the ridiculous and accusatory stuff floating around social media, maybe share this. Maybe celebrate with this couple the beauty of their life-long married love. And, of course, we can celebrate the good being done by doctors, nurses, first responders, and other medical professionals on the frontlines of this epidemic.

Here’s the second question: “What is missing that we can contribute?” At times like these, it might be easier to ask, “What’s not missing that we can’t contribute?”

In New York City, where the medical system is under severe stress, Samaritan’s Purse answered this question by setting up a field hospital in Central Park. Other Christian groups and churches are operating clinics and testing people for infection. One BreakPoint listener wrote in to tell us that she’s sewing surgical masks. I’ve read of groups providing meals to frontline medical personnel or home-bound folks, and MIT engineers posted blueprints for building cheap ventilators, for free online.

Especially now, Christians have something people desperately need and many are missing: Hope. Now of all times, we must be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks about the hope that is in us. A culture whose worship songs are “Imagine” by John Lennon and “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen is a culture missing a vertical reference point. We’ve got that, too.

Third question: What evil can we confront or stop? The obvious answer for healthcare workers is the coronavirus itself, though we all have a role to play in stopping or at least slowing the spread of the virus. Physical distancing and other precautionary measures is a way of putting love of neighbor ahead of our own desires.

On a more immediate level, we can stop the cynicism and anger. We can stop from forwarding an unhelpful message or accusation on social media. We can stop pornography from coming into our homes while so many more people are online.

Final question: What is broken that we can restore?  Among the brokenness exposed in our culture by this virus is loneliness and social isolation. It’s difficult to imagine a better and easier example of Christians running towards the plague than reaching out to people like this. Relational brokenness, in our families and beyond, is an epidemic far more reaching than COVID -19. As this pandemic continues, we’ll see endless opportunities to help restore broken lives and broken livelihoods.

Restoration is the core topic of our next Colson Center short course, which starts tomorrow night, “How the Church Can Respond to Culture’s Brokenness.” Come to BreakPoint.org to see our excellent lineup of speakers and to register.

I know some of these ideas may seem too simple to be effective. Too easy.  But the problem is we often dismiss the good we can do, the missing we can contribute, the evil we can fight, and the brokenness we can restore because of what we can’t do. Let’s not do that.