Why aren't we (conservative mennonite culture) having more impact in American culture? Good question.

After reading a thought-provoking blog post by firefliesanddandeliondust, I would like to weigh in with several thoughts.

I. Spiritual apathy causes lack of spiritual impact.

It's important to remember Christ's number one commandment. Before you do anything else: Love God. Ours is a resultant-based life. The natural result of loving God is keeping His commandments. And guess what one of His commandments is? Of course: Love others! (I wonder if I can memorize this one?) Pretty simple, but maybe not pretty easy. So if you have trouble loving others check your love for God.

If you're like me, you do this once, and you're like, "I've got this one taken care of. It's fixed." And then you go on your merry way and forget about it. The problem with love is that it can cool off. This then translates into an attitude of apathy towards God. Oh, we may claim to love God, but our lives say otherwise.

This was obvious in the lives of early church Christians, a fervent love for others was displayed as a result of their fervent love for God (think: Stephen).

Any love not based on a love for God is fake. This is a strong statement; is it true? I think it is, but I'm open to be corrected. I would maintain that any show of love that is not rooted in a love for God is in the end done for selfish purposes and is therefore not true love. Read I Cor. 13. One may perform all sorts of sacrificial deeds that look loving, but if they're not done out of love, they are futile.

II. Salvation is the means not the end.

The main theme of the Bible is not man's salvation. The main theme of the Bible is God's glory revealed. It's pretty easy to get caught into a "me-centered theology" because I am very important to myself. (After all, if I didn't exist, I wouldn't be here to write this post. Ha ha ha!) It's not about primarily about me, it's about God. Now fortunately for us, it brought God glory to invite us into His kingdom (think: the Gospel). But alas, we cannot enter due to our sinful condition. However, God in His mercy brought salvation for us through Jesus Christ.

It's not about "fire escape salvation", either. One revivalist from the past (Spurgeon, I think) said he questioned anyone's salvation if they had only become saved to escape hell. Ouch.

As one who was motivated to make a commitment to Christ based on a fear of hell, I now wonder about the sincerity of my commitment. To me the Christian life was reduced to a couple of "thou shalts" (daily: read your Bible and pray) and a bunch of "thou shalt nots". Ugh. How tiresome. What a drag. Originally what kept me from making a commitment was the fear of losing my indepenance. Self. Yet I realized it was in MY best interest in the long run to "accept Christ". Still selfish.

God meets us where we are, though, and so maybe He grows us out of this selfish thinking on salvation. Then turns it into what it should be: a denial of ourselves and a following of Him instead. Salvation is simply the way we enter God's kingdom.

III. Who says we're doing nothing?

Based on tangible results, it would seem that we have become irrelevant to our culture around us. However, not all results are immediately evident to us. There are those among us that are active in ministries of various capacities, but we just may not hear much about it. I think this is true in the church that I attend. Not everybody knows everything I'm involved in, and I don't know everything they're involved in (for better or for worse). Nevertheless, we are still working together to build the kingdom in our different capacities. Could we do better? Um, I think so.
I would also challenge the assumption that is made at times in our Christian culture that there are both secular and holy compartments of life. Or secular activities and holy activities. Really? Then to be truly holy, we should only do holy activities. If what we mean holy activities are only those things that pertain to ministering to others and to God, then I would disagree. What makes an action holy is not so much what it is but more why it's done. Any right action done for the glory of God is holy.

Therefore, it could be holy to dig ditches. In fact, it's possible, depending on the situation, that it could be more holy to dig ditches than to *gasp* preach the gospel.

So maybe our problem is we don't do things to bring maximum glory to God, and that's where we fail.

Please feel free to express any amounts of disagreement you may have. Thank you. (Is this on? *Squeal*)