[American Thinker] The skinny jeans. The nonfunctional glasses. The spray tans. The tight muscle shirts. The obscene shopping bill at Nordstrom. And the social justice sermons more fitting for the faculty lounge at Wellesley than for a Bible-believing church. Behold, the Woke Pastor, and he’s gunning for your White Privilege and ready to tackle America’s systemic racism, one vegan protein shake at a time.
There are myriad examples of the Woke Pastor today, with ministers falling over themselves publicly to prove their progressive bona fides in the wake of George Floyd’s awful death. Let’s focus on two in particular. Both lead megachurches on different ends of the country. Both are considered dynamic preachers with A-list followers. Both are viewed as models by media elites on how to render Christianity "cool" and "relevant" to the unchurched. And both exemplify the disturbing trend among young Christian leaders to align with culture, rather than speak truth prophetically to it.
Judah Smith is the senior pastor at the oddly-named "Churchome," which is based in Seattle and Los Angeles, and where it is "not uncommon to find the front row reserved for celebrities," as one publication put it. If you thought that the phrase "All Lives Matter" was both innocuous and conveyed a fundamental axiom that, well, all lives do matter because we are all made in the image of God, and therefore we should condemn racism wherever and through whomever it surfaces, Judah Smith has a message for you: Stop It.
"It is very normal for Caucasian Christians" in this country "to insist that All Lives Matter," for Caucasian Christians "to insist" that we should "also pray for business owners and police officers." But, implores Smith, "we don’t need to say that anymore" because "All Lives Do Not Matter until Black Lives Matter." The circular reasoning here aside, why is a lead pastor, who has at least 10,000 people pack his pews each Sunday and who has even more devotees online, instructing his congregation not to pray for law enforcement and entrepreneurs in the midst of anarchy? What about the black police officers who have been murdered and the black businesses destroyed by those killers and vandals marauding under the Black Lives Matter banner? Do their lives and their livelihoods not matter because of what one rogue cop did in Minneapolis?
Judah Smith didn’t specify. You’ll have to take his word for it.
Woke Sermons calls for Woke Faith. |