How would you describe your ministry passion today?
My passion is to reconcile the vertical and horizontal, and I will give you the historical reason and the imperative, the motivation.
Growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s, I saw the evangelical church divided between those who followed Billy Graham (the vertical) and those who followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (the horizontal). You could see that division represented in Sunday morning church attendance—we had African-American churches, we had white churches, and this Latino emergence in the 1960s and ‘70s. I saw that division and I wondered, Why does it have to be either/or? Billy Graham’s message of salvation in Christ alone or the African-American community’s pursuit of justice in the name of Jesus—and they needed to pursue justice, there were so many inequalities. But something grabbed ahold of me and said, “Remember when you were 14 years old? The words written in your Bible: Billy Graham and Dr. King.”
So what drives me? My mission in life is to reconcile the vertical and the horizontal. I believe the cross is both righteousness and justice, sanctification and service, covenant and community, orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It is both John 3:16 and Matthew 25, conviction and compassion, truth and love. It is Billy Graham’s message and Dr. King’s march.
My mission in life is to speak to a church, speak to a generation. To try to frame the optics of a movement that stands centered not in the extremes but in the center of the cross, where righteousness meets justice, where we reconcile the optics of redemption with the metrics of reconciliation. That, I believe, is the strongest part of the cross, the nexus, the point of convergence. And that’s my mission. I call that the Lamb’s agenda.
Why “the Lamb’s agenda”?
Because for too long American Christianity—particularly American evangelicalism—has stood more by political ideology than by prophetic activism. This marriage of politics with the church worries me. The Christian community should be independent from political manipulation.
We can’t marry the agenda of the donkey or the elephant. The Christian church must be exclusively married to the agenda of the Lamb.
For the past three decades it’s been commonly known and understood through surveys and exit polling that the majority of white evangelicals are firmly committed to the elephant. In the African-American born-again Christian community—they know the Bible, they preach the Word—90 percent are married to the donkey. I believe the Christian community should be politically independent so they can be more effective prophetically, more effective in messaging and mobilization strategies.
We should be like Daniel and Esther, able to speak truth to power without acquiescing, without sacrificing truth and without allowing ourselves to be manipulated by political forces.
Besides, the moment a church is identified with a political party you are alienating ethnic groups and generations that would otherwise be attracted to that church were it not for its political inclination or leaning.
Now I’m not calling for Christians not to vote. I’m not calling for Christians not to be engaged. Quite the contrary. They should be engaged, but as an act of prophetic witness and prophetic activism rather than political advocacy. They need to be independent, and that’s why I call it the Lamb’s agenda. It’s the agenda that brings people together and speaks truth with love, where we understand we can’t sacrifice truth on the altar of political expediency. We don’t measure our Christian faith by rhetorical eloquence, but by the constant of loving actions.
So my mission in reconciling the vertical and horizontal is to somehow redeem the narrative of American evangelicalism. I don’t want American evangelicalism to be known as angry individuals who oppose everything. I want it to be known by what we propose: a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. A loving, compassionate, transformative church that does not sacrifice truth. But it’s truth with love—conviction and compassion—where we change the world for the glory of Christ.
