“How can committed Christians work alongside, learn from, and collaborate with colleagues who are very different from them in terms of their faith and values?”
Anti-Christ? Or Pre-Christ?
I was listening to an interesting discussion on a podcast this week. Amid the discussion, one of the guests stated that Christians often view nonbelievers as under the influence of the anti-Christ. The guest said that perhaps we, instead, should view non-believers as Pre-Christ. In other words, they are on their way to Christ—they just haven’t fully encountered or embraced Him yet.
I love this perspective! Truly, we don’t know who will be drawn in by Christ and will ultimately become a believer. We just don’t know. It is much healthier for us as Christians to view nonbelievers as pre-Christians who will eventually embrace Christ fully than to see them as under the control of the anti-Christ.
Why is this the better perspective?
Does Your Pastor Have a Biblical Worldview? (Spoiler: Most Don’t!)
Recently, the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University surveyed 1,000 American Christian pastors to understand better the worldviews that drive their thinking and behavior. The survey of these pastors revealed that a large majority do not possess a “biblical worldview.”
What is a biblical worldview?
A Lesson from The Lion and the Mouse
What is the Strength of Your Church?
In the spring of this year, Christianity Today released a small publication, CTPastors.com. Within that publication, is an article entitled, “Little Church, Big Faith,” which summarized the 2020 Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey on the state of the Church in America.
The survey revealed that the median attendance at church on a given Sunday is now half what it was 20 years ago, dropping from an attendance of 137 to 65. Whereas in the year 2000, 45 percent of churches had an average weekly attendance of 99 or fewer people, today 65 percent of churches report that smaller level of attendance.
But the news is not all bad.