Editorial: When Christians Behave Rightly
The Holy Spirit’s power in a quiet faithfulness
In Joshua Coutts’s article, “Good news in a secular age,” he points out how Christians behaving badly is an obstacle, even for Christians themselves, to believe in the good news of the gospel. This is not a new problem.
In the Gospels, we see Jesus calling out the Pharisees for their hypocrisy, going so far as to call them “child[ren] of hell” (Matthew 23:15). John, similarly, says, “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness” (1 John 2:9). In other words, “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (James 2:17).
C. S. Lewis pointed out the problem this way: “If Christianity is true why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians?” He addresses this question in depth in chapter 10, part IV, of his book Mere Christianity. I can’t do justice to his full argument here; I highly recommend you read it for yourself. (As the original text is now in the public domain in Canada, you can find a full pdf online at www.fadedpage.com.) In the end he concludes,
“Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.”
In our current online world, it’s not hard to find examples of Christians whose lives show little evidence of the name they claim. And, perhaps in part due to our tendency to a negativity bias, those examples can speak louder than the examples we find of the opposite. In my real life, I daily see examples of my Christian neighbours quietly living out their faith in everyday ways.
Because so often “good news” isn’t “news” it can tough to find stories in the mainstream media of Christians behaving in Christ-honouring ways. Are there other ways to elevate some of these stories? I’d like to mention two I came across recently.
On her August 22, 2023, post on Instagram, Sarah Bessey mentions how, as a child, her teenaged babysitter bought the album “Bullfrogs and Butterflies” as gift for her and her sister. “It was her quiet way to share the Gospel with our family,” Bessey says. And as her mother listened, she experienced the Holy Spirit’s call. “That album was the start of so much for our family,” says Bessey. “We began to follow Jesus together.”
Another story of conversion following quiet faithfulness is that of David Suchet. Suchet, who played Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Poirot and the voice of Aslan in Focus on the Family’s audio production of the Narnia Chronicles, became a Christian in 1986 after reading Romans 8 in a hotel room. Presumably, the Bible (or New Testament) he read from was placed there by the Gideons, an organization of faithful donors who fund efforts to place Bibles and New Testaments in strategic locations, such as hotels and prisons.
While we need to reflect on and learn from instances of Christians behaving badly (the EMC Ministerial Misconduct Policy is one way we are doing that), we also need to amplify the stories of Christians behaving rightly, pointing to the power of the Holy Spirit to transform human hearts and minds into the likeness of Christ, to the glory of God!
