How should pastors respond when congregants ask them to speak on particular political issues? We know that we want to apply the gospel and the whole Bible to all aspects of our world. But how does that work when the pastor is asked to speak about very specific, complex and polarizing issues – like war in the Middle East, IVF fertility procedures, or how to think about an election? It can feel like an impossible task, and no matter how you handle it, some people will be upset.
Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge up front that God does not raise up pastors to gratify the consumption preferences of the congregation. The sermon is not an entertainment product whose purpose is to cater to the audience. Paul firmly admonishes the faithful to respect and esteem their pastors (I Thessalonians 5:12-13), and both the Old and New Testaments frequently discountenance “grumbling” among the people of God (consider for example the sobering statements of Numbers 14:27 and I Corinthians 10:10). So congregants ought to be ready to have their assumptions challenged from the pulpit, or to be told that their pet issue may not be a high enough priority to be explicitly addressed as often as they’d like—and also to give the pastor some leeway if things are sometimes not phrased in exactly the way they might have preferred.
That being said, pastors are called to do the difficult job of helping people understand God’s word as it applies to every aspect of life (consider Acts 20:27 and James 3:1). How can pastors do that job well without turning themselves into culture-war weathervanes, blown about by every wind of political and ideological doctrine (c.f. Ephesians 4:14)?
Personal Humility
Sermons should help people apply the Bible to every area of life, but that doesn’t mean pastors are called to become subject-matter experts in every specialized field. Pastors are human beings, and therefore have a limited capacity to acquire knowledge. Only God’s knowledge is infinite.
Making matters even more challenging, we live in a time when systems of specialized knowledge are being disrupted, both by new technologies and by new concerns about their validity.This is not the pastor’s fault, nor is it something the pastor can do much about. A pastor in 1962 who wanted to know more about the Cuban Missile Crisis in order to have something to say about it in a sermon knew where to go to get that information. But a pastor in 2024 who wants to know more about the war in Gaza is confronted with a cacophony of sources, offering sharply divergent narratives, each of which claims to be valid and reliable. This has occurred partly because new communication technologies have made it easier for diverse opinions to be heard (a development that has had both good and bad effects) and partly because legacy institutions of social authority are no longer granted the same deference as they once were (also a development that has had both good and bad effects).
The good news here is that pastors can use this as an opportunity to demonstrate personal humility and encourage their congregants to do the same—that is, in fact, a core part of what it means to help people apply the Bible to every aspect of life. In cases where specialized knowledge is relevant, pastors ought not to attempt to go beyond what it is possible for them to genuinely understand. In respecting these limits, they can encourage the same behavior in congregants, both by modeling it and by explicitly calling for it. In doing so, they are helping congregants remember that they are not God and they must respect their own limited role in God’s order.
Social Humility
I was once a member of a church where there was longstanding tension over how often, and how explicitly, social issues like abortion and marriage should be preached on. A number of elders and other influential congregants were concerned that these issues were insufficiently addressed. But the pastor and some of the other elders were concerned about allowing authentic discipleship to take a backseat to politics and ideology. I found myself thinking both sides had a point:my own preference would have been to hear about these issues more frequently than we were hearing about them, but probably not as frequently as I think the critics would have wanted.
In 2015, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declared it unconstitutional for government to recognize only heterosexual marriage. The tension at my church boiled over, and there was a direct confrontation about it. To placate demands from the critics, the pastor agreed to preach a sermon on the definition of marriage.
They should have been more careful what they wished for.
The sermon began with a clear and cogent summary, including scripture passages, of the Bible’s teaching that marriage is designed for one man and one woman. Then the pastor said: “Now, let’s talk about what it means to love your neighbor when your neighbor is wrong.” What followed was a blistering, prophetic sermon on the evil of refusing to love our non-Christian neighbors, and caring more about political power than about a Christlike witness to the world.
When pastors keep this lesson front-and-center, the difficulty of preaching on divisive issues of social ethics is greatly reduced. The goal of Christian social ethics is not to gain power and impose our ways on our neighbors by force. It is to offer the world the holy love of Christ in the form of a better social ethic. We want to have a Christian approach to war in the Middle East or IVF procedures not so we can force that way on others, but so we can offer others an ethic that embodies God’s love and holiness—which it does precisely because it is powered by the Holy Spirit rather than by political ambition.
Witness is not for ethics, ethics is for witness, and witness is for worship and discipleship.
Ecclesial Humility
But this brings us back to where we started. For the church to embody the personal and social humility described above, it must contain people who value this humility more than they value the gratification of their consumption preferences. Alongside personal humility and social humility we need ecclesial humility: a willingness to recognize that the body of Christ must reflect the kingdom of Christ.
The real goal of the sermon, and of the life of the congregation both inside and outside the church building, can never be the triumph of a partisan side, or an ideological cause, or even of justice and mercy. The real goal is the triumph of Christ, and in him, the fulfillment of all our hopes for justice and mercy. This is the only real solution to polarization. If we are in Christ together, it will still matter what we think about political issues and whom we vote for, but Christ will matter more/Our bond with other Christians and our witness to a watching world will matter more as well.
