Here’s the painful news. It’s hard, distressing, but it’s true, and you probably know it already. Evangelical Christians are not widely thought to be full of grace.
The secular media regularly describes us in terms which we hardly recognise but which, to them, are self-evident. They don’t describe us as filled with love for others. They call us hypocrites, shrill, bigoted, judgmental, mean-spirited and – worst of all – Pharisaical. Even some fellow Christians have jumped on the bandwagon, and have been known to describe us as the Taliban, people who don’t know the meaning of God’s kindly welcome.
This is not the place to explore why this has happened, but the frequency of the perception gives us a unique hurdle to our evangelism. We, of all people, are thought to be grace-less and hard, where the people who have gone soft or even abandoned the Reformation doctrine of ‘grace alone’ are thought to be loving, kind and accepting. So what do we do about it?
