Defending the Faith – The Great Awakening by Jim Wallis
Interestingly, my pastor recently asked the question in our small group, “Today, who’s defending the faith?” The first name that came to my mind was Jim Wallis, but I knew my pastor and no one in the room other than my wife were familiar with Jim so I blurted out Billy Graham.
I never mentioned Jim Wallis during our small group discussion; however, he is an unwavering biblically-based and progressive evangelical that is defending our faith. I first discovered Jim Wallis and his commentary during the ’04 Presidential election cycle as I stumbled upon the Sojourners website, and shortly after, I bought Jim’s book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.
I read some parts from Jim’s upcoming book The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. Dr. Richard Land of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission summed up Jim’s efforts nicely: “Despite our significant public policy differences, I commend Jim Wallis for advocating religious belief as an invaluable resource in addressing the urgent moral and social crises of our time.”
The book, The Great Awakening, walks the reader through past spiritual revivals and explains how revival creates both inward spiritual change and outward public change for justice and compassion. The book recalls leaders of previous revivals such as John Newton. John Newton wrote the words we all know, “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” Well, Newton was a slave trader or a wretch in his own words, and his life was transformed by Jesus Christ. John Newton’s spiritual conversion eventually helped to end slavery in England. The great awakening for John Newton was personal but helped to produce national social and political change.
So I titled this post “Defending the Faith.” The Great Awakening contains a chapter called, "How to Change the World, and Why". Included in this chapter is a very thought provoking sentence which reads, “Faithfulness comes before effectiveness.” In other words, 'what would Jesus do?' does matter. Jim Wallis often quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., and he paraphrases King to support his statement, “those being faithful to their convictions are more crucial to a society than those who conform to the culture in order to be more ‘effective’”. Our faith matters, and it is the faith of a mustard seed that moves mountains. Guess what? We have some big mountains to move.
You can read more about the book, The Great Awakening, at www.sojo.net/greatawakening.
Jan.17.2008.
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