Every couple of years most of PCC’s ministry staff and spouses head west for the National Pastors Convention in San Diego. After the winter we’ve had in Chicagoland, San Diego in February sounds really nice. This year I’ll be posting a few reports from the convention over at Out of Ur. I’m also hoping to line up some interviews for Leadership Journal and Out of Ur.

One of those I hope to interview is Greg Boyd, author and pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Saint Paul, MN. To prepare for this potential interview, I’m quickly reading through Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation. Two longish quotes from my reading this morning:

How might our churches be different if we took Paul’s teaching [about love] seriously? What would happen if the ultimate criteria we used to assess how “successful” or “unsuccessful” our churches were was the question, are we loving as Jesus loved? The truth of the matter is that we are only carrying out God’s will and expanding the kingdom of God to the extent that we answer that question affirmatively. No other question, criteria, or agenda can have any meaning for kingdom-of-God devotees except insofar as it helps us respond to that question. (pg 45)

Conservative religious people involved in kingdom-of-the-world thinking often believe that their enemies are the liberals, the gay activists, the ACLU, the pro-choice advocates, the evolutionists, and so on. On the opposite side, liberal religious people often think that their enemies are the fundamentalists, the gay bashers, the Christian Coalition, the antiabortionists, and so on. Demonizing one’s enemies is part of the tit-for-tat game of Babylon, for only by doing so can we justify our animosity, if not violence, toward them… If we were thinking along the lines of the kingdom of God, however, we would realize that none of the people mentioned in the above lists are people whom kingdom-of-God citizens are called to fight against. They are, rather, people whom kingdom-of-God citizens are called to fight for. (pg 48)

I’m not far along enough in the book to recommend it, but it’s certainly intriguing thus far.

Related…

• My friend Vincent Bacote pointed me to this not-so-glowing review of The Myth of a Christian Nation by James K. A. Smith on Christianity Today’s site.
• Greg Boyd was interviewed by Charlie Rose about the book back in 2006.