Dear Pastors

I’ve been seeing a lot of you on social media lately. There are days I suspect I see you more than your congregation does. I just wanted to remind you that your local congregation, which exists in a physical location with real needs, actually needs you more than social media does.

Some of you seem trying to go viral with your political posts. Some of you seem to be trying really hard to convince people Jesus would endorse one of two sinners as an acceptable lesser evil, which means you’re setting up the King of Creation to endorse an evil. Remember, neither Jesus nor the church needs a particular person to win this election, even as I suspect the person many of you and me would prefer is going to win.

Two people yelled “Jesus is Lord” and “Christ is King” at a Kamala Harris rally the other day. The tribal right declared her response that they were at the wrong rally to be proof she is hostile to the church.

I have not found any of you trying to go viral online pointing out that the two protestors were not trying to proclaim Jesus but to use His name as a weapon of disruption and division at a political rally. They were not there for God’s glory, but for their own agenda’s attention, and they got it.

We’ve got people yelling “Jesus” to disrupt their political opponents’ rallies. We’ve got antisemites yelling “Christ is King” to target Jews. And we’ve got pastors trying to tell us what Jesus would do in this election when I’m pretty sure He would not vote for either Harris or Trump because He has not returned to walk the earth in physical form and is still preparing a place for us that a lot of Christians forget about while thinking this is their home and filled with the angst of a future they’ve deluded themselves into thinking they can control. We don’t need a hypothetical Jesus. We have the real one who was far less interested in the things of Caesar than the things of eternity.

Pastors, remember the words of John Chrysostom about pastors seeking the crowd’s approval. “[If] … he is successful as a preacher, and is overcome by the thought of applause, harm is equally done in turn, both to himself and the multitude, because in his desire for praise he is careful to speak rather with a view to please than to profit.”

There are a lot of Christians who are planting their flags for politicians right now, not for Christ. I suspect your efforts to enter the conversation because that is where the crowd’s mind is will do less to advance the Kingdom than trying to get the crowd to refocus on Christ. Too many people are looking for political saviors to spiritual problems right now. Your entering the conversation there just keeps them looking at the politicians rather than Glory.

If I might encourage you, remember that the world won’t end after the election, but many in your congregation will despair if their side loses. But God tells us to love Him and love our neighbors. Please encourage your congregations to not weaponize Jesus against political opponents or enemies and that God commands we pray for our leaders, pray for our enemies, and love our neighbors, some of whom might be our political enemies.

People are out yelling “Christ is King” to divide. Pastor, you know Jesus will come to separate the goats from the sheep, and many who yell “Lord, Lord” will be cast away. Some out there have lost the plot and decided that turning the other cheek is weakness and the meek are patsies, not inheritors of the earth.

Please lead people to the real Jesus, not a political idol. Please lead people to the cross, not the ballot box. It’s perfectly fine for Americans to show up and vote. I plan to cast my ballot. But there is no redemption there for any of us. A ballot is a list of the names of sinners who are arrogant enough to think they are needed and necessary enough for our government but not our God. Too many people are fixing their hope in these sinners to turn things around, and I pray you remind them that only Jesus can fix what ails us. Weaponising him in partisan politics takes the Jesus who is Lord and replaces him with an idol.

If your theology of stewardship cannot recognize that sometimes leaving a field fallow yields a better, more abundant crop later, you might need to rethink some things.

This infernal and seemingly never-ending election really does end in two weeks. Remind yourselves that only the Kingdom does not end, and it needs to be our focus as Christians. This election should show us that there is a mission field in our own backyards—people with anxiety craving a future of their design instead of savoring the present of God’s design.

“In a word, the future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as creative evolution, scientific humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future….

“[W]e want a man hag-ridden by the future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.” C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letter #15

We’ll have another presidential election in four years. But we have God right now, and He wants us to love Him and our neighbors more than anything else. Here, two weeks before the election, it is really important to remember that the Kingdom matters most.