Musins on the Show Me State

One of the interesting events on the recent Presidential election is that for the first time in a while, if ever, Missouri has NOT voted for the winning candidate. As I was watching the returns last week and watching as the vote in Missouri got closer and closer, I wondered if they were once again going to pull it off and back the winner. I started to ponder whether it could be said that as Missouri goes, so goes the nation, or was it more that as the nation went, so went Missouri. Certainly, with almost every other state all ready called by the major networks, it seemed more like the second one, that Missouri was simply following the lead of the majority in moving towards Obama. While Missouri was given a lot of media and political attention in the weeks leading up to the election it was not seen to be as critical as Ohio, Florida, or Pennsylvania in determining the winner. Still Missouri has been a reliable bellwether for years of which way the winds were blowing, at least until now.

Thinking about Missouri and it status as either the leader or follower made me wonder where we in the church fall in all of this. While I don't think the church should try and determine the next president, I think maybe we should wonder whether we fall into the role of following culture or do we lead it. Do we in the church simply get caught holding our finger to the wind and trying to gauge where things are going, or do we use our potentially prophetic voice to call for change to lead people in a new direction.

There are times that we need to simply follow the flow of culture, because some of what the church has to do is be ready to provide support to our communities and to speak relevantly about things that matter to people in the community. At the same time I think there are times we need to also challenge the ways things are going, to challenge what is happening. I am reminded of the saying of Dom Helder Camara, "if I give food to the poor they call me a saint, if I ask why the poor have no food they call me a communist." I believe the church is called to be both saint and communist. We are called to simply the trends of culture and respond to the needs of people where they are at. We are also called to challenge the trends of the culture and look at how to change the direction society is going.

My final thought on all this is: if we really want to change society, we need to change ourselves. I think if we look at the financial crisis we are in it is easy to blame a society that supports greed and encourages personal gain at communial expense, but I think if we closer we will realize that many of the people who helped create the problem were Christians, and if we look at the church we will see the signs of greed and corruption internally as well. If we really want to change the world we need to change ourselves, then we can be a real leader, like the great state of Missouri once was, or maybe still is.