An Independence Day Meditation

America needs a Church on a hill standing tall and setting an example of righteousness on this Independence Day.

The Church is a city on a hill, which cannot be hidden. But today, our evangelical leaders demolish the hill to blend in with other institutions. We have become just another mall, just another mom-and-pop business, just another space among the many competing spaces in society. We have accommodated so much that accommodationists are feeling threatened. The church has attempted to be all things to all people by giving away her identity. But you can only be all things to all people if you are who God says you are: the Church.

Societies always reflect their ecclesiastical spheres and our America society lives in what Christian Smith called a moralistic therapeutic deistic culture. It’s moral like soap, therapeutic like an MRI scan, and deistic like Thomas Jefferson’s bible. This is a fitting image for our American nation. We are infatuated with our ability to say absolutely nothing with a host of words like cis and zen that mean absolutely nothing.

Society looks like the Church. If we tolerate binary gods in our creeds, culture tolerates binary gods. It may not look like it, it may not feel like society is watching, but the Scriptures say that God gave the Church the keys of the kingdom, and so the culture wants access to our Narnia wardrobes she wants access to the divine world; she wants the supernatural, culture wants myths, it wants its own set of martyrs, and they want gods to worship as well. This is why every story made up by some fancy Hollywood director merely reflects the great story of the Bible.

Yes, the world is watching.

And this is why America needs the Church more than ever today; but not an effeminate body that meets every week fearful; rather, our nation needs a strong body that meets every week courageous; with the boldness to call President Biden a coward and an ethical delinquent for advocating crimes and misdemeanors against the Church and her Lord, Jesus Christ.

America needs a Church on a hill standing tall and setting an example of righteousness on this Independence Day. The Prophet Jeremiah tells Israel that if they turn from their sins, God will forgive and restore them. King Solomon says that righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. And if any of these things is true of a nation, it is only true because judgment begins in the house of God. The future of the Church and the nation go hand in hand because a nation reflects the Church. Therefore, the Church should be objective in its proclamations, demonstrative in its charity, and biblical in its ethics.

If America prospers, it prospers because God prospered the Church. There is no ordinary salvation outside of it; if America fails, it fails because God judged the Church. Yes, make America great again because the greatness of the Church is incontestable before the nations. The Church is and must always be a city of a hill which cannot be hidden. May she live her true life that the nations might be glad!.