I emailed myself this quote from Facebook last May, and now I don’t remember who wrote it. Nevertheless, it is interesting, even if I may not agree quite 100%. Should we build a free Christian school? That would be expensive and time consuming. Is homeschooling not inadequate? I know there are plenty of Christians who would want to send their kids to school if there was an alternative to public school, but I think the gold standard of child education is homeschooling. It’s something to think about. Here’s the quote:

While calling sinful people to repentance is important, we’d be falling short of the Biblical standard if that’s all we do.

You can’t beat something with nothing.

If you want to get rid of the government-run schools, the way to do it is to offer a better alternative to the children who would otherwise end up there. Most likely, this means building our own free Christian schools, but it could take any other form that would work with the parents. Care for the orphan is a primary Christian duty, and children whose parents would abandon them to a Moloch school essentially fit the category.

If you want to get rid of power-religion churches, the way to do it is to build true, Christian churches, which aren’t beholden to the cult for power. Their fruit will be better (Matt 7:16), and so once the alternative is there, people would find no reason to join the power cults.

And if you want to get rid of abusive policing, offer an alternative. It’s not inconceivable to have a private company that can offer communities policing according to a Christian, self-sacrificial standard. What does this mean? We treat everybody with the presumption of innocence, and we never fire the first shot in self-defense. Offer the alternative to voters, and once it’s demonstrated to work better than the current practices, no community in America would have a reason not to switch to your demonstrably better approach.

Neither Jesus nor the apostles exhibited the deconstructionist rhetoric that I hear so often from my Recon friends. They lived in times of much bloodshed, slavery and abuse, yet they taught to honor the emperor (a rather shady guy), to pay the temple tax (which was clearly unjust, according to Jesus), and to honor the people sitting in Moses’ seat.

Does this mean they compromised? Not at all. The focus of their preaching was on constructing better alternatives. A new synagogue (the church of Christ) and a new society, with its own charity and its own judicial practices. Care for the orphans out of our own pockets. It’s all over the pages of the New Testament.

Our job is to faithfully construct godly alternatives. God will take care of the demolition. He demolished the temple and the empire. He’ll demolish today’s idols too. But only after we’ve built working alternatives (with His help).

And there is nothing that prevents us from building today. The only bottleneck is the shortage of our own faithfulness.