Club or cult

"One of us! One of us!"

I was listening to some talks from a 2019 conference with Timothy Keller and Rebecca McLaughlin recently, and heard Keller put his finger on something that I have felt for a long time. I won't get his words exactly right, but he said something like

You don't love people in order to share your faith, you share your faith in order to love them. If you do the former you are in fact objectifying them.

This! This touches it exactly. I have sat through so many talks, presentations, discussions that always felt like "you have to go and evangelize people and tell them the gospel of Jesus and get them into the club." And the why of it was always that - getting people to join the club. It wasn't stated like that, it just so often feels like that. Get them to join our club because our club is best.

And then, everything else gets instrumentalised. Loving your neighbour, doing good deeds, engagement with your city or your neighbourhood, building relationships with people - all those things become instruments to get people to join your club. Which means they are fake. If you build a relationship with someone primarily because you want to convert them, how is this different from a cult? How is this not a kind of grooming behaviour? How is this not social and psychological manipulation?

Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash

You know who else wants to build their club? Everyone. I've sat in a hundred and one other conversations that are like, "How do we get more people interested in Latin? How do we get more people interested in Greek? How do we get more people interested in gymnastics, Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting? Etc etc.." The Latin ones were always particularly funny, because I listened to a local high school teacher provide detailed statistics and a study on the decline of Latin in schools nationwide, and discuss at length with the participants ways of increasing the numbers doing Latin. But there was zero consideration of why it mattered how many people were doing Latin. Is there an objective reason why having 5 people study Latin or 500,000 is better? They wanted people to study Latin because that was simply their patch of turf, and they wanted people to join their club. Now imagine they were told that they had to go out and build relationships with people and get them to feel connected and appreciated and loved, in order to get them into Latin. Wouldn't that be weird? Yes, it's weird. And still you haven't answered why people should care about Latin at all.

To genuinely love people means treatment them as ends, not means, as subjects not objects, and to sacrificially seek their highest good. And precisely because that love is genuine, and you want to share who you are and what you love, because loves shared multiply, you would share about your faith. Because you believe that coming to faith in Jesus is the best possible thing for them, and because it's the most valuable thing in your own life that you can share about yourself. That's a sharing that's based on genuine love for people. It says, “you’re a person I care about and this is what I believe is most true, beautiful, and good in the world, and I want you to know about it”.