Ambassadors as a rule do not join municipal steering committees.  They are not citizens.  Neither do they move into caves and preach prophetic denunciations from a safe distance.  They live in the culture as representatives of a foreign power.  That is the essence and substance of the Bithynian Option.  It understands the Christian mission as being to “proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light.”  It understands the church as being simultaneously “in” and “other”.

Sometime over the last 10 years the Evangelical church made a startling discovery:  We’re not in Kansas anymore.  Things have changed.  This is not your grandfather’s church.  This is not the Promised Land and this is not a Christian culture.

Evidence of this new reality can be found every night on the evening news. While I have no interest in discussing the intricacies of U.S. law or the difficult ethical questions associated with holding public office as a Christian, I think all Evangelicals could agree that our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a scenario wherein a Christian clerk would be jailed for refusing to sign marriage certificate for homosexual couples.

Whether you are praying for Kim Davis or embarrassed by her convictions, let’s at least admit that the idea of it being illegal for anyone in North America to withhold their public approval for a gay marriage would have been impossible to imagine 50 years ago.  And yet, here we are.

I think our grandparents would also have been incapable of imagining a scenario wherein a private business might deem it expedient to publicly distance themselves from Christian clients.  And yet, that too is happening in culture and being discussed in the daily news.

In an article titled “Being Picky About Customers Early On Can Bolster Long-Term Success” New York Times business columnist Caitlin Kelly tells the story of how a caterer made her decision to disassociate from Christian clients public so as to demonstrate her discernment as a business operator.  To be clear, Tsuang explicitly rejected a customer on the basis of their religious beliefs, believing that this would better position her brand within the marketplace.  Apparently its good business now to discriminate against Christians.

Whatever you think about that from a legal perspective – I’m actually all in favour of companies being able to discriminate of the basis of morality and values – my point is that our grandparents could not have imagined a day when it could land you in jail to believe what the Bible says about human sexuality and when it would be considered good business to tell Christian people to take their money elsewhere.  We are not in Kansas anymore.  The attitude of the culture towards Christianity has undergone a seismic shift in the last 20 years.

So what do we do now?

That is the question that has been occupying Christian thinkers and writers for the last several years.  Several options are in play.

Option 1: The Accommodation Option

This option is more of a default reaction rather than an intentional strategy.  However it is common enough that it merits attention.  There have always been plenty of voices within Evangelicalism ready to cast significant doctrines over board every time the waters of culture get a little unsettled.  Perhaps if we made the church a little more like the world more people would come and more people in the culture would look upon with greater favour?  That strategy was on full display last week in a viral video posted by Buzzfeed on Facebook.

The basic message of the video is that you can be a Christian without believing all of that nasty, exclusive, mean spirited dogma concerning human sexuality.  You can be a Christian and “love you some Beyonce”, drink lots of wine, have sex with people of your own gender and generally look exactly like the world.

This idea was attempted without success by the United Church of Canada in the early decades of the 20th century.  In his excellent book “After Evangelicalism” Kevin Flatt details how the UCC made the intentional decision to jettison Evangelical doctrines in the ill fated effort to narrow the mission gap with Canadian culture.  The results were catastrophic.  The United Church of Canada was for a long stretch in the latter half of the 20th century the fastest shrinking major religious body in North America.  It turns out that when the church says all the same things as the culture, people forget why they are supposed to get out of bed on Sunday mornings.  If they want lessons on recycling, they can watch public service commercials on TV.  If they want encouragement towards embracing alternative sexual lifestyles, they can watch day time talk shows.  This option can be considered “tried and failed”.

Except that its back.  And back with a vengeance.  The seeker movement of the 80’s and 90’s invited us all down the same garden path.  We were all told that if we sang Beatles’ songs and wore casual clothes people would come in droves.  They did.  From other Evangelical churches.  The seeker movement was not a front door it was more of a side door and in many cases it was a back door.  It provided a soft landing for people who had already decided to leave the church – they just wanted to do that in comfortable stages.  The slicker 21st century versions of this model seem like more of the same.  The recent evidence of young adults departing the faith, mostly from nominal Christian families and churches, only serves to reinforce what the lesson of the UCC should have taught us in the first place: accommodationist churches can’t reproduce.  They don’t make actual converts and they have a hard time passing faith on to their kids.  Version 2 of this Option will likely fair no better than version 1.

Option 2: The Benedict Option

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