mgpcpastor's blog

Christian discipleship can never comfortably rest in the general. It has to be applied in the specific.
The more general the repentance, the easier it is to transition from true Gospel dependence on life-giving grace as the response to a reliance on a moralistic determination to do better.

Will Willimon writes about preaching to confront racism in his 2017 book Why Lynched Willie Earle?

A church that no longer knows how to name sin has no need for talk of redemption because we have lost the ability to know that we need redeeming. We have been so wonderfully successful in saving ourselves by ourselves that a monthly drop-in at church for a moral pep talk is sufficient.
Such has always been the faith of people in power, people on top, people who assume that his world, for all its faults, is our world, people whose faith is mostly in ourselves. People on top come to church to stabilise things as they are rather than to dare to live into a new heaven and a new earth in which God “pulled the powerful down” and “lifted up the lowly” as Mary sang in her Magificat (Luke 1:52; see vv. 46-55). Apocalyptic preaching engenders in the congregation the conviction that this is not all there is, that power, goodness, justice, and action exist beyond and above that seen in the presently experienced world. Thereby apocalyptic destabilises a world that is officially sanctioned as ll there is. Advantaged people are always made nervous by eschatalogical language that promises something more that present arrangements and dreams of divine disruption.

Will Willimon, Who Lynched Willie Earle?, Abingdon, 2017, pg 68.