Russell Moore has accused prosperity preachers of ignorance on the plight of persecuted Christians.
Writing on his website, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission compares these preachers' TV shows to horror movies, saying he gets the same scary jolt watching them. Moore recalls one instance when a female prosperity preacher was sitting on a golden throne. She said even if the gospel were not true, she would still choose to be a Christian because it is "the best way to live."
Moore cannot help but shake his head to this. "That's easy to say from a golden throne on television," Moore says. "That is not easy to say in first century Ephesus when identifying yourself with a crucified and resurrected Messiah means that you are going to lose your standing in the marketplace. That is not easy to say in an unregistered house church in China right now. That is not easy to say in Sudan. And, in fact, that is never what Christianity has proposed itself to be."
Moore says there is good reason why Christianity stands out, adding that the moment it starts conforming to normalcy is the time people should be worried.
The Christian faith "isn't normal anymore, and that's good news," he writes.
"The Book of Acts, like the Gospels before it, shows us that the Christianity thrives when it is, as Kierkegaard put it, a sign of contradiction. Only a strange gospel can differentiate itself from the culture around us. But the strange, freakish, foolish old gospel is what God uses to save sinners and to build the Church."
Secular society has long been urging Christians to make compromises on their faith, Moore says. They have been urged to abandon their historic and biblical sexual ethics and welcome people who are hostile towards Christianity. But the moment Christians start doing so, faith would be in danger, he warns.
"One of the most dangerous things we could do, I think, as the Church is to normalize Christianity, and normalize the Gospel," Moore writes.
