Read How Love Versus Coercion Changes Everything

Faith

by David Cassidy,Christ Community Church,Franklin 

It’s an exciting and beautiful weekend in Franklin, with Main Street Festival welcoming an expected 100,000 people to our city. Oh sure, parking will be a problem, but at the end of the day the joy of meeting so many new friends – and so many new friends discovering the cool factor of the town we Franklinites call home. From shops and live music to festive food and even a Sunday worship service, Main Street Festival is sure to be a great experience for all who attend.

Why do people come to Franklin? Maybe a better question is, “Why do they keep coming?” There will be a lot of first timers this weekend, but many of our guests have come before – and love coming back. We’re so glad! Many have told me ‘I love Franklin!’ I’m guessing my fellow residents have heard that many times as well. So do we – and there’s a lot to love. The history, the creativity, the beauty, and the charm all contribute to making this a fantastic place to visit and in which to live.

The ‘love’ for Franklin a newcomer discovers comes from the love for Franklin that residents already have; the city-love we already have is midwife to the love our guests feel when they’ve visited.

Love isn’t a mere feeling though. Love takes action – it digs into policy and planning on streets and schools, traffic patterns and shops, architecture, and politics. Love engages, often time sacrificially in terms of time, finance, and the risk of being misunderstood. Love for the city,for one’s neighbor, it all draws us out of our self-preservation and into the vulnerability of engagement.

Christians recognize this as the deportment of Jesus in his love for the world – leaving aside the majesty of heaven for the weakness and humiliation of his birth and death on the cross. God saw a broken world and, far from walking away from it, he decisively entered it in love. He did this in weakness rather than power, showing the authentic nature of love, the kind of self-giving that seeks out the other for their good rather than turning away from the other in displeasure.

Unfortunately we Christians don’t always recognize this strategy of engaged love as the proper course of action with people and organizations with whom we sometimes disagree. I’ve witnessed over and over again the faithful calling for a boycott of a restaurant or a business in the name of fidelity to Biblical values. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the world of course. Sometimes these activities are just stupid and ridiculous – like the Starbucks boycott over a red Christmas Cup. Sometimes the issues might be legitimate, but don’t we realize that boycotts are power plays meant to politically beat others into submission and conformity to a contrary view.  Let’s get this straight – if ‘conversion’ and conformity to a supposedly Biblical view is the goal of said boycotts, power plays designed to pummel, aren’t the right approach. Coercion and conversion don’t go together in the Gospel.

A couple years ago a LGBT organization,Campus Pride,advanced a boycott against  Chick-fil-A, and I totally understand why an organization rooted in the idea of pressure politics to create change would do so. That’s how you do things in that scene. What surprised Shane Windmeyer, the leader of that effort, was the response of Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy. Instead of anger and some power push back of his own, Dan Cathy reached out to Shane, and something amazing happened: over the course of time the two men became friends, overcoming fear, misunderstanding, and deep-seated mistrust. In his Huffington Post article on this unexpected gift of friendship, Shane summed the outcome of that friendship this way –

Now it is all about the future, one defined, let’s hope, by continued mutual respect. I will not change my views, and Dan will likely not change his, but we can continue to listen, learn and appreciate “the blessing of growth” that happens when we know each other better. I hope that our nation’s political leaders and campus leaders might do the same.
In the end, it is not about eating (or eating a certain chicken sandwich). It is about sitting down at a table together and sharing our views as human beings, engaged in real, respectful, civil dialogue. Dan would probably call this act the biblical definition of hospitality. I would call it human decency. So long as we are all at the same table and talking, does it matter what we call it or what we eat?
Read the  entire Huffington Post  it is worth taking the time to read in its entirety.Christians are called to love their neighbors and seek the good of the city to which God sends them. We aren’t here to pick and choose which neighbors ‘qualify’ for the love, or which businesses we will go to based on their views of everything from sexuality to religion. Most of the believers I know dig Chinese food even if a Buddha is sitting on the shelf behind their table, and love Curry even when the meal is overseen by a Kali statue in the corner. So get over it already. Let’s stop the power plays and serve our city in love. It’s not only what Jesus would do. Its what he already did.

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