When we say, “I’ll pray for you,” it can often also become a way of exiting the conversation. When someone is sharing details that are too intimate or too uncomfortable or too painful, we can extricate ourselves pretty neatly with a statement like that. But in asking, “How would you like me to pray?” we are actually pressing in. We are inviting more disclosure. More knowledge. More intimacy. We are choosing to step closer rather than step away, and this is what a true friend does. A true friend presses in.

Friendship Is Work
The older I get, the more convinced I become that it’s true. That’s because when you’re younger, you have natural and regular points of personal connection with the same group of people. You see them every day at school, you play beside them on the court or field, you sit next to them at lunch. These are friends, sure, but they are friends by association. Or, if you’re a little more cynical, they are friends of convenience.
But as you get older, you become more established. You acquire more and more responsibilities. The schedule gets busier. And as a result, friendships are affected. You no longer have as many of these natural and regular connections, and as a result, you have to work at friendships. Every relationship has a cost, and you have to subconsciously weigh the value of that relationship against the cost in time, resources, and energy it will take to maintain and grow it.
I suppose, then, it’s a bit natural that real friendships get smaller in number the older you get. Natural, but still a bit sad. Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons why moving into the empty nest phase of life is so difficult – it’s because parents center their lives around their children, and with the children moving out and moving on, they find a lack of shared interests and a lack of other relationships.
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The task of the Christian then, is to be less and less the foul odor of sin, and more and more the pleasing aroma of Christ. We are to be little pockets of the new creation in the midst of a desert of sin. Or, to put it another way, we are to be reservoirs of beauty and greenness in the middle of the smog and harsh realities of sin.

Within the city I live in, there is limited natural, green space in which to escape the cacophony and the concrete. But there is one place my family and I frequent that gives us some sense of escape. It is a small water reservoir with a dirt path on the perimeter and populated by a variety of birds and flowers. It’s a nice place, other than the the greenish, contaminated water, the beer bottles, the lost shoe, the bag of garbage, etc.
This little reservoir reminds me of how sin contaminates our world and compromises its goodness and beauty. I don’t just mean sin in a general sense, I mean my own sin. My sin makes this world an ugly place because it hurts others and is an offense to God.
That was true for Israel as well. God had promised his chosen people a land flowing with milk and honey – symbols of its flourishing. It was to be a little bit of Eden in a desert of sin. It was to be a holy land and a place where people could go and catch a glimpse of what the world was like before sin crept in and infested everything under the sun.
But Israel could not keep herself holy. The nation was rarely a light to the nations and the land was frequently defiled with immorality. Despite the prophets warnings, Israel persisted in her sin and continued polluting the land.
And then God said enough!
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Even before the value shift to diversity instead of the universal Gospel, some mission departments changed their names to ‘intercultural studies.’  This involved reconceiving the method and purpose of mission studies.  Instead of being about understanding the Gospel, the focus was now on understanding the audiences.  Instead of missions understood through Biblical and theological interpretation, it was now a project of the social sciences—anthropology, culture, and sociology.  Instead of involving evangelism to the lost, it was now about dialogue and understanding.  Instead of understanding the Gospel as all about the world streaming to the cross to make their garments white in the blood of the Lamb, the public square’s value of diversity ruled the agenda. 

I continue to be very pessimistic about the public square, expecting an increasing opposition to and persecution of Christians throughout the world.  This is based on reading stories daily about how Christians are opposed, sued, discriminated against, deplatformed, and ridiculed.  This does not mean for me a disengagement with the world but a recalculation of what that engagement involves.  The prophets found themselves in the important role in ancient Israel of telling the governmental and social powers of their day that they did not know God.  As the West today becomes increasingly anti-Christian, not simply post-Christian, in its values and practices, and as it redefines virtues in anti-Christian ways, the Church’s engagement with the public square ought to be less and less a matter of finding common cause with others in the pursuit of justice but needs rather to be a matter of showing the world that it is not the Kingdom of God.  An anti-Christian vision of the world defines social justice in a way that is opposed to divine justice.
One significant way to describe the moral changes in public discourse about justice is in terms of social values.  Not that long ago, Western values were defined in terms of human rights, based on the notion that all humans were equal.  Freedom and equality became the primary values for the West.  The American version of this argument involved a Deist understanding: the Creator made humans from the same cloth, so to speak, and He endowed them with inalienable rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence.  The French had their secular understanding of this, but it, too, highlighted similar values: equality, liberty, and fraternity.  Over the history of secular Western modernity hung the vestige of a Judeo-Christian worldview involving freedom and equality for all because there is one God, Creator of all.  With this loosely Christian version of justice, Christians could usually agree—it was their ethic, after all, that stood at the root of Deist and secularist versions of the public square’s ethic.  Thus, Christians could frequently engage the public square in common cause with non-Christians.  Or they could, at least, dialogue and argue with them.
In the 21st century, however, these values have been shuffled to the storage closet and three new values have been erected in the public square: diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Not a few in the West have been duped by the reshuffling of values, thinking that there is continuity between what was and what is now proclaimed as truths self-evident.  The three new values are all predicated on the essential differences of humanity, not their essential sameness.  Instead of universal commonality or unity we now have diversity.  Instead of equality we now have equity.  Instead of God’s work of inclusion, His mission—Christians would say His offer of salvation through Jesus’ sacrificial death for the sins of the world—we have strictly human efforts at inclusion, particularly of things God calls sin.  The shift in values in the public square has left many Christians speechless.  Thinking that diversity, equity, and inclusion sound like worthy values, ones Christians might affirm, they have been confused at the resultant changes in Western society.
I recall one well-meaning Christian jumping on the Black Lives Matter bandwagon only a short while ago, thinking that this racist organization was all about racial justice.  I know a seminary administration and board that has made diversity its mantra, even down to replacing white male authors on its syllabi for anything else—as though truth wears the faces of the authors writing about it and academic excellence is found in readers’ responses rather than critical arguments.  I know of ministers who crafted confused sermons about diversity, equity, or inclusion, not realizing that they were shifting the congregation’s eyes from the cross to street activism, from the Church’s mission to the public square’s version of justice.  The confusion comes because activist efforts in the face of perceived or actual injustices are easily endorsed without realizing that they are defined and pursued in entirely non-Christian ways.  Justice in the Kingdom of God is not a mere quantitative improvement of justice in the public square; it is a qualitatively different understanding of justice.
Some ‘evangelical’ seminaries have contributed to the confusion.  Even before the value shift to diversity instead of the universal Gospel, some mission departments changed their names to ‘intercultural studies.’  This involved reconceiving the method and purpose of mission studies.  Instead of being about understanding the Gospel, the focus was now on understanding the audiences.  Instead of missions understood through Biblical and theological interpretation, it was now a project of the social sciences—anthropology, culture, and sociology.  Instead of involving evangelism to the lost, it was now about dialogue and understanding.  Instead of understanding the Gospel as all about the world streaming to the cross to make their garments white in the blood of the Lamb, the public square’s value of diversity ruled the agenda.  In an Evangelical seminary, beyond the mission department changes, this might not be so blatantly presented as the study of other religions.  It might also be presented as a communal journey toward social diversity.  The result is to focus on ourselves, not the cross of Jesus Christ.
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