C.S. Lewis’ Challenge
Listen to this challenge from C.S. Lewis:
“We can make people attend to the Christian point of view for half hour or so; but the moment they have gone away from our lecture or laid down our article, they are plunged back into a world where the opposite position is taken for granted. As long as that situation exists, widespread success is simply impossible. We must attack the enemy’s line of communication. What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read a…book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialist assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a…popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.” (“Christian Apologetics” in God in the Dock)
I would assume that few of us are in a position to write a textbook. Nonetheless, the broader principle applies. Our goal must be not merely to promote Christianity AT our workplace but to carry out the task of our vocation IN a thoroughly excellent and thoroughly Christian way. This requires a radically different way of looking at things and that’s…something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective”.
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.
~Colossians 1:17-18 NIV
