Finney, Weld, Booth -- Radicals for Christ

Charles Finney and Theodore Weld were two prominent revivalists of the early 19th century -- both committed to spreading Scriptural holiness over the land as well as bringing about social reform. These men were progressives and "liberals" in their day -- they were strong abolitionists, feminists, and opponents of war in all of its forms. I was inspired by the following quotes which I cannot help but believe are quite prophetic in our own day:

"There is among the professed ministers of Christ such connivance of cherished sins, such truckling subserviency to power, such clinging with mendicant sycophancy to the skirts of wealth and influence, such humoring of pampered lusts, such cowering before bold transgression when it stalks among the high places of power with fashion in its train, or to sum up all, such floating in the wake of an unholy public sentiment, instead of beating back its waves with a ‘thus saith the Lord’ and a ‘thou art the man’ – that even men of the world who are shrewd discerners, regard them rather as the obsequious cooks and confectioners who cater for a capricious palate, than as the faithful physician who administers the medicine demanded by the disease, however much the patient may loathe it, and steadily pushes the probe to the core, whatever his struggles or upbraidings” - Theodore Weld

“Is it not time for us, brethren, to repent, to be candid and search out wherein we have been wrong and publicly and privately confess it, and pass public resolutions in our general ecclesiastical bodies, recanting and confessing what has been wrong... – our want of sympathy with Christ, our want of compassion for the slave, for the wretched prostitute, and for all the miserable and ignorant of the earth?" - Charles G. Finney

One more quote from the great co-founder of the Salvation Army, Catherine Booth:

"It is a bad sign for Christianity of this day that it provokes so little opposition. If there were not other evidence of it being wrong I should know it from that."

All three of these comments are pertinent critiques of my own denomination, the Free Methodist Church, as well as of the larger evangelical church in the U.S. Perhaps we should be hated because we are so vocal in our advocacy for the equal rights of homosexuals. Perhaps we should be shunned in the public square because we refuse to bow the the gods of economic prosperity, blind nationalism, and the drum of war. Perhaps we should be crucified by our fellow Americans because we preach the good news that God loves Osama bin Laden and wants to redeem Moqtada al-Sadr. But we are not persecuted. We are not called "fools." And this indicates to me that we are not the true church.