Being 'Joyful Outsiders'

Are Christians prepared for what being an outsider might look like?

A few weeks ago, Glen Scrivener from Speak Life interviewed Patrick Miller. It was a fascinating interview: they spoke about the culture wars, the importance of not being negative all the time, and how we should counteract that in the church. You can watch it here —

I did like the emphasis on the positive church to contrast with the negative world. It’s very easy to get focussed on the bad stuff that’s going on in the world, but I believe God asks the church not simply to critique what’s happening in the world but to actively show the world a positive vision of what life should be like. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, the church is to be both salt and light — that is, to critique where the world is going wrong, as well as showing the world what it should be doing instead. Both aspects are necessary.

The phrase that Patrick coined is “joyful outsiders,” which I really like: it says that we as Christians should be prepared to be outsiders in this world, but at the same time we can be joyful in it because we know we are with Jesus. They referred to Hebrews 13:

Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Hebrews 13:13-14

In a sense, all Christians are outsiders in this world, all the time — this is simply what Jesus said would be the case until he returns.

However, my fear is that many Christians today simply have no idea of the full reality of what being an outsider might look like. As I was watching the video, several times it struck me that they didn’t go nearly far enough — Christians today aren’t simply different on a variety of ‘culture war’ issues, but Christianity is now almost antithetical to our prevailing cultural worldview.

It seems to me that many Christians today want to have their cake and eat it: they want to maintain Christian distinctiveness on a certain number of moral issues (e.g. marriage), but they also want to remain part of the club when it comes to society. I think those who want to do this will find their positions increasingly untenable and are going to be either forced in one direction or another.

Let me illustrate using the example of Covid.

Case study: Covid and lockdowns

When covid hit, I was — like many people — totally unprepared to respond to it rightly. Because it seemed to come out of the blue, I hadn’t thought through many of the issues involved. I say this to my own shame, as I think covid caught many of us (including myself) asleep on the job. Still, over time I read the news, studied the Bible, prayed and came to the conclusions which regular readers will recognise. In a nutshell, I came to the conclusion that it was important for Christians to stand up against lockdowns etc. because of what the Bible teaches.

Note: You can see some of my journey on my blog, e.g. this post Why I spoke out against lockdowns was written back in November 2021.

One of the things which was abundantly and painfully obvious during that time was how few other Christians were speaking out against lockdowns and everything else that went with them. It seemed that there were only a handful of Christian leaders speaking out publicly. In fact, there were some people in my church at the time who agreed with me in private, but refused to say so publicly. For example, a couple of people in my old church agreed with me about the futility of face masks, but still continued to wear one. They also didn’t speak up in my defence when I got in hot water for not wearing one.

If you’ve never experienced anything like this, believe me when I say, it is a very lonely place to be. It makes you feel like the whole world is against you.

But the real problem was not so much that I disagreed with the world — as Christians, like I said, we expect to disagree with the world. It’s not pleasant, but at least we are forewarned about it. The problem was that many Christians seemed to be on the other side, or at least, simply went along with it and refused to discuss it. Far from being a ‘joyful outsider’, I felt like I was an outsider even within my own church.

Over time, I’ve come to realise that the lockdowns were simply part and parcel of a broader authoritarian agenda. It seems that the powers that be, whoever they are, want to bring the whole world under one government and essentially bring us into a kind of digital feudalism. This is more or less what is predicted in the book of Revelation.

I’ve spoken at great length many times about the failures of the church in speaking out about this, so I don’t want to go over old ground again. For example, I wrote about how the church pays lip service to Biblical authority, including lockdowns as an example. Many churches seem to simply ignore large swathes of biblical teaching when it comes to what’s going on in the world.

It seems to me that some Christians are happy to be outsiders on certain issues, but not on others. They are happy to be outsiders when it comes to believing in traditional marriage, but they are unhappy to be seen as conspiracy theorists. They are happy to be outsiders by believing in Jesus, but unhappy to be outsiders when they have to choose between Jesus or the State. They think that the church can continue to be the church while saying nothing about State overreach and injustice.

I need to emphasize here that this is not simply a choice to relegate these matters to private conscience: as I discovered during covid, you’re not allowed to question the authorities on issues like compulsory vaccination or masks. You can’t have a conversation about these issues as a church. Because the Bible doesn’t say anything specifically about it, at least in their view, the only right course of action is simply to get on with obeying what the government says… and remain joyless insiders.

Freedom and being a joyful outsider

Two years ago, we left our old church and have since been meeting in our living room on a Sunday morning. There are only six of us, but we have enjoyed a growing sense of fellowship. We have conversations that we would never have been able to have in our old church — we talk frankly about climate change, net zero, the war in Ukraine, the World Economic Forum, and so on. The kind of things which are simply not possible to talk about these days in polite society!

What I’ve realised is that freedom is key to being a joyful outsider:

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1

But freedom not defined in some ‘super spiritual’ sense, but real freedom: freedom to talk about topics that some consider controversial. Freedom to think through every issue from a biblical perspective. Freedom to go places where polite society might not want you to go. After all, the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it: why should Christians restrict themselves to talking about purely ‘spiritual’ matters, as if that’s all God cares about?

Freedom in Christ means that we need to stand up against things which might curtail our freedom, such as government overreach. That doesn’t mean political action necessarily, but — to take an example from covid — it might mean refusing to obey certain government rules about wearing masks and closing churches. In other words, civil disobedience.

Above all, it means the freedom to put Christ first rather than the government. At the end of the day, if Christ wants us to do something, or not to do something, then we should obey him — no matter what anyone else thinks. This is why Christians through the ages have found the need to disobey the secular governing authorities, right from the earliest days of the apostles:

Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!” Acts 5:29

Being a joyful outsider means recognising that the world is now pursuing a vastly different agenda to God’s plan for our lives. We as Christians, however, need to stick with God’s agenda — and as we do that, we are going to stand out like a sore thumb.

Let me borrow an analogy from C.S. Lewis to explain.

Borrowing from C.S. Lewis

The older I get, the more respect I have for C.S. Lewis. His writings seem to become more wise and prescient as time goes by. One such example is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I read the book several times as a child, and I knew it well. And yet, one aspect of it never really struck me until the events of the last few years:

The evil White Witch is the pretend Queen of Narnia. She has stolen the throne from the one who it rightfully belongs to, and has subjected Narnia to a harsh and unjust rule (in the memorable words of one character, “always winter but never Christmas”). Her ultimate goal is to turn people into stone, which she does frequently. Aslan, the true ruler of Narnia, is the opposite: he turns people into living beings, and he has the power to revive those who have been turned into stone and make them live again.

It struck me that this is such a wonderful picture of Satan as contrasted to Jesus: Satan wants to destroy life, to turn everyone into stone. He wants to take away everything enjoyable in life — all the while pretending to give joy and satisfaction. Satan is the thief who wants to steal, kill, and destroy; Jesus, on the other hand, promises us “abundant life” or “life to the full” (John 10:10).

You can see this working out in society. So much of of what’s going on today is designed to stop us enjoying life and living it to the full: we are meant to be full of anxiety about the future, we are to stop eating meat, stop flying, stop driving, stop having children, even to kill ourselves if we don’t want to live anymore. Ultimately, you feel that the powers that be want to confine us to a tiny little box, isolated from our friends and family, dependent on them for everything. This agenda is not from God, it’s from Satan.

Jesus, on the other hand, grants life — true, rich, full, life. Jesus knew what it meant to live life like that, because that’s how he lived himself — they even called him a “glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19). He embodied what it meant to be fully alive. And yet, look what happened to him…

Are we prepared to be outsiders?

The main point I am trying to make is that it’s no good being “joyful outsiders” if we’re not prepared to truly embrace what it means to be an outsider. I fear that many Christians are trying to hold on to being an ‘insider’, at least in part, while at the same time claiming they’re outsiders.

We need to go where Jesus leads us — and, if that means going outside the camp, so be it. If that means being considered a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by our friends and family, so be it. If that means leaving the institutional church behind, so be it.

We don’t get to decide what it means to be outsiders: Christ does. We are not at liberty to say, “I’m happy to be an outsider in one of these ways, but not one of those…” And if Christ calls us outside the camp, we need to go.

Are you ready for it?

I’ve spoken more about what it might mean to leave institutions in my podcast about the Benedict Option.

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