Beautiful Resistance: The Joy of Conviction in a Culture of Compromise

by Jon Tyson

“In each age the church faces a challenge in which she is called to live out her heavenly call among the thorns and thickets of compromise and coercion.

The church was capitulating to and cooperating with the Reich, handing the loyalties that belong to Christ to the Führer.

I stubbornly believe that the church can be a source of hope and reconciliation in the midst of the world.

Being and reading this quote in Alaska it’s incredibly hard to believe that the Church isn’t necessary to produce hope and be a living hope within its community. With a desperate need for salvation and rescue from suicide, molestation, and other heart breaking generational and isolative curses we see that both the practicality of the local church and the global partnership and embrace from the Global church is desperately needed here. Jesus is needed here. However in more comfortable and numbed cultural center piece like Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York to name a few larger scale examples when people are free to align with and follow whatever they please and the voice and conviction of the Holy Spirit is ignored due to the loud booming voice of consumerism and a “need” for comfort the local church, in its current model, ceases to be of necessity when people can resource out the silencing of their spiritual needs with physical, emotional, and relational gluttony. So the question becomes; how, in a post-modern world where our needs, values, and understanding of whats important has been realigned, how does the church live out as an active voice calling for a pursuit of Christ and the repentance He asks of us?

The scars on my soul come from the church, as does the joy that has come to define me.