If you have access to this review, you know we live in a highly polarized culture. One the one hand, our political polarization has been on display during the past week as a miscreant from Florida sent mail bombs to leading Democrats, as an evil doer from Kentucky decided to go kill black people for no reason other than their race, and as a murderous thug killed almost a dozen Jews in Pittsburgh. We didn’t even have time to mourn before the tribal recriminations began.

Our churches are not only in this polarized culture, but are in many ways of it. My own United Methodist Church is in the final throes of a battle that’s been raging pretty much since the denomination began in 1968. The denomination’s official position on issues in the bounds of sexuality are mostly in line with traditional Christian positions, and thus at increasing odds with broader American culture. As American United Methodists, we have, as always, taken up positions defined and defended in our culture as not just American, but also as Christian.

Rick McKinley, in his recent book, Faith for this Moment: Navigating a Polarized World as People of God takes these cultural issues head on. McKinley frames the Christian approach to this conflict in terms of the Old Testament experience of Exile. The nation of Israel was God’s chosen people. They had experienced awesome moments of God’s blessing. But then in the 6th century BC, they were defeated by the Babylonians and carried off into captivity. In the prophetic literature, Israel is challenged to respond to their Exile in a way that maintains their faith in God and their calling to be his people.

McKinley, a pastor in Portland, Oregon, has experienced the marginalization of the church first hand. Portland is on the leading edge of secularization in America, so how could he plant and grow a church there, where the culture seemed as such deep odds with traditional (American) Christian culture?

Faced with what to do with its host culture – while in “exile” – McKinley sees three common responses. When we are confronted with culture we either baptize it, accepting it as indistinguishable from our faith, burn it, see if it as entirely in conflict with our faith and thus worthy of total warfare, or bless it, recognizing its people are our neighbors. Settling on Jeremiah 29 as a primary text, McKinley opts for the “bless” it option.

The greatest weakness of the book is the failure to confront the specifically Christian contribution to current American culture. For most of our history, Christians have been in charge. It’s not that some foreign culture has invaded and imposed its values on us. What we have is evolution within a formerly Christian-molded culture. And that Christian-molded culture was profoundly broken in multiple ways. We need look no farther than the Christian voices that built and defended slavery and the oppression of African Americans even after slavery. The hypocrisy of Christian culture is a large part of what got us where we are.

The greatest strength of the book comes in the last chapters where McKinley discusses “practices” that enable the people of God to “bless” their host culture. The chapter on Generosity is particularly good.

Note: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of writing this review.