We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20)

"Frank" was a grizzly bear of a man. Years of farm labor had hardened his body while a hard country religion had petrified his soul. He was a deacon in a church I served. Never short for words, Frank always told it like it was. He could be brutal. His wife and children cowered before his harshness, and they loathed him for it.

After church one Sunday, the deacons and I went out for lunch to discuss the state of the church. Things didn't seem to be going well. Frank wasted neither time nor words. He raced through his meal, put down his fork, and blurted out, "The problem with the church is that the preacher ain't preaching evangelistic sermons."

Frank spoke volumes more than he thought. I was sitting next to him, yet he referred to "the preacher" as if I were absent. He had distanced himself from my ministry, and his words showed it. By evangelistic preaching, Harold meant that I should aim my sermons at non-Christians and at those Christians who needed to get right with God. He assumed that he was in neither camp, and therefore he wanted my preaching to leave him alone. He regularly got angry when I touched issues in his life like anger, racism, or compassion.

One Sunday I preached from the text, "Blessed are the peacemakers" (Matt. 5:9). I thought the passage was relevant since court-ordered busing to force school integration had created near-riot conditions in nearby Louisville, Kentucky. I asked the congregation to consider what the Christian response to that kind of anger and hate should be. The church was small enough to allow conversation, and I used the last part of the sermon time for discussion of the question.

Frank spoke first. His face was red with anger, and he more or less yelled a question at me. "Why'd you bring that up here today?" he asked. He obviously didn't want to think about it.

Frank granted me very little authority as his pastor. His framework of faith and life excluded any human from having spiritual oversight of his soul.

A Crisis of Authority

Frank is a rough-hewn symbol of our time. We live in a culture in which submission to authority, especially moral or spiritual authority, is anathema.

An Authority-Resistant Culture

The Western world is at the end of a long battle against authority. Long ago, individual rights and personal sovereignty overthrew the centuries-long moral authority that resided in the state and the church. Now about the best our culture can do for moral authority is offer some vague notion of shared community standards determined by the larger culture. The moral voice of the church is mocked as hopelessly irrelevant for a world like ours.

Other authorities are under attack as well. It seems that nobody trusts the government anymore. Public figures, governmental or otherwise, have a brief day in the sun before they are discarded for new and more congenial figures. Public figures who speak with moral authority are viewed as hopelessly out of touch, even dangerous. Somehow Billy Graham escapes the cynicism of our time, but few Americans view him as a moral authority for their lives. The Pope, a towering figure of moral strength for many people of Christian faith, is a figure of ridicule in the media and in some quarters of his own church. We are living through a tremendous cultural evasion of authority.