Why Hope Matters (Part 1)

This year, many churches and leaders will wring their hands in worry about the political process in the United States. One way or another, on one side of the aisle or the other, Christians will be convinced that the destiny of Christianity, the existence of our country, and the state of our world will hinge on the contents of ballot boxes on the first Tuesday in November. 

Elections are very important, but they aren’t the main thing happening in the world today. It’s not even the main thing confronting the church and her future. It’s not even close to the main missional imperative of our generation. 

Making hope clearer in chaos is. 

Why Hope Matters

The primal and preeminent question of our time is not about the existence of God. No, our sincere doubt asks: “Is there anything to hope for? Is there anything that changes me and the world?”

“The primal and preeminent question of our time is not about the existence of God.”

In 2000, Stanford sociologist and international affairs specialist, Francis Fukiyama, wrote in his prophetic book, “The Great Disruption”, that with the the end of meaningful community and the rise of individualism, the distrusting of institutions and even media, and with broken families, higher crime, and greater awareness of disasters, conflicts, and disease the world would spiral into despair and confusion. “In a world in which we no longer believe family, finances, and fame repair what’s broken within us, we ask: is there anything to hope for?”

Our society hungers for something to hope in. 

Award winning novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, summarizes, probably accidentally, the challenge of Jesus: 

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

Kingsolver highlights a well kept secret: life doesn’t function without hope. Our primal humanity beckons us to long for a horizon that will bring a new day. It is survival. Hope steers our lives from morning to evening, from month to year — from birth to death. Who do I want to be? Where should we go? How should I live? What do I want? How should I spend it? What should I buy? Who do I vote for? How do I want you to behave? What should I eat? Who should I love? All these questions find answers only in our hope.

“Unexamined hope will spend your life.”

We inherit most of our hope from family, steal it from friends, or absorb it from those around us. Unexamined hope will spend your life. The least you can do is figure out what you hope for.

Hope is both the things you long for and the means by which they will come to fruition.

If you hope in a progressive or conservative society, you also hope in the election of progressives or conservatives. If you hope in that, you spend time concerned with, worried about, and persuading people toward a candidate. Why? Because your hope is the transformation of society into a particular political reality and those hopes take actions. Hope drives.

Hope steers our lives.

Hope embeds itself in daily movement. Unexamined hopes percolate into actions and attitudes we sense but don’t understand. Often we’re discouraged but don’t know why. We’re disappointed in others for what we ourselves believe are superficial issues. We get depressed at the outlook of the world or the state of our inner souls. We’re anxious about outcomes we don’t remember deciding were important. We’re lost in a sea of hopes that guide us while simultaneously knowing those hopes won’t work. We’re too disoriented and disappointed to know what hope for, much less live inside it.

Some have pointed to the 2016 election as the cause of the mass deconstruction and deconversion of young Christians. For those who heard, “character counts” the support of someone without any character is obviously a red flag, so people left. That’s an easy podcast take. It’s too shallow.

For the person who grew up within a Christian-leaning culture, like the West, there’s a deeper disappointment or despair than who their parents or old Sunday school teacher voted for. The despair is in Christianity’s apparent lack of transcendent hope. 

If you think back on youth group meetings, you might pinpoint hope as something to avoid—sex, drugs, alcohol. As you listen to pastors preach on politics, you’re left feeling like the hope of Christianity must be so feeble a ballot box can overturn it. The desire to maintain cultural relevance seems irrelevant to a God who is supposedly sovereign. The longing for bigger churches built to scale feels more like a Home Depot business plan than the world-made new. 

“The mass rejection of ‘cultural Christianity’ in our generation excites me.”

Depending on how deep you were into church you might be left with hopes that proved so deeply false you’re unsure of where to go now. The mass rejection of “cultural Christianity” in our generation excites me. It reflects humanity’s internal barometer to seek satisfaction in a transcendent and transformative God.

Ultimately, if you were raised in the West over the last 40 years, you likely encountered a Christianity without transformative hope. Hope in recruitment, hope in growth, hope in influence, hope in power, and hope in the battles of the cultural war; but never hope in a transformation that would raise broken to whole, dead to life, war to peace, grief to celebration. 

The generations are telling us we’ve shared a hopeless message. Dr. Tracy Munsil of the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, made this observation from the various studies and surveys: most millennials don’t put hope in the top ten of what they think is core to Christianity.

As a pastor, the mass rejection of “Christianity” in my generation excites me. It reflects humanity’s internal barometer to seek satisfaction in a transcendent and transformative God. Most of us, even those raised within the church, haven’t heard the message and purpose of Jesus that fills us with a transformational hope. 

The greatest evangelistic and apologetic challenge facing the church today is to make the hope of Jesus clear to a world in chaos, even within the church.