Much has been said and written to help today’s churches become more missional. Organizations, parachurch communities, and conferences abound in trying to move the Church in this direction. This emphasis is certainly justified in light of how many Evangelical churches are not missional and are either in a state of plateau or decline. But does being missional mean that a church cannot also be attractional?

​Like many Americans, we are grieved by recent events in Charlottesville. The white supremacist rally there showed that overt racism is alive and well in America, and that it can turn violent and murderous. As Christian scholars of American history, politics, and law, we condemn white supremacy and encourage frank dialogue about racism today.

Some people enjoy gardening and collecting stamps as hobbies. Daryl Davis, a black man, musician, and believer in Jesus, befriends white supremacists.

Today, about 300 people fill the seats each Sunday at the last church Martin Luther King Jr. visited before his death. Congregants of Downtown Church look at stained-glass windows original to the 1892 construction. They hear messages from their black and white pastors. They reach out to the neighborhoods they straddle—the revitalizing city to the north and the historically black, under resourced community to the south.

“How have you personally dealt with intellectual doubts about the faith?” Jason Cook—TGC editor and pastor of preaching at Fellowship Memphis—poses this question to Russ Ramsey, pastor and author of Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death (IVP, 2017), and Greg Thornbury, president of The King’s College in New York City and author of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? (Convergent, 2018).

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, President Trump’s nominee for international religious freedom ambassador, describes religious freedom as “the choice of what you do with your own soul.” If confirmed, the 60-year-old, two-term Republican governor, former U.S. senator and onetime presidential candidate would be the first politician confirmed as the ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

I can talk all day long about moral corruption in Hollywood, the secularist agenda being crammed down our throat by the media, activist judges who are misusing their positions in our country to curtail religious freedoms, the corruption and hypocrisy of groups like Planned Parenthood, and the evils of Islamic terrorism and the wickedness of religious persecution in places like Russia, China, or North Korea. But what happens when the spotlight turns on us? How many of Israel’s sins do we also see replicated in the church?

It's time for the grown-ups in Washington to make themselves known. If we've learned anything, it's to take Trump at his word when he claims he will take vengeful action if he doesn't "win." If he can't get a health bill through Congress, he has plenty of ability to damage the Affordable Care Act through pure mismanagement.

We are prone to “cause ADD,” lurching from one crisis response to another. Fueled by media coverage and critical mass on social media, we embrace Kony 2012 and child soldiers one day and “Bring Back Our Girls”—the release of Nigerian schoolgirls from Boko Haram—the next. We care about refugees when there’s an atrocity in Syria and child trafficking when movie stars champion it. And all causes fade when a big earthquake hits.

If one sentence captures the quintessential idea of America, surely it the famous assertion contained in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Almost every word of this remarkable sentence, 236 years old today, is pregnant with meaning and strikingly relevant.