The God who speaks - Feb. 15, 2005 http://bradjersak.com/fearnoevilfeature.html

Welcome back everyone! Thanks for checking in to this episode of The God Who Speaks. For this issue of the newsletter, I'd like to share a sneak preview of my new book, "Fear No Evil: Breaking free from the culture of fear." I believe that behind every fear you will find a lie, so obviously, hearing Christ's truth through listening prayer is a major key to freedom. It was along these lines that I interviewed Tony Campolo for the introduction. I'd like to share his answer to the first of my questions. His insights are extremely valuable:

By the way, you can now order Fear No Evil (finally) by clicking on the weblink in the above title. So much for the sales plug; now for the interview:

Brad Jersak: The government, the media, and the church tend to use fear to manipulate, control, and leverage people. I believe that using fear on people is inappropriate. I’d like to hear your comments on that.

Tony Campolo: Well, it is inappropriate. It’s very effective though. Take the last election in the United States. It was really won by the fact that one candidate was able to reassure the nation that he could provide more protection than the other candidate. The issue was, “Who can alleviate our fears most effectively?”
I think that the church does this as well. I think that through the proclamation of the gospel, we talk more about the threats that go with not accepting Christ. “You’re going to burn in hell forever. You’re going to go through these different circumstances.” Sigmund Freud once said, “The church is in the business of alleviating people’s fears. But since a lot of people don’t feel fear, it becomes the task of the church to create fear, so that they can alleviate it. The problem is,” said Freud, “that the church does a better job of creating the fears than of
alleviating them.” That’s a very scary statement and a very serious indictment. But I think there may be some truth to that.

I think that we have to recognize that there’s another way to do it. And that is to inspire people with possibilities of what can result from becoming committed to Christ, and I don’t mean just on a personal level. I believe that when we become committed to Christ, we begin to understand that through us, Jesus can do incredible things in this world. He can do much through us to eliminate the agonies of our present existential situation: hunger, war, overall poverty.

I think that Christians get so wrapped up with those statements that there will be wars and rumors of wars, that the poor you will have with you always, that they ignore the fact that Jesus really calls upon us to be peacemakers, to be agents of reconciliation. Paul teaches us to be at work in the world to drive back poverty. There are over two thousand verses in Scripture that call upon those who would follow Jesus to respond to the needs of the poor. Whenever I talk to church people, I hear them say, “Didn’t Jesus say, ‘the poor you will have with you always’?” But I think that is a description. That is not a call to give up responsibility. We can do much. I don’t think we can create the perfect world, but I do believe that Jesus will come back and join us and carry us to that kingdom. That’s what the Second Coming is all about.

So it’s about time that we recognized that the real thing that causes people to move in the right direction are visions and dreams of what could be done as we work together under the direction of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is quite clear as it says, “People will perish.” But they will perish when the young no longer have their visions and the old no longer have their dreams. Without visions and dreams, the people perish and we’re not giving people much of a vision of what they could do. We have not given them much of a vision of what we can achieve. Instead, we have operated on the basis of fear. “If you don’t do this, you are going to be punished.” So we need to change our modus operandi if we’re going to be biblical, if we’re going to be in accord with what Jesus calls us to be: people who declare good news. And fear is not good news; fear is bad news. Our mandate is to bring good news.

Thanks for tuning in. The rest of the interview is quite shocking, but I'll let you read it in the hardcopy of Fear No Evil. If you could let others know that the book is finally ready, I'd be much obliged. God bless!