Church authorities confuse God’s mission in the world with a plan for their church designed to halt numerical decline. Or they feel that Christianity requires them to seek global solutions to intractable issues such as immigration or poverty. The Christian task is at once much simpler and more demanding: it is to show compassion to those who are cursed by political, social and religious systems. That’s harder than nurturing fantasies such problems can be solved – the whole of history shows they can’t – because it leads in one direction: to the cross.

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