My wife, Clary, and I were talking after church. During the worship service that morning, the church where I serve as senior pastor ordained a woman to gospel ministry — the second woman the church has ordained to ministry in just under a year.
We were talking about how special and meaningful the service had been, how proud we both were of the congregation and the way the church had supported and encouraged this young minister since she was a high school student, how impactful she has been in the lives of our two children, among others.
Kris Aaron
Then Clary observed how important the ordination service was for our youth, especially for the teenage girls. Those girls seeing someone they know and care about being ordained, being affirmed and encouraged and supported — that is their expectation now. “They now expect to see both men and women ordained in church, and they won’t tolerate going to a church in the future that doesn’t accept the giftedness of both,” she said.
I’d like to think that my wife is right; I hope and pray she’s right. But those notions of tolerating and accepting and expecting have stuck with me ever since. I just can’t get out of my mind the idea that what we tolerate, accept and expect impacts us all in ways we don’t fully appreciate.
Much of what we see now, for both good and ill, is directly related to what we first tolerated, then accepted and then finally expected in the past.
For example, we now expect our elected officials, regardless of which party they represent — but especially if they are a member of the party we don’t typically vote for — to lie to us constantly. And we expect our elected officials to lie to us because we first tolerated and then accepted their lying. By and large, their lying did not impact our voting behavior. Instead, we put on partisan jerseys and voted for them anyway (including in primaries) rather than expecting the people who represent us to do better.
“We could have remembered that those who seek our vote are seeking to work for us, and we could have held them to a higher standard.”
We could have chosen differently, of course. We could have remembered that those who seek our vote are seeking to work for us, and we could have held them to a higher standard. We could have refused to vote for liars, regardless of which party they belong to, but instead we chose cynicism. We told ourselves all of them lie because that made it easier for us to sleep at night, because then it wasn’t our responsibility or our fault.
And in embracing cynicism, in refusing to accept responsibility for our decisions, we decided to forego using our agency, using our voice. And in that process, bit by bit we let go of hope.
Consequently, now people are so disgusted, so frustrated and angry that they have little hope of things ever getting better — or at least not getting better any time soon.
We see the tragic results of this embrace of cynicism, rejection of responsibility, foregoing of agency and letting go of hope all around us. For example, we tolerated the indifference, the growing income inequality between the haves and the have-nots, and the misuse of public funds. Then, we accepted it, and now finally, we sadly expect it.
Of course, the same is true in our churches. We don’t expect people to come to church regularly, to give regularly, or to serve regularly because we first tolerated and accepted it when they didn’t. It was easier to be “polite,” accept things and move on than it was to tell them the truth in love — that their spiritual health suffers when they remove themselves from healthy, vibrant Christian community.
COVID made it easier to sit in our sweatpants and watch worship from the sofa. Travel ball and lake/beach houses and college football games — you name it — made it easier to sleep in on Sunday mornings.
We listened and allowed people to claim that their faith was the most important thing to them without regularly seeing them in Christian community or seeing any signs of spiritual growth and maturity or seeing any evidence of the fruits of the Spirit in their lives. And in the process, we allowed the word “Christian” to become a social and political moniker rather than to mean someone who is a disciple of Jesus the Christ.
Now, bemoaning the state of the world has become a cottage industry lately with people searching fruitlessly for where to place the blame. But we are where we are because of what we, collectively, have tolerated, accepted and expected.
“I still have hope because I believe hope and putting forth effort are the antidotes to cynicism.”
In spite of this depressing reality, however, I still have hope. I still have hope because I believe hope and putting forth effort are the antidotes to cynicism, and I refuse to become cynical. I believe remembering we have agency — remembering we have a voice and then using it — those are the antidotes to helplessness, and I refuse to feel helpless.
I still have hope because I believe if what we tolerate, accept and expect changes, then this world will too.
We don’t have to live this way. We can choose; we can form a different future.
We don’t have to live in a country that expects mass violence or expects illness to lead to financial ruin. We don’t have to live in a country that expects rich and powerful men to be protected from accountability. We don’t have to live in a world in which there is an “online rape academy” that teaches men how to drug and sexually assault their wives.
Instead, we can make a different choice. We can not only expect, but we can demand better — because people frequently live up to expectations when those expectations are made clear. We just have to expect better.
Thus, we can expect our elected officials to tell us the truth once we quit tolerating and voting for those who blatantly and consistently lie. We can expect equity and equality once we quit tolerating bigotry, misogyny and racism and empowering those who promote it. We can expect our churches to be healthy, vibrant communities of faith instead of institutions barely struggling to get by once we ourselves put forth the effort to show up, give and serve and once we hold leadership accountable.
We can expect better. After all, the teenage girls in our youth group do. Because once we experience that which is good and healthy and holy, we won’t accept anything else. In fact, we won’t even tolerate it, and we shouldn’t.
Kristopher Aaron serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Bristol, Va. He is a graduate of McAfee School of Theology and Brite Divinity School. He is married to Clary Gardner Aaron, and they have two children.