How Should Christians Respond to Crisis?

At the time of writing this article, all anyone sees in the news is COVID-19. There is a lot of fear and confusion around the virus and it can become easy for Christians to get caught up in the chaos. We can under-react and pretend like this is going to be gone tomorrow. We can overreact, sell all our 401k stock, and buy a year’s supply of toilet paper. Neither of these options is helpful or really even Biblical.

I have seen many well-tempered and well-informed responses to this crisis from Christians. So many in fact, that I thought that perhaps my writing about this was redundant. But this is a series about engaging life with proper theology and so I decided to give my take on the issue. As always there will be a livestream to discuss. The livestream for this article will be Wednesday April 15th at 8pm EST.

Your Prayers are Pointless

Recently my church had a showing of War Room. The plot of the movie revolves around a middle class African American family. The couple and their daughter are in the midst of struggles that would seem familiar to many families. They don't seem to love each other anymore and both are ignoring their daughter. The wife finds a mentor and seeks to change her family through prayer.

By the end of the movie the family is happily back together. The wife still meets with her mentor, but now seeks to find someone else to pour into. The thrust of the movie is that the prayer of the wife changed the family. Prayer works . . . at least in this movie.