Christians and Swine Flu
It looks like the panic over pandemic is passing this week, but I found this Mark Galli article on Christianity Today‘s site challenging. How should the church respond to a crisis of the magnitude that the media so badly wanted us to fear last week? What role should Christians—and Christian families—play in a global pandemic?
In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark describes those dark times in Roman history when city-wide epidemics wiped out whole sections of a population. The empire would do its best to quarantine sections of cities, and those remaining were abandoned to a slow and painful death. The only people willing to risk life to care for these suffering souls were Christians. Many of them flocked to the areas most infected and literally gave their lives to care for the dead and dying. This heroic example was one reason the empire took a second look at this outlandish sect.
As parents, our understandable instinct is to protect our families from harm at all cost. But as Christians teaching our teens to demonstrate Christ’s self-sacrificing love to their hurting world, how can we demonstrate that trusting God and serving others matters more than saving ourselves?
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