Months after former ERLC President and current Editor of Christianity Today Russell Moore joined forces with David French, who recently came out in support of gay marriage and child genital mutilation, and Curtis Chang, who launched the website ‘Christians and the Vaccine’ where he routinely shamed Christians for refusing to get vaccinated to launch ‘The After Party” a teaching curriculum to educate Christians on how to have a proper view of politics, we have begun to see the rotten fruit of their ministry endeavor.
At The Evangelical Covenant Church’s Midwinter 2024 Conference, Curtis Chang reveals that the purpose of “The After Party” is to take the “bullseye” off pastors by moving political teaching from the pulpit to small groups, so that pastors can share their political beliefs without congregants getting mad at them for it.
“It’s tempting to think, oh god, I’ve got to preach the sermon, the sermon that will like, you know, reframe everything, solve all my problems. And that turns out to be, for most pastors, a really flawed process because the Sunday morning sermon is actually a really bad way to deal with something like politics.
It’s one-to-many communication. It’s limited. People are bound to misunderstand even a small thing you say. People will filter what you’re saying through their existing political biases. In 30 minutes, I guarantee you, if you go up on Sunday morning in most congregations and you try to preach the one sermon on politics that you haven’t been preaching on for a long time, your Monday morning inbox is going to be an ugly scene.
And that’s honestly why most pastors or many pastors don’t preach on politics on Sunday morning because they instinctively know ‘my Monday morning inbox is going to look awful if I do that.’ So the challenge we need is to give churches and pastors a way to head in towards healthy Christian politics that doesn’t force them to preach this magical Sunday morning sermon that will solve everything.
And The After Party is our attempt to do that so that you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting and also, frankly, you don’t have to take the bullseye, right?
You don’t have to take the bullseye, right? Because this way, if you run The After Party in your small group community, in your Bible studies and so forth like that, then if people get mad, they get mad at Curtis, Russell and David. They get less mad at you. You can have plausible deniability, right?You could just say, ‘Hey, you know I don’t agree with everything these guys say, but I think they’re worth listening [to].’ That’s the classic move, you know, you do make as a pastor, right? To, uh, you want to inject something but, you know, not have to take all of the shots for it, which you shouldn’t have to take all the shots for. That should be part of our job, is to do that. This is, that’s the partnership here.”
Commenting on the clip, Josh Daws notes that “This clip is representative of how many of these gospel-centered parachurch organizations work. They encourage pastors to focus narrowly on the gospel while these organizations disciple people with bad application that smuggles in leftism and egalitarianism.