Public Faith, Public Policy, and Public People in Church Leadership

Public people who make public policy will always find that their faith becomes a public issue.

People who influence public people through spiritual leadership will have a responsibility to navigate between inappropriate influence and the responsibility to be shepherds to those leaders in the arena of principles.

In a sense, all people are public in their faith, their influence on policy, and their political responsibilities.

How do we occupy our seats of responsibility?

One cannot take a sharp knife and carve out the interconnected, fibrous threads of thinking and relating to the world that comprise the psyche of a human being.

Who a woman or man is spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually is an interwoven fabric of complexity and unity with diverse entities that comprise a whole.

One can be aware however, and participate in driving the development of ones own thinking processes. One can be critical of how one thinks and why one thinks as one does.

One can challenge assumptions, prejudices, biases, and attitudes that formulate over time. Some of these may have come from surface reading of primary texts and superficial understanding of deeper teachings.?

Some may have been filtered through the lenses of limited exposure to life.

At every stage of life, and perhaps, every day, some reassessment of ones assumptions is in order.

And the basic question of where our political convictions come from is a live subject of debate in these days.

Even the definition of the term is tossed around flippantly and without consideration, some seeing policy participation as an ultimate good and some as an ultimate evil.

Referring to Etymology Online ,? "politic" derives from:

early 15c., "pertaining to public affairs," from Middle French?politique?"political" (14c.) and directly from Latin?politicus?"of citizens or the state, civil, civic," from Greek?politikos?"of citizens, pertaining to the state and its administration; pertaining to public life," from?polites?"citizen," from?polis?"city" (see?polis ). Replaced in most adjectival senses by?political . From mid-15c. as "prudent, judicious."

To break it down, it is the activity of citizen shaping their own communities and how those communities are governed.

Citizens are those enfranchised souls who form the communities and their background, ethnicities, biases, religious convictions, world-views, and attitudes are diverse.

How then, do such people work it all out??

How do they come together for common good without compromising their deepest convictions?

I would suggest that they begin with themselves as they prepare to weigh arguments that they will face and as they prepare to find common ground with their neighbors. In this brief article, I will not go far beyond that self-assessment process which involves some questions:

1. Is my faith really shaping my policy, politic, and opinion? If so, how and why? In what way? What is the true root of that faith conviction and what is the core theological presupposition that is at its root?
2. Are my policies, politic, and opinions actually shaping my faith? Am I creating a lens through which to view the world that is tinted by my own ideas, translating them into faith and then re-filtering everything else through those secondary assumptions?
3. Alternatively, and I allowing policies, politic, and opinions, mine and those of others, to inform my faith, raise timely questions that send me back to my primary sources and cause me to prayerfully think and rethink my ideas?
4. Finally, am I ultimately my faith and faith commitment to continually shape my faith and faith commitment as well as my attitudes toward policy, politic, and opinion?

Without giving answers, I charge you to work through the questions on your road to formulating participation in the body politic.

Then, teach others how to do the same.