By Mark A. Taylor
One stirring moment at this year”s North American Christian Convention was a video clip from Forefront Christian Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Vince Antonucci is the preacher there, and the video preceded his NACC message Wednesday morning.
“Before I Came to Forefront” featured the testimonies of former drunks and drug abusers and other lost souls whose lives had fallen apart by the time they were young adults. But they were attracted to Forefront, introduced to Jesus, and transformed into people with hope and peace and purpose.
We tend to concentrate on the spiritual victories in such stories, and that”s not wrong. But a column in The Wall Street Journal a week later reminds us that converting people to Christ accomplishes something besides saving their souls.
Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute, wrote July 9 about how the “return on human capital” in America is increasing. He pointed out that those with a college degree today earn 70 percent more than those without one, but in 1980 the differential was only 30 percent. Graduate degrees bring an earnings increase of 100 percent now, compared with 50 percent then.
And yet the percentage of the population with college degrees has been slow growing, and the number of high school dropouts remains high. Why aren”t more Americans taking advantage of today”s “return on human capital” with its possibilities for increased earnings? The reason, according to Lindsey, is a “culture gap.” This is how he describes it:
The problem is not lack of opportunity. If it were, the country wouldn”t be a magnet for illegal immigrants. The problem is a lack of elementary self-discipline: failing to stay in school, failing to live within the law, failing to get and stay married to the mother or father of your children. The prevalence of all these pathologies reflects a dysfunctional culture that fails to invest in human capital.
Without realizing it, the secular researcher Lindsey has written a mandate for evangelism. Spiritual pollution feeds cultural dysfunction, but “elementary self-discipline” takes root where hearts have changed. Every “pathology” Lindsey mentions can be healed by believing the God of the Bible and yielding to the lordship of his Son.
When addicts recover, when marriages stay whole, when respect for authority prevails, then a society prospers. Nothing will accomplish all this like infusing the culture with biblical values. And nothing will achieve that better than communicating the gospel to those who have not understood it. When they are changed by the claims of Christ, they bring the culture with them. By our evangelism, we not only populate Heaven, but we also redeem our society.
Brink Lindsey believes this redemption needs to happen. Vince Antonucci is showing us how.
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