A group called the Alliance Defense Fund is encouraging pastors to endorse a presidential candidate from their pulpits. The leaders of this movement say they are trying to provoke a legal battle over the Internal Revenue Service restriction which, as a condition of churches’ tax exemptions, prohibits them from endorsing political candidates.
I have been a pastor for 38 years and I have never endorsed a candidate for president in any church I have served. A member of New Hope asked me recently if I would vote for a certain presidential candidate. I said, “They put curtains around the voting booth so that no one will know how I am voting.” There are some good reasons why I won’t endorse any political candidate for any office.
The main reason is that I want to be the pastor of all the members of New Hope Baptist Church. The Bible in Romans 14:19 tells us to “aim for harmony in the church and try to build each other up.” That is what I want to do: aim for harmony. Getting us divided over presidential candidates or any other candidates would promote disharmony and would keep us from building each other up.
Brent Walker, director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty wrote that pastors endorsing political candidates from their pulpits would “politicize churches more than it would Christianize politics.” I agree. We don’t want our church to pursue something as fleeting as a partisan political agenda when our purpose is to create a spiritual community that loves God and each other and reproduces followers of Jesus Christ.
Churches exist to enrich people’s spiritual lives, not act like political machines that issue marching orders to voters. Our church is tax-exempt because we are a spiritual community, not a political block. I am more interested in keeping our spiritual harmony than in keeping our tax exemption, but let’s keep both.
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