I serve on the board of a church-planting organization in which half our planters are immigrants or refugees. Due to intensifying immigration policy nationwide, many now hesitate to attend work, school, and worship. Three have lost visas or TPS and are pursuing new legal paths. New laws enhance the ability of local law enforcement to question, detain, or arrest people based on immigration status, affecting at least a dozen of our members, including U.S. citizens. Last week, Congress passed a bill allocating over $100 billion to ICE and border enforcement and expanding detention capacity nationwide. In the wake of July 4th celebrations, it has me wondering: what is freedom, who is free, and on what terms?
Some conceive of freedom as primarily about security, preserving heritage, culture, and the boundaries that may require. Others see it as dismantling barriers, redistributing resources, or advancing individual autonomy and expression untethered from any inherited culture. For marginalized communities, freedom often means deliverance from systems of oppression and forging avenues of solidarity and survival. There are countless variations and combinations, each rooted in particular histories and longings.
Within congregations, these visions collide. Some expect the church to shore up old certainties and lend moral force to culture wars; others seek a faith community that champions socio-political progress (both of which if not careful risk collapsing divine transcendence into political ideology). Still others, weary and unseen, seek sanctuary from the systems that bind them. Pastors and lay leaders feel the strain, trying to meet every expectation and preference.
How do we proceed faithfully?
In part, we’re called to tunnel under these colliding versions of freedom to explore and expose the captivity that people are experiencing in their hearts, souls, minds, and spirits. This is not to neglect the necessary, ongoing, faithful work of liberating the oppressed! It is to remember and remind one another that the soul-level, spiritual freedom in Christ we desire for enduring all circumstances is inextricably bound up with joining Jesus in the work of liberating the oppressed, setting the captives free. For the disciple of Jesus, these freedoms are a package deal.
Eugene Peterson gets at this point in his translation of Galatians 5:13-15: “It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?”
Freedom that comes by wholly unconditional divine grace removes from us the burden of self-justification and judgmentalism, from the self-absorbed words, “’I thank you, God, that I am not like other people” (Luke 18:11), freeing us to love others unconditionally. This is the shape of grace that advances freedom by prioritizing humility and service instead of status, hospitality without judgment, mercy over mastery, openness more than “order”. We don’t initiate this freedom, but receive, internalize, and extend it. It manifests not as an abstract ideal, but a lived reality, echoing in the lives of those unshackled by fear and welcomed – and advocated for – in love.
Between fortress and frontier, perpetual choice and relentless control, the way forward is with and through Jesus, who proclaims that freedom is neither a fortress to protect nor a blank canvas to fill, but open arms of welcome, rest found in grace, and the daily assurance that we are already free because we are already loved. And if that’s true, what do we have to lose by extending that love and freedom unconditionally? Our status? Our being right? Our preferred cultural norms? “Winning” at politics? How about we “count it all as rubbish, that we might gain Christ and be found in him” (Phil 3:8). So then, once again, What will you do with your freedom?
Discussion prompts:
- What are the colliding versions of freedom in your ministry context?
- What do we mean by freedom in Christ, and how does that relate to other expressions or meanings of freedom?
- Are there avenues for your congregation to engage this topic in a constructive manner? What needs to happen to move in that direction? What will be the costs? What could be the fruit?
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