By Charles W. Colson

One thing the last election clearly does. It shatters any false security Christians might have felt because a president sympathetic to our views was in the White House. It should cause us soberly to assess who we are, what we've been doing, and what strategies God would have us pursue in the future.

This is a good thing. For the strategies evangelicals have followed over the past decade have not worked. As I wrote in my book, The Body, ChristianvaluesareinretreatonalmosteveryfronL Two-thirds of the American people believe there are no moral absolutes, and half as many people today believe the Bible to be true as did in the 1960s. We live in a post-Christian culture.

Why did we fail in the 1980sùthat era of evangelical enthusiasmù to change people's attitudes for the better? Why are we losing ground? There are three principal answers to that question.

LOSING GROUND

First, we were politicized. While it is good for Christians to be active in politics, to work for moral issues and candidates, there is an important balance to be struck. When our focus is completely political, then people can dismiss us as just another extremist interest groupùthe "Religious Right". As is now painfully clear, when Christians marry one political agenda, theyareheldcaptiveto it When their political spouse losespower, they do too. Those who live by the political sword also die by it.

Second, some of our leaders fell. Their well-publicized scandals caricatured the rest of us; Christians became the butt of ridicule and suspicion.

Third, we neglected the basics. In our desire to reverse America's moral slide, we rushed off on all sorts of energetic entrepreneurial crusades and movements. Well-intentioned, but we forgot the truth that being precedes doing. We must first be holy people before we can bring a holy influence into society. And the institution by which we are equipped to be holy people is not the U.S. Congress. It is the church.

Have we really forgotten this most basic truth of all? Has our political fervor blurred our focus on God's revealed plan for the redemption of the world? Itis His Body: the living, vibrant community that spans centuries and continents, whose purpose and mission and character cannot be boxed by political agendas, whose power is dependent solely on the living Christ and the in-dwelling presence of His Holy Spirit

BACK TO BASICS

Whether we are distressed, pleased, or neutral about the results of the election, the message for all of us is clean as believers, we must get back to basics. Though, we of course, must continue to contend for Christian truth in every area of life, politics included, our primary task is not to build political power structures. It is to build the church. The church is the only institution on earth that is supematuralry endowedù the only one, Jesus promised, against which the gates of hell itself cannot stand!

When we grasp this truth, all else pales by comparison. Election results, court decisions, anti-Christian bias in the mediaùare these really more powerful than the promise of the King of Kings?

Our brothers and sisters in the former Eastern bloc know the power of that promise. For decades they were oppressed, imprisoned, driven underground by a government system that was determined to destroy Christianity. They had absolutely no political power at all.

But the church could not be destroyed...and in the end, it was the church triumphant that brought the fall of Communism. It was the cross of Jesus Christ that triumphed, because people's hearts and minds had been changed by the power of Jesus Christ No government on earth can stop that revolution within!

It's ironic: I have been a lifelong Republican, and for many years my fortunes and my state of mind were tied to the fortunes of the Republican party. Today, as the conservative presidency, legislators, and referenda across the country have been defeated, I am not dismayed. I am greatly concerned over the issues, of course, but I feel a renewed sense of energy and vision and purpose.

This is an historic opportunity. Itis time to build the church. As our brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe can tell us, we will not win the culture war, either with bullets or with ballots. Wewon'twinitbecause "our man" is sitting in the White House.

We will win it by building up the Body of Christ Our place is on our knees, in the streets helping people in need, winning our neighbors and colleagues to a Christian world view by speaking the truth in love. We will win die cultural war one house, one block at a time, as God's people are trained and equipped by the church, and then go out and live their faith in the world. That's how we' 11 bring about real moral – and political – change.

Remember that through history, movements that truly change cultures come from the bottom up. Only in rare cases have societies been changed from the top down. Ground swells of social change come from the people, not from the palaces.

This is the hour for the church!

* Colson, the leader of Prison Fellowship, and world authority on prisonreform, sent this excerpted letter to hissupporters soonafterthe election last November.