What If You Knew They Would Also Come for You?
Reassessing Our Own Witness amid the Evils of the Trump Regime
Beloved,
It has been one year since our inaugural post in The Fellowship of Confessing Christians newsletter.
On this coming September 17, the FOCC’s contributing writers and co-hosts will meet in conversation to discuss the future of the Fellowship. Taking into account the increasingly questionable future of America as each passing day displays the mounting fascist guile of the Trump regime, the conversation will include some serious self-reflection as to how the FOCC can help frame the form and sustain the substance of the Christian message at this point of crisis.
While it is true that Trump’s imperial presidency, like all empires, will eventually fall, it is also true that Christ’s Church will abide.
And that’s despite the Church’s many defections. Some have falsely and futilely attempted to convert the Church into an unholy alliance with the State in the manner of kings, czars, caesars, führers, and presidents of the past who sought to co-opt the Church into sanctifying their unquenchable thirst for power. And some have despaired at the silence of the Church, as if its mission were to provide political cover rather than proclaim prophetic truth.
Together, as we in the FOCC reassess our role at the conclusion of this first year of publication, we will seek to discern the direction that our witness to the gospel should take in the face of the pressing evils that increasingly surround us.
We welcome and invite your personal input.
If you have thoughts and recommendations about the FOCC’s future, we hope you will let them be known by adding your comments to this post or by emailing them to me at charlesdavidson@substack.com. And if you have an interest in writing for the FOCC, please let me know. We would welcome a conversation with you.
As you consider the value that the FOCC newsletter has for you as a confessing Christian, and as I take a few weeks at summer’s end for self-renewal and discernment, I leave you with the familiar (and now timely) confession of the late Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemoeller, who for seven years was Adolf Hitler’s personal prisoner in various Nazi concentration camps.
Pastor Niemoeller’s solemn admission is inscribed upon a tablet at the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, Massachusetts. It is fitting that his words have come to rest upon American soil.
THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Just so, you and I face the same decision. At what point will it be too late for us to speak up?
Charles Davidson
