Bishop Raymond Rivera explains his framework of “captivity theology” and the models of ministry in the city that become possible when we recognize we all minister in the context of captivity.
Christianity is declining in the West. How will the church respond?
Redeemer City to City's "How to Reach the West Again" podcast takes the insights of author and pastor Timothy Keller's book of the same name—and explores them in greater detail with a host of guest ministry leaders.
Join us as we examine ourselves, our culture, and Scripture to work toward a new missionary encounter with Western culture that will make the gospel both attractive and credible to a new generation.
Brandon O’Brien: Welcome back to How to Reach the West Again, a podcast that aims to inspire and empower a fresh missionary encounter with Western culture. I’m your host, Brandon O’Brien.
This season we’re talking about cities—what are they? What does the Bible say about them? How do we plant churches there? What does it mean to love our cities?
Our guest today is a highly regarded and immensely influential leader of a catalytic contextual ministry in New York City’s South Bronx neighborhood. Bishop Raymond Rivera is founder and president of the Latino Pastoral Action Center (abbreviated as LPAC) and, as I learned in his book, has participated in countless initiatives and projects to better the circumstances of his neighbors. He authored a book called Liberty to the Captives: Our Call to Minister in a Captive World, which provides much of the shape of our conversation today.
In addition to modeling contextual ministry, Bishop Rivera offers a framework for cultural engagement in cities. He begins with recognizing that all of us, in our different ways, minister in the context of captivity.
Brandon O’Brien: Bishop Rivera, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. We're very excited to talk about your book, but also about your ministry and your insights on what it means to be a church that engages the city in a fruitful, effective, and loving way. And so, we thank you for coming down.
Ray Rivera: It's my pleasure.
Brandon O’Brien: Very often at Redeemer City to City, when we talk about the need for ministry in cities, we frame the conversation in terms of the movement of people into cities. People are moving into cities, our urban areas are growing, and the church is not keeping pace with the growth, in keeping with the population rise. So, very often we're talking about moving into or thinking about the city as a mission field, but your ministry, as a lifelong New Yorker, you didn't move in for ministry and you're not working for a population that is often considered in some of the materials when we talk about people who move into the cities.
I'd love to get your perspective on what it means to minister in the city from, I feel, a population or a part of the city that's often neglected in these conversations. As we begin, if you could start by just describing for us the contexts that you've ministered in over the last almost 50 years.
Ray Rivera: Well again, thank you for having me on this podcast that's connected in some way to the Redeemer City to City movement. I am always honored to participate. So, the context of my ministry, now over 50 years, 53, 54 years I've been a pastor in the city, I pastored in my first church at 19 years old, and that's because in the Pentecostal context where I come from, you have a conversion experience.
Right away you are motivated by others to go into Bible Institute and in the Bible Institutes, in the indigenous Pentecostal context you don't need a bachelor's to study the Bible, so you can just go right in. I wasn't even a high school graduate at that time because I had left school, and then I studied there for three years and in my fifth year after that, my pastor asked me and said, "Look, I'm going to send you to a church." So, there I saw myself, 19 years old, and they sent me to this small storefront church, that was the early '70s, late '60s, and the phenomena of storefront churches was a very dominant theme in New York City life, black and Latino, Puerto Rican, storefront churches, mostly coming out of a Pentecostal tradition.
So, there were 12 members, there were three families, and I always say they were all feuding with each other because in our conference, the way they tested if you had a calling, they sent you to the worst church possible. So there I was, 19 years old with these three families feuding with each other and I became a pastor in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Sunset Park was predominantly a Puerto Rican neighborhood, but it bordered Bay Ridge and Park Slope. Bay Ridge then was a lower middle class neighborhood, pretty much European ethnic, Italian, Irish, that type of thing. Now it's become interesting, more and more Muslim. Then, on the other side was Park Slope, which has always been below 4th Avenue, was a Puerto Rican community, but then it became the place where yuppies began to move into and upward-mobile, young white people.
So, that was the context and Sunset Park was right in the middle of it, in between Bay Ridge and Park Slope. So of course, the Puerto Rican community, it was a community of poverty, all the demographics had all the socioeconomic, and political, and cultural problems that the Puerto Rican community had in the late 60s, early 70s, so it was in that context that I began to minister. Since I had to do a tent ministry, because of course 12 people couldn't support a salary, so the first job that I got, and I'm going to date myself with this, was in President Johnson's war on poverty, and I got a job as a community organizer.
Not that I was thinking of running for president, but that was my first job, and they put me to organize welfare recipients. So, I was organizing welfare recipients, trying to raise their consciousness, after my training that they could demand a larger budget that would meet their needs. So during the daytime, that resulted in confrontations with the welfare system, picketing, demonstrating, taking over welfare centers. That was the height of the national welfare movement that began in the 60s and the 70s, and I would teach the people, the women, "You can change the system now," and I would even learn chants where they would chant that back. "We can change the system now," but since I was Pentecostal and came from a dispensationalist, eschatological, end-time type orientation, which basically said, "In the evening, we can't do nothing. We have to wait for the Lord. The hope of the churches for the Lord to come."
So, in the morning and the afternoon I was telling the women, "We can change the system now," and at night I was telling the people, "No, we can't do nothing. We have to wait for the Lord to come." So, that produced in me this existential duality. I didn't even know what those words meant then, but there was this creative tension and it began to raise in me the question that I deal with in my book, Liberty to the Captives, and I've been dealing for the last 50 years and I continue to deal with it, which is basically, does the gospel respond to personal transformation and systemic transformation? Does the gospel respond to the needs that I was facing during the day with these women and in their personal lives? And, did it respond to this system that was oppressing them and that was really disenfranchising them and disempowering them? That was the beginning of that journey, and it's lasted 50 years because the community that my first parish was in was a community that was totally dominated by poverty.
Brandon O’Brien: Bishop Rivera’s mature reflection on this question—how does the gospel address both personal sin and systemic injustice?—is a framework he calls “captivity theology.” Captivity theology is a way of reading both our own spiritual and physical situation, as well as a way of reading and applying the Bible. So listen for that dynamic as we go along.
Ray Rivera: Well, from the beginning in that parish, I was there anywhere from six to seven years, the church grew from 12 people to about 135. We were in the storefront, I bought a Lutheran Norwegian temple that had declined in membership. I bought that, but from the very beginning, because I was dealing with a community that was impoverished, I began to provide services, summer day camps, after school centers, and I began to understand that, yes, the gospel that I was preaching which was gospel-centered from a Pentecostal context, which implies evangelical also, the focus on personal transformation, not evangelical as we know it today, but certainly that element of personal transformation was there. If a man or woman be in Christ, they were a new creation, if you'll know the truth, the truth shall set you free. If the son set you free, you should be free indeed.
And, I reached out and there were gangs in Sunset Park at that time, and I was trying to minister to them, and many of the young people that began to get converted using our language saved. They had a personal transformation and their lives were changing, but at the same time of the community, as far as the systems, the individual transformation didn't impact them because the contrast that was so amazing, I felt it then there was a tension, but I hadn't articulated it, and even in this book, I do, but not as well as I'm going to do in the second book that I'm writing. The same experience in Christ that transformed my people, and they became from being poor, they became working class. Maybe some of even them became lower middle class by the definition of those times, so here they prospered.
If they were drug addicts, they were no longer drug addicts. If they were involved in vices, the Lord changed their lives, they weren't involved in vices. If they were not good family people, the Lord had strengthened their families. If they weren't good fathers or mothers, that personal transformation took place, and here they were, some of them started buying homes. At that time, the American dream was still real. You could buy a home, not like now, but that same upward mobility that the gospel produced in a socioeconomic, sometimes political context, disconnected them from their community, disconnected them from the context of poverty.
Some of them, if I wasn't careful in my discipling, even developed condescending attitudes about the poor because, "If I made it, why shouldn't they make it?" So, it's almost a subtle implication that's pretty dominant in the white Pentecostal evangelical church, that almost the subtle implication is that Jesus died to make you middle class. So, if you prosper economically that somehow is tied in your mental framework to spirituality or to God working in your life, which could be, but at the same time, it could be disconnecting you from the real mission of the church.
Brandon O’Brien: It would mean then that rather than trying to challenge systems in the broader economic or social realities, you're benefiting from them because you're moving up into those systems. They become comfortable for you and not marginalizing.
Ray Rivera: That's right, and you have a certain amount of success within them. So if you're not careful, which I believe is what happens, and I challenge my friend Tim on that at times, if you're not careful, you sanitize the system. You say that it's okay, and you almost say that it's God's will for that system to exist, so you begin to take the fall that is not only an individual fall, but it's a cosmic fall, all the systems and structures are falling.
We're in Manhattan and it's economically strong and maybe politically strong, and people may not feel as oppressed as maybe people in the hood do, but the fact of the matter is Manhattan is just as fallen as Sunset Park or the South Bronx. It's just a different expression of fallenness. It's more respectable, it's more acceptable, so the implication then becomes, how are you not only pastoral to the people in Sunset Park, to the people in the South Bronx, and you are prophetic to them because just because they're poor, that doesn't mean in some way they're not participating in that fallenness, but usually people in Manhattan get a pass because they look more respectable. Their sin is more acceptable under the guise of respectability.
We get young people at LPAC from all over the country. They come on these little mission trips for 10 days and I receive them and all the kids, they're all excited because they're coming to Babylon. We're Babylon here in the city and they're salivating at the mouth because they're going to really deal with the worst sinners in the world, and they've been raising money in their hometown to come here on these ministry projects, and I used to give the orientation. I made it a point, and they've continued that tradition when I do the orientation to say, "I'm glad you're here. Praise the Lord you're here. You're passionate about sharing the gospel, and I'm so happy about that. So, I'm going to take you to where the worst sinners are in New York City." And all of them, you see their faces, they get excited, and then when I lift them up and they're thinking that I'm talking about the hood, I say, "I'm taking you to Wall Street." And then I say, "Because here in the hood, we steal pocket books, but at Wall Street they steal whole nations."
So see, that's the way I talk about captivity. There's the captivity of poverty, there's the captivity of affluence. Everything has been affected by the fall. If you look at the Genesis narrative, yes, men and women were separated from God. They were separated from each other. Cain killed Abel, but the environment produced thistles and thorns. So, the fall wasn't an individual fall, it was a cosmic fall. The fall affected systems and structures and ideology. So I usually say rhetorically, nothing is as it was intended to be. Everything has been affected in the fall. if you're a traditionalist, or even maybe a reformer within Calvin thought, your nuance is that you change the world through the stewardship of your gift.
So if you're an investment banker, be an honest one, be one that has integrity, but be the best you can. The subtle nuance implication is wherever you're at, reformed theology says, and that's your contribution into changing the world and transforming the world, but the point that I raised, if the whole apple is rotten, if the whole system is rotten, can you really change it by your individual gift if you are not conscious that in and of itself what you are participating in is fallen? If that perspective is not clear, people in mainstream America or Middle America, they live like everything's okay. This is God's will, this God's plan for things to be the way they are, which is not. It's a result of the fall and in the new heaven and in the new earth and in the final consummation and restoration of things, things are not going to be like that.
Brandon O’Brien: And, I think it's really helpful that you frame the language of our situation in terms of captivity, rather than just the language of fallenness, which you have described here that they go together. It's not one or the other.
Ray Rivera: One of the things I say is that the fall, in the biblical narrative, ushered in captivity. So yes, the disobedience in the Genesis narrative of Adam and Eve, and prior to that, we can talk about the theological implications of that, but certainly after or before we see bondage to self, we see all the results of that fall and it ushered in captivity. So, that's the way I explain it, and of course, one of the things that's been surprising to me and I'm blessed by is I go all over the country, the book seems like yesterday, but it's almost a decade old now, I meet white evangelicals that say, "Dr. Rivera, I went through a deconstruction period of deconstructing white evangelical theology, but I had problems because it's not only about deconstructing, it's about reconstructing, and then I didn't have any place to go in reconstructing it because my spiritual formation and my tradition rejected progressive liberal theology.” They tell me, "But, your language helped me. It gave me a biblical language to be liberationist-oriented without discounting the Bible.”
Brandon O’Brien: I think it gives potentially a new imagination for engaging a city through the ministry of the local church. You've alluded to this already, that if you say, "My primary contribution to the renewal of all things is if I'm a banker to just be the best banker I can be, or if I'm a teacher to be the best teacher I can be," that's one mode of engaging for transformation in your neighborhood, but if you then accept that all of that is happening in the context of captivity, how does that for you shift how you understand our role in the transformation of things?
Ray Rivera: Well, it's almost like, yes, you've gone through the renewal experience depending on what wing of the church you're in. You're born again, you're spiritually mature, and you're growing in your faith and your discipleship, let's say in a Redeemer context, the way Tim Keller did where he engaged all these young investment bankers and these upward-mobile young people, I think he affirmed their gifting, and certainly he included them in God's overall plan of salvation, but in his writings, he critiqued the system. He also said there's something fundamentally wrong with the system. To some people, not to their liking, they may feel that he didn't go far enough. To others, he went too far. So you have that challenge when you do that.
This brings me into my other word that I use a lot and that's “holistic,” and I discovered holistic, not from holistic health where it probably was when it first appeared in the late 60s, but the first theologian that I heard used the term holistic was Orlando Costas and Orlando, I got to know him well. He was a mentor of mine when you came here, and I was so amazed that he was a liberation theologian, and talked about personal transformation and systemic sin and personal sin, but he still was evangelistic. He still believed in proclaiming the gospel. So, that I think is the challenge to those of us that are gospel-centered, those of us that still believe that the word of God has the ultimate answer for our cities and is to be integral, to be holistic, to be Christ-centered, and speak about personal transformation, but also to speak truth to power, not to sanitize systems.
And, I guess to the people that are hearing me in mainstream America, your greatest temptation and greatest challenge is not to confuse the gospel with U.S. ideology, not to marry the gospel to the American civil experience because they're not the same. Certainly there are elements of redemptive history within the history of our country, and one of the things I tell white young people is, "Listen, you got heroes.” Yes, there was slavery. Yes, the majority of the founders of the Constitution were slave owners. You see, that's the context and you can't forget that context because if you forget that context, then you almost forfeit your ability to also speak to personal sin, to speak to institutional sin, but at the same time, when I'm speaking to white, young people, I say, "Listen, yeah, they were slave owners, but they were abolitionists. Yes, there were women that stood on the side of sexism, but there were suffrage evangelical women too."
In other words, there is a counter movement within the white dominant efforts of American civil religion. So, you can connect to that tradition. In the civil rights movement there were people that stood for the gospel and a holistic perspective. You just have to discern it and you have to begin to identify. there is a prophetic tradition also in gospel-centered evangelical folks that while they maintained their evangelism, they also spoke truth to power, and I think we need that to surface at this particular time. And, people like Keller did it in his own context, I think I'm doing it, and I think there's others, and I think there's a whole generation, the white urban church planner types that they're struggling with the issue of being holistic, and I think that's what's exciting at this time.
Brandon O’Brien: One of the things I found the most helpful about your book and in a series of talks and other things is the four paradigms that you develop about how to engage the in ministry from the context of captivity, and I think sometimes we can talk about cultural engagement as if we opt into one mode or another, or we try to balance various tensions. I like that you gave these four paradigms as all appropriate, but necessary under different circumstances, and I wonder if you could unpack those for us.
Ray Rivera: And it's interesting, I've been doing ministry, like I said, for over 50 years, and this was my first book and it took me four years because I never reflected on it. So, when they asked me the question, why do you do what you do? That's when I really started thinking of what I did experientially and existentially, and I came up with captivity theology and holistic ministry that to me go hand in hand. So, what I say that the Bible unfolds in captivity. It starts in the Genesis narrative, but then if you want to go to Egypt, that's the Egyptian captivity, and then if you continue, then there's the Persian captivity, then there's the Babylonian captivity, during New Testament is the Roman captivity. So, the Bible unfolds in captivity. The covenant community is usually in a same situation of captivity. Sometimes they're the victims of a conquering power, like when Babylon destroyed the city in the book of Nehemiah. I have different studies that I do.
So, my community development study is based on Nehemiah because there they're in their own country. See, that's not systemic engagement, they're building up their own community. So to me, that's community development, Nehemiah, but Babylon is systemic engagement because there they're within the power. You follow the difference?
So, I do a study on systemic engagement, on community development, but what I do in the book, I take the situations of captivity and how the covenant community navigated them, and I don't use all of the illustrations in the book because the whole Bible unfolds in captivity. So, I have much more material than the ones in the book. What I share is just the four general paradigms.
Brandon O’Brien: I’m interjecting here to make the descriptions of the four paradigms a little easier to follow. The first paradigm is “confrontation.”
Ray Rivera: And what I say is in the confrontation paradigm, that's Moses and he confronts Pharaoh, no negotiation, no navigating, no compromising. He says, "Listen, you can go but leave the animals."
He said, "No, I'm not leaving them."
"You can go, but leave the children."
"No, I'm not leaving them. Let my people go."
In other words, he goes for the jugular, it's confrontation and I say sometimes God calls us to confrontation. We got to confront the system head on. Martin Luther King in a “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he confronts the white pastors. They come to him, they say, "Well, why have you come here causing all this trouble in Birmingham? You're in jail." And what is his rhetorical answer? "Why are you not in jail?" In other words, sometimes God calls us to confront the system. It's a “thus sayeth the Lord” type moment, “Let my people go,” and that's legitimate. And during the history of the church, we've seen that. We saw that in with Bonhoeffer in Germany, and we see that with all the movements where the church confronts power.
Brandon O’Brien: The second paradigm is “collaboration.”
But, then I'd say that in the Persian captivity, there Nehemiah and Ezra, that's one book in the Hebrew scriptures, it's not confrontation because when the king sees Nehemiah sad and asks him why, he says, "My people have been destroyed, the city had been destroyed."
He says, "What can I do for you?"
Nehemiah says, "Well, give me permission, and I want to go rebuild the city." And he prays, I talk about that in the essay that I do in a deeper way than the book that he prays, he seeks the Lord, then he comes back and he says, "What can I do for you?" And, then Nehemiah does the answer. He says, "Well, I want you to give me material to build a temple, and then I want to give you to give me a military escort, so I can navigate all of this journey without people attacking me."
And then I get a little sarcastic, I say, "And, then I want you to give me material to build my own house." So, he was looking out for himself to a point and what I say there, it's not confrontation of the power, it's collaboration. And I ask the rhetorical question, “Does the Bible give us permission to collaborate with systems outside the covenant community, even if they're fallen?”
And I answer, “Yes,” because he did take resources from the empire. He took resources from the fallen system and utilized them for kingdom purposes, so that has a lot of implications in the neighborhood. Could you partner with secular groups? Could you partner with people that are not part of the covenant community? And the answer is yes, you got to be discerning. What fellowship does light have with darkness? You got to still be discerning, but I think in this paradigm the answer is yes, you can collaborate with power at times.
Brandon O’Brien: The third paradigm is “civic engagement.”
Ray Rivera: In the third paradigm, which I call civic engagement, and it's during the Babylonian Empire there again, they're in a situation of captivity and the three Hebrew children and Daniel are there in the first chapter, that very interesting text where it says that the king educated them in the language and the science of the Babylonians. And he said, "Take the best among them, get the cream of the crop," which that's typical, in my opinion, oppressive methodology. He always takes the best of the colonial subjects, and then he tries to assimilate them, acculturate them. So, he put them into training, he changed their names, he changed their uniforms. So what was the purpose?
He was trying to disconnect them from the God of Israel because in disconnecting them from the God of Israel or their own history or their own culture, the God of Israel was part of that. So, they were astute and they said, "Okay, we'll take the science, we'll take the language, but we reject the meat." They rejected the food, and I used that as a metaphor to say that what that meant is you have to master the tools of the empire, and that was the education and the language. If we want to be successful in the fallen system, you have to learn how to speak their language, you have to master their language. But to me, rejecting the meat was a metaphor to reject what nurtures you, you see? So, they stayed close to their own food. They stayed close, and I think even though you master the tools of the empire, you got to stay close to what forms you, to the Bible, to prayer, to pietism, to those traditions that will keep you rooting. And of course, after 10 days, they looked at them and they did well. And, what happened? He promoted them and they became governors. So, that's why I call it civic engagement.
In the first paradigm, you confront the system. In the second paradigm, you collaborate the system. In the third paradigm, you enter the system, you become part of the system. They became governors. So to me, that answers the question rhetorically, “Does the Bible give you permission to enter the system?” And, the answer is yes because they became governors, they were instrumental, they interpreted visions, they did good work, but in that narrative, it gives you a warning. And, the warning is that sometimes your faith and your loyalty's going to be tested because the king got up one day, he had a dream and he built a statue, and then he developed a decree and said that at the sound of the flute every subject of the kingdom of the empire must bow.
So, there basically a warning to those that enter the system is “You got to be careful because the fallen system may ask you to bow, and that means there the loyalty, who are you loyal to, Kingdom principles or the fallen system or the empire?” So, of course you know the quest, you know the story, we've preached on it 100 times. He said, "Which God will free you?" He said, "The Kingdom we serve," but then they said, even if he doesn't free, we're still not bowing, and they were willing to pay the price, and sometimes we've gotten funding from public agencies during our 30 year history, LPAC, but at times I've given the money back or at times I haven't wanted to accept their values. You're going to have to decide whether you're going to bow or you're going to be thrown in the lake of fire and you know the story there, the Lord helped them anyway, but sometimes you're going to have to pay the consequences for not bowing.
Brandon O’Brien: The fourth paradigm is “confronting your own community.”
Ray Rivera: And that's Jeremiah, and I used him as a prototype that he was always speaking against his own covenant community. They didn't receive it well, they called him a pessimist, they called him a traitor, they put him in jail, they called him a cynic. So, there I raised a question that sometimes your own covenant community will treat you worse than fallen systems, but you have to be willing to also pay that price.
And, that may mean secular to your own Latino community or to the church, which there I apply it, and I give it a dual application that sometimes I've had to go against even my own cultural community, but sometimes I've had to go against my own church.
In the last paradigm, you may be called to confront your own local church. You may want to do something, they may not want to do it. So, you may have to confront your own board, and there may be consequences to that. It doesn't mean you have to tear up your local church, but it may mean that you may have to leave if you're really not comfortable with what your church is doing because the universal church is larger than that.
So, there's a lot there. These things can be seen individually, but they're not sequentially. Sometimes you can start in confrontation and end up collaborating. Sometimes you can start in collaborating and end up confronting. Sometimes you can start in one of those two and get into civic engagement and run for office or get an important position within the system. So, sometimes you can be doing all three of those things at the same time. In some areas you're confronting, in some areas you're collaborating, in some areas you're working within the system, and you're confronting your own community, but you're part of that community. Since I'm a church person, I believe in the church. So, I'm not one with all the young ones who say, “I’m giving up on the church," and all of that. I'm not there. I believe that the body of crisis is the body of Christ, I'm a committed church person. And, I don't think there's enough of a biblical foundation. You say that you give up on the church because one of the things that I do in a situation of captivity, when in the book of John, when he writes Revelation, he writes to the seven churches of Asia Minor, and every church was messed up. The first one had even lost its first love, and that was the one that was doing okay, and now the seat was neither cold nor hot, but if you notice Jesus spoke to all of them. He always called them, he always affirmed them, rebuked them.
So to me, the concept, I really still believe that, “Upon this rock I'll build the church in the gates of hell.” If the Lord gives me time, the larger picture will be, I'll be speaking about other situations of implications from doing ministry in a situation of captivity. These are not the only examples. In other words, you can go to so many others of the implications of doing ministry in a fallen world and the tension that that requires.
Brandon O’Brien: As you're unpacking these paradigms, four ways to engage the broader culture from the context of captivity, it seems to me that there are some communities who feel the pressure of the broader culture, either differently or more heavily than others. So, I think if you're already pretty comfortable in using the tools of the empire, to use that language, then you may feel like that's the only way that you need to engage. If you're not even anywhere near having access to those tools, you may feel like you need to engage a different way. In your view, what's the most fruitful way for Christian communities, say those are represented by Midtown Manhattan, and those that are represented by the South Bronx to work together to engage a city together? What can they learn from each other, ideally, in your view?
Ray Rivera: So, I think certainly one of the ways that they can collaborate is financially because they have more of the wealth. Another one is their gifting.
I think in your discipleship, in the theology that informs you, you have to contribute to the whole church. And if you put your resources in that, I think it's a better witness because in some places, what has deteriorated into reconciliation and deteriorated into a multicultural church is that people eat each other's food and they dress up in each other's native costumes. They have one day a year doing that, but there's some cultural assimilation, but I don't think that's the thing. It's structural assimilation. Are you sharing the decision making power? Are you helping to confront the fallenness, so there will be more equity as the Kingdom manifests itself?
Now, as we wait for its consummation, are you participating in those struggles or in those struggles are you basically still the same? You support the status quo, you don't support change. You're okay as a catalyst for personal transformation, but when it deals with systemic transformation, as you said, since you are pretty comfortable, you're doing well, you don't see any need for change and you use cliches and rhetoric, which by the way, happens to be true at some level that this is the best country in the world.
All of that is true, but to say that eliminates fallenness, and to use that as an excuse to say that there's no confronting sin, and to say that fundamentally there's nothing wrong with the richest country in the world still not providing healthcare for its people, while the Bible says in Kingdom literature that in that day the infant will not die of 100 and the senior will live to 100, to be against housing for the poor when prophetic Kingdom literature says that in that day everyone will have their own house to live under.
To be against immigration, when the Bible clearly says receive the stranger, receive the immigrant, and to put state policies above kingdom policies... That's not to say that you should not be for some level of secure borders. That's not to say that, but where does your vision of come from? Does it come from the Kingdom, or does it come from politics that support you and perpetuate the status quo? When you hear policies that talk about full employment and employment opportunities, is that what informs you, a conservative political agenda or are you more rooted in Kingdom literature that says in that day they should finally live in houses that they built? So, there is a view of Kingdom that has policy implications, not in the future, but now if you read into them, what the Bible says. So, to me that's the best way, but what has happened is, in my opinion, the focus is so much on multiculturalism, and I think more of the focus should be on authentic discipleship.
How do you disciple your people, so that they don't confuse American ideology with Kingdom, or if you lived in Russia, Russian ideology? Because this is a universal thing. I think that's the challenge, and one of the interesting things I read a couple of years ago, I was rereading some articles on Bonhoeffer and it said when Christian nationalism began to rise in Nazi Germany, the underground church under Bonhoeffer, one of the immediate reactions of that church, and what nurtured them and fed them was small Bible studies. They went back to the Bible as the dominant culture was becoming more nationalistic. So, the Bible has always, and look at liberation theology, again, small based communities, going back to scripture to inform you, you see?
And, I'm not for the white evangelicals or moderate evangelicals that say, "Oh, this is just another one of those radicals downing America." I'm not saying that at all because yes, the fundamentalist left likes to talk about the atrocities committed under the name of Christ and Christianity, but they don't like to talk about the millions that Stalin killed or that Mao killed. So, I'm saying it's all fallen, Marxism, socialism, capitalism, and we have to work within these fallen systems, but that our ultimate loyalty, understanding that we minister in a captive world, our ultimate loyalty is to the kingdom of God.
Brandon O’Brien: Amen. Thank you so much, Bishop Rivera, for being with us today.
Ray Rivera: Well, thank you for the opportunity.
Brandon O’Brien: Bishop Rivera’s book, Liberty to the Captives, is available wherever books are sold. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m partial to bookshop.org.
Next time on the podcast, we have Robert Guerrero, a church planting catalyst for City to City in North America and the Caribbean. Robert discusses how centering the margins in church planting could reshape our imaginations for what successful city ministry looks like. You won’t want to miss it.
How to Reach the West Again is a production of Redeemer City to City.
Today’s interview was recorded at Gotham Production Studios in New York City and edited by Lee Jerkins.
The episode was produced, written and hosted by Brandon O’Brien. Our associate producer is Braeden Gregg.
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