Which "news" matters more: Ariana Grande or the evangelical church?
If you open up the BBC website, or look at the news in your Facebook feeds, most of the headlines you see tell you about trivia, like "Five people called the Met Police 8,655 times", "How do you justify selling a £2 T-shirt?", and "Athlete bitter over mesh that almost ended career". If we let the BBC, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, or Al-Jazeera tell us what matters in the world, we'll quickly discover the church of Christ doesn't make the cut. I remember when the Guardian website removed the "religion" tab from their homepage. On the BBC website, you can find stories grouped around Politics, Business, Health, Tech, Science, Family & Education, Entertainment & Arts, but nothing on religion! Religion has become invisible.
This isn't how the Bible wants us to look at the world. As Brad Bitner helpfully reminded us on Sunday, from Psalm 87, the city that matters more than any other isn't London, New York, or Tokyo, but the city of Zion (a picture of Christ's church). That city will last forever. Christ's church should interest us more than anything else.
There's a great moment in the book of Nehemiah, when Nehemiah is far away in the capital of Persia and meets some Jews. He writes in 1.2: "I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile". That's the news Nehemiah really wanted to know. The news he really wanted to hear was what was happening in Zion. That's what the Bible wants to teach us. We should care much more about how the evangelical church is doing in England or any other part of the world than the latest irrelevance about Ariana Grande!
Here are some links that give helpful news and comment from a Christian perspective with a high view of the Bible. Why not set one of them as your homepage?
Evangelicals Now – a monthly newspaper, edited by John Benton, filling you in on things happening in the British church scene and abroad.
Evangelical Times – another monthly newspaper, edited by Roger Faye, a minister up in Yorkshire.
Affinity – Affinity is a grouping of conservative evangelical churches that formed under the influence of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. It represented the desire for church unity between Christians rooted in a shared commitment to the gospel and God's word (in contrast to the ecumenical movement, which promoted unity at the expense of truth).