Election Year Rule No. 1

Stop posting. Start praying.

This was the challenge lead pastor Jim Mullins issued to Redemption Church in Tempe, Arizona, as the 2020 election season approached.

On the surface, the suggestion sounds like a conversational shutdown — a call to silence, cloaked in Christian cliché. Yet, dig a little deeper, and you will discover that Mullins’ aim was to promote political discourse, not prohibit it.

Redemption Tempe experienced some intense moments during the 2016 election season. The congregation is ideologically diverse, which is something Mullins loves.

“As 2016 was getting closer and closer to the election,” Mullins said, “we started to realize that many of us — myself included — were living life on social media. The algorithms and everything conspiring against us was not creating flourishing community, but was actually tearing apart deep friendships.”

Online algorithms fortify allegiances, deepen divisions, and fracture communities. Like a stumbling block along a trail, the complex dynamics between faith and politics can cause us to lose our footing, our friends, and even our faith. What appears at first to be a pebble of partisanship can become a stone we throw at those who see things differently than we do.

Mullins and his team wanted to do things differently as the 2020 election approached. Rather than throwing stones at political “enemies,” Mullins modeled a different method.

He introduced a 10-point pledge called the “King of Kings Commitment,” which contained guiding principles for maintaining a Christlike posture during the election season. Individuals were invited to sign the commitment, agreeing to engage in humble reflection, upstanding face-to-face discussions with their political counterparts, and meaningful action.

The church arranged groups that were intentionally politically diverse to discuss various issues. The call was to understand others with a different perspective, hear their story, and work together to impact worthwhile change.

“It’s all worth discussing,” Mullins said, “Let’s do it with our primary commitment to Jesus, and let’s do it with a commitment to action. And if you can’t do that, if you’re too busy in this season to get face-to-face, to really pray, to really engage, then we would invite you to just say then you’re probably too busy to be posting on social media about it. And so [we] invited people to refrain in that way.”

The response was encouraging. “To see people who were at odds with each other online actually become and act like brothers and sisters, shoulder to shoulder, working on stuff together in that face-to-face, relational dynamic was very powerful,” Mullins shared.

Rather than allowing politics to become their pitfall, the Redemption Tempe community transformed the stumbling blocks of partisanship into faith-filled stepping stones of cooperation. They found unity — not in uniformity — but in a communal commitment to build something together.

There are stones everywhere. It is up to us whether we trip over them, throw them, or use them to build something better for the common good.