2018 is an election year in the United States. In 2016, our last national election season revealed and exacerbated tribal lines that divide our population and our churches. Families didn’t gather that Thanksgiving over it, marriages dissolved over it, and churches came apart over it. This course will ask what Christian leadership and discipleship look like in this divided nation and how Christians on two sides of a Civil War-sized divide can stay church together. These questions face every Christian leader and every Christian in our time and place. Whether a congregation leans strongly left, strongly right, or big tent, the challenge remains, because we are all disciples whose Christ prayed “that they all may be ONE.” The glorious opportunity of this calling in our time is the prospect that Christian communities might become God’s agents of healing, not only inside the church, but in a broken nation and world.
In this course, we will raise important questions about the shape of God’s help in our day – “#Resist vs #Unite” and “#Gradualism vs #Revolution, #WhatGoodIsTheLeft?! vs #WhatGoodIsTheRight?! With one eye on the discouraging history of Christian division, we’ll cast the other eye on the divine prospect of a Spirit-forged redemptive, robust, perspective-diverse community. Dr. Hilton will help participants engage one another in honest conversation about the questions they face, and offer them skills at preaching to complex contexts and facilitating cross-political conversations and relationships in their communities.
Leadership
Rev. Allen Hilton, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of House United, a non-profit initiative he has built to bring people together across political and theological difference. He speaks, leads, and consults with churches, colleges, seminaries, denominational leaders, and corporate teams. His recent book, A House United: How the Church Can Save the World (Fortress 2018), casts a challenging vision for how to be church in this age. God prepared Allen for this work through a first career in academe (New Testament professor at St. Mary’s College of California and the Yale Divinity School) and in the church (teaching pastor in large churches in New England, the upper Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southwest). Allen lives in Austin with his wife, Liz, and their two teenage sons, Sam and Isaac.