Church Marketing Sucks

Oscar Romero on the True Church

August 6, 2013 by Kevin D. Hendricks

“A religion of Sunday Mass but of unjust weeks does not please the Lord. A religion of much praying but with hypocrisy in the heart is not Christian. A church that sets itself up only to be well off, to have a lot of money and comfort, but that forgets to protest injustices, would not be the true church of our divine Redeemer.” –Oscar Romero (The Violence of Love)

Learn more about Oscar Romero in our ebook, Church Communication Heroes Volume 1: Lessons From Those Who Have Gone Before.

Post By:

Kevin D. Hendricks

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When Kevin isn't busy as the editor of Church Marketing Sucks, he runs his own writing and editing company, Monkey Outta Nowhere. Kevin has been blogging since 1998, runs the hyperlocal site West St. Paul Reader, and has published several books, including 137 Books in One Year: How to Fall in Love With Reading, The Stephanies and all of our church communication books.

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3 Responses to “Oscar Romero on the True Church”

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  the Old Adam
  August 7, 2013
  
  

  If you look in the New Testament, you’ll see scant little, if any protesting about the injustices of the Roman rulers of the day. And there was a lot of injustice. Christians should be concerned about injustice. But it is not job #1. Pointing to Christ for sinners is.

  
  
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    Kevin D. Hendricks
    August 8, 2013
    
    

    I don’t buy that. Jesus aligned himself with the poor, spoke up for the sick and the downtrodden. How many times in the Bible do we see God crying out for the fatherless, the widow and the alien?

    I think what Romero is getting at, which echoes Christ, is that we do no good if we focus on eternal things to the exclusion of what’s happening around us. Both are needed, the eternal hope of salvation and the earthly cry for justice.

    Job #1 for Jesus was to love. Oscar Romero says that if we could just love as Christ has taught us, and share that love with the world, then the violence, injustice and terrorism we see in the world would cease to be. Of course we’re fallen humanity that won’t fully happen until Christ returns, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it here and now.

    
    
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  Kevin D. Hendricks
  August 8, 2013
  
  

  Maybe I should just let Oscar Romero speak for himself:

  “The church does not want the liberation it preaches to be con­ fused with liberations that are only political and temporal. The church does concern itself with earthly liberation – it feels pain for those who suffer, for the illiterate, for those without elec­ tricity, without a roof, without a home. But it knows that human misfortune is found not only there. It is inside, deeper, in the heart – in sin. While supporting all the people’s just claims, the church wants to lift those demands to a higher plane and free people from the chains that are sin, death, and hell.” (The Violence of Love)

  
  
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