The following student report was submitted by Ambassador League Agent Luke W. during the 2009-2010 League.
Mission: Read Roaring Lambs by Bob Briner
Author Bob Briner delivers a call to Christians to be roaring lambs that have salt flying from their mane, preserving and flavoring their hunting grounds. At the beginning of his book, “Roaring Lambs," he stirs us up by reminding what it means to be salt.
Referring to where Christ talked about being the salt of the earth, Briner said: “This salt Scripture is so familiar, so much a part of the evangelical vernacular, that it has lost much of its power." He declares that salt is anything but “tame." Instead it is the “cutting edge."
Briner argues that we have become irrelevant because of our isolation and as a result the nation has become irreverent. In Briner's most indicting critique of Christians he submits:
“We feel like we are making a difference because we are so important to ourselves. We have created a phenomenal subculture with our own media, entertainment, educational system, and political hierarchy so that we have the sense we're doing a lot. But what we've really done is create a ghetto that is easily dismissed by the rest of society."
Instead of running from sacrilege into the Christian ghetto, Briner argues, Christians must salt it. We must be like Lot, the last righteous man among irreligious people. He argues that the battlefield for Christians is on ground that we have surrendered – the culture of mass society and specifically the arts.
He submits that Christians need to be in the print media offering spiritual light on a dark world. Briner points to cartoonist Johnny Hart as an example of a lamb who roared. On a Good Friday, Hart used his cartoon to preach the Gospel: “You, who were bought by the blood of his cross / You can call ‘Good Friday' good." Hart used his material in major newspapers as a pulpit. The battle, Briner believes, is in the big league newspapers not the smaller, more Christian friendly publications.
Christian movies are absent in a godless media; he believes it is godless because there are not enough Christians working in the field. Some, Briner argues, have done well in this arena. He points to Chariots of Fire, the story of Eric Liddell, the famed Scottish runner who would not run on Sunday, as a good example of a Christian movie. Good movies, not a boycott of bad movies, are the Briner solution to a media full of bad matters.
When considering the garbage on television, Briner repeats his mantra that good shows can replace bad shows and “lighting a candle is better than cursing the darkness." Funded boycotts of television shows are not nearly as good as pooling efforts together to form better programs.
Art always needs a savior, rather, the Savior. Art that used to glorify God's creation now mocks the Creator. The glorious cross on which eternity turns is thrown into a jar of a yellow liquid and the elite call it art. Right images must answer the wrong images.
Briner said he didn't have all the answers and I believe that was an astute observation. He complains that we have created a Christian ghetto but when addressing television shows, he rips the Christian networks for not carrying his own program suggestions.
When the same art show that has a urine soaked crucifix won't display the work of a young and upcoming Christian artist, it seems that the need for a Christian coalition, that is ghetto, presents itself. Is the Christian ghetto a shameless retreat from the battlefield of ideas or is it a fortress that a dark world can look to in order to see a flicker of light? Sometimes Christians back down and sometimes they regroup.
Rather than concentrating on turning into lambs that roar, we should look to the Lamb who was slain and who is returning in power. When a small thing looks to Him it becomes much larger than it was before. How much greater is it when a large thing will look to Him. C.S. Lewis observed that demons are not made from bad mice but bad archangels. The role of the Christian is this: look to God. The things that turn to Him will be glorified.
