Faithful Presence Needs Prophets

Five years ago, James Davison Hunter wrote To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. This book has loomed large in the conversation about how Christians should interact with culture, though many Christian scholars and pastors disagree with Hunter’s prescription that, rather than try to change the world, Christians should seek simply to be faithfully present in the world.

Last week, The Gospel Coalition released a multi-author eBook evaluating and responding to Hunter’s thesis. The book is called Revisiting ‘Faithful Presence.’My guest today on The Gospel Coalition Podcast is Vermon Pierre, one of the contributors to that book. Pierre is lead pastor for preaching and mission at Roosevelt Community Church in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of Gospel Shaped Living, the latest installment in the Gospel Shaped Church curriculum published by The Good Book Company and TGC. We talked about what it means for Christians to be “aggressively gracious” as we seek to be a counterculture for the common good.

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Collin Hansen serves as vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, as well as executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and has written and contributed to many books, most recently Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation and Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. He has published with the New York Times and the Washington Post and offered commentary for CNN, Fox News, NPR, BBC, ABC News, and PBS NewsHour. He edited Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor and The New City Catechism Devotional, among other books. He is an adjunct professor at Beeson Divinity School, where he also co-chairs the advisory board.

Vermon Pierre (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is a founding pastor and the lead pastor at Roosevelt Community Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and a Council member of The Gospel Coalition. He is the author of Gospel Shaped Living and Dearly Beloved: How God’s Love for His Church Deepens Our Love for Each Other. He is also a cohost for The Un-Silent Church podcast. He and his wife, Dennae, live in downtown Phoenix and have five children.