How Should Christians Stand When Standing Is No Longer Considered Polite Or Permitted?
In January, worshippers at Cities Church in Minnesota were shocked to see a mob of angry activists storming the sanctuary, shouting obscenities and terrifying young children as they protested. Across Europe, anti-Christian attacks have also been steadily rising—vandalism, desecration, physical violence, and arson. Britain has supplied its own version of opposition: men and women arrested for silently praying outside abortion clinics, Christian speech silenced online, and even a lawmaker, Finnish Parliament Member Päivi Räsänen, temporarily barred from flying through London Heathrow because of her Biblical convictions.
These aren’t just distant headlines. They’re the very ground on which the fight for religious liberty is now being waged. Two Christian lawyers, both heavily involved in that fight and in the work of proclaiming the truth of the Gospel, understand how real it is. They have learned, in courtrooms, city halls and an increasingly hostile public square, that defending the freedom to speak of Christ is inseparable from the posture of the heart with which that truth is told. As believers proclaim the truth, the lawyers insist, we must be as mindful of the condition of our hearts as we are of the freedom to speak.
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association General Counsel Justin Arnot and Tom Ellis, a solicitor from the U.K. with whom BGEA has worked for years on religious liberty challenges, sat down for an interview with Decision.
In a divisive and hostile culture, Arnot said, even Christians can come to think the objective is just to stand and declare truth without any regard to how that truth is expressed—ignoring that the relationships built with people, and the aroma we leave behind, is critically important. Aromas, he noted, are what linger.
Christians “cannot be satisfied just to declare the truth and walk away thinking that we’ve stood firm while disregarding any fruitful engagement,” Arnot stated. “We must have a heart of humility, a heart of compassion.” The mission field is made up of those who are sinful and trapped in blindness, he added, “but we’re still working for their redemption because we have the truth.”
All over the world, faithful believers are being challenged online, in the courtroom and throughout the public square. Some believers, weary from a culture that treats Biblical conviction as bigotry, double down on in-your-face declaration and grow callous. Others, wary of appearing unkind, soften the message until it is empty and only a shadow of what God intended to convey.
Arnot and Ellis, who is managing director of Ai Law in the U.K., have spent years working in a space where those two failures meet regularly: the U.K.’s political arena. There the persecution against Christianity seems to grow by the day, and ordinary Christians have learned that speaking of Jesus can carry a hefty legal cost.
Even the evangelistic efforts of BGEA in the U.K. have faced this reality, as Arnot knows well.
In 2018, advertisements for a Franklin Graham Festival in Blackpool were stripped from public buses after complaints about Franklin’s Biblical teaching on marriage. A court later found that local authorities were guilty of unlawful discrimination. Then, in 2020, venues across Britain canceled contracted BGEA evangelistic events after activist pressure. In Glasgow, a court eventually ruled that canceling BGEA’s gathering there was unlawful discrimination.
Those cases forced a question the church cannot outsource to lawyers: How should Christians stand when standing is no longer considered polite or permitted?
Ellis emphasized the necessity of being rooted in the Word of God in order to properly engage this battle. “This life is but a flash in comparison to eternity,” he said. The question is: How do you want to spend it?
Reflecting on the cases he’s been a part of, including those in partnership with Arnot and BGEA in helping defend the right to preach the Gospel in the U.K., Ellis argued that “part of the reason we’re where we are today is that many Christians and churches have moved away from the Bible and moved into a sort of feeling over faith.”
He encouraged believers to ask: What is my faith built upon? For every believer, he emphasized, the goal is to stay close to the Word and have it written on our heart, because then we can be prepared to give a defense to anyone who asks for the reasons for the hope within (1 Peter 3:15).
And when sharing that truth, we are to swim against the cultural tide—not “sounding a drum like a clanging symbol without love, as it says in 1 Corinthians, but actually doing it as our Lord and Savior would, with the hearts of people in mind.”
Arnot added that Christians should not prioritize a sense of “safety” as they proclaim God’s truth. In this modern culture, “even in Christian circles, we pray for safety,” he said. “But that’s not actually how most of human experience has been and certainly not for the church.”
God’s people are not called to recklessness, yet Arnot noted how the New Testament church knew that following Jesus in the Roman Empire was anything but safe. And when it proves difficult, he explained, “We distinguish ourselves as Christian because we love in word and in deed. You can’t divorce the one from the other and expect to have an impact.”
Adding to this, Ellis emphasized that if we focus on meeting physical and social needs without the Word, we become nothing more than a charity. “People need to know the reason why you’re there,” which is “because of the love of Christ. … You need to get that balance between grace and truth.”
And in finding that balance, Arnot offered the reminder that “you can’t do charitable works in the Name of Jesus with an angry and proud spirit. That’s one of the challenges of the church being so closely aligned with politics. … Christ never wanted to conquer Rome. And I know we have to live in the public square in ways that reflect being salt and light—and that’s important. It’s very important, critically important. But the heart and the motivation behind it cannot be lost.”
“The absence of opposition or the silence of opposition or even success in these things is not the goal,” Arnot said. “Faithfulness in the task of proclamation is the goal.” When Christians faithfully proclaim, he added, they will be met with opposition. “We shouldn’t be disappointed. We shouldn’t be discouraged. We should be conciliatory.”
Yet in being conciliatory, the Christian doesn’t compromise. Making peace isn’t about surrendering the conviction but standing firm in that conviction in a Christ-like manner. The Apostle Paul modeled Christian cultural engagement in Acts 17:16–34. He didn’t ignore Athens’ idols or attack them from a distance. He started with their altar to an unknown god and their own poets, then pointed past both to the Creator who raised Jesus. Some mocked, some listened, few believed—but Paul’s delivery revealed a strong balance of standing firm in truth while delivering it in a respectful way.
The danger Ellis and Arnot warn against is that winning the argument, case or election will quietly replace the primary assignment: to reach the lost with an upright heart.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians that faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love. The greatest of these is still love—not a softening of the Gospel—as the ultimate motivation for sharing the eternal hope found in Christ.
Sarah Holliday is an Assistant Editor for (Harbinger’s Daily Contributing Publisher) Decision Magazine. She is also a Family Research Council (FRC) contributor.