Speaking Pastorally In a Political World

Holding the Bible in One Hand and the Headlines in the Other

I don’t enjoy writing about politics. I’ve agonized over it more than I’ve celebrated it.

It’s exhausting, risky, and rarely satisfying. Every sentence feels like a tightrope. I second-guess my tone, my words, even my silence. There are days I wonder if I’m helping at all—or just adding to the noise.

But I keep coming back. Because I love the Church. I love people. And I believe pastoral care means stepping into the places where people are most confused, most angry, and most afraid.

I believe the Church should be so committed to the Kingdom of God that it refuses to legitimize the kingdoms of this world. I believe our lives should bear witness to a different reality—a Jesus-shaped reality. One where love disarms power, where peace confronts violence, and where grace refuses to be manipulated by party lines. I believe the gospel doesn’t need to borrow the language of empire to change the world.

But I also know this: we don’t live in a vacuum.

Political culture has become a kind of religion, offering identity, purpose, even a sense of righteousness. And it’s doing the work of discipleship—louder, faster, and more consistently than most churches. I see it every day as a chaplain. Newsfeeds shape fears. Platforms define identities. Talking heads mold theology. While I would like to believe that all the political noise in the world comes from just a small group of the loudest voices, my pastoral work tells me otherwise. Often, when patients meet with me, they’re already saturated in suspicion, outrage, and curated conviction. They come full of fear, or rage, or anxiety stemming from the political climate that currently pervades our society. They don’t need another opinion. They need someone to guide them through the fog without both falling into the ditch. They need pastoral care, which the church is called to provide to one another on an ongoing basis. That’s what it means to care for souls: to grieve with the grieving, to celebrate the sacred and the mundane, to tell the truth in love, to confess and be confessed to, to carry each other through the days when faith feels fragile.

That’s not just a task for clergy. It’s a task for all Christians.

The Great Commission wasn’t given to a professional class. It was given to disciples. All of them. And making disciples—helping others grow in Christ, resist the lies, and walk in love—is pastoral work. Some of us do it in robes. Some in scrubs. Some in blue jeans. But the work is the same: to care for souls in a world intent on breaking them down.

Spiritual care is not a job description—it’s a way of being. It’s the work of presence, discernment, and love in a world that feels like it's always at war. And in a world like that, we need more than pulpits. We need neighbors, nurses, baristas, teachers, chaplains, and friends who know how to show up with compassion and clarity.

That’s why I write. Not because I have all the answers. But because I feel the ache of the world. And I want to offer something steady. Something true.

I first saw this sort of theologizing of political news when I sat in my Grannie’s living room watching Jack Van Impe flip through newspapers and link every headline to some apocalyptic timeline. It was wild. Terrifying. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was too young to know the difference between interpretation and exploitation. But something stuck with me: What happens in the world matters to God. And it should matter to us.

“We must preach holding the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

Karl Barth, maybe…

Years later in Bible college, I heard the line attributed to Karl Barth: “We must preach holding the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” That hit like lightning. Finally, someone gave words to what I’d always felt—that faith divorced from the world we live in is not faith at all. That theology has to touch the ground. That if we’re going to preach the gospel, we have to do it in the real world. The loud world. The wounded world. The political world.

I’m not trying to be a political commentator. God knows we have enough of those. I’m trying to be a faithful pastor. And in this moment, faithfulness looks like naming the forces already shaping our people. It looks like helping them theologize the news instead of sensationalizing it. It looks like refusing to let Fox News or MSNBC do the Church’s discipleship. And to some degree, it looks like revealing the absurdity of the comedy that is our political theater.

I know the arguments. I’ve heard them all. Stay out of politics. It’s too divisive. It distracts from the gospel. But what if the real distraction is our silence? What if avoiding the hard conversations is not holiness, but fear? What if it’s not faithfulness, but abdication?

The Bible isn’t apolitical. It’s dripping with the tension between prophets and kings, shepherds and emperors, fishermen and tyrants. Jesus didn’t avoid political language—He reframed it. “The Kingdom of God” wasn’t a sweet spiritual abstraction. It was a threat to the powers. A confrontation with empire. A new world being born in the shadow of the old.

The gospel is not just a message of personal salvation. It’s a public witness—a vision of what life looks like under God’s reign, not Caesar’s. It confronts systems, not just souls. It cares about the poor, the oppressed, the outcast. It doesn’t float above policy decisions and power struggles—it descends right into them, and flips over the tables.

That’s why I keep writing. Not to score points, but to keep pointing toward the Kingdom.

When challenged with the idea that Christians should not be concerned with politics or legislation, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The law can’t make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.” That’s not just political. That’s pastoral care in the flesh. It’s what it means to show up, to protect the vulnerable, to name what harms, and to create space where human dignity can breathe again.

“The law can’t make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I don’t want to go back to prophecy charts and fear-driven theology. Nor do I want to buy into the evangelical myth—popularized by figures like Jerry Falwell—that Christians must seek political power in order to create a righteous society. But I also don’t want to ignore the noise that’s consuming people’s attention and love. I want to help them see through it. Name it. Heal from it.

To pastor through politics is not to endorse a party. It’s to reclaim our prophetic voice. It’s to remind the Church that the gospel is public truth. That Jesus is Lord—and Caesar is not. That our allegiance belongs to the Lamb, not the elephant or the donkey.

If that sounds political, maybe it’s because the gospel always has been. Not partisan. But political in the truest sense: it reorders our lives, our loves, our loyalties.

In an age of rage and spectacle, the pastor’s task is not to shout louder. It’s to speak truer. To stay grounded in the Way. To help people unlearn the illusions of empire and remember who they are.

Less commentary. More courage. Less performance. More presence. Less neutrality. More truth.

Because the powers of this world aren’t waiting for permission to disciple your people.

They’re already doing it.