There are people making the case that Christians need to pull out of the world.

I do understand their case. The world can spiritually damage even destroy people. It is too easy to be corrupted by the world. To be sure, just as a physically wounded person can’t be expected to run a marathon, maybe those who are spiritually debilitated need to stay within protection.

But that can’t be the case for most of us and certainly wasn’t the case for Jesus.

In his book “Life Together” pp 27-28 Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the case: “Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies…So Christians, too, belong not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the midst of enemies. There they find their mission, their work. “To rule is to be in the midst of your enemies. And whoever will not suffer this does not want to be part of the rule of Christ; such a person wants to be among friends and sit among the roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the religious people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing, who would ever have been saved?’ (Luther).’Though I scattered them among the nations, yet in far countries they shall remember me’ (Zech 10:9) According to God’s will, the Christian church is a scattered people, scattered like seed ‘to all the kingdoms of the earth’ (Deut 28:25) That is the curse and its promise. God’s people must live in distant lands among the unbelievers, but they will be the seed of the kingdom of God in all the world.”