Does Mark Tooley ever get tired of kicking Bob Edgar?
“Former [National Council of Churches] chief Bob Edgar’s intense liberal political activism gained secular foundation support but seems to have further undermined church support,” Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, noted in a statement Friday.
“Evangelical groups such as the National Association ofEvangelicals should take the NCC’s disastrous tenure under Edgar as a cautionary tale against embracing divisive, liberal political activism over church unity.”
In making his point, Tooley highlighted how 13 of the NCC’s 36 member communions made no contribution to the once preeminent association of U.S. Christian churches and how undesignated contributions by member churches to the NCC dropped 25 percent over the past decade while designated church contributions dropped 65 percent.
Shorter Tooley: liberals! Ooga-booga!! Scary!!
Edgar, it should be noted, left the NCC in 2007. He managed to keep the Council going through six years of financial crisis, and it’s not like nothing’s happened since he left.
Tooley has a point in saying the NCC may be outmoded. But it’s not for the sneering reasons he offers. Rather the NCC is the victim of a larger trend. Denominational identity isn’t as important to most people as it used to be; rather than being Methodists, for example, people understand themselves as part of a congregation that happens to be Methodist. Their giving reflects it. Less money goes up the ladder to the denomination, which in turn passes on less to the NCC.
It has nothing to do with politics, in other words, and everything to do with the mission of the church. If the NCC has any wits about it, they’ll brush off Mark Tooley like an irritating little fly and concentrate on figuring out how they can best serve their member communions.
