Reclaiming Our Radical Roots Against Reckless Hate

By Chris Kaufman

“So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?”

On Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, my wife and I sat down to rewatch “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” for the umpteenth time in my life. This time the question, which King Théoden asks while clearly defeated and broken, gripped me and refused to let me go.

It is a question that I found myself asking when I heard the news of Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting by a government-authorized force on Saturday, Jan. 24. It is the question that kept ringing in my mind standing in the cold with a hundred other people who came out at a last-minute call Sunday afternoon, Jan. 25, to protest the actions of that government-authorized force. It is the question I keep asking on Monday morning, Jan. 26, after being told by fellow pastors and Christians that I am speaking too politically and too divisively because I believe that Jesus would be abhorred by what transpired that weekend.

I grew up in a relatively fundamental/evangelical branch of the Free Methodist Church that placed a high emphasis on knowing the Word of God and living it out.

I was a Free Methodist Bible Quizzing champion and, to this day, can still quote almost any passage from Luke’s Gospel if given a reference number.

I went to every Christian conference available in my area. These conferences constantly reinforced the ideals that living like Jesus would result in a tyrannical government banging my door down and forcing me to choose between Christ and my life.

After a decade of pastoring, I have been radicalized by the words of Jesus. The red letters inform and color everything that I think about and look at in our world. As a pastor and a planter, I often consider Jesus’ dissertation in John 15 and cling to it for hope.

“Remain in me, and I will remain in you. A branch can’t produce fruit by itself, but must remain in the vine. Likewise, you can’t produce fruit unless you remain in me.” (John 15:4 CEB)

I have tried desperately to remain in Christ — to bear as much fruit as I can. But the more I sit with Jesus and His words, the more I am convinced that we, the American church, have misinterpreted what Jesus meant by fruit. Almost always, the fruit the American evangelical church wants to judge us by is how many “souls we have saved.” This shows up in various subtle questions that we use as a scorecard: How many people attend your worship service? How many made Christ-following decisions this year? How many were baptized?

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 “The red letters inform and color everything that I think about and look at in our world.”

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Maybe these questions aren’t bad in themselves, but they are the wrong scorecard. They aren’t the fruit that Jesus is talking about in this often-quoted passage. Instead, Jesus makes our scorecard clear: “As the Father loved me, I too have loved you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete. This is my commandment: love each other just as I have loved you.” (John 15:9–12 CEB)

For the Christian, Jesus’ idea of bearing fruit is that we would love each other as He has loved us, and that we would remain in His love. Of course, this is harder to measure than attendance, but maybe the strange fruit of numbers that we have settled for is why the American Church may soon piddle out and fade into nothingness.

Last year I was asked to give a talk at the Justice Summit as a co-chair on what actions Christians can and should be taking. In essence, I was asked to answer Théoden’s cry: “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

I’d like to briefly share what I shared there, as it has become all the more relevant in the last few months. Much of what I shared there does not come from me but from scholars and activists much smarter than I am. One of those is Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, whose mantra for times such as these was: educate, agitate, and organize. I believe we can use these three simple steps to follow Christ’s command in John to bear much fruit. For I believe it is in loving each other and remaining in Christ’s love that we lean into these three pieces.

Educate

Education must begin with ourselves. The only way I learned to love Christ was to study His Word closely and be among people who have done the same. In the same way, we cannot hope to understand the times we face without educating ourselves.

In our modern era, the term “education” has become synonymous with the idea of indoctrination, but there could be no thing more Christlike in our lives than intentionally seeking and understanding the truth. For it was our Savior who said: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)

So we read books from different perspectives than our own. We take knowledge from our brothers and sisters in the faith who have learned what it means to persevere in the face of trials. We listen to the thought leaders of the past and those among us now who are doing the work on the ground. We learn their stories, even when they come from different cultures than our cultures, and then we use that education to bring light and life to those entrusted in our care.

At the Justice Network, we have a wealth of resources for pastors who are trying to navigate these current times, from videos, to podcasts, to articles, to recommendations, which can all be found at justicenetworkfmc.org.

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 “We take knowledge from our brothers and sisters in the faith who have learned what it means to persevere in the face of trials. “

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Agitate

The word agitate tends to carry a negative connotation. Nobody wants to be labeled divisive or a disturber of the peace, even though these are the same charges the religious elite levied against Christ Himself and the early church workers like Paul: “We have found this man to be a troublemaker who stirs up riots among all the Jews throughout the empire.” (Acts 24:5 CEB)

Agitation is important. As Americans, it’s a tradition as old as our country, and as Protestants, it is literally where we get our name from. Our faith heritage begins with protest, and that legacy carries through to people like John Wesley and B.T. Roberts who saw the injustice in their various countries and religious systems and could not remain quiet.

Agitating the status quo based on the love for others that Christ calls us to is one of our greatest callings. So, yes, we attend protests against injustice even if people at the protests don’t share every ideal or doctrinal point that we share. Without the protesting of injustice, the church would have never spread throughout the Roman Empire and the reforms that we hold as paramount to our faith would never have been brought about.

As I alluded to, I attended a protest that was called to make it clear that the actions of the government had gone too far. While there, I held up a sign about being the salt and light with a reference to Matthew 5. I had a dozen conversations with folks asking me why I, as a Christian, would be out here. Every one of them was with an atheist who told me they didn’t know that Christians could really love like this.

Do I agree with every sign I saw there? No, but my presence with my community and my solidarity with them showed more Jesus to them than many of the protestors had seen in a long time.

Organize

Finally, as Christians we need to organize. Here’s the good news: Most of us are already organized into some kind of group. What we need to ask is why our group exists in the first place. If your church isn’t visibly doing the work of Christ in its community, then you aren’t a church; you have organized a country club.

I still believe that the greatest force for change in any community can be the local church, a group of people organized around the life-giving and liberating message of Jesus Christ whose mission was “to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed.” (Luke 4:18 CEB)

Every Free Methodist church I have ever been in has always had the conversation about what their mission statement should be, and very few ever get around to figuring out how to live one out. The reality is that if we want to bear good fruit, the kind Christ calls us to, we have to do something. Otherwise, we may settle for the strange fruit of bad scorecards. Collective action is what brings lasting change, and most of us are already in a “collective” of some sort. If we want to see lasting change, our communities must begin to move from a Sunday morning “goods and services” rock concert to fuel the finances of the church into the work of the saints.

This means we must look outside our walls and connect with the people already doing the work on the ground. It means linking arms with local mutual aid networks to care for our neighbors’ immediate needs. It means joining or forming rapid response networks so we can act quickly when injustice strikes. It means putting our organizational weight behind food banks and advocacy organizations that fight for the dignity of the marginalized. It follows the examples of people like John Wesley, whose movement opened the first free medical clinics in England; B.T. Roberts, who refused to “middle-way” a conversation about owning human beings and organized to create places where all people could be free; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose vision of a “beloved community” still lives on because of the actions of countless individuals willing to put their bodies on the line for a new world.

We stand at an inflection point in the church’s history. Will we be the hands and feet of Jesus to a world that desperately needs it, or will we allow political allegiances to get in the way of truth? Will we rise up as our ancestors did?

The time is long past for us to do something, but that doesn’t matter. Whatever time it was that you decided to do the work that Christ calls us to, the time is now 11:55 and the task is urgent. Educate yourselves, agitate the unjust status quo, and organize your communities around the mission of Christ. Lead with the love of Christ and remain in Him.

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 “Educate yourselves, agitate the unjust status quo, and organize your communities around the mission of Christ. “

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What can men do in the face of such reckless hate? I want to invite you as Aragorn does to Théoden: “Ride out with me. Ride out to meet them.”
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