Freeing the Oppressed

I began reading Dayton's Discovering an Evangelical Heritage and a comment which he made in the preface struck me:

(In reference to the 1960s)
"While other students responded to calls for civil rights workers or took to the street to protest against Vietnam, we [referring to students at the Evangelical college he attended] fought our administration over whether the yearbook could picture male swimmers without T-shirts, struggled for the right to watch TV in the lounge on Sundays, and wondered if Christians should attend the theater (legitimate or cinema), or read twentieth-century literature."

At first, I found myself becoming appalled at the students at his school, but the more I dwelt on this paragraph I began to see the reality of his statement even in Christian schools today. In our attempts to become "separated from the world" we have become apathetic towards what is happening around us. We become so caught up in what we believe to be personal injustices that we forget that there are bigger injustices happening outside the walls of our institution. And this apathy doesn't begin and end at the walls of Christian academia, no, it has roots in the Church. Churches with members who argue more about the color of the carpet and the price of repairs then they pray for one another or read scripture. Churches who's idea of missions is sending money to missionaries, but then having no idea what is going on in the countries they support.

To me this seems so antithetical to the gospel. We are not meeting the needs of those around us because we are choosing to not even know what their needs are. We trade in our ability to touch the world with the love of Christ for the protective Bubble to shield us. I shutter to think how God cries at our self-centeredness and desire for "protection".