Why I'm Annoyed by the Vision Forum

From their website: "Our name — The Vision Forum — points to our desire that the Lord would use this work to be a forum for communicating a vision of victory to Christian families." First of all, what's with the dashes? The humble comma would just as effectively set off "The Vision Forum" in that sentence, without all the flash and also without raising the suspicion Mr. Phillips might not know as much about punctuation as all the homeschooling propaganda would lead one to believe.

More substantively, I'm seriously concerned about the nature of the victory the Vision Forum (no, I'm not going to capitalize "the") has in mind. Victory over sin would be a good thing, of course, but flipping through their catalog, the emphasis seems to be on victory over the society and culture around us. And the way to beat the snot out of said society is to turn one's children into culture warriors through the judicious purchase and implementation of the wares hawked by the Vision Forum.

And what a great number of wares there are: 113 pages worth in the 2009 catalog. An awful lot of stuff for those who claim to be pursuing an agenda at odds with that of the world.

Only I'm not persuaded that's the case, not by a long shot. Take this sentence from the blurb for the DVD The Return of the Daughters: "This highly-controversial [again with the misused dash, hypenating what ought never be hyphenated!] documentary will take viewers into the homes of several young women who have dared to defy today's anti-family culture in pursuit of a biblical approach to daughterhood, using their in-between years to pioneer a new culture of strength and dignity and to rebuild Western Civilization, starting with the culture of the home." Let's just a take a moment to reflect on the self-congratulatory air in this ad copy (which, I admit, is a particularly egregious example, but not an uncommon representation of Vision Forum fare). Have enough people even noticed this documentary exists in order to controvert it? If that weren't enough of an overly grand sense of oneself, they're rebuilding Western Civilization.

So much for living quietly, minding one's own affairs (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

This is precisely where the presence of the Vision Forum catalog in Christian homes begins giving me, as a pastor, heartburn. There's something unnervingly worldly about the Vision Forum's anti-world vision. Again and again, one gets the impression each Christian family should be building a legacy which will endure for generations to come; not only that, they should be actively engaged in transforming the culture and reshaping it according to their liking. In other words, they are about building a name and a city for themselves and claiming a country in this world, during this age: a country which they hope, and even believe, will endure.

But this present age is passing away.

And as for me and my house, we are also seeking a country of our own, but not that country from which we came out. Rather, we desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore we are not ashamed of the Cross of Christ; for the God who became despised and nothing has called us to be likewise despised and nothing. He has invited us to live as aliens and strangers in this world. He has not invited us to build a city here because he has prepared a city for us.

But I don't suppose I'll sell much merchandise with that vision.