Amsterdam 2023: Are We Confusing Sympathy with Compassion?
Evangelist Christine Caine says that if believers, especially kingdom leaders, are to achieve the daunting goal of reaching every person with the gospel of Christ by 2033, they must overcome “compassion fatigue.”
The founder of Christine Caine Ministries and the A21 campaign, a ministry focusing on the abolition of sex trafficking in southeastern Europe, Caine believes many Christian leaders confuse sympathy with compassion during these chaotic times. She calls for kingdom leaders to seek a fresh touch of the Holy Spirit to renew their hearts for compassion.
“The world desperately wants to be seen and while we are busy judging them and marginalizing and objectifying people, we are doing everything but seeing them,” Caine told the audience during the Amsterdam 2023 conference.
“We live in the most contentious period of time that I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime, and it astounds me at how the church and Christian leaders could in any way could objectify people, marginalize people and separate people when we are called to go and seek and save that which is lost; when we are called to reach a lost and broken world. That is the mission of the church. I wonder if Jesus would ask us, ‘church, do you see these people?'”
Many within ministry, Caine says, get excited about the conference’s mission of reaching the entire world with the Good News of Christ within the next 10 years. But, she says, nothing will change unless kingdom leaders, as well as dedicated lay Christians, get involved in this broken and lost world with their whole hearts.
Caine wonders whether many are simply not in it for the lost anymore.
“Pastor, you can be in a church preaching a sermon but your heart’s just not in it,” Caine says. “Guilt, shame and condemnation are not going to get your hearts back into it. A fresh, radical encounter with the Holy Spirit is the only thing that gets our heart back into it.
“The only One in history that never had compassion fatigue was Jesus, but the same Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead lives on inside of us. You can’t love in your own strength, you can’t be gracious in your own strength, you can’t keep giving in your own strength. We can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit in our own strength. We need a fresh outpouring of the Spirit of God to fill us again and afresh so that our hearts are in it. We’ve got the world trying to give a counterfeit form of caring for people and it’s not going to last.”
Caine is convinced that if true believers in Christ are going to be different for the world in this hour, if we are truly going to be salt and light and true witnesses for Christ, then we need not only to tell people about Jesus but that our lives must bear witness to Him. {eoa}
Shawn A. Akers is the online editor at Charisma Media.
