IRD has a New President

The following originally appeared in a recent IRD email sent to all IRD Users and supporters.

IRD has a new president!

Retiring IRD President Jim Tonkowich has already emailed you about my appointment as his successor. Jim will continue writing as a scholar at IRD. Meanwhile, I am greatly honored to succeed him at the helm of IRD, where I have for nearly 15 years directed IRD’s program for United Methodists.

Click here for our news release. And here is some bio about me. I am a lifelong United Methodist from Arlington, Virginia. As a college student I started representing my congregation at our Virginia Annual Conference and served as our missions chair. I was shocked by the liberalism I found in my denomination’s upper reaches; it bore no similarity to the faith practiced by my local church. Particularly horrifying were the spending habits of the New York-based United Methodist missions agency. This was the 1980’s, and the missions agency was supporting Marxist liberation movements in Central America, Africa and elsewhere, as part of “liberation theology.”

The church supporting Marxism! It seemed incredible. I compiled a 16 page report about the mission agency’s spending and shared it with my local church’s administrative board. (Much of my research relied on IRD materials, and I then met Diane Knippers, who later became IRD president.) My local church was also scandalized, and we mailed my report to nearly 1,000 other churches in the Virginia Conference. Our bishop organized 30 of us mostly lay people to spend a day with the missions executives up in New York City.

These missions executives were sincere but did not represent the whole denomination, just its most radical fringe. The agency treasurer, when pressed about funding for a violent guerrilla group, responded: “We know most United Methodists would not support this, but most Methodists did not support Civil Rights 25 years ago. We cannot be bound by what most Methodists think.”

This was an admirable sentiment if it applied to his own money. But he was talking about millions of dollars that belonged to the whole church, and ultimately to Jesus Christ. I vowed that the missions agency must be reclaimed from radical political activists and restored to spreading the Gospel around the world.

That was 20 years ago! I thought United Methodism’s problems could be fixed more quickly. But God’s time schedule is not ours. I joined the IRD staff in 1994, to work for church reform full-time, and I am grateful that God has used IRD’s program for United Methodists to encourage our church’s slow return back to accountability and orthodoxy.

But there is so much yet to do! Mainline Church bureaucrats (Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, UCC, etc) continue to equate the Kingdom of God with Big Government. But God’s Kingdom is not a welfare program or an environmental regulation. God’s purpose is that we all know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Mainline Protestants have suffered a terrible price for their theological and political confusion over the last 45 years. While America’s population increased by more than 50 percent, Mainline Protestants lost one third of their membership.

American church goers have flocked to evangelical congregations. But now a growing Evangelical Left is determined that evangelicals repeat the same mistakes of Mainline Protestants! Increasingly, IRD is challenging the Evangelical Left, much of which seems to believe the Obama Administration is a harbinger of God’s reign. Evangelicals must be reminded how they became America’s largest religious demographic; it was Gospel, and not politics, that gave them success.

In the coming months, IRD will boldly confront the Religious Left, as it exploits our churches’ names to espouse pacifism, same-sex unions, unrestricted abortion, an engorged welfare and regulatory State, Global Warming alarmism, accommodation of radical Islam, chronic condemnation of the United States, and an eagerness to appease rather than transform the secular culture.

We will offer up an alternative social witness for our churches that emphasizes the sacredness of all human life, the sanctity of marriage and family, the importance of religious freedom, and the gift of democracy.

We at IRD are optimists, not because we are naïve, but because we are confident in Christ’s promise that the Gates of Hell will never prevail. Twenty years ago, our churches often touted Marxism. Today, they tout sexual revolution or apocalyptic environmentalism. But the Gospel endures!

Will you please join IRD in the grand adventure of affirming the great orthodox traditions of our churches and challenging the mind-numbing political fads that captivate too many church bureaucrats and agencies? Please pray for IRD and for my new presidency.

And please commit to support IRD with a monthly gift of $25, $50, $100 or more, to ensure that we can move ahead full throttle. If you cannot now commit monthly, please send your urgent one-time gift. If your denominational officials will not represent you, then IRD will strive to, with God’s help!

Full speed ahead!

Mark Tooley
IRD President