Egypt, Youth, Jesus, and Pacifism

I happened upon a blog post by Brian Kirk tonight.

Pastor Kirk poses some challenging questions about what youth (and adults) can and might learn from the recent events in Egypt in which a non-violent protest eventually led to its head of state stepping down.

Here are some of Kirk's comments, but really, you should just click the link above and check it out in its entirety:

I wonder what the events in Egypt might tell us about the power of non-violence to transform the human tendency to use coercive power. What I really wonder: might this example of the truth of non-violence be dangerous for our youth?

Think about it. What happens if teens discover that the pacifist life of Jesus that we often idealize and couch in metaphors turns out to be an actual possibility for a way to be in the world? The question of non-violence has never been an easy one for the Christian Church. Our history together has often been bloody and there are events of the Church's past that we'd just as soon forget. Historians assure us that the earliest followers of the way of Jesus were a pacifist movement, though that quickly changed as the Church became institutionalized and gained political power. Our teens today are probably much more familiar with the institutional Church that tends to see war as a necessary way to fight evil in the world rather than the Church that followed a Jewish peasant who was willing to go to his death rather than raise a fist in violent resistance. In many ways, the American church seems to have resigned itself to the notion that non-violence sounds good in principle but all too often feels it has to fight fire with fire.