WHEN PASTORS ARE LOBBIED

1,000 American Evangelical Pastors in Israel in Dec. 2025

Pastors and the State

In December 2025, the Israeli government hosted a group of American pastors in Israel. Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Dr. Mike Evans of Friends of Zion welcomed them, and the purpose was made plain: these pastors were to return home prepared to preach against antisemitic ideology in America.

At one level, that sounds purposeful. Any Christian faithful shepherd should denounce hatred toward Jews, just as he should denounce hatred toward any people made in the image of God. Antisemitism is evil, and as a sin against humanity, the church should reject it without hesitation.

But a question confronts us. Why is a foreign government lobbying American pastors at all?

The trip was reportedly sponsored through a partnership between Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Friends of Zion Museum. In other words, this was not merely a ceremonial visit or a goodwill tour. It was a deliberate act of influence. Mike Evans has spoken openly about selecting influential pastors to influence the churches they pastor. The strategy is clear enough: shape the shepherds, and the flock will follow.

That should trouble the church. Not because pastors should be closed off from persuasion. Not because opposition to antisemitism is not a worthy cause. But the church of Jesus Christ is not meant to be governed by carefully managed proximity to power. And the people of God are not meant to outsource discernment to important men with microphones.

The Same Old Temptation

Scripture repeatedly shows how eager God’s people are to hand spiritual responsibility over to central figures. Israel wanted the kings to go out before them and fight their battles. They leaned on priests, prophets, institutions, and visible centers of authority while covenant loyalty withered in the hearts of the people. Again and again, the result was failure. Centralized leadership could not produce a holy people. External authority could not substitute for inward transformation. God’s people were never meant to outsource covenant fidelity to a handful of prominent leaders.

The church is always in danger of relearning that lesson the hard way. Today, we may not ask for a king like the nations, but we often settle for celebrity pastors, politically connected religious leaders, and platformed personalities who tell us what Scripture must mean before we have wrestled with Scripture ourselves. We are still tempted to borrow confidence from visible strength and influence with wisdom. This temptation can lead to outsourcing the burden of theological judgment to public leaders. But Christ did not build his church on superhero pastors, and he did not redeem his people to become spectators. He sanctified a people to know the truth, guard the truth, and bear witness to the truth together.

That is why the issue here cannot be reduced to antisemitism alone. The deeper issue is theological.

What Do You Mean

Ambassador Huckabee has argued that a growing segment of evangelicals now believes Israel does not matter, or that there is nothing biblical about the church’s relationship to Israel. But that framing, while sharp, is too imprecise to do the real work required. The question is not whether Israel matters in the Bible. Of course, Israel matters in the Bible.

The real question is this: How does Israel matter now that Christ has come?

That question sits beneath a great deal of contemporary evangelical confusion. It sits beneath the arguments between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz. It lingers beneath the rhetoric of Mike Huckabee and the activism of Mike Evans. It hovers over sermons, donor campaigns, prophecy charts, and foreign policy debates. Everyone says Israel, but not everyone means the same thing.

Do we mean ethnic Jews?
Do we mean the old covenant Israel?
Do we mean the modern nation-state?
Do we mean the people of God fulfilled and gathered in Christ from Jew and Gentile alike?

Until that question is answered carefully, Christians will continue collapsing biblical categories into political ones. And Scripture will continue being drafted into arguments it was never meant to settle on those terms.

Abraham’s Promise Goes Beyond Bloodline

The covenant with Abraham is central here. The promise begins in a particular man, in a particular family, and in a particular land. But it never ends there. From the beginning, the promise carried outward force. Abraham was promised not merely a son, not merely a tribe, and not merely an ethnicity preserved in isolation, but a multitude of nations. The covenant moved toward expansion. It moved toward the nations. It moved toward a people gathered not by blood alone, but by faith in the promised offspring.

That is why the New Testament speaks so directly: those who belong to Christ are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise. The point is not that God abandoned his promises. The point is that he fulfilled them in the way they were always intended to be fulfilled through Christ. By that union with Christ, a people is gathered from every tribe and tongue.

The Abrahamic promise was never race-restricted in the narrow modern sense. Even within the old covenant, outsiders could be brought near. The covenant community already included the foreigner who embraced Israel’s God: Rahab, Ruth, resident aliens, and the mixed multitude. From the beginning, the promise anticipated a global family. Faith in the God of Abraham, not ethnicity alone, marked the true line of promise.

That means the current debate is often confused from the outset. When public figures argue about Israel, they are often speaking past one another because they are not using the term in the same way. One speaker means a nation-state. Another means an ethnic people. Another means a covenant people. Another means a prophetic symbol.

The Ultimate Fulfillment of Hope

The inheritance itself must also be handled carefully. The land promise mattered. It was not imaginary. But the land was never the endpoint of biblical hope. It pointed beyond itself.

The promise expands toward a greater inheritance: a heavenly country, an imperishable kingdom, and an everlasting possession secured in Christ. The New Testament does not flatten the promise. It fulfills it and opens it to its intended scale. The covenant is not canceled. It is brought to maturity. The inheritance is not denied. It is deepened and universalized in the Son.

That is why Christian fidelity cannot simply mean attaching oneself to the political claims of the modern state of Israel and calling the attachment biblical by default. The question is not whether God is faithful. He is. The question is not whether the Jewish people matter in redemptive history. They do. The question is not whether antisemitism is evil. It is.

The question is whether the promises of God are now to be interpreted through the risen Christ and his apostles, or through the strategic interests of modern political actors.

Christ is the Story

Mike Evans has said that his ministry intends to reach one million pastors and one million churches globally so they will understand that God has not canceled his promises to the Jewish people. Very well. But what those promises mean must be determined by Scripture, not by a lobby group, not by a foreign ministry, not by a donor network, and not by a politically connected pastor.

Christ is not an appendix to Israel’s story. He is its climax. He is the promised seed. He is the son of David. He is the one in whom the nations are blessed. He is the one who forms a sanctified people for God’s name in the world.

And that sanctified people must not be passive. Christ has not saved his people merely to consume messaging, admire influential leaders, or repeat the lines handed to them by powerful voices. He has called the whole church to be holy, discerning, and active in the mission of truth. If pastors preach falsely, congregations cannot shrug and say they were only following trusted leaders. The whole church is called to guard the gospel.

Two Errors the Church Must Refuse

The church must resist two equal and opposite errors.

The first is antisemitism: hatred, suspicion, slander, and resentment directed toward Jews as Jews. That must be condemned without qualification. The second is theological intimidation: the insistence that unless Christians align themselves with a particular political reading of Israel, they are betraying Scripture itself. That too must be resisted.

The church does not belong to embassies, donor coalitions, lobbying groups, or religious influencers. The church belongs to Christ. And because it belongs to Christ, ordinary Christians bear the responsibility to test what they hear. The issue is not merely what pastors were told on a trip. The issue is whether congregations have enough biblical depth to recognize when political messaging has been draped in covenant language. The issue is whether Christians can still distinguish the kingdom of God from the kingdoms of this world.

The Primary Calling of the Church

In the end, the church’s calling is not to function as a religious wing of any nation’s foreign policy. The church’s calling is to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, to reject every form of ethnic hatred, and to bear witness to the one kingdom that cannot be shaken.

So the question remains, and it deserves a clear answer: Did God break his covenant with Israel? Or has that covenant reached its fulfillment in Christ, who gathers Jew and Gentile into one sanctified people by faith? And when Christians say Israel, to whom are they speaking?