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The church is coming out of a comfortable, dormant time in the western world, where we could sit in our comfortable pews, and hang out with our Christian friends, and buy stuff at Christian book stores, and rail against secularism; A time when it was impossible to be the President of the United States without being a Christian. And that time is fading, dying. Good riddance. Dig the grave deeper. We’re fat and lazy and afraid and judgemental and we reek of pharisaism.
“Engaging the culture” and “catalyzing conversation” and “building relationship” are nothing more than buzz words. A lot of comfort-oriented churches are doing the same thing they’ve always done, except that they’ve added a cappuccino machine at the back and movie clips in the sermon and now they say they’re exemplifying these buzz words. But the culture they're engaging is the Christian sub-culture; The conversations and relationships are with other Christians. The church walls are just as high as ever, they've just been painted a nice new colour. At their heart, if these buzz words are going to mean anything at all, then they have to be about loving people, and getting over ourselves, and not attempting to restrain Jesus; which is an illusion anyway, because the Jesus we can keep in a box under our bed is a fabrication of our own neediness; A fabrication that we use rather that follow. The real Jesus is out in the marketplace, in the sanctuaries of other religions, in the brothels, under the bridges, in the alley behind the glass office tower, in the foul-mouthed writers room, and everywhere in between.
I’m not interested in building a sub-culture, I’m interested in following Christ … the Christ who both enters and transcends culture.
* Acts 17:16-34
** John 4:1-29
1 comment:
Testify Brother! Amen! w00t!
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