Oops
11 chapters into Luke in my New Testament reading project and I can’t find anything that resembles church as we do it today in the western world.
That’s not hyperbole.
Okay, maybe it is a tiny bit of hyperbole, but not much.
Yes, I know that statement is unbalanced. What are 11 chapters of one book compared to the whole New Testament? And why should it church look like what Jesus did? The church wasn’t even established yet. And if we don’t do church like we do it now, what are we going to do? How will anyone be taught? Jesus taught. Jesus preached. Anyway, the world has changed…
Yep. I know. It’s hard to imagine anything different. I’ve been in church all my life – I help pastor a church! – and my head hurts when I try to imagine something different. All I know is that when I look at the practice (industry?) of western church, I see very little that looks like what Jesus did.
I can say the same thing about my life. I’m so steeped in the culture of Christianity that all my relationships are tainted with it. When I look at my husbanding and parenting I see a heck of a lot of the religion of the Pharisees and not nearly enough of the life-giving attractiveness of Jesus.
I think I am understanding the significance of the title of Rob Bell’s book Jesus Wants to Save Christians
I think Jesus is trying to save me. I think the more I read, the more the Holy Spirit will have to work with and the more hope there will be for me to imagine without my head hurting. And that gets me closer to the goal actually following Jesus, whether it looks like church or not.
I’ll finish with a quote from this remarkable post by Brant Hansen:
And I want to convey how remarkable Jesus is. How smart he is. How he understands our nature. How infuriating he can be to those in power. I want to subvert a culture that turns the church into an incredibly expensive and remarkably harmless spectator sport. I want people to understand how revolutionary the love of Jesus is.
4 March 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: church,
kingdom of god,
nt
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