When there is no soul-searching, is the soul still there?
from The Sacredness of Questioning Everything by David Dark

We'll build new traditions in place of the old
'Cause life without revision will silence our souls
from "Snow" by Sleeping at Last

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Would Jesus Start the Kind of Church We Attend?

The following is the most well written paragraph I think I've read concerning the thought it expresses.  In the first chapter of his book Prodigal God, which I am currently reading for a Bible study group at church (shocker!)*, Timothy Keller beautifully and succinctly communicates the fearful truth that our church must be missing the point.
Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people.  The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers [as in the wayward son in the parable popularly known as "The Prodigal Son"] they must be more full of elder brothers [as in the brother from the parable who resents his father's forgiveness of his less righteous brother] than we'd like to think. 
* The shocker! comment is not ironic; I've steered clear of church Sunday school classes, Bible study, and the like for a while now.  I still fear that many/most exist for good Christians to regurgitate the "right answers" and congratulate each other for knowing the faith so well, but I want to quit being so closed.  I do believe that people grow and learn from community with others, and my condemnation of the communities around me does nothing for anyone and is bitter sin on my part.  It is time for me to quit judging and loathing what I suspect to be wrong and start learning and living what truly is right. 

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