I was done being a Christian.
Let me rephrase that. I was done being CALLED a Christian. I was not done with loving the way of Christ. I was not done living out God's story of ultimate grace and love through the resurrection of His son. But as far as the title goes? No way.
“I don't want to be associated with THOSE people,” I often said, “they don't represent the Jesus I know.” Then over the next few years, I've had a series of ups and downs with this very subject.
I know that this is an issue that many Christians like me struggle with. We grew up in a traditional conservative Christian church, then came of thinking or reasoning age, and (in my case) got liberal, or postmodern, or whatever you want to call it, and then just got plain disgusted.
One thing I've been learning over the past year or so is that that disgust easily leads to a rebellious and sinful attitude towards the bride of Christ. I'm really happy that in one of Bryan's initial posts he mentioned that the point of this is not to tear down the church. Too many times in our "we just want to be real" circles, we end up with a major "screw you" attitude towards the church. It runs rampant in our 21st century churches (and contrary to popular belief, its not just in "emerging" churches).
The emotion is not unwarranted though. Although I think a lot of the action that is taken is rebellious and unhealthy, I'm not letting the church off the hook here. We have done a lot of disservice to our neighbors. And we've done a lot of disservice to ourselves in the process. Galatians 5:15 says "if you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other." Or you have the whole passage in 1 Corinthians 12, talking about how we are dysfunctional parts of the body when we don't work together as one. And in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul talks about how we have been given the Ministry of Reconciliation. How are we going to reconcile the world to Christ if we can't even reconcile our internal differences?
There's a popular saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I guess that's the attitude I want to have towards the church. My pastor was saying something yesterday about focusing on what IS working, which really resonated with me. Why do we always focus on the negative side of things? We are fixers. We see things that are broken, and we (try to) fix them. The way I see it, if we keep on pushing forward the things that ARE working in our communities, then Christ will help us fix the broken things along the way, and I guarantee He'll fix them in a lot more constructive way.
Our center is—or should be—Christ. Everything else, all of our theology, all of our stupid arguments, all of our humanity, it all pales in comparison to the glory and mystery of Christ. Let's keep it that way.
