"Whose Side Are You On?"

I had someone ask me this once. My problem is that Christianity today makes it so easy to switch sides; which I why I have had to completely rethink it to keep my own faith intact. It wasn't simply to rethink the answers to the BIG questions, but to rethink the way Christianity needs to be practiced.

I suppose I should be worried out on a limb like this but I am in good company -- Jesus was very much a guy who was not afraid to take on the religious people of his day. You know those Pharisees that made their rules more important than the Bible. In the end, I had to create some questions to test myself:
1. Am I seeking to enslave people with my religious rules or am I liberating people through the Gospel?
2. Am I following my Master's command to do good to those who hate me and praying for those who are my enemies or am I engaged in political action to get them to see things my way and conform?
3. When dealing with unbelievers am I practicing wisdom or contempt?
4. Is it easier to pass judgment and think the worst or exercise grace and believe the best?

I follow these rules and now I find myself in a position more and more to talk to unbelievers because by doing this I have found myself listening more and talking less. One thing of note is that no dialogue takes place when we treat people with contempt or engage in name calling -- save that for the self-righteous.

In the end the issue is one of living the commands of Christ, not just acknowledging the truth of them and still doing what you want.

That is why at times I seem to be on the side of agnostics and atheists because they are bringing up valid points, but Christians as a general rule seem to be more interested in creating their own safe Christian world than ministering to the world outside.

Petra's song 'Looking Through Rose Colored Stained Glass Windows' has become more true each year.
"Looking through rose-colored stained glass windows
Never allowing the world to come in
Seeing no evil and feeling no pain
making THE LIGHT as it comes from within so dim."
Petra off the album 'More Power To Ya" (emphasis mine)

Whose Side am I On? Christ's: but I am learning that following his teachings and fulfilling them are the real mark of whether that is true or not. I find the more I understand this, the less time I have call down judgment on the world because I know that He himself said: "For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him" John 3:17. Jesus was more interested in bringing the sinner to repentance than condemning that sinner's lifestyle and trying to regulate it through legislation.

I now value openness between sides so they can talk. If Christianity truly is the truth, then there is no question that should throw it or that Christians should not be able to come up with a reasoned and rational response. If it is true, there should truly also be no evil done to us or around us that we cannot respond to with compassion and love. If these things are not true of Christianity then there is something wrong and it needs to be corrected. We can't expect respect until we give it.

Five Reasons Why the Church is Failing

This post is in part a response to the more common reasons people leave Christianity and partially my own rantings.

1. The Church continues to fail to provide an adequate response to the Problem of Evil when someone has a personal crisis. In part this is because of some very bad doctrines and theological systems but mostly comes down to the fact that there is a very pat simplicity in our answers and an unwillingness to face the fact that maybe our ideas of God may be the problem. This is especially true when someone comes to us and says: "God huh, why did God kill my daughter?" Truth be told, the average pastor and his doctrine cannot answer this one, because the answer they have formulated is based on a certain concept of God they are stuck with. It is one that we have created that is comfortable to us, not what the Bible ultimately says about God or what God says even about himself.

2. Lack of deep thinking on the part of most Christians. The prevailing attitude in most churches, for some reason, is that if you think about your faith or use your brain to engage God, that it will destroy your faith. This is particularly prevalent in churches that are based on emotional experience for their core beliefs but all of them have it. The flip side is a cold intellectualism about faith where God is indeed a mean SOB. This creates a difficult environment for someone who wants both genuine answers by using their brain or common sense. The church unfortunately, seems to have forgotten the lesson of Galileo: "I find it hard to believe that the same God who has endowed us with reason and common sense, would require us to forgo the use of both." As long as reason is a perceived enemy of faith, the church will watch a more knowledgeable and secular youth and young adult population head to the door.

3. A Theological stuck denominational system. What I mean here is that many times people maintain doctrine or theology because of tradition. I have been continually amazed how many clergy and bible college and seminary professors are simply blind recordings of their denominations doctrinal system. New theological ideas are often met with same response as an atheist. There is actually only one root cause for this -- spiritual pride. We apparently think when we described God in theology and doctrine we got it right the first time. I remember when I first purposed open theism (a different way of looking at God's knowledge of the future) to a friend -- "Well that's wrong, because it denies the way we traditionally understand omniscience." Apparently we are so smart we got our understanding of God right the first time.

4. Hyper-fundamentalist Holiness. Simply put, we spend far to much time attacking people for their morals and 'incorrect' view of life and not enough time understanding the real meaning of grace and then putting some love and compassion into action. Between this and the fact that most standards of holiness in churches are too high for anyone to attain and you have to live a double life to fool everyone, it is no wonder people head for the door. We are becoming very good at proclaiming something publicly, but denying it in our lifestyle and yet keeping it covered up. What we are really creating is not holy saints but sneaky sinners.

5. Continued silence on why Christianity is superior to other religions and belief systems. There are two enemies here: 1) Ignorance because most people in Christianity simply don't know the foundation of their faith and 2) Misguided Tolerance -- 'lets just say there is no distinction between us and other religions'. Then why be a Christian, what is the imperative of Christian faith then?

My personal belief is that if these things are not ultimately corrected we will watch the church become nothing more than a footnote in history of the Western World.