Tagged: Jesus
America becoming less Christian (CNN)
This is a portion of a headline taken from CNN.com. (Want to read the article? Click Here) The gist is this: a recent survey has found the percentage of those that “call themselves Christian” has dropped by 11% since 1990. And while compared to the percentage drops Wall Street is racking up, this stat is nonetheless telling, sobering, and… I think… encouraging.
Tonight I am scheduled to share my testimony with our Church and also to spend a couple of minutes talking about what God is putting in front of me and challenging me to work through. This article has everything to do with both. My testimony has a large focus on God’s faithfulness to me in college and how that has shaped my post-collegiate years. College is where I feel the “liberation” from religion is preached loudest. Participating in religion no longer has the strong influence of parental enforcement, and if all you need is to feel secure that you’re not alone when you skip-out and checkout on religion – a college dorm is full of peer support. I struggled with this temptation to “checkout” in college and because of that, reading this article is anything but shocking. If we don’t have ownership of our faith going into college, and we don’t take ownership in college, we come out the other side “liberated.” And when a phone survey asks us our religious affiliation, we proclaim our liberation. (Note: Mark Driscoll has a heart for just this demographic – the twentysomethings that come into adulthood liberated and faithless. He sees the gap in the church, and sees the need, and has made it his mission to reach this lost generation, my generation [generation Y or the millennials - whichever you prefer] – His book: Confession of a Reformission Rev. can fill you in on the details – it’s a good read.)
In other words, I think this article is telling with regard to the real nature of the rising generation. We are a generation that never had ownership of our faith, and are now owning our faithlessness.
And that is sobering.
But here is why I am also encouraged. A theme we see in the NT is that God redeems hearts that are faithless. Jesus calls out those that claim to be God-followers (i.e. the Pharisees – if asked on a survey if they were “God-followers,” they would have said “yes”) and exposes that their assent to faith and their possessing saving faith are not one and the same. And at the same time, Jesus calls the faithless to belief, and their hearts are drawn. Our focus shouldn’t be on how many claim to be Christians, but instead on the mission given us to take Christ to all (100%).
If anything I find the statistic refreshing (in a backhanded manner), because that means that potentially the numbers of those that truly believe are less inflated by nominal faithless assent to a religious affiliation. (The article notes a trend that attests to this: “The survey also found that… “evangelical” Christianity is on the rise, while the percentage who belong to ‘mainline’ congregations… has fallen.”)
I see it this way: our nation is like an older church that has 500 members on the books and 125 that actually attend the worship service. It’s time to purge the books and stop clinging to numbers and statistics and focus on the mission Christ laid our for us. Love Christ and tell people about how much he loves us. Our goal isn’t that people will claim Christianity, it’s that people will love Christ. I hope those that follow Jesus and read CNN’s article will feel the same challenge.
August #2 “The Hard Sayings of Jesus”
This is a book I’m using to put together a series of youth talks for this fall. I like the idea of working through some of the more confusing and perhaps difficult passages that recount Christ’s words. Jesus said things that are difficult to wrap our minds around. But I encountered something unexpected as started working through this book… I began to flip through the chapters and decide if I actually thought it was a difficult passage, and there were quite a few that I skipped right over. I didn’t give it a passing thought. Until a couple hours later.
Why was it so easy for me to pass over quite a few “controversial” texts with relative ease. My first thought: I’m quite the budding theologian, and that which some find murky I find clear and straightforward. (I struggle with pride… difficult to imagine, i know) Shockingly, something about this answer left me wanting – and I wrestled for a little longer. Here’s what I think. It’s easy to make Jesus abstract and the more abstract we make him the easier it is to marginalize his teachings to the category of abstract thought. When something is abstract it’s easy for me to say I “understand” it (meaning: I understand something about it, or that I draw some truth out of it, or read some truth into it) and not think about any context in which it is taught and/or applied. Ideas are not controversial if they never leave the strata of impersonal abstract thought, and I find myself unhealthily content to leave the hard sayings of Christ in this ethereal strata. Christ spoke the words recorded by the Gospels at a certain time and place in history. He had original hearers and his words impacted them immediately. Their confusion and their struggle to understand the complexities of the revelation of God to man should not be so different from our struggle.
Jesus spoke hard sayings because they needed [and need] to be struggled with and wrestled with and considered and ultimately there should be desire to understand. I think that by pulling Jesus out of any context and making his words nothing more than out of context revelation, I have marginalized how they should confront me and shake me up. The revelation of God demands a response, and if I can read the words of Jesus and not feel them pull at my heart, then I’m not appreciating them fully.
Maybe I’m on my own on this one, but I’d bet there are a few others who, like me, read without engaging the Word of God. My goal is to start engaging God’s word – from the perspective of the original hearer and as a 21st century believer whose world needs the confrontation that only the revelation fo God can accomplish.
