At the gym yesterday evening, I was just thinking about how we as Christ-followers engage people in the world around us who may not be followers of The Way. This is roughly how it went, about half way through my jog on the treadmill. (You may even be able to get a clue about how long I was on the treadmill by reading this. Not long, as you'll see.)
I’m wondering if, when people in our society reject Christ or Christianity, they may not actually be rejecting Christ or His ways. They may just be rejecting the weirdness that sometimes comes with the Christendom package or the obnoxious, antiquated traditions that seem more to do with religiosity than with The Way of Jesus. As a result, we may actually be asking them to convert to a quirky sub-culture that seems very foreign to them more than we are asking them to become a follower of Jesus.
I’m wondering if we need to use far less words and do far more demonstrating of the supernatural life that we’ve been given. At least then, if people reject The Way of Jesus, they’ll have a better understanding of what exactly it is they’re saying “no” to. We’ve filled the streets and the cable TV signals with preaching, we’ve filled hotels with Bibles, billboards with quotes from the Bible in 400 year-old English, and we’ve filled the radio waves with “Christian” music (particularly in the States – everywhere else in the world, “Christian music” means “weird American sub-culture music.”)
The result has been something similar to making a small boy read the Major League Baseball rule book and then quizzing him on it – when actually, we should have taken him to watch the Mariners kick the snot out of the Yankees at Safeco Field during the American League Championship, gradually explaining the rules to him in the process. Now look what we’ve done. The kid hates baseball and would rather memorize HTML code or play Killer Sudoku. Poor little guy. (NOTE: This analogy works with just about any sport. Except cricket. Take a kid to a 5-day-long cricket match and he’ll still be scarred for life.)
Often, it seems, we as Christians only have a wall of propositional or didactic noise to offer, when actually, we’re called to be the aroma of the Bread of Life. That aroma comes from the character of Christ being formed in us, not from our clever defensive arguments for the existence of God. It comes from the supernatural love that we have to offer in relationships with people, not from our judgements towards non-followers for being non-followers as if they should know better. It comes from representing all of the qualities of God’s Kingdom – justice, truth, care for creation, peace, life, etc. – not just for the three values of America’s Christian right.
I wonder if maybe the amount of talking that Christians have done in the last century is grossly disproportionate to the impact that we’ve had on society overall. I wonder if Jesus was serious when he said, “People will know you’re my disciples because of the way you love.”
I wonder if this blog post has far too many words by now and is close to being guilty of hypocrisy . . . .