It seems like I’ve had some of the best conversations lately. It started with this post, which asks if Christianity is a system of belief or a way of life.  And then it extended to this post, which asks if denying God is wrestling with God.  And within these conversations seems to be common thread.  What is a follower of Jesus? What is the true essence, the stripped down version of being a follower? In other words, did Jesus come to establish complexity or simplicity?

I ask this because of a recent conversation I had with a friend who said that he has a bunch of friends who are willing to practice love, which is arguably the basis of what it means to follow Jesus, but who are completely unwilling to set foot into the church.  In other words, they dig what Jesus is saying but they are unwilling to add on all of the religious jargon associated with Christianity.  And for them its not just about social justice, but about engaging a deeper form of what it means to be human.

And it seems like so many people I meet and talk to are wrestling with this strange notion of what it means to strip away the religious connotations, in order to get to following.  We all want the real thing.  And this desire is not limited to Christians.  It’s deeper than that.  Its extends to human beings (who are created in the image of God anyway).  Jesus even said, “You will know them by their fruit.”  And can’t we make the assumption that love is the greatest fruit, and the essence of Jesus’ intention for spiritual formation?

So I would ask if you think one can be a follower of Jesus, and not set foot in the church or participate in traditional forms of worship?  Can one be a follower of Jesus simply by practicing love. And this doesn’t mean not participating in community because so many of my friends already have tribes that are asking these deeper questions, and they aren’t taking place in churches.

Sometimes I think God allows pain in order to get us to the point of admitting what we don’t want to admit.

Recently I was talking with some friends about some very important aspects of my life.  We were lamenting in some regards.  It was a very hard conversation but beautiful in many ways.  We were all sharing what was one our hearts and there was no holding back.  But at the same time it was the recognition that deep within we were hurting inside.

And one of my friends said, “I sometimes wonder if God failed?”

There was a long moment of silence as we all let the question sink in.  It wasn’t that we had reached a point of nihilism and wanted to give up on God.  It was that we had created a space of grace for someone to speak one of the deepest fears we had all felt.

I sometimes wondered if the disciples came to the same conclusion at Golgotha.  Seeing Jesus on the cross, I can imagine a few raising their hands at God in the heavens and saying, “Did you fail?”

I walked away recognizing that as much as my pain hurts, it also restores.  It frees my soul from my own bullshit.  It liberates me from pretension.  But it doesn’t leave me there.  Friday gave way to Sunday.  It calls me to resurrection and hope, to discover my own faith that comes FROM suffering.

What is the one question your suffering is creating?

What if it is time to reimagine the slippery slope?

I was watching a video this morning of Dan Brennan and Spencer Burke talk about male female relationships.  It’s a great video and a really great topic that I hope finds traction.  How do men and women find wholistic relationships together in community?  (Brian McLaren also talks about the sex issue here and has some great points too.)

At 6:00 Dan states:

“We need powerful stories.  There are stories in Catholic spirituality spanning every century that are chaste, powerful, intimate friendships where sex was never in the picture.  And there are plenty of stories in our day, both in the secular realm and in the Christian realm where men and women are working close, side by side to each other, traveling with each other, spending time with each other…encouraging relationships…without ever falling down the slippery slope.”

That we engage a wholistic conversation around sexuality between men and women is deeply important.  But what caught my attention was the last part of the comment.  I wonder if we will ever be able to have a wholistic conversation around sexuality until we can deal with our response when someone does fall down the slippery slope.  Often we think God is found at the top of the slope, watching us fall into oblivion.  But the Gospel finds Jesus at the bottom of the slippery slope.

Can we as a humanity find the conversation of grace that completely re-informs the slippery slope in a way that virtually eliminates the fear behind it?  Do we really believe that Jesus is found at the bottom of the slippery slope?  Or are we kidding ourselves about the Gospel?

What do you think?

“Christianity is in crisis – and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe.”

Top of the morning to you too. ;-P

I woke up this morning and began reading Andrew Sullivan’s interesting perspective on Christianity.  And I pick this out because Andrew represents for me the broader view of faith in America.  He’s extremely intelligent, refreshingly honest and insightful, shares a deep love of God, but doesn’t fall into neat little categories of evangelical belief.  He’s gay and I believe Catholic, but he also is one of the more important bloggers in America and has a huge audience that listens to him.  So when Andrew suggests Christianity is in crisis, people listen.

Andrew suggests that we’ve entered into a different period of faith.

“I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists – of total papal or Biblical authority – because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves. Sadly, a critical faction of the Straussian right has been engaged in exactly that kind of cynicism for a while now.”

“No modern Christian, it seems to me, can claim the literal inerrancy of the Bible without abandoning logos. No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have – copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories – are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later.”

While I don’t share Andrew’s (or Bart Ehrman’s) cynicism regarding the validity of Scripture, he brings up one really important point in his post.  He shares the tension that is the Catholic and Protestant problem.

“When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called “absolute corruption”.”

As Phyllis Tickle says, “Where now is our authority?”  If science, literary criticism, and reality are exposing the fallacy of a perfect Scriptures (the Protestant authority) and history is revealing the fallacy of the Papal authority (the Catholic authority), where is the authority?

Could this be a period of time that shifts authority back onto Jesus?  Andrew even suggests this.

“So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely.”

What I love about this time in history is that we’re not only aware of the problem.  Because of the Internet, we’re also aware that we’re aware of the problem.  The crisis is as much our awareness as the problem. History is forcing us to face reality and we don’t like it. We’re conscious enough to know what hasn’t worked in the past but we don’t know how to progress in the future.  This is why I have suggested that we need a new story to progress forward. We need a better understanding of the problem and how to participate with God in faith.  And that structure must in some way recognize the reality of the problem, but suggest a logical, and wholistic solution.

So I would ask if you think Christianity is in crisis?

I love Greg Boy and Tony Campolo.  Some classic lines in this one.

Do we have an intrinsic mobilizing story that compels us to follow?

This video by Francis Chan is interesting for several reasons.  Francis talks about how we’re attracted to Jesus but not really willing to follow Jesus. We like what Jesus did, but we’re not willing to see Jesus as an action role model to emulate. The subtle tension is that our lack of action reveals a roadblock to following.  Yet what is that roadblock?  I would offer that it’s the way we approach the word “must”.

Francis shares Jesus’ own words that we “must” walk as Jesus did.  I would suggest that “must” is true in the sense that we cannot realize the life of Jesus unless we actually follow.  But the tension for me is seeing it as something we have to do in order to make grace true in a cosmic sense.  This is the subtle tension I have with focusing on “must”.  Its easy to hear “must” and walk away thinking, “If I’m not doing it God must be disgusted with me.”  We can easily create a roadblock to experiencing life.

The question for me is where does our motivation reside.  Do we follow because it’s the right thing to do?  Or do we follow because its the most valuable life to live?  It’s really easy to see following as an extrinsic cosmic rule isn’t it?  In other words, its easy to develop a extrinsic story that has no personal motivating value in our lives.   We assume we’re supposed to follow because it’s the “right” thing to do.  We even agree that its right as though it sits on a shelf waiting to be picked up at some point in our lives.  And suddenly we’re sixty and its still sitting there.

The question is then what would make us pick up that call to follow?

I would offer that we need to shape our stories as something intrinsically valuable.  To follow is to live.  We don’t have to follow in order to be loved.  God loves us before we were born.  But we do have to follow in order to experience that love.  See the difference.  One is a conditional requirement that makes it true in a cosmic sense, or from God’s perspective.  One is conditional requirement that makes it true in a personal sense, or from our perspective. Legalism continually focuses on the former, where I think Jesus saw it as the latter.  We follow to realize the love of God in our own lives, not make it true in God’s perspective.

We need intrinsic mobilizing stories.  We need to see that God’s love is not something we earn by doing the right thing, which is an external motivator.  God’s love is something that is simply true, but can only be experienced by following. The difference is light years apart. I see so many people wanting to love God but their stories are deeply shaped by something they have to do “in order to” receive love.  I’m suggesting that we reframe our stories based on something we “get to” in order to intrinsically experience God’s love.

Mark Batterson writes in his book Primal:

“The great commandment is the lost soul of Christianity. If Jesus said that loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength is the most important commandment, then doesn’t it logically follow that we ought to spend an inordinate amount of our time and energy trying to understand it and obey it? We can’t afford to be merely good at the Great Commandment. We’ve got to be great at the Great Commandment.”

Just curious when was the last time you heard this on Sunday?

When Jesus said:

(New International Version) ²²Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.

²³“Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their fathers treated the prophets. (Luke 6:22-23)

He wasn’t giving people an excuse to be a jerk.

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We see what we want to see.

“There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus himself of his early followers taught that suggests you can decide just to enjoy forgiveness at Jesus’ expense and have nothing more to do with him.” Dallas Willard, The Great Ommission

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