RAPID CHRISTIAN RESPONSE IS NOT A TOO-TALL EXPECTATION.

It’s not surprising that some Christians become disillusioned and disappointed with a church, with its leaders and with the Christian friends who comprise it. Christian education and evangelism are not the only services a church should prioritize. When a person, or couple or family experiences a crisis, the church should respond. Rapid Christian response should be the ready position. Christian friends should jump to assist. Even when the presenting issue is awkward, distressing, immoral, angry, or hopeless, it is a God-assigned responsibility to love and to listen and to counsel and to shelter and to give aid. That’s not a too-tall expectation.

SUFFERING for FAITH

I work and play at Pagoda Ridge Golf Course. One day each week I am a marshall, a player's assistant. And one day a week I play golf.  At Pagoda I am working with and playing with mostly non-Christians. It's amazing that the Trinity is so closely associated with the game of golf. A player blasts a drive out of bounds and I hear him say, "Goddammit." Another player hits a bad shot and Jesus' name is mentioned as an expletive. I have told some of them, "I hear Jesus Christ's name more often out here than I do in churches." I can get away with that because I live in Canada, and I am thankful for my freedoms.

Asia Bibi is a Christian and does not share my freedom. I don't share her pain. I know nothing about it but what I read. She lives in Pakistan. She is married and she has two daughters. Her family is safely out of the country. She has been in prison for 8 years under sentence of death. In 2009 she was harvesting fruit with some neighbourhood women. She dipped a drinking cup in bucket of water and the women said they couldn't touch it now because her faith had made the water unclean. She rejected that accusation. They told her to convert to Islam and she countered that her faith is in Christ as Saviour. The women reported her as having blasphemed the prophet Muhammad. She was convicted and sentenced to death. The sentence has been delayed by her legal appeals. Two weeks ago Pakistan's Supreme Court acquitted her because it ruled that here conviction was based on unreliable evidence and a confession extracted under the threat of death. She was released early this month and was to be flown to freedom and safety.  Then the 98% of Pakistan's population being Muslim, created chaos, threatening strikes and shutdowns and violence. The government rearrested her and is awaiting a review of the court decision. 

CYNICISM IS OUR SOCIETAL CURRENCY

Cynicism is our societal currency. It's harmful to democracy but it is our default social coinage. It is injurious to relationships but it our learned security.
Hope was the preferred currency until we ruined it. Any institution that you name has lost people's trust and confidence, government, law enforcement, banks, corporations, organized religions, education, and even the press. In fact, news sources are the propagators of cynicism. Networks are predisposed to an interpretation. Objectivity is obscured by bias. Comedy, talk shows, celebrities and film augment cynical attitudes. Saddest of all, we have become less trusting of one another. 

Too often politicians have failed to keep promises and have catered to special interests. Law enforcement has broken law and failed to keep streets safe. Banks have screwed customers' futures with easy credit. Corporations have expanded the space between wealthy and middle class. Religions have displayed repeated hypocrisies. 

As the institutions fail us, our immediate worlds are filled with truth-starved, connection-starved, hope-starved people.

PERCEIVING GOD

Perceiving God

I see a young man standing in the sun at a bus stop. He stands with a backpack slung over one shoulder. He has a pleasant face and he looks purposeful. He is of university age. He is travelling locally so he may attend a technical college. He is living in the moment. His mind may be on what lies ahead in his day, an assignment, a project, a person with whom he will spend some time. I surmise that he is not thinking, "How did I get into this world?" "Why am I here?" Big picture thinking for this fellow as the bus moves toward him, is probably concerned with nothing more extensive than what he will do after graduation? 

Yet, seated in my car, I pass him and my eyes are multi-tasking, observing the road ahead, vehicles attempting to merge, the speed I am travelling, the time on my car clock, and the blue sky that expands forever. I am projecting my thoughts into the frontiers of space and to the metaphysical reaches of origins. I am a man with a faith but fleetingly I seek to consider how a person without faith can imagine the genesis of all things.

I think of the other 7.125 billion humans on this planet, 2.1 billion of whom are overweight like me. Still we expect to live 70 years on average, and that's that. We will be gone. Others will take our place just as they presently are doing at a rate of 1.2% annually, which is why only twenty years ago we were 6.5 billion people. Forty years ago there were only 3.999 billion people on earth, and while we have almost doubled the world population, we still depend completely and solely upon this biosphere and minerals of this sphere. I marvel at my earth home being one of the four terrestrial planets in our Solar System, yet it is the densest planet and the third from the Sun, and earth is the only planet that is known to accommodate life. Mercury, Venus and Mars have not supported life. But why here on this earth and since when were we here, and who or what started this?

This is what my mind is doing as I drive to my gym to keep this body healthy for a few more years.

GENUINELY CHRISTIAN YET PRACTICALLY AGNOSTIC

GENUINELY CHRISTIAN YET PRACTICALLY AGNOSTIC (1)

Within the context of Christian faith in an omni-everything God, one should assume that the two terms 'christian' and 'agnostic' cannot describe the same person. Yet here I am advancing the opinion that some people of faith are practicing Christians yet practical agnostics. In daily life they are not acting in faith. My own guestimate is that this is true of a large percentage of authentic Christians.    

I am not suggesting that a person can be both Christian and agnostic. I am saying that a Christian who believes in the person of God and the deity of Christ and the redemption available through trust in the substitutionary death of Christ for sinners, may be living each day without meaningful contact with God, communication with God, or reliance upon God. This person sincerely believes what the Bible teaches, accepts mainstream theological tenets, yet when real life could benefit from the intervention of God, this person's faith does not translate into dependence upon God.

 This person may pray in public with other believers; may be sincere as the words are expressed. I am speaking about personal life, private practice, where the evidence of dependent faith or lack of it is on display to the God in whom the Christian professes faith. This person may teach scripture to others and earnestly intend each truth. At home the only prayer that is uttered is the grace before a meal. An inertia takes over when it comes to intercession for oneself, for spouse, or children, or grandchildren or neighbours. This is an agnostic uncertainty not in God himself but rather that God will act. It's practical agnosticism.

(I will pursue this subject in a few posts in the days ahead)

DO BELIEVERS OUTGROW THEIR NEED FOR CHURCH?

Maybe there are times or intervals at which churches are no longer able to nourish some peoples' faith.

Why say something like that?

We know that people leave church for assorted reasons. Some leave church A to go to church B. That's not the theme of this piece. I know people who have stopped going to a church in a building, anywhere. They are people who have been in church for years and for whom the traditions have been important. Yes we can talk about solidarity and church being a family and small groups being where the growth truly happens. The people I refer to must not be faulted, because their reasons for departure are not chiefly because the preaching or the music or the programs have changed or because of church politics or petty squabbles as well as escalated rows. Those factors may have influenced their choices, but primarily they have a deep longing for more of God or more with God.

Do you think that some believers outgrow their need for church?

CHRISTIANITY

Let me tell you what it is not and then what it is.

Christian faith is not primarily about the sacrifice that believers make for Jesus in order to become Christian, but rather about the sacrifice that he made for us. Christianity is not about intensified devotion, trying even harder, doing better and being better, proving ourselves. No, no. Its essence is not doing something for Jesus but rather it is Jesus accomplishing something in us. His sacrifice once, and his ongoing work in us now. That is something that people find attractive because that is not religion. It is relationship. This is not about performance with respect to a faith system that legislates morality. A heavy-handed condemnation has resulted from that model and people have walked away from Jesus when they should have walked away from that specific model of Christian expression. Jesus' proclamation was good news. It was good news to good people and to bad people, to free people and prisoners, to healthy and diseased people, to sighted people and blind people. It was good in the first century and it is still good today because is about God's mercy to every last one of us, each of whom is naturally undeserving. Yet we are invited into relationship through faith in Jesus, Son of God, Lamb, Saviour, King, and endorsed a member of God's family.

CHANGing CHURCHES & CHANGing FAITHS

People change church affiliation and membership. As many as 40% of North Americans do. This can be a simple denominational change but is occasionally a conversion from one faith system to another, or even bailing on religion.

LOVING YOUR CHILDREN ENOUGH

Some parents care about their children's spiritual destiny.
What follows is a personal opinion, born from experience. If you profess to be a Christian and you are a parent of young children, the clearest indicator of your own theology and the authenticity of your confession of faith is the consistent effort you make to provide your own children with the indispensable information that enables them to have a relationship with the God of the universe, and the model your own life exhibits that this relationship is a priority for you. If they are hearing it from you and seeing it in you, your theology is on target. It matters that you love them and it’s rewarding that they love you, but they need to know that they are loved by God and that they are at home in his presence rather than disassociated. Be certain that they do not miss out on what should be their inheritance.

BE CAREFUL HOW YOU MEASURE SPIRITUALITY

Fundamentalist and evangelical Christians are known for drafting creeds of right beliefs and right conduct to separate themselves from the world. Some of the lists by which you may have lived your life might include abstaining from certain foods and drinks and practices that other mainstream Christians feel are harmless. Lists tend to lead to self-righteousness and the opinion that the more you abstain, the more spiritual you are. Isn’t that the way it goes? The more fastidiously you comply with rules of self-denial the greater your holiness. Well that doesn’t wash with Paul. For him, the mark of true religion is not a rigorous compliance to rules of self-denial, but rather faith in Christ and a life in his Spirit. What finally defines true Christianity is "being in Christ," where God's grace transforms people into an alternative faith community. Any definition of Christianity that substitutes regulations of self-denial for self-transformation by the grace of God is spiritually impoverished and finally useless.

I AM - THAT'S A NAME?

To understand what the human is, we must understand who God is and the bible provides that identification. We are required to listen to the bible's declarations about God and God's grace enables us to make the quantum leap to acceptance. God is the only self-existent and eternal being, existing in a way like no other being in the universe. He exists without origin or beginning. God confessed this concerning himself when Moses expressed his concern to God who had called him to lead the Israelites. Moses didn't know how to answer the Israelites if they were to ask him the name of the God whom he represented. God told Moses "I AM who I AM" and God instructed Moses to tell Israelites, "I AM has sent me to you." (Exodus 3:14). This name connotes existence without origin or beginning. God simply is, over and out. It signifies self-existence and eternality. God is the ultimate being, the one prime reality and source of all other reality. God is infinite. God is He, a pronoun which in this case speaks less to gender and more to the meaning that He has personality characterized by self-consciousness as well as self-determination. The essence of God distinguishes three persons who are neither three gods or three parts or modes of God but rather are coequal and coeternal. This trinity of persons that comprises the ultimate being confirms his communal personal nature.

GENERATIONAL DISCIPLESHIP

Do you want to pass faith and values to the next generation? Then consider that the family should be the primary vehicle for discipleship. I am talking about generational discipleship. Churches must catch on to the concept that they must equip parents and grandparents. They must also gather in spiritual orphans.