[Link] Dregs of Culture

by Sam Williamson

I was in a college ministry that targeted its evangelism for one purpose: to select future leaders. I’m ashamed to admit we called this process, “Selective Evangelism.”

We felt that we could recognize future spiritual dynamos by their past high school triumphs. We pursued unbelieving men and women who excelled at sports, academics, and (I’m even more ashamed to admit) who had a sense of coolness about them.

The ministry chose to target evangelism to those cool students because it felt it could discern God’s future go-getters based on natural gifting. It clung to this heresy despite God’s direct rebuke to the prophet Samuel who thought he could pick Israel’s next king by his good looks.

I suppose we thought we were smarter or more spiritual than one of God’s greatest prophets.

But the humanistic virus that infected that ministry still flourishes in modern Christendom. Look at how many mega-church pastors are good-looking and just plain cool: almost every one of them.  And those who don’t look cool spend their money on ratty jeans and tattooed sleeves.

The worst part is that believers in the pew begin to doubt God’s impact through their own lives simply because their body shape is pear, their intellect is lower than Einstein’s, and the only sport they excel at is shuffleboard.

As though God needs Joel Osteen’s smile to part the Red Sea.

Read the full article: https://beliefsoftheheart.com/2021/03/10/dregs-of-culture/

Wouldn't It Be Nice...?

I had a thought hit me at random while driving home the other night. 

(And yes, it happens fairly often, so no, it wasn't lonely in my head, thank you very much. Smartass.)

Wouldn't it be nice if ... Christians were recognized and known as those really loving people who had some strange ideas about their beliefs? 

Wouldn't it be nice if ... Christians were seen by the world as that group of genuinely helpful and caring people who could be forgiven for believing their had the corner on Truth because their compassionate actions outweighed their talk?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... churches bailed out the government's welfare programs, and took the lead in taking care of the widows, orphans, jobless?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... the religious folks who get political about it sang the praises of the helpless poor who endure day to day and still persevere rather than those of the mighty who have "made something of themselves" by being self-reliant -- the opposite of accepting grace and then giving it because it was offered to you?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... every person who spoke out against homosexuality had at least one gay true friend that he or she hugged and spoke to on a regular basis so the humanity could outshine the activity?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... my HIV-positive friends didn't have to thank me for actually shaking their hands and hugging them, as if that's something out of the ordinary?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... I and my fellow Christ-followers entered the world/culture/etc. with faith and friendship rather than avoiding in fear that we might be tainted by simply setting foot inside a place that is still being redeemed?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... I and my fellow Christ-followers fully realized the truth that we are no better than this world/culture/etc. we hide from inside our subcultures because while we are redeemed, we are still being fighting the same fights and wearing the same dirty clothes as the rest of the world?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... we Christians finally got our supernatural erasers out and once and for all obliterated that imaginary line we've created that separates the natural from the spiritual, the sacred from the profane, the lost from the saved, and let God deal with that while we go about our "as you go" lives loving people, helping people, and introducing them to live more abundant?

Wouldn't it be nice if ... those same Christ-followers could still stand against sin and call people to repent from it, but in such a way that those people felt loved and respected instead of condemned?

The Great Moralization

Here's another old one. In this case, a really old one. But I think writing this one so many years ago really helped begin shaping my understanding of my life of faith. So, in essence, this one's one of my formative ones.

A man walks into a doctor's office with a knife stuck in his back. Of course the receptionist sends him straight in, and the doctor leaves his other patient to check the wound. But... When the doctor reaches to remove the knife, the patient protests, "You don't understand doctor. I just wanted some medicine for the pain. You can leave the knife where it is."

"Can I has aspirin?"

Most all of us would say that this idiot is crazy. If he'd just let the doctor remove the knife the wound would heal, and the pain would eventually go away for good. It's a classic case of deciding whether to cure the symptoms or the disease, get rid of the cause or the effects.

What a stupid story, you may say. But did you know that Christians do that very thing? If abortion was made 100 percent illegal, vague prayer allowed in schools, and homosexuality pushed back into the closet, would Christian groups be satisfied? I think that by and large, they would, and that is a sad commentary on modern Christianity.

Are we attempting to help the world be redeemed or are we simply trying to moralize society? Sadly, the time spent in "moral" activities vastly outweighs the amount of time in "redemptive" activities.

It would seem that we are more interested in subjecting a world of various beliefs and non-beliefs to our own Christian common sense of decency and morality than in helping people find God. Just as the pain was a symptom of a knife in the back, all those things we fight against in culture are only symptoms of a greater problem -- sin, including and particularly our own! It would have been foolish for our doctor to focus only on the pain and not on the knife. It is equally foolish for us to focus only on the symptoms and not on the sin that causes them.

A moral society does not equal a redeemed society. A redeemed society will become a moral society, however. But the order is reversed. See the difference?

Perhaps the problem lies in the Christian's escape from the real world. As Christians, somewhere along the timeline, we saw that the world was going "bad." So we retreated into the ordered Christian subculture where we could have as little contact with the big, bad world as possible. But then the big, bad world started to encroach into our territory, so we fought back by organizing political groups and launching publicity campaigns. Even though the world was going to hell in a handbasket, it didn't bother us until it rained on our parade.

© 1994 Sean Taylor