Church at the end of Christendom

Can I tell you one thing that truly excites me?  It’s the end.  The end of patriarchy.  The end of triumphalism.  The end of ‘turn or burn’.  The end of systems of discipline in the ‘name’ of Jesus.  And certainly, the end of the predictable.

The end heralds a beginning... hope.

There’s so much to be said of the church in our present and bygone era.  So many fors and so many againsts.  The church is made up with humans, and wherever there are four humans, there will be at least five opinions.  Throw in a heap of theology, ethics, hermeneutics, eschatology, and many more long worded complex paradigms and there you have it—a recipe for division.

Satan loves division.

Satan loves dividing those who are for God against those who are for God, especially when those who are for God think their ‘for God’ is really ‘for God’ and the divergent viewpoint isn’t.   Read it again.  Yes, it’s a folly.

How can I be right all the time and you be wrong?  Flip the script!  Who’s right and who’s wrong?

Jesus doesn’t believe in what we believe as much as we believe he does.

Perhaps true faith is appreciating the ethics that both the Left and the Right embrace—but if you’re on the Left, you see one set of ethics as primary, and if you’re on the Right, you see a different set of ethics being primary.  All the world sees is a church that fights over semantics—important semantics, but semantics all the same.

What if we went beyond diverting into the petty discussion, and getting sucked into a fight, and actually did something meaningful and positive with our time.

Have you noticed, too, how Facebook elevates the fight!

Maybe Jesus doesn’t want conservative or progressive, just those who will follow him.

Have you noticed how hard it is not to be dragged into the arena?  I see an issue and immediately my dualistic mind takes a side.  Are we really serving God by always letting our reptilian brain decide for us like that?

Maybe there’s a more important agenda.

Maybe the Christian life is more about finding a way to love the other Christian person we would otherwise be in combat with.

Perhaps we need to demonstrate to ourselves how equally worthy of God’s love and our love they are before we go on the offensive and prove our point.  Not saying this is easy.

But if only we stop ourselves at the keyboard for a few seconds, and say, “God, show me what this person can teach me—about you, about other viewpoints, about being open-hearted and open-handed.”

Maybe out of a position of disagreement we can both learn.  Maybe as we turn to one another instead of turning away from one another, we will stop trying to relate only for rhetorical purposes.

Can we just be FOR one another?  Can we start from there?  We’re brothers and sisters after all.

But instead, we come with our position and all our focus and attention is on holding firm.  The other person reciprocates.  Never the twain shall meet.  It’s futility in motion.

All Christians working together to love people without agenda—that’s what I want to be part of.  Alas, maybe that’s only possible in eternity.  But wouldn’t it be fabulous in our lifetime?

Let’s convince others less and love people more.

Church at the end of Christendom has its divisions.  It’s time to make a new day.  A day where Jesus’ final command has unequivocal prominence.

“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing.”
—Isaiah 43:18-19a (NIV)