Recently I took a train out to St Louis to meet up with my wife and her family for a graduation, and while on the train I had the privilege of sitting next to this really cool guy named Bian. He was a botanist from Asia who worked and traveled the country and abroad on behalf of the Botanical Gardens.
We talked the entire 6 hour ride out to St Louis, about everything and anything from music, to politics, to the environment, to world travel and food. He even showed me a few hundred pictures from his travels all across the world. He actually stood at the base of Mt. Everest. Way cool! Anyways, about 4 hours into the train ride, we got onto the topic of religion. We both shared our faith to each other, and he shared with me he was a Zen Buddhist, but that he had a lot of respect for other faith perspectives and saw universal truths in each of them.
We began talking about Christianity and I began to share my faith with him and my take on faith's importance in the world. I shared with him my personal journey, my relationship with Christ, but also spent much time talking about my frustrations with modern day American Christianity as well as my negative experiences growing up in the church. Somehow we eventually got onto the topic of homosexuality.
I expressed with him my frustrations with how the church as a whole had really shunned the homosexual community, and that these sad representations of the church in fact were not a true expression of Jesus' love. I shared with him that we need to do more to build relationships with them, talk with this community, that we need to LISTEN to them and find commonality and ways to share our faith in a way that uplifts rather than condemns, and that through our loving relationship, we can then discuss more personal matters like sexual orientation choices. I was obviously trying to be firm but diplomatic.
All of the sudden, I noticed tears welling up in his eyes. He then responded to my words by first saying he had never known that Christians had such love about them, and that he had always seen Christianity as sort of a judgmental and hateful religion. He then proceeded to tell me that he was in fact gay. Wow! It blew me away. Here I was talking about my faith to this guy I had come to really enjoy in our 4 hours of talking, and God gave me the exact words to say in the exact way to have an impact on some random guy who's life story I was redeeming through my personal faith in Christ.
Now I have no clue if that guy made any life changing decisions that day or the days that followed, but I planted a seed through love, and now that's the only way I want to do it the rest of my life.
I write this because right now I have a great love and desire to engage the homosexual community, and I have recently had the privilege to make several genuine friendships with members of that community, and it has been eye-opening and has challenged me in the way I live out my faith around these good friends as well as everyone else I encounter in my life.
It is amazing that when you engage communities in which Christians are notoriously known to keep at arms length and to shun from the outside, you begin to see issues with people's names and livelihoods attached to them. It is no longer about issues that are right and wrong, but it becomes flesh and blood people that identify with those issues, and it becomes more about loving them and showing them what Christ-like love is all about.
I believe that God takes care of the rest!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
eChurch...I wonder if Jesus "tweets"
This morning I was reading one of those free Chicago newspapers on my train ride into work, and I stumbled across a feature article on the newest internet sensation- eChurch. “eChurch,” you may be thinking to yourself, “what’s e Church? That sounds so cool.”
The idea is that you can basically go to church from the comfort of your own home without ever having to change out of your pj’s. You can watch an internet pastor give you a sermon from his internet studio right to you in your own living room or home office. They even have a separate guy who, before the actual sermon, leads you in a slew of worship songs like some sort of Sunday morning sing-along. I guess you follow the bouncing cross or something…I don’t know. (I picture some guy sitting around in his boxers eating a bowl of cereal, corn flakes dripping from his chin, while he’s singing “How Great is our God” with a mouthful of food desperately trying to not fly out of his tone-deaf mouth) They even have people take communion by themselves from home with their own bread and grape juice. (What???! The word is “communion”, which is basically a fancy word for a “spiritual union”, like when people come together to remember something important.) Technology is making us more and more isolated. We as Christians, but also as the human race, have become more selfish than we have ever been any other time in human history. This goes beyond the church or specific culture or society, but the fact that the church is among the groups of people buying into this innovative brand of “all about me” is something to be genuinely concerned about.
My point is- this disturbingly and overwhelmingly technological age has now become a centerpiece for the modern church as a whole. No longer is the church a body of believers who gather together to share in the joy of love and faith. No longer does it seem that we gather as members of a congregation, or as human beings in general anymore, to be social beings who were created and designed to need one another, to help one another, to love one another, and to help and encourage one another. It seems to be all about ourselves, and all about making our own self-actualization as easy and as effortless as possible. We're closing ourselves off from the world God called us to cultivate, to change.
We’re like those fat slobs in the movie “Wall-E” who ride around on hovercrafts and eat and watch TV without ever having to lift a leg to do anything meaningful with our lives. Now we don’t even have to make an effort for God, or other people for that matter.
Whether it’s sitting in a movie theatre seat in a mega-church watching some guy we don’t know preach to us from some church building we’ve never been in while we sit next to someone we’ve never introduced ourself to or been introduced to likewise, or whether we’re crammed in alongside hundreds of other people huddled together is some sort of religious mosh pit while a “worship” band entertains us with “Christian” songs and cool light shows, we’re quite frankly, simply, and genuinely….missing it.
It amazes me that they didn’t even have church buildings in the early days of Christianity. They had rooms in people’s houses where people in a town or village would gather together for community, for fellowship. They came together to worship and experience God together. It was as selfless and genuine as it could have ever been. Now we’re back to no buildings, but it's like we’ve lost the community too. It’s just us, alone, in front of our computers "You Tube’ing for Jesus."
There was a day when back when the earth was first formed when God said to Himself- “it is not good that man should be alone”. Yet here we are, alone in our rooms being fed "church" by someone we’ve never met offering us what is basically a pornography-like and cheaply whorish version of the church body that I feel God originally intended.
If we keep technologiphying every opportunity to replace genuine human interaction and fellowship, and most importantly the raw power of experiencing a living and breathing God, we’ll have to add Jesus on Facebook just to network our way out of self-reliance and the self-made reality of being completely and utterly alone. Is it any wonder the world looks at Christians like used car salesman and head for the woods? It's all about keeping up with the times to "sell Jesus". But Jesus could not be bought or sold, and in fact ransomed Himself for all of us. I don't claim to be the model person for doing this all right, but if love and community are not central to what we as Christians in a pluralistic society do on a daily basis, we will close ourselves off from a world that needs genuine faith now more than ever.
So with every monitor bowed and every web browser closed, let’s try this again.
The idea is that you can basically go to church from the comfort of your own home without ever having to change out of your pj’s. You can watch an internet pastor give you a sermon from his internet studio right to you in your own living room or home office. They even have a separate guy who, before the actual sermon, leads you in a slew of worship songs like some sort of Sunday morning sing-along. I guess you follow the bouncing cross or something…I don’t know. (I picture some guy sitting around in his boxers eating a bowl of cereal, corn flakes dripping from his chin, while he’s singing “How Great is our God” with a mouthful of food desperately trying to not fly out of his tone-deaf mouth) They even have people take communion by themselves from home with their own bread and grape juice. (What???! The word is “communion”, which is basically a fancy word for a “spiritual union”, like when people come together to remember something important.) Technology is making us more and more isolated. We as Christians, but also as the human race, have become more selfish than we have ever been any other time in human history. This goes beyond the church or specific culture or society, but the fact that the church is among the groups of people buying into this innovative brand of “all about me” is something to be genuinely concerned about.
My point is- this disturbingly and overwhelmingly technological age has now become a centerpiece for the modern church as a whole. No longer is the church a body of believers who gather together to share in the joy of love and faith. No longer does it seem that we gather as members of a congregation, or as human beings in general anymore, to be social beings who were created and designed to need one another, to help one another, to love one another, and to help and encourage one another. It seems to be all about ourselves, and all about making our own self-actualization as easy and as effortless as possible. We're closing ourselves off from the world God called us to cultivate, to change.
We’re like those fat slobs in the movie “Wall-E” who ride around on hovercrafts and eat and watch TV without ever having to lift a leg to do anything meaningful with our lives. Now we don’t even have to make an effort for God, or other people for that matter.
Whether it’s sitting in a movie theatre seat in a mega-church watching some guy we don’t know preach to us from some church building we’ve never been in while we sit next to someone we’ve never introduced ourself to or been introduced to likewise, or whether we’re crammed in alongside hundreds of other people huddled together is some sort of religious mosh pit while a “worship” band entertains us with “Christian” songs and cool light shows, we’re quite frankly, simply, and genuinely….missing it.
It amazes me that they didn’t even have church buildings in the early days of Christianity. They had rooms in people’s houses where people in a town or village would gather together for community, for fellowship. They came together to worship and experience God together. It was as selfless and genuine as it could have ever been. Now we’re back to no buildings, but it's like we’ve lost the community too. It’s just us, alone, in front of our computers "You Tube’ing for Jesus."
There was a day when back when the earth was first formed when God said to Himself- “it is not good that man should be alone”. Yet here we are, alone in our rooms being fed "church" by someone we’ve never met offering us what is basically a pornography-like and cheaply whorish version of the church body that I feel God originally intended.
If we keep technologiphying every opportunity to replace genuine human interaction and fellowship, and most importantly the raw power of experiencing a living and breathing God, we’ll have to add Jesus on Facebook just to network our way out of self-reliance and the self-made reality of being completely and utterly alone. Is it any wonder the world looks at Christians like used car salesman and head for the woods? It's all about keeping up with the times to "sell Jesus". But Jesus could not be bought or sold, and in fact ransomed Himself for all of us. I don't claim to be the model person for doing this all right, but if love and community are not central to what we as Christians in a pluralistic society do on a daily basis, we will close ourselves off from a world that needs genuine faith now more than ever.
So with every monitor bowed and every web browser closed, let’s try this again.
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