Looking at life through stained glass windows.

I am currently taking the most thought provoking class of my academic career. The class is called the Life of Christ. Yea I know, should have been an easy class for a guy who has been in church for the majority of his life. How much more is there to really learn that hasn't been covered in Sunday School or a sermon. This class has challenged me to strip away the preconceived thoughts that I had about Christ and how he lived while on earth. In other words to throw out all the baggage we bring with us. The effects are troubling. We no longer can hide in the pews and feel safe. Thankfully this journey had started a few years earlier for me but others have had their cages rattled.

We have pretty much put the ways we do things under the microscope of scrutiny to see how our value system lines up with Christ. We have examined the way Christ lived, who He walked with, and how He taught those around. One of the most recent questions we had to ask ourselves was "how does the life of Christ and the values He clearly held and taught inform the way we engage culture? contextualize?" After going over this question in my mind I wrote this response. "We have done all these things to bring the world to us. We set up programs, fall festivals, Christmas plays, and the list goes on. We do all these community outreach events at our church with a come and see attitude expecting them to flood our services but fail to engage them where they are. I do not see a biblical example of this anywhere. I believe it tells us to GO. What if instead of planning our own events we were to be involved with their events? You know be Jesus to them where they are? Instead of creating our own culture embrace the culture we are already a part of. Stupid things such as handing out water at a local art show may actually allow us to teach in a much more profound way then having a hayride at our members only church meetings!" I am not saying these events don't serve a purpose but they can not take place of living a life of love. Living a life where we are called to LOVE. If we are to be the salt of the earth don't we have to be alive on this earth. It does not tell us to be the salt of the church. We have withdrawn to our churches and look out through stain glass windows at a world going to hell. It looks pretty as we view it through the colored glass that distorts the image of the single mom who struggles to put food on the table. Everything we see is bright and vibrant. We are so comfortable sitting in our pews and voting on a committee to recommend how we will help those with needs. We make ourselves feel better because we recognize a need. All the while afraid to get dirty. One student, Richard wrote a quote that we may not even begin to understand the truth of. "The problem however is that there are too many christian eunuch's that are either too afraid or unwilling to engage the culture." How true. We are so afraid of the culture we create our own. One that if we don't leave we feel safe.