In the churches and faith groups that I talk to I find there is a real hunger among people to live the Way of Jesus, not just belong to a church or acknowledge a creed. These people want to live for Jesus–not just on Sunday, but everyday. They feel that the message of Jesus was that of not intellectual agreement with a set of propositions, but that of a way, of a lifestyle. And the sad thing is, they see no way to do that. The church they go to does not teach them how to do that. The pastor or worship leader does not talk about how to do that, or if he does, they suspect he is being less than honest, because they do not see it in his (or, much less frequently, her) life.
These people have no idea whether they are Emergent, Post-Modern, Modern, Evangelical, Democrat or Virgo. They just know that they find the message of Jesus attractive, that he probably meant what he said about the Kingdom of God and loving your neighbor and they desire to experience the knowledge and presence of God in the same way Jesus did.
I have coffee 2-3 times a week with someone who tells me they have questions about their faith, that they just cannot “buy” what the church is pushing any more. They tell me that they find contradictions between the infighting they see among church people and the teachings of Jesus. Many tell me that they no longer care to be called Christian because they have no desire to be associated with the term… but they love Jesus.
They are convinced that Jesus was about more than creeds, more than six verses and a prayer, more than an hour and a half on Sunday.They want to live deeply, to feel what Jesus felt, to love God and love people. But they feel they can no longer, in good conscience, ‘do’ church. Heck, some of them are not even certain that Jesus was God.
So, what do I tell these people?
First, I sympathize, for I am one of them. One day, I realized I just could no longer ignore Jesus and his message of radical discipleship. And if there is one thing I have learned about following Jesus, it is that it will cost you; friendships, economically, time, opportunities. You really don’t think of it that way, any more than marrying this girl will mean you cannot go out with any other girls. It is true, but you don’t count that as a burden. If you do, you may want to re-examine your relationship.
The next thing I tell them is that if they feel they have to choose between belief and action, to choose action. After all, we are told that if we feed the hungry, visit prisoners and shelter the homeless, we encounter the living Jesus himself. And I am just crazy enough to believe that if you spend that much time in the presence of Jesus, it will change you. I have said it before, but loving people is prayer.
I also tell them that the church has many bad qualities, but if Jesus was serious about loving our neighbor, than that also means Sister Bertha-better-than-you on the front row of church. If Jesus was serious about salt and yeast and mustard seeds, then we probably need to be there, right in the middle, getting busy salting and leavening and… mustarding? In any event, Jesus loved the church, and thought it was worth dying for, so it is probably worth our fighting for.
The last thing I would tell them is that I have no idea for ‘certain’ that the creeds are right or that Jesus was God. In other words, I cannot prove it, but that they probably should not spend a lot of time freaking out about that. The author of Hebrews tells us that faith is being certain of what we hope for, so we truly are people of faith, for every one of these people hope, more than anything, that God is a lot like the Jesus we see in the Gospels. And should he not be, we probably would not want much to do with him anyway.