Monday 4 April 2016

Radical

I'm currently reading Radical: Taking back your faith from the american dream by David Platt. Long time readers may remember how i found this book.

Here's what happened in Chapter 1:

"We have missed what is radical about our faith and replaced it with what is comfortable. We were settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves."
Why do we do this? Author David Pratt says we look at what Jesus asks of his followers, and find it too difficult. We decide (or perhaps pretend) that he didn't really mean those things. We effectively re-model Christianity to make a jesus that wants us to avoid any sort of danger or extreme behaviour. A jesus that comforts us as we live out our Christian version of the American dream.

This makes jesus a lot like us, which is convenient because that's who we're comfortable with. But of course this mean that when we say we worshipping god we're probably just worshipping ourselves.

He talks about the effects of Christians who don't follow God's command to gve to the poor, but instead buy larger homes nicer cars and more stuff. Such Christians gather millions on a nice building cushioned chairs and program to enjoy for themslevs.

David Platt tells of a Christian newsletter. The first headline reads "Church celebrates 23 million dollar building". The second headline declares "Baptist relief helps Sudanese refugees". In Sudan there were 350,000 refugees dying of malnutrition as a result of the war there. The Baptists sent $5,000.

Isn't that just wrong? For every dollar to help the poor and suffering we can find $4,600 to spend on ourselves.

Sometimes I wonder if this is part of the reason church struggles. Why would anyone outside the church go to the effort of joining it, just to live the same lifestyle but with a tiny bit of Christian flavour.

Perhaps if we want people to take Christianity seriously perhaps we should take it seriously first.

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