A CONFESSION

A confession. As I live in Christ, following Him, albeit in an imperfect way into discipleship to be the person God has always intended me to be, I become less and less interested in presenting Christianity to people. I don’t want to invest my life into trying to get people to align with or adhere to Christianity. I want people to find what I have found in the person of Christ.

The lovely, winsome, intelligent, intriguing and living person of Jesus Christ.

Since childhood I have always questioned the prevailing assumptions being presented in the church and was regularly thumped (both literally and figuratively). I went underground for years and built walls that almost destroyed my soul. God never gave up, even when Christianity did.

I found new life in Christ. A person. Not a religion, church or sect. And it has been Christ, not Christianity that has begun to heal my hurting soul. Redeemed by His blood and saved by His life.

Christianity was a tag hung on some by the world, then taken over by the church and now argued over as to who is and who isn’t really in. Count me out. In Lebanon it is the name of a political group, in America it is the description of our historical roots and in other places it is the side of bloody protests. Perhaps it is time to give the word back to the world that gave it to us. Like Cassandra in Greek Mythology where Apollo's cursed gift of prophecy became a source of endless pain and frustration, the moniker ‘Christian’ has been an untold source of sorrow and hurt, wars and blood.

Let’s be honest, ‘Christianity’ is now a ‘religion’ and the world isn’t buying what we are selling wrapped in the description they invented. For good reason the world has had a bellyful of our sermonizing and in-fighting. What we are selling is a merchandized, commercialized, consumer driven religion that requires adherents to bow at the shrine of the influential writers and speakers who apparently are the gatekeepers and protestant popes of this religious movement.

Often what we are selling is not consistent with the person of Jesus in whom we are finding a life of such transformative power we have had no trouble considering the cost as the best bargain ever presented in life.

I am too old to speak to a movement or start a trend. I have neither the energy, the patience, the intelligence nor probably the right. I pray for those God is rising up in the midst of our religious culture who will say by their life, no more. No more religion. No more consumerism. No more to ‘Christianity’. Just followers of Christ into the kind of life He intends, becoming all that He intended us to be and by our lives shut the mouths of kings. For it might be His intent that this new breed of Christ followers will be the way by which He will sprinkle many nations with Himself; where the kings shall shut their mouths at him; for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider (Is. 52:15)