The Well's summer book club is under way and tonight we have another discussion. In case you missed my last post, we're reading through a book by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay called, "The Tangible Kingdom." I wanted to share a thought from the book with you:
"...as I'm sitting at a Starbucks in the final week of editing this book, I just took a break to talk to a guy named Don. Don grew up in a non-practicing Catholic home, watched his father convert to a Seventh-Day Adventist tradition, but only remembers the types of meat he couldn't eat. His wife hates the idea of God, and Don's already expressed his love of God but his disdain for organized church. Since he seemed open to talk, I lobbed up this question, 'If Christianity was only about finding a group of people to live life with, who shared openly their search for God and allowed anyone, regardless of behavior, to seek too, and who collectively lived by faith to make the world a little more like Heaven, would you be interested?'
'Hell yes!' was the reply. He continued. 'Are there churches like that?'"
What do you think about the author's description for church and Christianity? Could it be that we've taken something that is supposed to be so simple and exponentially complicated it? If Christianity really were this real, this simple, this communal, do you think people would respond as Don did?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Acts 2, pure and simple. I think that is what most people are attracted to, but somehow it gets so unnecessarily complex.
Thanks for sharing that. I'll have to get the book.
It's getting more simple the closer I feel like I get to God's Dream for The Church. Today, it goes like this from my perspective - God's perspective...Live your lives together by telling My Love story. Take only what you need to survive and joyfully give the rest away. You have a place in My Kingdom both here and now and Perfectly in Eternity. The bitch of the simplicity outlined above is that it's really quite difficult. Bottom line (especially in America) we consume church like we consume Taco Bell, 2200 sq ft homes, $30,000 SUVs and CCM. How did it become so about us? More directly, how did it become so about me? [Ah]
"If Christianity really were this real, this simple, this communal, do you think people would respond as Don did?"
Hell yes.
Post a Comment