It's well known around here that I and all of the authors on Mod-Blog are Christians. I take my Christianity rather seriously, but even in that I'm pretty tolerant of different views and doctrines on what it means to be a Christian and how one lives as a Christian. Despite being not quite 30, I've been around the church quite a bit, so I can see positives in quite a few things. With that said, today as I was reading my Boarders Rewards email I saw that Joel Osteen is putting out a new book and my heart sunk. It's not that I dislike him so much as I dislike what he represents - the Dummies approach to Christianity. His new book is subtitled (the title doesn't really matter) 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Everyday. I hate this whole idea that Christianity can be summed up in 5, 6, 7 or God forbid 3 easy steps. Christianity is GREAT, but the idea that it can be summed up that easily is disgusting to me. The last church I worked at did the Purpose Driven Life campaign, which has admittedly helped lots of people, but it made me sick. As a pastor you get a stack of sermons that go with the campaign. These sermons are more like persuasive speeches than actual sermons. There is no major scripture to ponder and hardly a theological point that needs to be ingested. Instead you get proof-texts chosen from whatever translation uses the word they're trying to pass off as this great theological insight, it doesn't even matter if the context of the verse points to that point or whether the translation is good. All that matters is that this translation says what I want it to say. Any first year religion student can do that, heck you don't even have to be a religion student - if you can read you can do it. Is this really what the great Christian minds of America think we, as the church, need?
In so many ways it feels like they're lying about Christianity. Like I said before, Christianity is great, but sometimes it really sucks. There are times in every Christian's life when the will of God seems like male bovine fecal matter, when you just don't want to be a Christian. There are parts of the bible that are hard to understand and others that are hard when you understand them. It's not that I'm against teaching about the good parts of Christianity, I think that it needs to be taught, but we need to be fair to people coming to Christ that Jesus is difficult and there are a lot of things that are going to be hard. Seriously, the last thing the Church needs is another Joel Osteen book (or board game ). I believe that if we study the bible - really study it, the whole thing not just our favorite parts - that we'll find ourselves as a better people - call me naive. We need to embrace mystery, accept that we're not always going to understand God, that the 5 easy steps might not work this time and there is a reason for that happening. Christianity is so much bigger than just telling people about Jesus that when we dumb it down we are doing a severe disservice to the church and our culture as a whole. The Dummies approach to Christianity leaves us with weak Christians that drop out at the first sign of difficulty.
Rant over. :)
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