Bring yer guns to church…NOT!
Jun 29th, 2009 by ljkim
There’s a silly and sometimes bizarre tendency to want to make church center on something other than God. Some of these are obvious: “the gun-toting church…” for instance. There are some I kinda’ like: how about a “motorcycle riding church?” But other versions of this are more subtle: the hipster church, the yuppie church, the intellectual church, the anti-intellectual church, church for older people, church for young people, the politically conservative church, the politically liberal church, etc, etc… Sometimes we do this with good intentions. We want the people who fall into these categories realize that Jesus is for them too. The problem is that Jesus is not limited to these, and so it’s very easy to wind up misrepresenting Jesus (usually without realizing it).
Sometimes we do this intentionally for misguided reasons; as a marketing principle you need to differentiate your product from your competitors. But church is not really a product (although, okay you can think about it in that way, but not for long…), because other churches are NOT “competitors” any more than the family down the street is a “competing” family to your own.
So how about we make the church into being about Jesus instead? Being fans and lovers and fanatics of God first… And on the side we can always share our other passions, helping one another put them in perspective. The essence of sin in the OT is that we want to take things that are not God and put them in the center of things (the Bible calls this idolatry), in the center of our lives, the center of our work, the center of our churches. But what we want to do is make Jesus the center, not just of church but of everything: to show how Jesus makes sense of money, makes sense of work and love and family and recreation and sex and friendship…because God is the author of all these things He makes sense of them too.
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