The Church of What’s Happening Now

Trying to see clearly and understand reality is probably my most enduring obsession. What is true?

My main complaint against many Christian bloggers is that they are so thoroughly contemporary. Their agendas and commitments seem to increasingly mirror those of their secular counterparts. How lovely to find that Jesus fits so neatly into our moral and ethical demands upon our world. It bears all of the weaknesses of all of the searches for the “historical Jesus” minus any of the flawed scholarship. The point this most firmly proves is that we are blind to ourselves which is the most crippling power of sin’s grip on us.

World Christianity

I stumbled upon Mark Noll’s piece in Books and Culture on church history and world Christianity. What a breath of fresh air! What an open window to a far larger world than our incessant, intramural squabbles over the same old same old. It gives is a glimpse of the amazing expanse of cultural diversity within the church and the huge things God has done that we take no account of because it doesn’t address the few hot topics that we fall over ourselves about.

How does this help me? It recalibrates my sense of what is real, what is true, and helps me know how small I and my time are. The “important” voices of our time are part of this small world. It gives me courage to not simply mirror what the great rush of mob thinking demands.

We’re No Better Than Any Colonialist

It also demonstrates that all the dogmatic blogging we do to declare and establish the great heights we have achieved will likely be dismissed and ignored like we do to most of the world. While we imagine ourselves to be multi-cultural, diverse, tolerant, we are actually as parochial and imperialistic as our predecessors we feel so superior towards.

Lord, save us from ourselves.