A Disturbing Trend… – Part 2

In A Disturbing Trend… – Part 1 I discussed a trend I have been seeing among American Christians. A trend where we, Christians, think we have the right (or even the duty) to strong arm the world to act antithetical to their nature. As I have been thinking about that post I asked myself a simple question – can this trend be found anywhere else?

Thinking about this I realized something – the actions we take to force the world into acting the way we want are very similar to the actions we use for those who meet in our Church buildings? It seems to me that we have been trained, perhaps by ourselves, to think it perfectly acceptable as a test for true Christianity that people make an appearance during the Sunday morning “meeting.” So much so, that we, generally do not care about where you are spiritually, we just care that you meet with us. Of course, the more spiritual people meet in the building more often.

First, you start meeting on Sunday mornings… eventually you are coerced enough to start going to Sunday school. Then, eventually you will be spiritual enough to be coerced into meeting Sunday evenings. After a little while, you are so spiritual that you will be coerced into meeting on Wednesday nights. If you meet with the same group long enough, they will coerce you into teaching a Sunday school, or working with Awana, or whatever program happens to be around.

Of course, I say this all a little tongue-in-cheek – but isn’t this similar to what we do? You see, doing these things has become the test of true Christianity, instead of your relationship with Jesus. Since we are trained to see “acting a certain way” or “doing a certain thing” as Godliness, we think that if we force others to “act a certain way” or “do those things” then they will be portraying the same Godliness. The problem is that this does not deal with the heart, you can act according to any man-made standards for the sake of appearance. This is what we (American Christians) are expecting from the people who meet in our Church buildings and it is what we expect from American culture.

Maybe it all goes back to discipleship. It is only when we are truly obeying the command to disciple, when we are truly involved and engaged in each others lives that we can know when someone has a relationship with Jesus.

What do you think?