Caught Up In It All…

[I originally posted this in May 2006, but I wanted to re-post it in preparation for some thoughts to be posted soon.]

For those of you who haven’t read anything by Donald Miller, or have no idea who he is or what he’s about, I encourage you to check out the Christianity Today blog Out of Ur. If you don’t like the guy, think he’s a heretic, or just outright can’t stand him and think he’s headed to hell, I still encourage you to read the interview at Out of Ur. A few posts back, I asked the question, “How Friendly Is Your Church?” I want to focus on two points Don made.

I attended the Dove Awards and was brokenhearted. I saw all these beautiful Christians, wonderful people, with this wonderful, revolutionary message of Jesus, who, instead of saying, “Look, fashion doesn’t matter, hip doesn’t matter,” were saying “World, please accept us, we can be just as hip as you, just as fashionable, only in a religious way.”

This is something I see in the younger Christians today. Look, the simple fact is, we’ve got a lot of people (especially in our youth and college groups) who are playing the Christian subculture equivilent of a popularity contest. I went to a David Crowder concert last October. All I saw were high school and college students vying for the role of “closest to the stage.” Everybody a walking Abercrombie or American Eagle advertisement. I walked around some, and nobody smiled at me when I smiled. There was little to no courtesy or friendliness. It’s the same thing in church. A popularity contest. This isn’t how it should be. This isn’t Christianity. It’s the same thing they were doing before, but now they feel like they’re better than everybody else because they believe in Jesus.

We sometimes take a Darwinian approach with love—if we are against somebody’s ideas, we starve them out. If we disagree with somebody’s political ideas, or sexual identity, we just don’t “pay” them. We refuse to “condone the behavior” by offering any love.

If the basis of following Jesus is to “love God and love others,” then we’re blowing it. There’s rarely any talk of love these days. Not the real kind. I mean, when was the last time I heard of anybody talking about leading a relief team to Africa or Southeast Asia? Okay, too big? In a time when “God Hates Fags” and Pat Robertson’s assassination calls are considered a valid portrayal of the vast majority of Christians (in particular evangelicals), how are we changing that? It’s time we stop getting caught up in our own hypocrisy and start proving that we mean what we say we believe. It all starts and ends with love.