We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
In the Wilderness of Religion
Eric Bryan via Compfight
There are an awful lot of us in the Church today who are no longer feeling at home in Evangelicalism. Regardless of how you feel about World Vision’s hiring policy decisions, the spectacle of thousands of people discontinuing their child sponsorships (relationships with flesh and blood children in need) because of a theological disagreement left many of us aghast. Is this what American consumerism has done to our faith?
Ed Cyzewski wrote a blog entitled We Know Where to Find Jesus, But What If We Don’t Want to Go There? If you’re feeling like you’re wandering in the wilderness of religion, it might comfort you to know that the wilderness can be a holy place.
From Ed’s blog post:
The riddle of Jesus was as confounding to John as it would be for us today. There’s no doubt that many Christians today would struggle to believe in and follow a religious “leader” like Jesus who wasn’t married, didn’t have a large following, and never assumed any kind of official office or put together an organization/denomination.
Jesus wasn’t organized, systematized, or influential according to our own terms. While he had a certain amount of authority and clout because of his powerful teachings and miracles, he never took on a formal position. That latter point made no sense to John.
I was reminded of these lessons about John from my book Unfollowers when I read a post by Sarah Bessey over the weekend. Sarah gives evangelicals “permission” to step away from labels, traditions, and positions for a season in order to grieve and to rediscover what following Jesus may look like for them. Everything in her post resonates with my own experiences in evangelicalism: the need to grieve its worst parts, the desire for distance and space, and the reassembling of my faith out in the wilderness apart from religious structures.
We don’t get to remake faith according to our own terms. We can only seek out Jesus wherever he may be found, and as the story of John the Baptist teaches us, Jesus spent a lot of time in the wilderness.
Category: General
Tags: Doubt, Ed Cyzewski, Evangelism, Faith, Jesus, Religion, Religious Idolatry, Sarah Bessey, World Vision
Related Reading
Crucifixion of the Warrior God Update
Well, I’m happy to announce that Crucifixion of the Warrior God is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Like many of you, I found that the clearer I got about the non-violent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing love of God revealed in Christ, the more disturbed I became over those portraits of God in the Old Testament that…
Why Doesn’t God Heal When We Ask?
If we are called to manifest what Jesus manifested and revolt against what Jesus revolted against, and Jesus carried out the kingdom through healing, then why doesn’t God heal those we pray for? One of my personal kingdom heroes is a Vietnamese lady named Dr. Huyen Tranberg. She is a medical doctor who works with…
Quotes to Chew on: How First Century Jews Came to Worship a Man
“Legends do not generally arise in contradiction to fundamental convictions held by the culture of those who create and embrace them. Yet if the Jesus story is largely a fictitious legend, this is exactly what we must suppose happened. We submit that the initial historical implausibility of this supposition should be enough for us seriously…
The End and Beginning of Faith
Eduardo Amorim via Compfight Micah J. Murray shared the story of how his doubts and loss of faith led him to a truer, deeper faith. While we fear the doubts that sometimes sneak in, sometimes those doubts lead us to a place of goodness. Be not afraid. From Micah’s story: Eventually I gave up on…
Radical is in the Eye of the Beholder
Josias Hansen is a Brazilian-born, Charismatic Mennonite student at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. Together with Third Way Church, Josias enjoys experimenting with what it looks like to take Jesus seriously as a jolly community of kingdom disciples. Was Jesus a radical? Did he do and teach radical things? What if I were to tell…
The Key to Understanding the Bible
In yesterday’s post we discussed how Jesus is the starting point for interpreting Scripture. If this is the case and Jesus is the subject matter of all Scripture, then the ultimate challenge is to disclose how each aspect of Scripture bears witness to his subject. To state it otherwise, if the intended function of all Scripture is to mediate…