Whom Does the Church Attract?

I recently took up the continuance of reading a book that I started a while ago.  It’s titled Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller.  The section that I opened up to held very good points (as does the whole book), but this particular section spoke to me.  He writes:


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Reading through the Gospels was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.  I know how strange it sounds to say it, but Jesus saved my faith.  Several years ago I was getting to the point that the enormous entangling religion of Christianity, with its many divisions, its multiple theologies, its fondness for war rhetoric, and its quirky, lumbering personality, was such a nuisance I hardly wanted anything to do with it.

But then I saw this very beautiful film about Martin Luther, a German monk who started the Reformation, and before he started the Reformation, when he had yet to read a copy of the Bible, he used to pace around in his room and beg God to forgive him.  He would beat himself up and argue with Satan and basically act pretty screwed up, but then later, when he was able to read a copy of the Bible himself, he realized that all his redemption came through Christ, that what he really needed to do was place all his love and faith in Christ and Christ would take care of everything because Christ loved Him.

This meant a great deal to me because there are, honestly, about a million ways Christians worship and about that many ways different groups say a person becomes a Christian.  Trusting Christ, really placing my faith in Him the way Martin Luther did, seemed quite meaningful and simple.  It also seemed relational, not formulaic, and as I have said, my gut tells me the key to life is relational, not propositional.

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The first thing that hit me when I started reading through the Gospels was the thought that Jesus had come to earth in the first place.  Like the alien, He had it good where He was but He sacrificed it all and became a man.  I suspect our mental pictures of God in heaven, of what Jesus looked like and His general composition, are not very accurate.  My guess is He was quite amazing in His previous state, that He was quite happy, always surrounded by beings who loved Him, always feeling the fulfillment that an intimacy with His Father would give Him, always having God’s glory shining through Him, sitting on a throne in a place of honor.  The mystery of what Christ was before He was human is one of the greatest mysteries of all time, and one that will not be solved until we have new bodies, new eyes, new hearts, new minds, and strong souls with which to engage any place near Him.  To exchange heaven for a place, and to exchange eternity for time, was an act of humility I don’t think any of us can understand.

I was reading Brian Greene’s book The Elegant Universe, in which the Columbia professor talks about potentials of the super-string theory.  It is a very fancy book, but I was struck at one point when Greene indicated the possibility that multiple dimensions may be laid out against each other as slices of a loaf of bread or tissues in a great brain.  And while distantly scientific (strings are too small to actually see and prove scientifically and have been seen only through mathematical formula), the theory had me pondering about the greatness, or should I say the otherness, of God.  I began to wonder how odd it would be if we existed in the mind of God, as Brian Greene, perhaps unknowingly, suggests.  I am not saying I believe this is true, but something as radical as this, as foreign to our minds, certainly may be.  And out of this other place, this other existence, Christ stepped to inhabit ours.

If you believe Jesus was God, and He came to earth to walk among us, the first thing you start considering is that He might actually care.  Why else would something so great become something so small?  He didn’t close Himself off in a neighborhood with the Trinity; He actually left His neighborhood and moved into ours, like a very wealthy and powerful man moving to the slums of Chicago or Houston or Calcutta, living on the streets as a peasant.

I started thinking about the idea my friend at the Bible College suggested about how, if God is a perfect and loving Being, the most selfless thing He could do would be to create other beings to enjoy Him.  And then I started thinking that if those creatures fell away from Him, the most selfless thing a perfect and loving Being could do would be to go and get them, to try to save them from the death that would take place in His absence.

That said, if Christ was who He said He was, and He represents an existence, a community, and an economy that are better than ours, and it is important that I ‘believe in Him,’ what is He like?

As I read the Gospels and other books about Jesus, I started a little list of personality traits and beliefs I thought were interesting.

HE BELIEVED ALL PEOPLE WERE EQUAL

In reading the Gospels of the Bible, I discovered that the personality of Christ was such that people who were pagans, cultists, money-mongers, broken, and diseased felt comfortable in His presence.  All this goes back to the idea of the lifeboat and how Jesus, outside that system, wouldn’t believe one person was any better than another.  Apparently this counterintuitive belief system was obvious in the character of Christ.  In the Gospels, Jesus is always surrounded by the poor, by the marginalized.  And, adversely, He is often opposed by the powerful.  Not all the powerful, but those who oppose Him are almost always the people who are ahead in the lifeboat.  In this way, Jesus disrupted the system by which people were gaining their false redemption.

Phillip Yancey, a writer I admire a great deal, taught a class at his church in Chicago about Jesus.  He reflects on what he discovered about Jesus in his book The Jesus I Never Knew:

‘The more unsavory the characters, the more at east they seemed to feel around Jesus.  People like these found Jesus appealing: a Samaritan social outcast, a military officer of the tyrant Herod, a quisling tax collector, a recent hostess to seven demons.

In contrast, Jesus got a chilly response from more respectable types.  Pious Pharisees thought him uncouth and worldly, a rich young ruler walked away shaking his head, and even the open-minded Nicodemus sought a meeting under the cover of darkness.

I [Yancy] remarked to the class how strange this pattern seemed, since the Christian church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most suspicious of Jesus on earth.  What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus’ day?  Why don’t sinners like being around us?’

This makes a great deal of sense if you think about it, because Jesus was offering redemption through a relationship with Himself, and for those who were already being redeemed by a jury of their peers, people like politicians or wealthy people or powerful religious leaders, the redemption Jesus offered must have felt like a step down; but for those who had nothing, for those who were being threatened in the lifeboat, Jesus offered everything.  In fact, at one point Christ says that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.  He says that a man like this will have trouble seeing the beauty of Christ on his own, and that he will need God’s help. (See Luke 18L25-27.)”



I was sitting in church the other day thinking about this passage; more specifically, about the words Miller quoted by Yancy.  What most struck me were Yancy’s questions…”What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus’ day?  Why don’t sinners like being around us?”  These questions are great ones to ponder, reflect upon in our own lives, and commence deep thinking.  I can’t say I know the answer, but I want to try and find out.  Even more importantly, I want to reverse it.

If anything, our churches should be more, radical, so to speak, to attract the everyday people; the lost ones, the hurt ones, the abused ones, the searching ones…everyone who needs to know how much God loves them.  I want to see if we can strive towards bringing in those who really and truly need God.  Those who already acknowledge Him and are aware of His existence, know what is right and what they need to do.  The choice is theirs.

We need to bring in those who don’t know our real God, don’t know His love for them, how much He gave up…just for them.  As Christians, we should be encouraging and loving the ones that everyone else condemns.  Bringing in to church the ones who need to hear about God…not the ones who already know about Him.  Bring in the unlovable…not the respected.  Bring in the poor…not the rich.  Bring in the broken…not the healed.  Bring in the hated…not the loved.

Our goal should be to be examples of Christ and love everyone, despite of our own feelings.  If Christ would love them, we need to love them.  And since Christ loves everyone, we need to love everyone.

This is just something to keep in mind as you live your daily lives.  Try to come out of your shell and reach out to those whom you would not normally reach out to.