Love. Light. Melody.

The process of maturation is a complex and awkward one. We mature because we engage at some level with a failure or short coming. We mature because we engage with other people to talk through the process of how things went wrong thus learning from our past mistakes.

So if I look back upon my life, there are certain things that I now am or do because of shaping forces. As a child my mom was always very quick to encourage me in good things but was also very quick to say, “Dont do that!”  You see, I have what some people may call an authority issue which simply means that I have to learn things the hard way. I have not yet decided whether it is a genetic, spiritual, or emotional aptitude but for whatever reason my brain likes to question everything. If it stopped there I might be ok, however my body quickly follows suit to test everything in order to see if it is indeed true. This led to my mom saying “Don’t do that”….ALOT!

My dad, on the other hand, taught me a great work ethic. He did so not by talking about hard work but by actually working me hard. Saturday morning was random project day at the Craig household. It seemed like my dad was always waking me up at 6:30am to begin some mindless task like building a sidewalk….more on this later.

Not long after my conversion, I was presented the opportunity to speak at another church…a youth group in fact. I preached on Hebrews 12:1-2

 ¹Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.²Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Let’s be honest…I brought it! I told them that since we are surrounded by a group of people who want to know if the gospel is real and true, lets throw off everything that hinders and dive into the gospel full force with our lives. It was a good message…at least I thought it was powerful.

Afterwards the youth minister approached me and told me that I did a great job and how I certainly seemed comfortable in front of people. But what he said next I will never forget. He said, “Patrick…have you ever read Hebrews 11?” His point was this: Although everything that I said may have been true, it did not apply to the context of the text from which the passage was taken. Lesson learned: If you are going to lead people by standing before them and proclaiming the Word of God, you better know what the Bible says and you better be accurate with the text. This marked me.

I tell you this story because God has recently placed this statement upon my heart: “If you want to lead God’s people and be God’s man, the freedom to tell half truths has to go at the feet of Christ.”

It didn’t sink in until now, but at 20 years old I can look back and be grateful. I honestly would not have said this at 18, but now I can look back at what this youth minister told me and be grateful. I can look back on what my father taught me and be grateful. I can look back upon the things my mother warned me against and be grateful. This is how maturity works. It collides with us where we are and pushes us into what is next. We should constantly be progressing in our maturation by moving forward into what is next. 

We must apply the same concept to the church. The goal of the church has never been and should never be evangelism and evangelism alone. Rather we should be progressing in our sanctification and growing in our righteousness. The bible makes this quite clear. We should be constantly becoming more like Christ. When this fails to happen our faith begins to retard and may even die.

We are raising up a generation of “Christians” who repeat someone’s prayer, they repeat someone’s mantra and after that, outside of church attendance, nothing has changed in their hearts or minds. This is not conversion and it is certainly not the gospel…it’s witchcraft.

Here is reality for far too many people: They say a prayer, they go to church, and then life punches them in the face! Life is tough. Relationships are stressful. Disease happens. Money runs out and then they bail. They bail on the church and they bail on the God who didn’t help them out like their evangelical preacher told them he would. What then has evangelism accomplished? 

True evangelism is accomplished by guiding others in spiritual maturation through real organic discipleship. The process of spiritual maturation is much like personal maturation. We must engage with others and look at how God engages us. I think back to my dad waking me up at 6:30 to do a task I didn’t want to do…how does God engage us like that? I think back to the youth pastor pulling me aside in a teaching moment…how does God engage us like that. I think back to my mom warning me of the potential consequences of my actions…how does God engage us like that? To find out we must engage God in scripture. We have not done this and thus we find ourselves at a very dangerous disjoint.

We have a group of people who believe that God reveals himself to us in Scripture and has relevant information there about how we are to live our lives. And yet we have a people, who as a whole, know very little about those scriptures and have not tried to dig through those very scriptures themselves. We have raised up a generation of Christians who live, not through the scripture, but live vicariously through other peoples’ teaching of half truths which causes a great deal of young believers to wander off into myths.

Thus, the 21st century church has raised up a generation of Spiritually immature Christians. We must change how we do things! I’ll close with Paul’s advice to Timothy regarding the authority of scripture:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, ¹⁵and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. ¹⁶All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

7 Keys to Victorious Living.

1. Admit your weakness
2. Give your maximum effort
3. Break with your past
4. Strive for the prize
5. Consider your verdict
6. Bury your arguments
7. Hold your commitment

Here lies the problem:

Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.

Jesus was not simply a missionary to the poor. He was poor – born a baby refugee from the badlands of Nazareth, wandered the world a homeless rabbi, died the rotten death of insurrectionists and bandits on the cross, executed by an oppressive empire, buried in a borrowed tomb. Jesus was crucified not for helping poor people but for joining them. That is the Jesus we are called do follow, and yet we (myself included) do not.

Have we lost the ability to dream? To imagine how life could be?

Most Christian congregations and communities have a statement of faith articulating their “right belief” but that is where it unfortunately ends. Belief is only the beginning. What matters is how that “right belief” gets fleshed out into “right living”.

It is this right living that should drive us to ask what it would take to re-imagine the world.

We have all heard the saying, “Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, but teach them to fish and they’ll eat for the rest of their life.” The problem, however, is that nobody is asking who owns the pond. As we consider economics, some of us will give people fish. Others will teach people to fish. But still others must be looking at who owns the pond and who polluted it, for these are also essential questions for our survival. We must storm the fence that has been built around the pond and make sure everyone can get to it, for there are enough fish for all of us.

There is a big difference between managing poverty and ending poverty. Managing poverty is big business, ending poverty is revolutionary. And yet we continue to be satisfied with putting a band-aid on top of a flesh wound.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar. Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: “We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.“

I fear that 21st century American christianity has become nothing more than an opiate for the masses. For if this post makes you feel uncomfortable and this task seems to much to ask. Then maybe you should take a step back and count the cost of discipleship.

Let’s live the gospel that Jesus preached, which is clearly far from the gospel we are being preached.

Lets join the revolution.

*post inspired by The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. For more information on his revolutionary ministry, visit www.thesimpleway.org

A new post is churning in this scrambled head of mine. I wish I had the time to communicate this message today, however the world of academia is consuming my life. Stay tuned…..