Turning back

I once sat in a Sunday school class where one woman fretted. “What should I say to these teenagers who are wearing a cross when I know they aren’t believers?”

There was an uneasy rustling as the others worried. They should confront but didn’t want to.

You know what I think Jesus would have said to that teenager? I think he’d have said something like, “Tell me about that cross you’re wearing. Why do you wear it? What does it mean to you?”

And I think he’d have eventually turned the conversation around: “Let me tell you what it means to me.”

I think he’d have used that cross as a tool to interact with the person, hear their heart and show them truth, like he did with the Samaritan woman at the well and so many others. He loved them and interacted in ways they could understand.

Churchianity wants to protect the cross as a symbol of their pure beliefs. We need the cross on our churches, on our neck, on our cars. It is a symbol of our separateness.

If you don’t regularly read A Small Scribble, you need to read the last couple of posts. Kate is tackling a topic that gets me raving. I call it “churchianity.”

What’s being discussed at Kate’s site is how many in the church today disdain the arts unless images are in familiar, comfortable modes. Do you have a nightlight with an angel on it? Do you have your plastic nativity scene? Do you have a fish on your bumper?

The discussion at Kate’s site asks how we interact with art that doesn’t have a cross or a glowing angel but explores new ways to communicate God’s truths. While those in the church are polishing their church symbols, a world outside is dying without wrestling with God. The church looks irrelevant with its old-fashioned secret language and obscure signs.

What have we done? In our rush to protect our purity and our separateness, we have morphed into mediocrity. Christian movies are usually corny. Christian literature is usually predictable and patterned after the hot-selling secular stuff. Christian art usually has symbols, not ideas.

I tend to identify myself as a follower of Jesus because even the word “Christian” speaks of legalistic mediocrity to today’s culture. What have we done?

How do we turn back?

Kate has some wonderful links at her site. I’d like to compile those and more. If you know authors, artists, movies, whatever that rise above the modern day Christian fluff, would you get those to me? I want to put a list on the sidebar, a place where we can all check out artists going deeper.

E-mail me (see my link at the top of the right hand column) or leave a comment with names and/or links.

This is an important issue for us as followers of Jesus. We have been commanded to go into the world and we must speak a language the world can grasp.