Light and love to the world
Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.
The Christian communities in the West were once alive and thriving. For example, in the 1950s and early 60s, the world-famous Billy Graham crusades had an immense impact. Millions gathered and heard him speak, both in the largest stadiums in America as well as all over the world. It is said that in his lifetime, Graham has explained the Christian faith to more than two billion on earth.
Yet, something changed in the 1980s and 90s. Materialism, egoism, self-contentment, and complacency soured the once-so-genuinely Christian movements. Many Christians withdrew from engaging actively in “the non-Christian world,” arguably reacting to the hostile atheist and Marxist push that increasingly defined the public narrative. The anti-Christian, hedonist development happening outside of the church congregations produced an isolationist attitude, believers now content to stay within the comfortable zone of likeminded peers.
The religious doctrine of “separating yourselves from the world,” has sometimes been misinterpreted to legitimizing the Christians’ right not to care about what happens in the world. Desensitized to other people’s suffering, we grow cold and stop loving one another.
Many do not quite know what to say to a nonbeliever, apart from “Jesus loves you.” When questioned, many simply recite Bible verses, yet are unable to link the reference to Scripture to current-day issues, as if reciting a history book. Modern protestant churches focus much on feelings and great music, but less on theology, apologetics and rationally explaining what is logically great about Christianity. Many miss the great theologians such as Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who explained the faith so eloquently in works such as “The City of God” and “Confessions.”
Christianity has an image problem, write David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons in “unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters.” They ask: What do people think about Christians and why do these negative perceptions exist? They find, for one, that today’s Christianity reflects a Church infatuated with itself.
Many Christians have lost touch with the outside world, living in a “cultural Christianity,” that downplays the inner, spiritual life with its corresponding love for those who are outside the church buildings. It is more about how you are perceived by others in the group, and less about compassion with the outside world. This self-contented form of “Christianity” is often determined by a whole range of culturally determined rules not found in the Bible.
The critique is that many Christian communities enforce strict control, religious restrictions and prohibitions that are based on Christian cultural norms but have little real basis in genuine Christianity. These functions as a “Christian party whip,” forcing young believers into an artificial “kindness” or “meekness” seeking to submit them to denominational leaders, who endlessly seek to maximize their personal ministry. These protestant movements are often characterized by strong leading religious figures who, remarkably, seldom make public statements outside of the church buildings. It is almost like they are hiding in church; we rarely see them in the public realm.
How are outsiders ever to find the spiritual reality of Christ, if Christians hide in their congregations, fearful of resistance, when one should have been out at dinner parties, in clubs, at the malls, wherever we all gather and apologetically defending the faith? Do these attitudes actually represent a whole new self-serving, man-made religion in which compassion and love for others is not required?
When was Jesus Christ a boring, weak individual filled with powerless anxiety, who sat silently on church benches, nodding uncritically to everything that was said? Jesus participated everywhere. He did not withdraw into retracted groups, isolated with his disciples. He was at the marketplace, in the Temple, at parties, in open discussions, all the time demonstrating the love of God towards the human race.
Thom and Joani Schultz point out in “Why Nobody Wants to Be Around Christians Anymore: And How 4 Acts of Love Will Make Your Faith Magnetic,” that the institutionalized Church has forgotten its main message of love. “We do not go to Church, we are the Church,” Schultz writes, the act of love does not show up beneath stained glass, but as every day, ordinary acts done to people you meet throughout the week.
Yet, Christianity was never about selfishness and personal comfortability. Saint Augustine wrote in “Confessions” that Christianity is all about loving others. Love has “the hands to help others, it has the feet that hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. This is what love looks like.”