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Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality - Softcover

Spencer, Michael

 
9780307459176: Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307459179 ISBN 13: 9780307459176
Verlag: WaterBrook, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Have you left the church in search of Jesus? 
 
Studies show that one in four young adults claim no formal religious affiliation, and church leaders have long known that this generation is largely missing on Sunday morning. Hundreds of thousands of “church leavers” have had a mentor and pastor, however, in Michael Spencer, known to blog readers as the Internet Monk. Spencer guided a vast online congregation in its search for a more honest and more immediate practice of Christian faith.
 
Spencer discovered the truth that church officials often miss, which is that many who leave the church do so in an attempt to find Jesus. For years on his blog Spencer showed de-churched readers how to practice their faith without the distractions of religious institutions. Sadly, he died in 2010. But now that his last message is available in Mere Churchianity, you can benefit from the biblical wisdom and compassionate teaching that always have been hallmarks of his ministry.  
 
With Mere Churchianity, Spencer’s writing will continue to point the disenchanted and dispossessed to a Jesus-shaped spirituality. And along the way, his teachings show how you can find others who will go with you on the journey.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

During the years when he was blogging as the Internet Monk (www.internetmonk.com), Michael Spencer was followed by hundreds of thousands of readers. He offered a lifeline to the spiritually dispossessed in his speaking, teaching, and writing. Michael graduated from Kentucky Wesleyan College and earned a master’s degree in theology from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. For seventeen years, he taught Bible and served as campus minister at a Christian school in Kentucky. Michael passed away in April 2010.

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Introduction
 
The Dairy Queen Incident
 
This book began with an atheist in a Dairy Queen, thirty-three years ago.
 
I was a twenty-year-old college student and youth minister at a Baptist church in Kentucky. Most Sunday nights I took my rowdy and unspiritual youth group out for fast food as a reward for their endurance of church and Sunday school that day. A new Dairy Queen had just opened in our community, and I took the kids there for burgers or, if any of them preferred, soft ice cream.
 
We all loved DQ, so we stayed awhile. We bought our food, ate our food, and acted like a typical rowdy and unspiritual church youth group. The biggest stress of the evening for me, as the responsible adult, was some kid dumping an entire shaker of salt on a table. Having attended public schools and spent my share of time in school cafeterias, I thought nothing of it. I just left the mess for the help to clean up. We had paid for our food and, as far as I knew, departed the DQ without serious incident.
 
On Wednesday morning I received a letter from a girl who was working at the Dairy Queen the previous Sunday evening. I don’t have that letter today, but I have never forgotten its basic message. Allow me to paraphrase:
 
Mr. Spencer,
 
You don’t know me, but I am Jane Doe, and I work at the Dairy Queen on Hartford Road. I was working the front this past Sunday night when your youth group invaded and abused our restaurant for an hour. You probably have no idea how rude they were and how much time and trouble their behavior and destruction of property caused our business because, like every other youth minister I see in our store, you are clueless about
anyone who isn’t in your group and blind to the behavior of your students.
 
You also probably don’t know that I am a member of your church, but for the past year I have been an atheist. The reason is very simple: Christians like you have convinced me that God is a myth, an excuse used by religious people to mistreat others. As long as there are people like you and your youth group, I’ll never come to church or believe in God again. You are petty, selfish, and arrogant. I would rather be an atheist, no matter what the consequences, than have people like you accept me just because I was a “Christian.”
 
I know you won’t contact me, and you’ll probably throw this letter away and forget it, but just remember that when you and your youth group are being destructive and inconsiderate, there are people like me looking at you and making up our minds whether God even exists. If you are all I have to go on, he doesn’t and never will.
 
Sincerely,
 
Jane Doe
 
Reading this letter, many of you are probably reacting much as I did: here’s some miserable, rejected girl with a chip on her shoulder, mad at her parents for making her go to church. She’s probably mad about other things in her life too and needs someone to blame. So she takes it out on the youth group and on God. C’mon, it was just a little spilled salt. Really, how self-righteous does a person have to be to blame the representatives of God for her own rejection and pain?
 
If you were thinking something like that, you may be right. Or you could be dead wrong.
 
To show you where my head was at, I didn’t go back to apologize.  I wrote her off as a sad, isolated atheist with issues. I probably told some of the youth group members about her letter and had a big laugh at her hypersensitivity. At the time, I was fully capable of taking a letter like that and waving it around during a sermon, using it as an example of how miserable atheists are. I’m sure it crossed my mind that the presence of Christians in her workplace may have brought her “under conviction by the Holy Spirit” for her unbelief. Surely she had no legitimate reason to criticize my youth group.
 
Back then, I was a paid expert in churchianity. I knew how to impress the home crowd. I used all the right words, and I knew what buttons to push to rally the troops. Sadly, I knew very little about Jesus and the life he calls his followers to live.
 
Lots of Christians are like I was. They would find it easy to blame an atheist for not acting like a Christian, while failing to act like a Christian in the presence of an atheist. I did such things too many times to recall. I used the girl’s honest, heartfelt critique as an easy pitch to hit in front of a clubby, misguided Christian audience. I bought into all the accepted assumptions: Christians are right, the other guys are wrong, and since we’re in the right, we have nothing to worry about.
 
I held on to that safe place of smug comfort for many years, and then I realized it wasn’t all that comfortable any longer. It has been more than thirty years since I read Jane Doe’s letter, and I still can’t get it out of my mind. Today I see her insights in a very different light. As a cocky, twentysomething preacher boy, I could easily write off a woman who didn’t believe the truth. But now, in my fifties and bearing the scars of life, struggle, sin, and loss, I respect that young atheist more than I do a long list of high-profile Christian leaders.
 
Jane Doe is emblematic of something I now believe very deeply: unbelievers see some things about life, integrity, and consistency much more clearly than Christians do.
 
On that Sunday evening in Dairy Queen, my youth group probably was out of control. They were likely rude to the help, possibly foulmouthed and insulting. They vandalized a saltshaker and made a mess for another person to clean up. I gave them a pass. I even thought it was funny. The prevailing tone of that evening was a selfish, unthinking party
with all of us—adults and kids alike—caring a lot more about what we wanted than what another person might be thinking. And we didn’t care who would have to clean up after us. Our understanding and practice of churchianity endorsed such behavior.
 
We had fun that night, but did we invite Jesus Christ to the party? I don’t remember him being there. In fact, I don’t think he mattered to us at all that evening. We were taking a break from the religious stuff. The people working behind the counter? The guy who cleared the tables? The other customers? They might as well have not existed.
 
An atheist girl, having left the church behind and now looking back with eyes and ears sensitized to the Christian game, saw through our act with sobering clarity. She tried to do me a favor by telling me I had lost touch with Jesus. An atheist girl cared enough to tell me that my credibility as a Christian was zero, because there was nothing of Jesus about me and my students. All we had was distasteful pretense.
 
It took an atheist to tell me, perhaps for the first time, that I was not a Jesus-shaped person, no matter what I claimed to believe as a Christian. But I was so sure of what I believed, so convinced of the rightness of my religion, that I chose to ignore the truth she spoke.
 
When you read the title of this book, you might have thought it’s a book for Christians, and that’s fine, because I am a Christian. I have no doubt that Christians want to hear what I have to say. However, this is not a Christian book in the time-honored tradition. I’m not going to tell Christians to be nicer, care more, help other people, be generous, try to forgive, do more for God, and so on, so that we can be better witnesses for Jesus.
 
I have good reasons for staying off the standard Christian-book path. It was churchianity—the “do more, be better,...

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Verlag
WaterBrook
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307459179
ISBN 13 
9780307459176
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar