In catching up on reading/scanning some of the blogs I follow, I came across one from last week by nakedpastor talking about the dialogue between Christians and atheists, and how quick one group is to mock the other sometimes. Within that conversation he made one statement that resonated within me far beyond the topic of discussion:
“When someone thinks they are superior to another, they also feel no need to understand the other.”
True dat.
Does anyone else out there feel sometimes like they just bring out the worst in people?
Despite what some of my longtime readers might think, I’ve never been one to court controversy. I don’t go into a situation with the intent of stirring the pot. Usually, my default mechanism when joining a work place, or a community, or a conversation, or whatever, is to go along to get along. Keep my nose clean. Go with the flow. Make friends. That kind of thing.
Considering the recent events that have unfolded here in Colorado, I am going to interrupt my current two-part series on “A Changing Sense of Mission.” I promise I’ll finish that thought within the next couple of weeks, but for now I have some more pressing thoughts to process.
I woke up Friday morning in fairly good spirits, despite being a bit tired and loopy from the busy-ness of the past couple of weeks. I got on Facebook to find a friend from back in Tulsa posting, “Praying for the people in Aurora, CO.” I scrolled down and found several other messages like this. What happened in Aurora last night? I wondered.
The title of this blog, not to mention the nearly four years’ worth of posts within it, should make this clear: I despise religion.
Please understand when I say this that before I go pointing fingers at anyone, I realize that four other fingers are pointing back at me. Before I go on this rant (if that’s what it ends up being), I want to make it clear that I’m not coming from the standpoint of someone who is totally free of religion, passing judgment on those who are not. There are very few Christians who do not have some sort of religion embedded in them, and with all my personal struggles to be free of it, I still see remnants of it in myself on occasion. I see religion as a sort of disease that afflicts us all, one in which healing is mainly gradual, as layers of it are removed from our minds. At least, that’s how it’s been for me.
Yesterday, I came across a book review on a blog that got me stirred up about institutional church issues like I haven’t been in a long time. The book is Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion, written by the same guys who wrote Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be).
Now I haven’t read either book, so it would definitely be unfair for me to issue an actual review of something I haven’t read. But the blogger posted some select quotes from the book, and that was enough to get me started. 
Here is just a tidbit from the book:
This post has been on the burner for several months, and I haven’t really made mention of anything political since the last presidential election (mainly because that’s not what this blog is about). But in just watching the unfolding of current events (including the health care debate), and continuing to ponder what the church’s role should be in such things…I think it’s time to write.
In my process of deconstructing, not just from institutional church but from institutional thinking…
…I’ve been realizing that there is a common thread or theme running through it. It could be worded several ways, but all convey the same basic question:
Kathy over at Carnival in My Head just got back from Africa with her family, and posted a preliminary report about her trip on her blog. One of the most profound moments she described was when she said her missions team was the first American team ever to actually stay at the orphanage they were visiting–that most teams sleep at a nice hotel an hour away. One of the teachers at the orphanage expressed gratefulness at this, saying, “people come to help, but they don’t really want to be with us and live our life with us.”
Ouch. In so many ways.
Recent discussions on this here blog have got my mind turning…as if it didn’t have enough to do. Not really so much agreeing or disagreeing with comments made, or anything like that…just thinking.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about what would make us not know when it’s real.
For a long time I’ve thought of religion as working the same way that a vaccine does, only instead of making us healthier, it has the opposite effect.
So I’ve been pondering lately about the dilemma I faced while still operating as part of the institutional systems of church, the dilemma that so many well-meaning church leaders face today.
The dilemma is this: we like to see ourselves, and our local church, as part of the larger Body of Christ, recognizing that we are only a part of THE church. And yet, because of the nature of sustaining an institution, most of the decisions the leader(s) must make have to do with the growing of “our” church rather than building “the” church.