First Posted 08-Feb-2015
I don’t have arguments like this anymore. By now, folk hopefully know I don’t understand, don’t behave, and don’t tell the truth. So I have less to explain, maybe. Also, this is a conversation for my Christian brethren. If you are not Christian and the below rant doesn’t apply to you, no worries. You can browse to your next destination on the Interwebby thingo. I’m partial to historic airplane videos. Those are cool. I’ll give y’all a second to leave this page. Any Non-Christians still reading? No? Good.
I had friends who punctuate any argument with, “But, you don’t understand!” It took me a while to figure out that the reason I didn’t understand is that I hadn’t agreed with them. But, being the brat I am, I tried to split hairs and say that although I did understand, I didn’t agree. This did not calm the argument down. I hadn’t agreed with them, so by the above premise I didn’t/don’t understand.
There are Christians that run about sure that if folk understood, if they agreed, they would come to their church, be saved, and live forever. They iterate the OCD cycle of insisting that folk don’t understand, because if they understood, they’d give their life to Cheeeezus, right then and there. Well . . . these of my Christian brothers are nuts.
As a community of believers, we are over 2,000 years old. People know us. People know who Jesus is, know what his basic message is, and do understand. It isn’t that they don’t know. Quite the opposite, they know us and that knowledge isn’t helping, isn’t furthering the understanding. I won’t stop the breathless evangelizing of these Christian brothers and sisters. Nor will they quit acting like timeshare sales folk, sure that if they meet this quarter’s numbers of saved souls, God will look with favor on them once they make the final journey home. Folk know who they are just like folk know who Wyndham is and what is being sold. I don’t want them to stop. There is a place in God’s house for salesmen.
I am not a salesman. Never have been. What I do in my day job and in my life as a follower of the Way, is serve everyone, signed customer or not. My place in God’s Kingdom is on missions, serving folk as I am able, doing the small things with Great Love that Mother Theresa spoke of. If I want people to understand anything, to agree with me, is that we have enough salesmen. What we need is more servants, more folk doing for each other, a more mission focused church. Christ told us we would always have the poor with us. There is no shortage of work. Rather than start with trying to attract someone to a church, start with finding out how to partner with them and help them do for themselves. Prayerfully discover and do whatever small things there are to do with great love. I’d like a world in which more of us did that. It could be rather good.