Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Jesus attracted the "non-church folk"


"Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders [that] Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers [irreligious], they must be more full of elder brothers [religious] than we'd like to think."
-- Tim Keller, Prodigal God

"But when he heard it, [Jesus] said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
-- Matthew 9:12-13

Today our churches all face a strong pull toward religion and morality and away from the Gospel preached to lost, irreligious people. Christianese is the common language of the Church and it is barely intelligible to the outsider looking in. If our preaching does not offend the religious, as Jesus' often did, then the irreligious are by nature repelled. Jesus sought those that are repelled by the current message of the American Church. He spoke often with love to the non-religious type, but to the religious with strong condemnation... may there be reformation in the Church where that the irreligious repent of their sin and (equally as important) the religious repent of their religion.

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