It’s been a while since I’ve blogged and now that the holidays are over I plan to get back to a little more regular blogging this year. (No, it’s not a New Year’s resolution – LOL).
It’s been around a month now since my first visit of getting my hands dirty with Jesus. As several of you know and most of you probably do not, my family and I began a journey with an organic church experience last September. This post is not about the specifics of organic church but if you need or want a deeper explanation of that then Google: Frank Viola organic church.
We began our journey outside the institutional church in September 2010. Since that time, we have discussed as a group the desire to “live” the life that Jesus talks about in the scriptures. No offense to the churches I grew up in, the people in those congregations, the ministers at those same churches, and my family who raised me in a loving and Christian home…but what I grew up knowing isn’t the Way.
As a matter of fact, what the vast majority of institutional churches experience every single week isn’t the Way. It’s not backed up by scriptures and it’s a pale attempt at a life changing experience.
What I’ve grown up with can best be described as Country Club Christianity. We spend money on our buildings, on our programs, on our lifestyle, on ourselves. We focus on what we want, we focus on what makes our congregations grow in size, and we focus on what makes us comfortable.
While pastors back up what they say from the pulpit from the Word, I think I’ve been duped by some serious cherry-picking. I never realized the importance of context and I’ve fallen victim (you have too) to a serious distortion of the Word of God to fit into our comfortable little box. I don’t know why ministers all across America do this. I’m sure it’s a vicious cycle that we as a religion have fallen into – but it’s a cycle that needs to be broken.
Before Christmas this past year my family and I had an opportunity to begin to work with a group called Bikers Against Hunger as they ministered to the mostly homeless in our communities. Our first visit was to a bridge in Greenville, SC where a community has sprung up living literally under a bridge. Outside. In the cold. With no roof. With no refrigerator. With no bathroom. Did I mention they don’t have a home? Real people, real problems, real needs.
Now I’ve grown up in church. My family has taken me to church since I was a baby. I made a decision to follow Jesus as a child and reiterated that decision as a teenager. I’ve been a part of “good” churches and they had their hands in all sorts of ministeries. They had groups that did the homeless thing. They had groups that did the foreign missions thing. They had groups that did the addict thing. I’ve seen all the special interest groups there were to have inside the institutional church. The problem (with me at least) is I always thought of “those groups” as just that…”those groups”. Even now when my wife and I talk to someone about what we’re doing they almost always say (with a smile on their face) “Oh yeah, we do that. Our church buys backpacks for needy school children, and we buy shoe boxes for needy countries, we do this, we do that.” The problem to me seems that most people don’t really do that.
My family has bought the Christmas Angels off the tree at Christmastime for needy kids. We felt good doing that. We felt all warm and fuzzy. We felt like we did something. But that mentality is we did something but we didn’t “do something”. I’m going to be blunt. It’s real easy to go to Wal-Mart and buy a toy for a kid you’ll never see and put it in a box in a corner at a church building then pat yourself on the back and tell all your other country club buddies…excuse me…I mean Christian friends how much you did for God!
I never got my hands dirty.
I don’t see that model in the New Testament. At the bottom of this blog is a part for responses. I would LOVE to hear a response from anyone who can show me those verses where that model of “Christianity” was lived out in scriptures. Anyone, anyone?
On the way home from our first visit to the bridge I was driving down the interstate and I was almost in tears. I knew it would be like that. I gave my phone to my 13 year old and had him post a Twitter message for me. I dictated, “I am so done with Country Club Christianity” – December 12th. I saw real people in real problems and I got my hands dirty.
I read in the Gospels about the people Jesus hung around with. Mosty the same kind of people I’ve started hangin out with. Not a lot of the country club set in those scriptures. Jesus didn’t care much for the religious sect of Pharasees who liked to control people with religion. He didn’t care much for the way the poor were overlooked and scorned opon. The Jewish society has always cared for the poor. It’s a mandate they believe in and have since the Torah commanded it. The sociey Jesus lived in and walked in believed in helping the poor but they STILL couldn’t accept Jesus having dinner with sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors…the fringe of society.
I started a journey two years ago that has brought me to this point in my life. This is just a point in my life. Where I am today is not the destination. This is only part of the journey. This past weekend we went to downtown Spartanburg – in MY hometown and fed 221 adults and children who were hungry. That has blown my mind. I was leary there would be people who maybe didn’t really deserve a free meal. Maybe there were people just looking for a free meal. But what I saw this weekend was real. Painfully real. What I saw was Jesus and he was hungry. This weekend me and my family fed Jesus. He liked the meal 
