Reforming North American Christianity, part 4

Besides a return to the wells of spirituality in prayer, contemplation, and silence we have some additional work to do as North American Christians. This work does not involve programs, gurus (whatever their current iteration, e.g. trendy in grunge, or casual in collar and jeans), or the latest pronouncements from ecclesiastical central avenue. Rather, this work is dreadfully mundane, painfully difficult, and without a hint of sexy at all. I’m talking about the work of re-forming our essential Christian character, both as individuals, and as local congregations. As North America Christians we must become increasingly comfortable with being different, often radically different from those around us.

We can expect the culture to continue to move away from the Church and the fading glories and atrocities of Christendom, leaving us behind as a sub-culture, dangerously out of tune with the times. This comfort with strangeness will not be of the exciting sort (often enjoyed by the outcasts along the edge of every culture), but a hard strangeness that will cost us more than dirty looks and derogatory comments. If all that was necessary for this was the wearing of cassocks or clever t-shirts our reformation would almost be complete. Rather, our strangeness must be our difference in character, our difference in moral values, our difference in how and who we spend our time with.

We get a peek at this sort of difference when we look at our brother and sister Christians who are being persecuted around the world. How increasingly post-Christian and post-modern societies will serve up their persecution remains to be seen (though I continue to argue that its worst and most insidious method is and will continue to  be indifference), but we can be certain that what is presently considered unfashionable may soon be understood as indefensibly quaint.

In other words, if you’ve been struggling to grasp my subtly, we must allow the Holy Spirit to shape our characters to be more and more like Christ (what we sometimes use to call holiness). We cannot lift a finger in evangelism, in witness, if our individual lives as Christians continue to be largely no different than the lives of non-believers. If the only difference between Christians and non-Christians is that some of us go to Church on Sunday and some of us do not, why bother with the whole enterprise at all? The great apologetic of the North American reformation of Christianity will be holy examples, not found in a few saints, but found in struggling little communities of faith, hope, and love. May you and I be part of such communities, whether in founding them, joining them, or sticking with them despite all the temptations to join trendier or more respectable crowds.