maybe it's because i'm in the land of the free...
It’s easy to talk about religious people reaching out to their communities, or about churches making a difference. There are scads of books being written about “being Christ in your community”. The pathetic reality is though, most don’t really even come close. Neither do churches’ attempts to reach into their communities, neither do outreach driven services. Emergent churches do little better.

The problem is that few people are willing to admit that Christianity has become a sub-culture. In many ways it is as foreign to the average Canadian as being a Seik, or Amish. Virtually all church growth strategies still mistakenly assume that the average non-churched person understands the language and culture of evangelical Christianity. The sad fact is, they do not. They don’t use words like “blessings” and they don’t “trust you’ll have a good day”. They are not even marginally interested in hearing some guy talk about an issue that is wholly irrelevant to their lives; let alone in a time slot that is inconvenient with music that they don’t listen to… repeated over and over and over.

I met with a denominational leader this week who admitted that he feels the denomination he belongs to, and the Christian world in general, has lost it’s poignancy and is probably obsolete. This is undoubtedly a hard admission from an individual whose entire career is built on encouraging churches to grow. We wondered together if there was any hope of the church actually connecting on a macro level with its community, based on what is happening now. This denominational head told me he doubted it would happen.

The solution, it seemed at the time, was for the church to finally come to grips with the brutal and almost ugly reality of incarnational living. Jesus Christ was far less mainstream and far more controversial than Christians are willing to be. His lifestyle was well beyond the acceptable range for behaviour in your average Baptist or Free Methodist Church. He was accused, apparently in light of some supposed evidence, of living flagrantly and with moral license.

For my entire religious life I have heard the argument that as a Christian I must be careful when playing with fire, morally and culturally speaking, lest I get burned. The unspoken truth of that statement may be that most Christians are so afraid of being burned by the fire that they don’t even come near the heat. They draw a moral line in the sand that isn’t even remotely close to the edge they are so afraid of falling off of. With all the talk of balance and witness, being “in the world not of it”, the lectures on the slippery slopes and the evils of compromise, people of faith rarely venture into the real world of the messy majority. Though they desperately want to make a difference it is almost always a ‘difference’ on their terms, using their methods, and with their intended results. Eventually it usually comes back to church attendance and discipleship.

The question may be, what would ‘touching your community’ look like without an agenda, without intended results? What if we left our comfortable pews behind permanently and asked to be let back on the playing field?

What would that look like?