Some thoughts...

I haven't been very good at updating this blog. I could blame it on any number of things, but honestly, I am just lazy. For the past few weeks I have been updating my diet blog here .

I have a lot on my mind, and will hopefully spend some time typing them out. These range in topic from movies, books, and politics, to theology, religion, and the state of American Christendom.

For now, I will leave you with a quote from the new Brian McLaren book, "Everything Must Change." You can purchase it at Amazon.com .

Even in the United States, where church attendance figures are comparatively strong, church leaders can't help but notice the rapid decline in local church involvement among younger generations and wonder what to do about it. Church leaders often begin by criticizing the young people: "What's wrong with them?" But eventually, some leaders ask a more productive question: "What's wrong with us?" Typically, they proceed on a rather superficial level, talking about cosmetics: musical styles, ambiance, and lighting, digital projection, dress codes, various ways of getting "cooler" or "hipper." These are of some importance perhaps, but certainly not the whole story. Then some thoughtful leaders go a little deeper, addressing the need to be relevant to culture and to contextualize their ministry for today's world. But they're still barely dipping below the surface.

Eventually some leaders begin to realize that many young and alienated ex-churched people originally dropped out of their churches after attending college (or getting out on their own where they could think for themselves) and learning about the dark side of the Christian religion's track record...the Crusades, witch burnings, colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, apartheid, environmental irresponsibility, mistreatment of women.

These young people started caring about these issues, but they didn't find their fellow adherents to the Christian religion very concerned. Too often, they realized, Christians through history have played on the wrong side of these issues. And even when Christians in recent decades concerned themselves with contemporary issues, they focused primarily on personal and sexual matters, simultaneously neglecting larger societal and systemic injustices that caused unimagined suffering. And even in regard to their narrow range of "moral issues," they were consistently less effective in making a lasting, constructive difference. In so doing, they created an image of the typical Christian believer as tense, judgmental, imbalanced, reactionary, negative, and hypocritical.

...for the millions of young adults who dropped out of their churches in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Christian religion appears to be a failed religion...it has specialized in dealing with "spiritual needs" to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has specialized in people's destinations in the afterlife but has failed to address significant social injustices in this life. It has focused on "me" and "my soul" and "my spiritual life" and "my eternal destiny," but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, systemic poverty, systemic ecological crisis, systemic dysfunctions of many kinds.

A message purporting to be the best news in the world should be doing better than this.

[What people wish for is] a vibrant form of Christian faith that is holistic, integral, and balance--one that offers good news for both the living and the dying, that speaks of God's grace at work both in this life and the life to come, that speaks to individuals and to societies and to the planet as a whole." (McLaren, Brian. "Everything Must Change." Pp. 32-34)

Some interesting thoughts to wrestle with, argue about, be challenged with, and come to conclusions regarding. It is hard for many to hear Christianity being criticized, but if we are going to be honest about who we are and what we represent, we must honestly look in the mirror and acknowledge our failures as well as our successes. Christianity is not flawed, however, our representation of Christ often is.