What if God meant all that stuff? A Letter to Non-Believers
Written by: Christina Crook on Feb 8, 2010
Shane Claiborne, of The Simple Way, a Christian ministry for the poor, recently addressed those who don’t believe, in Esquire magazine’s ‘A Letter to Non-Believers’.
In it he writes:
***To all my non-believing, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.
Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.
The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.
...
I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter.
(If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it's that you can have great answers and still be mean... and that just as important as being right is being nice.)
The Bible I read says God did not send Jesus to condemn the world, but to save it... it was because "God so loved the world." That is the God I know and I long for others to know.
I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven... but because He is good.
For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch and, somehow, God has survived the embarrassing things we do in his name.***
At the core of our "Gospel" is the message that Jesus came "not (for) the healthy... but the sick." And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.
Rev. Faun Harriman, pastor of a small church in Burnaby, B.C., claims, along with Claiborne, that “people don’t leave the church because of God.” In your experience, is this true? What caused you to leave the Church, or kept you from entering in the first place? People or God? If you were to step in, what would you hope to see?
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