Friday, May 8, 2009

How to Change the World

Recently, I was reading "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr. where he defended his methods against the local clergy that wanted him to back off. Amazingly, I had never actually read this famous essay before. It's amazing because I took a upper-division class on post-WWII US history where a lot of attention was given to the civil rights movement. Anyway, while I was reading, a particular paragraph stuck out to me and caused me to think.

"There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that there were 'a colony of heaven,' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest."

Immediately after reading that, my mind went back to something one of the students that I work with said when we were talking about modern Christianity. She said something along the lines of "The world [the established structure] is supposed to hate us and the people love us. Instead, the people hate us and the world loves us." We're the opposite of what we're supposed to be. The early Christians, as MLK pointed out, were small in number and big in commitment. Today, we're big in number and small in commitment. The Christian faith is hard to "sale" to many people because we care more about ourselves than the hopeless people around us. More time is given to debating predestination than what can be done to stop sex trafficking in our own cities, much less the world.

More and more I'm seeing that the faith I practice is lightyears away from the faith that Jesus talked about. Jesus called us to be, as it says earlier in the letter, "creative extremists." Extremists for Jesus, extremists for what is right, extremists for loving both the people that we know and the people we don't. If the Church transformed into "creative extremists", we would change more lives than any evangelism program could prod us into and our world would look more like the Kingdom that God desperately wants us to live in.

Just a thought.

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