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Sunday, April 09, 2006

Where would Jesus go...

...to church?

When I think about the myriad of denominations and houses of worship there are, I wonder if Jesus would feel at home in them. When we read the stories of Jesus' life, although we know he went to synagogue, it's not a main point. It's more of an aside. He spent time with people in their homes, on a hillside, in boats, etc. He went to where people were; he didn't bring them to where he was. It seems we maybe have it backwards today. We try to figure out ways to draw people in so we can convince them that they need Jesus. We want them to think church is not some weird place; that it is culturally relevant. So we have powerpoint presentations with the lyrics to songs, we build gymnasiums, we even have Starbucks and ATMs. We want everything to go perfectly, so that people will come back again and again.

Would Jesus feel comfortable there?

Did Jesus care about making people say "wow!"? On the contrary, he told people not to talk about the miracles he did. Did Jesus care about everything going perfectly? Probably not, since he had a group of more than 5000 and there was not enough food. That's not good planning, now, is it?

But these are the things we have to deal with and think about in Christianity today. And I wonder if maybe we're missing the point.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

He'd go to an orthodox synagogue of course. (grin) He'd recognize at least 50% of the prayers.

Kelly said...

I'd like to know what synagogues were like then, because I somehow don't think they'd have the Pharisee one, the Sadducee one, the Essene one...etc.

Unknown said...

And that would be different from today how? (grin).