Quick post here on the "Image of the Church"...

The Church as a whole has so many denomination, so many worship styles, so many biblical/theological interpretations, so many styles in general. How much do we screw it all up? Likely a lot.

On the evangelical side of things, which includes my denomination, even Royal Rangers, we tend to be awful at how we label and present ourselves. Don't believe me? I don't care personally, yet have you listened to outsiders? I have. And have you seen what we call stuff and how we present ourselves? Maybe we are off the wall a bit, even if we make total sense to ourselves.

"Crusades", both the medieval ones and the evangelical ones, a la Billy Graham. What image does that show? A bunch of militant Christian out to convert people to Christianity? An organized attempt to convert the masses? To me it seems like there is a lack of peace, relationship, and cultural harmony in "crusades".

Of course the Billy Graham version of "Crusades" was nothing more than mass evangelistic outreaches in a community, with the height of it being stadium preaching of the gospel message.

I used to participate in "Invasions", such as "Pittsburgh Invasion". could sort of sound like a rock concert tour or rock festival. Also to me sounds a lot like "crusades". I love how they were run, where there was a whole lot of discipleship and evangelism training and it all was centered around prayer/worship time. And yes, we were invading the city with the message of the gospel, yet maybe we should be doing something less war like and more community centric.

"Master's Commission" to me sounds good. There is the discipleship and evangelism training. And it sounds more "book of Acts" where we are following the commission of Christ in reaching out to people together as a team of Christian disciples.

I hear from time to time terminology of youth groups, outreaches, etc that makes me cringe. Are we truly going to war against people who don't believe in Christ? Are we declaring a "Jihad" or "Holy War"? With some Christians, that actually seems to be their intent. But has Christ ever called us to "war"?

No.

Maybe Paul might use such terminology in his letters to the churches, yet it is likely we sometime take that too far. Yes, we are in spiritual warfare, as Paul is really describing, yet not at war against people. Let me calrify something, in this "spiritual war" it is Jesus Christ that fights on our behalf and it is a war against angels and demons. Of course we as human are caught in the middle of the battle, as C.S. Lewis portrays well in his book "Screwtape Letters"

Bottom line we need to be careful not to go to war in any way against people. We as true Christian (denominations aside) are not out to defeat the Muslims, Jews, pagans, wiccans, atheists, agnostics, etc, etc. Hasn't Christ won that battle already? Are we not to treat all people as we should Christians?

We fail both within Christianity and outside all to often at treating each other as we should. Yet that is that is rant for another day.

In conclusion...

- We need to live a life where people see Christ through us.
- We need to be ready to share Christ, not just in words, yet through our lives.
- We need to separate and differentiate Spiritual warfare and evangelism.
- We need to be careful too with Christianese!
- We ought not to be militant about Christianity and sharing it (evangelism) with others.
- Furthermore, we ought not to be crusading, invading, and going to battle/war.

"This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!"

Labels: evangelism, semantics, witness church_image