A few years ago I started writing a book… it was called “I hate christianity”. I know, I started writing a book … I’m too young, too inexperienced, too immature in my faith, too… a lot of things.
The first promise I made to myself as I set out writing was:
Promise #1: I will not deal verbal spankings to Jesus' Wife just because I can.
… My writing didn’t last very long. The honest truth? I ran out of things to “hate” about Christianity. If you get close enough to the heart of Jesus Christ your heart starts saying, “yeah, I’d die for her.” Broken, Branded, Cold, Cantankerous – You would die for her too, because Jesus did.
But recently I’ve noticed within myself an inevitable leaning towards the negative. It’s easy to get at least a few words of criticism in from your armchair. It is easier to withdraw into the safety of a coffee shop, put your head in your hands, and “write the wrongs” rather than “right the wrongs.”
In fact, the more Christian blogs I read the more confounded I become. Time and time again I am finding it hard not to gravitate towards the “issues.” My generation’s Christian bloggers love to sit down at the feast of the church’s deficiencies and gorge themselves. The table is vast, there’s no denying. At this point I'm pretty sure that blogs on Rob Bell’s Utopia, Homophobic Bishops, and Religion vs. Relationship are the re-runs they'll play in hell. They're easy targets when you want something to write about… There’s always some pastor acting the fool or some church program that shouldn’t be. Always something to nitpick always some quibble to quack over.
Christian blogging has, as a whole, become a shark-feed that has managed to mutilate every beautiful aspect of the bride of Christ, de-limb every strain of doctrine, and turn everyone into a cynic. Where one blog sings praise another breathes curses. Were every Christian blog Truth I should be expected to walk away a religiously-paranoid, profanity-slinging, American-missions-hating, program-snobbing, self-taught-and-self-proclaimed theologian. There would be no preacher, no denomination, no tradition, no creed, no form of worship that could stand under the weight of some blogger’s “two-cents” and certainly none that I could trust. No one is safe when there’s a blogger around. No one.
Where are the main-stream bloggers that clack about the beauty of creation? Where are the Christians that have something to say about the lavishness of the love of Jesus? Where are the grown ups who actually listened when their parents said, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all”?
They call themselves “faith-bloggers” but often their faith in God’s redemptive power for the sake of His Wife is more or less yet to be seen. Where He says, “If you are faithless, yet still I remain faithful” their elegantly written letters would condemn their weaker brothers and sisters and whisper behind their backs in dark corners of the web that they will never see: “My Brother is going to hell in a hand-basket! And my sister to the pit!” How is it that faith-blogging culture has so bread a movement of faithlessness that we could monopolize on the misgivings and weaknesses of our own family?
It might be accurate to say that the most trending Christian blogs, the most cultured, and the most read are also the least reflective of Jesus Christ’s love for His Wife… “But his blog is a wake-up-call to the church.” “But her writings are prophetic!” some will say. To which I rebuttal and rebuttal with a clinched jaw – show me a prophet or messenger of God, who when proclaiming wrath cannot help but also proclaim, even in the same breath, the redemptive hope and promise of the love of the Bride-Groom. Show me, please.
Computer-chair prophets? I never heard that term used in Bible College… I must have missed that lesson.
For all these scribbles, these prophetic-slams I’m just going to say: “shame on you.” Jesus didn’t die so that you could make a living off of writing hate-letters about His Wife. All this “do as I blog, not as I do” bull-crap has become itself the disease it hates in the church. It is hypocrisy. It is as blasé as Obama’s drama, as non sequitur as the prosperity Gospel, as ugly as sin.
Admit it, you’ve thought it at least twice – “So wait… He’s blogging negatively about blogging negatively?”
Darn tootin’.
I say this all from a blog… Resolute to see with new eyes the beauty I find in the love Jesus has for His Bride and skimming the horizon for any mainstream blog that is hell-bent on scribbling it for the masses.
Calling all Bride-Loving-Bloggers. The masses await you to tell of the love of Jesus. Feed them.
“If you love me, feed my sheep.”
John 21:17
