What is unChristian Faith?

We started a new Bible series on Sunday. We began discussing the book unChristian (I have a link to Amazon if you want to know more about it).

I have read through over half of the book and am excited about how well the discussion went Sunday morning. We covered about half of the first chapter.

Here is a little of what we discussed.

Why are young adults (ages 16 to 29), who do not attend church, turned off by it? What about those in the church, what are they turned off by?

Two answers came up. One was dealt with how many in the church are hypocritical (they say one thing and do another). The other had to do with how some Christians seem to be more concerned with the church than caring about others (more judgmental than loving).

Believe it or not, these are two of the six topics discussed in the book (the answers were given without any prompting). These are topics that young people deal with every time they come face to face with Christians or the topic of faith.

What defines your faith? What turns you off about church or Christians?

I hope that by discussing these topics we will be able to heal some wounds and find new ground in which to engage everyone about faith and Christ. A ground that is not overbearing nor judgmental but open to hear and discuss ideas from both sides of the discussion.

Only by listening do we begin to truly understand one another. Only by discussing do we begin to hear.

The Bible says in Romans 10:17, "Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message through the word of Christ."

For Christians, this is a mandate to represent the true Christ, the Christ who can be seen in the New Testament. If people outside of the church are getting a mixed and confused message, then the first thing we need to do is to check our message. We have to refrain from putting the blame on the hearers.

For those outside the church, this is a great opportunity to hear from the true Christ.

For the next few months, Uprising will be tackling six subjects that hinder the message given to the church by Jesus: being hypocritical, being too focussed on getting converts, being antihomosexual, being too sheltered and out of date, being too political, and being judgmental.

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