Study: Christianity No Longer Looks Like Jesus

dynamo23 »

Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:06 pm Agree: 8   Disagree: 10

When I read through this article, I cannot help but agree with all of the survey's findings. Even though I am in the church I share a lot of the views of the participants. I do not think there is much difference between the church and the world we are *cough* "attempting" to save. I see these as symptoms of a sick church, there is so much infighting and hypocrisy in modern Christianity that when the world looks at us it says "if they don't even know what they believe so why should we believe it?" Not to mention that there are so many "Christians" who are committing as many, if not more, sins than the world is and often it is right along side of them. No wonder we have a poor witness.

When I look at the church in the U.S. all I see coming out of the mouths of it's leaders is in a sense hate speech. The big issues in the US church seem to be homosexuals and abortion. When the church puts all of the focus on these issues and denounces the people who are participating in these sins instead of trying to show love towards the individuals involved in these sins. When the church attacks these people based on their life choices, their walls and defenses go up and they stop listening. What happened to love the sinner and hate the sin? Jesus once said that the world will know his children by our love, but will they really? Or should it be that they will know us by our lack of love or hate?

There are much bigger issues out there, like poverty, Aids, thousands of people dying of malnutrition (most of them going to hell) every day, and wars. The church seems to be largely silent on these issues, except in supporting the war, and people who seem to be speaking out against these other issues are getting a bad rap for it by the main stream church leaders because they are going against the narrow minded focus of the mainstream denominations.

I don't really have a solution or an answer as to how to fix the church or it's image in the world, perhaps there is none. Maybe we just need to get back to basics and start being known for our love and compassion?