Skip to main content

Christ and Christianity

My Pageflakes page had the following quote from Quotiki:

I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.

- Mahatma Gandhi

I can definitely relate to this statement.  When I look at some of the infighting going on within churches and denominations I have to come back to the same thought, that we call ourselves Christians but we still don't get it.

There is one primary teaching Christ brought which changed everything.  We must love one another as he loved us.  We must live our lives in love and as an expression of that love for each-other.

If someone is letting their responsibilities slide we must find a time to meet with them face to face and lovingly figure out what is going on and find a solution.  Avoiding the problem never helps and it's certainly not what Christ taught.

I was talking to someone recently as we looked at some options for a leadership position.  One of the concerns came up that we need to find a person who is willing to think outside the norm and be willing to lead and defend change.

So many people I know fall into Christianity because it is the right thing to do.  Especially in the Episcopal Church, and Catholics to be fair, we have the same service each week, with communion and the same format.  It's been like that for years and brings a strong sense of comfort.  I know that no matter what church I go to I will have the same prayers, the same format and shared communion.

The problem is that I can become so used to that that I'm unwilling to change.  A few years back it was suggested our contemporary service stop doing communion every week to make time for other unique opportunities.  I hated the idea.  Now that I think about it I was so used to what I knew I was unwilling to change.

All Christ ever thought about was change.  His purpose for being was to change every aspect of my life so that is focused wholly on loving him and everyone around me. 

Having a willingness to experience new things is key to this love taking place.

As I think about becoming a priest I sometimes wonder if the Episcopal Church is ready for me.  I like traditional services, but if I were to lead a church I would very strongly do away with the traditional service and focus energies on some of the lively and unique options which come from non-denominational churches.

I'd keep the Eucharist, but modify it so that our prayers focus on how Christ is moving our church that week.

Pretty much everything else is open to modification.  Robes? optional.  Hymns? optional.  Readings? optional or presented in a different format. How can we focus on the church building when our neighbors are crying for help?

I wonder how many feathers I'm going to be able to ruffle and how many lives I'll get to change.

Peace,
+Tom

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using an Array of Objects in C++

 I've been programming for years (over 35 at this point, which is crazy  to think about). My career right now is much more Software Architecture, and much less Software Developer, but I still get some time to write out GraphQL APIs in TypeScript, Vue 3 UIs, GitLab pipelines, and just generally making "big" decisions and helping make them a reality. It's nice every now and then to come across different articles and ideas that get me to remember life in college when I was using C++. Who would have thought C++ was the "hot new thing" right now (though I suppose it's more like Rust and Go, both great languages as well). One of the things I find frustrating with most technical posts is where they focus on the "how do I build an app" and not so much on "how do I do this one slightly useful thing". I figured I'd throw one together what was front of mind, using user attributes for permissions (i.e., Attribute Based Access Control - ABAC) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Red-Gate SQL Compare

Every now and then I come across a program that becomes so ingrained in my daily work that I hardly know how I'd get by without it.  I'll probably break down a couple over the next few days, but for database work, I have never found anything as good as Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare .  Essentially these tools let you compare two SQL Server databases (all objects, users, permissions, functions, diagrams, anything) and update changes to whichever database you want.  This is amazingly useful for deploying database changes to a test or production environment (do it to production with ridiculous care, even though it will generate a SQL Script for you and run all updates in one transaction), and making sure everything is synchronized. For releases we can just generate the compare script, confirm that the changes match the updates we want to go out, and store it all in one place with the release details.  This is true for both the structure and the d...
6 comments
Read more

Kids Activities

I find myself often in a situation where it's some morning, I have the kids for the afternoon, and I'm not sure what to do with them. We could go to a movie, or play Legos, but living near Washington, DC, I want the kids to love the museums as much as I do, or to see what else is going on. This Sunday, while my wife was travelling, I took the kids to the Chocolate Festival in Old Town Fairfax. I didn't even know there wad an Old Town Fairfax, much less a chocolate festival. It was okay overall, but the best was seeing any type of chocolate you could imagine, and letting the kids pick something for themselves and their teacher. For finding cheap or free stuff going on nearby with the kids, I have to say About.com has consistently been the best. I tried si.edu (the Smithsonian Website) which is also good, but a little hard to navigate, partly because they have so much going on. At About I did a search of what to do with my kids this weekend, and a bunch of items came ...
Post a Comment
Read more