Unintended communication

Metal folding chairs are a visual cue that an event is going to be boring. They unintentionally communicate sitting inactively. We associate them with school. Assemblies. Head stuff.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons we have made Christianity a head thing instead of a heart thing is the affordability of metal folding chairs.  They are the visual cue for passivity.  Something in our Christian practice believes that if we could just sit and listen enough, read enough Bible studies, learn enough doctrine then we would be able to do this thing right.

Here's the challenge with this.  When God is a head thing, then it becomes about being right.  We feel if we could just present enough evidence, then people would believe.  It becomes the war of the plastic fishes on the back of a mini-van.  (You've seen the plastic Jesus fish right?  Then you've seen the fish that has legs that says DARWIN?  Then you've seen the plastic fish eating the DARWIN fish?)

Yesterday at a restaurant I picked up a tract.  When I opened it, I saw that it was actually a tract for another religion. Here's the thing.  There was no difference in that tract than the Christian tracts I've read except that it didn't say Jesus.

When we make Christianity a head thing, then it is simply one more idea in a list of other ideas with people trying to shout louder than the others about being right. 

When Christianity is a heart thing, it becomes about love. That was the desciptor that the book of Acts describes as how people knew who the Christians were.  Funny thing is that love is the thing we all so desperately need. The thing that souls are dying for lack of.  Real love engages. 

I asked a man named David Hall once why when you first become a Christian, church is so rich and every lesson seems to produce epiphanies, then as you grow in your faith that happens less and less often.  David quoted the verse where Jesus says, "My bread is to do the work of my Father." 

The deep learning of Christianity comes about in practice.  In taking off all the things that make us special, wrapping a towel around our waist and washing feet.  There is no other way.