Getting Engaged

No! I am not looking for a wife, I am perfectly content with the one I’ve had for the last fifty years. But, what I have experienced of Christianity and the Church for the last forty-five years has not prepared me for adequately engaging the world creatively or constructively, and for this I need to get engaged.

What my experience in the Protestant Church has prepared me for is comfortability. This comfortability has blunted and dulled my sensibility and engagement with the world as I accommodated its many ways and means.

I had a solid conversion experience that radically changed my life, so how did this happen? First of all, the picture I eventually developed of the “Church” was false. All of Christendom had impressed on me the idea that the Church  consist of brick-and-mortar and not a living, breathing, spiritual organism: Church is something you do on Sundays and not something you are.  Secondly, the Church made God very predictable and the world enjoyable; socially, the Church had become one with the world; the Church and the world were holding hands. The doors were swung open and the world was invited in until the Church and the world were indistinguishable besides a few different words and definitions.

In this scenario, the Church was the offspring of the cities where I grew-up, where men and women live anesthetized lives, immune to truth. God was known as the Comforter, but not as Liberator, so the resources of the world could be enjoyed without pain,  problems, or persecution.

Consequently, my experience of God, of spiritual awareness and power, was inferior; and my involvement in the world was limited to personal benefit and not the transformation of human lives. The result: I am not, we are not, as battle-ready saints prepared to stand at the forefront of truth with the declaration that our God is about to return with a great judgment on this decaying corpse we call Earth. Because we lack an adequate vision and purpose we can hardly have a great concern for the lost who are dying in the cities.

“For God so loved the world . . .” our worship of Him should always lead us to get engaged in the important issues of our day, which our Anabaptist forefathers had resolved to do, and count the cost we are willing to pay in our own quest to follow Jesus and to bear His name in a dangerous world.

I am running out of time, and so are you! Get engaged!