Another Quiet Tuesday

This will be another quiet day. I am doing a load of laundry but that's about all. I am reading my book....quite an interesting book. I may have mentioned it before. It's called "Saving Jesus From the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus". It is by Robin Meyers, a pastor from Oklahoma City. The flyleaf of the book says: "The most urgent questions of all go unasked: What kind of God did Jesus reveal? What is the proper object of our worship and what would it take to make Christianity compelling, even irresistible again? How can our faith become biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying and socially significant?

Our task, he says, is not to just demythologize Jesus. It's to let the breath of the Galilean sage fall on the neck of the church again. First we have to listen, not to formulas of salvation but to a gospel that is all but forgotten. After centuries of being told that "Jesus saves" the time has come to save Jesus from the church.

Countless thoughtful people are now so disgusted with the marriage of bad theology and hypocritical behavior by the church that a new Reformation is required in which the purpose of religion itself is re-imagined. The author takes the best of biblical scholarship and recasts these core Christian concepts to exhort the church to pursue an alternative vision of the Christian life.

Jesus as Teacher not Savior
Christianity as Compassion not Condemnation
Prosperity as Dangerous not Divine
Discipleship as Obedience not Control
Religion as Relationship not Righteousness

This is not a call to the church to move to the far left or to try something brand new. Rather it is the recovery of something very old. This book may help us recover what it means to be a Christian and how to follow Jesus' teachings today.

The book is praised by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Bill Moyers, John Shelby Spong, Fred Craddock and Diana Butler Bass. It will give the reader something to mull over and may even change their viewpoint of what we ought to be about as Christians. I'm about halfway through it.