mclaren thought #1

“In Western society there is the assumption that smart white men define reality. Western civilization and the Gospel so linked that when Western civilization goes down, the Gospel goes down. So, out of fidelity to the Gospel [a conservative Christian author] defends Western culture and denigrates other cultures.”
McLaren

My thought:

In Chariots of fire – there is a scene where the British are trying to talk Eric into running on Sunday, they say, in my day it was “country first, God second.”

We need to not let our country and our Western view do this to us – demand our allegiance to anything on a level above or equal to our allegiance to God.

A parable – a baseball player might think that wearing the same pair of underwear every day –without washing them- makes the team win. So, out of devotion to the team, he wears the same underwear everyday. He smells. He gets sick. He’s uncomfortable and cannot play well because of it. But when you try to take the underwear away, he’ll fight you for the seeming sake of his team.

We cannot allow this to be the church. We, as people who see this and people who love the church (as in God’s people – not as in the institutional organization – have the responsibility to expose that they are aligned to something unworthy of their alignment.