Faith Under Siege

Recently, I have been feeling like the Christian faith is under siege. Not from those who choose to not engage at all, or even those who follow faiths different to our own, but from something far more insidious, and damaging. Slowly, but surely, we are eroding from within, as we tie ourselves into knots that we have no chance of easily untying and focus on robust defenses of ‘issues’ rather than the very real work of reaching out to a world crying out in pain on many fronts. The internet has recently been ignited by a lengthy treatise by Kelsey Munger where she speaks of being tired of being a Christian. You can read the full piece, published in the Huffington Post here:

 www.huffingtonpost.com/kelsey-l-munger/im-tired-of-being-a-christian_b_10285128.html? 

What struck me about the writer’s lengthy, brutally honest essay is that she did not say she was tired of loving Jesus, or being stirred by the Holy Spirit or being protected by God. What she was tired of was what it meant to be a Christian today. The thing is, like it or not, Christians are increasingly being defined by what we are purportedly against and what we are meant to despise. From the arguments for and against women ordination and the levels of service they can play (bishops/ deacons/ welcome greeters at the front of the church / lurid exemplum of the Jezebel Spirit – delete as necessary), to attitudes to the LGBT community, right through to the hardy perennials such as the Pro-Life/Pro=Choice debate, Do-Or-Don’t-Do IVF and a whole lot more in between. Being a Christian, for the most part, if the media headlines are to be believed is about beating your drum against a whole swathe of modern and not so modern ills. It’s about placards and protests and intense bible verse heavy quoting trolling. As a life=long believer this makes me sad, as what is often absent from the knee-jerk reactions, the clamour to condemn, the judgment and the proclamations is the very thing that made Jesus so compelling and marked him out: his inexhaustible capacity for compassion and love.

Compassion is so absent in our world, and it can feel especially acute in a church. These spaces are meant to be spiritual hospitals open to all, where Jesus says: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt11:28) and means it. If we who claim to know and love Jesus are not showing the same love and compassion, then somewhere along the way we have gotten lost and we need to find that track, the one dotted with grace and mercy and kindness and gentleness, and return to it, pronto. We need to take a moment as Jesus so often did to walk a nanosecond in the other person’s shoes. Jesus never had children, but look how he was so quick to perform miracles for parents who had lost theirs (Mark5:35-42 and Luke7:11-17). As a man, the monthly menses would have been a theoretic concept, but look how he sorted out the poor woman with the perpetual period lasting 12 years (Mark5:25-34). He never got married, but see how he ensured the wedding reception at Cana wasn’t a wash out and provided the best vintage for all (John2:1-11). These miracles weren’t big show off events, they were not about Jesus pointing out how much better he was than the rest of us, it was about him expressing empathy, loving people and meeting them at their point of need.

I truly hope and pray that Kelsey stops feeling tired of being a Christian, but hers and many others like hers’ plights are down to the thoughts and efforts of the rest of us: the silent majority who love Jesus but don’t trawl the internet looking for people who don’t share our beliefs to lambast. It is up to us, who may witness off-colour comments and attitudes gaining ground in our parishes or prayer groups and fellowships and choose not to challenge them for fear of upsetting the applecart. Yes, it is scary, but think how scary 1^st Century evangelism as seen in the Book of Acts must have been? And the Apostles still got on with it. We are the only ones who can save our faith, a faith which at its centre is love from being besieged by haters. We are the only one who can protect our flock both inside and outside from feeling condemned. We are the only ones who can trust that God in his grace and goodness will assist us in this greatest of challenges.