Note: Published yesterday, but republished today after I removed it briefly for fear of insulting readers. Then I realized that this is my blog and if readers are offended by my thoughts, they can simply not drop by any more. So consider this post in play.
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Day’s Verse:
Remind them to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed, to malign no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing every consideration for all men.
Titus 3:1-2
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I have heard many complaints about the Church, both inside and outside its walls. The church is no longer one of fearless, faithful action; it has become a hive of buzzing social bees, excluding those for whom it was truly founded: “How we have blemished and scarred [the body of Christ] through social neglect and fear of being nonconformists.” In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. says,

The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. …If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

We do not want to be the last embers of a quietly dying religion. What we must do as contemporary Christians is to become as the early church, “not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” The church is no closer to Christlikeness than it was when King penned his letter in that Birmingham jail. All too often Christians are weak, huddling together for support, mouthing platitudes about freeing Iraqis and spreading democracy when hundreds of thousands die and mumbling phrases of stewardship regarding the wanton widespread destruction of priceless biomes while paying a premium for the oil obtained from those very habitats. This is not the Christianity that Christ preached, and it is not the Christianity that He meant us to follow. The status quo has never been for followers of the Way, yet we have become the loudest proponents of hairbrainedly rejecting the earth-shattering “theory” of evolution and the society-changing discovery of global warming. May God forgive our complacency and light a fire under our well-cushioned butts.

- KF -

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