How Do We Flip The Flippin’ Church?

Thankfully the answer to how do we flip the church isn’t really relevant because we don’t flip it, Jesus does. He is building his church, his way. Perhaps a better question would be:

"what must we stop doing,

that we call building the church,

to enable Jesus to build his church today?"

If we were to talk to the famous Martian who beams down to earth and ask him to give his impression of this thing called church what would he say?

I’m not even going to attempt to answer that because it would probably entail sweeping statements and assessments which would not only be depressing, but would also fail to achieve what I want us to understand. My point is that when we start to wonder what the Martian would say, we immediately begin to think of all the things we think are wrong with the church, especially the other parts of it that we are personally not involved in. For instance a Roman Catholic Christian might well say that the Martian would be amazed at the stupidity of protestants who keep falling out and starting yet another denomination. And lets face it, that brother's comment would have huge credibility. Just ask yourself, ‘how many times has the Roman Catholic Church split?’ The answer is debatably three times. How many times has the protestant church split? Well, too many to count unless we look at just this year! What about a protestant evangelical what would he think a Martian’s findings might be? Well for a start, some in this group won’t be reading this at the moment anyway. Why? Because they haven’t got past the three words a few lines above “Roman Catholic Christian”. Figure it out for yourself.

A Martian who knows his bible might just conclude that the church is noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. If we look at our major debates over the last 100 years we can see that we have not had love.

Biblical interpretation conservative/liberal

Sexuality (or more to the point - homosexuality)

Abortion

The role of women in the church

Gifts of the Holy Spirit

Hell

The list could go on and on. But the relevance is that these debates end up polarised and separate Christians who so often take combative stances to those who oppose their particular view. If an evangelical leader dares to entertain a line of discussion from a liberal scholar he is accused of going over to the ‘other side’. Marty the Martian wouldn’t see any difference to these debates from any other issue in the rest of the world. 

I once put this observation to an evangelical friend of mine who was denying that Roman Catholics were Christians and spoke of them in threatening terms. I asked him where the love was. His answer was that of course he loved these poor misguided fools. It was out of his love for them that he needed to correct them. Aaaaargh!

I’m really not sure how to end this blog. I have left several months between writing the first 30 episodes and beginning this final section. I love Jesus, I love his church and I love people. However, I rebel against Jesus, I can be extremely frustrated by his church and often people get on my nerves. I don’t think that I have all, or even most of the answers, but I am a seeker and God has placed in me a vision which sees a church in unity with all kinds of disagreements but huge love on display to the world which knows not love.

In the next blog I have two final thoughts which I want to touch on which I believe will help us let go of our church and let Jesus flippin’ well restores and revive his church.