Shalom and Such

"I don’t wanna go through the motions
I don’t wanna go one more day
Without Your all consuming passion inside of me
I don’t wanna spend my whole life asking
What if I had given everything?
Instead of going through the motions"
-Matthew West (The Motions)

I came to the realization that I spent a great deal of time going to church when I was growing up. The problem is that most of my time in church was spent going through the motions. 
I was 15 when I stopped believing in God, but I started to go through the motions around the age of 12. 
Like most 12 year old I did not want to go to church on Sunday mornings. I would sit there and listen to the sermon, while patiently waiting for God to strike me dead in my seat. 
I was at every church function, not because I wanted to be there but because I had to be there. 

When I turned 18 everything changed. I was still going through the motions every Sunday. I stood when everyone else stood and I sang the words to the hymns, I even raised my hands to praise God. But my heart was not in any of it. I never felt connected to something greater than myself. 

Everyone thought that I believed everything that I was supposed to believe. The reality is that I did not believe in God, I did not want to accept Jesus into my heart, and no part of me wanted to convert anyone.

Church should never ever be a place where people sit in the pews and go through the motions of worship. I believe that church should be a place where people want to go, people should want to worship God. (Having doubts and fears is perfectly normal. The problem is when people go because it is what their families have always done on a Sunday. Going to church does not make someone a Christian). 

I finally felt connected to something greater than myself my freshmen year of college. It was during the passing of the peace. I was being hugged and welcomed by strangers. When I thought about later on, I came to the conclusion that the Open Door Service at Asbury United Methodist Church was filled with people who have love and peace flowing through their veins. 

The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom. In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell says the following about Shalom.

 "For many of us, we understand peace to be the absence of conflict. We talk about peace in the home or in the world or giving peace a chance. But the Hebraic understanding of shalom is far more than just the absence of conflict or strife. 

Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It's the presence of wholeness, completeness.

So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is placing the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God's presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul-it involves all of you."

Instead of trying to win souls for Jesus, the goal of all Christians should be to spread the Shalom of God to everyone. Maybe just maybe if the Church focused on shalom and not the saving of souls more people would want to go to church on Sunday mornings and less people would spend their Sunday mornings going through the motions.

go in PEACE. live PEACE. be PEACE. 

Some Thoughts on the 4th

I would love to be able to put all of Rob Bell's Jesus Wants to Save Christians on my blog but I can't. He makes some very profound points in that book about the United States and the part that Christians and the Church have in the United States and its future.
If you don't know by now, the main line denominations are shrinking, in fact the number of Christians in the United States is shrinking. A lot of people are shocked when they hear this, but I was not. After all the reasons people are leaving the church are many of the same reasons that I want to go to seminary. I want to change the way people view the church.
So now for some quotes:
1. "The only way to break that cycle is for someone to absorb it. A true leader of a new exodus would have to resist ever using power in the form of violence against another human being."
2."In the same way that entitlement can cause us to loose perspective, it can also cause us to resist checks on consumption. If a particular resource becomes scarce at home or in other parts of the world, it can be very difficult to cut back, because the powerful forces of entitlement convince us certain things are deserved. Empires naturally accumulate, accumulation has consequences, and those consequences are expensive."
3."If you are a citizen of an empire that has the most powerful army in the history of humanity and is currently on the way to spending a trillion dollars on a war passages in the Bible about those who accumulate chariots and horses from Egypt are passages about you and your people."

Jesus said that the peace makers would be blessed. The Church should be the greatest peace maker. People are leaving the church because she has forgotten the call to be light and salt.

go in PEACE. be PEACE. live PEACE.