Can a person follow Jesus and quit being a Christian or part of Christianity?

Big news this past week as Anne Rice, the best-selling vampire novelist, made the announcement via her Facebook account:

“For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else … In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control … In the name of … Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

Is she right?  She says she still loves Jesus.

I think on some level many Christians have had feelings that resonate with what she said.  There is this ideal picture, and that somehow everyone in the church will love and forgive like we should.  Except it doesn’t happen.  And people get hurt.  She has said this is not a rash decision, and she gave it some time to process.

My initial reaction was that it may be a good idea to avoid using Facebook as a filter from the kind of Christians she describes.  (Seriously, what is the deal with the internet, forums, and comment or message boards bringing out the very worse in people?!)  Although I would admit that her description is not entirely wrong, I still don’t think she is right.  The larger issue is that I don’t think she has described the whole of Christianity, and Christians. Certainly there are a few or a lot, depending on your perspective, that fall in line with her sketch of Christianity.

So where is the line?  Jesus said the number one thing we would be known by is love.  Are we held in check?  Made accountable?  And to who for not being what we should?

She gets right to the heart of some issues on why so many people are leaving the church.  Christians should do a much better job at being and living in Biblical community.  But I would also say that in our me-first, feel good culture, where the spectator and consumer calls the shots even in the church, we shouldn’t be swayed by an imperfect group of people given that at the core of who we are as humans and specifically Christians:  forgiveness, patience, and self-control all seem to imply a certain measure of dealing with messed up and annoying people.  That includes me.

So I will continue to love imperfectly…and do so within an imperfect community of people we call the Church.  I am absolutely committed to the Church, not in spite of others, but in spite of me. Loving and serving those as best I can who are not religious.  And I only do this because a guy like Jesus could love a messed up guy like me.  And Anne Rice may be going through a “dark night of the soul” personally, or she may never come back to Christianity.  I don’t know.  I can say that Christians shouldn’t treat her with anything other than love.

Inception.  Great movie.  I really enjoyed it.

Inception is about thieves that can tap into our subconscious during our dreams to steal ideas.  Think of them as late 21^st century white collar thieves stealing corporate secrets.  Except the idea of “Inception” is to plant an idea into someone’s subconscious, so that they wake up from their dream and think it was their own idea.  It’s a film about dreams, but perhaps more essentially a film about love, failure, memory, time, and reality.  Or questions about what reality is.  I think along these lines, the ending gives you a feeling that whatever you believe is reality.  (*Spoiler Alert:  So whatever happens to Cobb’s spinning totem doesn’t really matter.*)  I think this is false, and reality is unaffected by what we believe.

This movie is crazy to keep up with, at one point there are like four timelines. Chart below gets at the chaos that was a lot of fun to keep track of:

But there is an interesting line in the movie, Cobb says, “What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules. Which is why I have to steal it.”

The implications of this quote are wide ranging.

At one point in the movie, we see a group of people that are in this drug induced dream state more often than they are in reality, because they like their dream state better.  It’s not scary to think that what we believe to be our reality is in fact a dream, it is scary to think that we often live our lives and don’t think serious enough about this reality really being reality.

Dr. Seuss said, “You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

Cheers.

We have three more preview services the last Sunday night of each month until we launch weekly services on September 12.  Thank you to those who have been praying for us! 

More pictures here.

Cheers.

There is a video from the author of Eat, Pray, Love named Elizabeth Gilbert at TED.  I watched it this week, and I think she is connecting with something that gets close to something the church can acknowledge.

There are a couple other quotes that track with what she is saying.

 ”How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be truly religious?’ Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with most scientists. Neither can understand that poetic and religious imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the total meaning of things without being in any sense an analytic description of detailed facts.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr

“But the Christian imagination – shrunken and starved throughout the long winter of secularism – needs to be awakened, enlivened and pointed in the right direction…Christians needs to sense permission, from God and from one another, to exercise their imaginations in thinking ahead into God’s new world and into such fresh forms of worship and service as will model and embody aspects of it. We need to have this imagination energized, fed and nourished, so that it is lively and inventive, not sluggishly going around in small circles of a few ideas learned long ago…

Genuine art is thus itself a response to the beauty of creation, which itself is a pointer to the beauty of God. The beauty of creation, to which art responds and tries to express, imitate, and highlight, is not simply beauty which it possesses in itself but the beauty which it possesses in view of what is promised to it… If Christian artists can glimpse this truth, there is a way forward to celebrating beauty, to loving God with all the soul, without lapsing into pantheism on the one hand or harsh, negative ‘realism’ on the other. Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are, but to the way things are meant to be.”
- N.T. Wright

I’m not drawing a conclusion. Just a prayer for something in Mason City and north Iowa.  Rhythm Church among so many good Mason City churches, so many creative and talented people here, and I hope we can be something imaginative and creative in our communities.

Cheers.

Website Link

Cheers.

(Video by Derrick Collins who did a great job!)

We also had an article published in the local Paper – The Globe, and they did a good story on us. You can read it here until they pull it from the archives:  Link

We are getting together as a church regularly, and in May we will have our first preview service. Our plan is to have monthly preview services the last Sunday night of the month until we officially launch the church for weekly services on September 12th.

Pray for us…and stay tuned.

Cheers.

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.

(Matthew 11:28-30)

Cheers.

I hope you will like it, and feel free to pass it on to others!

Cheers.

Cheers.

My question, as you watch, is how does this apply to the church? Does it have relevance to the way we should do things at all? Now or in the future, how do you transition? If schools teach from a 19th century paradigm in the 21st century, what about the church?

Give it a chance to warm up, and what are your thoughts?

Cheers.

If you lurk and don’t think I subscribe to your blog, then leave me a comment, and I will put you in my Google Reader.  I’m trying to get organized, and I don’t want to miss anyone.

AMERICAN IDOL.
Carly is gone. Brooke keeps making it, and is being pushed by “Vote for the Worst.” Carly did mess up the words, but you wouldn’t know it by the lines the judges are given to put some under the bus, and push others into the finals. Jason can make it another week or two?
They wonder why ratings are down? Beatles two weeks in a row. Dolly Parton. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Neil Diamond. Hmmm…no clue?!
Article link.

Cheers.

And then there is this deal down in Texas. Something like 414 kids not with their parents.

A cult.

What do you guys think about this?

The mothers who have children under 4 stay with them, but the rest go off where?

Is polygamy enough to take children from their parents? What has actually been proven to allow them to do this, because I haven’t read anything proving something? An anonymous phone call? Are they running the young men off from the group or something?

Come to think of it, I don’t know any mothers who get custody of their children who are not fit to be mothers. Not in our fine judicial system.

And here are these mothers who raise their kids up, literally teach them to be good people, and their crime is getting married too young. Which is horribly offensive to me since the rest of the world doesn’t do that. Certainly the mother of Jesus was at least like, I don’t know, 23 when she was set up with Joseph.

We have laws, so that’s good because my religion agrees with most of our laws. None that would get me in trouble. For now.

Don’t parents get in trouble for spanking their kids these days? 14 hours of TV, internet, and X-box in one day is totally cool though.

And these women may be brainwashed, but from what I can tell, they seem like responsible mothers.

Strange. It must be an emotional ordeal that I couldn’t imagine.

Cheers.