David Hirsch says, “If our conception of who Jesus is false, then it is better for us to be atheists because an allegiance and adherence to a false Jesus is absolutely devastating. It would be far more preferable if we just didn’t believe anything.”
• The false Jesus who says it’s all about comfort and security destroys Christian mission.
• The false Jesus who says it’s okay to turn a blind eye to the suffering in our very inner cities as long as we’re raising our children undermines Christianity.
• The false Jesus who says it’s okay to keep accumulating goods and bank accounts at the expense of investing ourselves fully to the cause of alleviating the suffering of our community repudiates everything the Christ of Scripture lived for and died for.
• The false Jesus who says it’s perfectly fine to remain racially divided in your churches and worship while the rest of the world is multicultural undermines the gospel that we are all God’s children.
• The false Jesus who says you keep doing church the way you’ve always done church in your own little circles and denominations because that’s the way we’ve always done church is killing our witness in a non-Christian majority world.
If that’s what being a Christian and being a part of a church means, is what we are doing here in our churches in The Colony, is it even worth doing? multiplying? Worth imitating?
We live in a community that has 270,000 people in a ten mile radius from us, and 91% of them are unchurched. Here’s what that means in a very practical sense. While we keep doing church the ways we’ve always done it, segregated by race, by denominations, and history, 246,000 of our neighbors, coworkers, and will spend an eternity in damnation apart from Jesus.
That my friends is simply unacceptable. We must discover better ways to do church. We must get better at making new Christians and growing them up to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.
To the 246,000 unchurched in our area, our denominational differences don’t mean a darn thing to them. They don’t care if you’re Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalean, Church of Christ, Assemblies of God, or non-denominational. What they need to know is does God matter? Can God change my life? Is God for real? Is there hope for our world?
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