What If Christianity Needs to Be Reintroduced… to Christians?
Inside the uncomfortable but necessary mission I can no longer ignore.
If your life were a movie, and people had been watching everything up to this point...
What would the audience be shouting at the screen, begging you to do next?
What’s so apparent to everyone watching, that you’re completely missing?
“Leave him!”
“Quit the job!”
“Stop doing _____!”
“Start doing ______!”
What do you think?
What’s the one thing you're avoiding—the thing any reasonable person would say you should act on right now?
As Richard Feynman once said,
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
When I asked myself that question last week, I didn’t expect the answer that came.
In my last two articles, I shared that the focus of my next book would be that of helping Christians overcome exhaustion.
But the more I sat with that question—“What would the audience be screaming at the screen, telling you to do next?”—the more I realized something sobering:
I need to spend whatever time I have left doing what I do best and what people need most:
Writing about Jesus.
Exposing how American consumerism has infiltrated even faithful, Bible-teaching churches.
And showing how, in those churches, the version of “Jesus” being taught—and the life being prescribed—stands in direct contrast to the Jesus of the New Testament.
Which means:
The last thing Christians need from me right now is a book to help them feel less stressed while continuing to live a compromised, consumer-Christian lifestyle.
As Søren Kierkegaard so bluntly put it:
“Official Christianity is not the Christianity of the New Testament.
Established Christianity is about as far away from God as one can possibly get.
If anything is to be done, one must try to introduce Christianity into Christendom.
What we have before us is not Christianity, but a prodigious illusion—and the people are not pagans, but live in the blissful conceit that they are Christians.
So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced, first of all the illusion must be disposed of.
But since this vain conceit, this illusion, is to the effect that they are Christians, it looks indeed as if introducing Christianity were taking Christianity away from men.
Nevertheless, this is the first thing to do—the illusion must go.”
And I believe that’s the work I’ve been called to do now.
Not to comfort the crowd.
Not to maintain the illusion.
But to disrupt it—lovingly, boldly, faithfully.
To reintroduce Jesus… to people who already think they know Him.
That may not be popular, but it will be faithful.
And for me, that’s the only kind of writing that’s worth doing anymore.
Brian
I didn’t know that—thanks for sharing. I can attest that döstädning is powerful. Six years ago, Lisa and I sold, donated, or threw away more than 70% of what we owned. It was liberating. Now, when I walk into my closet, the open space and empty hangers give me this quiet sense of simplicity and intentionality.
The demons in the Gaderene had just gone into the herd of swine. The swine had just run off the cliff.
The ‘folks’ who owned the herd of now drown pigs showed up.
‘Ah…Jesus,, you gotta go.’