- Eichel Davis
#TheFinal14 | Old Church Sayings
Jefferson Bethke put out a video a few years ago about how he loves Jesus, but hates religion. The video went viral to no one's surprise and ended up being shown in a class of mine in my senior year of high school. It was short, and to the point, but the words of that video have continued to resonate with me throughout my life and my faith.
I have a mildly complicated relationship with churches.
I love mostly everything about real churches. The love your neighbor type churches. I love the sense of community, the bettering as a whole, the use of time to help others. In fact, many of the reasons I love churches are the reasons I loved Westminster. There was alway this sense of the servant attitude. Me for You. Us for Them. It’s a mentality I’ll keep forever, and it’s become the cornerstone of my ever strengthening Christian faith.
But it’s not perfect. Churches tend to oversimplify issues. We tend to live in bubbles of those communities we build. And more importantly, we tend to put church over Jesus himself, and in a time where the world seems complex and out of order, we as Christians need to come back to the roots.
We need to stick to the core message of love, and faith, and forgiveness, and servanthood that make our religion great. We sometimes get lost in the old church sayings, in the tithes, in the routines, and in the isolated culture that many churches have built.
Im guilty of this myself. For most of my life, I had no non-Christian friends. I went to a Christian church, attended a Christian school, hung out with my Christian friends, and listened to a lot of Christian music. Some of this was the work on my caregivers, but a lot of it was my doing. It was comfortable. It was familiar. And it was everything that Jesus fought so hard against.
The conformity and shelter from others not like us.
Then I went to college, and my world shifted. Again, this was no work of my own. I didn’t seek out non-Christian friends. They found me in some incredible, and devine ways. But the chances I have been given to spread my views, and my servanthood mentality on Christianity has been a joy that I never thought I would have.
I didn’t really have a mission when I started this post. I sat down at my desk, and just started typing. I had no agenda. I had no plan. And now we’re here, and I can’t help but think about my own faith for the first time in a while. I’m a Christian Liberal, something that seems to contradict itself in today’s world. I have a faith built on Love, Forgiveness, and Servanthood, not on rules and laws. Because I don’t think that that was His plan. I don’t think He meant for this beautiful thing he built to be a textbook. But I think some Christians have fallen into that lie.
Faith is hard guys. It really truly is. Faith is hard when the world can seem so very broken. Faith is hard when your family goes through rough trails. Faith is difficult because it requires you to have such a strong feeling in the face of tragedy. But Faith would be harder if it was just a bunch of rules, a bunch of sayings. In fact, Faith would be impossible.
It was would pointless. And Christianity is anything but pointless.
With Love,
Eichel | @EichelGDavis
