{"id":30430,"date":"2015-06-03T09:20:57","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T13:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=30430"},"modified":"2015-06-03T09:20:57","modified_gmt":"2015-06-03T13:20:57","slug":"the-church-needs-a-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/06\/the-church-needs-a-revolution.html","title":{"rendered":"The Church Needs a Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"The<\/p>\n

Some years ago I blogged about<\/a> Robin Meyers\u2019 book, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. Recently\u00a0Progressive Christianity shared<\/a> an excerpt from his new book, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance<\/a>\"\"<\/i>. Below\u00a0is a sample, from the larger section from which the quote above comes. Click through<\/a> for even more, or better yet, buy the book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The sad truth is that much of the church today is a harmless handmaiden of the corporate machine, clinging nostalgically to a gospel that is as unacceptable in practice now as it was in the beginning. We confuse performance with ministry, beliefs with faith, and charity with justice. Our demise is the result of the abandonment of our peculiar witness to the upside-down instructions left to us by a God-intoxicated misfit. Christians can survive almost anything, save the loss of distinctiveness. We can make our share of mistakes, but we cannot be a mistake.<\/p>\n

The very definition of what it means to be a Christian must be salvaged now, taken back, by force if necessary, from those who domesticated a way of life and turned it into a quarreling quagmire of noisy \u201cbelievers.\u201d While we fiddle with the meaning of the Trinity, present-day Rome is burning. While we mumble our prayers for the poor, their poverty and pain increase by the hour. While we coddle the industries that ravage the earth for energy and then market death to us disguised as comfort, the conscience of the faithful has been euthanized by public relations campaigns that make us swoon with gratitude for the humanitarian altruism of Big Oil.<\/p>\n

Where are the holy fools for God today? Who stands out in the crowd as a troublemaker for justice? Where can we find the spiritual contrarian, unplugged and unmoved by the choreographed hysteria of celebrity culture? Where do we find real wisdom in the age of the blog, where everyone with an opinion can self-publish, where authors presume not to need editors in a worldwide web of intellectual autoeroticism?<\/p>\n

The sad truth is that to help the American church \u201cgrow\u201d we have dressed it in the uniform of Western culture. We have taught its leaders to be entrepreneurs, and to fret more about parking spaces than about peace and justice. We sing familiar hymns, but the lyrics fall on deaf ears. We recite creeds in worship that move no one, while others have decided they cannot speak them aloud in good conscience. In short, countless communities of faith are engaged in a charade on Sunday morning. The pews are full of pretenders.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\" \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a video online of him speaking about the topic:<\/p>\n