Got God?

If I were an unbeliever and I attended these churches and listened to all their sermons week after week, how would I define the term "Christ Follower"?

Here's the answer I came up with after reviewing the sermons preached at these seeker-driven / purpose-driven churches over the last 24 months:

Christ Follower: Someone who has made the decision to be an emotionally well adjusted self-actualized risk taking leader who knows his purpose, lives a 'no regrets' life of significance, has overcome his fears, enjoys a healthy marriage with better than average sex, is an attentive parent, is celebrating recovery from all his hurts, habits and hang ups, practices Biblical stress relief techniques, is financially free from consumer debt, fosters emotionally healthy relationships with his peers, attends a weekly life group, volunteers regularly at church, tithes off the gross and has taken at least one humanitarian aid trip to a third world nation.

Four:  Hidden behind the other dynamics that have made us reluctant to speak in a direct fashion about God is something more amorphous, but infinitely more powerful: the Progressive fear of being thought of as fundamentalist. Listen for any time at all to Progressives talk about their faith and you will learn far more about what we don't "believe in" than you will learn about what we do believe: We don't believe in being bigoted. We don't believe in being homophobic. We don't believe in creationist assumptions about the origins of the universe. We don't believe in literalist readings of Scripture.

It's not surprising then, to find that we are reticent to claim that we can or have heard God speak. It's one more thing "those crazy, ignorant fundamentalists do." So we certainly don't do it.

None of this is surprising, of course. The label, "Progressive," screams "not-fundamentalist" and implicitly makes the really rather silly historical claim that we became progressive thanks to a faith that—if it weren't for our generation's synergy of faith and learning—would continue to be narrow, repressive, and worst of all, fundamentalist. Frankly, I find the label self-important and a complete misreading of history which—without Christianity's influence (not fundamentalism, just garden variety orthodoxy)—would not be marked by the characteristics we have supposedly "discovered." Read, for example, Marcello Pera's book, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians. But because we are hell-bent on making sure that no one thinks we are fundamentalist, we have jettisoned the notion that God speaks—wreathing it round with false humility and skeptical reserve.

Where does this leave us?

The irony, of course, is that because the Christian faith is finally about a relationship, the kind of reticence that all factors nurture may not have any bearing on whether God speaks, but it certainly makes it difficult to hear when God does.

"Got God?" Sure.

But are we listening?