| | David Arcos wrote:
"To be an artist is to walk with a certain amount of credibility in Los Angeles. For one, when someone identifies themselves as an artist they are connected to ideas like: talented, ambitious, creative, mysterious, deep, and passionate.
To identify yourself as a pastor on the other hand has certain words connected to it as well. You know these words or perhaps you’ve felt them: narrow minded, untrustworthy, legalist, dull, irrelevant, conformist."
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He's right. However, I tend to think that if you identify yourself as christian you get affiliated with those same words. Why is that?
My wife and I went to an internet cafe owned by a gay couple (they have the best coffee in town!) We had to pay $4.00 an hour to get on-line and sign a waiver stating that we wouldn't download any porn or learn how to build a bomb, blah, blah, blah.
So we get our coffee, sit down, and get on-line. We immediately go to one of our favorite "Christian Web Sites" only to discover this "pop-up" that blocked us from accessing the site. It was some kind of filter or something that read: content/religion/christianty. We tried a couple other sites all with the same results. For some reason this struck me has funny, no hilarious! I just knew there was a sermon illustration here somewhere.
Later I'm recounting all this to a kid in my youth group and I ask him, "David, what kind of Christianity is sooo bad it has to be banned in the same category as porn?" He said, "That's DIRTY CHRISTIANITY!"
The people that owned the internet cafe apparently believe that "Christianity" is sooo bad it's got to be banned. I suspect that they have encountered "DIRTY CHRISTIANITY" and lumped all of the other Christians in there with them. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathe water.
The sad truth is that much of our heritage is dirty. The Crusades, The Inquisition, the fact that many churches owned slaves, on and on and on. I would even have to admit that as a Christian some of my deepest hurts have come from those within the church. I fear criticizing the "Church' because I fear God and Jesus died for it.
The wheat and the tares. . . Why do the tares get more press than the wheat? May the day soon come when we are more often identified as "Artist" being in the likeness of our Creator than the filthy tares.
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| | Posted 11/29/2005 8:42 AM - 97 Views - 6 eProps - 3 comments
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