Searching for God Knows What

I felt very much like a real writer today. I spent the afternoon sitting in or local coffee shop sipping way to expensive coffee and eating a toasted bagel while listening to my MP3 and working on church stuff. I have been in there before, but something about the bagel made the whole thing official.

I am reading Donald Miller’s new book “Searching for God Knows What.” I like Miller because I like his writing style, but most of all because he is a voice against the established ways of doing Christianity in

America

and anyone who is that sort of voice is someone who is OK in my book. I really should read more people who don’t agree with me (or I guess who I don’t agree with would be a better way of saying that) But in my increasingly fast paced and full up days I don’t have time to really dig into a book so I end up reading things that I already can nod my head along with. With that being said the book has some really cool observation about the way we live out this whole relationship with God that we call the Christian life.

We started FAITH (our outreach ministry) back again tonight and it made this quote jump out at me. “It makes you wonder if guys like John the Evangelist and Paul and Moses wouldn’t look at our systematic theology charts, our lists and our mathematical formulas, and scratch their heads to say, Well, it’s technically true; it just isn’t meaningful.”

There have been many times when I have look at plans for sharing the gospel and felt this exact same way. For some reason when you make a plan that is one-size-fits-all it ends up looking too much like a magic spell and too little like a relationship. The way some people practice evangelism it isn’t much different than someone performing and incantation.

That is one of the things that I like about FAITH. It focuses on bringing people into Sunday school to build relationships and develop their faith in community. Still I think sometimes we Christians get sort of hung up on the God is a formal thing and forget that ever every turn God can do something that we can’t understand. That is why art is better at explaining God than a sermon or a lecture ever can be. Art gets to the soul behind the truth. Now what I have to figure out are new ways to get Art into our worship.