Tuesday 17 May 2011

I'm Sorry I'm a Christian

For those one or two readers who are not friends with me on Facebook, or who missed this first time around:

I'm not clever enough to work out how to add the actual video here, but please follow this link for the rest of this post to make sense.

A friend, responded with this:

"That's powerful stuff. Challenging but quite negative. Does it describe how you feel about Christians you know?"

This was my response:

I posted it because a lot of people I've spoken to see Christians in this way, so I think it's healthy for Christians and non-Christians to hear something like this. This is the reality of the context that we're witnessing into - when I say "I am a Christian" these are the assumptions that people may make about me. Though this is more about the people with the loudest voices or the biggest placards than individual Christians I might know personally, I do think it's important to acknowledge that these are things that sincere and often genuine Christians have done, and I think there’s a place for saying sorry for being part of the same body that has done these things. Not for the sake of being negative, but to have some authenticity about our failures and hypocrisy and to point out, as the poet does, that this was not how Jesus conducted himself. I long for people to associate the word Christian with Jesus’ radical indiscriminate love and compassionately spoken truth but the tragic reality is that many people don’t. I am a part of the reason for this too.

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