Unreasonable Fundamentalists and the World Out Yonder

I am concerned that the majority of the world is being written off by many Christians. I have, for the past six months or so, had the privilege of getting to know much of this world who I have ignored for the past four years. It appears to me that evangelical Christians have settled into their ghettos and dug their stakes, set up their billboards, and developed their television programs all the while forgetting to go across the tracks. This mentality has been promoted through what I call "unreasonable fundamentalists" for at least the past 100 years. After the civil war, modernism arose and the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche came on the scene along with Darwin in science and Freud in psychology. This assault on the foundations of the Christian faith caused conservative Christians to retreat from the secular universities where they would teach and study alongside these other disciplines. But out of fear of being poisoned and overcome with these ideas, they withdrew and retreated into their own schools and universities and no longer held any discourse with the rest of the world and the rest of the discplines of study. This process eventually trickled down to the churches and created a huge Christian sub-culture. This subculture is our security blanket and safety net - with Christian radio, Christian television, Christian bookstores, Christian concerts, Christian cruises, and on and on down to Christian testaments and cartoons. We who have the truth and should have boldly confronted the ideologies of the world and shown Christ to be Logos and One True God, yet we have shown ourselves to be unreasonable and incompetent to hold any discourse with the world. As a result, Christians are considered as hay-seed idiots who are blind followers and bumbling dogmatists. We have prefabricated our gospel to a few verses and spiritual laws and left evangelism to something like an altar call. We expect them to come to us and have worship services catered to the lost (while I may add that lost people are not found in the Bible going to church . . .we are to go to them!). So we reach out only to those who are most inclined to religion - the gullible, the hurting, the religiously inclined. We are only as agressive as one night's visitation for a few hours and considering that we have done a find job if the numbers deem it so. Yet the point is this: Chrisitians are not called to "visitation" but rather "cohabitation". The world doesn't need to hear another cheesy presentation; they need an authentic demonstration of Christianity. And they won't see that as long as we are in our ghettos complementing ourselves of the work of our hands, the buildings we have built, and the programs that we busy ourselves with. There is a big world out there, and it is right across the street. Christianity will continue to be marginalized and deemed irrelevent as long as we continue to do what we do. We have become so concerned that we should not be "of" the world that we are no longer "in" the world. Rather, I would dare say that Christians have become "of" the world and not "in" the world, becoming tail-waggers to the culture and panting after worn out fads of our day. Dialog with the rest of the world needs to resume. 150 years of retreat is long enough. Programs and billboards are not justification. The world needs Christians; Christians who are not propped up by the sub-culture and ghetto mentality. Maybe this retreat mentality is why so many churches are going goo-goo over numbers; we want them on our side of the fence. Why can't it be the other way around? Are we supposed to be going to them? No, cohabitation means that we will have to be exposed and accountable, our lingo be deprogrammed, our crutches removed, and our unreasonableness for the world to see. We dare not do that. We will just reach the people who are at arm's length, the people who are like "us", and well for the rest of the world, a hearty "God bless you." Those others just think too much, have too many questions, are "unsavable" and irksome to us because our programming doesn't fit them. So see ya. And when you get a chance, read this tract and come to our church and sing our songs, and oh as a result of your "visit" here is a Christian testament and candy bar for having come to be a part of "us".