What's Rankin been thinking about lately?

"The matter is quite simple," Soren Kierkegaard wrote. "The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?"

Rich Mullins stood to speak in the chapel service at Wheaton College. He said, "You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest."

Ouch!

I culled these two quotes from The Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne. Someone gave me this book over a year ago, but it wasn't until recently that I took it down, putting it into conversation with other writers (Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Darrell Guder, David Bosch) around the topic: What are Christians for? What is the church supposed to look like?

Agree with him or malign him (and he'd be equally pleased with either – just don't call him a saint, and so easily dismiss him) Claiborne is just the sort of prophetic voice the church needs to hear today. I'm not saying you have to agree with him (I don't on many points) but at least he moves the conversation, a conversation that any church concerned about its calling and purpose ought to join.

Or, if this sort of irreverent book doesn't excite you, you can always go on-line and read (reread) Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, a most amazing document scrawled on the margins of newspapers and toilet paper, then smuggled out of his cell by friends. King wrote:

I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion,which makes a strange, unbiblical distinction between the sacred and the secular. I have traveled the length and breadth of the southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings, I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. Over and over I have found myself asking, "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were they?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment, I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured my tears have been tears of love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I see the church as the body of Christ. But oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body.

Early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed. But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were a colony of heaven. Small in number, they were big in commitment.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club.