Faith, youth, ranting

"God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him." - Andrew Murray.
"Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven." - Luke 11:2

Is it possible to have an epiphany when you're sitting at your desk, reading a book that you picked up the day before to give to your book reviewer to read and review, when the computer program that you need to be working on is consistently refusing to function, even going so far as to crash the computer when you try to work on it?

Perhaps it is...

And it makes me wonder about what God is up to when He lets these kind of things happen as they do. Besides, he knows I'm a sucker for books, and Pride and Seek by Seth J Pierce was just sitting here, innocently, when I decided to pick it up and read it while I waited to hear back from the IT guy. And now I'm almost finished! And I'm starting to wonder whether God was allowing this 'distraction' to happen.

This hit me smack between the eyes when I read it:

"You want to hear something scary? You want to know why some churches have explosive growth? You want to know why their sermons are deeper and more effective than so many of ours? It's because they have a larger focus on Christ's return than we do. Everything they do is in light of going to heaven and living in a powerful way for God to influence others to making a decision for eternity. They believe God will bring results no matter what. They believe that when Jesus said, "I will make you fishers of men," He really meant it..."
- pp 112-113, Pride and Seek, Seth J Pierce.

That's one thing I have to give to the 'charismatic' or 'evangelical' sort of churches. They really are enthusiastic about God coming back, even if they get some other elements of the mix really warped (like the prosperity gospel side of stuff, being slain in the spirit, etc). And there's a real focus on meeting people, regardless of where they're at or who they are, which is excellent. And it's about youth! Like my ex's former church, the big Salvation Army church a few streets up from Rundel Mall in Adelaide, has a great outreach thing for teenagers that makes it really comfortable to be there and you can integrate as quickly or slowly as you want - if you want to go to church with them on Sunday, cool, but if you just want to hang out at the Friday night programme, that works, too. And there's none of the jargon crap. Everyone there was friendly, too (except for my ex's friend Mark, who apparently referred to me as "that f*cking freaky b*tch," probably because on the one time I met him we were out doing a soup kitchen night for the homeless people in Adelaide and spent the evening joking around with the homeless people, giving them far more than the "regulation" and strictly instructed one teaspoon of Milo and avoiding the irritating people in the soup kitchen who acted like doing that was earning them points somewhere. Although I am a freak anyway, so who knows...).

I went to Paradise church a few times too (that's where Guy Sebastian was from originally... and that cued a whole lot of teenage girls after the Australian Idol thing which made me exit stage left... I *hate* Australian Idol, and in a strange indirect way, it meant that you couldn't get a seat in the mega-church unless I bothered to arrive at least an hour early). To be blunt, I never felt any real spiritual stuff at Paradise, but I did get a lot out of the times that I went to the Salvation Army church (including properly committing to God during a sermon mid-last year that was just amazing). At Paradise, they wouldn't notice if you slumped over dead and would probably think you were slain in the spirit until you started to decompose...

Apparently people need about seven close friends in a church to want to stay there and become active members. Aristotle said, "What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies." This is true, I think. It might not be soulmates or anything like that, but our connections to people are important. We're not going to show people that Jesus wants to be friends with them by bashing them over the head with a Bible and telling them that everything that they do is wrong. That said, we shouldn't make friends with non-Christian people with the view to winning them over or anything like that either. That sort of thing is just exploitative. I think we need to stop having such fortress mentalities with our churches and encourage people to make ministry and outreach more personal. AND work on making churches more friendly, welcoming environments. Because when you're not a church-attending person, they are kind of scary. You either get totally ignored or over-friendlied to death by people you don't know.

But back to what I was thinking about before! God coming back! How much do we totally forget about that? I know I never think about it. That makes me wonder how many other people who go to church think about it and really truly believe that it's going to happen. What's happened to our bold faith? What about the right sort of spiritual pride? And youth involvement?? Youth involvement is so important in the charismatic churches - they're never stuffed in a back room to twiddle their thumbs until they're 55 and "old enough." They're passionate about Jesus being a part of their lives and about Him coming back.

As someone who has a responsibility to youth, I have a big responsibility with God happening, too, and suddenly I'm seeing that this isn't just a job, but something much more enormous than that and I just hope that God can really guide me with everything and help me to find some answers to how we can get back the bold faith young people in charismatic churches have but ours seems to be so sadly lacking.

Hmm... your mission should you choose to accept it, eh...

Yikes.