Hopeful or Stupid—about the future...

There is lots of stuff out there about the various ways Christian people are trying to spread the Gospel without the usual tools of buildings and money.

My disclaimer is that I am all in favour of finding new and creative ways of proclaiming the Good News and often these ways are quite inexpensive. The premise of many of these endeavors are ones I easily get behind.

We often assume that the Early Church did without buildings and money. I wonder. They met in people homes after they’d been kicked out of the synagogues and marketplaces. No doubt, they would have preferred a building and would have used one, if they could. In fact, they simply moved into people’s houses (buildings), and let people know where they could be found.

Money, on the other hand is a more tender matter. People assume that Jesus was very poor. We know that most of his closest male companions were out of work or seasonal fishers. However, many biblical scholars thought that the women who also followed Jesus were wealthy widows and funded his ministry. This reminds me of a scene in the movie “Gandhi”, when a wealthy philanthropist says, “keeping Gandhi in poverty costs me an awful lot of money.”

When I object to the shortsightedness of the kind of thinking that rejects the very real and beneficial (and expensive) elements of organized Christianity, I am mocked and made to feel stupid.

Oh well, I say, if hopefulness is stupid then call me stupid.

When we challenge some of the traditions of our faith group and perhaps even dismiss some of it, we are not practicing Church-lite, but looking for ways to get at the core of our beliefs and being the people Jesus calls us to be… a people of love, radical love.

Did Jesus command us to sing the Psalms? Did he command us to recite creeds that hadn’t been written? Of course not. But he did command us to love. And love we will.

It is stupid to think that trying the same thing over and over will produce different results. It is a matter of hope to think that if we make love the hallmark of who were are, that new thing God promises can be make real.