I love college basketball. From the pre-season to the final four, I could watch college basketball for hours and it doesn’t really matter who’s playing. The intensity, the speed, the fact that any given team could win on any given night are all exciting to me. I love to watch the sport and I am a great spectator of college basketball. Especially if the Tar Heels are playing.
It’s a good thing I love to watch, because I wouldn’t make a good participant. For starters, I’m no longer eligible to play by NCAA rules. I’m too old. I’m too fat. I’m too slow. I can’t shoot the basketball. Tommy Simons slaughters me at horse every time we play. I can’t dribble the basketball very well. I can’t rebound the basketball. You couldn't get a slice of pizza underneath my vertical jump.
I’m a far better spectator than participant.
Some might say the same thing about the Christian faith.
Like college basketball, there are two ways to view the Christian faith. You can either do it as a spectator or a participant. Spectator Christians don't have bad theology, they're not heretical, and they're not bound for hell.
So if spectators are not bad or wrong, what’s the problem? The issue is that, as a Spectator Christian, it's easy to miss significant amounts of the good stuff in the faith. We miss the fullness of life as a follower of Jesus. But sadly, Christianity in American has become very good at producing spectators and not so good at helping people to fully clench the faith as a way of being and doing life. This is a shallow experience of a deep and mystical faith.
When Jesus was on this earth he gave his disciples a message and he gave them a way to live it out. The American church (if there is actually such a monolithic being) in our time is largely living out the gospel in a way that Jesus never intended it. It seems to me that we have become a generation of religious spectators, when the gospel of Jesus clearly demands that we be a people who “DO” our faith.
So I wonder, how do others out there "do" their Christianity?
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