[What follows was written in early July. I did not publish it then. In fact, I forgot all about it until I spotted it in my queue of un-posted work just a few minutes ago. I present it as is, unfinished. -- Ed.]
OK. So you've had a hard faith. You were raised in a tough church. Your conception of God was all wrong. You've been living under a cloud of fear, judgment, wrath. You were told the gospel was free, full of grace, and then you were told to follow a bunch of rules. You followed those rules; you swallowed the idea that grace was a legal term. You fell short -- always. You could not live up to expectations. You failed to gain mastery and the plaudits such mastery allegedly merits.
And now you're wounded -- and mad.
I went this morning to the "Free Believers Network," a website for the disheartened who still have faith; for the disenfranchised who still want to belong. Those who find their way to FBN are greeted with this:
We are a growing network of Christians committed to returning Christianity to its natural habitat. As you browse through this site, open your heart; ask yourself one question: What if?
I can't resist: What does Christianity's natural habitat look like? Does it look at all like a web-based social network? Is that Christianity's natural habitat?
Perhaps you are not like me. Perhaps you'd like to see Christianity return to its roots, its roots in the dust of Palestine, watered by the Spirit under the brutal sun of Roman occupation. Maybe you believe this is the period of Christianity at its purest, its most authentic.
I, however, do not hold such a time in high regard. I am not one to wish for Roman occupation, nor am I one to romanticize walking about in sandals, with a tunic, a staff; a donkey for a friend. But many of my more "emergent church-type" peers strike me as longing for the "old ways," ways, if they just thought about it, that would be lived without any scriptures at all (the early church almost exclusively drew from a comprehensive and beloved oral tradition). The early church, formed in the natural habitat of Palestine under Roman tyranny, was rife with power struggles, idolatry, apostasy, heresy, sexual immorality and corruption.
In short, the natural habitat of Christianity is like any other time or place. Indeed, it IS any time or place.
But note that the faithful at FBN believe something I don't. They believe they know not only where the true habitat of Christianity is, they know where it is not, and they can lead us from the artificial habitat in which Christianity is largely lived today to the real, authentic, genuine habitat that was lost, abandoned, rejected.
They are wrong.
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