Difficult places

    As an InterVarsity campus staff worker I have found that Christians have been the most difficult to work with. The reason is because Christians have been so deeply covered in church language. The language has become so foreign to Christians with words such as atonement, sanctification, glory and admonish that they automatically pour out of a Christians mouth. It is like speaking a code that is just handed down generation to generation. I know this because I am the best example of this "Christianese", I knew every hand motion or Sunday school answer and memory verse. Church culture becomes so natural that many of us forget how non-Christians do not even know what any of these words mean. We have created an inside and outside culture which is very similar to the Pharisee environment that Jesus saw when he was on earth. We are suppose to teach and model Christ and not a church program or else we are like Pharisees. What is lost is even an understanding of why those words were made in the first place. 

   I feel that I have to challenge every student that I meet who has been deeply embedded in the Christian culture so that Jesus can be represented as more than the t-shirts, bumper stickers and God videos. When we look at Scripture we have to push for a more critical thinking than just taking "because Jesus is the light of glory who shines in the darkness for sinners" as an answer for why Jesus had to come, we need to ask why it is important in context and what do those words even mean? There is absolutely no entrance for someone who does not follow Jesus to even understand what that means because it is hard to understand without explanation. I think of it in the way that God came incarnate down to man, something so ridiculously mysterious but revealed so that our limited minds could fathom how deep and important Jesus' life as God on earth, how crazy that really was. We have a job of interpretation, everything that we have experienced or learned about God must be translated so that the world can understand who God is.