As a Christian pastor, I have learned that there are so many sides to the Christian faith. I am also trying to reconcile what I believe with the actions of the Majority in the Christian faith. I spent the last three years of my life devoted to the study of Christian faith. Archetypal courses, like the History of Christianity, Christian Ethics, New Testament, Old Testament, Christian Leadership helped provide me a better foundational understanding of my faith and equipped me for my work in interfaith activism. In all of my interfaith dealings, I have found that Western Christians tend to be the most threatened, the most insecure about what we believe. The interfaith settings I was blessed to be a part of were not what Evangelical Christians would consider “fertile ground” for proselytizing or witnessing to the “heathen” Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, or Hindu. Personally, I have never thought converting people was a part of the Christian faith. I just do not get that from hearing or reading the Great Commission.
As I watch what has risen to the top of Christianity in America, I think of the process of filtering milk. During that process, the solids and impurities separate. Before the technological age, people poured the milk into the cheesecloth to catch the solids and impurities. I believe the next phase in this post-Christendom era is going to be just that, the filtering of what has risen to the top, white Eurocentric, patriarchal (with the exception of Paula White and a few other female cult leaders) Evangelical Christianity. These religious leaders have done more damage to the faith than they even understand. Their misguided preaching and teaching have led hundreds of people into a superficial faith system that does not sustain them beyond the next Sunday, just enough for their next “injection” of faith.
We Christians need to focus more on creating a more sustainable faith, a faith truer to its origins, a faith without all of the added solids and impurities.
Rev
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