I really enjoyed reading Erwin McManus' book, "Soul Cravings."
Here is chapter or rather, "entry," #22:
Entry #22 Standardized Testing
(McManus, Erwin R. Soul Cravings. Nelson Books: Nashville, TN. 2006.)
IRONICALLY, ONE OF THE VERY THINGS THAT SHOULD DRAW people to God has actually repelled them from Christianity. Over the last 2,000 years, the Christian religion has abdicated its unique view of the individual and has fallen in line with every other world religion. It's easier to run a religion if you can standardize everything, including the people. Religion, after all, has become one of history's most powerful tools for controlling people. If you were thinking of a stratergy to keep people in line, religion would have to be at the top of the list. In this, Christianity has become no different.
If you were to interview people who have come out of churches and have no intention to return, you'd find some common themes. One of them is the controlling nature of the churches they came from. Somehow we've equated conformity with holiness. Spirituality is more identified with tradition and ritual than it is with a future and a hope. Too often discipleship equals standardization. It's almost as if God's solution to the human problem is cloning, making us the same, extracting from us all that is unique, destroying that which makes us different.
The tragedy, of course, is that this has nothing to do with Jesus. It would be an understatement to say that Jesus was unique. Even if he were not God, he would have been history's most extraordinary human being. He was a nonconformist; He was anti-institutional; He surrounded himself with outcasts; He was everything except what they expected. Jesus' life was a model of uniqueness, and his movement was nothing less than that. The people he chose to entrust his message to had to have been the unlikeliest of candidates. They were nothing if not unique. The son of a carpenter gave the responsibility that would typically be entrusted to priests and theologians to an unqualified group consisting of fishermen and even a tax collector. Furthermore, his inner circle also consisted of a woman who was once a prostitute. From background to temperament there was nothing about Jesus' disciples that reflected conformity—neither did his message.
When Jesus spoke to the crowds in what become known as the Sermon on the Mount, he described the masses in a way that no one else saw them. The thousands who pressed against each other to listen to the teachings of Jesus were the social outcasts of their time. They were the unwanted, the poor, the criminal, and the sick. Yet when Jesus described them, his words were filled with both affection and admiration. "You are the light of the world," He told them. Their lives should not be hidden, but open for the world to see.
These masses were the invisibles.
They were part of the countless number of people who are lost in the shadows of great civilizations. They were the throwaways. They were seen as liabilities, burdens to society, but not to Jesus. He saw them as lights hidden under a bushel. He knew that there was something deep inside them waiting to come out, something beautiful, something breathtaking.
They were created by God to be luminous if only Jesus could make them see it.
"You are the salt of the earth," he told them. But here there is a different danger. When salt loses its flavor, it has no value. It's thrown out and trampled upon. I think a lot of people listening understood that. In fact, they had probably experienced it. In the sight of those who were powerful, they were considered worthless. It was easier to walk on them than to waste a good bag of salt. But they themselves may have been their worst enemies. If they did not recognize their own worth, if they relinquished the uniqueness of being human, if they denied their own value, they were like salt that had lost its savor.
In both these images, Jesus appeals to the intrinsic value of every human being.
You may not agree with this, but you should take time to consider it. While religions have historically tried to make us the same, Jesus calls us to be different. If you have ever experienced this, you know your soul bristled at the demand to quietly get in line and conform. But something in your gut told you this was wrong. If there was a God, his value would not be uniformity, but uniqueness. And you were right. Imprinted on your soul is the fingerprint of God. There is something inside you that resists surrendering your soul to legalism. The good news is that all that time it wasn't you fighting against God; you were fighting for what God has created you to become.
To come to God is to discover the uniqueness of your being.
When you come to God, you begin a process that re-creates you from the inside out. You begin a journey that is nothing less than life transforming. While there are something things we will share in common,
the journey God has prepared for you is uniquely yours with him. Don't be confused about this—everything around us pushes us toward conformity. Whether it's communism or Islam, Calvin Klein or McDonald's, we are all pushed toward standardization and quickly find ourselves as
assembly-line humanity.
We have to choose.
Liberal or conservative? Democrat or Republican? Evolution or creation? Pro-choice or pro-life? The enviroment or development? Coke or Pepsi? Coke Zero or Pepsi One?
Choose your box and stay there.
