I love my Jesus, mostly becasue he's mine.

I have been thinking a lot lately of the concept of Jesus as "personal savior."

I grew up in a context where a personal relationship with Jesus Christ was the primary focus of all evangelism and discipleship efforts. When we wanted to ask someone if they followed Jesus, we asked them if they had a "personal relationship" with him. This is the way we figured out whether or not they were going to hell.

I have difficulty with this approach to the "divine relationship" because it takes a very complex thing (human relationships) with transcendent implications (the God of the universe is involved) and makes it a simple binary mechanism. Do you or do you not have a personal relationship with Jesus?

What if you do one day, but don't the next? I mean, this seems to be the way most human relationships work, they are constantly in process, in a sate of flux. Sometimes they are good sometimes they are bad. They are very meaningful some days, and almost meaningless other days. Relationship undulations are a normal part of the human condition.

And then theres the reality that Jesus was/is much more than my personal savior. We forget that the biblical Jesus was a prophet, priest, king, rabbi, radical, Jew, and human. He is the Savior of the cosmos, the Redeemer of all that is. This is a magnificent reality that is almost ignored in our obsession with our own personal Jesus (queue the Depeche Mode riff). We have taken the Creator-God, the Redeemer of the Universe, and made him our "Buddy Christ."

Yay for us.

It’s not you, it’s me…well ok, it’s you.

I had a person approach me on Sunday to inform me that they were leaving our church. I am not sure I can recall the exact reason given, but I am fairly confident that it was some version of the reason I have been given many times before, “I kinda don’t like it here anymore.”

I have become more comfortable with the inevitable departure that accompanies change within a church community. Things change, people leave. To be honest, many people have left our church over the past two years. Fortunately they have been replaced by others. The problem with this kind of dramatic and accelerated turnover is that the more people leave, the more things change, and the more things change, the more people tend to leave. At last count almost 95% of our church family has left since I showed up a little over two years ago.

I must have slept through the “church growth” class in seminary.

Thankfully, I have a bunch of good friends in our church who assure me that God is working in our small group, and that this kind of “changing of the guard” is quite natural. I tend to agree with them. I just don’t like what has become of our concept of community. How can you go from being a committed member of a family to “you know, this just isn’t working out” without ever really trying to work through the situation?

I think one of the most painful things is when people compose a kind of “Dear John” letter to explain their grievances while they slip out the back door. When people leave because they don’t like something about our church, or agree with me, or whatever and never make an attempt to work it out, it shows me that they value comfort more than they value the relationship they have with me or the church. It is just too uncomfortable to stay or try to work it out.

It makes me wonder if people are excluding themselves from the kind of relationships made possible by working through tough issues with your church family. I guess they’ll never know.