Christians don’t dance. Christians don’t drink alcohol. Christians don’t curse. Christians don’t get tattoos. Christians don’t wear short skirts. Christians go to church. Christians read the bible. Christians pray. Christians pay tithes. Christianity has a culture. It has evolved over the years. It’s ok to dance now (but only to Christian music of course lol).
In 1980 an American management professor Edgar Schein developed a model for organizational culture. It looked like this:
Using this model, all the examples of what Christians do and don’t do, that I listed above, fall squarely into the category; Artefacts and Behaviour. These, and other things, are what people on the outside observe about us. Then there are the values that Christians espouse; values such as kindness, love, generosity and patience. Finally, at the deepest level are the basic assumptions of Christianity that I prefer to call our convictions. These are the underlying beliefs that are so fundamental that they are assumed. For example, a basic taken-for-granted belief of Christianity is that God is real.
I imagine that things were not always this way. Before Christ, there was no Christian religion (obviously) or ‘Christian culture’. The early church must have spent a lot of time preaching about basic beliefs and values and new believers were converted when they were convicted of the reality of the truths that the apostles and disciples of Christ were preaching. Their behavior flowed from deeply held convictions. Unfortunately, I see a different dynamic at play in the church today.
Today, I see thousands of people who have adopted some of the behavior, maybe a few values but rarely the convictions of Christianity. To illustrate my point let me give some hypothetical examples. Let’s define three Christians:
- Person A only knows the most visible part of the Christian culture; the behaviour.
- Person B knows the behaviour and the values.
- Person C knows the behavior, values and convictions.
So, suppose all three persons lose their jobs and are struggling to gain employment. Here is a hypothetical reaction of each person:
- Person A falls into a depression. He cannot understand how come this happened to him when he attends church regularly, says the ‘Our Father’ daily and pays his tithes faithfully. Soon he leaves the faith.
- Person B struggles with depression as well but maintains a brave facade. When asked about her situation she says, “I’m too blessed to be stressed!” She fasts and sticks up scriptures about God providing for her on her mirror. She asks her pastor to pray for her but struggles to understand why this is happening to her.
- Person C is not worried. She knows that God is faithful. She prays, and God tells her that she needs to forgive her old boss and open the business she has always been dreaming about.
Rare are the person Cs in this world. The sad reality is that many who have grown up in church have no deep convictions of anything; they have just mirrored the behaviours and adopted the catch phrases that they saw/heard around them. We have become adept at emphasizing what Christians should and shouldn’t do. There have been whole sermons dedicated to how women should dress for church. (Can you see my eyes rolling?) Most of us know what we should believe and are oh so quick to tell others what they should believe too. But too few of us actually believe and live the reality that God exists, loves all men unconditionally and wants to be in intimate relationship with us. We are working at the shallowest levels, failing miserably to reach the depths of conviction that can truly transform the church and the world.
We are wasting our time with whether abortion is legal or illegal, whether gay marriage is legal or illegal, why divorced sister so-and-so is receiving communion or leading worship, forcing our disinterested children to attend church and the list goes on. These are all symptoms of a much deeper problem but 90% of our effort is aimed at the symptoms. We are living the delusion that behavior modification is what Christianity is about. Christianity is about a real relationship with the living Christ! Nothing less will do!
We need to get back to the core of our faith; the deep convictions of our faith. Let’s talk about those! Let’s live those and turn the hearts of men back to God. Then and only then will we see a cultural shift that will overtake the planet and shake the universe!
Joyfully,
Copyright 2018, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.