What Do Christians Look Like to People Who Aren’t Christians? Part 2

If non-Christians—and frankly, even some Christians who go to church fairly regularly but don’t pay close attention—get their view of Christianity from a few celebrity Christians, popular media, and whatever the most vociferous Christians are saying and doing, the world may have a skewed view of what we actually believe. However, with this view being pretty firmly set in popular imagination, how are we to correct the record? How can we bring people to church who view Christians as overly-judgmental and think of Christianity as a fancy country-club with weird robes and funny hats?

Before we get to some things that we should do, I want to point out something we should avoid. Some Christians have gotten the idea that we should essentially sell Christianity, possibly with false advertising. “Come to church, we’re all just one, big happy family, and no one will judge you.” That isn’t true. Judgment and conflict happen wherever you go. We shouldn’t lie to people to convince them to come to church. In fact, that is a theological failure. We should be honest about the nature of the church. It is called by God to proclaim the Gospel and serve the world, entrusted with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but it isn’t perfect. It has flaws. It is made up of human beings with their own interests pulling against each other. But we can speak of the church as a community centered on the Gospel. It isn’t the perfection of the church that should draw people but the goodness of the Gospel.

Some Christians go a step further. Rather than false advertising, they actually believe the things they say. I’m not sure if people in the more extreme progressive Christian positions actually think that they will draw more people to church by rejecting a lot of traditional church doctrine, or if they just genuinely believe those doctrines are wrong, but the result is bringing people to a church that is hard to call Christian. There are arguments that Christians have across denominational lines and even within congregations. There are theological issues that are still up for debate today. However, we shouldn’t be denying the divinity of Christ, the reality of Christ’s resurrection, the Trinity, or the normative nature of Scripture. It is one thing to debate whether the Bible is inerrant or not. It is another thing altogether to suggest that our own feelings of right and wrong are equal to the Bible for determining Christian ethics.

If we are going to teach people about Jesus, we shouldn’t correct years of church hurt and feelings of exclusion by rejecting the message of the church. In fact, the Gospel itself and the reforming nature of the Holy Spirit call us to fight against exclusion in the church. Instead of rejecting our doctrines, we need to return to them with force and passion. We are not better than the Gospel.

So what exactly should we do to get things back on track? For one, we should engage with the tough stuff more. I’m talking about theology. We don’t necessarily need everyone who goes to church to read Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, though that has happened in the past more than it does today, but pastors can be more intentional about preaching and teaching theological concepts that help us make sense of our world in terms of the Gospel. When I was in high school, I could not figure out what the differences between Lutherans and Catholics were. I asked my Catholic friends, but they didn’t seem to know either, despite the fact that they were pious and intelligent people. I’m not suggesting that we need to define ourselves by our differences, but we didn’t even know enough about our own traditions to understand why we were different. The Gospel message is good, but if we don’t engage it theologically, we won’t dwell in it deeply enough to share with the people who need it. We need to get better at Christian education. We need to know who we are and what we believe enough to take that message to people who need to hear it.

Knowing is at least half the battle, and with a deeper understanding of what we actually believe and how to talk about it, we can begin to correct the record, but there is still more work to do. Many people see the church as useless. In a time when wars, natural disasters, tremendous wealth disparity, and climate change have set the world on fire, how valuable is it to gather for an hour on Sunday and just talk, sing, and read the Bible? It seems like a waste of time. We could be protesting injustice, picking up trash on the side of the road, or producing something that would help people. There are two ways that we can address this criticism.

First, we can actually go out and do stuff as a church. Maybe after church on Sunday, we go out and clean up trash along the road. Maybe we send a mission team from the church to volunteer at a soup kitchen a couple times a month. Maybe we work to help the community in whatever ways we can. It would be hard to accuse the church of doing nothing and wasting time when church members are actually out in the community working to make things better.

Second, we can push back on the criticism by asking why we need to be doing stuff all the time. There is a restlessness in our society, driven on by a cult of production. We believe that if we aren’t busy all the time, we will fall behind. I know for certain that I have bragged about how many hours I have spent working in a week, and I have heard other people brag about that as well. I’ve even heard final year seminary students do it. Of course, they phrase it as a warning. “Don’t do what I’m doing.” But the problem stands. What is being communicated in these boasts is that the person is a much harder worker than others because of the time they spent dedicated to the task. However, our restless society produces a bunch of junk because we simply cannot stop working. We don’t need to be so productive. Furthermore, if we have no leisure time, no time for anything but work, what is all the work for? Gathering for worship on a Sunday morning reminds us that our lives aren’t all about work. Sometimes gathering together to hear God’s story and remind ourselves of the Gospel is exactly what we need to do. In fact, I’d say we need to do this, at least once a week. We need a time when work isn’t the most important thing, to remember that, in fact, God is much more important than work. I think even atheists and agnostics in our world are tired of the excessive expectations for production that have been laid upon us. Maybe we can all respect resisting the urge to be busy all the time.

With better knowledge of our beliefs, the ability to articulate them well, and a strategy for getting out into the world while also maintaining time for rest and worship, we can start to pull on the levers of power that have gone so far in creating a public image of Christianity. Right now, there aren’t a lot of popular religious books by Lutherans, Presbyterians, or Methodists. Evangelicals get the most attention because most Christian books stores and popular publishers are Evangelical. Maybe this is because we don’t like to talk about our faith with others and Evangelicals are more than ready to do so, but more importantly, I think this is because we don’t know how to talk about our faith. Once we grasp the distinctions of our traditions and take them out into the world, maybe we’ll find our place in the Christian bookstores. Maybe we will find our place in popular culture, not as caricatures about lutefisk and beer, but as deeply theological people, rooted in the Gospel and God’s love for us and all the world. The Gospel is good; our theology is good; our traditions are good. When we learn to speak about these things with confidence and joy, the world will listen, because the Gospel is a message the world needs to hear.