good news

Why is that most people think highly of Jesus but not so much about people who say they are followers of Jesus? If you want a cinematic treatment of this question, I recommend the movie, “Lord save us from your followers” (lordsaveusthemovie.com). But a better approach would be to ask someone what s/he thinks. Yesterday I went to a meeting of pastors from all around the Bay Area. We broke up into groups of 3 so that we could say the things to each other that we know we’re thinking but can’t tell the people in our churches. It’s very cathartic. But I still got a bit of a surprise.

One of the guys in my group said that he wasn’t working in a church at the moment, but was working in a grocery store. He even admitted that he was considered the wine expert by the rest of the staff. As we talked I found out that he was doing this by choice because he’d been a pastor in 2 different churches and had “burned out” both times. In fact, he isn’t attending any church currently, although he’s still a professor of religion (professor as in teacher, not someone who is professing).

I won’t go into the details (although they’re pretty entertaining) because I don’t want to give away his identity (and because I don’t want people from Grace Community getting any ideas), but the gist is that he is still following Jesus but isn’t very happy with Christians.

So I asked him: how do you explain the gospel to your co-workers? To be honest, having to go to church and act like a good person doesn’t sound like good news to me, anyway. But I’m not going to answer the question here. I’d rather leave the question open: how would you explain the gospel to your co-workers?