Get Real

This is life in the real world. This crazy, mixed-up, quicksand... ever-changing, bleeding, sweating, weeping, and laughing. Messy and challenging, beautiful and broken. There is no room here for niceties and rose-colored glasses. If you want today's generation to believe you're real, you've got to get real. We're tired of your platitudes and your pretenses that you are anything other than exactly as crazy and messed up as we are. Just because you put away the crazy in your Fibber McGee mental closet doesn't mean it's not there. The only difference is you're less honest about it.

You want to reach us? Start looking at the world through our eyes. This is not the generation you grew up in - moms, dads, aunts, uncles, friends of the family, grandparents - I'm talking to you. You don't ‘get’ us because you're scared to be as real as we want life to be. Most of us are tired of pretending to be anything other than what we are. We need to know that what we believe and think and feel is real, and when it just doesn't add up, we dismiss it. When it seems fake, we want nothing to do with it. We don't even begin to live in the facade of the world you grew up in.

You say we're losing our religion? We look at you and think you never had a relationship with Him. We see empty acts of religiosity and works-oriented beliefs in you. You see apostasy and modernism creeping into us. What my generation wants, what we crave is grassroots revivals. Not going back over the fundamental beliefs or minutiae of doctrines. You've 'doctrined' us right out of the church. We want nothing more to do with your doctrine unless it's based off of true faith.

We want to start back at square one - we want to know first and foremost who God really is, as much as our finite brains can handle and understand. We want God in His infiniteness, as GOD. Not the pre-packaged God-in-a-box we got in our childhood. We want a merciful God who is also just. Not just a God who beats us over the head with the law. When we were kids, half of us were convinced that God didn't even like us, because we were being told half the time that we were disappointing Him with every move we made.

We crave the God in the New Testament who shook up societal and cultural ideals and presented Himself as the offspring of a virgin girl. Never in my 28 years of life have I heard a sermon that really explored that topic very thoroughly. Most people are convinced that the reason God chose an unmarried girl was to show His power over life, and to prove that Christ's birth was divine. Did any of you ever stop to think that He was also shaking up society by the very fact that an unmarried girl became pregnant in the first place? That from Jesus' conception He was proving that our ideas about life, about Him, are nothing more than a tiny piece of Who He really is? He is bigger than your 30 minute sermons, your weekly ritual you claim as worship every Saturday or Sunday. He’s bigger than the arguments over the 28 fundamental beliefs, or however many they have added by now.

There is a world out there that is dying, for want of hope, while you stand debating the finer points of women’s ordination, or your dress code for those serving on the platform. You want to reach those of us who grew up in the faith, let alone those who didn’t? Are you actually willing to do what it takes? It’ll take getting your hands dirty, scuffing up those polished church shoes, wrinkling that 3-piece suit, getting runs in your stockings. You want to share the gospel? Jesus healed and helped first, and preached second. We don’t really want your revelation seminars, although that may reach some. Most of us can’t even hear your words over the roar of circumstances in our lives. We don’t know how to listen over the din of the bills piling up on our tables, the broken relationships we just can’t seem to heal, the jobs that take all of our energy. What we do know how to listen to is kindness, and someone befriending us just for the sake of human compassion. Don’t do it though if you have an agenda. We’ll know it in a heartbeat and it will only turn us away further.

The purpose of church was to create a community of believers, strengthening each other through their circle of faith, lifting up those who needed a helping hand. But sadly, in many cases, it has become the last place you are safe. It is the place you avoid if you don’t want to be condemned, judged, or simply ignored. We’re all guilty. We’ve all been less than kind. We’ve all been less than godly. We can’t change the world single-handedly, but we can allow change to begin in ourselves. We can rediscover the gospel in a nutshell: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.”