Words'nTone

Woody Allen once quipped, “It’s not that I am afraid to die.  I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Often Christians can take a similar attitude toward spiritual growth.  “It’s not that I am afraid of spiritual growth,” they say.  “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

H.G.  Wells once called Buddhism the “best religion.” But he admitted it could only flourish in a warm climate.  Wells was not poking fun at Buddhism.  He was commenting on Westerners’ preference for comfort.  Our modern version of Christianity is also unfavorably disposed toward discomfort.  But any theme that gets as much space in the Scripture as suffering does should have our careful, reverent attention.

Suffering is no more avoidable than breathing.  But let’s face it.  Today we view life through the lenses of comfort, personal rights, and material affluence.  Our culture is collapsing under the weight of a thousand rights and needs.  Meanwhile, that same weight has become a millstone around the neck of Christian spirituality, church-life, and discipleship.

Our churches are filled with disappointed, disillusioned Christians.  Many float from church to church, from one self help book to another, from one get healed quick guru to another.  They search for the “power” that will release their pain and unleash their happiness.  The problem is not the gospel or the power of God’s Word.  The problem is our preference for comfort.  (Well, at least it is my problem!)

It seems that Christians, today, are more apt to shrink spiritually than to grow.  In his book, New Rules, Daniel Yankelovich observes:

You are not the sum total of your desires.  You do not consist of an aggregate of needs, and your inner growth is not a matter of fulfilling all your potentials.  By concentrating day and night on your feelings, potentials, needs, wants and desires, and by learning to assert them more freely, you do not become a freer, more spontaneous, more creative self; you become a narrower, more self centered, more isolated one.  You do not grow, you shrink.

Much of our problem rests in our inability to reconcile our culture’s call to comfort with the biblical texts calling us to suffer.  And that’s the scandal of contemporary Christian life.

We have a generation of Christians who cannot say with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Praise God for this prison.” They cannot identify with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s conviction, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” They cannot understand the depths of A.W.  Tozer’s comment, “It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.” The Bible, I fear, is much closer to Solzhenitsyn, Bonhoeffer and Tozer than we like to think.

We have a Christianity and a church-life that is designed to help the believer to be comfortable with himself or herself, and to help their faith to fit nicely in our democracy.  There is a temptation to accommodate ourselves with the status quo, to identify with our democracy.  Don’t get me wrong, I love our form of government.  I am only (beginning) to question whether my conflicts (my perchant for avoiding suffering), my uneasiness with how my faith works in our democracy is a result of wanting to feel more comfortable in western, American modernity.  I fear we dislike feeling alienated from our surrounding culture, so we choose a faith that reflects more our contemporary, democratic values rather than following the Way of the suffering Messiah, the way of the cross.

© Chip M. Anderson
    Words’nTone

Adapted from my book, Destroying Our Private Cities, Building Our Spiritual Life, a lay-commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Philippians.  For more information on the Book and a free-downloadable chapter, click here.

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