Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons - Christianity Today Magazine

Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons - Christianity Today Magazine: "Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons
Eugene Peterson talks about lies and illusions that destroy the church."

Een tot nadenken stemmend artikel. Wat zoeken we zélf eigenlijk in de kerkdienst en in het 'horen bij een gemeenschap'?
Emotioneel betrokken bij God, meer nog dan eerst. Eugen Peterson (ook bekend van z'n evangelisatieboeken en -werk) laat zich kritisch uit over dit 'verlangen naar meer', bijvoorbeeld:
"I don't want to suggest that those of us who are following Jesus don't have any fun, that there's no joy, no exuberance, no ecstasy. They're just not what the consumer thinks they are. When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world's values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.
The Gospel of Mark is so graphic this way. The first half of the Gospel is Jesus showing people how to live. He's healing everybody. Then right in the middle, he shifts. He starts showing people how to die: "Now that you've got a life, I'm going to show you how to give it up." That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.
It involves a kind of learned passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting, instead of giving and getting and doing. We don't do that very well. We're trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform."

En even eerder: "Spirituality is not about ends or benefits or things; it's about means. It's about how you do this. How do you live in reality?
So, how do you help all these people? The needs are huge. Well, you do it the way Jesus did it. You do it one at a time. You can't do gospel work, kingdom work in an impersonal way.
We live in the Trinity. Everything we do has to be in the context of the Trinity, which means personally, relationally. The minute you start doing things impersonally, functionally, mass oriented, you deny the gospel. Yet that's all we do."

posted by Peter Wierenga @ 8:01 p.m.