| if you have the time - read this. it kind of slapped me in the face...it's about one of philip yancey's Bible classes "At last he [my friend] asked if she [a prostitute] had ever thought of going to a church for help. 'I will never forget the look of pure astonishment that crossed her face,' he later told me. '"Church?" she cried. "Why would I ever go there? They'd just make me feel even worse than I already do!"' Somehow we have created a community of respectability in the church, I told my class. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today? Someone in the class suggested that legalism in the church had created a barrier of strict rules that made non-Christians feel uncomfortable. The class discussion abruptly lurched in a new direction, as survivors of Christian colleges and fundamentalist churches began swapping war stories. I told of my own bemusement in the early seventies when the redoubtable Moody Bible Institute, located just four blocks down the street from our church, was banning all beards, mustaches, and hair below the ears of male students - though each day students filed past a large oil painting of Dwight L. Moody, hirsute breaker of all three rules. Everyone laughed. Everyone except Greg, that is, who fidgeted in his seat and smoldered...Finally Greg raised his hand, and rage and indignation spilled out. He was aslmost stammering. "I feel like walking out of this place," he said, and all of a sudden the room hushed. "You criticize others for being Pharisees. I'll tell you who the real Pharisees are. They're you [he pointed at me] and the rest of you people in this class. You think you're so high and mighty and mature. I became a Christian because of Moody Church. You find a group to look down on, to feel more spiritual than, and you talk about them behind their backs. That's what a Pharisee does. You're all Pharisees." All eyes in the class turned to me for a reply, but I had none to offer." |
