I would recommend that you actually read this book for yourself. But knowing some of you may not and desiring to still be able to discuss some of its content, I am going to spend the next few days posting some of my highlighted portions of the book. Realizing that by taking the quotes out of the context of the book, they may not be fully understood. But that is the price I pay for not finding an actual book club to participate in.
If you have questions, please ask and hopefully I can clarify what the author and the book is saying. Would love to hear your thoughts, as well. Hopefully, I will be sharing mine after I share the quotes.
Here goes:
From the chapter, The Backstory
1. Often outsiders' perceptions of Christianity reflect a church infatuated with itself. We discovered that many Christians have lost their heart for those outside the faith.
2. Through these surveys and interviews, the Lord has graciously helped me understand the experiences and in may cases the very real offenses, confusions, questions, discouragements, and disappointments that people have had when interacting with Christianity.
3. In fact, the title of this book, unChristian, reflect outsiders' most common reaction to the faith: they think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it is meant to be.
4. Our task is to be effective agents of spiritual transformation in people's lives, whatever that may cost in time, comfort, or image.
From the chapter, Discovering unChristian Faith
1. Our tracking research suggests that today young people are less likely to return to church later, even when they become parents.
2. As you will see later in this book, the premise of Christianity is not a mystery because the vast majority of outsiders have been to Christian churches and have hear the message of Christ.
3. One outsider put it this way: "Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn't believe what they believe."
4. We have become famous for what we oppose, rather than who we are for.
5. Only a small percentage of outsidersstrongly believe that the labels "respect, love, hope, and trust" describe Christiantiy.
6. The important thing to remember is these experiences have deeply affected outsiders, and the scars often prevent them from seeing Jesus for who he really is. This should inspire our compassion for those outside our churches. We should be motivated not by a sense of guilt but by a passion to see their hurts healed.
7. "You are what you are, not what you tell people you are." As Christians, however, we need to make continual, honest evaluations of ourselves so that we can uncover the ways in which our lives do not accurately reflect what we profess.
From the chapter, Hypocritical
1. We are not known for the depth of our transparency, for digging in and solving deep-seated problems, but for trying to project an unChristian picture of having it all together.
2. In many ways, our lifestyles and perspectives are no different from those of anyone around us.
3. The most common message people hear from us is that Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations. They think of us as hypocritical because they are measuring us by our own standards.
4. The fact that lifestyle is the most common priority of Christians suggests a related difficulty: the temptation to give a false pretense of holiness.
5. Our passion for Jesus should result in God-honoring, moral lifestyles, not the other way around.
6. The unChristian faith - hypocritical, judgmental, and full of empty moral striving - is what Paul warned his readers about! And it is part of the reason we are known as hypocrites.
7. Another significant antidote to hypocrisy (in addition to integrity and purity) is transparency. On one level, hypocrisy is failing to acknowledge the inconsistencies in our life. It is denial. It is, as the Bible describes it, trying to remove the speck from someone else's eye when you have a log in your own. Living with integrity starts with being transparent.
8. I figured that people wouldn't listen to us until we got off our high horse and became real with them. We needed to recognize where there have been faults and sin. Then maybe people would be disarmed to the point of actually listening to the true message of Christ.
9. Transparency disarms an image-is-everything generation.
10. The problem is not fundamentally hypocrisy. We're all hypocrites at some level. The problem is the air of moral superiority many of us carry around. We stop acknowledging imperfections in our lives.
11. The building fund, the pew fund, the organ fund lose their importance when you encouter hungry people daily. Those who have put in a year or more living with families in pain, people on the street, adn victims of injustice, quickly lose respect for the church.
12. Young adults are turning away from a modern church that they see as nothing more than hypocritical. Standards and rules without sacrifice and solidarity is hypocrisy. Christian rhetoric without tangible acts of love is hypocrisy. Churches on every corner with hurting people outside is hypocrisy. A large building with little connection to the streets is essentially empty.
13. The only way to regain our footing is to remind ourselves - and others- that an authentic Christian is simply someone who has made the decision to believe in Jesus as his forgiver and then attempt to follow him as his leader.
14. Novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote this in a personal letter: "Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!"
Don't jump to final conclusions just yet. There is more. Much more. Tomorrow maybe.
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