Inside out and upside down Christianity

It was time to tidy up in church ready for a funeral yesterday and a wedding on Saturday. It was a good opportunity to bring my model of the Tabernacle home before recycling it. 

When I first presented it at church as part of our series Wilderness Ways, I talked about how it represented God's desire to draw close rather than exclude the people from his presence. This, for me, is a key perspective on the heart of God. There are times when I get the feeling that we've spent much of church history creating an orthodoxy that majors on our unworthiness, our sin, our exclusion from God's presence rather than God's desire to draw close to us. Such a perspective makes grace hard to grasp.

I think also that it means we emphasise judgement and all that's wrong in our world instead of focussing on grace. When failure comes, we ask first what discipline we should apply. We become desperate to preserve the purity of the church. 

But the church is not pure. 

I guess the fear is that if we turn things upside down, we run the risk of thinking we're okay. We're afraid that we'll stop preaching about the need to repent. We're afraid that we will make it too easy to be a follower of Jesus. But how difficult did Jesus make it?