Faith is not mainstream

While I work I'm also importing CD's into my iTunes library. I bought a separate hard drive onto which I'm slowly copying all the music I have from Hillsongs to Dire Straits. Eventually I'll add an Airport Express point to the lounge and connect the stereo to it. Then I can play iTunes through the stereo in the lounge. Well that's the idea.

As I do this and work on Sunday's sermon, it made me think. We have Christian bookshops and we have Christian web sites where we can get all our resources. We have Christian radio and Christian TV. We have some Christian schools. 

We are a sub-culture.

But we want to be at the heart of everything. We want our laws and statutes clearly to reflect Christian values. We want all our schools to give Christianity a higher profile. Some even want creation to be taught in the classroom as part of science.

But we are not mainstream.

The kind of radical faith to which Jesus called us does not exist, it probably can never exist at the centre of a secular society. Our faith is a faith lived out on the margins because by its very nature it makes us different. Christians cannot fit in. when we do, we become indistinguishable from the rest of society and our faith claims loose credibility because we are no different.

Of course that doesn't mean that we pull up the drawbridge and separate ourselves off from the rest of the world. It doesn't mean that we stop caring about injustice or that we give up on reforming our legal system and constitution (the one we don't really have anyway). But it does mean that we have to learn to live the uncomfortable life of an exile, a refugee in a foreign, sometimes hostile, land.