Here a few more anecdotes about folks who would rather be known as followers of Jesus rather than as Christians - I think that they qualify as Gnu Christians!
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Labeling myself as a Christian can be dangerous. So many so-called “Christians” have done so many things that are blatantly un-Christian. For this reason (and many others), I’m trying to separate myself from this label. I’m nothing but a follower of Jesus. That’s it. I don’t have a political agenda. I’m not anti homosexual. I’m not a Republican (or a Democrat for that matter). I’m pro-choice (only because people do have the God-given right to choose). I’m not sheltered. I sin all the time. I love Jesus more than anything else. So many Christians have given Jesus a bad name. When I talk about living like Jesus said and modeled, that doesn’t mean chastising people, judging people, criticizing people, or separating myself from people. It means the exact opposite: loving people. If I see someone in need, I try to help them out. It’s that simple. I don’t know too many people who would thing this is a bad way to live.
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I remember when one of my colleagues said, “I’m not a Christian anymore. I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.” I wondered what it would look like if we decided to really follow Jesus. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what a fully devoted Christian looked like, or if the world had even seen one in the last few centuries. From my desk at college, it looked like some time back we had stopped living Christianity and just started studying it. The hilarious words of 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard resonated in my thirsty soul: “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole like will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.” Then I did a little survey, probing Christians about their (mis)conceptions of Jesus. I learned a striking thing from the survey. I asked participants who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question. I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.
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Being a Christian is about following Jesus. It seems to me, then, that a good barometer of our success would be in how well we follow him. Checking things off a list will never bring us close to Jesus, but actually following him, his teaching, and his example, will. Jesus said, “I did not come to be served, but to serve” (Matt. 20:28). We are called to be followers of Jesus. A follower, well, follows! So we should be doing the same things Jesus did. But when we treat our Christianity as a checklist rather than as a relationship we view our relationship with God not as a true relationship but as a list of things we must do or a set of requirements we need to fulfill. We wait for others to take the initiative. We don’t connect with each other away from the church building because it’s not on our list. If Jesus did not seek to be served by others, why do many of us? Why do we criticize the minister or someone else for not visiting us when we never bothered to pick up the phone or make an appointment to spend time with someone else? Jesus served others. He added value to the lives of others. The best question we can ask ourselves is not how we can fill a building with people, or how we can get others to do what we want them to do, or how we can make sure the minister “does his job.” The best question we can ask ourselves, to be a true follower of Jesus, is: Who can I love right now? And how? That’s what it means to follow Jesus.
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I look at all that is wrong with the world, and then look at the average Christian and as a result, I want nothing to do with Christianity. It appears Christians would rather spend their time arguing and debating theology than helping the poor and homeless, and would rather drive Hummers and build huge church buildings than drill wells in Africa or feed orphans. I don't think that Jesus would be a “Christian” if Jesus were alive today. There is a YouTube video where a secular rock artist posted his video about this very thing. The artist is very angry. The video and song lyrics show Christians going to church and pastors preaching sermons, all the while ignoring the hungry and needy that are all around them. The basic message of the song is "Christians need to stop praying and preaching and building huge cathedrals for themselves, and start doing something that actually helps!" After I watched the video, I had to think that there is a special place in hell for Christians.
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Let's remember, Jesus/Yeshua was not a Christian then, and probably would not be one now.......
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