Repenting of Religion

As I watch my boys dive over waves, I ponder much of this book that I'm reading. As with most books, I don't agree with the author in every area. That has never been a problem for me. I love to read. I love to read those whom I do agree with and also those I disagree with. I like to think it allows me a look into the pardigms of others. This book gives me much to think about. I was in college when I became a believer and involved in a parachurch ministry called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Something that rubbed me the wrong way all through school (and still does)is what I refer to as "Christianese." That language of "holiness" that so many students and staff members alike, learned and used as though it were a blanket of protection. It was like you had to learn the lingo to be in the club. This book addresses that aspect and more of what is now called "Christian culture" in America. It also addresses what so many believers and unbelievers see as the impotent church. Here's a passage from the book.

“The church as a whole often seems to function like a sociopathic husband. The evidence is pervasive. The fact that the collective body of the church is known more for its declarations of good and evil than for its outrageous love is telling. We often do good things (at least as we define good), but something is often lacking—and it happens to be the one thing that is needful.
The church as a whole does not look like the body of Christ, whose outrageous love attracted people who would otherwise have had nothing to do with a “religous establishment” or “ethical system.” We don’t generally have tax collectors, prostitues and other sinners (not former tax collectors and former sinners) in our company (Mark 2:16). Rather, despite our own insistence that it is not so, we often look like a body of Pharisees whom sinners—people with certain kinds of sin we’ve identified as more serious than our own—avoid at all costs.
Another evidence of our spiritual pathology is that at both an individual and corporate level Christians often lack the freedom, flexibility, joy, boldness and playfulness of a real lover. The abundant life and reckless love Jesus exemplified and came to bring is often replaced with a hypervigilance on what people ought to believe, how people ought to behave, and how the church should appear. We live out of our ethical maxims and religous ideas rather than the vibrant, concrete life and love of God. We live in the abstract, not the concrete.
In a proper context, of course, there is nothing wrong with concerns about right belief and proper behavior. But it is evidence of spiritual pathology when these concerns dominate our individual or collective lives and are not rather merely by-products of what ought to dominate our lives: the outrageous, freely-given, unsurpassable love of God to us and through us.”
Gregory Boyd on pg. 97 of his book, “Repenting of Religion.”