My First Shack Thoughts

I first heard about The Shack just about a year ago and heard you just need to read it.  I did not read it.  Then some folks in the congregation began speaking about the Shack and expressed how much they enjoyed reading it.  Of course they encouraged me to read it.  I did not read it.  Then some of those folks decided to get together and talk about it after our regular Sunday school stops.   That is when I got excited.  It excites me when people imagine together and then do it.  So I am reading the book. 

Let me make a bit of a note.  I don't care if you hate the book and think Satan wrote it.  If you do post on someone else site who hates the book.  I have not made my opinion yet.  What I am intending is to lift out some points that stick with me.  If you want to comment on that please do so. 

So at the end of chapter 4 on page 68 of my book, it reads"

"He realized he was stuck, and Sunday prayers and hymns weren't cutting it anymore, if they ever really had.  Cloistered spirituality seemed to change nothing in the lives of people he knew, except maybe Nan (his wife).  But she was special.  God might really love her.  She wasn't a screwup like him.  He was sick of God and God's religion, sick of all the little religious social clubs that didn't seem to make any real difference or effect any real changes."

So here I am reading this and I think, yeah me too!  I am not sick of God.  I am sick of all the stuff that gets attached with  God in the United States.  For example pop Christian music that all sounds the same and talks about how in love with Jesus we ought to be.  And Christian radio that is more full of rhetoric than intelligence.  And Christian bookstore Christianity where you can purchase all these cool accessories for being a Christian including breath mints for the Christian.  I am sick of religion.  It does not work yet we keep on trying.  I mean I create the services this guy Mack is talking about.  I write ( or cut and paste) those prayers for people to say.  I choose the hymns.  Some days I too wonder if they really speak to the deeper realities of our life.  Yet what I hear, and I admit I have my lens, is that when we just simply think faith is something we do when we gather on Sunday morning, then it is impotent to speak to our deeper human life.   If it does not include a growing, authentic community where you are known and know more and more, then it will not work.  If church is just about providing spiritual goods and services then forget it.  If church is just what you do or don't do on Sunday and not a living organism of which you are part of and connected within then its toast.  If church remains a people who are not being transformed by the narrative of God in scripture  and therefore biblical Christ-likeness, then it is not a church.  If church remains a cloistered, social club that has nothing to do with God's ongoing mission of healing and reconciliation in the world then it will not speak to our own deep human-ness.  I think the author Wm. Paul Young is on to something and is speaking a strong, present voice in our American culture.  Church and the faith of the followers of Christ will be irrelevant, powerless, unbiblical, un-Reformed, unnecessary and disobedient if remains cloistered. 

So far I like it.  Remember, (and I don't even know who reads this)  if you are going to write something stay within the present dialog and keep your Shack hammers in your tool belt.  Oh and peace be with you.

Comments

[janet e.]

Oh, I'm reading! I am not going to comment on 'The Shack' because I don't want to mess up our book discussion which is still a few weeks away!! That being said, I love the excerpt you chose to write about...and somehow, I knew that would be the one!