Soft.
If you’re a pro basketball or football player, that’s a downright dirty word.
No one wants that label attached to their game, ever.
The word soft, implies that you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to deal with the tough stuff at game time. Sure, you may be talented, and smart, and quick, and skilled, but you’re weak in character; afraid of contact, hesitant to engage the fight… a “finesse player.”
The more time I spend in ministry here in America, and the more I rub elbows with people who claim Jesus and who fill our buildings every weekend, the more I’m convinced that our deepest flaw as a people, isn’t lust, or greed, or vanity, or anger.
Our greatest weakness isn’t materialism, or sexual immorality, or racism, or any of the hot button issues our preachers spend endless hours pounding the pulpit about.
The American Church’s worst sin, is that we’ve gone soft.
We’ve become religious finesse players, all doughy in our midsection.
I think it’s mainly because we’ve grown to believe that we’re really following Jesus, simply by saying that we’re Christians in the absolute easiest possible place in the world to do so: in a church building, in America, for an hour on Sunday.
Surrounded by people who largely believe what we believe, we spend 60 cozy minutes (but hopefully not much more), singing songs, seeing cool videos, and getting a (preferably) short message, that will give us encouragement, humor, and inspiration, (and a bit of challenge, though not enough that we feel compelled to change too much about our normal routine).
We hope and expect things get neatly wrapped-up in an hour, so that we can beat the crowd to Cracker Barrel, or start tailgating, or trim the hedges.
The rest of the week can then be spent, biding our time, waiting for our next weekly holy huddle, facing little duress of any kind.
Today our churches are designed to be soft. They’re built for comfort, and ease of use, and they’re tailor-made to cushion the crowd.
Instead of being set-up as utilitarian staging areas for passionate, sacrificial revolutionaries beginning life-long mission trips, they’re all too often ammenity-heavy clubhouses, designed to deliver coffee and religious-based entertainment to its dues-paying members
In fact, as Christians here in America, we can easily go lifetimes and face no true opposition to our beliefs. As a result, we so rarely exercise those beliefs in our daily lives with any repercussions beyond the occasional eye roll or snarky blog comment.
Our spiritual muscles gradually begin to atrophy in the absence of resistance, and over time, we soften.
And so when these minor irritants do come along, they feel much greater than they actually are. Their power is mistakenly magnified, because our threshold for pain and pressure have become so low. Like concrete beams never tested, we don’t truly know what our faith will support, because we’ve never needed to fully rely on it to bear any real weight.
In American Christian Church culture, we’ve mistakenly come to call anything remotely resembling inconvenience in our faith lives, persecution; restraints on school prayer, policies of fast food restaurants, social strides of groups that make us uncomfortable.
We’ve believed extremist talk radio, that we as believers in America are “under attack”, and so we walk around with a religious chip on our shoulders, as if we are somehow modeling bravery by slapping a Jesus Fish on our bumper, or posting a link to the latest Joel Osteen quote.
Meanwhile, all over the world, pastors, missionaries, and those who simply publicly claim Christ are being imprisoned, tortured, and murdered… and we’re looking for kudos because we went through the drive through at Chick-Fil-A.
I’ve been a pastor for 16 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced persecution. I’ve faced opposition, conflict, irritation, discomfort, and maybe a little pain, but not persecution, and to be honest, that worries and saddens me. It makes me think that I have a faith, that although sincere, is a little cushy.
And in many ways, I envy those who have been able to see what their faith is really made of, because they’ve been pushed to the brink, with only that faith to sustain them. As much as I don’t want persecution, I want the knowledge of having believed through it.
If you’re a Christian in America and you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve never been persecuted for the name Jesus.
May I suggest that you pray, that one day you will.
When you do, you’ll renounce Cushianity… and you’ll never be soft again.
