Not Weirdness, but Mereness

It’s Monday, so here it goes. Out of my four topics this week, one that I have been wanting to address for some time is the “weird Christianity” impulse of our day. In preparation for this topic, I read a couple of essays, neither of which made the point I am trying to make, so the most likely conclusion is that the writers’ fathers smelt of elderberries, and I want nothing of it.

The first pre-requisite to understanding this discussion is to keep in mind that the American youth, by and large, are fairly fed up with the modern Christian faith as is. Now, this stems from various angles. Among them is that their parents smoked a lot of weed in their day so that whatever faith they desired to pass on to their children was a tainted mustard seed and whatever that seed produced was enough for their children to reject it later on.

Another perspective is that such young adults felt the burn and went the way of all flesh, accepting Bernie into their hearts. They are probably vegetarians now and look down on people like me because of my muscular consumption of high fats. Theologically, I fart in their general direction. And if my Monthy Python quotations make you uncomfortable, you are probably a vegetarian as well and I sit in judgment of you.

Given that this is the general state of our young adults, what then are they doing? Some of them are rejecting the faith by attending your local display of effeminism. They are likely attending a local church whose pastor has a co-pastor who wears a dress. In most cases, it’s his wife. Yikes! To quote “The Life of Bryan,” “Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords, is no basis for a system of government!”But a whole other group has embraced a somewhat orthodox weird Christianity. This is the group I’d like to address because some of them fall in my camp, or at the very least hover around my camp.

The impulse to be weird is a natural one. Christians do breathe different air. Our ethics are quite strange from the world (Gal. 5:22-23) and our singing tends to bring fire on things indifferent. So, I am not opposed to looking different. In fact, a quick glimpse at what happens in my neck of the woods on Sunday morning will give the modern evangelical lots of topics in the drive home and the next 27 days. What I am seeking to oppose with gracious eyes is the kind of weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Much of our impulse in reaction to what we see as the onslaught of the left is to do things as wildly different than the thing the most conservative Christian is doing. Therefore, we scramble our eggs while singing verses one and nine of the Lorica, we read from one holy translation of the Bible, we put on our legal gloves in judgment of the local family who educates with curriculum A instead of option Z, and we live as if only our idealized agenda fits John’s description of the descending city in Revelation.

What I am arguing for is “Mere Christendom,” not weird Christendom. Christians, in fact, should be the most normal of all people. We should do our jobs each day with a minimal amount of complaining, we should feed our kids each day with a minimal amount of temperamentalism, we should respect our bosses, even when they are pagan imbeciles, we should watch our soccer games without getting drunk, we should go to church with one of three kids wearing something that is not utterly wrinkled, and we should laugh through it all at the end of the day giving thanks to God.

Mere Christendom is not looking for the latest trend to divorce ourselves from culture, but we should be looking for the most biblical way to make a dent in culture with a Christ-centered imprint. One writer put it succinctly when he said that we don’t need to be more weird than Christian.

The faith itself offers plenty of natural ways to be discerning and different. What we don’t need to do is add a shekel or ten to that amount of weirdness. In fact, weirdness never conquered nations. Just look at the Anabaptists of the 16th century. In fact, some of them were anti-trinitarians to the core, and I argue it stemmed from their separationism, which inculcated in them a spirit of ingenuity when it came to theology, and theology does not need ingenuity–hello Arius!”–it needs healthy and normal carriers.~~~~Many, many years ago, a visitor to our congregation came to me asking what I thought about nudist beaches. The fella had a fairly developed biblical view of the topic, arguing from Genesis that the ideal state of man is to be naked and to return to that glorious Edenic state where men walked around naked and were not ashamed. And therefore, attending a nudist beach now and then was not that bad.

Now, remember this was many years ago and our church was small enough that I had some time to give this thing a thought. I did end up responding to his insanity in a five-page paper, which did convince him. If that had happened today, I would have found the two largest guys in our church and escorted him out of the building. Not everything requires an explanation, some things simply require condemnation.

But the fact that he was convinced by my arguments against nudist beaches didn’t mean he stopped seeking after weirdness. It was just one of his many attempts to separate himself from the present culture, but also the present Christian culture, no, the present reformed culture…sorry, the present reformed, sub-culture.

Friends, what the church needs today is not weirdness, but mereness. Mere creeds, mere lives, mere wine, mere merriment, and mere Christendom. And in this, there is much liberty and various ways of growth in the kingdom.

So, three cheers for basic Christian living!