The Bubble Theory

So I watched the movie Saved a couple nights ago. Maybe it was due to the fact that it was 5:30 in the morning and it felt like my eyeballs were on fire, but I rather enjoyed it. True, there were some messages in it that I definitely disagreed with - like God made us different, therefore anything goes - but there were also some really interesting perspectives. It made me think about people who come to church for the first time, or who hang around churchgoers for the first time. Just how things we say, or how we act must seem so incredibly fake to them. How we use wierd words and phrases that we're used to and that make us sound more spiritual but that we don't really understand. How we befriend people to try and "convert" them. I know these are horribly generalized conclusions, but I mean that is our motive for doing a lot of things. We want to see more people become "christians." We want the number of people attending our church to grow. We want lots of new people to come to church. Don't get me wrong, none of these things are bad - I wish everyone I knew understood what it was like to be loved and cared for by Christ - but I think our good intentions have been twisted. We care more about pulling people into our secluded buildings that we huddle in every Sunday morning, and getting them to "ask Jesus into their heart", whatever the heck that even means, than we do about them as a person. I mean isn't that the whole point of what we call Christianity? To love God, and to love other people. I don't know, I don't remember Jesus saying anywhere in the Bible that we should love other people after they've become like us. Look at the apostles in the Bible. They loved people so much they ran to meet them where they were, usually got some form of beating because of it, and then did it all over again. Their lives were ruled by this intense, passionate love for people. And here we are, in our Sunday morning services, in our Christian schools, with our Christian credit unions, reading our Christian books, and buying Christian music from Christian stores, waiting for newcomers to walk into this delicate safety zone we've established so they can join the Christian community.

I understand that we're not "of this world" but surely we're taking this a bit too far.