I get a lot of different responses from people when I tell them I am a missionary student.
The most common response is to ask if I am a Mormon.
The next most common is usually an attempt to subtly let me know that they are a Christian as well. A lot of people feel it is important to get that message across because they enjoy the company of fellow believers but I have a suspicion some want me to know they are a real Christian so that I don’t try and witness to them. They ask me questions that only a true Christian would know to ask like “So have you heard the new Chris Tomlin CD?” or “What is your favorite Kirk Cameron movie?” so that I can know without a doubt that they are like me.
Another extremely common response is to share with me what I have come to know as their own weenie gospel.
Nobody really wants to think about what is in a hotdog because despite how much we love to eat them we know that they are just a bag full of random animal body parts squeezed into tube form. We choose to ignore its’ origins while we boil it, grill it, chop it up and serve it with baked beans or wrap it in cornbread and shove it on a stick and have a grand ole time. When we think about hotdogs that way it makes them a whole lot less appealing, but having faith like a frankfurter has the same effect.
I met a man in Indianapolis who after finding out what I do began to share with me his own weenie gospel. Everything started out fine but it slowly evolved into some very strange theology. He had so many people influencing what he believed to be true that in just a couple minutes of talking to him I was extremely confused as to where his ideas had come from. The conversation started with talking about the importance of sharing our faith and ended with his explanation to me that Adam had a wife before Eve who left him to marry Satan and that he thinks people used to be able to fly and walk through walls before the Fall of Man in Genesis. My best explanation to where he got these ideas was that one day while watching TBN he accidently sat on the remote control and changed the channel to a station playing the X-Men movies without noticing the difference and accepting them all as truth.
Or what about the cross dresser I met in Albuquerque who was fully convinced that he was God and so was everybody else but in the 45 minutes of talking to him could not give me one reason why he believed that way.
A weenie gospel is a belief system tracing its origins to so many different influences that nobody can really digest what the final product is, including the one trying to feed it to someone else. There are more views and ideas about who Jesus was and how we should worship Him than there are Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, and every person everywhere is at risk of believing wholeheartedly a misconception they were taught. Let’s face it, Christianity has more public figures than ever before and they all have different ideas about how this whole following God thing should look. Then on top of that you have centuries of Church tradition that has crept its way into our beliefs and the rise of relativism in the secular world creating a plethora of worldviews and possible options for “truth.” I could have said in that last sentence, “creating a whole bunch of worldviews” but “plethora” is so much more fun to say.
The issue, though, is not that we have so many ideas floating around, but that we as people have gotten the notion that choosing a faith is like walking into Build-A-Bear workshop where we can pick and choose exactly what we want and leave out all the pieces we don’t like. Listen to this pastor, read this book and hold onto that thing you grew up hearing and smash it all together and you must have truth, right?
I cannot in one post tell you everything you are supposed to believe and that is not my intention in writing this. I just want people to start thinking about why they believe what they believe.
If you have an unsaved friend that you have been praying for, hide behind a corner and wait for them to walk by. When they are in good chucking distance, jump up and fling and uncooked hotdog at them like a Ninja throwing star right at their face and see how they enjoy it. If this sounds like a terrible idea to you, consider the fact that every time we try to share our faith with someone, we are asking them to digest our own processed philosophy of unknown origins and it most likely will have the same effect as the wiener toss. What right do we have to serve the world anything but pure, absolute truth?
I grew up a church kid and at no point in my life do I remember not believing in the God of Christianity but I came to a point where I desperately wanted to believe the actual truth and not just what had been digested and spit up by the people around me. I really wanted to believe that God was everything I had always known Him to be but if I wanted truth, I had to be as objective as possible in my rediscovery of Him. I can’t ground anywhere the belief that truth changes depending on what we believe it to be. Our perceptions and interpretations of truth can be different, but there are things that simply are and
I can’t change them by believing they are something else. That being said, I thought of some questions that, if answered honestly, would tell me if the truth I held onto about anything came from just what I wanted to believe, or what was actually true.
Though these questions could be asked by the unsaved in their pursuit of truth, I am mainly talking about us church folks who are proclaiming Christ to the world and throwing their raw hot dogs at people.
Who taught you what you believe?
Where did these ideas about God come from? Your Grandma? Your family pastor? That book you read once?
Tracing back the origin of our ideas gives us a really good look at the credibility of our truth. Now I am not saying that is is wrong to listen to teachings of other people but I would be really careful believing something that was not confirmed to you personally by God through talking with Him or reading His Word.
Does what you believe lean solely on either your intellect or your feelings?
It is the classic Spock dilemma; who gets the final say, logic or emotion? Who wins in the arguments of your head: what makes sense or what feels right?
I don’t think either side of your brain can determine all by itself what is true, otherwise you wouldn’t have both sides. Leaning on your intellect alone will do everything it can to squeeze God into something you can understand when the reality is that He is so far above our comprehension that no person could ever fully fathom everything about Him. Leaning on just your emotions will cause you to throw everything out the window the minute you stop “feeling” God like you once did.
Shoot for the balance. If God is everything He claims to be then He should be able to satisfy all of your intellectual queries as well as be everything your heart has always known He is.
Do you like everything you believe?
If truth really were just like a Build-A-Bear workshop this would be a completely irrelevant question. Why would you believe something you did not want to believe?
What are the chances that everything in the Universe operated exactly the way you wanted it to? Isn’t it more likely that there would be things about “truth” that you weren’t particularly fond of?
I don’t think anyone can be trusted to believe the truth unless they have come to terms with the fact that there are things they do not like or understand about what they have come to believe.
Do I like believing that there is a real place called Hell where billions and billions of people will spend eternity in torment? Do I like believing that the only way to honestly follow God is to crucify my flesh and abandon myself completely before Him?
Of course not, but that does not change the fact that they are true.
We have to be willing to say that there are things about God that we do not understand but because of what we do know about Him we believe with everything inside of us that someday it will all make sense. Otherwise you are at risk of spreading your own weenie gospel.
Give up your hotdog because there is a steak waiting for you.
The most common response is to ask if I am a Mormon.
The next most common is usually an attempt to subtly let me know that they are a Christian as well. A lot of people feel it is important to get that message across because they enjoy the company of fellow believers but I have a suspicion some want me to know they are a real Christian so that I don’t try and witness to them. They ask me questions that only a true Christian would know to ask like “So have you heard the new Chris Tomlin CD?” or “What is your favorite Kirk Cameron movie?” so that I can know without a doubt that they are like me.
Another extremely common response is to share with me what I have come to know as their own weenie gospel.
Nobody really wants to think about what is in a hotdog because despite how much we love to eat them we know that they are just a bag full of random animal body parts squeezed into tube form. We choose to ignore its’ origins while we boil it, grill it, chop it up and serve it with baked beans or wrap it in cornbread and shove it on a stick and have a grand ole time. When we think about hotdogs that way it makes them a whole lot less appealing, but having faith like a frankfurter has the same effect.
I met a man in Indianapolis who after finding out what I do began to share with me his own weenie gospel. Everything started out fine but it slowly evolved into some very strange theology. He had so many people influencing what he believed to be true that in just a couple minutes of talking to him I was extremely confused as to where his ideas had come from. The conversation started with talking about the importance of sharing our faith and ended with his explanation to me that Adam had a wife before Eve who left him to marry Satan and that he thinks people used to be able to fly and walk through walls before the Fall of Man in Genesis. My best explanation to where he got these ideas was that one day while watching TBN he accidently sat on the remote control and changed the channel to a station playing the X-Men movies without noticing the difference and accepting them all as truth.
Or what about the cross dresser I met in Albuquerque who was fully convinced that he was God and so was everybody else but in the 45 minutes of talking to him could not give me one reason why he believed that way.
A weenie gospel is a belief system tracing its origins to so many different influences that nobody can really digest what the final product is, including the one trying to feed it to someone else. There are more views and ideas about who Jesus was and how we should worship Him than there are Elvis impersonators in Las Vegas, and every person everywhere is at risk of believing wholeheartedly a misconception they were taught. Let’s face it, Christianity has more public figures than ever before and they all have different ideas about how this whole following God thing should look. Then on top of that you have centuries of Church tradition that has crept its way into our beliefs and the rise of relativism in the secular world creating a plethora of worldviews and possible options for “truth.” I could have said in that last sentence, “creating a whole bunch of worldviews” but “plethora” is so much more fun to say.
The issue, though, is not that we have so many ideas floating around, but that we as people have gotten the notion that choosing a faith is like walking into Build-A-Bear workshop where we can pick and choose exactly what we want and leave out all the pieces we don’t like. Listen to this pastor, read this book and hold onto that thing you grew up hearing and smash it all together and you must have truth, right?
I cannot in one post tell you everything you are supposed to believe and that is not my intention in writing this. I just want people to start thinking about why they believe what they believe.
If you have an unsaved friend that you have been praying for, hide behind a corner and wait for them to walk by. When they are in good chucking distance, jump up and fling and uncooked hotdog at them like a Ninja throwing star right at their face and see how they enjoy it. If this sounds like a terrible idea to you, consider the fact that every time we try to share our faith with someone, we are asking them to digest our own processed philosophy of unknown origins and it most likely will have the same effect as the wiener toss. What right do we have to serve the world anything but pure, absolute truth?
I grew up a church kid and at no point in my life do I remember not believing in the God of Christianity but I came to a point where I desperately wanted to believe the actual truth and not just what had been digested and spit up by the people around me. I really wanted to believe that God was everything I had always known Him to be but if I wanted truth, I had to be as objective as possible in my rediscovery of Him. I can’t ground anywhere the belief that truth changes depending on what we believe it to be. Our perceptions and interpretations of truth can be different, but there are things that simply are and
I can’t change them by believing they are something else. That being said, I thought of some questions that, if answered honestly, would tell me if the truth I held onto about anything came from just what I wanted to believe, or what was actually true.
Though these questions could be asked by the unsaved in their pursuit of truth, I am mainly talking about us church folks who are proclaiming Christ to the world and throwing their raw hot dogs at people.
Who taught you what you believe?
Where did these ideas about God come from? Your Grandma? Your family pastor? That book you read once?
Tracing back the origin of our ideas gives us a really good look at the credibility of our truth. Now I am not saying that is is wrong to listen to teachings of other people but I would be really careful believing something that was not confirmed to you personally by God through talking with Him or reading His Word.
Does what you believe lean solely on either your intellect or your feelings?
It is the classic Spock dilemma; who gets the final say, logic or emotion? Who wins in the arguments of your head: what makes sense or what feels right?
I don’t think either side of your brain can determine all by itself what is true, otherwise you wouldn’t have both sides. Leaning on your intellect alone will do everything it can to squeeze God into something you can understand when the reality is that He is so far above our comprehension that no person could ever fully fathom everything about Him. Leaning on just your emotions will cause you to throw everything out the window the minute you stop “feeling” God like you once did.
Shoot for the balance. If God is everything He claims to be then He should be able to satisfy all of your intellectual queries as well as be everything your heart has always known He is.
Do you like everything you believe?
If truth really were just like a Build-A-Bear workshop this would be a completely irrelevant question. Why would you believe something you did not want to believe?
What are the chances that everything in the Universe operated exactly the way you wanted it to? Isn’t it more likely that there would be things about “truth” that you weren’t particularly fond of?
I don’t think anyone can be trusted to believe the truth unless they have come to terms with the fact that there are things they do not like or understand about what they have come to believe.
Do I like believing that there is a real place called Hell where billions and billions of people will spend eternity in torment? Do I like believing that the only way to honestly follow God is to crucify my flesh and abandon myself completely before Him?
Of course not, but that does not change the fact that they are true.
We have to be willing to say that there are things about God that we do not understand but because of what we do know about Him we believe with everything inside of us that someday it will all make sense. Otherwise you are at risk of spreading your own weenie gospel.
Give up your hotdog because there is a steak waiting for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment